Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  Getting behind the desk was just a matter of lifting a hinged part and walking around. Corry skipped a step and ducked under, quickly confirming his aloneness.

  “Must’a gone to the bathroom,” he said to himself, sitting down in the chair. That had to be it. He’d go down the hall to double-check, but after the hell he caught the last time he went down the hall alone he figured it’d be best if he just waited.

  A few minutes passed. He whiled away the time shooting rubber bands at the video screens and wondering exactly who it was he was waiting for. Not Ned, surely. Ned would probably pee in the garbage can before he left the front desk unattended for so long. Ethel, maybe—she was pretty loose about the rules. Or Bob, a really tall guard with hairy knuckles and a goofy, high-pitched laugh Corry found sort of alarming.

  After another couple of minutes it dawned on him that there wasn’t anybody coming. And if that were true, something was really and truly screwed up.

  He stepped up to the hallway door—which was closed—and put his ear up against it. This didn’t do much good other than to occupy him while he figured out what to do.

  And what do I do?

  He would have to tell somebody the front desk was unattended, because that just wasn’t right. Anyone could walk in off the street and right down the hall through the always-unlocked door. Worse, Corry was pretty sure the Mildly Crazy patients didn’t have locks on their room doors, so one of them could wander out if he wanted to. Probably none of them did want to, but still.

  Grabbing an internal phone directory, he started flipping through the laminated pages, looking for the right person to call. He knew the names of most of the hospital directors, but they didn’t really know him, so a phone call would be sort of odd. Better to contact somebody he knew. Violet, for instance.

  Violet didn’t know he was coming, which was why she hadn’t been at the door to greet him. Lately, she had been giving him more latitude, to the extent that sometimes she didn’t even ask what his daily plans were. Corry had no idea how he’d earned the extra trust but thought it was so cool he didn’t want to ask about it and screw everything up. She’d probably think her pestering was missed.

  She worked in the Really Crazy wing most of the time. Corry had never been there, but didn’t figure he ever wanted to be, just based on some of the stories Violet sometimes told to other adults when she thought Corry wasn’t paying attention. The word feces came up a lot, which hadn’t bothered Corry until he looked up the word. It sounded to him like the patients there were very different from the ones he knew—and not in any good way.

  Fingering his way through the directory, he found a place described as the Medium Security Nurse Station. That had to be it. He picked up the phone.

  And then Corry’s weird afternoon got weirder, because the phone wasn’t working. It was one of those really big telephones with bunches of extra buttons on them and four digit numbers written next to the buttons, but none of the buttons seemed to make the phone work. He checked the line leading from the phone into the wall and saw that it was intact. What was going on?

  Sitting up again, some movement on the video monitor caught his eye. Any action on either screen was pretty easily noticeable because the only thing on display was the front door and the back door. He always thought of the monitors as unnecessary, because you could see the front door from the desk, anyway, and the back door wasn’t even supposed to be used except in case of fire.

  The movement was at the back door. Someone was opening it from the inside. Corry didn’t know where the door was, but he remembered Ned saying how there was an alarm attached to it, which meant somewhere, an alarm was supposed to be going off.

  The door pushed open further. Whoever was doing it was having a lot of trouble, as if it weighed hundreds of pounds. Corry saw his face. He was dressed like a patient, but it wasn’t anybody Corry recognized. Probably, it was one of the Mildly Crazies he’d never met before. It couldn’t possibly be one of the Really Crazies. They didn’t have that kind of freedom.

  The guy looked totally terrified. There was no sound, but the way his mouth kept opening and closing, Corry was pretty sure he was screaming. And for a second it looked like he was going to make it out, but then the door suddenly slammed shut—as if a really huge guy had just hit the outside of it. It happened so abruptly Corry actually jumped to his feet in surprise.

  “All right, seriously,” he said to himself, his voice trembling slightly, “what’s going on?”

  He ticked off the anomalies one more time, as if by lining them end-to-end they would form a picture he’d recognize, but it didn’t really help much except to make his heart beat faster.

  I should call the police, he thought. Except the phones didn’t work. And he had no idea where the nearest police station was. And, he was probably totally overreacting. But in case he wasn’t, there was another matter to consider.

  His mother was somewhere inside.

  Corry had been calling her Violet since he was seven years old. It was entirely her idea. She said a lot of junk about treating each other like people and so on, but he thought the truth was she hated admitting she had a kid while she was still sort of young and pretty. And in a way it worked, at least for him, as he rarely thought of her as his mom anymore. She was just an older woman he had to answer to all the time. But word choice didn’t make her any less his mother, and at that moment the idea that she might be one of the people inside, screaming and trying to get out like the guy on the monitor, made a lump form in his throat that spread all the way to his stomach.

  I’ll feel better once I know she’s okay, he thought.

  But that meant going further into the hospital.

  Screwing his resolve by swallowing a few dozen times to push down the creeping bile in the back of his throat, he walked to the ward room door and grabbed the handle.

  He half expected it to be as heavy as the back door looked to have been on the video feed, but it swung open cleanly and easily. Corry knew before he formally looked down the hall—thanks to the Secret Future, which was a tremendous help for this particular scared twelve year old—that the hallway was empty. It was also mostly unlit. The corridor had regularly spaced fluorescent ceiling lights that, when on, left little to the imagination. But they were all off. Instead, at every T-junction, as well as above the door, was a small spotlight attached to a battery box. Emergency lights, he remembered. They were supposed to go on when the power went out. Corry wondered what else in the hospital relied on the same power as the lights. Not the video monitors, obviously. But it could be the phones did.

  He stepped into the hall and felt the door close behind him, cutting him off from the sunlight coming in through the lobby windows. To further emphasize the strangeness of the emergency lighting, the spotlights were red. It made the white walls look like they were blood-colored, which was terribly creepy.

  Corry took a deep breath and started walking slowly down the hall.

  Find Violet, or find another adult, he thought. That’s all. Any adult will do, even a Mildly Crazy one.

  There were three doors—two on the right and one on the left—leading up to the common room’s doorless entryway. All of the doors were closed. The one on the left beside the common room was the bathroom. Corry didn’t know where the other two led.

  He tried the first of them and found an unoccupied Mildly Crazy ward room, lit up thanks to the emergency light fixture in the corner inside a metal cage. It didn’t look like the room had been lived in.

  Door number two was opposite the bathroom. It was locked, which meant it probably wasn’t somebody’s room at all. The edges were more worn than that of the other doors, and the lock in the doorknob was free of brass coloring—from multiple key uses, probably. Corry figured this was where all the janitor supplies were kept.

  He tried the bathroom door. It wasn’t locked or occupied, and nothing appeared to be out of place. He flashed back briefly to the time Harvey Nilsson had cornered him in there, and he
grimaced. Not now, he reminded himself. I got enough to be scared of already. He closed it and moved on.

  Turning the corner to the common room, he half expected to see the gang assembled as always, with Mr. Pierce at the card table and the hands already dealt out and Mr. Parseghian ticking loudly through Donahue next to an annoyed Mr. Conway. But to his immense disappointment, the room was empty.

  It was also very well lit. Sunlight streamed through the big picture windows, overwhelming the weak red emergency light above the doorway to such a degree it was easy to pretend it wasn’t even on. Corry was happy to see at least one part of the hospital still looked normal. He was tempted to just sit down at the window and wait, as if this was the normalest of normal days.

  But when he took a few steps into the room, he realized something was out of place. It took a second for him to figure out that the problem lay with the afghan. The couch—a beat-up old felt thing that was the kind of comfortable only an extremely lived-in couch could be—always had an old afghan covering the top of it, and now that was missing.

  As he got closer, the mystery was solved; apparently the afghan had ended up on the floor in front of the couch. Messy, he thought. He wondered which patient had done it, and why nobody’d bothered to put it back.

  He stepped around the couch, until the Secret Future showed him what was really wrong with this scene, and he froze.

  There was something under the afghan.

  It was a big lump, roughly the size of an adult human, which was exactly what Corry was pretty positive it was. Nicer explanations ran through his head—somebody fell asleep, rolled off the couch, and accidentally pulled the covering down, or he passed out and someone else covered him and went to get a nurse—but none seemed to work, because whatever was underneath it most definitely wasn’t breathing.

  Trembling, he knelt down and grabbed the edge of the afghan. It took him three deep breaths before he could move again.

  The image that followed would stay with him for the rest of his life and was that much worse for the fact that he saw it twice—in the present and in the Secret Future.

  It was Ned. He was lying flat on his back, his eyes open, and wearing a permanent angry expression. There was a large hole in the front of his chest around where a person’s heart was supposed to be. Corry’s heart, preparing to leap directly out of his own breast, helpfully identified the correct location for him. All kinds of blood and guts had been forced out of the hole and traveled some distance down the front of dead Ned’s white shirt.

  There was blood elsewhere too. Blood he hadn’t seen before splattered on the wall and the chair near the window, telling him exactly where Ned had been standing before he was shot, in the back, by somebody standing right about where Corry’s feet were. And he wanted to understand how he’d missed all of that blood when he first walked into the room, but quite suddenly everything he ever ate in his entire life lined up at the back of his gullet and demanded to be let out, and there was no time to think about anything other than that.

  He ran from the room, rounded the corner, and made for the bathroom, barely reaching the toilet before satisfying his gag reflex.

  A few minutes passed with Corry doing nothing more than holding his mouth open and choking up semi-digested matter into the bowl, flushing as frequently as possible lest the smell trigger another round. Finally, trembling and covered in sweat, he sat back on the floor, his head up against the wall tile.

  Somebody killed Ned with a gun, he thought. That’s nuts. He didn’t need to spend any time wondering how a gun had even made it into the hospital, as he was one of the few people around who happened to know that Ned carried one himself. He wasn’t supposed to, but it was one of those little things Ned had to do or he wouldn’t be Ned.

  Corry could remember clearly when Ned showed it off to him, calling Corry around behind the desk and pulling it out of his pocket. It was a little thing, much smaller than the other guns Corry had been around before. In fact, that was exactly what Corry had thought of at that moment—that time in the woods, when Charlie Bluff nearly got his leg blown off. He’d instinctively recoiled with the memory, which Ned took to mean he was afraid of the gun. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “Nobody’ll be taking this baby away from me.”

  Guess he was wrong about that, Corry thought.

  “Go to the police, shithead,” he said to himself. “That’s what you do when somebody’s been shot. Find a cop. Everybody knows that.”

  Galvanized, he pulled himself up, walked over to the bathroom door, grabbed the handle, and froze. He was safe where he was, but if somebody was running around the hospital with a gun, he might not be this safe again for the rest of the day—certainly not if he opened the bathroom door.

  You can’t get the police if you don’t leave the bathroom, he told himself, which was surely true. “Open the door, open the door, open the door.”

  He opened the door. There was nobody in the hallway pointing a gun at him. He was still as alone as he had been when he first biked up.

  Go! He bolted for the lobby, running as hard as he could while thinking, irrationally, that the person with the gun was just now right behind him and aiming to fire.

  He hit the door, twisted the knob, and—

  The door was locked.

  “No!” he shouted and then clapped his hand over his mouth, as if by doing so he could shove the exclamation back down before anybody else heard it.

  He spun quickly around and saw that the hallway was still empty.

  Okay, okay, okay, get a grip. He reached for the handle and tried it again, but it wouldn’t budge. The door was never locked, which was why he didn’t even think to check it before walking through. And now he was trapped inside, just like everyone else.

  But I’m not like everyone else, am I? he thought. I’m not just a kid; I’m a kid with a gift.

  He thought again of Charlie Bluff, how Charlie had been standing with the shotgun at his side, the tip of the barrel pressed up against his leg while Tyrell had run ahead after noises only he could hear. And how cold it had been, even with Violet next to him trying to keep him warm.

  Back then Corry hadn’t been very good at distinguishing between the present and the Secret Future; to him it was all happening at once. So when Charlie’s hand had gotten tired—or maybe it’d just gotten cold, since he hadn’t been wearing gloves—and the gun slipped in his hand, Corry knew before anybody else did that in trying to catch the gun Charlie would inadvertently pull the trigger.

  Having never heard a gun go off at close range before, the sound had frightened Corry. He’d screamed and jumped away from Charlie, and when Violet asked what was wrong, he’d said simply, “Bang!”

  And then, in real time, the gun did go off. To Charlie—and also to Violet—it seemed as if Corry had somehow commanded the gun to fire.

  That was why they’d had to leave the commune that very night and also why Violet was a little scared of her son. She had thought she had a devil child on her hands. She still thinks that.

  Corry took more than one lesson with him from that day. The first was that, clearly, he was seeing things other people were not. The second was never speak of the Secret Future to anyone because adults were prepared to jump to a bad conclusion really quick. Third, he had to learn to respect cause and effect, if only as a way to understand what was happening versus what was only about to happen.

  A fourth lesson came to him as he sat next to the locked door, staring down the hall and expecting a killer to emerge at the other end of it. He had known the gun was going to go off before it did. If he could know that, he could also know where the bullet would be going. Further, if he concentrated, he could probably avoid being the one standing in the way of the bullet. It should be no different than it was on his bike, when he could see traffic movement ahead of time and adjust accordingly.

  The thought was a revelation. As much as he liked to pretend his future-sight was a superhero power, the truth was he hated having to deal wi
th it all the time. This was the first time in his life he saw it as a blessing instead of a curse.

  Emboldened, he pushed himself off the floor. He could save his mom and maybe other people, too. He could be a real hero.

  Just as soon as he figured out how to get his legs to walk again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Corry had a powerful fear of going crazy himself someday. It was one of the drawbacks of spending so much time around people who were crazy, people who were on drugs a lot of the time, and his mom, who had some of the qualities of both groups. It seemed to him going crazy was something that sort of snuck up on you from behind, like a tiger in the jungle, and once it had you, that was it—you ended up in a place like McClaren, and then you never ever left. Except with a tiger, you knew you were being eaten by one while it was happening. Crazy just . . . happened, without you even knowing it. This was a terrifying notion.

  And that was why, when he reached the threshold of the common room again, Corry stopped at the entrance and stared hard at the prone body of Ned the guard, just to make sure it was still there. He’d heard from some of the Mildly Crazies about how sometimes they saw stuff that wasn’t real. But Ned was still there. Corry understood that so long as he was the only one looking at him, he hadn’t truly ruled out the possibility that it was all in his imagination, but he still felt a little better. Then he felt bad for feeling better because Ned was probably not happy to be dead.

  Rather than continuing, he walked back to the body and pulled the afghan aside, not really knowing why he was doing so.

  Dead body, dead body, dead body, he thought. Not throwing up.

  He wasn’t going to throw up again, which was important because heroes don’t throw up, like ever.

  “Keys!” he said aloud. Ned had keys to the whole place on his belt. That was why he’d gone back, he decided. Not because he was a sick—or crazy—kid who enjoyed staring at bodies. He could find the keys, open the door, get the police . . .