“Ah, yes,” Lyle said. “The one about the tiger.”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s about the devil.”
“And you think Vance is the devil,” Lyle said, “or a monster, at least. But he makes possible all kinds of healing upstairs, not unlike Christ himself. He pays for procedures no human being is willing to give for, even in a country like America, where people have so much disposable income.”
I gripped the edge of my stool. Vance wasn’t anybody’s savior. “It’s a head trip for him,” I said. “He’s not doing it to be nice.”
“He keeps the local corpse population under control,” Lyle said. “Sine pulsim should be an epidemic. But Vance kills rogue corpses; he keeps his people from spreading the blight. That protects a lot of lives, in the end.”
If there was one thing I’d learned from Vance, it was that doing a good thing didn’t make you a good person. I shook my head at Lyle. He could talk me in circles if I let him.
My lack of response didn’t seem to matter, though. He was content to circle without me, vulture-like.
“Whether or not you are a monster,” he said, “depends on the definition of the word.”
He could quibble all he wanted about definitions. I might not be able to explain, but I knew a monster when I saw one.
If I’d always been able to do that, maybe I wouldn’t be in this mess. Lyle would learn. “You are way out of your element. You don’t understand what Vance is capable of.”
Lyle didn’t correct me. I took his silence as a victory. I didn’t know what I expected from him, then. An apology? An admission of weakness? Whatever it was he didn’t deliver. But at least the smile was gone from his face.
Lyle went to the door. He gave it a sharp knock before he opened it. “My assistants will be waiting for us,” he said.
Lying in wait for us was more like it. Two corpses pounced into the room and grabbed me, one on each arm. These were some of the better look-alikes—the ones Vance kept close. Zeke said Vance changed a lot of them himself. I struggled against them, but couldn’t do much more than lift myself off the ground between them. If only I’d had some muscle before Vance changed me.
The corpses smelled of the same chemicals as the rooms. As I struggled, the pounding in my head grew sharper. I could smell Lyle’s blood, pumping in his veins. My monster stirred.
“You need to feed me soon,” I said.
Lyle didn’t respond. “Take her to Room Seven,” he said.
I could smell more humans at the end of the hallway. “There are other people in here,” I said.
“A few,” Lyle said. “Not as many as there are corpses.”
As if that made everything all better.
The goons took me down a narrow hallway, bright and fluorescent.
“We need just a few more samples,” Lyle said. “Corpses are incredibly durable, so you won’t hurt a bit.”
He made us sound like a Rubbermaid product. Corpses are incredibly durable! Watch us run them over with this truck. See? Still in one piece!
Lyle opened an unmarked door and ushered me inside.
The first thing I saw was the buzz saw.
“Oh, no,” I said, stopping in the doorway. “What are you going to do with that thing?”
“Just a few more samples,” Lyle said. “Kindly lie down on the table.”
This wasn’t an exam room. It was an operating room. The table was flat and barren, surrounded by trays covered in instruments. None looked as threatening as that saw, though. Was he planning to dismember me? Just because I could regenerate didn’t mean I wanted to be drawn and quartered.
“No way,” I said.
Lyle looked back at his assistants. “Restrain her,” he said.
Theoretically I could have fought, since I couldn’t feel pain, and could damage my body without hindering myself. But that was only true if I had the reflexes and training to know what to do, and I didn’t. Lyle’s assistants forced me face down on the table, my nose squished against the metal hard enough to give a beater a nose bleed. My arms were strapped in before I could think to do more than pull against them.
“I need to get a look at your brain tissue,” Lyle said. “With your healing ability, you’ll be back to normal in no time.”
My brain? I knew from high school biology that brain tissue didn’t heal. Once a brain was damaged, that was it. Did my supernatural healing work on my brain? I’d never injured it, so I couldn’t know for sure. All I knew was that if it was severed from the body, that was it for me.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
“Rest assured,” Lyle said. “We won’t come near your pancreaticosplenic lymph node, nor sever your head from your body. You’ll be fine.”
Panic rose in my throat. “My what?”
“Your node,” Lyle said, testing out the saw with a quiet whirr. “The home of the virus. If it’s pierced, you’ll die. But otherwise—”
If he used one more polysyllabic word I was going to die of intellectual shock. “You mean my heart?”
“Common misconception. Piercing your heart does nothing. It’s the pancreaticosplenic gland you have to worry about. An understandable mistake, really. It’s so close to your heart, right between your ribs on the—”
“Don’t come near me with that thing!” I said. He was moving over me with the saw, and I could feel a draft of air spinning from the blade.
“Stop worrying,” Lyle said in his bedside voice. “You can’t feel any pain. This won’t hurt you at all.”
He was right, of course. I didn’t feel any pain as his clinicians shaved sections of my hair off with an electric razor. They didn’t bother to shave my head clean—they took criss-cross sections out of the back and sides where Lyle would make his incisions. If the operation somehow interfered with my ability to heal, my head was going to end up looking like a shar-pei who got in a fight with a lawnmower.
Lyle followed immediately behind the razor, splitting my skin open before my hair had a chance to grow back. One of the goons followed behind the scalpel with a saw. The smell of burning hair filled the room; apparently they weren’t fast enough.
Then Lyle cut chunks out of my brain and set them on the low table. Out of the corner of my eye, they looked like slices of cheesecake.
I could smell it all, from the stench of the saw burning through the bone to the odor of the exposed tissue underneath. Brain tissue had an eerie smell, made especially eerie by the knowledge that the brain was my own.
Lyle stepped back, admiring his samples. He didn’t even bother to stitch me up—he just left me there, strapped to the table.
And I felt my flesh begin to heal itself. It came slower than a muscle injury, but the pulling and tugging of the tissue and bone re-growing were unmistakable.
A living person’s mind wouldn’t have stayed functional missing those large sections of brain tissue, which meant it hadn’t damaged me mentally, either.
“You corpses are fascinating creatures,” Lyle said, his hands resting next to the slices of my brain. “You have brains, but even when you’re physically missing them, you function unimpaired.
“If your head is removed, you stop functioning, sure. But the brain isn’t the center of your thoughts. Do you know what it is?”
I didn’t respond. After what Lyle did to me, I wasn’t going to justify his actions with argument.
That was fine with Lyle, apparently. “It’s the lymph gland. The specific one, under the left side of your ribs. Pierce it, and your tissue drains of liquid and you’re reduced to carbon. We haven’t been able to explain this phenomenon scientifically—not yet. But with your help?” He gave me a proud smile, like I’d won him the blue ribbon at the science fair. “Perhaps in time.”
Three
When Vance retrieved me from Lyle’s cutting room, I couldn’t look at him. Vance took me back down the hallway, past the howling corpses locked in the tiny rooms, to a tiny room of my own.
I knew there was a girl in there befo
re Vance opened the door. She smelled young; she smelled fresh. I shuddered. I shouldn’t be thinking of a living, breathing girl in those terms.
As the door swung open, the girl pressed herself into the corner. She looked a few years older than me—maybe a high school senior, with stringy blonde hair and a lifeguard tan. She’d wedged herself between a couch and the far wall, as if the furniture would protect her.
“April,” Vance said, “meet Lexa. I’m sure you’ll get along fine.” He pressed his hand to the small of my back, pushing me forward. My legs wobbled into the room, if only to get his hands off me.
“What are you going to do with us?” Lexa asked. Her voice sounded hoarse, like she’d been screaming.
Vance just left and locked us in. I tried to search for him outside the door, but all I could feel was the group of wannabe stiffs around him. I couldn’t sense Vance leaving, and I wouldn’t be able to sense him coming back.
But as far as I could tell, he could do both to me.
The bare room was more like a closet, containing only a flowered couch and an end table, probably rejects from a hospital waiting room. Now the end table was covered in deep scratches.
I sat on the end table, across the room from Lexa. We didn’t even have a clock. Vance’s men had kept my duffel, with my money and my blood. The pain in my head was pounding, now, though I still had a few hours left before I lost it. I wondered how long it would be before Vance would feed me. The pints in my duffel would spoil quickly if they weren’t refrigerated.
Lexa shifted. Her scent wafted over to me, rich and delicious. My stomach lurched and I moved into the corner, as far from her as I could get. They weren’t going to feed me. They’d already served me my meal.
I’d never had hot blood before. I liked mine so cold it formed ice, like a slushy. And I flatly refused to eat flesh. Blood could be extracted humanely. Flesh, not so much.
Lexa eyed me from the opposite corner. “Are you with him?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“So he kidnapped you, too?”
“He did.”
“What does he want with us?”
If she only knew. “I don’t know,” I said. “Where did he take you from?”
“The hospital,” she said. “I came in because I ripped up my knee running.” She lifted her leg in the air, so I could see the bandages. “I had surgery, and they were going to release me, but then I fell asleep, and I woke up down here.”
“Do you have family?” I asked.
“My mom. She lives in Michigan. I just started school out here.”
So her mother wouldn’t come to find her—at least not right away. That was lucky for her mother. To Vance, the hospital was nothing but a people farm. It gave him the access he needed to know which people he could take—which ones no one would be able to trace back to him. Thousands of people went in and out of the hospital. Only a few disappeared.
My parents had had the misfortune of being around to notice.
“Do you know where we are?” Lexa asked.
“We’re under the hospital,” I said.
“And the welfare guy. He’s the one who took us?”
“You met Vance upstairs?”
“Sure. He said that the hospital foundation would cover my surgery, since my crappy insurance isn’t going to pay.”
I nodded. “That’s what he does. He helps people. And then he hurts them.”
Vance had showed up about a week after I was first admitted to the hospital, on the day it was determined that I’d need a surgery that would cost my parents ten years’ worth of income. They’d just gotten off the phone with our insurance company. The procedure was "experimental" and therefore not covered.
Vance-the-hospital-administrator swooped in, paying for my surgery, pulling strings to fly in the best heart surgeon around, and not letting my parents pay a single dime.
My hero.
“You seem to know a lot of things,” Lexa said. She still hadn’t come out from behind the couch.
“Not really,” I said.
“What do you think they’re going to do with us?”
I looked at her. She clearly had no idea what they’d locked her in here with. My skin was paler now, but not unnatural enough to be noticeable. I didn’t have fangs or glowing eyes or torn skin. The only real sign that I was dead was my lack of heartbeat and body heat. Lexa wasn’t close enough to feel either.
“I don’t know,” I said.
But I did. My temple gave a violent throb. I needed blood. Corpses have to eat often, just like living people, or risk bloodlust. Zeke and I were on a twice a day plan, one pint in the morning, one at night. Vance kept the blood supply tightly rationed. He had a kind of cartel going, distributing pints leaked by his people at the hospital. He owned the local Red Cross.
Under normal circumstances, Vance would kill me for eating a living person—just like he did with anyone who turned others without permission. He didn’t allow us to drink hot blood unauthorized. But this was different.
He’d fed her to me.
“How old are you?” Lexa asked.
“Nineteen,” I said. That’s what my ID said, anyway. But it also gave my name as April Fenix. In life I was fifteen-year-old April Jasinski, but Zeke gave us a new last name—after the main character from his favorite shooter. We were different people now, he said. We needed new identities to go with our new lives.
“Me too,” she said. “I’m a freshman at the U.”
“I don’t go to school,” I said.
When I’d asked Zeke about finishing high school online he said, “April, you’re dead. What the hell do you need with home school?” Then he taught me to play Out for Blood 4: Revenge of the Eaten. It had taken a while, but I’d gotten pretty good with a rifle.
“We need a plan to get out of here,” Lexa said. “My school sent around this video about active shooter situations. They said you can’t sit around and wait for someone to save you. You have to be willing to act.”
I shut my eyes. The light was starting to bother me, and the smell of Lexa’s blood was growing stronger.
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why fund my surgery if he’s going to kidnap me afterward?”
Why fix my heart if he was just going to stop it from beating? “That’s how he is,” I said.
Had I stayed away from the hospital after my surgery, I might have lived. But instead I kept coming back. Visiting other patients in the cardiac ward. Volunteering in the pediatrics wing, reading to children. That was Vance’s idea. An opportunity for me to give back. After my shifts, I’d go up to see him in his office.
Now that I knew what to look for, I would have recognized the signs. The floor-to-ceiling windows were tinted dark, just like the windows of the limo. I never saw him leave the building during the day. And when he shook my hand, his skin was so cold, I felt drained of warmth myself.
But back then, I didn’t know any better. Lots of people had cold hands. The tint kept the sun from glaring on his computer screen while he worked. All day. Helping people like me.
“Are you okay?” Lexa asked. “You seem kind of out of it. Did they drug you or something?”
“I think I hit my head,” I said. I pressed the back of my neck against the wall. It was probably cold, but then, so was I.
“Do you have a concussion? You’re not supposed to go to sleep, or you might go into a coma.”
No risk of that. “I have a headache. I think I just need some quiet.”
Lexa didn’t look too pleased about that. I probably wouldn’t have either, in her shoes.
“You try to think of a plan,” I said. “And I’ll think, too. Then we can coordinate when my head feels better.”
She crept out from behind the couch. “Lie down, if you need to. But seriously don’t fall asleep.”
I lay down on the couch with my head against one armrest and my feet against the other. Lexa sat on the floor across from me, next to t
he door.
“I won’t sleep,” I said. “I promise.”
With my eyes closed I couldn’t see Lexa, but I could smell her blood and flesh, the perfect balance of squish and tang, like really good Thai food where the sweet and savory meld together deliciously.
Stop, I told myself. I couldn’t think of her like that. She wasn’t a meal.
I couldn’t let myself reach bloodlust. At that point, I’d lose control of my impulses, and there was no coming back.
A tremor twitched through me, and I could feel my fingertips quivering. My flesh felt hot, then cold, like I’d developed a sudden fever.
It would take hours for the bloodlust to set in entirely. I could hold out for a while, but not forever. If Vance was really determined to drive me permanently mad, he could do it.
I stared at the end table. What would Zeke do, if he were in my spot? Stake himself with a table leg? If he did, he’d wait until the last possible moment. That’s how Zeke was, always second-guessing everything.
Even if I had the nerve to do it, the flimsy plastic probably wouldn’t pierce my ribs. And I hardly knew how to aim for the heart, let alone the panplasticwhatchmacallit gland.
Deep inside, I could feel the monster stirring. Most of the time it stayed dormant, but whenever I felt hungry, it started to skulk around inside me, like some fearsome beast slinking toward its prey. The first poem Dad made me memorize was the one from William Blake: little lamb, who made thee? After I could recite it, he taught me the companion poem about the tiger, burning bright, both references to Christ and the devil. Now, I was the tiger, and Lexa was the lamb, and it didn’t matter if the same God made us, we were both of us going to die.
“You need to tie me up,” I said.
Lexa looked up at me, surprised. “I need to what?”
“Tie me up.”
“How’s that?”
I sighed. “Here. I’ll take off my jeans, and you can use them.”
“I think that concussion is making you delusional. I’m going to yell for help, okay?”
“No one can help you.”
Long Dark Night Page 3
