by Melhoff, D.
It was a sobering experience, she had suddenly realized, to be among the dead—to really be among them, not as a practitioner or puppeteer of abandoned vessels, but as a humble houseguest. There was something in this place that Camilla couldn’t explain. Presences, perhaps. Or maybe imprints was a better word. Imprints of people who had all known each other and bonded together in life as well as death, leaving some sort of collective stamp on the world that was greater than the sum of its graves. It only made her feel more alone.
Don’t worry, mom. I’ll fix everything.
Her daughter’s voice echoed over the nightmarish vision of the nooses hanging in the Vincents’ doorframes. Abigail’s innocent tone had Camilla on edge. It had been the kind of tone someone might use to say they’re going to shovel the walk, or take out the garbage. What was she planning? How was she going to “fix” it?
The horrifying possibilities solidified the inevitable truth: Abigail had to be abolished. That thought was the sharpest and clearest of them all. If Camilla didn’t do anything, she would be risking others’ lives to protect a devil in a cute, curly-haired disguise.
The Vincents had known it. Lucas had known it. Even Peter had known it through his tears of rage and pain. Losing her would be devastating, but keeping her would be worse.
If a child goes bad, it must be abolished.
It wouldn’t be easy—neither emotionally, nor logistically. The Midnight Sun would inevitably run a story revealing her and her daughter as Nolan’s number one and two enemies, which would make moving around virtually impossible. Even if I could get around, she thought, I have no idea where to begin.
Camilla’s stomach let out a tiny gurgle. She frowned. That’s the last thing I need to worry about right now. But as she looked around the mausoleum, a part of her wondered how long she could keep Maslow’s hierarchy flipped on its head. I have no food and not much heat. I can melt snow for water, but how long will that be able to keep me going? Another gurgle escaped, louder this time, and she adjusted her legs, forcing all thoughts of meals as far away as possible. I’ll worry about it when I worry about it. Until then, I’ve got serious thinking to do. So Camilla retreated into the warm cocoon of her own mind, suspending her physiological needs, and concentrated on the one thing she wanted most.
Abigail. Where on earth is Abigail?
The time turned out to be much later than Camilla had thought. At two o’clock, the Anglican church bells tolled twice and she sat up, wiping the crystals of frost away from her eyelashes. She leaned back and looked at the floor in front of her—there was a rough sketch of Nolan’s main landmarks etched into the dirt at her feet. She had tried reproducing the town from memory, starting from Main Street and working her way outward to the Midnight Sun, the post office, the graveyard, the school, the hospital, the deputy’s office, and finally the Vincents’ house. Most of it was there, reconstructed with a combination of rocks, sand, and dead ants.
“You’re here somewhere,” she muttered, narrowing her eyes over the dirt map. “Where are you, Abigail?”
Suddenly there came the sound of car tires crunching over loose stones. Camilla stood up—the roof was just tall enough that she didn’t have to hunch—and crossed a row of burial vaults to the far wall. She squatted and peeked through a crack in the cinder blocks. Hmm. The fissure was too small. She picked her handgun off the floor and jammed the handle against the stone, chipping a few chunks off, and carved out a wider peephole. She checked again.
The skies had opened up since the blizzard died off during the night, and visibility was greatly improved. Across the cemetery, clear as day, she could see a vehicle entering the iron gates.
But it wasn’t just any vehicle.
It was a hearse.
Camilla shrunk back as the Vincents’ funeral coach slunk toward the neighborhood of mausoleums. It pulled nearer, gliding down the road at an ominous pace, and stopped right outside her crypt door.
The gun was quivering in Camilla’s hand. She had no idea how many bullets it had left, but then she was frightened at herself for even wondering.
Thunk-thump. A door opened and closed. The Vincents’ town car pulled up behind the hearse and parked with the engine still running. Thunk-thump, thunk-thump, thunk-thump.
The whole family was here. Their polished dress shoes crunched over the gravel, and then came the familiar click of the coach’s rear door releasing automatically. A shadow passed over the peephole, and for a second Camilla expected Moira’s hawk eye to appear in the crack with a look of bloody, scavenging triumph. We’ve got you now, you miserable trollop! Come, let us rip you apart.
But the shadow passed, and Camilla saw for the first time that the structure directly across from the Goodwynns’ tomb bore an ornate V insignia carved into its archway.
It was the Vincents’ crypt.
Camilla’s lips trembled as Peter stepped into view. Seeing him in his black suit—looking as dead as she felt—was immobilizing. She was a ghost watching from another plane, unable to comfort him or receive any comfort back.
She watched as Jasper, Brutus, Maddock, and Peter approached the back of the hearse and rolled Lucas’s casket out of the rear compartment.
The casket was strong and sturdy for a strong and sturdy man. Moira unlocked the crypt with the third key on the closely guarded chain around her neck, and then she and Laura helped brace the weight of the casket on their bony shoulders. Once they were balanced, the family moved together, proceeding as one, through the doorway that each of them would reenter in their own time and never return from. Truly, they were a family bound to the end.
Somewhere in the distance a siren went off, but Camilla paid it little attention. She was focused on the crypt, and when the Vincents emerged five minutes later—just as silently as when they’d entered—she watched them return to their vehicles with heavy-laden feet. Laura was being held up by Maddock, Moira by Brutus. Peter walked by himself. Where he once had a father and a brother, a wife and a daughter by his side to prop him up, he was now alone, like Sisyphus with the same circular doom.
How do you stop this? Camilla reeled. How do you end the vicious cycle and give this family their peace?
Then out of a dusty corner of her mind, she heard a voice tell her: Once the fire was out, the murders stopped. Like the bad had been bottled up in that one place. The voice triggered a thought: it starts with the sick and spreads from there. Suddenly more voices and images were cropping up, faster and faster, as activation spread from one axon of her memory to the next.
News headlines of hospital spending on the rise.
Rumors of patients not getting better.
Pictures of a candlelight vigil. ‘A pair of nurses at the hospital went loony and killed five patients…Thank Christ for the fire—something caught the hospital morgue and burned the whole goddamn thing down.’
Camilla watched the Vincents drive away, and for the first time she noticed the peak of a tall, black structure in the distance.
She looked down at her feet and studied the dirt map of the town with fresh eyes. Then the sound of the distant siren—the wail of an ambulance—came into focus, and everything tied together for the first time that day.
It starts with the sick and spreads from there. That’s where I need to go.
She leaned forward and stuck her finger determinedly in the dirt, dragging a big, fat circle around the rock that was nestled between the graveyard and the Deputy’s Office. The rock that marked the hospital.
“Don’t worry, Peter,” she whispered her daughter’s words. “I’ll fix this. I’ll fix this for you.”
28
Quarantine
Camilla had predicted the hospital would be under stricter surveillance since the Sun started churning out features about it, but she hadn’t expected a total lockdown.
From a copse of trees across the street, she spied two police cars parked directly in front of the entrance. A pair of officers was stationed by the doors, and every time somebody t
ried entering the building, the cops would stop them for a thorough pat down and a series of pointed questions. If the arrivals weren’t orderlies, doctors, or administrators, they weren’t getting in. Period.
Around back was the hospital’s loading bay. Camilla slipped into the alley unnoticed and bypassed the ambulance zone for a series of small window gutters along the foot of the wall.
She looked left, looked right, then bent down and stuck her fingers between one of the windows and the frame. Sven, the hospital’s undertaker, kept it propped open so he could smoke inside without setting off the fire alarms. He’d been caught several times, but—being the only licensed pathologist in Nolan—he sloughed off his supervisor’s threats with the safety of knowing that his job was never really in jeopardy. “I work with the goddamn dead,” he once told the Minister of Health and Safety during a formal inspection. “They’re not complaining.”
Sven’s shift was from ten to six, but he usually knocked off half an hour early to make it home for Star Trek reruns. Just to be safe, Camilla had waited until seven to slip out of the Goodwynn crypt and sneak up to the west edge of the graveyard where the hospital was only a block away. She peeked around the shadows and confirmed the room was empty before scooting her feet through the frame and dropping into the abandoned basement below.
The morgue was deserted. A row of stainless-steel body drawers dominated the right-hand wall like a grid of polished gym lockers; the rest was a series of adjustable ceiling lamps, industrial sinks, and washing stations. The only decoration in the entire room was a grinning Kit-Cat Clock hanging beside the door, its black pendulum tail tick-tocking with the gaping cartoon eyes that had seen more death in one day than most people see in a lifetime.
Camilla unbuttoned her blazer and crossed the room to a laundry hamper. She snagged a green hospital gown and slipped out of her shoes and socks, rolling up the cuffs of her pants and dress shirt, and slung the gown over her shoulders. Her skin prickled as the fabric settled down; even Camilla, who was used to everything morbid and macabre, got the heebie-jeebies thinking about the fact that the gown had been worn by a corpse not that long ago. She reached around the back and worked the strings into a little bow, then gathered up her jacket and shoes and stalked across the chilly linoleum.
A freezer compartment swung open and a pair of wrinkled feet popped free. She slid out the tray and folded back the white shroud to unveil a shriveled arm with a hospital bracelet looped around the left wrist. The limb was so emaciated that Camilla was able to reach down and slide the band clean off.
Isobel K. Zuckerman.
She forced it around her own wrist, then placed her jacket and shoes on Isobel’s chest before sliding the compartment back in and shutting the door.
Finally Camilla moved to the cupboards and found a pair a shears in the nearest drawer. With a deep breath, she bunched up her hair in one hand and made a monstrous snip with the scissor blades. Ten inches of red locks rained over the trash can and disappeared in its rumpled black mouth. Roughing out what was left of her truncated hairdo, she allowed herself one wince before ducking below the sink and searching for phase two of the disguise.
Disinfectant wipes, Dawn Power Dissolver, mildew remover, cotton swabs, latex gloves, hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, all-purpose cleaner, rubber gloves...
She took a pair of rubber gloves and put them on, then retrieved the peroxide and ammonia and cracked them open above the sink.
Her hands hesitated. “Don’t wimp out now.”
Camilla craned her neck over the basin and tilted her head forward, closing her eyes as peroxide and ammonia came trickling over her skin and sloshed down the glugging stainless-steel drain.
The door of the morgue peeked open and Camilla stepped through...
She was wrapped in an aqua hospital gown with a paper surgical mask covering her mouth and nose. Her hair, which typically hung below her shoulder blades, was barely to her jawline now, and its rich red color had transformed to a dull, washed-out dirty blonde. Thanks to the corrosive concoction of diluted ammonia and hydrogen peroxide, the strands were fried in all directions and her scalp burned like hell.
She ruffled her bangs, but it was a lost cause. A few loose tufts fell to the floor and settled on the tiles. I think I’m going to be sick.
She choked back the urge to vomit and climbed the stairwell to the first floor, pausing outside the door to the main lobby. There was a clique of nurses around a circular check-in desk, and behind them hung a list of wards with tiny arrows giving directions down the appropriate hallways. Cafeteria to the right, outpatients to the right. OR straight ahead. Imaging to the left. Recovery ward second floor.
Second floor it is.
She stepped away from the door and took the flight of stairs up another level.
The second floor had a triage desk and a common area situated in front of the elevators, followed by a long hallway with recovery rooms flanking either side. A handful patients were watching an episode of Divorce Court on the old tube TV in the corner, while a few others pretended to partake in higher forms of entertainment—newspapers and crosswords and issues of The Economist—when, really, they too were glued to Judge Lynn Toler’s hammer of justice in between commercials for Freddy’s Fun Fry Chicken Wings and rainbow Snuggies.
At first when Camilla stepped into the room, she thought she could hear the fluorescents humming above the silence, but then she realized it was just the sound of her blood in her ears.
The receptionist barely glanced up. As Camilla walked by, she noticed in the reflection of the nurse’s glasses that the woman was too busy sorting through an online shopping cart to notice anything short of a power outage.
Camilla’s heart rapped harder and harder against her chest as she passed an elderly man with a Midnight Sun lying in his lap. The front page showed Camilla and Abigail’s picture underneath the giant headline: VINCENTS ACCUSE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF CRIMES AGAINST NOLAN. The photo, with Peter cropped out, was taken in their courtyard two summers ago. She imagined Moira hacking apart the picture and her blood began to boil. How long had it taken the old hag to rush to an album and find the appropriate snapshot she wanted to cut up? And how much satisfaction had she felt when she finally got to slice the two of them—the cancerous, rotted limbs—off her family tree, despite seven years of living together and claiming to love them as much as the rest of the family?
Camilla pressed on, not entirely sure what she was looking for but hoping she would know it when she saw it.
As she stepped past the recovery rooms, she peeked inside and saw most of the patients passed out on their mattresses, or looking lazily out their windows at nothing in particular. Is it supposed to be this quiet in here? The thick silence combined with the atrophied, degenerated looks in the Nolaners’ faces reminded her not of a recovery ward, but of a palliative care unit. Or worse, death row.
She got to the end of the hallway and arrived at the hospital’s neonatal unit. A large windowpane was fixed in the wall so that excited parents could look inside and watch their newborns doze peacefully in their incubators.
Except all the incubators were empty.
She touched the fingerprint smudges on the glass and imagined hundreds of parents pressing themselves against the window to be as close to their children as possible. The Mullards, the Pinktons, the Corys. Herself. No parent could predict what would become of those little bundles any more than they could see their own futures, but they had all stood there the same, wishing and praying for the best. Camilla shook her head. The best doesn’t always come to pass.
“Hey! Stop it!”
Camilla spun around as a monstrous crash thundered through the hall. Someone was screaming inside one of the rooms.
The nurse at the front desk snapped out of online-shopping mode and started pecking numbers on her phone like a terrified hen. Barely ten seconds later, two burly orderlies came bursting out from the stairwell and went running into the room where the shrieking was
coming from.
Camilla slunk to the doorway. Inside, the orderlies had a man—a skeletal, white-haired patient—pinned to the floor. He was thrashing like a 60-pound walleye with a hook caught in its face, and his scraggily arms pulsed with sinewy strength that was difficult to restrain, even for two fully grown men.
But his veins weren’t the only parts of him rushing with blood. There were lines of crimson trickling down the corners of his mouth, and when he roared at the top of his lungs, the spaces between his teeth flashed the same sanguine bloodstains. Camilla gaped in horror at how much the man’s dark, screaming rictus reminded her of the Cory sisters’ demonic faces.
The blood trailed across the floor to another man: the one who was shrieking the loudest. He was rocking against the far wall in a mortified fetal position, a chunk of his cheek bitten clean off. One of the nurses was trying to wrap a bandage around his face, but he wouldn’t stay still.
“Fucker bit me! I was sleeping, and he just bit me! Just—just bit me!”
“I’m comin’ for the rest!” The man with the blood in his teeth gnashed.
“Hurry up!” shouted an orderly. “Stick ‘im!”
A syringe flashed through the air and plunged into the attacker’s wrist. The man wailed, but the staff kept him down while they pulled over an IV cart and fought with the tubing. Finally they got a drip going, and it wasn’t ten seconds later that the deranged patient lost his edge, then another five before he was out cold.
Without a moment’s pause, the orderlies lifted the unconscious cannibal off the floor and dumped him into a wheelchair. They marked a big black X on his hospital wristband, then gathered the cart and wheeled him out of the door. Camilla stepped back as they took the sedated man to the elevator and punched the Up button, then disappeared inside.
Just like that, the chaos was over. The perpetrator was gone in three minutes flat, and the receptionist was already on amazon.com again, browsing second-hand designer clutches and all the related accoutrements. No one else seemed phased in the slightest. Someone had turned the volume of Divorce Court up a few notches, but otherwise it seemed like everybody was used to this kind of occasional ruckus.