Vicious Grace bsd-3

by M. L. N. Hanover

  “I am absolutely joking,” he said with a sad kind of smile that meant he had been, and also he hadn’t. He wanted to be what I wanted and what Kim needed, and he’d resigned himself to failing us both. “Two girls at once was never one of my big fantasies.”

  “No?”

  “Well, pleasant thought, I guess, but I always figured I’d wind up feeling like the host at a party, you know? ‘Doing all right? Can I get you anything? How about you? Everyone okay?’”

  I laughed, and he blushed. There were only three steps between us. They seemed like an ocean until I took the first one. Then he was right there. I kissed him softly, opening his mouth with mine for what we both knew was the last time. We were both crying a little.

  “Aubrey,” I whispered.

  “Jayné.”

  “You’re fired,” I said. “I’m breaking up with you. Me. With you.”

  He leaned back, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He didn’t understand.

  “If you stayed with me,” I said, “I’d always know you were thinking about Kim. And Eric. Wondering what it would have been like if you hadn’t run into my uncle. You’d keep it hidden because you’re a stand-up guy, but it would be there, and we’d both know it.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not going to live that way. Go where you want. Do what you need to do. But you’re not welcome in my bed or with me. You understand? I’m telling you right now you’ve got no place here.”

  His face was gray, but something deep in his eyes was glittering. It looked like hope. I was sad to see it there, and happy too.

  “You’re doing this so I’ll stay with Kim,” he said.

  “I don’t care what you do,” I said. “That’s your business.”

  “This is silly—”

  “No sillier than ditching both of us out of a misplaced sense of chivalry,” I said. Then, more gently, “You need someone to tell you it’s over. That’s me. It’s over.”

  He took a long, shaking breath. His fingers touched my cheek. I wanted to turn toward them, to press his palm against me. But then I would want something else, some other last thing for the last time. This was as good a boundary as any. I stepped away. His arm fell to his side.

  “Fired, eh?” he said.

  “Pink-slipped,” I said, fighting to keep the catch out of my voice. “Let go. No longer with the company.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “The severance package is pretty good,” I said.

  “No. Jayné, I can’t—”

  “It’s Eric’s money,” I said. “After what he did to you—to both of you—you’ve got some coming. Besides, it would make me feel all magnanimous and stuff.”

  “We’ll talk about it,” he said.

  “I’ll tell the guys when we get back to the condo,” I said.

  “Think they’ll be okay with it?”

  In point of fact, I thought Chogyi Jake already knew as much about it as Aubrey or me. And Ex would probably be quietly pleased, though he’d never show it. That was going to be a whole new box of problems, but later. That was for later.

  “It’s the right thing,” I said instead of answering.

  The others were waiting in the hallway. Ex was standing up on his own now, even though he still had one hand protectively over his solar plexus. He looked annoyed. Chogyi Jake smiled at me and Aubrey both, and Oonishi glowered. Kim took a step forward, then paused. Her movements were sharp as a bird’s. She probably wasn’t quite sober yet.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  The quiet hospital corridors felt colder than when I’d come in. Our footsteps echoed. We rounded a corner and almost walked into a security guard. He stared at us, clearly alarmed to find a bunch of people tramping through the dark hallways. I smiled and nodded. The elevator Oonishi led us to was different from the one we’d come down in. Deep enough for a gurney and equipment and medics to surround it, it looked more like a freight elevator. With all six of us inside, there was still enough room to break apart. Kim stood at the back, arms folded, and Oonishi beside her and Aubrey. Chogyi Jake and Ex and I were by the door. Like a single cell becoming two daughters, we were pulling apart.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d lost a lover. Depending on how I counted it, it was either the second or the third. But it was the first time that I didn’t feel lost or confused. Sad, yes. Emptied. Dreading the moment when, still half asleep, I would reach for Aubrey and wonder where he’d gone. But I also felt calm and centered and certain, and that was new. I had to think that it came from having done what needed doing. When I looked at Aubrey, I thought I saw the same look in his eyes. Sad. Relieved. It was a peaceful kind of grief.

  Kim looked from one of us to the other, confused. I figured he could tell her what had happened later. My cell phone chirped again, and I swung my pack around to get it out. Seven missed calls, six new voice-mail messages, and I’d slept through all of them.

  “Third floor?” Ex said.

  “There’s a walkway to the parking structure,” Oonishi said. “It’s the only way to get there. They lock the ground-floor doors at midnight. You can get out, but you can’t come back in.”

  “What time is it?” Kim asked.

  “Quarter to three,” Aubrey said.

  “Jeez,” I said, checking the readout on the cell to confirm it, “how long was I asleep?”

  “Five hours, more or less,” Oonishi said.

  “Weird,” I said. “Didn’t seem that long.”

  The first message was Chogyi Jake wondering where I was and asking me to call him back. Then a number I didn’t recognize. The elevator doors opened, and I stepped out into a dim hallway with arrowed signs pointing toward Pediatric ICU and Labor and Delivery Unit. A soft, artificial breeze stirred the flyer on the wall, 72-point Arial about Project Morning Air fluttering uneasily, and David Souder started talking in my ear.

  “Something’s wrong. Something’s happening. I can feel it. It started an hour ago, and I thought . . . I thought maybe I was having an anxiety attack or a stroke or something, but I’m not. Something’s coming after him. I . . . I can’t explain this. Grandpa Del, I can feel it that something’s coming after him. He’s scared. He needs help.”

  The memory came back, fleeting bits of the rider’s consciousness I’d stolen in the fight: the dark room, the metal tank. Hurry, she’s killing me. I didn’t realize I’d stopped walking until Ex looked back at me. He started to talk, but I held up a hand, silencing him.

  “I know you told me to stay away, but . . .” David said. His voice was shaking. “Call me back. As soon as you get this, call me back. I’m getting in the car now. It’s at least a couple hours down to Chicago. Just call me.”

  The message had been left at ten thirty, almost as soon as I’d gotten to sleep. I said something obscene. The others clustered around me, questions in their eyes. I thumbed onto the next message. Chogyi Jake saying that Oonishi had called, and that he, Ex, and Aubrey were coming to Grace. An empty message from Ex’s cell number. Kim saying that she’d gotten a call from Ex, and she was coming to the hospital. Then David again.

  “Jayné, I don’t know where you are, but I’m at Grace Memorial. It’s a little after midnight. I know you said it was dangerous here, but I know that this is the right thing. Grandpa Del’s in there. He’s . . . talking to me.”

  “That’s not your grandfather,” I said to the recording. “Come on, snap out of it. It’s not him.”

  “He’s in trouble. Something’s after him. A spirit or a ghost or something. Invisible, but it’s burning. Sonnenrad, I don’t know. It’s really powerful, and I have to help him now. It’s okay, though. It’s going to be okay. I know where he is, and I know how to get him out. It’s going to be all right.”

  I fumbled with the buttons, calling him back. I was muttering obscenities under my breath. Down the line, David’s phone rang. Once, twice . . .

  “Hi, this is Dave Souder. If it’s about a roofing problem, give me a
call at the office. That number—”

  I killed the connection.

  “Problem?” Ex said.

  “David Souder’s here someplace,” I said. “In the hospital. He got here two, maybe two and a half hours ago.”

  “What is he doing?” Aubrey asked.

  “Digging up his grandfather,” I said.

  “What?” Oonishi said, raising his hands in bewilderment and annoyance.

  “That’s a real problem,” Kim said.

  I pushed the cell phone into my pack and pressed my palms to my temples. I had to think. He was in the hospital already, within the rider’s domain. Even if I could talk to him, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to break the control it had over him now.

  “Okay,” I said. “We need to find him. The rider’s able to guide him. Talk to him. It’s probably worked out a plan to get David there as quickly as possible. Wherever the hell ‘there’ is.”

  “Civil defense ward under the north tower,” Ex said. “Fifth level down, right underneath the fallout shelter.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “All this time you people were sleeping and figuring out your love lives, I was working. Remember?” Ex said. “It’s not spelled out on Eric’s blueprints, but the implication’s right there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Once he gets there, how hard is it to undo the interment?”

  “If he can get the coffin,” Chogyi Jake said, “it’s not hard at all. A little blood, the right words, and the intention. It’s like a balloon. All you have to do is make a pinhole and the pressure inside it does the rest. But reaching the coffin might not be easy.”

  “But we don’t have a north tower,” Oonishi said.

  “You used to,” Ex said. “It got incorporated in the new design in ’48. You know how the floor numbers are different east and west of the operating theaters? That’s because the new construction joined the north tower with the Campion office complex that was just east of it, and they used different—”

  “Ex!” I snapped. “Gold star for research later. Why won’t the coffin be easy to get to?”

  “Um,” Ex said. “Because it’s buried?”

  “Probably under a concrete slab,” Chogyi Jake said. “If he didn’t bring a jackhammer or dynamite—”

  “A tank of gas,” I said.

  “There are plenty of ways to make something explode in a hospital,” Kim said. “We’ve got a lot of tanks of pressurized gas, and most of them are oxygen.”

  “What’s cyclopropane?” I asked.

  “It used to be an anesthetic,” Oonishi said. “No one uses it anymore.”

  “Because it kept blowing up?” I asked. Oonishi blinked. That was answer enough. “Ex. Can you get us to the civil defense ward?”

  “The plans were eight years old. If they haven’t remodeled anything, then yes.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. Aubrey hit the elevator’s call button, and the doors slid open immediately. Oonishi came in with us. As the doors slid closed, I wondered whether I should have told him to get out instead. The car dropped down, gravity shifting. I watched the numbers crawl: Two. One. G. L. B. B1. SB1. SB2. We were underground, and I imagined that I could feel the weight of earth pressing in against the air.

  I’d underestimated the rider. I didn’t get to do that twice. If we could reach David before it was too late, carry him out of the hospital, we’d be okay. We’d sedate him if we needed to . . .

  The doors slid open on a hallway, fluorescent lights bright as noon, and green-white walls that kept every ray of it bouncing back. The ceiling was high, marks on the wall showing where a network of sound-killing acoustical tiles had once been. Pipes ran the length of the hall, turning at corners or vanishing into walls. I thought of blood vessels. Grace Memorial as a single, vast body more complex than any individual human within it.

  “We’re going to need to head north,” Ex said.

  “Cool,” I said. “Is that going to be right or left?”

  “Left,” he said.

  We walked fast. Signs in English, Spanish, and what I thought was Chinese pointed us toward the laundry, the film library, records storage. The mix of languages left me with the eerie feeling that I was in some universal ur-hospital, like I’d stumbled into a network of halls and tunnels that connected to infinity at the back. If I followed them long enough, I’d wind up in the basement of the Mayo Clinic or St Mary’s in London or some tiny little hospital in the middle of Serbia. The pipes above us shuddered and clanked, locked in a conversation of their own. Ex led us left, and then right. We passed through a warehouse, chain-link fencing on both sides of a single hall making storage cells for ancient medical equipment. The skeletons of beds with cranks on the fronts, wheelchairs of rotting wicker with shredding rubber wheels. Cabinets of glass jars filled with foggy liquid and covered in dust.

  “There should be a stairway over here,” Ex said. “It can get us down to the fallout shelter. The civil defense ward is underneath that.”

  “Have I mentioned that this is really creepy?” I said.

  “We’re going to be okay,” Aubrey said, and the lights went out.

  The darkness was total. Suffocating. I felt a hand brush my arm, and I yelped a little. Then a deep throbbing came, resonating all around us. Once, then twice, and then a vicious wind whipped through the passageway, hot and damp and thick with the smells of old soil and corrupt flesh. To my right, a rat squealed in terror. The silence that followed was worse.

  The lights flickered back on, dimmer and dirtier than before. They grew darker and brighter and darker again, like something breathing. A violent rattling passed through the pipes overhead, something huge sprinting one floor above us. We all looked at one another. No one needed to say it. We all knew what had happened; we were too late. David had reached the coffin. The haugsvarmr, the demon, the Beast Rahab was free. The hospital, taken over.

  I thought for a moment I saw the cold, blue glow of a demonic fish swimming through the air at the end of the corridor. I heard the rider’s voice in my memory. I can’t see you, but I know you’re here. I can smell your skin. The hair on my arms was standing up straight.

  “Okay, new plan,” I whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  TWENTY

  Retracing our steps, we were all quiet. The walls around us seeped with the threat of violence and a sense of something vast and implacable. Even our footsteps were quiet. Careful. Frightened as mice in a cat’s bed. Chogyi Jake wasn’t smiling. Oonishi kept speeding up or slowing down, unconsciously keeping himself at the center of the herd. Kim and Aubrey were walking side by side, neither looking at the other but their strides matching perfectly. Around us, the hospital changed.

  At first, I thought it was only the low light, fluorescents buzzing and flickering as we passed them. It was more than that. The floors got damper, and the air thickened. The salt smell was somewhere between ocean water and blood. When we passed back through the storage cells, I had the feeling that the old equipment had moved, that it was still moving whenever I wasn’t watching it. The pipes started dripping rust-brown water that burned a little when it hit the back of my hand. We got to the elevator faster than I’d expected, and paused there. There were five levels above us, just to reach the surface. I didn’t care about getting to the parking garage. Anyplace with a window I could break and crawl out of would do just fine. But when I reached out for the call button, I couldn’t quite do it. Somewhere in dim memory, there was a story about people getting into a haunted elevator and coming out as a thin, red soup.

  Ex, at my side, saw me hesitate.

  “Stairs?” he said.

  “Stairs.”

  We found the stairwell a few doors down, still marked by a glowing red exit sign. The door stuck when I tried to open it, but Ex and Aubrey pushed with me, and we got through. The railing was icy cold under my hand. I leaned in, looking up the central shaft. Two short flights to go up a story, twisting up for what looked like forever. Behind us, someone sta
rted shouting: a deep, angry sound. I started up.

  I had felt the insectile press of riders pushing in against reality from the Pleroma or Next Door or whatever we called the abstract spiritual place they called home. At best, it had been like standing in a lake where fish sometimes blundered into me. At its worst, it was like being the egg in biology class videos about fertilization. This was different. Instead of the almost physical pressure, I felt like I was floating inside something, like if I pushed off from the concrete and steel landings, I could almost swim up into the air. Even the immediate solid touch of the railings and walls seemed unconvincing, and I heard voices talking just outside the range of hearing. Fighting. Weeping. Begging.

  At the landing halfway to the ground floor, we paused. Oonishi looked winded, but he was the only one. He held up a hand, silently asking the rest of us to stop and let him catch his breath. I wondered for a moment what exactly we’d do if he had a heart attack or something right there. I didn’t think I’d be taking him to the ER or dropping him with the night nurse at the Cardiac Care Unit. The thought skipped ahead of me into unsafe territory.

  “Kim,” I said. “How many people do you think are in the hospital right now?”

  “We’ve got about five hundred beds,” Kim said. “With night staff? I don’t know. A little less than a thousand.”

  A thousand men and women—kids, infants, newborns—who didn’t know what was going on, only that all the familiar things around them were changed and changing. Would they think they were going crazy? That the sense of the hospital shifting, rusting, cooling around them was a kind of hallucination? Something rumbled deep in the earth, then a sound like metal shrieking.

  “Okay,” I said. “Anyone know what that was?”

  “At a guess?” Ex said. “Our hive-mind is figuring out that it’s still trapped. May not be happy about it.”

  “I can go on,” Oonishi said, still gasping. “Really. I’m fine.”

  The door marked G for ground level was green-painted steel with a bright crash bar. The exit sign above it looked like a promise. I pushed through. The hallway wasn’t quite dark, but the lights were flickering and hissing. Something black was welling up through the paint and dripping down the walls, and the air smelled hot and close as breath. A heavy-set woman in pale green scrubs stood in the middle of the hall under a sign pointing us toward the Pediatric ICU. Her hair and clothes seemed to float, as if she were underwater. Her eyes glowed a cold, deepwater blue.