Mercy House

by Adam Cesare

  As he had in the anteroom, he smelled the resident before he could pinpoint where he was holed up, the hiding spot seeming impossibly small.

  Piper used the end of his spear to knock the crate of bananas out of the way, and saw a man curled into a fetal position small enough to be a member of the staff. But it was a resident. Not only a resident, but one Piper recognized: Bobby Clemson.

  Clemson smiled at Piper, guilty, but also as if Piper was in on the joke, as if it was okay that he had tried to hide in the fridge to get himself locked in with the food. And in a way it was: Piper liked Clemson and knew that he’d been a jarhead like himself.

  Clemson climbed down off the shelf and fell in with Grant and Beaumont, helping ransack the kitchen cabinets, organizing everything into piles on the countertops. Piper motioned for the bodies to be stacked outside, scarecrows for anyone who tried to enter the kitchen through the cafeteria. Grant and Clemson had no problem understanding what he wanted.

  Their force was coming together.

  A moment later, before the rest of the kitchen and fridge could be checked, the melted man entered, hoisting up a dead resident by his neck, pulling juice boxes and taco-seasoning packets from the man’s pockets and tossing them down on the countertop. The scarred man didn’t salute like Grant and Beaumont had, but instead lowered the corpse he was holding and bowed to Piper.

  Piper lifted the man off his knees, fingers gently hooked under his arms, and watched the man flinch at his touch. Every inch of the big man was covered in blood, most of it his own, by the looks of his wounds, some beginning to scab and some still fresh. He tried to remember the man’s name, couldn’t, and then finally asked.

  “Name?” Piper said, having trouble with the word, stretching it out to neh-i-am.

  The man forced something out of his ruined mouth. It sounded like Ivan. Although not regulation, a single name, first or last, was good enough for this outfit.

  Chapter 19

  Teddy Reed watched chaos unfold on the security cameras and was shocked by the instant gut check of familiarity. If you watched something on a screen, even if it was real—news footage of the blurry hallways of Columbine, for example—it distanced you. Teddy was appalled, not by the fact that he was watching his coworkers being beaten and dismembered, but that he couldn’t work up the energy to care, to be scared or sad or anything.

  In high school, as unhappy as he’d been, as lonely, as imaginarily villainous, he’d always been secretly terrified that he was in fact one of those kids you saw on TV. He was such an ordinary guy, a little weird, a bit of a loner…

  Teddy had no real interest in guns, no real vendetta against the guys who pushed him into lockers, but that was part of the problem. He felt detached, a boy apart.

  Maybe that wasn’t it, though. Maybe he was wrong to be scared of the numbness, the anger he sometimes felt. Maybe it was all preparing him for this.

  Pools of black blood spread, nurses’ heads were closed in doors, and there were stabbings in the dining room. He’d gotten only a glimpse of the mayhem before the power had clicked off, the Wifi cut. On his laptop screen the feeds froze as he began to run on battery power. He watched the still images for a few moments before smiling, the motion feeling perverse but not unwarranted.

  Maybe a villain was what this situation needed, someone who thought like Teddy did, had the access that Teddy did, could bench-press like Teddy could.

  He spun around in his chair and consulted the large metal racks next to his bedroll, the glow of his computer screen providing more than enough illumination to see by.

  So much hardware to choose from but so little time before the police could show up and crash the party.

  It was a pity that the hedge trimmer required a wall plug and electricity, otherwise he’d be all over that.

  He tried to remember everything he’d seen on the monitor before the cameras had cut out. As childish as it was, as dopey as it made him feel to be indulging the idea, the closest corollary he could think of was zombies. This wasn’t like the movies, though, or the TV shows or comics, for that matter.

  Well, not that he’d spent a lot of time thinking about it. He’d always thought that if it did happen, they wouldn’t quite be zombies, that no filmmaker alive would have properly captured what it would actually be like. And he’d been right. From what little he’d gotten to observe on the closed-circuit footage, the monsters out there were fast and strong, but still with enough humanity left to be using tools, knives at least, from his observations.

  “Hmmm,” he intoned, rubbing his chin and then strapping on his tool belt, swapping out the innocuous items (screwdrivers, tape measurers) with the more exotic and utilitarian (garden shears, Maglite, etc). Then he reached up to the top shelf and grabbed a nail gun. Tinkering with it just last month he’d successfully pried the safety mechanism off, allowing the gun to fire without being held flush against a surface. He had been using it to bull’s eye rats down in the basement ever since. He tried not to enjoy it or feel bad about it, since the rats had to go either way.

  He searched the ground for his scrub pants and found them, taking the Laurels’ car key out of the pocket. He’d need a getaway ride if this thing had spread farther than Mercy House and the apocalypse really was upon them. Teddy didn’t own a car, but he did now.

  It was going to be a thrill, and the best part was he’d be a hero. Maybe that chick he’d stolen the panties from had managed to survive, but he doubted it. She was in a tough spot when the footage had cut, but it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility that he could be her savior.

  But what about his girl? What about Bea? Fuck it, she was never his girl anyway, just some old cooze with undiagnosed nymphomania. If he saw her he would not be swayed by their connection; that was then and this was now. Now she wasn’t his girlfriend anymore, she was the undead. Or infected. Or a Candarian demon. Whatever, he’d put her down like the rest of them, if it came to that. This thought, more than anything else, made Teddy want to move the shelves against the door and try to wait out whatever this was. Would he really be able to put down Beatrice, no matter how much of a monster she’d become? She was the only woman who’d ever shown him a little tenderness, had pulled him back from the brink at a time in his life when he didn’t think he could go on.

  Enough.

  Teddy locked eyes with himself in the mirror behind his door, put the flashlight under his chin, and spat some nasty Necro lyrics to get himself pumped, deliberately trying to push any shreds of consciousness and doubt out of his mind, then he threw open the door. Out in the hallway, he raised his nail gun in one hand and his flashlight in the other and prepared to get to work.

  The dining room was directly across the hall from his office. That seemed as good a place as any to start.

  Chapter 20

  Sarah’s mind was so frazzled, it was so dark, and her fingers were so slick, that it took her three tries before she could get the correct combination of her locker. It opened with the sweetest click she’d ever heard.

  It hadn’t been easy, traversing the room in complete blackness, with no emergency lights in the staff locker room or the service hallway that connected it to the hydrotherapy room. She’d located her locker by feeling along the rows, trying her best not to collide with too many open doors, cutting the tips of her fingers on the molded steel of the lockers, which felt like rubbing her palms over a cheese grater.

  Her clothes sloshed with every step. She was saturated with enough pool water and bodily fluids that she felt ten pounds heavier. For stealth’s sake she had toyed with the idea of stripping down to her underwear, but the thought that one of the residents could wake up and take her nudity as an overture kept her from doing it, so she just moved slowly and tried not to drip too loudly.

  She’d found her lock, read the numbers with the tips of one of her least injured fingers, like braille, finding zero and moving the knob ever so tenderly, counting by fives.

  The glow of the phone was
ethereal. It was the Holy Grail descending from the heavens; Excalibur tossed ashore by the Lady of the Lake, a young and beautiful woman in Sarah’s imagination, because a matronly lady would only remind her of the elderly, and what they had done to the staff and to one another.

  There was a loud clack as she unlocked the phone, the buzz of a wrong pin number as her fingers, wet with blood and ooze, didn’t conduct properly on the touch screen. Making the sounds should have caused her greater distress than it did, but she was so empowered just by holding the device that it could make whatever beeps and bloops it wanted to. When it finally unlocked, she thumbed over the screen to dial.

  “Ring, ring,” a voice said in the room, and Sarah jumped, almost dropping the phone.

  Sarah pointed the beam of the phone into the corner, where Beatrice Kent detached herself from the wall. Sarah could not stop the weakness that overtook her. It was a desire, voiced by every molecule of her body, to just give up.

  She tried to think when the woman could have entered the room without her noticing, whether she’d been in here the whole time, toying with Sarah in her silence, but the answer didn’t matter.

  Queen Bea walked toward her, completely naked, her body even longer and more muscular than it had been. Her skin was ghostly white in the green glow of the phone, the sopping patch of hair between her legs silver, and her fingernails glittering like daggers.

  No, Sarah thought, then said, “No!” the word coming to her lips, a war cry before she could think any better of it.

  Let the rest of them hear, if she was not going to survive this night, then she was ready to take her final stand.

  Sarah ran at the monster, ready to strike her down.

  Chapter 21

  Teddy had no sooner opened the door to his office than he was offered up his first target, as neatly as he could have asked for. He was a beginner, after all, and he would not look down on easy prey.

  The man’s arms and legs were broken, but he was still more than alive and ready to launch himself after Teddy. Whoever had done this to the old man was gone now and had left him as a heap in the hallway, his blood painting the wall behind him. There were skid marks and shoe prints on the wall, too, evidence that this dude had been stomped on until he was like this, more broken bones than whole ones, and that it had been done by more than one attacker.

  Extending his arm, feeling his muscles flex, Teddy leveled the nail gun at the guy’s chest and let three fly, quick pops that hopefully weren’t loud enough to alert whatever group had beaten this guy.

  The first two nails sunk into the man’s breast up to the head, pinning his hospital gown to him. The third was a glancing blow, making a different sound as it bounced off one of the guy’s ribs, staying half in and half out of the fabric and flesh.

  The old man panted and howled, a frustrated sound, not so much that he was in pain but upset that his arms and legs weren’t working so he could crawl across the floor and get at Teddy. Teddy made a tsk-tsk sound and put the nail gun to the guy’s temple, looking to get out of the hallway where he was exposed. He fired and the man slumped.

  Using his shoulder he pushed against the door to the dining room and it took a second to register that it was locked. Leaning his nail gun against the molding, he fished out his keys and started searching. His resolve was weakening, and as he tried to find the right key, he was unable to shake the sound that the nails had made while entering flesh.

  It was not what he had expected at all. Also unexpected were how alive the guy’s eyes had been, not the milky cataracts of the living dead, but the kind, alert eyes of the residents who sometimes shared their Fig Newtons, even if Teddy wasn’t pleasant in return.

  He couldn’t hear anyone on the other side of the door, but that was good. Getting into the dining room would get him out in the open and allow him to scope out both the cafeteria and the kitchen without having to run straight into either one.

  There we go. He lifted up the rounded key with the green edging. In nearly every other aspect of his life, from his drawers to his laptop folders, Teddy was not an organized man, but he’d learned that color coding his keys saved him a lot of time. He unlocked the door and pressed in.

  The smell was just as much a surprise as what he was seeing.

  This room was occupied. And it wasn’t the dining room anymore.

  For as long as he’d been working at Mercy House, there had been a vocal faction of patients that had wanted a chapel installed in the building. There was a shuttle bus that came the last Sunday of each month to take the religious residents to whatever church or synagogue they wanted, and a selection of priests and rabbis who were available to visit any resident too sick to make it out. But some residents still wanted a permanent house of God on the premises and they were uppity about it.

  They had a church now, kind of.

  The candles were a rough assemblage, likely scavenged from different parts of Mercy House, which made Teddy think that this was more than a one-person effort, since it had taken him only about an hour to work up a plan of attack and leave his office. There were skinny birthday candles, already small puddles on the hardwood, fat Yankee Candles from the residents’ rooms (although administration discouraged them), and long table candles probably pilfered from the kitchen. The flames gave the room an orange glow, offsetting the emergency lighting but still not brightening the room.

  The candles weren’t the centerpiece, though. No, this was a rough approximation of a Catholic church, and what are Catholics without idolatry? Their Jesus was a little heftier than most depictions, his arms and legs a bit shorter, his build stockier, with no beard to speak of, more of a five-o’clock shadow.

  It was the black girl’s husband, Mr. Laurel, bolted to the far wall with some of Mercy House’s formal silverware through his hands and feet. He carried the stigmata of the King of Kings, but there were other markings on his nearly naked body, too: long squiggles of dried blood, crosses and triangles and looping swirls, a new religion improvised and written onto the flesh of its host.

  There were three doors leading out of the “church”: one large, sliding partition that could be moved aside to reveal the cafeteria; one push door to the west that swung on its hinges and offered easy access to the kitchen; and the main door to the hall to the south, behind him. Both of the other doors were closed, but neither of them had a lock that Teddy was aware of, so there would be no securing this room.

  And then there were the parishioners. The six chairs from the dining room table had been pressed together into two rows of three. The residents hadn’t moved as Teddy entered the room, the three of them remaining stock-still in their seats. Two women and a man sat upon these chairs, their heads bowed in prayer as they sat in their makeshift pews.

  In the corner of the room, where a church meet would typically stash its coffee and donuts, they had pushed the table against the wall and laid Gail Donner’s mangled body. Her pantsuit was torn, her guts unspooled and streaming over the edges of the table. The scene both shook him and reinforced his nerve. No, he reasoned. These things may not be shamblers, but they are monsters all the same and deserve to die. Donner was maybe his least favorite person at Mercy House, but even she didn’t deserve this, no matter what accidents he’d fantasized befalling her.

  Teddy walked quickly to the middle of the room and put the nail gun flat against the back of one of the parishioner’s heads. He listened to her babble gibberish for a second before pulling the trigger. No, not pulling, holding it down and giving her a series of stegosaurus bumps at the base of her skull.

  She twitched and then fell over in her seat, knocking into the guy in front of her and causing the resident beside her to snap out of her prayer.

  And, boy, were they pissed.

  The man yelled, the reservoir of spit he’d built up during silent prayer spilling over his bottom lip and onto Teddy’s arm as he tried to push the rising man back down with the end of the flashlight.

  But Teddy didn’t have enough
leverage, and the man, tensed, with full use of his arms and legs, was much stronger than Teddy had anticipated. Instead of falling, the man batted Teddy’s arm away, a motion that looked casual but almost rattled the weapon from his hand with the force.

  A step behind but just as fast and fierce, the woman dove at him. Either she did not understand what the nail gun was or didn’t care. She presented herself to Teddy and he unloaded into her, but his wrist was bent and the nails collided with her shoulder, not her face where they would have done some good. A few of the projectiles caught nothing but air and tinkled to the floor on the opposite side of the room, with not enough force to embed themselves into the drywall after making the trip.

  Perhaps the nail gun wasn’t the most effective weapon he could have chosen. It looked cool, probably would have plenty of on-screen value, but it wasn’t of much use unless he had the time to aim and was close to his target.

  Jack-of-all-trades wasn’t merely his job description, though, it was part of his philosophy. Teddy Reed was nothing if not adaptable. He took two big steps back and dropped the gun to the floor, denting the hardwood, but not much concerned that he was going to have to buff it out later.

  He put his free hand to the hilt of the flashlight and swung, Major League Baseball–style. It was a home run as the male resident’s skull snapped back on his neck. The side of his face had collapsed, and his eye socket was no longer a circle but more of a heart shape.

  It was a thunderous hit. Those P90X videos paid for themselves with one swing, and the guy was dead before he hit the floor.

  There was no time to celebrate, though, because the woman was on him, knocking over chairs before Teddy had a chance to reset his swing. She hit him in the stomach with one hand, her fingers not pulled into a fist but instead pointed into a cone, her nails out, while her other hand dug itself into the sinews connecting his neck and shoulder.