by Adam Cesare
Never mind the fact that, oh yeah, Dane had locked the door, so this was now the safest place to be while they prepared to run into god knows what—there could have been old folks out there, too. Fuck, this thing might not even be a localized event. The Earth could have passed through the tail of a comet or been part of a parasitic alien invasion that affected only the elderly. The whole world could have been full of them, for all they knew.
Now who was the hero?
Nikki joined him, helped him lift the box he’d been struggling with, sweating onto.
The work was easier with two of them, and they had a series of three halfway serviceable steps stacked up by the time the basement door began banging.
At first it was just a jiggling of the knob, a testing before it became a knock that steadily transformed to insistent fists battering at the top and bottom, trying to break the door in. The service door was reinforced metal and had been heavy as they’d pushed it open before, but how long would it hold, especially against these things?
Not long, Dane estimated, once the real battery began a moment later. Whatever they were using sounded solid, and he was surprised how little time it had taken them to find whatever it was.
Nikki directed the beam of the flashlight over to where she’d stashed Paulo.
“Go!” the PT yelled out, the rattling of boxes and antique glassware the only indication that he was there. She’d done a pretty good job of hiding him.
She showed a moment of indecision, something Dane couldn’t abide, not when they were so close.
Women and children first was all fine in theory, but this was a new world. Women had achieved parity in the workplace, right? He bent down on all fours, trying to keep his center of balance low to the boxes and shelving unit as he scrambled up to the window. Behind him, Nikki made a sound that expressed her lack of surprise that he’d darted up before her. Fine, she didn’t need to be in love with him if his actions ended up saving them. He wasn’t the one who’d hesitated.
The door was holding up, which was good, because it looked as if the window wasn’t going to open easily.
Dane tried not to let himself be sidetracked by the lawn and driveway stretching out in front of him. There was a tantalizing natural world out there, sunlight bathing the auburn leaves in the distance, and he bet that it didn’t stink of industrial disinfectant and Salisbury steak.
No, you’re still indoors, focus on that, he thought, knocking himself out of the fantasy. He gripped on to the window lock. Who had felt the need to paint over the windowsill so many times? It wasn’t as if anyone was scrutinizing the basement windows, making sure the paint was fresh. He worked at the lock, his fingers turning red, then white, and then slipping off entirely.
Behind them, the hammering at the door got worse. The frame was metal, so they wouldn’t have the sound of splintering wood to warn them that they were running out of time. No, one second the door would be closed, and the next the dead bolt would bend or the lock would be busted off and the door would open.
“Come on!” Nikki said from behind him, not bothering to keep her voice down. He would have said that she was welcome to try, but she wasn’t. He was going to be the one getting them out of Mercy House.
Trying the knobs once more, getting no kind of leverage and making no progress chipping off the paint, Dane began to shrug off his white coat.
A movie montage of his white-coat ceremony flashed before his eyes. The pride he’d felt the second he’d put one on, when he’d been upgraded to a long coat just after graduation, a foot of fabric that separated him from the rest of the healthcare world. His parents had been there that first time, snapping photos on disposable cameras and taking video with his dad’s camcorder. But neither of them had been doctors, so could they have really understood? No, only his classmates could, and it was a pity that he never got to discuss those emotions with them; he hadn’t kept in contact with anyone after graduation.
He was doubly proud of that extra fabric now, thinking it might just save his life if he hit the glass the wrong way and the padding got get torn.
Balancing with his knees, one elbow on the sill for support, he wrapped the white coat around his right elbow. The first hit was disappointing; he hadn’t thrown himself into it hard enough, had been too timid, and ended up with his elbow glancing off the glass. The joints of his arm filled with a sharp ache. If he were doped up he would have been able to put his bare fist through the window and not feel a thing. Again, it had been a stupid time to get sober.
Nikki’s hands clamping down on his legs, he almost instinctively kicked her until he realized what she was doing, that the door was still in the process of being beaten down, not yet open. Nikki was holding him in place, trying to keep him steady so he could give the window another whack.
“Go for it,” she said, not quite a You can do it! but it was as close to a vote of confidence as he was likely to get.
The second hit brought two cracks, and he aimed for the space between the fractures with his third swing. A foot-long square of glass fell out and flopped onto the dirt and grass of the outside world. The blast of air that came with the sunlight carried an October chill that dried the sweat sopping Dane’s eyebrows. Instead of savoring the moment, he gave two quick taps with his elbow and knocked out the rest of the glass.
He turned around. The dirty window out of the way, a dense rectangle of unfiltered sunlight spilled into the basement, stopping before it illuminated the shaking door, but Dane didn’t want to see that anyway.
Nikki was smiling despite herself.
Knowing that it was ruined, that it had served its purpose and then some, Dane unfurled his white coat and draped it over the windowsill, covering the bits of glass that still poked up from the frame like alligator teeth.
He toyed with the idea of rolling out of the way and letting Nikki go first, but that would have been silly; there was no need for excessive civility now, especially since he’d finally won her over. Probably.
Careful not to lay his forearms down on any shards, he began his crawl out of the window. The sun felt so good on his hands that he stretched his fingers and clawed at handfuls of grass, even though he didn’t need the grip and could have squirmed his ass out of the basement without it. It just felt good, though, especially since the banging continued behind him, their pursuers having no luck opening the door.
He pulled his feet over the edge, got to his knees, winded and sore, and stood to feel the sun on his face. Behind him, he knew that Mercy House loomed large but he did not turn to see it. He never wanted to look at it again, and he made a resolution that he would try not to as they ran to the car, maybe hand in hand if she needed the support. He certainly did.
The shelving unit rattled in the basement as Nikki crawled up the boxes and began to climb out. The door held firm under their attack. Some monsters they were, tripped up by a fire exit.
Then there was another sound, more subtle, something he probably wouldn’t even have noticed if his adrenaline hadn’t been pumping like it had, making his senses so sharp.
“Don’t come out here!” Dane screamed, even before he’d turned to see what was crunching gravel behind him, the thing that had pressed itself flat against the stone facade of Mercy House, patiently waiting for them to crawl out the window.
Nikki just whimpered in response, pulling her hands inside.
Dane moved his eyes from the window to the slippers to the face of the man. It was one of the troopers, but not one of the ones they’d seen patrolling the anteroom. No, this man had been purposefully locked out, or maybe he had his own secret exit that Paulo hadn’t thought of.
The resident tried to suppress a laugh but couldn’t, half of his mouth drooped, spittle flew out between clenched teeth as he giggled, staring down Dane.
Fredrick Dane remembered the names of patients only if he saw them on a regular basis, and even then only if they left an impression.
Ivan Frank certainly left an impression. Well, at l
east his scars did.
The other residents had changed, and Ivan had, too, except for his scar tissue. So while the rest of his healthy skin tightened, darkened, and stretched as it had on the other residents, the burned skin on his face and body hadn’t.
Whereas before his left eyelids had been melted together, the look of it reminding Dane of a nearly closed pistachio shell, the skin had now been ripped open by the change his body had undergone. There was a red tear at both corners of his bulging eyeball. Ivan’s mouth, only his upper lip intact before, had been pulled downward by the change. How he would eat now, keep food in, was a mystery to Dane.
Despite his grotesque appearance, his skin torn up, fissures where the blood vessels didn’t flow right, Ivan seemed happy. Giddy, in fact.
Dane took a step back and Ivan matched his movement, coming forward. The man’s tread was bigger than Dane’s, which meant that he’d closed some of the distance.
With a scarred finger, the flesh of his hand marbled, some of it pink and waxen, some of it dark and tight, Ivan motioned for Dane to give him a moment. In his other hand, he depressed the button on his walkie-talkie. The talkies were a popular item, always going missing from the sign-out desk because in Mercy House they were better than phones. The radios didn’t cost you anything, they were portable, and all your friends were always within bandwidth, so you could ask what time they wanted to get dinner, or whether or not they had heard the latest scandal, real or on a soap opera.
“Outside. Over,” Ivan said into the device and then placed it back in his pocket. The “over” could have been walkie-talkie lingo or it could have meant that it was all over. It didn’t much matter; it meant both to Dane.
From inside the broken window, he could hear Nikki gasping, crying. There was no more banging on the door. If anything, Dane took solace in thinking that she was crying for him, that he had somehow proven himself worthy of the tears. The thought that she might have been crying for all of them, for their doomed lives, didn’t even cross his mind. He didn’t let it.
Chapter 31
There was a commotion. But that wasn’t news; there seemed to be a perpetual commotion in the recreation room. The cafeteria used to be where the action was, but now that everyone had been fed, or maybe more accurately because the room had run out of food, the bulk of Mercy House’s surviving residents had gathered in the rec room.
Many of the room’s old attractions had been dismantled and moved against the walls to either side. Chess- and Chinese checkerboards went ignored, the games too complex or slow-paced, and were piled up on upturned foosball tables.
The computer screens from the south wall were smashed and put into a pile, less an attempt to break down communication with the outside world—there was no electricity—than a protest against the twenty-first century. The last fifteen years had brought nothing but bad news and rotten memories for the residents of Mercy House. Even if they did not realize this on a conscious level, and had been here so long that they’d begun to crave captivity, their disdain for modernity was obvious to an outsider like Harriet.
For example, the games in the recreation room were all throwbacks. They were games that Harriet recognized from her own childhood: marbles, with an occasional glass eye pitched as a stand-in; double Dutch with IV tubing; and, for some of the residents who lost interest in these, vigorous games of doctor—the oldest pastime of all.
How did Harriet know all this without participating? Without being one of the community? The tribe, all its members seeking the same primordial release that they’d needed after being locked up for so long. Harriet kept a close eye on the rec room because this was where Nikki was going to show up, hopefully alive, if Harriet wasn’t the one to catch her first.
Earlier in the night, when there had been more living captives to take, more gruesome games had been played: real-life Operation, strip poker where the cards didn’t seem to matter and the competitors were forced to take off more than their clothes, and less-structured forms of torture. Harriet had little interest in these games, these blood sports, and she had observed them only to make sure that Nikki wasn’t a participant.
Nikki was hers and hers alone. Not the rabble’s.
Now that all their captives had been killed, the residents of the rec room had mellowed. There were still cheers, the occasional accusation of cheating that resulted in a fight, the rest of the room looking up from their games to watch.
There was a nonsensical economy instituted in the rec room. Trivial Pursuit cards and Monopoly money approximated cash, while game pieces from Mouse Trap and Risk assumed the role of change, placed on the games and fights, handfuls of this wampum exchanged with no clear conversion rate. But there were winners, and a hierarchy had asserted itself, with those able to tack the most useless junk to their bodies becoming the chieftains.
Harriet found these men and women pathetic. They had undergone a profound physical change but were content with attempting to recapture their childhoods, albeit without the white picket fences, domestic abuse, and casual alcoholism. With Pick’s, there were days when Harriet’s memories would bend and shift; she’d spent hours and days back in 1965. And she had no real desire to return there.
Unlike the residents, Harriet wanted to look to the future. She wanted to relish about five to ten minutes of it, the amount of time it would take for Nikki to bleed out. After that, who could tell how she’d want to spend her time? Maybe once she’d imbibed enough of the girl’s blood, she would find herself in possession of her black magic. Maybe she’d find a way out of Mercy House, go find her old house in East Passyunk, kill whatever bright young things had taken it over as the area had become up-and-coming and squeezed out the old residents.
That was the problem with Mercy House. These people had been here so long that they lacked vision, could not conceptualize the world outside. They all had their various interests— violence, sex, Tiddly Winks—but none of them wanted to seek out passions beyond these walls.
Oh yes, the commotion. This commotion was different from a heated game of hopscotch or a schoolyard brawl. There were about fifteen or twenty naked men involved and it was taking place outside the rec room. That alone caught the attention of some lookie-loos, Harriet included, once she had taken a sweep of the rec room and realized that Nikki wasn’t being stashed anywhere, dead or alive.
There were murmurs among the crowd and Harriet didn’t need to be able to discern what they were saying: She could smell it.
There was a girl hidden within that group of naked men, headed by a naked woman, her body long and lank and more desirable than anyone else’s, it seemed. Harriet was stricken temporarily envious; she wanted to shed her own clothes to check how her body had changed, if she looked like that, whether her muscles and curves had melted, resolved, and reconfigured themselves into something approaching that.
She was incensed. They were marching into the pharmacy and she needed to know who they were transporting in their doubled-up ranks. Harriet pushed to the front of the doorway, right up to the edge of the threshold, just in case these naked warriors were averse to the people of the rec room, a gathering among which Harriet would be embarrassed to be counted.
Using her nails, Harriet dug into the molding of the doorway, hooking herself up so she could reach the top of the frame and then performing a pull-up and looking over her shoulder to see over the heads of the men. Some of them watched her with expressions of suspicion, fixed lips that warned her not to try anything. But there was no need for her to: The girl they were trying so hard to protect had flat, dark brown hair, not Nikki’s dyed tips and natty curls.
Harriet dismounted with a modicum of grace, a three-point landing using a knee, a foot, and the tips of two fingers. It was a maneuver that gained her a few hoots from the men behind her, who’d stopped their games to watch the parade pass. She hissed at them, not shy to crack a skull or three if it meant she’d avoid molestation. But none of the men cared that much. Some of them spilled into the hallway
to see what was happening in the crowded pharmacy, but the majority of them returned to shooting dice and breaking each other’s wrists in arm wrestling matches.
Minutes ebbed, fewer and fewer observers filling the doorway until there was only Harriet. She locked eyes with one of the naked men standing guard in front of the pharmacy, his arms crossed and chest puffed so she could see as little of what was going on behind him as possible. There were three cracks, sounds that reminded her of construction sites, for some reason, of her husband and her boy, and then she heard a group exhale, the inhabitants of the pharmacy gasping together and then going silent.
Someone was dead in there; how she knew this was a mystery, but she did and could almost see the soul flash and then float into the hallway and up through the ceiling.
After that, the men and the woman left without a word or grunt, the woman cradling pill bottles, the girl nowhere in sight. They could have at least given her a bag to carry her goods in, if she had traded them a live girl for however many tablets. The parade of oversexed bodies disappeared up the stairs, ready to continue their business until the pills ran out, the woman let them go, or they starved, whichever came first.
But that wasn’t the end of the excitement. There was an electronic chirp in the pharmacy, some words exchanged, and then a torrent of disappointed residents kicked out into the hallway immediately thereafter.
Once they had cleared out the room, the two army men stepped out into the hallway. Their shoulder sashes were loaded with various equipments and they looked intimidating. Harriet hadn’t forgotten that the taller one had laid hands on her earlier, when she was so sure she had cornered Nikki in the waiting room. If he weren’t so well armed, if he didn’t seem so in charge of his faculties, where the rest of Mercy House seemed like drooling morons, he could have been next on her hit list; but he would have to keep until she’d finished with Nikki.
The other one, shorter maybe by an inch but still huge, and with a scuzzy mustache, turned back to the pharmacy and replaced the door on its hinges after laying down some caltrops made from the ends of hypodermic needles braided with twine. Smart. There were some other forward thinkers among the residents.
