Mercy House Read online

  “How the fuck is he going to be able to climb through there? Even if he could fit, which he can’t, he wouldn’t be able to pull himself up with one arm.” Dane was laying down all his cards now; lying hadn’t worked so he was trying to convince her to come around to his reasoning, spread his worldview.

  Okay, you caught me. It’s like this, Miss. They always called her Miss, no matter how many times she asked to be called Ms. Laurel. I roll up at this party, a party I don’t even want to be at, but my girl, you know how it is, Miss, she wants me there. So I’m at this party and I’m breathing, and I’m not saying that it was entirely secondhand smoke, but it was the secondhand smoke that got in my head and made me stupid enough to take a hit when some motherfu— some guy passed it to me. Now, please, Miss, please don’t make me test this week. I promise I won’t do it again.

  “He’s right,” Paulo chimed in, breaking her out of her reminiscence. The anger welled up in her so strongly that she was sure she would hurt Dr. Dane, the coward, the liar. Paulo’s eyes were open now but fuzzy, unfocused. “I’ll explain how to wrap my cuts, then you send help once you get out. Not that I don’t trust the doctor, but…” His words trailed off, as much from self-censorship as exhaustion.

  “He’s a weasel,” Nikki finished for him.

  Paulo swallowed hard, nodded, and then sent her looking for some gauze and medical tape. There weren’t going to be any drugs down here, he explained. What wasn’t lining Dane’s pockets would have all been kept in the pharmacy above their heads.

  It took her a few minutes of looking, but she found it. Many of the boxes had been torn open, ransacked for weapons or other tools that could be used in Mercy House’s new Paleolithic culture, but the gauze and bandages had been left untouched. The implication being that no one ministered to wounds in Mercy House anymore, they only caused them.

  “I’m not brave or strong, but I tried,” Dane said to himself and the quiet basement, launching into a self-pitying monologue as Nikki wiped the blood and bone splinters out of Paulo’s scrapes and punctures.

  “I did as well as I was going to do, locked the door. I freed you from that guy, not him. I just want to get out of here and that makes me the bad guy? Fuck you, both of you.”

  It was a hard soundtrack to work to, punctuated by Dane’s frustrated grunts as he moved furniture and stacked boxes, his weak frame shuddering as the tears began to flow. Was his refusal to help really that out of line? Could one make the case that getting out and getting help as fast as possible was the more responsible course of action, especially if there were still more survivors in the rooms above them?

  “Like that, here, give me the rest, that’s good enough,” Paulo said, the large fingers of his usable hand ineffective at wiping the tears from her face. “I’m not going to bleed out or anything, but do you think you could—”

  “What?” she asked, the anything implied.

  “Could you do a better job of hiding me?” He looked down at the floor around him. He’d plopped down in the middle of one of the paths that had been carved through the junk.

  “Sure,” Nikki said, and moved his legs out of the way of the path, then covered him the best she could with boxes, trying to obscure any possible sight lines from the basement door.

  “Thanks. I almost forgot,” Paulo said, his voice echoing off the empty box stacked in front of his face, the least successful hide-and-seek competitor in the history of the game. “I found this. Your ride?” He held out the rental car key.

  Nikki took the key, its materialization like a magic trick that meant she was no longer tethered to Dr. Dane or his BMW for a ride. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Now get out of here, then send the army or the A-Team or something,” Paulo said, his expression unreadable behind the stacks.

  “Will do,” Nikki said, not letting their goodbye last any longer than that, since she still needed her strength to help Dane with the window, to run as fast as humanly possible to the car, and then to drive away from Mercy House.

  Chapter 29

  The woman at the front of the short line had such a shiner that her left eye had swollen shut, but she was smiling anyway as she approached the pharmacy counter.

  It was a few minutes after 0700, the usual time the early-to-rise residents of Mercy House started lining up for their various medications before gathering in the rec room to watch the morning news, maybe teething a bowl of porridge to settle their stomach after their battery of controlled substances.

  Arnold Piper and his men didn’t take Medicaid, though. Nor did they care if the sons and daughters had paid the bill on time. This was a barter economy, and if a resident wanted to get wacky, at least wacky enough that the monkey would stop howling (they were halving the dosages of anything strong, to make their control last longer, maybe even stave off the worst of the withdrawals), he was going to have to pay up.

  The woman with the bad bruise offered Grant the cafeteria’s set of serving spoons, ten in all, a mix of ladles and slotted spoons, all with hard plastic handles for heat reduction. Grant pulled them under the clear partition and made a show of appraising them, then he counted out a handful of pills and pushed them back through the slot.

  The woman’s expression deflated to a frown. She’d clearly wanted more, but that didn’t stop her from nibbling on a white pill.

  “More?” she asked, not moving. Grant looked over to Arnold with a question on his face. Arnold stood where he could see the line but still remain out of the residents’ view, watching his cashier and determining whether or not he could trust Grant with this job.

  Arnold shook his head. No.

  They got no more than ten miscellaneous pills per trade, a max of two opioids in each. The team had no use for the serving spoons, and neither did the woman, really. But it was quite possible that her black eye had been earned fighting over those same spoons, so to her they were worth the drugs. It would be a similar case with many of the items up for trade. They were building an economy entirely based on perceived value, and doing it in order to stockpile weapons and keep the masses pacified.

  Territory was more easily occupied if the natives weren’t rising up, as every man and woman in his outfit was acutely aware.

  From the busted air vent and the dead bodies, it was clear that Clemson had liberated the pharmacy, but when Piper and Grant arrived to scout the room a few hours earlier, he was nowhere to be found. It was possible that he was ferreting around above their heads, drawn to the confined space of the vents like a reverse claustrophobia, a return to the womb, but it was also plausible that he’d been killed. There had been sounds in the hallway and wreckage left behind that Piper couldn’t ignore.

  Either way, they needed to push forward with the plan and hope for the best.

  Grant waved the woman away, the mass surrounding her eye weeping a tear of blood as she contorted her face in discontent, but she scooped up her assortment of pills and put them in her pocket anyway. They were precious to her now, more so than when she had given up her spoons. Good.

  The next man in line offered up his hearing aid, a handful of batteries, and a severed human ear. The trade must have made sense to him, and there was a certain logic to it. Grant took the trade, placing the batteries and hearing aid in the bin filled with small electronics, and tossing the ear into the pail at his feet. They weren’t going to be keeping the trophies, but it would be rude to turn a piece of the trade away, so it went in with the rest of the slop: severed body parts, unsalvageable half-eaten food, and one colostomy bag, used.

  The old man took his ten pills and didn’t argue. Behind him, the line had grown.

  As different as the healing had made them, these were still creatures of habit. That was what captivity would do to you. Arnold then thought of stories he’d heard about the POW camps and tried to force his mind elsewhere.

  At that moment a distraction wasn’t hard to find.

  A group of ten nude residents pushed their way into the room, more of them wait
ing out in the hallway. Grant, who’d just been getting a handle on the system they’d set up, began to growl low in his throat as his eyes widened with frustration.

  Piper patted him on the shoulder, revealing himself to the rest of the room and using his upturned palms to indicate to the impatient line that he was coming out from behind the desk. Before he did, he picked up the nail gun from the counter, Grant got the message and raised up his own weapon from below the window. Grant’s was a spear that he’d been keeping dipped in the slop bucket, the blade glistening with gore and bacteria as he hefted it to the Plexiglas. That was how you did it, fought dirty. You dipped your blade in the latrine. Just in case you didn’t get to finish what you started, an infection would. Grant and Piper showed their weapons, telling everyone in the room who was in control here.

  It was a good show, but that’s all it was—an act. Grant and Piper were the only two combat ready–troops in the pharmacy, with Clemson unaccounted for, Beaumont guarding their stockpile, one on patrol, and the two women still busy cataloging and packaging the pharmaceuticals.

  Arnold unbarred the door and walked out from behind the desk, leaving himself exposed, but none of the naked residents looked like they posed a threat, unarmed as they were. Muzzle pointed to the ceiling, he made a show out of hefting the gun, and the bodies in the room moved back to give him a halo of space for it.

  Out from the collection of male bodies, a woman stepped forward. Even with the changes, Beatrice was made instantly recognizable by her red wig, now angled wrong, more fitting lying on the ground like a drowned fox than on top of her head. Despite his discipline, his dedication to the mission, Arnold found her enticing.

  “Blue,” she said, holding a hand out, commanding, not bartering.

  Arnold narrowed his vision, took her in. If they wanted to, he and Grant could start a fight, show the rest of their customers what happened when you walked in to the pharmacy making demands, made a show of cutting the line. But that would be risky. They may have been bare-assed, bare-handed, and exhausted-looking, but the men greatly outnumbered them.

  “Blue,” she said again, pointing to one of her men, a specific area of him, to illustrate her meaning. This woman was dangerous. Maybe she had always possessed the quality, but now that things had changed, she was a leader, like himself, not one of the grazing sheep of the cafeteria or even the loosely organized sadists of the rec room, but a figurehead of her own movement.

  “Trade,” Arnold said, using his free hand to point at a woman clutching handfuls of costume jewelry and using her elbows to keep her spot in the line.

  Beatrice stared at him for a moment, grunted, and another hole formed in the phalanx of leathery skin and shriveled peckers. Pushed from behind, a young woman fell through the doorway, a murmur filling the room. Everyone who had been in line no longer cared much about their position; they wanted to inch closer to the girl. Even Grant was leaning against the Plexiglas partition, his nostrils fogging it.

  Arnold felt it, too. It was a strong instinct, like his animal attraction to Beatrice. He could hear blood rush against his eardrums. The sensation was a kind of curiosity. What would her liver look like if it was extracted through her belly button? He crushed those desires, reminding himself to stick to the plan.

  Well, this offer did change things for Beatrice’s trade. If she was seriously willing to give the girl up, he might have to break his ten-pill maximum transaction.

  “Yes?” the Queen Bea asked, and Arnold took a step toward the girl. She tried to sink back but the men held her firm. There were a few scuffs and bruises, but overall she was in mint condition. He looked around at the men and wondered how badly the scarring in her mind was.

  They’d thrown a scrub top over her; he could tell it was a new addition because her hair was wet but the shirt was mostly dry. She had no pants and he could see that they’d been doodling on her. He wondered if the symbols meant anything, even to them, her captors or worshippers or whatever.

  With little warning and no provocation, a male resident who’d been pressed against the wall by the new group pushed forward, grasping a pocketknife, probably something he was going to trade. Putting one hand on the girl’s hair, he pulled her down, exposing her neck. The man’s bloodlust had proved too much. It was as if he knew that his attack wouldn’t succeed, or at the very least not go without reprisal, but he couldn’t help himself from trying, a fiend for murder. His eyes were wide and streaked through like a junkie’s, looking to cop that last hit even if he knew it would kill him.

  He didn’t get the small blade within striking distance of the girl’s neck. Instead, two of the naked men clapped arms on him and held him in place. To show that there was no enmity between their two factions, to show that he was no relation to this crazed would-be assailant, Arnold put the nail gun to the man’s screaming face and held the trigger, sending two nails straight through his nasal cavity and one slightly higher to his frontal lobe.

  There would have been more, for show, but the nail gun gave a few empty puffs and he moved his finger. More ammunition would probably be returning to them shortly in the form of a trade, which was another perk of their system: no need to track down valuables.

  The man leaned forward, dying as the guards dropped him to the floor. His goods, including the pocketknife, scattered but no one dove to pick them up. If anyone else in the room had been thinking about trying anything similar, it was doubtful they’d attempt it now. Even so, Arnold remained tensed and put his attention back on Beatrice.

  She smiled. It was as if the attacker had been a plant, someone put in the audience at an auction, there only to drive the price up, conveniently folding at the first sign of resignation from his fellow bidders. Arnold’s violence hadn’t seemed to threaten her. If she were planning a double cross, she was doing it with a straight face and coal in her stomach.

  Arnold turned. Putting his back to her was a risk, but a calculated risk he was willing to take on his own, not something for which he was offering the lives of others. Grant took his eyes off the girl and regained his composure as Arnold signaled to him, willing himself to pay attention.

  Arnold used his empty hand to count out fives, flashing a fist then a palm, doing this so many times that even he lost count. Grant didn’t lose a step in their charade. They would give them the pills they wanted, spread out across a few different bottles, but still leave plenty to trade with. There weren’t only “blues”; there were also “yellows” and a rainbow of generics, something Bea might not remember, not since the healing had messed with her mind and body.

  The residents settled in to wait as Grant disappeared back into the pharmacy shelves, rattling pill bottles along the way, just for show, to remind them what their patience would be rewarded with. As the elderly set down their loads, someone scooped up the dead man’s Swiss Army knife while Arnold wasn’t looking, his eyes locked on the girl.

  She might need a jacket if they were going to stash her in the refrigerator. Pants, too. And after that? Well, he’d have to think. She might provide a way to bring any rebel factions to heel, make peace.

  Grant returned with a stack of bottles and laid them down on the counter, waiting for Arnold’s go-ahead to push them through the slot. Arnold extended his arm, pointed to the window with the empty nail gun, guiding Bea to pick up her prescription. As she did, he moved to the girl, getting her within arm’s length, just in case Bea decided that she didn’t want to lose her slave girl.

  This close, he could see the marks across the girl’s neck, the rug burn of captivity ringing her throat.

  It was getting hot in here with all these extra bodies packed in. Arnold could smell all the sweat beginning to gather, washing off lord knows what that had crusted on these men’s stomachs and crotches.

  Beatrice opened two of the bottles, both childproof caps providing various degrees of difficulty. Then, satisfied, she shook the rest without opening them. That was not the way to check; she shouldn’t have been trusting anyone, b
ut her blues were there. She nodded to her men and they began to file out of the room, pep in their steps, it seemed to Arnold. Some of them were already sporting Pavlovian erections.

  The girl winced as he put his arm around her, but there was no need for that, he was going to be gentle. She would need to wait in the pharmacy with them until the breakfast rush was over, until they could deliver her to the fridge for safekeeping.

  Her arms full, Beatrice nodded to him, more shimmy in her hips than there needed to be, like all this could be his, if he’d be willing to make another trade.

  No, he was content with things as they were.

  The girl wasn’t under protective lock and key for a minute before the line had straightened itself out. There were a few growls to reinstate spots, but no violence. Then the walkie-talkie on Arnold’s belt buzzed, a single word coming over the band: “Basement.”

  They were going to have to close shop for a few minutes and the women would have to watch the girl. He hoped he could trust them, because his man on patrol, Ivan, had found a possible problem.

  Chapter 30

  There was an hour or so there when Fredrick Dane thought that not dipping back into his pockets and getting high would allow him to be the hero. A bit of a hard-nosed hero, maybe. He styled himself a realistic hero for an unrealistic calamity.

  But then the physical therapist had to go and get his hand mangled while engaging in some real comic-book heroism.

  Never mind that Dane was the one with the car keys, the one who’d locked the door and saved the girl from being sucked through that black hole by her hair. No, instead they had chosen to focus on the fact that he was being sensible about the situation. Focus on that and hate him for it.

  Christ, his arms were tired as he tugged at the metal rack, the whole thing finally collapsing as Nikki finished cooing to the injured Paulo, no longer a survivor but a temporary martyr while they left him there.