Zed

by Jason McIntyre

  “No,” Zeke repeated, like the bullied kid finally standing up for himself.

  Banatyne’s voice went up. “Help me—”

  “Zeke!” Tom said in a shout. And then the axe was up in the air. The white of that man’s solitary eye blew up like a balloon. “—Die!” Banatyne finished.

  And then the axe came down. In a rush to connect with Zeke, Tom lost his footing and stumbled over his flashlight. It spun and sent the room into a madness of on-off colour. Dark plus light plus more bands of dark in a whirling merry-go-round.

  The glint of an old axe in motion. Down in a violent, heavy arc. It connected. It didn’t split open the man’s skull. Didn’t hit the growth of malignancy on his face. Didn’t split into the man’s heaving chest. And it didn’t come down on his pelvis bone where a second bulbous growth lived either.

  It came down directly on the side of Chris Banatyne’s wrist. Snagging and then splitting the brown leather restraint strap which held the poor soul in that old bed. And it made a snapping sound. A harsh thick snap in the dead, hot air of that room.

  Tom reached for the flashlight, still spinning. He settled it, killing the strobe effect of its on-off light show. He pawed it and managed to get it into both his hands. “Zeke,” he said again, this time a statement of fact and not a scream of fear.

  He pointed the beam at the face of Chris Banatyne. Then down at the man’s wrist.

  Banatyne’s fingernails were long, as if they’d been growing for five months without any attention. No clippers had touched them. And maybe they hadn’t. Maybe Karen, his loving wife, was too fearful of actually touching her infected husband since those giant black flies had bit him. It didn’t seem farfetched. Nothing did on this night.

  When it registered that one of his hands was free, a small smile touched Mr. Banatyne’s lips. His good eye traveled from Zeke to Tom, both of them in a sudden, silent stupor. No one moved for the longest time, but one that might have only been a second or maybe two.

  Then those long fingernails, the ones on his free hand, went directly to his face. In a single gesture he swiped at that big bulb of skin like a character in an old black and white Lon Chaney flick where the monster pulls off his mask to reveal his identity. Only this was no mask. It was a big piece of the man’s own flesh. The nails dug into it and dragged it away. It came in a bloody flap. Chris Banatyne screamed against the pain he inflicted on himself. Then a good half of his face was gone. Blood spurted.

  A second swipe at himself. This time, those long nails, already bloodied, went to his hip where the second bag of out-grown flesh lay in wait. Again, the awful sound of tearing. A burst of blood and a gush of something.

  The screamed died off. The man’s head fell back and the redness of those giant bulbs turned black.

  Tom’s flashlight went back and forth, one to the other and then back again. He said nothing. Nor did Zeke. They stood, solid blocks of ice, in the heat. And then a hissing sound rose.

  Out from the bulb at Banatyne’s face: tiny black spiders. Zeke stepped closer to see. They were a multitude of thousands. Each no more than a hair’s width. And he saw them scurry out in waves upon waves with his newly-minted twenty-twenty sight.

  A second gush, which at first looked like milk spilling out in waves but was actually tiny white creatures in the thousands, bursting from the hip-pouch. These white waves traversed the bloodied body and sheets in a similar manner, but didn’t look like spiders. Individually, these looked more larval. They moved much slower. Both Zeke and Tom stepped back when realization of what these two soldier groups were hit them.

  The hissing increased and that poor Chris Banatyne, his body began to smoke. Heat hit the room. More heat than ever before. As if the man’s organs had turned to ovens on his inside and started burning him from there to his clothes. He had ignited from within.

  And that smoke stank much worse than the belch from before. The body of the man sagged. As if his entire person had been filled with the tiny black creatures in his top half and the tiny white ones in his bottom half. And as they flooded out onto the bed and down the legs onto the floor, he only sagged with the loss of their mass. He was a formless shape now. Just skin settling into the bed sheets and smoking. Pouring tendrils into the room with a rising smell that watered both men’s eyes.

  Tom started to cough. He pulled his shirt up over his face and squinted against the acrid, putrid smoke. “Come!” he shouted. “Zeke! Come!”

  And Zeke came with him. They ran from the room, their flashlights bouncing and the remains of Chris Banatyne left behind to be scoured by waves of tiny creatures that seemed sentient in their skittering across the floor and up the walls and over his unmoving corpse.

  As Tom ran, he threw the light down on himself and got the willies as he saw flecks of black on his bare legs. He couldn’t feel them there. They looked like tiny points of ash from a campfire, but shiny in the light. And they kept moving. He brushed at them frantically. Off, off! He had to get them off.

  Both he and Zeke burst out that side kitchen door and into the cooling-off of the night around them. No crickets now. Only silence, as if the night now knew what was going on and wanted no part of it.

  Both men ran to the creek. It was at the end of the long driveway and out across the lane, then through a grassy dip. Tom plunged in first, choking as if the things had found their way into his throat. They hadn’t, but the mind plays plenty of tricks under duress.

  He bathed himself in the cold water and he crushed the stalks of cattails in his panic.

  He stayed in the water for a good five minutes, rubbing every inch of himself he could reach. Then he got out and pulled off his clothes in the darkness. He found the flashlight he’d discarded on his mad dash and he examined himself. Just his naked, white skin. No black flecks. Well, some, but when he examined them, they were bits of dirt and debris from the creek water clinging to him.

  Zeke followed his lead and they said nothing.

  He shivered. And then embarrassment hit him. Someone might happen upon them and wonder what the hell had gone on. He cared. But not enough.

  He went about putting his wet clothes back on. He needed to get out of here.

  “Jeezus Chrise,” he said to Zeke, nearly breathless as they sat on the edge of the creek in the dark. They looked at one another and panted. “What the hell was that?”

  34

  “I don’t know where the chief lives,” Zeke said as they drove. It was after hours and certainly the police chief wouldn’t still be at the station on Main.

  Tom stuck to the vinyl seat. He assumed Zeke did the same. They were both soaking wet and Tom’s flashlight had started blinking on and off. He switched it off, a tricky proposition with how Zeke was driving. Driving in the municipal truck, they bounced and slid.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tom said. They both saw the police cruiser’s flashing red and blue lights on the trees and shrubs out front of Ocean View Manor.

  Tom dashed from the truck as soon as Zeke had it slow enough for him to get out.

  He ran up the walk and standing in the midst of it were two policemen. One had a wide-brimmed hat. The other, no hat at all. They turned, and Tom saw who was with them. Farrah and Mike.

  “Farrah,” he said.

  “Tom.” She came over to him and threw her arms around him. “I have so much to tell you—”

  “What’s going on—?” He was cut off by the older of the two policemen. The gold star on his brown shirt probably meant he was the more important of the two.

  “You’re Tom Mason?”

  “I am, can you tell me—?”

  “And you work for Ms. Banatyne?”

  “I do. What—?”

  “I’ll answer all your questions. But we have a situation here. My daughter tells me you have some information on what’s been going on here.”

  “I’m not sure—” Tom looked stupefied. Zeke had parked the truck and was astute enough to leave his four-way flashers on. He joined Tom and the oth
ers on the walk but said nothing.

  “Dad,” Farrah said. “Let me explain it and then he’ll tell you everything you need to know. He’s gotta know how many people are in there.”

  How many people are in there. That phrase struck Tom and he felt his face flush while simultaneous beginning to shiver in his cold, wet clothes.

  “Okay, you’re starting to freak me out here,” Tom said, taking a step back.

  “Come,” Farrah said, taking his arm and leading him away from the group. “It’s crazy,” she said. “Remember out at the beach when you said Karen would have probably put totally regular people in her house if she could get away with it?”

  “Come on! I was joking—!”

  “I know, I know. She likes her money. Everyone knows the Banatynes have been in on some shady stuff. Especially the last couple years. They’re up there with the Smythes. You probably don’t know them but they had this laughable pyramid scheme running with the churches a couple years back. I was just a kid but it was a major scandal. Anyway, the Banatynes might have gotten away with some part of that, but my dad’s been watching them ever since.

  “I couldn’t sleep after the bonfire. You’ve really been an ass, you know that?”

  Tom said nothing. He glanced at Mikey and wanted to say, What’s he doing here? But he kept quiet.

  “I just kept thinking about what you said. That Karen and Chris would stick their own mother in Ocean View if they could make money off it. So I told my dad. He was curious, so he headed down to the municipal office. This afternoon, he goes to pull all these files from their office. It’s a pretty small place and everyone knows everyone. My dad’s friendly with everyone—”

  “—That why he has a key to the high school?”

  “Yup, exactly. So, listen. He grabs these files. The municipality has to keep records on a care home like Ocean View. There are certain requirements when a place like that gets public money. If the requirements are met, no problem. If not, everything gets flagged. Karen and Chris, and this place, never got a flag. Always on the up and up. But to get their money from all the different grants and stuff, they had to show that the guests had a certain IQ score. It’s like proof that they need special care. And the municipal office keeps copies of this stuff for ninety days— because the care home is in Dovetail. It would be the same if they were medical patients with heart conditions or diseases or anything. But in this case, it’s proof that all your guests need help because they aren’t as... bright... as you and me. Does any of this ring a bell?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I mean, not really. It makes sense that this would all be kept track of, but I didn’t know about it.”

  “Okay. So Dad goes to pull the files but they’re gone. Ninety days and everything gets shredded. It’s just a hoop to jump through. But yesterday, Karen filed new paperwork because she wants to expand—”

  “The new guest,” Tom said. “The girl with Cerebral Palsy.”

  “Bingo,” Farrah said, smiling. She started leafing through a stack of pages she had in her hands and found one. “Name’s Clarissa Denholme. Seattle, Washington. Spastic Cerebral Palsy. Onset and recognition, age one. And in her application to expand the care home, Karen had to include standardized tests for everyone, even guests that have been here two years. Plus all the drugs they’re taking.”

  “Let me guess,” Tom said. “No one at Ocean View is listed as taking any medication. At all. In any form.”

  By now, the irritable Chief Birkhead had joined them to overhear how much his feisty daughter had conveyed. He shifted from foot to foot.

  “You got it. So the pills you’ve been giving them are either bogus or not needed. That’s a huge problem.”

  “It’s illegal is what it is,” Birkhead said over his daughter’s shoulder.

  “Sir—I swear I didn’t know,” Tom said. “I was just doing what I was to—”

  “That’s fine, son,” Birkhead said. “I understand how it is. It’s like that all over the goddamn world... and you’re apt to find that out. But there’s more to it than that. So much more. Basically, to get into a facility classed like Ocean View, you need to take a pile of standardized tests. IQ and such. You need to score below 70 cumulatively on all the ones required. If you do, you’re included in the headcount that gets the owner-operator a grant. Real money. Dough in their pockets to spend on food, heat, shuffleboard table, whatever they want.”

  Both Birkhead and his daughter, Farrah, fell silent while that sank in for Tom.

  Then Farrah handed Tom some of her stacks of papers.

  He scanned through them.

  Ingrid’s cumulative score: 74. Smitty’s: 81 Dar: 72 Mary: 89 Zeke: 93.

  “I don’t know much about these numbers,” Tom admitted.

  “I don’t either,” Farrah said. “But every one of them is above 70. That’s the cut off. Under 70 and the Banatynes get a shit-load of money—sorry, Dad. Someone’s been telling some big whoppers. Even the Denholme girl—she has Cerebral Palsy but shows a score of seventy-even.”

  Tom wore the shock on his face. But Birkhead didn’t give it much time to register.

  “So, I come by this evening,” the chief said. “Just to chat with her. Ms. Banatyne’s here. Just doing some filing, she says. She invites me in and she starts sweating right off the hop. I ask her about the scores and about her husband. I tell her that I knew James Roundtree from the mainland had been here last week. He was subbing in for his supervisor who used to come and do the site visits instead. Now it’s Roundtree all of a sudden. A bit fishy, I suggested to her.

  “And I also suggested that maybe that old supervisor had been helping lots of care homes down the west coast with higher than average test scores. I tell her I called to speak with him, but he’s on unpaid leave for some similar accusations. Oh, and I ask her about the drugs. I walk right through the hallway and I see all these tubs—”

  “The cubbies,” Zeke said from behind the tight group.

  “Right,” Birkhead said. “And they’re all filled with pills.” He looked back at the house. The simple white light of the porch fixture seemed to move behind wavering shrubs.

  “Well, the polite way to say it is... she lost it, son. Has she ever done that before?”

  “Lost it... how?”

  “Threw her tea cup at me, knocked over a chair and a record hassock. Stormed out of there.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “She’s been known to lose her temper. I guess that’s putting it mildly. Where’d she go?”

  “Still here. Inside the main house. She barricaded herself in the dining room. Locked up tight as a drum. I was going to break the door down but she said she had a weapon. Plus one of the kids in there. I couldn’t risk that.”

  “Oh God. The house guests?”

  “Yeah, if that’s what you call em.”

  “Does she?”

  “Have someone in there with her? Well, we don’t know for sure. A staff member—”

  “Nurse Anne,” Farrah interjected.

  “Right. We know her, of course. But she just started here?”

  “I guess,” Tom said, shrugging. “Met her today. Might be my replacement, I’m not sure.”

  “Okay then. Anne, she took the bulk of them down the street.”

  “They’re at my place,” Mikey Dean said, piping up from a few feet away. “My mom’s giving them cookies and the short one, he got a hold of the TV remote.”

  Tom smiled at that. His anger at Mikey had faded a lot. Everything had cooled since seeing those things peeling off of Chris Banatyne and pouring out of his wounds. “Thanks,” Tom said.

  “Sure thing,” Mikey said, nodding gently and backing out of the fray again.

  Birkhead continued. “But we gotta know if there’s anyone else in the house.”

  “Well,” Tom said, straining against a pending headache. “Who’s all at the Dean place?”

  Birkhead flipped through a notebook and pointed at names with the tip of his pen as he listed them off. “We
got safe and accounted for—Smitty, Dar, Mary, Ingrid and the nurse, Anne.”

  “That’s everyone,” Tom said.

  “You sure?”

  “I am. If Karen says she has anyone else in there, she’s lying. She’s good at that.”

  “There’s something more,” Farrah said.

  “What?” Tom asked, looking pale-faced up at her and her father. What on earth could there be that’s more than this?

  Birkhead made a grimace. “Well, when she blew down the hall and into that room, I saw her grab a handful of those pills. She swallowed probably two dozen. Maybe more.”

  So she might be dead in there, Tom almost blurted but didn’t. And we’re all standing out here in the coming rain like dummies. But Tom didn’t say anything of the sort. Instead he said, “What can I do to help?”

  “We need to speak to her husband, but there’s no answer at the main Banatyne house. Phone rings and rings and the house is locked up tight. No answer. Any idea where he’s at?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Tom said.

  “What?” Birkhead said, scrunching his brow.

  “I do know where he is,” Tom said and looked back up at the facade of Ocean View Manor. “But you’re not going to want to see him.”

  35

  They left the deputy at Ocean View. Chief Birkhead told his second-in-command he’d be back in a tick. What he hoped was that he’d return in a half hour with Karen Banatyne’s husband to help talk his wife out of her seclusion in the house. No further weirdness and certainly no violence.

  The chief asked Tom if there were guns on the premises. He couldn’t swear to it, but he’d never seen any and he didn’t think Karen or Chris were the type to have weapons. “But,” he’d cautioned. “There’s a lot of secrets in that house.”

  Mikey Dean seemed to melt into the crowd of neighbours. Farrah and Tom rode in her dad’s police cruiser in the back seat, with flashers turned off for now. Seeing those red and blues in Dovetail Cove was the rarest thing, Birkhead said. And it usually meant something major was up, Farrah added. Birkhead didn’t want to spend the next two weeks explaining to everyone why he was tearing it up with the lights going. He’d only used the siren a handful of times. He left it at that and Tom didn’t ask him about it.