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  Harriet caught sight of the pale skin and light green scrubs of the other girl, then scanned the area around her, and, sure enough, Nikki was pushing the girl forward as they dove between scuffles, dazed residents realizing too late what was passing by them to get a grip on the girls.

  Oh, Nikki, why would you help that girl? She’s going to get you killed, Harriet thought, glad for her daughter-in-law’s softheartedness as she followed them to the doorway.

  Chapter 43

  Why help her?

  It was a good question, one that Nikki asked herself repeatedly as she doubled back over her path, watching Harriet get tripped up by the tangle of attendants, but the old woman not looking like she was going down without a fight.

  Because it’s what Paulo would have done, was the answer she came up with, even if she was able to instantly rebut it with the fact that Paulo was dead and it was his faith and trust that had gotten him that way. Don, too, now that she thought about it. Their deaths were direct results of their inability to acclimatize to a world without rules. My mother would never hurt me, even if she’s brandishing a knife. Or: My nurse was just taking care of me. She will choose to do no harm, right?

  But still she pulled Sarah off her knees, the girl cowering next to the two bodies and left alone, as packets of pills were being scooped up and fought over around them.

  “Get up!” Nikki screamed, the girl staying limp in her arms until Nikki smacked her. The sting felt so great against her palm that Nikki had to stop herself from landing a few more blows or putting a knee into Sarah’s chickenshit face.

  Nikki was angry with her, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t understand why she’d done what she’d done. The warning signs were all there. Did I let her kill him? To see if they’d really let us go?

  Then Sarah’s legs began to pump and she was up and moving, Nikki grasping the fabric of her clothes, the blood wringing out between her fingers as she pulled Sarah left and pushed right, guiding her around brawls and murders. That they made it as far as they did toward the doorway was a minor miracle.

  Nikki kept her head on a swivel, catching snatches of Harriet’s red and black sweater receding deeper into the room, and then finally beginning to get closer as they spilled out into the hallway. They’d been spotted and were being pursued.

  “I can’t! God, I can’t!” Sarah screamed, collapsing on the hallway floor as she stared up toward the stairs. Nikki was confused and yanked at Sarah’s collar before craning her neck to see what the girl was looking at.

  Before her eyes could properly adjust to the smoke and gloom of the hallway, she thought that some new monster was making its way down the stairs. Its body was a mound of leathery flesh, with tufts of hair sprouting at uneven intervals all over, and tubular feelers that moved it along the ground and gripped the wall, pushing down the stairs. It resembled that scene in The Blob, where the creature is coming through the windows and air vents of the Phoenixville theater.

  As she watched, the beast resolved itself into its true form. It wasn’t one creature but a swarm of naked male bodies, all fighting among themselves to get down the too-small stairwell and pressing into one another, their sexes bobbling like divining rods, pointed down toward the rec room.

  Sarah screamed, reminding Nikki that she had a history with this group, and Nikki began to realize what Sarah meant by “worse” when she had described the residents she’d spent time with before they’d met in the refrigerator.

  The men were making progress down the stairs, some of those on the front lines falling, crushed underfoot, their teeth colliding with the textured bumpers of the stairs as their naked compatriots moved over them. At the top of the landing, Nikki could see a female form, not pressing or rushing but standing behind her men and shaking a pill bottle, the beat matching the pulsations of their progress as they spilled out onto the bottom step, a tube of toothpaste squeezed until the cap exploded off.

  “I can’t do it, leave me,” Sarah said, as Nikki pulled at her, trying to get the girl out of the way of the stampede of naked men.

  No matter what she thought, the men hadn’t come downstairs for Sarah. They weren’t pining for their missing sex kitten, but were after the pills that the army had traded for the three of them. How they knew what was going on, whether they were attracted by the rattle of pill bottles or could smell the pheromones that had wafted up from the bloodlust, it didn’t matter because they were being pulled into the rec room regardless. It took Sarah a moment to realize this, her eyes slits, no tears coming, none left.

  “Get up, come on,” Nikki said. “We can hide.”

  They could hide, maybe needing only a few minutes out of sight until the traffic in the hallway had cooled enough to allow them access to the basement.

  Nikki was presented with two doorways, two options. They could either go back to the dining room, having to pass Don’s corpse one more time before they could hide in the kitchen, or they could take their chances with the cafeteria, probably empty now, the possibility that there could be any more residents than the ones that were packed into the rec room or streaming down the stairs seeming unlikely.

  “Come,” Nikki said, pulling Sarah toward the cafeteria, breaking the girl’s line of sight with the lithe, redheaded resident who stared at them from halfway down the stairs. The woman’s hand still kept a steady beat with her pill bottle metronome, and there was a slight smile on her chapped lips.

  They crossed the threshold and the cafeteria glowed with sunlight and fire.

  Wind hit Nikki in the face, cooling the sweat, and a wave of smoke replaced the whiff of fresh air, causing her to cough. The room was cavernous and still, with the exception of the breeze coming through the broken windows.

  Above their heads, clouds of smoke gathered and were then displaced as the air pulsed. It was a beautiful sight, mostly because they were alone, for the time being; the only other bodies in the room were dead residents, heaped over with aprons and scrubs taken off staffers. Nikki didn’t want to think about where the human bodies were being kept, if there was anything of the staff left but bones.

  If they had confused any possible pursuers and could cower behind upturned tables before they were spotted, it would be easy to get to the basement and make a break for the parking lot. The victory was real. They had survived several massacres, breathed in more death than their psyches could probably handle, and thereby bought themselves a lifetime of counseling, but they had bought a lifetime and that was all that mattered. Now all they had to do was hide before they could run.

  They moved farther into the room, the air a mix of hot and cold, rancid and fresh, the oppositions mirroring the tempered relief, the quasi-freedom that Nikki felt while waiting to escape.

  “Nikki? When, baby?” a somehow familiar voice called from the doorway behind them.

  Or maybe they would die here.

  Chapter 44

  The woman wasn’t dressed like a resident. She wore an expensive-looking sweater that was now too short for her since her arms had grown, and her black dress pants also looked a couple of sizes too small.

  She held two knives, but dropped one as she spoke Nikki’s name.

  Oh, they knew each other, it was this woman’s dinner; Nikki and this woman were the reason why the third floor had been short-staffed last night. Sarah realized all of this as Nikki let go of her shirt and her sleeves drooped from where they’d begun to chafe under her armpits.

  “Nikki. Nikki. Nikki,” the woman said, either stuck in a loop or giving an invocation. This woman remembered at least something of her life before, had discarded one of her weapons, did that mean she remembered her daughter? Was she ready to use her strength to help them escape, the last act of a mad dog who still loved its master, remembered their bond through the shifting fog of insanity?

  Or was Nikki the reason the old woman was here, and did she have a problem with that? That was a scenario that Sarah had seen play out under more ordinary circumstances, without glistening steak kni
ves and piles of dead bodies. It was sad to see the natural order upturned, to see the role of caregiver shift to a child and then eventually become too much for that child to bear and become a job that had to be outsourced to Mercy House, to people like Sarah.

  The woman in the red and black sweater raised the steak knife to her face, and they both watched, Nikki standing stock-still.

  “Don,” the old woman said, then brought the flat of the blade to her lips and kissed it. The kiss became a lick as she curled a long pink tongue around the blade, toying with the serrated edge using the tip of her appendage.

  “Fuck you, Harriet,” Nikki said, her eyes scanning the floor around them for something, but finding only a broken lunch tray within reach. Nikki picked up the placard anyway and held it out in front of her, ready to use it as a shield. It didn’t look like it would be very effective. Nikki’s fingers were wrapped over the edge, exposed.

  Hearing her own name, Harriet, made the woman retract her bleeding tongue back into her head and hunch her shoulders. She was ready to spring, and Sarah took her concentration as an opportunity to back away from whatever this was: a family matter.

  A nurse should always take the side of her patient, should always advocate, as long as it was in their best interest, but unless matters called for the nurse’s professional expertise, most familial problems should be left alone.

  She was able to back away from Nikki without either of them noticing. The woman began to circle Nikki like a lioness, swiping with her knife and laughing as Nikki moved to deflect phantom blows that weren’t meant to connect yet, only tire and dispirit. A real game of cat and mouse was not a back-and-forth like it was in the cartoons; but was instead a slow, playful murder that left the mouse panting and weeping blood before it was finally devoured.

  Feeling safe enough to do it, Sarah looked down at her hands. Even the one that hadn’t been mangled by Mrs. Samson, the bandages torn, ragged, and weeping, was spotted with nicks and dried blood.

  It was that uninjured hand that was to blame, that was powerful enough to wield a pane of glass and guide it under one of her coworkers’ ribs. Flores had called Paulo a good boy, a sensitive soul, which Sarah hadn’t realized meant gay until she’d confided in the older nurse that she thought the physical therapist was cute. It made for an awkward and embarrassing sign-out as Flores giggled through her updates.

  Now Paulo was dead and she’d done it. His sensitive soul was now untethered from his body and sent to live con los angeles, as Flores would say. The older nurse would light a candle for any patient who passed while she was on shift, stacking the candle on a paper plate at the nurses’ station, a sweet rule violation, but still a violation that Sarah blew out and stowed after Flores left.

  The thought of candles made Sarah’s eyes move from her hands to the flames nearest her, behind which she saw were Harriet’s and Nikki’s unfocused shadows, still circling each other. Harriet was laughing now.

  Sarah wrapped her bandaged hand around a can of Sterno, the metal hot but not impossible to hold as she pressed it against the gauze, her hand coming with its own oven mitt now.

  Staring into the blue flame, Sarah watched as her breath made the tips burn yellow and orange.

  Harriet’s back to her, Sarah tiptoed over to the old woman and flung out her arm. The gel didn’t leave the can easily, but she tossed it with enough force that she was able to douse Harriet’s red and black sweater in chemical flame, the acrylic fabric flashing white and Harriet’s laughter transforming to screams.

  Chapter 45

  Grant and Beaumont fought well, but they didn’t last, nobody could, in their situations.

  Grant didn’t fight the hardest, but he was certainly the loudest of the three of them, letting loose a battle cry for every broken jaw and bifurcated sternum he left behind. He swung wide and hard with his cleaver, the one that had been Clemson’s, which they’d picked up in the basement, like he was honoring his fallen brother with every strike. Grant was not differentiating between real threats and misspent punches, delivering kill shots and teaching lessons to both rec room and cafeteria people, and he maimed and killed all that came within his range.

  Perhaps it was for the best that he was swarmed and killed when he was, or else there might not have been anything stopping him from taking down Beaumont or Arnold if they stepped into his path. He’d been given full rein and had gone crazy shooting, as it were. It was something that was not completely unheard of in combat situations, but not something they put on recruitment posters.

  Grant had three men hanging off him by the end, one of them he’d nearly chopped in half at the waist before they’d been able to sink their pikes into the back of his neck, mimicking the humane way to kill a lobster before you tossed it into the pot.

  Beaumont, on the other hand, had fought smart. He picked his battles, using knife and shield conservatively as he pressed his shoulder flat with Arnold’s. The two of them were untouchable until the woman entered the room, preceded by her cadre of naked men.

  Even before they could see her, Beaumont had begun sniffing the air, trying to shake his head straight, as if someone was yelling out random numbers while he was trying to count, breaking his concentration.

  One of the cafeteria residents took advantage of this momentary confusion and opened Beaumont’s forearm with a sharpened cake slicer, the oversize blade somewhere between a sword and a hatchet. Beaumont snapped out of his stupor and Arnold caved his attacker’s face in with the flat of his shield, the man’s nose and cheekbones breaking upward, if not impaling his brain then at the very least crowding it.

  As the naked men filled the room, the visual effect was similar to milk being poured over concrete, their pale bodies washing over the gore of the room, many of the men tossing punches and snapping necks, but many of them ending up bloody and dead themselves as they ended up easy targets, exhausted as they were.

  The naked men didn’t just loot. They imbibed as they spread out into the room, snatching up pill bottles and upending them into their mouths, not caring what it was they were taking. Even once the battle died down, which it seemed to be doing already with half the men and women dead and the other half of them wounded and winded, these men would probably still keel over from mixing medications.

  Beatrice Kent glided in, her feet hidden behind a detachment of guards, the terrain too uneven for Cleopatra to be carried in on her litter, apparently.

  Even before Beaumont was struck down, when his gaze had been diverted to this woman, someone he recognized being intimate with in a previous life, a creature that clearly still had a hold on him even after their change, Arnold was considering their options for retreating.

  He thought not just of retreating but of options for the future, as he slashed and dodged.

  There were three ways this could shake out, four if he counted an unceremonious death at the hands of an anonymous enemy.

  The first, and least likely, was that the dust would settle on this battle and he could reinstate some sort of control like they’d had when they were running the dispensary. He could find some men and women willing to learn, to be molded into soldiers, and rebuild. For this to become a reality he would need to stop the girls from escaping out of the basement. Why hadn’t they relocked the door? He had no idea. Another casualty of his complacency, his hubris? That problem might have been out of his control at this point. The two women may have been piled under the dead around them or they could be out of the building already.

  The second scenario was locking himself and Beaumont away and using what little they had left in the refrigerator to live on until the number of residents had culled itself to a manageable level.

  The third was leaving the confines of Mercy House and living in the woods, possibly either building or finding himself some kind of shelter. Beaumont could come, too, if he wanted.

  But then there was the sickening crunch of a decorative ashtray being buried in the space between Beaumont’s neck and shoulder, and the m
an was excised from all of Arnold’s plans.

  And then there was one.

  Arnold felt rage and relief and panic and sadness, and most of all warm blood hitting his face. It was the blood spilling out of Beaumont’s killer as he skewered the naked woman in the mouth, raising her up off her feet. Beatrice Kent’s red wig topped the end of his spear like a banner. The death acted like a pause button on the world around him.

  Beatrice had used Beaumont’s desire to get in close, using her long fingers to palm the broken ashtray, a magician hiding a card. Clearly, she hadn’t taken kindly to Beaumont thinning out of her group of drones, and either didn’t see or didn’t care that Beaumont was offering himself as a willing replacement for the men he’d killed.

  The death of their queen didn’t incense the men but instead temporarily neutralized them, and Arnold saw this as his opportunity to duck out of the rec room, flee with his life so he could settle on one of his three options, maybe think of a few more that didn’t involve his own death.

  Leaving his spear in the woman, he placed both hands on his shield and used it to deflect blows and knock down would-be attackers as he ran to the hallway. He faced little resistance, the battle either entering a lull or the natural end coinciding with his choice to retreat. In less than ten minutes the entire population of Mercy House had been reconfigured, the sociopolitical landscape re-formed.

  Was their current situation demanding that someone take hold of the reins, or was their culture a flame that had eaten up all its fuel and was dwindling, sucking up all the oxygen in the confined space?

  Arnold had a vision then, similar to what a flashback must have felt like for his brothers with PTSD. He felt fires raging around him, rocks and asphalt being kicked up into the flesh of his exposed arms, and above him, the deafening whirr of helicopters, the blades cutting through the sky, their numbers blocking out the sun.

  They would come here, maybe not in Bell Siouxs but newer models, fire and rescue, helicopters carrying television cameras and men in Kevlar vests. Even if he decided to lead, could make it work, the helicopters would come and they would wipe his people away.