Mercy House Read online

  During his two-hour tenure, Piper had tried to prove himself as a firm but fair leader, and he was accepted, even if some of his seven soldiers had technically outranked him while they were on active duty. The sweeps they took for survivors were to boost morale, and Piper didn’t care if they caught any nurses or other miscellaneous staff while they hunted. It was a policy of appeasement, like letting the religious nuts set up the church. If a little bloodletting helped his troops prepare, then they could have it.

  Also good for morale: tasking the horribly scarred Ivan with an away mission.

  All these boosts were needed because Arnold had his eyes on a larger prize than just the kitchen, but it would take discipline and they would be met with strong resistance.

  Unlike the rabble that had overtaken the cafeteria, consumed only with their immediate desire to feed, or the crowd that had filled the rec room demanding a good time and nothing more, the group that had taken over the pharmacy was dangerous. And possibly, Arnold thought with a shiver, possessed more foresight than he did.

  There was a chance that they were junkies, but the way that they’d beaten Piper and Grant back when they’d tried to charge in had made him apprehensive. Could they have realized the importance of what they were protecting? Did they grasp the fact that when life had stabilized after tonight, the first signs of withdrawal would begin to rear their heads for the majority of Mercy House’s residents?

  Nestled across from the recreation center, in the northwest corner of the building, the pharmacy was not only an easily defensible position; the drugs on its shelves were the latchkey to complete control. Trading food and weapons was good enough, but trading morphine? The seven of them could rule this kingdom, unopposed.

  The entrenched group of an undefined number, although Piper suspected there were no more than six and no fewer than three, had used the pharmacy’s layout to their advantage. They barricaded the archway that led to the main hallway, able to keep watch on both the doorway to the stairwell as well as the entrance to the recreation center. The barricade served as a first line, with the countertop and thick Plexiglas of the pharmacy providing a second line. They had taken the door off its hinges and laid it lengthwise across the threshold, able to be bounded over easily but guarded by two watchmen with blunt weapons that they must have scavenged from the basement.

  They were sealed in.

  As Piper saw it, the only possible plan of attack would be to charge through the door, which would cause his force to bottleneck. Again, unnecessary risks, even to secure such a high-profile target, were not an option this early in the occupation. His men were spread thin as it was, one man patrolling the grounds of the building, with another who would have to stay behind and defend the stockpile in the fridge.

  Piper had been pacing circles around the kitchen and hadn’t noticed all the eyes on him. He could read their expressions. Some things didn’t need to be vocalized, which was good, because many words had recently started to sound similar to him. It was hard to tell if what he was saying was what he meant, as if he had a crossed wire between his brain and his voice box.

  Piper looked down at his feet, and then followed the cracks in the tile up the wall until he hit an air vent. The ventilation tunnel was located on the west side of the kitchen, pointing toward the pharmacy. Piper smiled to himself and then held both hands out and measured the mouth of the vent.

  He kept his hands the same length apart and walked his invisible window over to Clemson, then placed both hands on the man’s shoulders. There was about an inch of space on either side.

  The troops around him began to chuckle, even the women who had finished packing and were looking for the next job to be done.

  Good. They all understood.

  Chapter 24

  Robert Clemson was put on this earth for one reason, it seemed, and that reason was killing.

  The wrinkle—the cosmic fine print—was that he needed to have lungs filled with dust and dirt in order to do his killing and get those Xs he so wanted in his killbook.

  Decades ago, it had been an actual book. Inside a battered steno notebook, Clemson had kept a list of not only every direct kill, every pop of his rifle that found pay dirt, but of every claymore he’d set, diagrams of every length of tunnel he’d explored, and other sundry statistics. The gooks took ears, Clemson took data. In that way, he liked to think of himself as civilized.

  Now that his brain was a rushing torrent of stimuli heretofore unexperienced even at his advanced age, even with all the psychotropics he’d taken, he doubted that he’d be able to hold a pen still long enough to sketch this length of ventilation shafts, as simple as it was.

  In the mid-1980s, before Hettie had fully given up on him and taken the kids, he’d bought his boy a hamster. Initially, Clemson had seen the rodent as a chance to bond with his son and get Hettie off his back in the process, but he grew some genuine interest in the little fuzzy fuck once he realized that hamsters were, by nature, burrowing animals. Like him.

  He bought that kid and his hamster every piece of Habitrail equipment he could find, in triplicate, so that when the kids were at school, Clemson could sit on the floor of the den and build tunnels with the plastic tubes. That was until he’d experienced his first of many breaks. It was the daytime and he’d got to drinking, and mistakenly stepped on the hamster, crushing its little body between his toes but not noticing until Hettie came home and found him like that, still toying with the plastic tunnels, red splotches all over the carpet.

  When the kids had grown up and shipped him off to Mercy House, his killbook had been lost in transit. Its loss turned out to be a good thing, actually. He didn’t need any more reminding of the jungles, dirt, and noises hidden in it while he was alone without his liquor.

  Clemson breathed deep through his nose, getting a sniff of thick dust, but not coughing or wheezing. He’d learned to suppress those urges early in his career. If the enemy hears you sneezing under their feet, more likely than not you’re going to end up perforated.

  This dust was kid’s stuff, though, compared to some of the other shit he’d inhaled in his life. There was also no chance the steel ventilation shafts were going to collapse on top of his head, burying him in a ton of earth.

  Yeah, this was the way to get back in the game: modern and sleek tunnels for the information age. He shimmied forward, his crawl noisy before he readjusted his pack, keeping all his hardware balanced atop his shoulder blades so that it wasn’t thudding along the sides of the tunnel as he moved. He should have been getting close. There was no more than one turn left, otherwise he’d have gone too far and would be over the foosball tables soon.

  One more turn and he’d found it. You could take the dog out of the fight, but that didn’t mean that same dog wasn’t still capable of sneaking into your camp, putting an M26 under your pillow, and pulling the pin as he disappeared into the night.

  The grate was screwed on from the outside, but like the one in the kitchen, the grating was fine and the metal thin. No problemo.

  What he could see of the pharmacy was one aisle; the floor of a second aisle was obscured. The stacks of bottles, boxes, and canisters already looking picked through, there was a layer of pills and plastic caps sprinkling the ground, and in the center of that mess: a napping insurgent. Not so much napping as leveled, the man’s face pressed against the tile, a manner of repose that Clemson found eerily familiar. It was possible the man was dead, until Clemson noticed the fog his breath was leaving on the polished linoleum.

  Taking great care not to cause any more noise than he had to, Clemson took the butter knife from his pocket. The blade was thick and he used it to prize open the slats of the vent. When he had made four holes, the two on the bottom large enough for his thumbs, the upper two able to fit the rest of his fingers, he stowed his knife and applied even pressure to the grate.

  The small screws pulled out of the fixture with minimal sound, four puffs of drywall, and a slight sprinkle of paint chips from where
the grate had been brushed over. This debris rained down on the unconscious man, but he did not so much as sniffle.

  Slinging his pack onto his stomach, Clemson lifted his head through the loop and pushed past the vent, balancing the bag on the shelf below so he could wiggle out of the hole without dropping it. The flimsy shelving bent under him, almost ready to snap before he extended his arms and executed a controlled drop down to the tile.

  Before anything else, Clemson pinched the man’s nose, covered his mouth, and slit his throat with the other knife he’d been keeping on his person. The man didn’t scream, more like burped into Clemson’s hand as his body bucked, the skin around Clemson’s fingers going red and then white as he pressed. The man bled out and Clemson stayed kneeling over him, taking in his surroundings.

  There was nothing in front of him but some more shelving, a small refrigerator with a biohazard sticker, and some kind of mixing equipment. Turning to check behind him, he spotted something that he hadn’t noticed before dropping down.

  Peeking around the corner was a white sneaker, foot still in it, the rest of the leg obscured by the shelf.

  Clemson unclenched his hand from the man’s face. Clemson mouthed a curse, one of his mind’s own invention, as the man under him gagged, giving away his position. It was a death twitch that might have been loud enough to alert his friends, the other insurgents, but there were no footsteps. Nor was there movement from the front of the room or the immediate area behind the desk. But that didn’t stop Clemson from hurrying to get his pack down from the shelf, undoing the knot, and revealing his secret weapon: a cleaver, heavy and sharp.

  Creeping to the edge of the aisle, his shoes off now, his socks soundless on the tile, he angled the cleaver to catch the reflection on both sides of the desk. Whoever owned the white sneakers, they weren’t moving.

  Although the reflection in the polished steel was somewhat hazy and distorted, he could not distinguish any threats on the other side of the desk, could not see anyone guarding the door. This meant that whoever else was in the pharmacy besides White Sneakers, they were most likely in the second aisle, behind him.

  After wiping his lead hand on his pants, Clemson gripped the cleaver tight and gave it a few practice swings. He felt good, confident. There was one target down, an undisclosed amount to go.

  As obsessed as he’d been with statistics, there was only so much you could know on a battlefield. If you fixated on what you didn’t know over what you did, it could kill you. The situations he used to find himself in were staggering in their unknowns, and this was no different. Hence a need to categorize what little order there was; hence the sketches and tables in his killbook.

  Swinging around the corner, he buried the cleaver into White Sneakers’s neck before the tableau in front of him could even register. White Sneakers had been the staff pharmacist, and she was long dead. Her jaw hung loose against her neck; from the looks of it something had been stuffed inside her mouth, postmortem.

  But Clemson had found his real target: a lanky resident with his bald head resting on the pharmacist’s lap. He’d been dozing there, but wasn’t now. His black eyes shot open as he awoke with a confused yell, his expression a mixture of anger and terror.

  Clemson kicked him in the face before he could clamber to a sitting position. He’d used the ball of his foot, but his sock still dampened the impact and served only to anger the man. Putting both hands on the hilt of the cleaver, Clemson dislodged it from the dead pharmacist’s neck with a sucking sound. It was free a second too late. The third junkie was waking up now, her head had been resting on the man’s stomach, the three of them forming a weird daisy chain of bodies; two living, one dead.

  Winding back, Clemson was able to clip the charging man’s face before his momentum carried him through from where he’d pressed up against the wall to launch himself on top of Clemson.

  A wad of flesh hit the countertop beside them—the man’s nose and a slice of his upper lip. The cut was so fast and clean that there was no blood in the wound for a count of three, just pale, waxen flesh. Realizing what he was now missing, the man screamed again and rolled off Clemson as the blood began to flow. The male insurgent’s voice was different now that he had no nose. It was the opposite of nasal, fuller somehow.

  The woman squealed, angry to see her cuddle-buddy disfigured. Clemson pushed her back, her lighter frame bouncing off the wall and landing against the pharmacist’s corpse. Once she was a safe distance away and staggered, Clemson brought the cleaver down, a direct hit that stopped the man’s mewling and split the back of his skull.

  After that the woman was a snap, literally. She was strong, and could have posed a threat had she not been taken by surprise or had any kind of combat training, but that was why Piper and his mates were the masters now. They had the strength and the training. It had been so long since they’d had to use their skills, but there was such thing as muscle memory.

  With the three insurgents dead, the pharmacy was now theirs. It was a little bloodier than Clemson had found it, but still usable. Clemson would report to Piper and receive his hero’s welcome back in the kitchen. He didn’t want to take the vent route again and felt like stretching his legs, so, after taking one final sweep to make sure the room was secure, he settled in to dismantle the barricade over the pharmacy door.

  Chapter 25

  The man in the hallway, the one who’d looked dead, turned out to be less than dead. He had regained consciousness with the sound of someone resurfacing after being underwater for too long. Dane couldn’t help it; he’d given a short girlish yelp, frightening Nikki, who gave him the dismissive, soul-crushing look of pity that only attractive women were able to bestow. That was before the man’s crumpled body had caught sight of them with his one functioning eye and begun crawling across the hallway toward them, growling and snapping with his broken mouth.

  He had sustained a head injury. There was a carpenter nail pressing up against or through his brain, only rage and pain allowing him to move, and not well. His hands dangled by the flesh of his wrists, flopping as he pulled himself forward by his elbows.

  The broken man was too loud. Dane could already hear curious hoots and hushes from both ends of the hallway, the cafeteria and the rec room. They needed to shut him up before that commando goon squad showed up again. Before Dane could think of something, Nikki walked into the hallway, exposing herself to whatever else was out there, and instead of using her scissors, she stomped a heel down into the thing’s temple, driving the nail deeper. The hit brought an abrupt stop to hi cries.

  After their nap in the waiting room, Dane had sobered up and it had taken self-control not to dip back into his supply. He wanted to be sharp, wanted to help, he really did, but Nikki was just more man than he was.

  Pressed up against the door, Dane fell backward as it was flung open behind him, Paulo’s chest colliding with the back of Dane’s head. The big man tensed and Dane hoped he wasn’t about to be pummeled, either by mistake or on purpose for getting in Paulo’s way.

  “Let’s go,” Paulo said, already breaking into a run as he grabbed Nikki’s wrist. Dane wasn’t getting that special treatment, so he loped along after them. Dane gave the broken man wide berth even though it seemed impossible that he’d be capable of moving fast enough to grab him, if he was still alive.

  Paulo had switched his pipe for a flashlight. It was a weapon with more heft than Dane wanted for himself, and he was secretly happy that it had gone to the biggest member of their group.

  They ran in a small V formation, Dane veering closer to the middle of the hallway as they passed doorways. Nikki hadn’t thought to do this, so as they made a beeline for the stairwell, nobody seemed more surprised than she was when a hand popped out of the pharmacy and latched on to her hair.

  —

  Clemson had his hand out and then, like magic, she filled it. A similar thing had happened to him before, and he’d heard about cases of it happening to other guys. Or stories at least. Every
one needs stories to keep them warm as the night tries to kill them.

  It was possible to head out into the field with one objective in mind and stumble into an absolute gift from God, a secondary objective that netted you all the right kind of notoriety. Sure, it was more likely to stumble into a trip wire and then a chest full of ball bearings, but happy accidents were the stories that got the most play back at camp.

  Disassembling the barricade and having the girl run by at the exact time was one of those happy accidents.

  Flying high over his victory in the pharmacy, Clemson shot his arm through the hole he’d cleared, got ahold of her hair, thanked his lucky stars, and gave a swift yank.

  —

  Nikki’s head rocked back, and there was no delay between the movement and the sharp pain that turned her vision white. There was a moment when she wasn’t sure if her scalp was still attached to her body, but then her feet found purchase and she couldn’t pull herself away from the door. If Nikki hadn’t broken Paulo’s grip as the fingers wrapped around her hair, she probably would have snapped her neck as the men pulled her in two directions. As it was, she was pulled off her feet toward the doorway, her cheek pressed flat against a jagged stretch of wood.

  Paulo turned back to her, his face a mask of despair and surprise, which didn’t inspire confidence as to whatever unseen force was trying to pull her head through the small gap in the barricaded entryway. Knitting his bottom lip under his teeth, Paulo reached behind her and pulled, not her hair but the fist that had worked its way deep into it, fingernails digging up her hair follicles.

  Paulo lifted his flashlight to beat at her attacker; she could hear the thud of his blows and hoped her head wasn’t going to be suddenly thrust into the path of the heavy steel tube. It was no use attempting to turn, the creature’s fingers were stitched in place and he wasn’t letting go of his quarry, so Nikki stared at the ceiling tiles and wished for the best.