Whatever was on the other side of the door, he was ready.
Then he heard the scream.
Chapter 17
Mendez and Anita gave up pounding on the door. Anita swore. They turned to find themselves in a hospital nursery. All around them were little clear cribs, occupied by sleeping bundles. The name on the identification tag of each crib was the same: MENDEZ, Baby Girl.
“Bennie...?” Anita said, looking around.
“It’s okay,” he told her, giving her hand a squeeze. “We just have to ride this out. It’ll be okay.”
They looked back to the door and Mendez was not surprised to find a flat wall where it had been. Instead, a door stood on the far wall of the room, at the end of a long row of hospital glass through which Mendez could see a dilapidated hallway of broken floor tiles and graffiti-covered walls.
Inside the nursery room itself, peeling paint left irregular patches of wall tinted by steak-juice-colored rust stains. What little paint was left had gone from a sterile white to an unwholesome kind of yellow, scored with gray scuff marks. The ceiling above peeled as well, and occasionally, flecks fell like autumn leaves around the cribs.
None of that was so horrible, though, as what they saw lying in the cribs. Oily stains and splatters of dried brown blood covered the better parts of tiny ducky blankets, soft knit caps of pink and blue, and fleecy white undersheets. Looking at that made Mendez’s chest ache, but seeing the little bundles beneath the blankets, wearing the knit caps made him feel sick.
The majority of the tiny bodies had a blue cast to the skin, especially the lips and around the eyes. The tiny chests didn’t move. The tiny legs and arms lay limp. The miniscule eyelids did not flutter. Some little bodies were worse off. The blanket cast aside, those chests were opened up, and it looked to Mendez like something had reached in and grabbed hold of the delicate newborn lungs and crushed them. They hung deflated, smashed, even smeared inside the little chest cavities. Mendez fought back the rising gorge in his throat and looked away.
He pulled Anita to him, murmuring, “Don’t look. Don’t look, mami,” into her hair, but she had already seen. Her face was wet with tears, her chest hitching, her voice mumbling broken non-words into his chest. He knew she was thinking about Cora, about how they had almost lost her, about how even now, every night, sometimes more than once, she would slip out of bed to check on Cora, to listen for sounds of her breathing or feel her chest, even in her big-girl bed, to make sure she was still breathing. The near brush with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome had made her compulsive, probably obsessive on that one point, and more often than not, Mendez let her go, watching in silence, waiting for her to come back. He supposed he needed to see her return with a relaxed expression, satisfied their daughter was okay.
He honestly didn’t know what she would do if the little dead babies in the room began crying all at once.
He couldn’t help looking again, taking them in. They didn’t look like real people at all like that, but more like dolls designed in extremely poor taste. Babies, he had found, were so full of new life, so full of unspoiled and somehow purer and more intense energy, that to see the little shells devoid of that life and energy looked so much more unnatural than the countless dead adult bodies he had seen in his line of work. Both he and Anita had been given cases where the victims were children, sometimes even young children, and they were horrible, every open minute of them. That was the toughest part of the job. But brand new babies were a different thing entirely. A whole nursery full of them stripped whatever capability for detachment he had and replaced it with horror and revulsion.
“We have to get out of here,” she said.
“I know, mami. I know.”
He took her hand and led her between the tiny cribs. Just before Mendez could reach the door, a figure appeared at the outside of the glass. It slapped the glass with one gray palm and left a greasy smear as it dragged its fingers away. Mendez stopped short.
The gray-skinned woman outside in the hallway wore a traditional nurse’s uniform and cap. What little hair remained on her head had been pulled into a tight bun at the base of her bony neck. Her exposed arms, face, and neck collected moisture in the deep crevasses spidering across their surfaces. She reminded Mendez of a weathered rock, a golem watching over the silent forms of the dead.
It turned its head to look at them. The cracks in the liver-colored lips filled with blood. From the nose, then the ears and eventually the corners of the clouded eyes, tiny black tendrils poked and prodded the air, sensing things.
Mendez stepped toward the door with Anita in tow, and the nurse mirrored his action. He clicked the safety off his gun and drew it from the holster. Then he eased open the door.
The nurse watched them pass into the hallway before unhinging her bottom jaw and screaming. Dead things fell out of that gaping maw—shiny bugs, small, furry rodents half-digested, things with far too many legs, surfing on the waves of upheaved ichor that splashed onto the floor between them and carried the dead things along. Baby-doll parts tumbled out, too—at least, Mendez hoped they were only doll-parts. From where he stood, it was hard to tell, and he didn’t want to get closer.
“Kill it.” Anita’s voice in his ear was broken and uncharacteristically cold. He didn’t take the time to over-think it, though. He raised the gun and fired a shot into its chest and another into its head. The skull broke apart like a pinata, raining down its prize of tiny bones onto the ground muck.
“Let’s go,” he said, and led Anita around the mess and down the hall.
After a silence broken only by the sounds of their footsteps, Anita said, “I hope she’s okay.”
“She’s fine,” Mendez soothed. “She’s with Erik’s wife.”
“What’s to stop them from getting her there?”
“Us. They’re too busy with us right now.”
Anita sighed. “I’m really scared.”
“Yeah,” Mendez said. “I am, too.”
The hallway turned sharply to the left. As they rounded the corner, they saw further degradation of the halls and floor, which had taken on a slight cant to the right.
“Promise me we’ll get home to her.”
“We will,” he said.
“Promise me.” She looked at him. “Even if you don’t know if you can keep it.”
He squeezed her hand, but he couldn’t look at her. “I promise. And I don’t break my promises, mami.”
Far off, they heard a faint scream that broke the moment.
“That way,” he said, and tugged her forward.
***
Lauren and Ian found themselves in a large, mostly empty room, its apparent age and disuse stripping anything compassionate or calming away. It was a room of harsh angles and unforgiving concrete. Cold, sharp metal instruments lined a tray against the back wall, and a slab of table laid bare in the center of the room.
“Are we still in the hospital?” Ian looked around.
“A hospital, but not LPH,” Lauren said, eying the instruments. She crossed the room to them and picked one up. She remembered from her history of medicine classes in nursing school that it was called a leucotome. The instrument next to it, the one that looked like an ice pick, was called an orbitoclast. Neither had been used in the treatment of psychiatric patients in a good thirty or forty years.
“What are those?” Ian asked, joining her by the tray. She could hear his trepidation.
“Tools for performing lobotomies,” she said flatly, putting down the leucotome. Next to her, Ian shivered.
There was a pause, then, and Ian asked almost timidly, “Did my mother...um, did she...?”
“Receive psychosurgery? No.” Lauren tried a smile, but found it felt wrong.
“Did she ever get violent?”
Lauren considered this for a minute. “You didn’t see her much, once they committed her, did you?” It wasn’t an accusation, and she hoped it didn’t come off like one. She meant it sympathetically.
He seemed to
understand. “Not really.” He brushed his hands against his pants and turned toward the table. “She...the night I called the hospital to come pick her up, she tried to stab me.”
“Oh, God. Really?” Lauren touched his arm.
“Yeah. She didn’t recognize me, I guess. She had been trying to wallpaper the windows with some old newspapers, and she couldn’t find her tape—her ‘supplies,’ as she called it, were a roll of tape, a box of empty soda cans, some plaster, a lighter, a water bottle, and a pen. Oh, and a mirror. I was never sure what the mirror was for, other than her telling me once I’d know what to do with it when the time came.”
“So what happened?”
“Honestly, I really don’t know.” He leaned against the table, the spotlight from somewhere on the ceiling shining bright enough on him that Lauren could make out the little details of his face. She liked his face, she decided.
“See, she was calling me, yelling about her supplies, but when I came into the room, she looked as if she had never seen me before. She was all beat up, had done God only knows what, and something had set her off. But it was in her eyes—I could tell in her eyes that reason and reality had shriveled, maybe died completely in there, and that whoever I had just become, she didn’t know and didn’t trust.
“I tricked her. I admit it. I told her if she went to take those vitamins the good doctors had given her—that’s what I called her pills: her vitamins—that I would go find her box of supplies. She agreed. I went to call the hospital to come get her, and she went to get a knife and stab me before my ‘kind could take root and overrun the Earth.’ At least, that’s what she told her doctor later, when she was medicated and lucid again.
“Did she hurt you badly?”
Ian shrugged, but there was pain in his eyes. “Not really, no. It was just a scratch on my arm. No big deal. I got the knife away from her before the hospital folks arrived.” He looked down at his fidgeting hands. “I guess maybe you knew her differently.”
“I don’t hold it against you for not visiting her, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
He smiled, grateful, and gave a nod.
“She was a nice lady, but under our care, she had therapy and treatments and medication. No psychosurgery, but we kept a pretty close eye on her. We know our patients differently, but only because we know what they can be if not made to be different.” Impulsively, she reached out and grabbed his hand, giving it a squeeze. “You did the best you could.”
There was what Lauren had always thought of as a “movie moment,” where they looked into each other’s eyes and found desire there, and their heads inched infinitesimally closer for a kiss.
The clatter of the tools falling to the floor made them jump, snapping the moment.
They turned to find the tools still jittering on the floor, pulling together and moving apart. Lauren realized they were forming letters. The couple backed against the cool edge of the table, watching words form.
LOOK
BEHIND
YOU
They spun around. Lauren thought she was worn out of screams, but the sight before her ripped a hoarse cry from her throat. The two dived away from the table, kicking tools and sending them skittering across the floor.
They saw a tangle of spiny vertebrae ending in long, tapered appendages sheathed in a kind of sausage skin; patches were slick with a rapidly drying and crumbling fluid, and beneath they saw mottled black and pink. The appendages were rooted in a round mass about the size of a loveseat, perched on the operating table. The central mass opened and closed a series of gaping holes that sometimes cupped frenzied shark eyes, all black, and at other times, contained rows of thin, needle-like teeth. It smelled moldy and damp and made terrible gurgling noises in between iron groans.
It snapped one of its spiny appendages like a whip just inches from their faces, and Lauren cringed back. Then it vomited a black fluid onto the floor that smoked as it burned into it.
Lauren didn’t see a door anywhere in the room. There was no way out! The range of the thing on the table kept them where they were. From its central location, it could slap those tentacles down on already tender flesh if they got too close. Lauren eyed the lobotomy tools, now within the domain of the thing’s reach. If she could get to the orbitoclast, she could stab that awful mass in the middle, shove it up under one of those volcanic glassy orbs. Maybe lobotomize it.
Ian had evidently been thinking the same thing. One moment, he stood next to her, and in the next, he dove for the tool. Just as his fingers closed around it, a tentacle lashed out and wrapped around his neck.
“Ian!” she shouted. His eyes bulged in surprise, and in the sudden obstruction of his air flow. The creature wrapped another tentacle beneath his ribs and hauled him up off the ground, then tossed him overhead and across the room. Ian landed with a frame-jarring thud and rolled toward the far wall, groaning. It was difficult, given the rise and fall of the creature’s eyes, to gauge where its attention lay, but for the moment, it seemed to be on Ian. It snapped a tentacle and she heard Ian cry out in pain.
She inched her way closer to the tools and a tentacle snapped back in her direction, licking her cheekbone. Lauren felt the skin open up and wet pain trickle down her cheek. It brought tears to her eyes which she blinked away. She brought a hand up to her face and her fingertips came away with blood.
Ian, who had managed to pull himself up on one knee, roared at the thing. He was out of words, but she thought she knew what he was doing; if he got its attention and distracted it, Lauren could go for the tool and plunge it in.
The thing roared back at him.
She went for the tool again and this time she felt the cold steel in her hand before a tentacle sliced into her right eyebrow, knocking her off her feet. Brilliant, blazing pain filled her eye and then the whole side of her head, but she scrabbled quickly away from a follow-up blow.
“Laur— Damn!” Ian shouted.
She scrambled to her feet and saw him pacing frantically, his lip split open, a long tear in the shin of his pants already stained with blood from the wound beneath.
“You okay?” she asked over the bulk of the thing.
“Yup. You?”
She held up the tool and he smiled. “Atta girl,” he said.
He looked around for something to throw at the thing, to distract it, but none of the displaced tools had made it to his side of the room. He bent over and yanked off his sneaker, then hurled it with all his strength. It went high and wide—no baseball player, he—but it got the monster’s attention.
She lost no moments in lifting the lobotomy tool high above her head and bringing it down with all the force she could muster, right into one of those gelatinous black eyes.
The beast screamed like a kettle on the boil, the tentacles whipping wildly, and it sucked the eye back inside itself, replacing the socket with a mouth so quickly that it had bitten down on the tool and had it clamped between teeth before it had a chance to fall free of the removed eye.
It twisted a number of tentacles into a thick rope and backhanded her hard. The force of it sent her stumbling back, her head swimming among bright stars of pain. Her head connected hard with the wall behind her, and for a moment, fuzzy white threatened to close in on her vision. She sank against the wall, blinking until the scene before her came back into focus.
“What do we do?” Ian shouted.
She was about to shout back when she saw the door. She was sure it hadn’t been there before, but it was there now, not three feet from where Ian stood.
“Look! There’s a door!”
Ian turned to where she was pointing, then looked back at her, excited. “Come on!”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I can make it across! You go. Go on.” Between them, the thing bellowed, retching up more smoking black acid onto the table and floor below it.
“Not without you,” he said, and his tone indicated he had neither the time nor inclination to argue. “Now come over here, or I’ll
come over there and get you.”
“No,” she called back, using the wall to help her rise. “I’ll come to you.” It would be dangerous for her to try to get across for sure, but it was foolish and even more dangerous for him to risk coming to get her.
He held a hand out in her direction, and the look on his face gave her strength. “I’ll be here. I’m not leaving without you.”
The monster roared again, alternately swiping at her and at Ian. Lauren noticed the slime that had covered it was nearly dry now, and whether it was a direct result or not, the tentacles were moving noticeably stiffer and more slowly.
Nevertheless, she kept her back to the wall, moving with slow, deliberate steps sideways, just inches out of reach. She covered the back wall and rounded the corner and the room shook with another of its roars, this one more like a chorus from its multitude of mouths. As she inched her way up the side wall, she saw a tail like that of a lobster unshelled, that greasy, mottled skin making it look naked and somehow that made it more repulsive to her. A number of thin, jointed insect legs slid its bulk toward her and she cringed as another tentacle clumsily sought her face and missed. She moved more quickly down the length of that wall and as soon as she could, broke into a run. Ian caught her up in his arms and hugged her tight.
They were within arm’s length of the door when Lauren felt a hundred tiny bites in a band around her arm, yanking her away from Ian. She tumbled in a heap in the middle of the room.
“Shit!”
The tentacle released her arm and smacked at both her ankles, opening up furrows of overturned flesh. Enormous pain filled those furrows, and the blood soaked her sneakers. A tentacle lashed out again and flayed a strip of skin off her thigh. She screamed, and the beast above her screamed with her.
“Lauren!” Ian called helplessly.
That was when the door behind Ian opened.
The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy) Page 20