Mercy House Read online

  The men were fatigued. Candice looked resigned and dead-eyed as she was entered, but Queen Bea would not let the party stop.

  There was at least an hour of this, the room around them getting brighter with the coming sun but no less disgusting, before the first man failed to perform.

  Bea pulled on the man, seductively at first, even forcing her lips over her outsized teeth to give him a reassuring smile, but quickly getting frustrated at his noncompliance. He stood over her, his ass backing into Sarah’s shoulder. Her leash offered her limited mobility; it had been looped around one of the Jacuzzi’s handrails and would stretch tight and choke her if she leaned too far away.

  Queen Bea squeezed her eyes shut and focused on her ministrations, the man grunting, his face going red as he tried to wish himself hard. She removed her mouth from around him with a pop, then reeled back with her hand and swatted him, one of her fingernails clipping the flap of his shrunken testicles and the man screaming, falling out of line and jumping onto Sarah’s mattress.

  Pointing at Sarah, Queen Bea yelled one word: “Go!”

  Sarah, not quite sure what this meant, held still, fighting the tremor of fear that tried to work up her back.

  Queen Bea crawled across her own assemblage of pillows and blankets to slap Sarah on the rump.

  “Dance!” the old woman commanded.

  Unsure her legs would be able to hold her, Sarah put two hands on the leash and pulled it taut so she could stand.

  There was no music and she was never much of a dancer, so the performance wasn’t much more than a shifting of her weight, moving one hand over her body and the other on keeping the elasticity of the leash from pulling her down.

  Queen Bea didn’t offer her any tips one way or the other, all she did was stare at the man’s wasted member as he tried frantically to work himself back up, practically punching himself in the crotch, no erection on the horizon.

  After two minutes with no progress, Queen Bea growled some nonwords that must have translated, roughly, to Off with his head! because two more men stood from their beds and ushered the impotent one to the opposite side of the room. They lifted bedding, exposing only the pools and flooring—a drain under the doomed man. There they castrated him with a modified safety razor and then dumped him into the endless lap pool with the other body, holding him under until he stopped screaming and crying.

  Even with this to dampen the mood—or maybe it had the reverse effect on these men—the next few drones at bat were able to get hard and performed their duties admirably.

  It was a half hour later, the sun fully up but the weather overcast, that the next man failed to perform. They went through the same phases as before, Sarah putting a bit more effort into her dance not because she wanted the man spared, but because she didn’t want to listen to his pathetic cries, and because she didn’t want the blame to fall on her this time.

  He did not rise to the occasion, but did achieve a soft half-erection that caused Queen Bea to spare his life and instead resume yelling the word “More!” as she had when their spawning session had begun.

  “Blue! More!” she shouted. “More blue!”

  Winded and sleepy, Candice tried to echo her queen’s rallying cry, but stopped when Bea glared at her.

  “Blue,” Bea said once more, the word still meaning nothing to Sarah. Then, after all the men in the room had risen to their feet, Bee used her dentures to undo the knot that tied Sarah down to the handrail.

  Without the constant tug at her neck, Sarah allowed hope to kindle in her breasts, the survivor inside her uncovering its hands from its face and beginning to look around for options again. A few minutes later, as Queen Bea was tugging at her leash, leading her downstairs, she allowed herself to switch back to hopeless mode.

  “Blue,” in this context, could only mean one thing: Their group was headed down to the pharmacy. Naked, they carried nothing with them to trade with, nothing except for Sarah.

  Part IV

  Party Lines

  Chapter 27

  “Place pads on chest as shown in the diagram.”

  She did.

  “Monitoring heart rate. Please stand by.”

  She stood by.

  “Heart rate is stable, please remove pads and continue—”

  She turned the dial one click farther.

  “Manual mode initiated. Please be sure no one is in contact with the patient and press the green button when ready.”

  Harriet pressed the green button and watched the girl buck against her restraints.

  When the ready light reignited, she hit the button again. Foam started to appear at the corners of the girl’s mouth and she began to pant like a dog, sucking in air through her teeth but not able to open her mouth. From the looks of it, she was experiencing a kind of lockjaw even after the flow of current had ceased. Interesting.

  The woman didn’t look like Nikki, but she’d begged for mercy in the same way Harriet liked to imagine her daughter-in-law would.

  Harriet’s mission was the same. She hadn’t lost sight of the revenge she planned to get on Nikki, but there were so many places the girl could be hiding in the facility; plus it was so easy to get sidetracked with so much to do here! The memory of the tour-guide woman intoning something similar blazed through Harriet’s mind and was then replaced by an image of the same woman having her intestines coaxed out of her like a charmed snake.

  This girl had been cowering in one of the second-floor bathrooms—she must have been a nurse or therapist. She should have chosen to hide behind a door with a lock. Harriet barricaded herself in the second-floor room, suddenly protective of her find.

  Live, young bodies were at a premium in Mercy House. If any of the residents knew she had one, she’d be forced to share. Or worse, have the girl taken from her by force. Even so, it was unlikely she would be bothered. Most of the residents on this floor didn’t seem to be on the hunt. At least, not on the hunt for blood.

  As cogent as Harriet’s thoughts felt, she could not find a good reason why looking at the girl should make her so angry.

  Yes, she did covet the girl’s tight skin, her hair that was of a uniform color, flaxen and soft and semipermanently attached to her scalp. She pined to have the length of natural life left that the girl had, barring any calamity or malicious intent. Harriet wanted the mastery of technology that the young woman no doubt possessed, as she thought about the fact that she would live longer and no doubt witness miraculous, space-age advances. All of those reasons made her resent the girl on a conscious level, but her conscious workings weren’t what made her tie the girl down to the bed and grab the emergency defibrillator off the wall.

  No, it wasn’t hate that made Harriet backhand the girl as she fought against her. It was a kind of curiosity, the same way a child might hold a magnifying glass over an ant colony. It’s not that the child doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he doesn’t know what death will look like until he’s witnessed it firsthand.

  That the girl was so loud, so young, so insistent that she should be let go, only made things easier as Harriet pulled open her shirt, buttons ricocheting off the headboard. The girl had a tight belly, the kind that could only be due to a gym membership, maybe even a vegetarian diet, the kind of nutrition a young person would engage in only if they were planning to live a long time.

  To start things off, before Harriet even opened the defibrillator’s plastic carrying case, she punched the girl every time she uttered the word please. It took the girl a while to understand the pattern, that she was being hit only after the magic word, and she eventually stayed quiet long enough for Harriet to read the directions.

  Well, not read the text itself—that was a dense block of letters that kept swapping around in front of Harriet’s eyes as she tried to concentrate. Instead she looked at the diagram, which was a comic strip of six panels that walked her through the process of clearing the airway, shocking the patient, and then beginning compressions. She wasn’t worried about th
e rest of that stuff. Harriet was just looking for the shock.

  There were no blue sparks of electricity. No Jacob’s ladder formed between the girl’s legs and lit up the dark room, just a soft hum, and the girl went into convulsions for a moment before sinking back into the bed.

  She administered three shocks but received nothing except some mild hyperventilating. Not even a puff of smoke. Harriet was underwhelmed. This would not be a fate befitting of Nikki’s crimes. The girl’s breathing was aberrant, but she still lived.

  Nikki!

  How long had she been looking for the girl? Hours? Days? Was it possible that she’d escaped and was bringing the police, the National Guard, Obama’s street-gang hit squads to break up their party?

  Unacceptable!

  “Please,” the girl whispered, apparently either the lull in violence or the electricity had made her forget the moratorium on that word.

  “Please, what?” Harriet parroted back, trying to affect some level of sympathy in her voice, but unable to tell if she’d been successful. Words were coming out differently than she wanted. She might have whispered toaster fire truck to the girl for all she could tell, her language was a mystery to herself. Stroke victims did things like that. She’d seen a few of her friends from around the neighborhood die like that, but she didn’t feel impaired, didn’t think her newfound difficulty with words was the result of a blood clot in her brain.

  “Please let me go,” the girl responded.

  Good.

  Harriet had been understood.

  “Okay,” Harriet said. She removed the two white adhesive pads from the girl’s stomach and chest, feeling the girl’s heart going like a hummingbird’s under the top pad. The girl was supercharged now, but the electricity might kill her yet if she was going to come down from her shock and start seizing again.

  “Thank you,” the girl said, finding it hard to speak as the aftershocks of convulsions and sobs racked her. The girl’s thin eyebrows pointed down as she began to cry again, fresh tears rolling over her cheeks, a reservoir of snot pooling on her upper lip. “Thank you.”

  Harriet didn’t undo the straps across the girl’s legs and chest. Instead she had a better idea. She began to pet the girl’s hair, the blond curls had gone frizzy after all the struggling and the shocks, reminding her of Nikki’s hair, but Harriet did her best to pat it down, offering the girl a reassuring shush the whole time.

  When Don was a little boy, before the Great Betrayal, she had soothed him like this, playing with his hair, wiping the tears from his eyelashes and telling him that everything was going to be all right. It was strange to look back now on something that had seemed so true then and realize that she had been lying to her son every time she told him that.

  Harriet lifted the girl’s head off the pillow and slipped one of the defibrillator’s pads onto the back of her head, the adhesive sticking to the hair on the back of her neck.

  “No no no please no,” the girl said, not screaming this time but whispering because Harriet was still telling her to hush and because Mommy knew all the ways to make it better.

  Harriet stuck the other patch onto the girl’s perfectly smooth, blemish-free forehead, the pad large enough that it dipped down over her eyes and made an executioner’s blindfold.

  The girl continued to beg and Harriet continued to shush her as she depressed the green button.

  There we go, much more impressive. There were still no literal sparks flying, but the girl’s legs kicked wildly, a head of foam spewing from her mouth and a wetness forming under her on the mattress. She kicked for a good amount of time after the machine chimed that the current was finished.

  “Begin compressions. Down. One. Two. Three. Breath. One. Two. Three,” the recording said.

  Harriet closed the lid to the machine, stopping the automated voice but not taking the case with her off the nightstand as she headed out into the hallway.

  There were plenty of defibrillators to be had, hanging up all around Mercy House, but she didn’t think she would be using one again. No, Nikki’s death had to be special, more spectacular, more painful.

  But first she needed to find her.

  Chapter 28

  The first and most important rule of Nikki’s profession was that she had to remember at all times that her clients were not her kids. And even when they inched up in age and maturity, they were never her friends and she was never theirs.

  This rule and its addendum were put in place not only to keep her in the legal free and clear, but to stop the failures of others from affecting her on a deep, emotional level.

  Of course it was bullshit. They all became your kids, in a sense. If you talked with them enough and wrote up enough reports about them to send up the DHS ladder, you ended up doing more for them than their biological parents did, most times. But if you kept telling yourself they weren’t your kids, it went a long way in anesthetizing the sting when they—sometimes inevitably—fucked up. Or were fucked up, by forces beyond of both your and their control.

  The second rule, more of a mantra that tied to the first than a fully formed rule, was that you as a counselor were never responsible for the decisions of others. This stemmed from the fact that no matter what decisions a teenager told you they were going to make, whatever plans you two collaborated on during their time, they sometimes had their mind made up to do the opposite before they even walked into your office.

  Many of her counseling sessions resembled poker games, trying to figure out a kid’s story while they consciously or subconsciously lied to you about school, their parents, their boo, their dice games, that motherfucker at school constantly eyeballing them, or a mix of the above. Nikki was pretty good at it, which meant that she had made the decision early in the night not to trust a single thing that Dr. Dane said or did.

  Sure, maybe he was trying to help, but if it came to it, he was interested only in his own survival and would be useless.

  “Before anything else, you need to fix his arm,” Nikki said, her voice cracking as she lost the steely cool she liked to affect when playing hardball. She could be warm, even funny, if the situation called for it, but when dealing with the kind of kids that grew up to be the Dr. Danes of the world, the ones who would sell their mother for an Xbox, you had to be stone cold.

  “No, I don’t, I need to get out that window,” Dane said, hooking a finger up to one of the basement’s small windows. All the panes were glowing twilight blue now, the sun was coming up, indicating that they’d survived a full night in hell. That seemed like a milestone, and it also seemed like the boogeymen who haunted the night should be kept in the night, that it was only fair that the residents of Mercy House adhered to the fairy tale rules of vampires and werewolves.

  They didn’t, though. The sounds of their revelry could still be heard coming from the rec room and beyond, still going strong.

  “At least stop the bleeding,” Nikki said, appraising Paulo’s wounds, his arm looking like Silly Putty stretched over broken glass.

  “With what? We need to go now, before his friends bust open that door!” Dane indicated the nearly headless man, the shard of porcelain still clenched between his teeth, a pool of inky blood around him.

  “ ‘With what’? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re a doctor, find something.” Nikki waved her arms around at the boxes of medical supplies and equipment in the basement.

  Paulo made a sound as if he was waking from a bad dream and rolled his head around between the corners of the boxes where Nikki had propped him. “Just go,” he said, keeping his eyes closed.

  “You heard him,” Dane said, turning away from Nikki and Paulo, his eyes to the windows.

  “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He can come with us if we get him up and moving. He saved your life, too, you know.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Dane said.

  If he started going off on a tangent about how safe he’d been hiding in the administrative office with his pills, Nikki swore she was going to start loo
king for another bedpan.

  “You fucking coward,” Nikki said, her words muffled but still meant for him to hear.

  “Here,” Dane said, turning out his pockets. “Get him to chew up both of these, then help me stack these boxes.”

  She fed the pills to Paulo, placing them on the flat of her palm and watching as his lips scooped them up. It was a pathetic petting-zoo gulp, but still, it meant that he was aware of the world around him, and probably the conversation that was going on in the basement.

  They would need a boost if they were going to crawl out a window. The basement ceiling wasn’t as high as on the first floor, but it was still a comfortable four feet above both Nikki’s and Dane’s heads. They would need something to stand on to access the windows, assuming that they’d be able to open them, otherwise they’d need to first find something suitable for breaking the glass.

  “Help me, I’m not going to mess with his arm until he’s doped up, his screaming will bring them down here,” Dane said, and it was with that line, delivered so unconvincingly, that all of Nikki’s years of listening to lies paid off. Once the window was open, he wasn’t going to stick around to help Paulo.

  Nikki turned to Paulo and asked, “Can you tell me what to do? How to stabilize you?” The big man was still chewing on the pills, drool running down his chin. She readjusted the flashlight away from the windows and directed the beam into his face, the bulb making it look like he was about to tell them a ghost story.

  “Paulo!” She gave him a light slap on the cheek. “Don’t go under, stop that,” she said, and popped her fingers into his mouth, sweeping out the dusty half capsules and pill sludge from the inside of his cheeks.

  “What are you doing? Help!” Dane said, struggling to move a large metal shelving unit so he could get at the window behind it.

  “I am helping. I’m helping him so we can all go.”