“It is dangerous. That’s why you have to be dead quiet once we get inside. The place is not as deserted as it appears.”
“But it’s safe?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Safe enough.”
They passed beneath the canopy, which blotted the moonlight from view. Several shopping carts wheeled over from a local grocery store stood abandoned near the hospital entrance, most of them empty. Victor imagined someone backing a pickup beneath the canopy, then filling it with medical supplies stolen from the hospital.
They paused at the glass doors, which were marred by spiderwebs of cracks. “Be careful you don’t disturb anything,” Scarlett whispered in a voice Victor could barely hear. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a small flashlight. She cupped a hand over the bulb, then turned it on.
“Still works,” she murmured. “Alright, boys. Stay close.”
___
Dante’s makeshift cane rasped on the tiles as he entered the darkness of the hospital. It had been dark outside, but this darkness had a different feel to it. He wanted to say, Looks like we’ve just entered Shelob’s lair, but kept the comment to himself, remembering Scarlett’s warning to be silent.
Unlike most of the movies, there were no fluorescent lights flickering overhead to give them a shaky sense of their surroundings. They followed Scarlett’s light, which did not bob back and forth as it would have in Dante’s hand. He would have wanted to know what was around them. Perhaps Scarlett understood it was better not to know.
They passed a reception desk. To Dante’s horror, he discovered the receptionist was still there. A woman in a striped pencil skirt was bound to the chair with bungee cords that kept her lifeless torso from flopping forward on the desk. Her hair still hung against her shoulders, and in the tenuous outer limits of the flashlight’s reach, Dante thought he could see how this woman had looked when her face was still intact. She might have been attractive, a pretty face for the doctors to see as they went home at the end of the day’s shift.
Now she works all the shifts, he thought.
Beyond the receptionist desk, they passed a few hospital rooms before reaching a clutter of wheeled beds abandoned in the hall. They were pushing through this maze when Dante’s cane brushed something light and sent it drifting across the floor. He stooped…felt the soft fur…
Victor was watching him as he lifted the teddy bear. The stuffed animal was white, but other than a coat of dust, it appeared surprisingly clean. He raised his eyebrows at Victor, as if to say Would you look at that, and then tossed the bear onto one of the beds.
A woman’s voice, gentle and somehow distant, immediately began speaking.
“Hi Dana, this is mommy. How do you like your new toy? Daddy thought—”
“What is that?” Scarlett hissed at them.
“—you would like someone to keep you company when we’re not there. So whenever you’re afraid—”
Victor fumbled with the stuffed animal, smacking it against his fist in an effort to stop the message.
“—just hug your bear and remember how much we love you.”
The message ended and the hospital went quiet with a silence heavier than before. Dante tried to steady his breathing, if only to convince his heart to slow down.
From the hall behind them came the distinct click of a door latch disengaging. It must have come from one of the rooms they passed.
Victor turned, challenging the darkness with the Colt.
“Keep moving,” Scarlett whispered in a barely audible voice. “If you fire that gun…” She did not finish, nor did she need to.
Backing down the hall, trying not to stumble, the brothers followed Scarlett without fully turning their backs on the darkness behind them. She had quickened the pace now, increasing Dante’s chance of stumbling and falling with a loud crash. The rebar cane no longer brushed the tiles. Now it clicked and cracked against them, loud enough to cause Dante to wince.
He was about to ask if they were nearly there (because if they weren’t, he was pretty sure they would never make it) when Scarlett turned to a door with a small rectangular window. The glass was missing from the window, and through it Dante saw a gray, almost luminescent light. He stared for a few moments before realizing it was moonlight.
Something jostled one of the rolling beds. The wheels gave a high-pitched screech.
There was a milk crate beside the door. Scarlett pulled it toward herself, then stepped on it and reached up toward the exit sign, her fingers slipping blindly over the top.
“What’s going on?” Victor demanded.
“Just a minute!” she hissed. “It should be right up here…”
“Here, give me the flashlight,” Dante said, holding out his hand. She passed it to him and he aimed it at the exit sign. A moment later Scarlett gasped and they heard the telltale ring of a key striking the tiles.
“Did you see where it landed?” she asked.
Dante scanned the floor with the flashlight while Scarlett hunkered down. A low murmur, like the voice of someone waking, came from further down the hall in the direction they had been walking. Dante heard a strange, watery bloop come from the far side of the door.
Just hug your bear, Dante told himself, and remember how much we love you.
“Whoever you are,” Victor said to the darkness, “back the fuck up or I’ll shoot.”
The darkness did not answer. The flashlight wavered in Dante’s hand as he glanced over his shoulder, dying to sweep the beam down the hall and see what was following them, even if he would regret it.
“Hold still, damn you!” Scarlett hissed. She snatched up the key, thrust it into the lock, and opened the door. Dante nearly shoved her into the stairwell in his hurry to get inside.
“Victor!” he whispered.
Victor rushed into the stairwell, then hauled the door shut behind them with a resounding clap. They were all silent for a few long moments as they listened, hardly breathing.
Dante imagined a middle-aged zombified man on the other side of the door, his head tilted as if to compensate for a painful crook in his neck, his feet shuffling leadenly across the tiled floor.
The thing, human or otherwise, reached the other side of the stairwell door and lingered. The door was locked, but Dante had seen this movie before. When zombies were hunting for brains, they always found a way in.
The door handle jiggled. Dante heard nasal breathing through the small rectangular opening that had once held glass. Then, a few heartbeats later, the shuffling creature continued down the hall, becoming just another muffled sound in the old building, another thing that went bump in the night.
Character, Dante thought as he, Victor, and Scarlett began to breathe more easily again. This place has character in spades.
Chapter 21
The dog was a wrinkle, and not one he particularly liked.
It was in the eyes—a shy, fearful loathing, like a cockroach staring up at the heel of your boot and knowing it can’t escape.
The thing was, he and the mutt had a history. They’d snagged a few prizes in their time, hadn’t they? So when he saw the girl clutching the dog like the stuffed animal of a lost relative, he felt a nasty urge to tell her how many human steaks the creature had eaten.
What would she think then? How well would she sleep with its muzzle pressed against her face in the dark?
And what was on its muzzle, anyway?
The dog pinned its ears back and averted its eyes as Meatloaf glanced over his shoulder at the animal. A piteous whine escaped its mouth. What a stupid creature, so weak and pathetic. The girl was weak and pathetic as well, but he had plans for her—just-in-case plans, the kind you stick in your back pocket for a rainy day.
He turned again. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?” Jenny asked.
“Not you. The mutt. He’s staring at me. I know he’s staring at me and I want him to stop.”
The girl merely watched him from behind her sunglasses. Mocking
him, no doubt, thinking she should really be the one leading the pack. At least she did not look quite as miserable as she had before with that ugly blue dress. The combination of the baseball cap and the sunglasses gave her a child-spy vibe.
Meatloaf knew a thing or two about playing dress-up.
He could hear the merry tinkle of water nearby. A pair of buzzards fluttered their wings, then settled back down on their prey. He could not see what they had found, but the sight of the birds themselves caused his stomach to clench. His stomach had to be the size of a pea by now. He had no pack, no food, no water. A wise man would have smoked some of that horse meat and packed it away (for a rainy day, as the saying went), but Meatloaf - just a small-town kid on the out-and-out - had never even considered the idea.
Not once.
Then a remarkable thing happened. Jenny walked past him, clinging to the fur of the dog. The animal stopped at the edge of the brook and the girl lowered herself beside it, lapping water just a few feet upstream from the dog’s bloody muzzle. They might have been two wanderers lost in a fairy-tale world.
When the girl was finished, she wiped her mouth, sat down on the bank, and looked in Meatloaf’s general direction.
“It’s delicious,” she said.
The buzzards stirred again. Was that a bear they were eating? Was any of it still edible? What kind of diseases did vultures carry?
“Do you want some?” Jenny asked.
“Not thirsty,” he croaked, though in fact he was thirsty. Very thirsty. He wanted to unhinge his jaw and stretch his mouth across the entire brook, gulp it all down like a big can of coke.
But he wasn’t about to give in—not to that smug little girl. He knew why she felt that way. She figured that since she now had a friend (the dog), she didn’t need Meatloaf (her savior) any more. He was on the outside looking in, the kid with his nose pressed against the window of the candy store watching all the other kids fill their little paper bags, taking their time to decide whether they wanted fudge or peanut brittle or licorice.
Fucking licorice, Meatloaf thought.
His hand clenched around the meat tenderizer. He felt a sudden urge to bash the girl’s brains in—that would teach her some respect. He’d saved her when she was wandering alone in the forest, a child-size Happy Meal for all the little woodland creatures, and how had she repaid him? Not with a word of gratitude, that was for sure. No, she reserved all her gratitude - as well as her love, if it could be called such - for the mangy mutt that clung to her side like a burr, like a shadow, like a stubborn tick.
Just wait till he gets hungry enough, Meatloaf thought with a morbid sense of fascination. Just you wait.
He plopped himself beside the brook, scrunching his feet in his new boots so he could feel all the blisters popping out like those colored buttons you used to get on wax paper.
I can honestly say I’ve walked a mile in your shoes, Victor Gervasio, he thought, and stifled a laugh.
But where was Victor now? That was the real question, wasn’t it? And, a close second, was the question of what he would do when he caught up with Victor.
Never mind that, he told himself. You’ll think of something when you get there. You always do.
The horse had been a godsend. If Victor (and his brother, presumably) had traveled on foot, Meatloaf never would have been able to track them. But finding the horse’s prints in the soft turf of the golf course had been child’s play. A big game of Connect the Dots. Even here, where the ground was littered with crisp, shriveled leaves, Meatloaf could see at a glance where the horse had shuffled its way toward the trees.
Jenny cleared her throat. “Is there any chance we could find something to eat soon?” Her voice was timid. What did she think he was, a genie? Was he going to snap his fingers and make a feast appear out of nowhere?
“What, you didn’t like the salad we had this morning?” It had been nothing more than a collection of weeds that he was mostly sure - call it sixty percent sure - were edible. But the imagination could do wonders for one’s spirit. Just throw some leaves together, tell yourself it was a Caesar salad, try to pretend those beetles were just runaway croutons…
Jenny looked ready to cry. Meatloaf let out a heavy sigh and, using his best imitation of a paternal voice, said, “We’ll find something soon, child. I’m sure once we catch Victor, he’ll be more than happy to share his food with us.”
Why had he said “catch” instead of “catch up with”?
No matter. The devil was in the details, and if there was one person in all creation you wanted to leave alone, it was surely him.
So they went on, pursuing the tracks through the woods, not pausing again until the leaves had surrendered to bare concrete. Even there, however, Meatloaf did not hesitate long. The tracks had been leading them in a straight line, and so it was easy enough to predict where they would continue—just to the left of that factory up ahead, he supposed. It was a creepy-looking place, with broken windows as black as missing teeth, but every place looked creepy after it was abandoned. This one was probably no worse than any other.
After passing the factory and crossing the street, they stopped at a set of brick steps leading up to a porch. It was a nice little porch—decorative planters, a welcome mat that said “Go Pats!”, a gnome with a red hat and a bulbous nose standing sentry beside the door. Someone might have been happy here a long time ago.
If Meatloaf were to continue following that imaginary line, it would mean stomping right through this happy abode (and past the gnome, his guard duties be damned). But it only took a sprinkling of logic to realize the horse had probably not gone through that door.
Which meant the brothers had gone somewhere else.
Which meant Meatloaf was lost.
Meatloaf did the only reasonable thing. He picked the gnome up in both his hands and smashed it against the wall, opening a cavity in the front of the gnome’s face.
“Did you a favor, little fella,” he murmured as he returned the gnome to its station. “Your nose was too big, anyway.”
Then he did the next reasonable thing. He sat down on the brick steps, cradled his head in his hands, and tried to convince himself this was not the end of the line.
It came easily—that feeling of total helplessness, of being at the end of one’s wits. It was always lurking just around the corner. The moment he stumbled, it would leap upon his back, dig its fingernails into his shoulders, and ride him down into the dirt. It didn’t want anything from him. It just wanted the sheer pleasure of seeing him fail.
He was close to failing now.
A cold wind, smelling of nearby dumpsters, shivered down the street. The sun wavered a hand’s-breadth above the horizon, taunting them as if to say, How’d you like to go stumbling around in the dark, eh? Wouldn’t that be fun? Huh?
“We’re lost, aren’t we?” Jenny asked. She didn’t sound particularly disappointed. Maybe she had anticipated this outcome from the beginning.
“How perceptive!” he sneered. “Why’d I bring you along, anyway? You’re always lost.”
She turned her face to the wind and made no reply. Her skin seemed to have thickened since he first met her, protecting her now like a carapace. His words did not carry the sting they had before. My little princess is growing up right before my eyes, he thought ironically.
Then something happened, the second remarkable thing of the day. The dog began to wag its tail and trot down the street, breaking the girl’s hold of its fur. The girl gave a cry and chased the animal. She moved quickly for a blind person. Nevertheless, she would not have caught the dog if it did not stop just a short distance down the street.
“Meatloaf!” the girl called. “You might want to see this!”
He thought she was wrong, but in the end she was right. After some grumbling, he rose on tired legs and joined the pair.
“What?” he demanded. “What’s so interesting that—” He stopped talking.
“Crap,” he murmured.
H
orse crap, to be specific.
Chapter 22
Tuesdays were the worst.
Not Mondays—Mondays used to be the worst, especially if you asked Garfield. Johnny liked Garfield comics. He’d bought a whole stack of them from a peddler on the side of the road. Only cost him five rations. Five rations! You could hardly buy a pack of gum with five rations, unless you liked that sugarless crap. And if you did like that sugarless crap, you were better off cutting a branch from a pine tree and chewing on the sap that came out. Not much difference between the two.
The rations worked like this. Everyone willing to sign up for a job got a ration card. Every day you worked, the foreman stamped your ration card with a number. The size of the number depended on how valuable your work was. If your job was to pick up trash, you’d probably get a two. Two was the lowest, because all that bought you was two meager meals tomorrow—a late breakfast and an early dinner.
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