by Neely Tucker
At the back of the room, opposite the door, a tripod held a small video camera. The guy operating it wore a St. E’s uniform and a tired expression, leaning back against the wall, his camera already honed in and focused, cleaning his fingernails, ignoring the new entrants, too. Looking like he was getting overtime for this but now thinking he had better things to do.
Janice went to the near side of the table and sat. Sully, who had started in after her, now reversed his steps and went to the far side, the right. He wanted the man looking at him, not at his attorney. Wesley sat at the head of the table. Lantigua slid past Janice to get to the front of the room, the door closing and locking behind him. He moved between Jamal and George, the former stepping back to allow him the space. Lantigua looked up and motioned to the videographer, with a hand rolling forward, and said, “You can start it now.” He looked at the camera, expectantly, until the man pointed back at him. Lantigua bent down and whispered in the patient’s ear. George nodded but did not look up.
Lantigua buttoned his coat, looked at the camera, and stated the date, location, and the people in the room. “We are here at Mr. Waters’s request, including one media representative, as he wants to make a brief statement. He has made this decision after full consultation with counsel, though he is proceeding against her advice. I myself have interviewed Mr. Waters at length about this procedure. I reluctantly conclude he is competent to do so, no matter how ill advised.”
He looked around the room, nodded, and said, “As we have all agreed, there will be no questions. Mr. Carter, do you have your recording device?”
Sully took the slender recorder from the inside pocket of his backpack, turned it on, hit the ‘record’ button, and slid it toward the front of the table. “It’s directional,” he said. “It’ll pick up from there just fine.” He pulled out a small notebook and a pen as backup.
Lantigua nodded. “Okay then. Mr. Waters. Proceed.” He walked to the back of the room, standing by the video camera.
George looked up. His shoulders were rounded, the eyes distant. He looked as he had when Sully first walked into his cell earlier in the day.
“I, uh,” and he coughed, bringing his hands to his mouth, covering it while he coughed again. “Thank you all for, ah, coming. This will only take a moment.”
He rolled his neck, audibly popping the vertebrae. When his eyes opened again, they were still muddled, and he looked either down at the table, or up at Sully. He started speaking slowly and picked up speed and volume as he went. Making eye contact, Sully, leaning forward into the edge of the table, looking at the irises, would swear what he saw in them was fear.
“My, um, statement is, like . . .” He coughed again. Nervous. “My, um, name isn’t Terry Waters. Never has been. It is George Harper. This, uh, as of today, became known to Mr. Carter. I killed Barry Edmonds not for or against any Indian cause. I could give a shit about that stuff. I had petitioned him, about the care of my mother here at St. E’s, before her death here seven years ago. He was, ah, her local representative at the time, the representative of the place where she had come from. And, ah, Edmonds, he, well, I’d say he ignored that. He ignored what I told him. Or tried to tell him. There were letters, lots of letters, with documentation, and I, ah, called—about what was happening here, to patients here. So time went by. I had to figure out a way to arrange my own meeting. My mother, Frances, as Mr. Carter no doubt knows by now, was mutilated by a lobotomy by Dr. Walter Freeman, the patron saint of this shithole, as was my grandmother. My mother spent the last twenty something years of her life here as a . . . a vegetable. She was sexually assaulted, over and over again, I learned, for sport. On the ward. Orderlies putting their cocks in her mouth. Turning her over and butt-fucking her over the side of the bed. Taking pictures. I visited her as a child, as a teen, as an adult. You, Dr. Lantigua, you ignored me over and over—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Lantigua cut in, pressing forward, trying to cut him off. “Turn the cam—”
“—and though neither you nor your malignant staff recognized me, doctor—I suppose it has been several years now, and I took the time to gain some weight, you know, a little beard, color my hair—let me say it is so nice to finally be back . . . home.”
Janice was standing now, Wesley was sitting there, spreading both hands, palm up, in the air, like what the sweet fuck is this, and still, though the atmosphere in the room had changed, although the temperature felt like it had rocketed north, his implacable voice kept talking, still looking at Sully, as if drawing strength from him to continue.
“I was so concerned you would recognize me, Dr. Lantigua! But your incompetence is only matched by your lack of diligence, by the horrific torture chamber you call a hospital. I have been on these grounds three times in the past month, posing as an electrician. In this very building. It was so easy to walk in and out that it was tedious. Even Mr. Carter was able to walk into my room this morning. We had a nice chat.”
Janice whipped her glare over to him now.
“You did what?”
Ezekiel, the lawyer, was looking from Harper to Sully and back again, Lantigua was still yelling at the man with the camera, “Off! Turn it OFF!” Sully alone was still looking at George, and so he was the only one who saw him make a small movement and reach, with his hands in their plastic cuffs, into the waistband of his pants.
Later, Sully would never be sure which came first, Lantigua’s short, sharp bark of surprise, or the thick heavy boom that shook the building like a strike from a mortar shell. The recorder on the table slid sideways, the overhead light swayed, and a single fleck of paint, loosened by the blast, came fluttering down from the ceiling, until it came to rest, like a bone-white snowflake, at the right edge of the brown table.
“Sweet—” Janice said.
Harper pulled a small black circular remote from the waistband and held it in his palm. “Do you know you can get anything brought inside this place, for almost nothing? That the staff can be paid to do almost anything? That the gas lines in this building are so very old?”
He pointed the remote at them, like it was a weapon. He smiled, almost beatifically now, his gaze still resting on Sully. “But what I have always needed, these years of planning, I only learned recently, to truly make my work known, was my very own . . . reporter.”
He pressed the button.
The explosion blew the chairs across the room and the people out of them. It rocked the concrete-block walls and collapsed the ceiling. Fire and smoke billowed in the abyss above, advanced in waves down toward them, then retreated before coming forward once again, with more force, hungrily sucking up the oxygen. The overhead light fixtures dropped, shattering, sparking, noise lost in the shock waves. Blackness fell, electric blue light shot through the air.
Sully was thrown back against the wall, then scrambled on all fours back in the direction of the table, but hit the crown of his head on the edge. He went down hard. He covered his head and scrunched his legs under him, trying to present a smaller target. He rolled over a body that was not moving. No idea where George was, his recorder gone; his notebook, history. But even then, over the smoke and reverberating air, over the sound of debris collapsing, over the screams from the front of the room, over the sound of chains moving and the metallic click of the door swinging open into the hall, he could hear Lantigua’s strangled cry: “Get him, goddammit!”
THIRTY-THREE
GLOOM AND MOANS came from outside the door. The sputtering of dying light fixtures. Flames. Figures staggering down the hallway.
Then the door swung back shut and everything went black. The totality of it swept over Sully, leaving him grasping to the left and right, trying to get his bearings. The collapsed overhead fixture flared again. His eyes began to adjust. The exposed hole in the ceiling was giving off a faint orange glow, flames licking in the distance.
Debris, from the air vents above the room, shards of
jagged iron pipe. Behind him, the camera was overturned, on its side, the red “recording” light still on and the man beside it, on his back, his head gashed open above the forehead. He didn’t move and Sully crawled toward him until he could make out the deep cut in his neck, the real bleeder, shrapnel, some piece of flying metal taking him out. Then he stopped crawling that way. Ezekiel lay against the far wall, facedown. Jamal, he could see now, was lying on the floor in the rear of the room, not moving.
Janice Miller, flat on her back, eyes open, dark blood coming out of her ears, a spike of pipe buried in her chest.
The door, the door.
Fire, smoke, George, the other patients in the ward—all of that was loose and deadly and on the other side, but staying put was a death sentence. Any fool could tell that from the flames advancing above, the smoke descending now into the room in a thick, deadly cloud, causing him to retch and spit.
What he needed was a straight line to the exit . . . which was where? How had they come upstairs? His mind was foggy; steps and elevator, both?
The door was illuminated by the ghastly orange from above. Crawling forward, tapping each hand and knee to the floor to test it for glass, he made it to the wall. Then, sliding along it, to the door. He groped upward, and yanked it open. He stayed on his knees, below the smoke.
Streetlights from outside, coming in from the big scenic window, gave the room illumination. Sirens, in the distance. A revolving red emergency light hanging from the ceiling. From somewhere below, boiling up the stairwells, came an indecipherable roar, loud but not enough to muffle the screams in the distance, the clanging of what sounded like a metal tray dropped on the floor. Scurrying figures ran past him. The control room looked like it had taken a direct hit from a shell, shatterproof windows spider-webbed with cracks, its once-locked doors standing open.
“Sly,” he hissed. “Sly Hastings.”
There was a gunshot a moment later. Then two. There was a rumbling to his right and a herd of patients came stampeding down the hall. Their faces distorted, the leaders slamming doors shut in front of them as they ran, the doors bouncing back, the herd still coming, bearing down on him, smoke billowing behind them.
He braced himself against the wall and they swarmed past him in a rush until one man reached out, grabbed his sport coat, and pulled him forward and off balance, the man holding on to his jacket, pulling them both down and rolling onto the floor. Feet tripped over them, more bodies falling. Sully rolled and got himself back up but not before the patient rolled with him, Uncle Reggie rolling over him, screaming, “White devil! White devil!”
Sully got two hands on the man’s chest and pushed him, hard, and Reggie was back up and scrambling, running down the hall after the rest. Sully sat up, cursing, breathing, lost as to where to go, the explosion still ringing in his head.
From the darkness, from a shadow in the corner of the ruined room, a tall, lanky figure advanced on him. No rush to his movements. The features of Sly Hastings emerged as he came closer, his baseball cap gone, a long, thin cut on his right arm. He kneeled into a squat beside Sully, looking up at where the ceiling had been, the flames above them. Loosely, in his right hand, handling it as casually as if it were a cup of going-cold coffee, was a semiautomatic.
“The fuck,” Sully shouted, making himself heard over the dull roar, the pops, the yelling in the deep recesses in the building, and, aware of it only now, smoke detectors beep-beep-beeping. He ran a hand down his leg—it was stinging—making sure there was no gash.
“Gas line, boiler,” Sly shouted back. “Brother down the street from one of my properties wanted to get the insurance. Cut a gas line. It went about like this here.”
“Where’s Harper?”
“Who?”
“The crazy fuck we’re here for!”
“That Indian? Got none. That thing blew, me ’n Uncle Reggie got thrown halfway to the televisions. Great big hole in the floor opened up. Ceiling collapsed. Motherfuckers running.”
“You see anybody else from that room? Lantigua? The lawyers?”
Sly shook his head. “You hear them gunshots, though?”
“Counted three,” Sully said, waving his hand to the right. “If that’s what they were. Could have been another floor. Could have been the stairwell. George set this fucking place to blow. He’s got a remote, it’s pegged to some sort of explosives. On the gas lines, like you say.”
“Why he want to do that?”
“His mom. Died hard in here. I think he took it personal.”
Sly surveyed the damage. “You don’t say.”
The flames were lighting up the outside of the building now, flickering below. The floor, he could see now, had sagged. The wiring above them was hissing. Smoke began to appear as thick ropes in the air.
“You know how to get out of here?”
Sly jerked his head toward the control booth, the observation station, whatever it was, and the mass of collapsed debris that filled the hallway behind it. “Used to.”
Sully cursed, then tried to stand. “Help me up, brother. Damn.”
Sly pushed off the balls of his feet and rose above him, offering a hand. Once on his feet, he leaned backward, tested his arms, coughed.
“The smoke,” Sly said.
They started down the far hall, away from the control booth, moving deeper into the building, stepping over a blown-off door, chunks of ceiling. Water was now running in a slow stream over the floor.
Sly, slowing, bending down, then rising back to full height, wincing. “Sewer line.”
Fifty feet farther on, Sully turned into a darkened stairwell as a piece of ceiling fell behind them, collapsing in flame. When he turned back to look? The control room had started to burn.
He hesitated, though. There was no way to tell if, or when, police or firemen were coming. It was probably less than an hour before he and everyone else in the place would die of smoke inhalation, and that was without another explosion atomizing them all.
The firefighters might break open the doors, blow out the reinforced glass at the entrance. They might do that, sure. But they were not going to come rushing into a burning building filled with the criminally insane, rapists, child killers and throat chokers, knife-wielding cocksuckers and necromancers, grown men who once-upon-a-time had carried their prepubescent nieces from the car to the beach so that they could finger-fuck them while pretending to just have their hands under their hip.
No, no, no. The cavalry wasn’t coming. They’d let Canan Hall burn to smoking rubble and call it a public service. He and Sly would be two more crispy critters at the bottom of the pile when the smoke cleared.
They got down the stairs at as good a clip as they could muster, given the darkness and the smoke. But as they came down one flight and then the next, the noise grew louder and more frantic. Sully was in the lead by a step until, before he had fully realized what was happening, they had caught up and run into the herd.
The patients were stacked up against a double door, a large red EMERGENCY EXIT sign above it. Forty or fifty of them. They were leaderless and scared and angry, all of them talking, some yelling. The crowd was milling at the edges, packed in tight at the core.
Sully pushed his way forward, twisting to slide through a narrow gap of flesh here, lowering a shoulder to push through a narrower opening there, thinking the door ahead was open and the crowd was bottlenecked. It was one of the times he was glad to be next to Sly Hastings, except that when he realized the door was still locked, and turned to move backward, Sly was no longer there.
Instead, not six inches from his face, loomed the gaunt and wizened features of a patient, pressed up against him in the crush. He was, unlike the rest, utterly calm.
“Locked emergency exits,” he said, looking Sully in the eye, “and they call us crazy.”
Another explosion rocked the building then, the sound of shatt
ering glass and flying steel somewhere above and behind them, the blast waves drowning out everything else. The patients scattered, some pounding against the door with renewed ferocity, the rest turning and clambering over Sully, pushing him backward, stampeding now for the steps back up, toward the flames.
Trapped in the tidal surge, he ran with them, helpless. “Sly! Sly!” It didn’t matter. No one heard. No one paid attention. Keeping his feet moving, picking them up at the knees—he did not want to fall down in this bunch—they all came back up one flight. Half the tribe banged open the entry door and took off down the hallway. The flames were licking up the side of the walls. The other half kept to the stairwell, heading up to the third floor, where he and Sly had just come from. Sully started after them and heard two, three gunshots, all in quick succession. The patients turned as one and came roaring back, nearly knocking him over. He hung onto the railing, survived the flood, and made it up to the third-floor landing.
“Sly!” Nothing.
He tried it one more time, louder. He could make a run for it on his own straight down the hall, looking for another way out, but running into the herd again filled him with dread. So he stayed bent over, running quick for the control room. Something in there had to show the exits. Ten, twelve steps down the hall, his right foot and then his left caught on a heavy weight in the middle of the floor. He cursed and went tumbling, falling hard, landing on his chest, barely able to get his arms out in front of him. He slid and rolled over.
He came to a stop on his back and looked up, the orange and yellow lighting, the flames and the darkness. Standing over him and pointing a gun at his head was Sly Hastings. After a second, he pulled the gun back.
