by Adam Cesare
There was a change in the room’s lighting as the red bulb over the door illuminated solid for a moment and then began to flash.
“That’s me,” the doctor said, his voice sounding bored and zonked out. He stood and pushed in his seat, scurrying out of the room.
Gail, realizing that all eyes were on her, nobody too concerned with whatever emergency the red light denoted, course-corrected her tone. “So maybe next time you’ll have steak, girls.”
“No. Now,” Marta said, her voice gruff. The old woman shot her fork out and speared Gail’s steak, dragging it over to her own plate without pulling the dish closer, the steak leaving a wet splotch on the tablecloth as it passed.
“Oh man,” Don said, the glee in his voice the same as when he used to try to get Nikki to watch disgusting YouTube videos on his phone. She’d always watch, wanting to join in the shocked revulsion, but playing hard to get was part of the fun.
Beatrice stood as Gail Donner dove to wrestle her steak back from Marta, grabbing for the old woman’s fork hand but missing and catching a fistful of mashed potatoes instead. Don’s reaction was right, this was the stuff of Internet legend, comic gold. And them without a camera. Nikki’s sides hurt from holding in her shocked laughter, the air inside her swelling until she just decided the hell with it and let it out.
“No, it’s mine,” Beatrice said, creeping up behind the two seated women. She was not holding a fork but one of the steak knives that had been lain out in front of her. The old women would not need knives to eat their fish, but they had been placed in an effort to make the table symmetrical, make the residents feel included.
Nikki caught herself, cut her laugh sharply in half as Beatrice lowered the knife straight into Gail’s hand.
The blade was driven down with such force that it impaled Gail and cracked the china underneath her palm. Blood, fresh and bright, spilled out from the mashed potatoes, threatening to envelop the steak before Marta lifted her fork and took a bite out of the meat, not fazed by the attack happening inches from her.
There were stunned exclamations from the staffers, Flores shouting Spanish words that sounded especially colorful. But only one of them took action and it was the huge physical therapist, Paulo.
“Stop,” he said, his voice a tone that Nikki heard regularly from security guards trying to break up teenage scuffles. If there was a fight at the center, which there were with regularity, Nikki was not supposed to step in. Aside from the physical danger that the teenagers posed to her, she could be legally responsible for any and all of the kids’ injuries if she didn’t wait for a guard’s help to pry them apart. You didn’t lay hands on the patients, not ever.
With the length of his stride, Paulo required only two steps to cover the ground between the end of the table and Beatrice. The old woman’s face was pinched together in concentration as she dug the blade deeper into the wood, wiggling the handle to widen the gash, like she was trying to split Gail’s palm completely and give the woman a forked hand.
Paulo didn’t notice Marta’s attack in time to stop it. He was too busy trying to wrestle the knife away from Beatrice or Beatrice away from the knife, whichever. The frenzied old lady had planted herself, and was forcing the huge man to come from behind and lift her up from the waist with both arms. It was a pro-wrestling suplex that he was having little success with, since Beatrice was holding on.
With Gail stuck in place, quite literally, Marta had no problem stabbing her in the belly while they both remained seated. It was a prison attack. Marta hadn’t switched to a knife but instead used the fork to stab Gail repeatedly, her arm a blur of motion.
Nikki felt a warm droplet of blood hit her cheek, all the external stimulus needed to coax out a scream.
The other staffers were out of their seats now, but too preoccupied to help the chairwoman. Don, Nikki, and Harriet stayed seated, the events around them becoming a violent and surreal dinner theater. Nikki looked over at Don but his eyes did not leave the ruin that had been Gail Donner’s stomach. There was something glossy and tubular now visible between the slashes as Marta pulled out the woman’s intestines with the tines of her fork.
At the far end of the table, the steaks now unattended, the two elderly residents not engaged in manslaughter had lowered their faces to the plates and were chewing at the filets. A bald man was so intent on his meal that his upper dentures detached as he pulled against the fat with his hands, a row of teeth sliding out of his mouth and leaving a trail of drool and strings of spent dental adhesive.
Nikki’s eyes went beyond her husband’s face, a terrible shift in focus that revealed Harriet now on all fours, crawling from her chair, not bothering to push the chair out but taking the most direct route to them, climbing over the table.
“Don!” Nikki was able to get his name out and point a finger in the old woman’s direction.
Harriet was heading straight for Nikki, that much was clear from her sight line and trajectory.
Don, like she always knew he would if he had the chance to prove it, put himself between Nikki and harm’s way, a brave protector. No, maybe bravery didn’t even enter into the equation. Maybe protecting Nikki from Harriet’s attacks had become so second nature to him at this point that the fact that Harriet was now brandishing a knife was irrelevant to Don, a detail that didn’t register as possible.
“Mom!” he yelled, and then there was only the glint of the knife as Harriet raised a hand to cut through him to get at her real target.
Don’s head cocked back and his blood fanned out above him, like a sprinkler that had been kicked out of alignment and would waste a great deal of water if it wasn’t turned off.
Instead of moving toward her injured husband, Nikki’s chair tipped and she fell backward. In her mind she thought that if she came into contact with more blood, it would once again jar the world into clarity, make these events real.
Across the table, Paulo still had Beatrice in a bear hug, her feet off the ground but still armed with the knife. Flores stood behind them, her arms outstretched in an ineffectual I got you position, ready to catch him or the woman, it was unclear who her target was.
Displaying tremendous strength that was at odds with her slight frame, Beatrice placed both feet flat against the edge of the table and pushed, sending the table sliding over Nikki’s head, obscuring the action on that end of the room from view.
Nikki tumbled behind and rolled toward the nearest wall, flattening herself against it. She was trying to get as much distance as she could from the carnage, possibly a moment to reassess what was going on. Harriet and Don had been jostled by the sliding table and the pair was now hitting the floor.
Harriet’s mouth was on her son’s slashed neck. It was a bizarre mouth-to-neck, and it wasn’t meant to resuscitate. Harriet lifted her face and Nikki could see that her mother-in-law had been stopping up Don’s neck wound with her tongue. Harriet moved to speak and a fresh gout of blood rushed forth.
“Steak,” Harriet said, locking eyes with Nikki while her lips spread wide for a toothy grin, blood on her teeth, running down the sores of her chin.
A rush of action on the other side of the room forced Nikki to look away for a second. The toothless man was as finished as he was going to be with his steak and he leaped from his chair, taking two handfuls of Flores’s hair in his greasy fingers. Flores shouted something that sounded like a rushed prayer, as the old man slammed her face into the hardwood floor then snapped her neck midway through a word that began “Sant—”
The other staffer, a man with kind eyes who hadn’t said a word during the dinner, was not so quiet now. He screamed as an old woman, done with the cooked meat, buried her head in his crotch in a mockery of fellatio while slashing at his chest with her knife. Seconds later his pant legs were a mess of gore as she reached up to lift his shirt, burying her hands into the wounds she’d caused. Her fingers, in him now, found his rib cage. She pulled down with a sickening crack once she was able to snake her fingers far enoug
h in to find leverage, exposing the inside of his chest.
Paulo’s head swiveled, ricocheting back and forth from the dying to the dead and then settling on Nikki. He appeared to make some kind of decision as Beatrice bucked in his arms, trying to get into an angle where she could stab him with her flailing strikes. He extended his arms and flung the old woman against the wall where she hit and bounced, collapsing into a heap.
Paulo was bounding over the table as Nikki felt wet, warm hands close around her neck. Harriet was upon her, her rage and strength both alien and familiar, awe-inspiring and terrifying.
Her mother-in-law was going to kill her.
—
Like these other old bats, Harriet wanted meat, too. But dark meat, still squirming as if she would cut off a slice of it, just like Nikki had cut the soul and love out of her boy and replaced it with resentment.
Harriet could see the dark aura around the girl now, the force that Nikki had used to corrupt her son.
She had her suspicions before but now she was sure of it. The power was voodoo wielded by a high priestess of manipulation. Nikki was a witch who spent her days teaching her methods to the mongrel children of her insipid race, trying to destroy the country, the world, one “youth center” at a time. All these connections sprang together, only vague feelings, a knowledge that the girl was no good made concrete by the clarity she felt on her Abandonment Day.
Harriet picked up her knife and began to climb across the table, no path direct enough, no legs powerful enough to speed her on her way with the quickness that she desired. Her thoughts were a divine jumble, more ideas than a thousand books could contain, all of them spilling through the fingers of her mind.
Donald turned toward her, said something, a scream that ended in an almost imperceptible curl of the lips. Insubordinate and past the point of saving being two of ten thousand similar thoughts that Harriet heard before lashing out with her blade.
She wiped that all-knowing grin off her son’s face, part of her horrified that she’d done it with a knife and the other part, the bigger part, wanting to lap up his blood, feel it splash on her face, needing to scream that she’d brought him into this world and now she’d decided to take him out!, while looking into his dying eyes, but unable to find the words.
When she was done drinking, unable to stand the anticipation of cutting that black whore’s scalp from her body any longer, she crawled toward her. Harriet’s muscles tensed and twitched, feeling stronger with every breath.
Every molecule of oxygen she got into her lungs was immediately rerouted everywhere that she had needed it for so long. Her deflated frontal lobe knitted itself back together, the wrinkles returned. Nikki looked like she might make a run for it and Harriet almost wished she would. Want to race, daughter of mine?
Her hands were on Nikki, the blood of her son that had blazed white hot just a moment ago beginning to go cool and sticky, feeling like ice as it oxidized, coagulated, and evaporated.
She should have kept her eyes on the rest of the room, kept her situational awareness and not been so damn cocky. The big man grabbed her by the nape of her neck and tore her off her quarry, sending her crashing into the table as he and Nikki slipped out the door, the bolt of the lock clicking behind them.
Staggered, Harriet took a moment to watch the ceiling spin as if she’d just drank a quart of vodka. Lying there, she could feel an ache in her bones. The change was not only in her imagination but physical, as if she was experiencing a teenager’s growing pains on fast-forward.
When she could stand no more, had wasted enough time, she regained her footing and renewed her death oath.
There was nowhere the evil bitch could run that Harriet wouldn’t follow.
Part II
Of Sound Mind and Body
Chapter 10
As guttural as the exchange between the residents was, consisting of broken English, curses, and growls, Sarah could easily tell it was an argument. She could also tell, with no small amount of relief, that she had not been spotted by either of them.
One of the two residents was Mr. Ventura. Hale, hearty, and happy when she’d seen him an hour ago skipping down the hallway, gloating about his victory at the chess table, he was now reduced to throaty grunts. The man he was arguing with was his best friend, Mr. Phillips. Phillips, who had undergone hip replacement surgery two years prior, but who was otherwise a healthy seventy-two-year-old male, belonged on the second floor. Not up here where his ailing friend lived.
“Cheat!” Mr. Phillips screamed, throwing his hands up above his head and pumping his chest out, a great-ape version of barroom bluster. Even though they were ten yards away, Sarah could see that there was something different about them as she peeked around the corner of the doorway to Mrs. Samson’s room.
For one thing, they seemed taller than they had been. There was enough of a difference in height that it didn’t seem like they’d just stopped slouching, but that they had actually grown. The skin on their faces had also changed, stretching and tightening over their cheekbones. The transformation had smoothed out some wrinkles and caused deeper creases along their mouths and noses.
“Fucking liar,” Mr. Ventura returned, smashing his fist into the wall behind him, drywall and paint chipping away and dusting the tile of the hallway floor. That was new, too: the strength it took to take a chunk out of the wall, not something many patients of Mercy House were capable of.
Their argument was about ready to boil over into a brawl when farther down the hall the elevator dinged. The doors opened and Kate Hines, a second-floor nurse, stepped out. Kate was younger than Sarah and had a cute face but was plump enough that it was no surprise that she used the elevator to go one floor up. Sarah was no twig herself, but she knew that her hourglass shape came from her mother, genetically, and was not caused by a surplus of commissary milkshakes. As Sarah watched Kate’s confusion bloom, she realized that the girl was not built for stairs and now, apparently, it was going to cause her trouble.
Kate must have been responding to the red-light call that Sarah had put out a moment ago, and was now staring down the hallway, beyond the two men, toward Mrs. Samson’s room and the blinking red light above the door.
Sarah didn’t have a rational reason to duck back into the room, trying to remain unseen, but she did have a strong feeling that she should, so she did, sticking just her head out through the cracked door.
She wasn’t hiding from Kate out of guilt for having bashed the old woman’s head in. There was something wrong here, and it didn’t seem like it was going to be impossible to prove when the police showed up. But still, she wanted to see how the residents would react to the arrival of a nurse. Without that nurse being her.
“What are you two doing?” Kate said from the far end of the hallway. Her voice was playful, like she had walked in and caught a pair of toddlers trying to climb up to the cookie jar. Working with the elderly, it was easy to infantilize them, and some nurses found the phenomenon less troubling than others. The elevator dinged again and the doors closed behind Kate with a whir of antiquated machinery.
Kate now had no escape route. The elevator shaft was on the east wing and the stairwell that ran the length of Mercy House’s three floors down to the basement was on the west end of the building.
The two men stopped arguing and there was a moment of silence.
“Hello?” Kate said.
Sarah bit her lower lip as the sounds of heavy footfalls began to thud down the hallway toward Kate. The men were wearing only their standard-issue slippers, but even those rubber soles could be intimidating if you were big and fast enough, which the men were.
“Wait!” the girl yelled out and there was a thump. Sarah peeked around the door frame again, just in time to watch Mr. Phillips deliver a fist to Kate’s face, the girl already down on the ground, not moving.
Mr. Ventura regained his jolly mood and smiled at Mr. Phillips’s attack.
Sarah looked across the main hallway, making sure th
at no other doors were opening, that there were no more residents awoken by the commotion and coming out to see what their friends were doing. Sarah’s eyes lingered on the doors that she knew hid able-bodied patients. She was relieved to remember that Beatrice Kent had been invited to the welcome dinner and was not on this floor with her. That left only Mr. Piper on the third floor, and his door was out of her line of sight. The nurses’ station was just a few feet away from the door, phones and computers behind it, a tantalizingly close link to the outside world.
“Sarah, help me!” Kate yelled, her voice anguished and wet. Sarah pulled her head back inside, hiding from sight and hoping that the residents hadn’t seen her.
The hits and laughter continued, but Kate’s screams ceased.
A figure darkened the doorway in front of Sarah, only for a second, and was gone.
If Arnold Piper saw her, he did not give any indication, nor did he seem to care.
Sarah felt a squirt of wetness touch her cotton panties as the shape of the man passed, walking with purpose down the hallway, from east to west, away from the fight and toward the stairwell. With her breath held, Sarah listened to the stairwell door open and close, the wet smacks from the beating slowing down at the opposite end of the hall.
Mr. Phillips and Mr. Ventura were losing interest in Kate’s body and were now bickering again between kicks.
“Cheater, fuck,” one of them said, and then there was the sound of bone giving way.
If Sarah wanted to move across the hallway to the nurses’ station, she would need to do it soon. She stood at the threshold, her legs shaking underneath her. She would need to run, either lengthwise to the side of the station, or take a shortcut straight forward and over the counter. Looking down, she considered her shoes and her bleeding hands.
