by Adam Cesare
Nikki wanted to like the girl, but with no guard to keep them from raiding the stockpile around them, she had an irrational fear that the woman wasn’t a fellow prisoner but a secret warden. It kept her from talking to the girl right away. The girl was plain, in her late twenties or early thirties, with mismatched scrub top and bottoms, one blue, one green. Her hair was twisted in a greasy ponytail, and she had eyes that pointed up and down but never at Nikki when she asked her what her name was.
“Sarah,” she said, wincing at the sound of her own voice. “I’m a nurse. Was a nurse.”
“How long have you been in here?” Nikki asked, wanting to know everything now that the silence had been broken. She dabbed Paulo’s forehead with a cloth she’d taken from one of the shelves. He was burning up, his sweat chilling the moment it hit the air. Was that how you got pneumonia or was that an old wives’ tale?
“Not long. I was…” She paused. “I was with a different group.”
“What happened to them? Where are they? Did you find a way to call for help?” Nikki asked, the questions spilling out of her.
It took Sarah a moment to speak again, looking confused by Nikki’s questions.
“Oh no, not another group of”—she didn’t say humans or survivors, she just whirled a finger around to indicate the three of them—“I meant a group of them.”
Nikki nodded that she understood and then chose her words carefully. “I hate to ask, but: better or worse?”
“Worse,” Sarah said.
Well, that was something, at least.
Paulo coughed. It was wet, and Nikki looked around for something that could help. She opened a box filled with individual bottles of PediaSure and twisted the cap off one. Yes, it was odd to have a drink meant for children in an old persons’ home, but Nikki imagined that the formula had some kind of health benefits for the elderly, too. The alternative, that there was a nursery or a daycare in Mercy House, was too grim a possibility to think of.
“You should drink this,” she said, and Paulo’s eyes moved underneath his lids. Maybe a yes, or maybe just part of a dream he was having. She parted his lips and poured in a sip; he coughed, sputtered, and then swallowed it down.
“I haven’t touched the food. I don’t know if we’re allowed,” Sarah said, shivering.
“Fuck ’em. I’ll keep the trash over by me. They won’t punish you for it.” Nikki gave Paulo another sip and his eyes opened and he smiled. He was her sweaty, outsized baby.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Sarah said, her tone accusatory. But she didn’t elaborate.
For a nurse, Sarah seemed unconcerned with helping Paulo. Did nurses take the Hippocratic Oath? Nikki didn’t know.
“Do you—” Nikki started, but was shushed.
“Hear that?” Sarah asked. Nikki strained but couldn’t hear anything. This lady might have seen too much, could be a basket case. Suddenly the walls of the walk-in fridge felt too solid, like they were locked in here with the girl, not away from the drooling residents who’d been eyeing them in the hallway.
If the woman was right and there was something going on out there, if she had grown more accustomed to listening to the world beyond their heavy prison door, then Nikki wasn’t going to her death with an empty stomach.
Nor was she going to die without a fight.
Resting Paulo’s head on a bag of rice, Nikki hurried over to the corner to select a weapon from one of the piles. The troopers had picked the hardware over, and left nothing too menacing in this pile, but Nikki settled on a honing steel. The ceramic and metal bar was about a foot long, with a molded plastic grip and dull tip. She wouldn’t be able to stab with it, but it was heavy enough to double as a combat baton.
Nikki had been close to putting a similar item on their wedding registry, but a Wüsthof knife set had seemed excessive to Don, even if they were getting it as a gift.
Sarah didn’t move from her spot opposite Paulo, but she did crane her neck to get a better look at Nikki’s bandage job on his arm.
“That’s going to get infected,” she said.
“We know,” Nikki said, a bit more curt than she wanted, but if the woman wasn’t going to help, she shouldn’t be backseat nursing.
“It’s not perfect, but hand me one of those bottles and we can rinse it, at least, re-dress it with those towels,” Sarah said, pointing to one of the jugs of water behind Nikki.
The girl was coming out of her shell; maybe she’d had the same fears of Nikki that Nikki’d had of her. It was possible that’s what situations like this—if there were any comparable situations—did to people: raised their suspicions to unrealistic levels, a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome that turned good guys into bad guys. Nikki thought back to her job. Even though she’d been sitting in her office less than forty-eight hours ago, it felt like a different world. The kids that got it the worst tended to give it right back, to their classmates, teachers, and counselors.
When she’d finished bandaging, it hadn’t taken much convincing to get Sarah to have something to eat. They knelt over Paulo, alternating mopping his brow, watching the light slowly come back into his eyes, and eating Nutri-Grain bars.
Outside, the muted sounds of hell beat against the door.
Chapter 35
If you back a rat into a corner it is forced to fight back. But if you break down the wall in front of its nest while it’s away from home and start stomping on its babies, it has no way of getting revenge. It is just a stupid animal.
This was the reasoning Harriet had used to settle on her target.
She almost hadn’t recognized Nikki when they’d brought her up from the basement. The girl was smaller than she’d remembered, her skin lighter.
That was true, Nikki was a mongrel, not the tar-black voodoo priestess that Harriet had been building up in her imagination, since she’d been unable to conjure an accurate picture of the girl from her memories. That was fine with Harriet, though. Memories tethered you to the past. She was all about the here and now, the tasks at hand, the monster she was going to slay.
There were a few residents in the hallway still waiting for the pharmacy to reopen. These creatures gripped loot in their sweaty hands—useless junk for the most part, things they’d either pillaged or won in the gambling pits of the rec room.
Gambling was an addiction, but it didn’t hold a candle to pills, especially the kind that could provide oblivion instead of a distraction. These residents were junkies and they paced like junkies. They patiently watched the door to the pharmacy, not daring to touch it, as if any attempt to knock it down would upset their pusher and he wouldn’t give them what they wanted.
Following the troopers, Harriet had waited for a ten count before pushing open the door to the dining room and listening for any indication of what was going on in the kitchen. There were screams, but they weren’t female, and there was none of the telltale laughter that accompanied torture. No, these army men weren’t in the business of playing games with their prey, they were in the business of control. The screams were not Nikki’s.
If they weren’t killing them, there was no reason to storm in as an attempt to get her revenge before Nikki was cut down. No, the girl would keep.
She returned to the hallway, disheartened that some of the residents of the rec room had grown bored waiting for young people to make another appearance and had gone back inside to their games. There were only the diehards left, waiting for their dosages, bartering items in hand.
Harriet could still use them. She just had to be smart about it.
They were husks, their eyes dead, but that hollowness just meant that they would burn like kindling.
Returning to the rec room, Harriet found debris that she could use to make noise. Molded plastic, a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos would do, although the residents had emptied all of the marbles out. She gripped the square and made a show of leaving with it, banging it along the floor and hooting.
“Open!” she yelled at the pharmacy, th
e dopey eyes in the hallway turning to her, then back down to their own goods.
“Open!” one of the other residents joined in, kicking at the wall beside her, scuffing the molding, but not adding much of a sound herself. That was all it took; Harriet backed away and let the men and women have her spot at the door. Fists rattled against the knob, jewelry and canned goods were dropped and retrieved, minor scuffles broke out as their belongings were confused and then stolen and then forgotten again.
The hallway become more and more crowded, residents from the cafeteria, dining room, and rec room all wanting in on the action. Whether they were joining the mob for the drugs or just as a diversion, it didn’t matter: Harriet had started a small riot.
She tossed the hippos to the floor and took the knife from her waistband. The blade was dull, but the teeth had still managed to prick the skin of her hips a few times through her cotton underwear. This was the same knife she’d used to kill her son, but it had been meant for someone else. It would have been a betrayal of his memory to trade it for a different weapon, even if there were sharper and more novel means of dispatching Nikki.
Listening to the chaos unfold in the hallway, to the splintering of the pharmacy door as the residents’ lithe bodies crashed down upon its wood, Harriet huddled under the dining room table, her knees saturated in jellied blood. She tried not to meet Don’s dead eyes as they stared at her from across the room, simultaneously her son and her savior.
Here she could wait for the army men to clear out of the kitchen and finally get herself some alone time with her daughter-in-law.
Chapter 36
There was no time to formulate a plan. His women were alone in the pharmacy.
They should have consolidated their personnel and split some of the medical supplies between the pharmacy and the refrigerator; that was clear to him now. Stretching themselves too thin, trying to occupy too many objectives too far apart, had been a mistake.
But they were so strong, so disciplined, so well trained. And with so much hubris.
Arnold wanted to take a page out of Ivan’s book and close his hand inside one of the steel cabinets of the kitchen. No. He could punish himself later, if he lived.
The growls and shouts of his women echoed through the open air vents, making the pharmacy sound like it was right next door even though it wasn’t. They were strong women, and would try their best to hold their ground until reinforcements could get there to help, but they wouldn’t last long. If Clemson had still been alive he could have snaked through the vents and helped them fight on two fronts.
Arnold had been referring to them as his women for so long that he’d forgotten their names. What kind of leader did that? Asked people to die and didn’t bother to learn their names? Bad ones. The kind that got their outfits killed.
Arnold Piper let loose a roar that surprised even himself and bent to pick up his spear and shield. His men followed suit, Ivan having to feel around in the darkness, his drooped eye and salt rub leaving him nearly blind and worthless.
Grant and Beaumont fell in, but Arnold pointed back to the fridge and Beaumont nodded, resuming his position.
“Wait. No, you,” Arnold said, switching Beaumont for Ivan. If he was going to split his force, he would do it this way, bring his most capable men into battle. If Ivan wanted to make up for his mistakes, he could start by cooling his heels here.
Harry Beaumont guided Ivan to the door, sat him down, still weeping in the excitement. Every sob he let out hurt the men’s morale, and Arnold decided that he liked Ivan better back when he had been catatonic, before the healing.
They fell behind Arnold as he tore through the swinging door into the dining room, the force of the handle hitting the wall behind it and knocking paint off. It wasn’t just rage; he needed to make as much noise as possible, convince the residents in the hallway to disperse before they realized that there were only three men on the other side of the door.
Out in the hallway, more residents streamed from the rec room into the open doorway of the pharmacy. They trampled one another to get in, fights breaking out over pill bottles that had already been removed from the room. The looters tried to stuff their mouths with meds and return to the game room before they could be jumped.
Arnold put metal to acrylic, banging his spear against the cafeteria tray shield, screaming as he did so. Grant and Beaumont did the same, and the residents in front of them took notice. Took notice but did not flee, for the most part.
Some of them gave up ground as Arnold approached, allowing him space to maneuver. They were weaklings, too timid to throw the first punch.
The first aggression that came wasn’t a punch, as Arnold pushed into the mass of them with his shield, nearly at the door to the pharmacy before the first attack. It was a wineglass, lobbed at him, bouncing off his head and shattering on the floor. Glass crushed below the bare feet of the residents around him, but did not pierce his rubber soles. All the drinking cups in the cafeteria were hard plastic, so the glass must have been pilfered from the dining room.
The blow didn’t hurt, but it did embolden the residents surrounding them. Harry Beaumont yelped as a resident began to wrestle his shield away, the man weathering several blasts from the tray, but holding on. Beaumont let him have the shield, pulling a large knife from his bandolier and putting it through the man’s eye. The resident died still gripping the cafeteria tray, a pyrrhic victory in death.
Grant impaled both a man and a woman on the end of his spear, then drove it as far as he could into the wall and left it there. He then switched to small arms as Beaumont had, using a paring knife to slice his way forward, turning a few noses and ears into useless flaps as he advanced.
No one was taking a swing at Arnold, so he didn’t need to expend the energy or encourage retaliation. He just bowled residents over as he made it through the doorway, first into the breach.
The room had been hot before when it had been packed with naked bodies, but it was hell now. There was blood and shit an inch thick on the linoleum, and two or three dead residents lying across the threshold dividing the desk from the aisles. The looters who’d gotten their pills were trying to jostle their way out with what they could; those who hadn’t had a chance yet tried to dive through the doorway and found themselves stuck.
The residents weren’t the only casualties, though; pressed against the Plexiglas were his women.
Their necks had been slit, but that probably hadn’t been the cause of death—the wounds had been inflicted just to make sure. The women’s faces were bruised, their corpses stacked on top of each other, their weapons stripped away. That they had been put on display let Arnold know that they hadn’t gone easily; they’d stayed ferocious to the end.
Arnold wanted to apologize to them, but there was no sense in that. Looking beyond their bodies to the shelves he could see that their stock had been depleted. At his feet, empty baggies and bottles floated among pills, their casing dissolving in the blood.
It was too late.
“Fall back! Get out!” Arnold yelled, colliding with Harry Beaumont as the man backed out the door, slashing at the latecomers who got in his way.
They no longer controlled the drugs, but they still might be able to calm the people of Mercy House. Maybe not supremacy, but at least order could still be established if they gave the people what they wanted.
Chapter 37
Harriet slipped into the kitchen, expecting it to be empty. There was a large man, his legs crossed under him, sitting, crying, and shaking on the floor in front of a large chrome door.
If this was who they’d chosen to put on guard duty, the army men had indeed fallen on hard times.
It wasn’t until she’d snuck up close, shedding her sneakers at the door and padding on her socks, that she noticed his disfigurement.
His sealed eyelids and spotted, bulky hands resembled a physical deformity so severe that it had to cross over into the mental. It made him seem like an infant, as if whatever had burned him
had singed away his sins and left a child in its place. Harriet was treated to a barrage of images: Don taking his first bath in the kitchen sink; Don skinning his knee, crying with his helmet beside him on the pavement; Don with a stream of blood leaking out of his neck, lily-white and dead. No, the past was the past and this man was no more a child than a snarling wolf was a puppy in a storefront window.
She crept behind him, jerking her free hand out and catching him by one of his tufts of remaining hair, pulling his head to the side.
Then she ran the blade along his neck. Slashing and letting go, Harriet stood back. She was expectant, ready to see the torrent of blood painting the wall and door. In her imagination, she was treated to the anticipatory vision of it running down the chrome of the freezer. The chrome door was so heavy it looked like it belonged on a submarine.
There was no spurt of blood, though, only a cry of anguish as the man fell to his side and flipped around to face her. His less-injured eye was ringed red where the white should have been, and the mass above his closed eye trembled as he struggled to register his attacker. Harriet had not cut deep enough. His throat was unbloodied, only a knick where she had slashed across his toughened scar tissue, the dent looking similar to what you could put into a candle with your thumbnail.
She should have stabbed in and over, not sliced across.
He didn’t give her a chance to move out of the way. Pushing off the floor the way a swimmer might boost off the bottom of a pool, he was on her.
The monster screamed, the pitch of his voice making Harriet feel as if she were the root of all the setbacks and frustrations he’d had in life, from whatever incident had him crying on guard duty, all the way back to whatever had scarred him and beyond, to his childhood.
She sympathized—mice and men and their plans and all that—but she couldn’t let him take his dissatisfaction with life out on her. Even with both of her hands planted on the hilt of the knife, the metal of the blade between his teeth, he still didn’t close his mouth and stop screaming.