Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  But the key ring was missing. Ned kept his battalion of keys on a giant ring attached to a pull chain on his belt, and it wasn’t there. Could be it was underneath Ned, but Corry would have to flip him to check that, and he wasn’t willing to do any such thing. Besides, who wears a key ring on the back of their belt? Probably whoever had killed him had taken the keys.

  Corry felt his stomach grumble again and thought maybe it was a good idea to walk away from Ned now and get on with the hero stuff. So he covered up the guard and stepped into the hallway.

  Going left from there, it occurred to him that he had now officially traveled deeper into the hospital than he’d ever been before. “Hero,” he reminded himself, because that word made his hands stop shaking. “That’s right, I’m a hero.”

  The problem was in coming up with a name. He’d already accomplished the hard part, having an actual superpower, but now he needed a good name. All the best superheroes had one. A bad name and you didn’t even get your own book, no matter how cool your power was. The Batman, for instance, had no powers at all, just a really awesome name and a fairly cool costume. So what will my name be?

  The first few steps down the hall were uneventful. There were four doors to check, but as he was now prepared to forge ahead without an adult, he didn’t see a great need to go door-to-door. He needed to get to the T-junction at the end and figure out where that led.

  Something to do with time would be good, he thought. Time Boy, say, or the Clock Beater. Except maybe not either one of those because they were stupid. He had to do much better than that.

  He reached the edge of the hallway. There, the corridor split to the left and the right with a door directly ahead that looked like most of the other doors in the hallway and was probably another Mildly Crazy ward room. He didn’t know for sure which way to go, but he recalled on the one or two occasions when he happened to still be standing in the hall as Violet went off to work, she headed to the right.

  He pressed up against the wall and, in the Secret Future, leaned around the corner to peek at what was down there. It looked as if there was a well-lit area about twenty feet away that wasn’t just another part of the corridor. Looking to the left, he saw a long corridor of what appeared to be more patient rooms and no open space at the end. So he’d go right. And best part—nobody took a shot at his Secret Future head. He figured it was okay to step forward in real time, and so he did, looking both ways and then heading to the right.

  The hospital had already proven to be a lot bigger than he ever realized, especially if the left turn part of the corridor really went as far as it looked like it did. Where the heck is everybody? he wondered. Then he decided not to wonder about that, because for all he knew, each of them looked like Ned now.

  Chrono-Kid sprang to mind and then immediately sprang back out again. Terrible name. The Time Tamer? That wasn’t so bad. He instinctively liked any name that was supposed to have a “the” in front of it. But it wasn’t really accurate because he didn’t tame time, he just saw it differently. That was the problem, he figured, as he reached the open space at the midpoint of the hallway. His powers were too difficult to describe in a name. He was going to have to come up with something that described what he did with the powers, rather than what his powers were.

  The open space at the end of the hall was occupied by the Medium Security Nurse Station he’d tried to telephone. The station was a round desk area in the middle of a large square space. It had three chairs and a bunch of video monitors on a lower desk level. It was completely unoccupied. No nurses, no dead bodies of nurses, no anybody. Maybe they really were all dead.

  No, can’t be, he thought. He knew enough about guns to understand they had a limited supply of bullets in them. “They can’t all be dead,” he said. His voice echoed in the open space, emphasizing his aloneness.

  He sat down and examined the desk but found it about as useful as the desk near the front door, meaning not useful at all. So he checked out the monitors.

  There were six of them, and each one was labeled via the sophisticated method of magic marker on a piece of masking tape stuck to the top of the plastic casing. The first four showed rotating views of patient rooms, and the other two were labeled “public” and “halls.” Corry decided it would be a good idea to look at all of them. Maybe this way he could figure out where everyone was without leaving the comparative safety of the nurse station.

  It took him only a few seconds of watching to gain an excellent understanding of the difference between Mildly Crazy and Really Crazy. It seemed that about half of the Really Crazy patients were still in their rooms, and Corry sincerely hoped their rooms were locked, because—wow. One guy had his pants off and was doing things to his Private Place that Corry was pretty sure must hurt a lot. Another one was licking his padded wall, and a third was busily picking at the skin on his arm, causing a thin trickle of blood.

  The most interesting was the guy on screen twenty-seven who kept screaming at the camera. Like the one he’d seen at the back door, it was weird watching him because there was no sound, but clearly the guy was making as much noise as he could. Corry stayed at that monitor for a while because it looked like he was trying to say something. It wasn’t until the third pass that he figured out the word. Medication.

  Oh God, he thought. What time is it? He looked at the clock on the wall. The Mildly Crazy patients were supposed to get their meds after lunch, which was an hour ago. If the whole hospital was on the same schedule, that could mean the entire building was full of unmedicated crazies.

  On the fourth pass, the screaming guy wasn’t there anymore. Since it was basically impossible to not appear on camera—Corry could see the whole cell—it could only mean that the rooms were, in fact, not locked. Screaming guy was out in the halls somewhere.

  His heart rate going right on up again, Corry switched over to the view of the corridors. The cameras there moved much more quickly, as apparently McClaren Hospital was huge. The stairwell he saw in one shot explained that; there was a second level, probably underground. Also—and it was difficult to tell because the cameras were showing poorly lit hallways—two or three times he could have sworn he saw more bodies. It was mostly just a leg here or there, and the system was moving from shot to shot very rapidly, but by the fourth cycle he was pretty positive about what he was looking at.

  And he found screaming guy. He was running down the corridor toward who knows what. Briefly, Corry considered that the man might be heading for him, as he was sitting at the nurse station. But he didn’t hear any screaming. Guy must be downstairs, he thought.

  He could use the cameras to follow the man—every time he disappeared around a corner on one camera he’d appear on another one. It was a very useful way to map the basement, really.

  But then something odd happened. It looked at first like the guy tripped, but when the camera found him again it was clear there wasn’t anything to trip over. He stood up and looked around. Just before the camera cut away it looked as if something struck him in the back of the head. The shot returned in time to show . . . nothing. Screaming guy—no longer screaming, by the looks of it—was on his back and holding up his hands in self-defense. He thought somebody was hitting him, but there just wasn’t anyone there. Except there was blood on his face, and he didn’t get that beat up just from falling over. Maybe someone was hitting him, but they weren’t on camera. Which also didn’t make any sense at all. The camera cut away again, and when it returned, the screaming man was neither screaming nor moving.

  A terrible thought came to Corry, the As-Yet-Unnamed Superhero. What if he ran into someone else who also had superpowers? Like someone who was so fast he didn’t even appear on a video camera?

  His eyes flitted over to the last monitor, hoping there he would get some good news. But while “public” had four cameras, just one of them was working. From the working camera angle, he could see only that it was a pretty big room, somewhat reminiscent of his school’s cafeteria. Dozens of
chairs were stacked up on top of one another, forming a barrier and almost completely blocking off the big window that took up most of the wall. Sunlight came in through that window, so the room had to be on the same floor he was, seeing as how the basement level was underground.

  He caught the movement on the fifth camera pass. There were people behind the chairs and in front of the windows. Lots of people. And they weren’t running around and screaming for their meds or otherwise acting outwardly crazy. They’re hiding! he thought. That’s where everyone went. Of course, because that’s what sane people do when someone in the place has a gun. Hide.

  It was impossible to tell who and how many there were, but it was a good guess that Violet was there, too.

  He just had to figure out where there was. And maybe more importantly, where the person they were hiding from might be.

  * * *

  Access to the Really Crazy ward rooms and whatever lay beyond—like the public room, hopefully—was easily gained via a door behind the nurse station. Corry opened it and then stood there for several deep breaths to review what he was about to walk down and to drum up the courage to do so.

  Nothing jumped right out at him, literally or figuratively, as being dangerous. It looked pretty much like the other corridors he’d already been down, red-tinted from the spotlights, but with no apparent movement or visible bodies. Satisfied, he stepped over the threshold and started walking.

  Then he heard the door behind him close and the lock trip into place. Stupidly, he’d just locked himself in. Again.

  Idiot Boy, he thought. Or Stupid Kid. He was pretty sure those names weren’t taken.

  Sighing mightily, he headed down the hall, slowly at first, picking up speed as he went. It seemed the further away he got from the comparative safety of the nurse station, the faster he wanted to go. Doors in the hallway were alternately open and not open, which he guessed corresponded to occupied and unoccupied. He could probably open one of the doors and find an adult, but that was no longer the most sensible plan, not in the Really Crazy wing. Find a nurse, or an orderly, or a guard, or a doctor, or anyone not wearing the outfit of a patient.

  Moving faster worked the same on foot as it did on his bike, extending the Secret Future because he got to places quicker. So as he came up to the first turn in the hallway—no T-junction here, just a right-angled left turn—he already knew he was going to find somebody there. The sight was so jarring, in fact, that he stopped short of the corner and temporarily altered his own future.

  Corry stood just shy of the turn. What he’d seen was a patient, sitting down against the wall and crying. He could hear the man muttering something, but Corry couldn’t make out what.

  In the Secret Future, he turned the corner and saw what the man was looking at. He turned the corner for real and saw the same thing. It was Carl.

  He was lying up against the side of the wall, very still and probably dead, which was a conclusion Corry would probably never have jumped to about half an hour earlier.

  Temporarily ignoring the other guy, he knelt beside his friend, with whom he would now never get the chance to discuss baseball. Unlike Ned, there didn’t seem to be any obvious wounds on him. Just the same, he wasn’t breathing. Now he won’t get to see the Sox win the Series, he thought, and the thought filled him with a tremendous sadness.

  Trying to get his mind off that, he checked out the guy huddled against the opposite wall. He was a thin, little man who could have used a shave and a bath—and probably a whole gallon of medication. His head rocked back and forth; it looked like his eyes weren’t focusing on much of anything, and he was actively chewing on his wrist. Blood was in his teeth and on his chin.

  “Hey,” Corry said. “Are you all right?”

  The man didn’t respond. Corry couldn’t figure out what the guy was muttering, but he seemed pretty harmless. He returned his attention to Carl.

  Corry had only a vague appreciation of what made one person alive and another person dead. On television shows they did stuff like putting fingers on necks or wrists to feel for something or other, and he would’ve tried that, too, but he didn’t know what he was feeling for, so he skipped it.

  “Carl?” he asked. Carl didn’t say anything. His eyes were closed, though; might as well have been asleep. He slapped the old guard’s face a couple of times to see if that helped. It didn’t.

  “Guess you really are dead,” Corry said.

  “Duuuugh!” the patient against the wall declared loudly.

  “What?” Corry asked. “Do you have something to say?”

  He fell silent again.

  “Because I could use some help here,” Corry went on. “I’m just a kid, you know.” Nothing. The guy went back to being catatonic. First adult he runs into and he turns out to be useless. “Mom couldn’t work in the mall or something, could she? No, it had to be a mental hospital.”

  He started feeling around Carl’s belt. He didn’t know for sure whether Carl had the same kind of key ring as Ned, but it seemed worth a try. Unlike Ned, though, Carl was lying on his side, and after a few seconds of searching, he concluded that if there were keys, they were under the guard’s body.

  “Have’ta roll him over,” he decided.

  That meant touching an actual dead body. The day was becoming a series of obstacles filled with things Corry never expected to have to do, and touching dead bodies was right up at the top of the list. But he had to pass each obstacle eventually, didn’t he? Otherwise, he wasn’t getting back out again.

  “Hey,” he said to the catatonic guy. “You wouldn’t want to help me, would you?”

  “Dunnut . . .” the man declared.

  “Guy, you wanna say something, get your wrist outta your mouth, okay?”

  Sure, bad idea to yell at crazy people. But he was a little crazy person, and Corry had decided he wasn’t going to be scared of him. As much as it was possible to decide such a thing.

  Yelling didn’t change anything, though. The guy just sat there and stared back at Corry. At least he was recognizing there was another person. Maybe next he’d try speaking words.

  Carl was a big guy, short but tubby. He wasn’t going to be easy to move. Corry walked around him a couple of times looking for an angle or an idea how to do it while ignoring the voice in his head that kept crying Carl’s dead! because that just wasn’t helpful. Finally, he decided on a plan. He grabbed onto one end of Carl’s belt and started pulling. After no small amount of effort, Corry got him rolled onto his back.

  “Sorry, Carl,” he said quietly.

  “Do not consort,” said the man on the floor.

  “What?” Corry asked.

  “Donnut consssort,” he repeated. His words were slushy again.

  “Guy, I don’t even know what that means.” He stood over Carl and reached down to the other side of the belt. His hand came up wet. “Oh . . .” he muttered, jerking his hand back in surprise.

  In the red emergency lighting, the color of the liquid now coating his hand looked black, like motor oil. But he knew what it was; it was blood. Carl’s blood.

  He tried to use Carl’s white shirt to mop it up, but that only made matters worse, because he didn’t want to see the blood at all, and instead he was spreading it.

  “Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up . . .”

  “Monsters,” said the crazy man.

  “Shut up!” Corry snapped. He wiped his face with the not bloody hand, realizing he was crying and perhaps had been crying for the last few minutes. “Superheroes don’t cry!” he insisted.

  He closed his eyes and felt along the belt some more. It was all wet along that side of Carl’s waist, as was the floor where Carl had been laying at rest. But as long as his eyes were still slammed shut he could pretend it was just water, even though he knew better.

  He found a key ring.

  “Monsters!” the crazy guy screamed again.

  “Yeah, monsters,” Corry agreed. The ring was attached to the belt by the
same kind of clip Ned had. He forced open his eyes to study the mechanism.

  He needed to slide the clip up off the belt; the problem being Carl’s pudgy middle was in the way. He had to push the guard’s stomach in to clear space for the belt, and when he did so, it caused more blood to pour out of the body and over Corry’s hands. He gagged reflexively.

  “Monsters!”

  The shout came from right behind him. In a few seconds the crazy man would be grabbing him from behind by the shoulders and shoving him hard into the wall while screaming his new favorite word.

  He pushed harder at Carl’s pudge. The blood made the clip all slippery, but . . . there. The key ring came free. And just in time.

  He ducked and rolled to the side a half second before Mr. Monsters lunged forward. The crazy man fell comically atop poor Carl while Corry crab-walked some distance and got to his feet.

  “Sorry, guy. I gotta go.”

  “Do not consort with monsters,” the man repeated, still lying prone on top of Carl.

  “Right. I’ll remember that.”

  He stumbled away, backing down the hall and keeping an eye on this Grade A nut job.

  Running Boy? He thought. How about The Flee?

  Mr. Monsters found his footing, not caring that he’d gotten some of Carl’s blood on him. His wrist was bleeding anyway, so there was plenty of blood to go around.

  “Monnnnsters,” he droned.

  “I know!” Corry said. “Go . . . go back and sit down against the wall, would’ja?”

  He didn’t do that. Instead, he started walking down the corridor. Toward Corry.

  “Fantastic,” Corry said. Mr. Monsters wanted to beat him up for reasons that only made sense to Mr. Monsters. The guy didn’t move all that quick, but searching with the very real possibility that if he lingered too long he’d be grabbed from behind by a crazy just wasn’t going to make this go any easier.

  “I don’t need a sidekick!” Corry shouted.