Inspection

by Josh Malerman

  THE CORNER

  You ever pay attention to the bread in the cafeteria, J?

  He heard breathing from up the hall, from behind him, from either side. The Inspectors? It sounded more like the halls themselves were breathing. As if the basement had begun the process of swallowing him.

  “Turn around!” he called. “I haven’t done anything wrong! You’ll feel…” He thought of the book Needs and how perfectly Warren Bratt had titled it. “You’ll feel contrite!”

  “Easy, J,” Collins mumbled. “This isn’t any easier for us.”

  How human the Inspectors looked to him now! How unlike men and like grown-up boys instead!

  These men had protected him his entire life. These men had loved him. He’d loved these men!

  Let me show you how to tie your shoe, J.

  Let me help you with those gloves, J.

  I hear you’re doing well with your studies, J. Tell an old man, what’s your secret?

  “You’re the ones with secrets!” J yelled as Collins tugged him around a corner and Jeffrey attempted to quiet him with a hand over his mouth.

  Luxley once wrote of a gothic castle, and J now believed he’d modeled it after the basement of the Turret. Lanterns high on the walls. Wet stones. Sweat stones? Funereal was a word J had to look up in the Parenthood Dictionary. He loved that word. Dreamed of that word many times. Even tried to use it in an essay in grammar class. But now, here, it was much too real. He was the focus of the funeral, dead soon, the shrieking, bleeding boy.

  He reached for the stones in the walls, to put a stop to this forward motion, but the stones were sharp, damp, without pattern, and his fingertips bled like the letters on the door they took him to.

  With every supply closet they passed, J thought he heard a smacking, big lips hidden here in the basement, the world beneath his own.

  J imagined faces as worried as his own in one office they passed.

  “YOU’RE ALL SO SCARED!” he screamed.

  Then, swiftly, the fresh clacking of newly arrived boots ahead. A slash of red in the black heart of the basement.

  “A perfect match,” D.A.D. said, leading now, his back to J and to the Inspectors that dragged him. “Let them play together in the Corner.”

  Was K already there? In the Corner?

  “Jesus,” Jeffrey said. “Look at his toes!”

  J’s feet were bleeding badly. The big toe on his right foot was almost shredded to the bone. Yet he tried to find purchase with his feet. Tried to slow down the funeral, his funeral, the end to his book of needs.

  Where was Q? L and D? Did they know he’d been sent to the Corner? Did they cry? Did they think he deserved it because the Parenthood said so?

  “You don’t have to do this!” J yelled to the Inspectors. “If he lies to us, he lies to you!”

  D.A.D. stopped. Turned to face J. In the lantern light his face looked more like a stranger’s than it had yesterday morning, when he discovered Warren Bratt’s brilliant book.

  “What did you just say, J?”

  The Inspectors stopped, too.

  J, naked, hanging in the arms of the Inspectors, looked up to Collins. “You don’t have to do this.”

  Collins looked away and in doing so revealed, behind him on the wall, an arrow painted as red as D.A.D.’s gloves.

  J felt hope.

  GLASGOW TUNNEL:

  RICHARD ONLY

  Oh, K, oh, K, oh, K.

  And just beyond D.A.D., J saw the tunnel entrance itself. A gap in the wall. Something too dark to be a closet, too wide for an office door.

  “Let him go,” D.A.D. said.

  Collins and Jeffrey only stared. Had D.A.D. changed his mind?

  “You mean it?” Collins asked.

  “I always mean it.”

  The Inspectors let J go.

  J rubbed his shoulders and his armpits where they’d been holding him.

  “And what would you do,” D.A.D. asked him, “if you didn’t listen to me, if you could make up your own mind? Hmm? Where would you go?”

  D.A.D. spread his arms out, mocking J with false options.

  J looked to Inspector Collins. Inspector Jeffrey. How different they looked without the dogs behind them. How different they looked, slouched, guilty, against the walls in the basement.

  “Show us,” D.A.D. said. “Show us what you would do.”

  J stood up straight, inhaled deep.

  Then he ran.

  Past D.A.D. as the man reached down to stop him.

  J turned right, entered the darkness of the tunnel, felt free momentarily, invisible to both D.A.D. and the Inspectors, undetectable by the Parenthood, gone. Behind, already far behind, he heard the echoes of shoes on gravel.

  “K!” J called.

  His voice came back to him, swallowed then repeated by the throat of the tunnel.

  K!…K!…K!…K!…K!…K!

  The steps behind him were losing speed, losing volume.

  K!…K!…K!…K!…K!

  He was almost free, it seemed, free now in the darkness.

  K!…K!…K!…K!…

  Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

  “K! I’m here!”

  D.A.D.’s laughter behind, the huffing of the Inspectors. Were they close again?

  “K!” he cried.

  And K responded. K’s voice in the tunnel. Here.

  But it was too late for him to recognize it as a warning.

  “J, STOP!”

  His nose struck the Plexiglas first, the impact crushing it to the side of his face. The rest of him followed. His teeth, cheeks, and chin flattened to the divider.

  K screamed his name again as J was thrown back from the wall and fell hard to the tunnel’s dirt floor.

  Lights came on.

  On his back now, J brought a hand to his bleeding nose. Through watery eyes he saw what he’d hit. He saw K on the other side of it. And beyond her, a mirror of the blackness he’d run through.

  As the blood poured from his nose and outlined his lips, J smiled.

  Meet me…

  But K was pointing behind him, telling him to get up, GET UP, GET UP!

  There was blood on K, too. All over her face and hair. On her hands and arms.

  “What happened to you?” J said, trying to stand.

  But K was shaking her head no. No no. Turn around. Don’t think of me. Don’t be distracted by me.

  The Inspectors tackled him to the floor, his teeth smashing a second time.

  K pounded on the glass.

  Don’t worry, he tried to say. Don’t worry, K!

  A hand went over his mouth, then his eyes. Then he was being dragged again. Back.

  Between fingers he saw the color red rushing to the glass divider. Saw D.A.D. pointing at K. Saw K reach for the tunnel’s dirt side. Heard D.A.D. yelling at her.

  The lights went off. He swiped the hand from his mouth.

  “LET ME GO!” J yelled.

  But they pulled him from the tunnel, back into the cobblestoned halls. Then deeper into the basement.

  J, blind and bleeding, remembered D.A.D. as he’d looked just before the lights in the tunnel went off. Saw the fear and confusion on the man’s face.

  He looked more afraid than K did.

  When Collins finally removed his hand from J’s eyes, someone tugged hard on his hair.

  D.A.D. again. He brought his nose to J’s broken face.

  “How does it feel to know the one decision you made on your own was a bad one?”

  But D.A.D. didn’t wait for an answer. He looked quick down the hall, back toward the tunnel.

  J heard a creaking behind him. Jeffrey opening a door. He craned his neck enough to see something he didn’t think even Lawrence Luxley could�
��ve imagined: A spot where two basement walls met was revolving, opening to a hidden room.

  It didn’t matter that the door looked nothing like the one he’d been raised to fear. It didn’t matter that there was no label on it at all.

  It was the Corner, no matter what J said it was.

  “I’m sorry,” Collins said.

  J fell as he was shoved hard into the room. There he saw scant light from a distance, felt a concrete floor beneath his scratched palms, and heard harsh wheezing from only a few feet away.

  “K?” he asked. But he knew she wasn’t in here with him.

  As D.A.D. yelled for the Inspectors to follow him, the door swung closed.

  “No,” a voice answered. “I’m not K.”

  J was too weak to be afraid of it.

  “Who’s in here?” he asked.

  A man leaned forward on what J’s eyes now told him was a wooden bench. The man wore cracked glasses, and his face and arms looked as battered as J’s own.

  “Lawrence Luxley,” the man said. “We’ve met.” J’s eyes hadn’t adjusted enough to see the sad smile. “But you can call me Warren.”

  Two Markers in the Dark

  “Jesus Christ,” Warren said. “They didn’t even let you get dressed?” Then, “Come on, sit down.”

  His voice was hoarse. As if he’d been yelling.

  “I don’t belong in here,” J said.

  “If there’s one person who knows you don’t belong here, it’s me.”

  In the dim light of the second room, J saw two markers in the dirt.

  “Sit down,” Warren said.

  J did, feeling the cool metal lockers against his back, relief in his bleeding feet.

  “I think they went after K.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Her,” J said.

  Warren was quiet. Then he chuckled. “My God,” he said. “Things have changed quickly around here.”

  “She came to my rooms. She figured it all out. Everything you were trying to tell us.”

  “So you read the book?”

  “Some of it.” Then J gave Warren the most exhausted, the most meaningful and meaningless compliment he’d ever received. “It’s the best book in the world.”

  “Thank you,” Warren said, holding back many emotions. “You don’t seem very surprised to discover Lawrence Luxley is also Warren Bratt.”

  J stared into the darkness, his eyes still adjusting.

  “I’m just worried about K.”

  “I understand. But worry about us, too. We’ve got probably ten minutes to live.”

  Some silence then.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” J asked.

  “I can’t say for sure. But it can’t be worse than what’s upstairs.”

  J understood.

  “Are we going to die in here?”

  “Yes.”

  J looked to the scant light emanating from the second, deeper room. It stretched into this one, curling over a concrete lip like a piece of yellow fabric. At the very extent of its reach, J saw the soles of two shoes.

  He sat up quick.

  “That’s a person!” he said. “Who is that?”

  He hurried to the body on the floor. As he rolled it over, he saw it was a man. Old enough to be an Inspector. Old enough to be D.A.D.

  He inched away from the dried blood upon the man’s chest.

  Warren said, “I think it’s one of your fathers.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “One of your real fathers. Here to see if his son was okay.” Then, “Hasn’t been dead long, I don’t think. Minutes, maybe, before I arrived.”

  J inched toward the body again, touched the man’s head, his shoulders. He opened the dead eyes with his thumbs. Closed them again.

  He thought of a figure crouched behind Mister Tree far below his eighth-floor window.

  “We’re gonna die like him,” J said. “Just like this.”

  “Well,” Warren said, “I should know more about this than I do. But what I believe will happen is that door we came through is going to open. Someone is going to come through it. And, yes, they’re going to kill us.”

  J stood up quick.

  “So let’s not let them!”

  A cracking sound from out in the hall and J and Warren froze.

  “It’s the Parenthood,” Warren whispered. “Still breathing.”

  They stared at the door a long time.

  “We have to try to get out of here,” J said. “When they come. When the door opens.”

  Warren shook his head. “Go ahead and try. And my God I hope you succeed. But me? I don’t deserve to get out of here. I’m one of the monsters who lied to you.”

  “But you tried to help!”

  “A little too late.”

  J stepped to him in the dark, thinking instinctively that he needed this man to help him, that he couldn’t make it out of this room without the help of an adult, a man, a member of the Parenthood.

  Still looking for the Parenthood to protect him.

  But the Corner door opened before he reached him.

  J turned fast, squinting at the light from the hall. Warren spoke first, and the fear in his voice scared J more than the hooded figure that entered.

  “Couldn’t look us in the eye, you coward? Had to wear a hood?”

  “You,” the figure said, pointing a tool at Warren. “Go stand in the corner.”

  J recognized the tool from one of K’s drawings. But he didn’t know what it could do.

  He inched away from it, toward the corner of the room.

  “Not you.”

  Warren stood up. “You’re gonna have to kill me standing as I am. I’m not standing in the fucking corner.” Then, “Who are you? Collins? Jeffrey?”

  The figure raised the tool level with Warren’s head.

  “No!” J hollered. “Please! He tried to help me! He tried to help!”

  “That’s the last thing they wanna hear right now,” Warren cried. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Go on! Do it!”

  But the figure lowered the tool and turned its hooded head to J. As it did, J smelled something sweet enough to break through the despair.

  He had no way of knowing the pillowcase was worn the same way Marcia Jones had worn it in Judith Nancy’s White Lies. But he could’ve picked that smell out of a forest.

  “K?”

  “No,” the voice said. The unmistakable voice of a girl. “I’m Q.”

  She removed the pillowcase, revealing only the third woman J had ever seen in his life.

  Warren opened his eyes.

  “Is K okay?” J asked, astonished, breathless.

  “Who is he?” She nodded toward Warren.

  J saw that Q’s face was streaked with as much blood as K’s had been on the other side of the wall in the tunnel. He understood she’d already killed today. Maybe many.

  “This is Warren Bratt,” he said. “He’s on our side.”

  She stared at Warren. “Can you get us out of here?”

  “You mean can I get you to the real world?” Warren asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. I can do that.”

  “All right,” Q said. She lowered the tool. “Get us out of here, then.”

  Warren went to the Corner door.

  “Where’s Richard now?” he asked her. And the way he asked it, J understood that Warren planned to kill today, too. Maybe many.

  “We have a plan,” she said.

  “We?”

  Q nodded. “We got everyone else.”

  Revolt

  Earlier that morning, as J still slept the troubled sleep of knowledge, K slipped quietly out of his rooms. She was not worried about encountering any of the staff. If someone
saw her, she would kill him.

  She got the chance before leaving the building.

  Passing through the Body Hall, through the swinging kitchen door, she stopped and stood motionless, facing a man holding a plate, water filling a sink behind him.

  “Whoa,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

  K walked toward him, a direct line, as if there was nothing he could do to frighten her.

  She saw the way his eyes shifted from one side of the kitchen to the other, perhaps looking for help.

  She saw the way his lips parted, as though ready to call out, to announce the arrival of a girl in the boys’ Turret.

  And she saw, too, as she slashed his neck with a knife from a magnetic rack less than a foot from where he stood, the way the skin of his neck split easily.

  He fell to his knees.

  K took hold of him by the back of his white shirt, dragged him out through the garbage door and into the Yard. It wasn’t until she had him buried in pine needles and snow that she allowed herself to think, You’ve killed your first adult.

  She was grateful for the man in the kitchen. For teaching her how easily it could be done.

  She was ready, she knew, to do more.

  Within two hours of returning to her Turret, she knew that most of the Letter Girls were, too.

  Some girls refused to believe what they were hearing. Some believed but wouldn’t partake. In total, four decided to stay in W’s bedroom until it was over. G stood guard to make sure none of them attempted to reach M.O.M.

  E was especially hysterical. The news went against her nature in more ways than one; she’d modeled her entire self-image after M.O.M. Down to how she responded to the insane information.

  “K,” she said, attempting to maintain a civil smile. “You are scaring me.”

  K didn’t have time to convince. Rather, pressing the point of her knife to E’s back, she forced her sister into the dog area of the fifth-floor Check-Up room. She didn’t say anything encouraging upon exiting, didn’t try to calm her.

  There was simply no time.

  Q helped a lot. Including removing B from quarantine, which consisted of unlocking a first-floor room and letting B out. B, finding it difficult to let go of her former life, despite siding with K and Q, said she had a game of Boats scheduled with M.O.M.