by Aaron Dries
You’ve earned this, it read.
So no. It wasn’t Jordan on the ground in the courtyard. Understanding this didn’t make the revelation any easier.
Because it was her.
Mama Metcalf. Flat on her back. A grotesque piece of art on display for all, only the artist, unsatisfied with her expression, had wiped away her face. Gone. As simple as that.
Emily didn’t realize she’d been screaming until she ran out of breath. The door slammed shut behind her and a siren blared. Someone must have smashed the emergency alarm in the break room, likely one of the five Crowners.
Mama Metcalf at Christmas dinner, smiling over the food she had made for them, pointing out her festive decorations, laughing as they watched the ball drop just last night, telling stories about Dick Clark, who Lucette had never even heard of—these memories faded, replaced by Woods as she ran forward with two of the Crowners, Geraldine and the man in the Hawaiian shirt. Thankfully, Mykel had the old woman immobilized, but from the bulge in her side it looked as though he’d busted a few ribs in the process.
Serves you right you hateful bitch.
Emily wanted to help in some way, but Woods yelled at her to step back. “Give us space, damn it!” Emily shuffled to the door, hands on her stomach, kneading the emptiness in her that Lucette had left behind the day she was born. Some holes were never filled.
Geraldine picked up the gun. She walked to the corner of the courtyard, looking up at the jacket thrown over the barbed wire fencing.
Woods pushed Mykel off the writhing old woman and sat on that busted ribcage herself. She proceeded to punch the intruder right in the face. Woods let out a war cry that chilled Emily to her core. The old woman flopped against the blood-splattered snow, unconscious.
“Excuse me, little dove,” Geraldine said, easing past Emily to get back inside. Her tone was even. Emily assumed the Crowner was well accustomed to disassociating herself from slaughter. Had to be.
The puzzle pieces started to fit together in Emily’s mind. The old woman had somehow gained access to the courtyard and shot Mama Metcalf. Yet this realization didn’t usher in any resolution because it didn’t feel real, more like a movie.
The only thing that rang true was a single thought, a single repeating word:
LUCETTE. LUCETTE. LUCETTE. It chimed with the alarm.
“I have to find my daughter,” Emily told Woods, who stood over the old woman, fist raised. Her breaths were coming hard and fast. “I have to leave you.”
The one remaining Ministry worker, Mister Hawaii as Emily thought of him, was still out in the yard. “I’ll stay with her,” he said, kneeling beside the beautiful black woman who had so intimidated and challenged Emily on her first day of work.
“Go,” Woods said to her, eyes rabid beneath her brow. “Where there’s one motherfucking terrorist like this there may be more. Make sure Lucette’s safe. If she’s not, do what you have to do. Got me, girl?”
Emily grabbed the door handle, clenched it tight. “Crystalline.”
She rushed into the building. The break room was lit with red lights cast from wall sconces. In addition to this, every door in the building would have automatically swung shut as a protective measure against fire threat. Closed—not locked. The sprinklers hadn’t turned on, and of that Emily was relieved. If that had happened, some of their patients (not guests!) may get wet, and pneumonia was a constant threat in the winter months.
“Lucette!” she called, though the room was small enough to see that there was nobody in it. Emily took a step and her shoe crunched shards of glass from the BREAK IN THE EVENT OF EMERGENCY alarm near the door. She kicked them aside when she saw the open book of origami on the dining table. And then she knew.
She just knew.
Emily headed toward Corridor 3, passing the occasional co-worker who tried to stop her and find out what was going on. “Protect everyone and brace for evacuation,” she told them. Woods was right; this cowardly act of violence may be a sign of things to come. And worse, the protesters had been so riled up that morning. Sometimes all it took was a single drop of blood in the ocean to send the sharks into a frenzy.
“Hey, New Girl!”
She stopped short of the door leading to the FSU and turned in the direction of the caller, thinking to herself that you needed a code to gain access to the ward, but her daughter could be too damn resourceful when she wanted to be. Mykel ran up to her, blood slushing down his face in rivulets.
“I’m coming with you,” he said, catching his breath, reaching over her shoulder to punch the code into the keypad. “You just never know.” Mykel’s presence confirmed that sick feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach, the suspicion that she would not only find her not-so-little-girl in Robby’s room—but something else. “I’m just being realistic,” he added, stepping in front of her and pulling the door open.
Emily grabbed his arm. His skin was slick with Mama Metcalf. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Inside, she heard her daughter screaming. The sound was oddly muffled. Emily’s heart started trip-hammering as she made a mad dash down the hall, following the red silhouette of her co-worker. To her right she was vaguely aware of the blur of bare skin in Tammy’s room, but she didn’t pause to investigate. Lucette’s squeals were getting louder and more desperate—and yes, they were coming from the direction of Robby’s room.
“No, no, no, no!” she cried.
Keep her safe. Above all else. Keep. Her. Safe.
The two nurses hit a hard left and pivoted into the room, their shoes squeaking the linoleum. Emily feared she would freeze up again as she had out in the courtyard.
Robby had Lucette in his arms, his teeth clamped on her lips as the girl fought to free herself. Blood was gushing down on the sheets creating Rorschach patterns spelling death—her daughter’s if she didn’t break free of this paralysis right now. The air thickened, time slowed, everything ran at half-speed.
Mykel made it to the bed first and grabbed Lucette’s arm with one hand whilst smashing his other fist into Robby’s face. The boy released his hold on the girl and snapped his teeth. Mykel jerked back to avoid the bite, yanking Lucette with him. The girl pirouetted on the spot and landed against her mother’s chest.
Hysterical yelps tore from Lucette, the bottom half of her face gore-streaked. Her lips had been torn clean off. Eyes wide with shock as she reached up to finger the parts of her that were no longer there.
On an instinctive level, Emily knew that the only thing that was truly important in her life had been whisked away. But fear, that elemental need to survive, cauterized the wound. Gripping her daughter’s arm so tight their flesh might as well have been fused, Emily hauled Lucette to the door, forced her through, looked back.
Robby leapt over the side of the bed, landing on the floor. He was uncoordinated and ungainly, as all infected were right after the change, but he was fast. A blood-splattered lick of lightning that could have struck anywhere on earth, yet which had settled on this very room. On them.
On Mykel.
It wasn’t Robby that attacked him. All remnants of the boy’s humanity were gone as he scurried at the man Emily had found so intolerable. The child was an ‘it’ now. One of them. A smiler. A grotesque thing worthy of the mob’s hatred.
“Run!” Emily yelled to her daughter. “Get out of here. I’m right behind you.”
The girl didn’t need to be told twice. She made her way down the corridor, a ball bearing in a pinball machine, directionless, pained and scratching at the seeds of her infection. Emily spun to the room and watched Robby leap on Mykel, forcing him against her shoulder. The three of them fell in the corridor and onto the hard floor.
Snarling rat teeth snapped inches from their faces. Its black eyes didn’t blink. Not once. It wouldn’t stop until it had them in its jaws, their blood in its gullet, digging for their marrow. Mykel drove his knee into the boy’s stomach, flipping him off, gracing Emily with just enough time to scramble away.
The smiler rushed at them again, scrambling like a lizard, snarling and slobbering. It reached the end of its IV tubing, the needle coming free and spurting morphine across the floor. The stand overturned and clattered against the mattress.
Mykel was on his hands and knees, trying to force himself upright when the smiler leapt on his back, the gown flapping away in the process, revealing the former child’s mutated form. Skeletal protrusions. Mismatched muscles. The elongation of its fingernails and teeth.
Screech. Screech. Screech.
Lucette collapsed at the foot of the door leading out of the FSU before having a chance to open it. Seeing her there, Emily had to make a choice. She either helped Mykel or she helped herself. In the end, the smiler cast this decision on her behalf. It slung its head sideways and latched its jaws around the base of Mykel’s neck.
Emily scuttled for the wall, reached out to balance herself, only to misjudge the distance. She tumbled onto her knees—blinding white bolts of pain—and doubled over.
She watched, almost at the point of disbelief, as the thing that had once been the boy she pitied lived up to its other moniker. The bone-eater.
It forced its arms and legs on Mykel’s limbs, pinning him down, and then ripped the nurse’s head into an unnatural hinge with its jaws. A human Pez dispenser. Only instead of candy, the prize was a fountain of blood jetting up over the opposite wall. The boy lifted a hand and used those elongated nails to slit open the flesh of Mykel’s back. Then the creature arched itself rearward, contorting itself almost double. The head was still in its maw as it peeled Mykel’s spine from his body. It all came away from the flesh in one fluid motion, swinging through the air like a ball on a chain.
The bone-eater dove on its bounty. Ate.
Emily regained her footing, alerting the creature to her presence again. She ran, hearing the clatter of bones as it discarded the severed spine in search of fresher specimens. Its greed was inexhaustible.
The door at the end of the corridor was open. Lucette was dragged from sight.
Emily moved faster than she’d ever moved in her life. Scratching fingernails against linoleum at her heels. She dove through the FSU architrave where Speedy and Tammy were pulling Lucette from harm’s way, about turned, and flung the door shut. The old man dropped his shoulder against the metal barricade as the smiler tried to force it open from the inside. It was a fire-escape safety measure that security doors automatically unlocked when the alarm was sounding. Both she and Mykel had forgotten this when he punched in the code earlier.
“You. Have to. Escape,” Speedy said through elongated teeth as he wrestled with the weight.
Emily picked Lucette up again, her back and knees crying havoc. “Come with me,” she said to Tammy, who was crawling back over to the FSU entrance, her gown open to reveal her bed-sore spotted buttocks.
The infected woman reached the door and stretched out her arm as though casting a blessing. “No. It won’t take us! RUN!” That command blurred with the whine of the alarm until there was only one ear-piercing squawk that Emily feared would never end. Were she to survive this, she was sure it would loop in her head forever in both waking and dreaming lives, twin reflections of each other where monsters lurked. Emily held her bleeding daughter, and even though it hurt like hell, turned her back on her saviors, two people who had come here to die with dignity and in the end discovered it on their own.
Emily limped to the fire exit and pushed it open, clear light shining through, forcing their shadows back into the hall like sacrifices to the creature. Snow crunched underfoot as Emily emerged into the day and kicked the door closed.
***
Tammy had been right—the creature had no taste for tainted goods and passed them by. It was inevitable that their depleted strength would be no match for it, and only moments after Emily and Lucette had spirited themselves away and along the side of the building towards the rear entrance to the car park did it break free of the FSU.
It carried itself with the elegance of a dead ballet dancer, arms swishing through the air so its elongated claws whistled as it walked. The whiteness of its skin was reflected in every door handle, in the concave mirrors masking security cameras, upturned in a teaspoon thrown from a dropped food tray. Hunger drove it on, sending it stalking through the corridors of the hospice. Were it unlucky in its pursuit, it would go back to the other place and suck the fluid from the bones it had collected before.
The creature wore an apron of blood, ready for its next meal. If given the choice, it would eat but one bone from a hundred living things over every bone from a single person.
***
Woods stood up, spent. The old woman at her feet had stopped breathing, despite her efforts, despite hating herself for even trying. Not even her up-to-date CPR training had saved her, regardless as to whether or not survival was warranted. Woods wiped the dead bitch’s stinking spit from her own mouth.
The one remaining Crowner joined her, the skinny man in the Hawaiian shirt. He grabbed his arms, trying to warm himself. “You did everything you could,” he said, shivering.
Woods tried not to cry. That would come later. “Maybe I did. Maybe not. Let’s get back inside and find the others.”
Before closing the door on the courtyard, Woods saw Mama Metcalf’s unmoving legs splayed in the snow. That woman, as annoying as she could be sometimes, had deserved a better end than the one she’d met. Woods said a quick, silent prayer, hoping that the big southern girl didn’t freeze her ass off on her way up to the Pearly Gates.
***
Thirty simple seconds tick-tocked on by, and despite the electric crackle of expectancy in the air, Mama Metcalf remained well and truly dead. Even her blood had stopped flowing, ruby diamonds on a cigarette-butt strewn patch of land. The old woman across from her, Wanda Mabry, would also never move again. Her index finger was curved inwards as though still depressing an invisible trigger that shot invisible bullets of hatred at a sky that would never die.
Sirens sung in the distance. When the hospice alarm was activated an automatic call out was prompted to the fire brigade. They would be there soon. Though not quite soon enough.
A chirping issued from this crimson scene.
It wasn’t a bird, although in many ways it sounded like one. It came from the old-fashioned cell phone that had tumbled into the snow beneath the staff picnic table during Mykel’s tussle. The screen had cracked in the fall, but the name of the incoming caller was clear as day.
Two words flashed over and over.
MY ERIK.
***
Woods and the Crowner in the Hawaiian shirt rounded the corner into the corridor that would lead, after two subsequent turns, to the front of the building. Their hands were plastered over their ears to block out the alarm, but Woods still heard him ask, “When do you think the police will get here?”
She didn’t have a chance to answer. It was as though someone had reached inside her throat and snatched the oxygen straight from her lungs.
One of the other five Crowners, a bearded man wearing a long sleeved plaid shirt—as though he’d set out that day to fell trees as opposed to felling a life—sat against the wall. A tossed aside play thing. His hands were upturned to the ceiling; a wedding ring glimmered scarlet from a nearby sconce. Beyond the shock of seeing him, Woods felt a throbbing for the people he left behind. The slaughtered man was loved by someone somewhere, a person who likely at one point or another sat him down and held that very hand, pleading as spouses do, “Are you sure you want to work at the Ministry? What if you get called up for Crowner duty? I’m frightened for you, babe.” And now here he was. Head slouched to one side. A husk, having been emptied out. Ribbons of intestines arranged before him in tribute to the fickleness of his flesh and the merit of the bones that had been thieved.
The door to the room next to the dead man opened a fraction, and in the red light Woods saw a woman’s face. It appeared engraved in the dim
. She was one of her guests. Her name, from memory, was Margaret, though Woods couldn’t be sure. There were so many of them, a revolving door of infected souls passing through this way station. Men, women, and children coming from terrible places with terrible histories heading straight into the great big black on the other side. Woods’ jolt over seeing the dead Crowner was secondary to the guilt of not being able to recall that woman’s name with certainty. Such was the curse of caregivers, the most diminutive cuts bled the worst.
“You have to leave,” the shadowed face whispered. “Quick. Before it gets you. It’ll gobble you up. Fee-fi-fo-fum.”
Maybe-Margaret’s hand—so youthful—snaked out into the hall and pointed back in the direction from which Woods had come. “It went that way. Fly out the front door before it’s too late. Fly!”
Woods shuddered, fearful she may vomit. Maybe-Margaret’s door clicked shut with unnerving delicacy. A tiny clunk. Woods felt alone, exposed. She turned to calm the skinny Ministry worker who, God bless him, had been by her side since the courtyard. Ha—calm. The truth of it was that Woods was downright terrified and longed to hold his hand, to have this complete stranger squeeze her fingers and tell her that everything was going to be okay.
Only he was gone.
Woods stood there, frozen to the spot, the siren continuing to boom about her. She sensed movement just around the corner they had come from, only she was too terrified to retrace those few feet to identify its source. The faces of her children, her darling boys, boiled in her brain like bones in a pot. She wanted to see them again. Hold them. Devour them with love and bathe in their broth.