The Hollow City

by Dan Wells

  I jerk back in a spasm of fear, remembering the giant maggot. I look desperately at my body, patting my legs and stomach where I can reach, searching for some sign of its passage; bite marks or slime trails or anything else. I look wildly around the room, but there’s nothing there. Is it behind me? Under the bed? I strain at the straps on my arms, craning my neck to see around the edges of the bed, but there’s nothing to see. It’s gone. I have no idea what it did.

  Was it real? I want it to be fake. I consider the doctor’s diagnosis—that my brain is screwed up and sees things that aren’t really there. I don’t want that thing I saw to be real. I want it to be all in my head.

  I shiver reflexively, the involuntary twitch you get when you touch something disgusting. The thought that the maggot could be in my head almost makes me gag with revulsion—and then I remember the faces of the Red Line victims, hollowed out and bloody. What if the maggots were in their heads, laid there like eggs, nestled up in their sinuses, and then ate their way out when they hatched? The thought makes me gag again, and I throw up; I’m still tied down, and the vomit covers my chest because there’s no way to get it anywhere else.

  It can’t be true. It can’t be. I feel a wriggle in my head, as if something’s writhing against my brain, and I throw up again. I force myself to think about something else, about anything else, about the walls and the ceiling, about the nurses and the other patients, about Dr. Little and Dr. Vanek and everything I can possibly think of. They say that I’m crazy: what if they’re right? Dr. Vanek said that my hallucinations are probably based on some kind of real experience; that my brain is constructing its artificial sights and sounds out of old memories and emotions, filtered through the lens of imagination and fantasy. If that’s true, then the things I think are real could potentially be explained away, the same way you’d interpret a dream.

  The maggot wouldn’t have to be real.

  But how can I possibly decide what is real and what’s not? The mere thought of it hurts my already-throbbing brain. There’s Shauna, the night nurse, who I thought at first was Lucy. Nobody else knows who I’m talking about. With no visits from my girlfriend, did I create a fake one?

  And then there’s the Faceless Men, and the pile of faceless corpses. I thought before that the corpses might be a result of my battle with Them, but what if it’s the other way around? What if I saw a Red Line victim somewhere and was traumatized by the experience, and my brain created the Faceless Men as a way of dealing with it? That must be it—I saw them on the news, back when the very first body was found …

  … except that I don’t watch the news. I don’t watch TV at all, and the people who do—my dad, my boss—don’t ever talk to me. The only person I really talk to is Lucy, and of course Dr. Vanek, and something like a serial killer never comes up in those conversations. It’s entirely possible that I saw those faceless corpses sometime in the past and simply blocked them all from my conscious mind, waiting for the day my subconscious dredged them up and created a delusion. My biggest block of lost memory is from that two-week period before I was put in the hospital, but my memory before that is anything but perfect. Does anyone remember 100 percent of everything? Can I account for myself every hour of every day?

  But how and why would I ever come into contact with the Red Line’s victims, unless I was the killer?

  My head nods, and I think about the horror of my own body’s rebellion. Someone was controlling me—no matter what excuse Dr. Little comes up with, I felt it. My body was not my own. What if someone really can control my body, fully and completely, and they’re using it to kill people? What if I’m just a puppet, dancing on the end of a string, while a nameless, faceless killer sits in the dark and controls my every move?

  Cell phones—that’s got to be how They do it. Cell phones and computers and TVs.

  Do I really have something in my brain? Do They control me through a chip in my skull? Or is it something worse—is there really some kind of grub inside me, drinking my blood, nestling against the motor functions of my cerebellum, picking up a signal and passing it on, wearing my body like a glove?

  That maggot was real—I saw it, I heard it. I can’t stay here, knowing it might come back.

  A nurse comes into the room: Devon. He has a tray.

  My throat hurts from disuse. “Breakfast already?”

  “Yeah, but let’s get you cleaned up first.” He uses a towel to sop up my vomit. “You slept like a log, man.”

  I cough at phlegm, trying to clear my throat. “It’s the drugs.” Cough. “Dr. Little gave me something new last night.”

  “Seroquel,” says Devon. “I hear it really kicks you in the butt.” He gives me a swallow of water through a straw, and my throat starts to clear a little. “I also hear you went AWOL on us last night.”

  “I have to get out.” I close my eyes and fall back against the bed. “There’s no point in hiding it anymore. I have to get out of here.”

  “Lunchtime,” he says, holding out a spoonful of oatmeal. “They’re going to unlock you again in a couple of hours.”

  “That soon?”

  “You’re not dangerous; once they figure out how you got through the gate they’ll just patch up the hole and let you walk around again.” He holds the spoon closer, and I take the bite. He scoops up some more while I chew. “How did you get through the gate, anyway?”

  “I watched people enter the code.”

  “Really?” He laughs. “That’s it?”

  I nod, for real this time, though I feel guilty doing voluntarily what my puppeteer forces me to do against my will. There’s no harm in telling them about the code—they’re going to figure it out eventually, and at least this way I can get out of the restraints sooner. I take another bite, chew, and swallow. “I sat in Linda’s social therapy class and watched people go in and out; after a couple of people I had a pretty good idea what the code was.”

  Devon grins. “You’re kidding. I can’t believe it was that easy.”

  I shake my head. “Most of the patients in here don’t have the focus for something like that.”

  “Oh, they’ve got the focus all right—you’ve never seen people this focused. They just don’t have the presence of mind.” He feeds me another bite, frowns, and looks me in the eye. “You’re different than most of our patients, Mike. You’re … clearer. More clear-minded, like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Not right now,” I say. “Those drugs are killing me; I feel like I just drank a bathtub full of gin.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” he says. “You know Steve? He’s on Seroquel and he’s fine.”

  “Steve, the bookstore guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  Steve’s a little weird, but he’s not a twitching mess. I take another bite and think, trying to find a way out. Devon’s a lot more talkative than normal. I shake my head at the next proffered bite, and look at him carefully. I need to trust somebody. Why not him?

  “You’re not like the other nurses here, either,” I say. “Why’d you become a nurse?”

  “I … just like it, I guess.” He laughs suddenly. “Plus there was this girl, Rebecca, who I went to high school with. She signed up for all these nursing classes in college, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and she was really cute, so I signed up for some of the same ones.” He smiles. “Then she ran off with an artist, like a sculptor I think, but by then I was hooked. I just … really liked nursing.”

  “You like helping people.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you studied nursing in general, or psychiatry specifically?”

  “There isn’t really a psychiatric nursing specialty, at least there wasn’t at my school. I—”

  “So how much do you know about the patients here, and the diseases they say we have?”

  He looks at me a moment, as if surprised by the question. He stirs the oatmeal in the bowl. “I’ve worked here almost two years, so I’ve picked up a lot, but I don’t have a diagnostic b
ackground, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “So you like helping us, the people, but you have no real connection to the—”

  “Mike,” he says, cutting me off firmly, “where are you going with this?”

  I take a breath. “If I could convince you that I’m not crazy—that there really is a conspiracy here at the hospital, and I’m being held prisoner as part of it—what would you do?”

  He stares at me.

  “I know this is a very difficult question,” I say, “and I’m sorry I have to ask it, but there’s nothing else I can do right now. I’m sorry. You’ve got to tell me: what would you do?”

  He laughs softly and shakes his head. “Looks like I never learn, do I?”

  “Devon…”

  “What is it you see again? Men without faces, or something like that?”

  “Have you seen them?”

  “And a woman too, right? An extra night nurse?”

  “They are real—the men, at least. I don’t know what to think about the nurse.”

  “Yeah,” he says, nodding, “yeah, I do this sometimes.” He holds up a bite of oatmeal—not offering it to me, just staring at it. “You’re sharp, Mike, you really are, and sometimes I take that for granted.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  He sighs. “You’re sick, and we’re trying to make you better. Don’t you think you’d be happier in a world where nobody’s chasing you all the time, and you don’t have to hide and scheme and run away? Don’t you want that?”

  “I want that more than anything,” I hiss. “You think I like being chased, trapped in here with Faceless Men and phantom women and the damn clock radio watching everything I do? You know what came in here last night? A maggot—a giant maggot, bigger than you are, slithering right through that door. Of course I wish it wasn’t real—I’d give anything to make it not real—but what if it is? What if there really is something sinister going on, with the government or aliens or … I don’t know. Something. And what if we could do something to stop it? What would you do?”

  He stirs the oatmeal, back and forth, watching it fold and curve. He scoops up a bite and holds it out to me. “Come on Mike, let’s just eat your lunch, okay?”

  “This is serious!”

  He holds out the bite. “Let’s just eat.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “That’s okay,” he says. “Sorry it’s just oatmeal—that’s pretty much the only food we have for, uh, restrained patients. Anyone that has to be fed by hand.” He stands up. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “I don’t want dinner!”

  He turns and walks out.

  “I want to get out of here!”

  * * *

  DINNER IS MORE OATMEAL, and this time an extra nurse comes to back up the first and make sure I eat. I fight them for the first few bites but they hold me down and force it in, and eventually I give up and eat it all.

  I try to imagine I’m eating peaches, but it doesn’t work.

  ELEVEN

  EVERY NIGHT DR. LITTLE ARRIVES with another pill and a gang of guards and orderlies to help force it down my throat. I fight him every time, and after a few minutes they inevitably resort to the shot, but they never stop trying. I sleep every night like a corpse, and I awake each morning from a vast, primordial void.

  Dr. Little takes me into the hall, flanked by the biggest orderly I’ve ever seen. “I want to show you something, Michael.” We walk toward the gate and I stop just shy of the office door. The window in the wall, formerly home to the top half of a monitor, is now adorned with a larger monitor, computer speakers, a clock radio, and a phone. The gate looks the same as ever, but I don’t dare get any closer.

  Dr. Little turns, smiles, and beckons with his hand. “Come closer.”

  “No thank you.”

  He clasps his hands together and stands there, smug and satisfied. “That is precisely my point,” he says. “As you can see, we’ve upgraded our security: the gate code is now changed daily, and the office nurse and I are the only ones, in general, who know it. Anyone passing through the gate will have to ask for assistance, which not only reduces the number of leaks but has the helpful side effect of putting at least one extra person in the hall every time the gate is opened; this will help block your view of the keypad.” He gestures at the shelf of electric devices. “These, of course, pose no threat to anyone at all, but we have the feeling they’ll serve to keep our primary security risk—namely, you—well away from the gate altogether. With time, medication, and therapy, we of course hope that your fear of electronics will go away, but by then we imagine you’ll be much less of an escape risk anyway.” He smiles, his eyes buggy and massive behind his glasses.

  I reach toward the row of devices, tentatively, testing them. My hand buzzes as it gets close, a tiny tremor. I pull it back quickly. “Is the code posted anywhere?”

  “Obviously we’re not going to tell you that.”

  “But if it’s outside the gate somewhere, it doesn’t matter if I know or not, right?”

  “You’re a very resourceful man, Michael; even the scant details I’ve just given you are tools you’re probably already using to plan another breakout. Assuming, of course, that the details I’ve given you are true.” He smiles.

  I watch him, trying to read something from his face besides that maddening smile. Is he really layering lies and half-lies just to confuse me? Am I really that dangerous? I escaped once, yes, but I didn’t get far, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t hurt anyone—

  But what if he thinks I did?

  If the Faceless Men truly aren’t real—if that really is just a delusion—then Dr. Little is worried about something else altogether. Abnormally worried. I turn to face him directly. “Tell me about the Red Line Killer.”

  His eyes narrow and his brow creases, though the smile never leaves his lips. “Why?”

  “People keep talking about him,” I say, “and your desk was covered with pictures of his victims.”

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing to tell, beyond the facts already available.”

  “What does he have to do with me?”

  “With you?”

  I step closer, one wary eye on the wall of electronics. “Do you think it’s me? That I killed all those people? Is that why you’re keeping me in here?”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “Michael, you’re far from my only case. Anything you happened to see on my desk is not automatically related to you.”

  “But their faces are missing!” I say. “Of course that’s related to me—I made that connection immediately, surely it must have crossed your mind as well.”

  “There are some superficial connections, yes, but it’s nothing. The FBI has asked me to look over their files; I have no experience in criminal profiling, but I have more experience with the … local psychiatric community than anyone else, and they thought something might stand out.” He smiles. “So far nothing has.”

  “Nothing but me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  I step forward again. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  He opens his mouth to answer, but in that moment the computer speakers chirp loudly and my head explodes in pain. I clutch my ears, trying not to fall over, and somewhere nearby a cell phone rings. Arms grab me, supporting my weight, and my entire body is a knot of agony. Someone drags me down the hall to the commons room and the pain lessens instantly; by the time someone props me in a chair my head is already beginning to clear—at least as clear as it can get with the lingering fuzziness of the Seroquel. I look up and see Dr. Little on one side, the large orderly on the other. The room dances madly.

  “Are you okay?” asks the orderly.

  “What did you do to me?”

  “We didn’t do anything,” says Dr. Little. “My cell phone rang and you had an acute phobic reaction.”

  “The headache hit before the phone rang,” I say, closing my eyes and breathing deep to slow my pounding heart. “I
t wasn’t the phone that did it, it was that chirp from the speaker—it was like a sonic attack. You deliberately incapacitated me!”

  “That chirp was the phone,” says the orderly. I open my eyes to look at him in surprise, and I see Dr. Little doing the same.

  “You’re sure?” asks the doctor.

  “Speakers like that produce sound with a magnetic field,” says the orderly. “A cell phone signal that crosses the field warps it enough to change the sound. It happens to my home computer all the time.”

  Dr. Little looks at him, then at me. He pulls out his phone and I shy back.

  “Stay here, Michael. Carter, come over here.” He nods toward the hallway, twenty or thirty feet away, and the orderly follows him over. “You have a cell on you?”

  The orderly nods and pulls it out. Dr. Little gives him his number. “Dial that in, but don’t call yet.” He walks back toward the nurse’s station, and I stand up to get a better view—keeping well clear of the orderly and his phone. Steve and a couple of other patients wander over to watch as well. We’ve never seen Dr. Little this concerned.

  “All right,” says the doctor, standing next to the speakers, “call me.” He holds his phone up to the speakers, and the orderly hits a button on his phone. I take another step back, just in case. A few seconds later the speakers chirp—a loud, syncopated rhythm. A second after that the doctor’s phone starts to ring. Dr. Little stares at it a moment, then presses a button to stop the call. The ringing stops, and with it the chirp. “Well,” he says. He takes a step, glancing up at the speakers. “Well.”

  A nurse steps out from the office. “The monitor image flickered too, not just the speaker. What did you do?”

  Dr. Little puts his phone away, takes a few steps, and stops. He pauses, turns, and stops again. “It could still be a psychosomatic reaction.”

  I stare, incredulous. “What?”

  “If you knew about the speaker effect, even subconsciously, your mind could produce the same reaction to that chirp that it does to a cell phone ring.”