Mercy House Page 9

  The door eased open, still darkness on the other side.

  “Dr. Dane?” Paulo whispered into the darkness, only to be shushed in return. The door opened another few inches and a skinny hand appeared out of the blackness to wave them inside.

  As Nikki’s eyes adjusted to the office, she recognized the thin mustache and heavy eyelids of the doctor who’d left the dinner to see to the emergency call.

  “How bad did it get?” Dane asked in a whisper, crouching low. “The dinner.”

  “If you heard it, why didn’t you help?” Paulo asked, not bothering to whisper. He was shushed again.

  “Do you have a key for this?” Dane ignored the question and motioned to the office door. The blinds were drawn but the doctor was still crouched below the windowsill. She wasn’t sure why, but Nikki crouched, too, trusting him.

  Paulo put a hand into his pocket, took out his key ring, and squinted as he went through them. They all winced at the noise.

  “To answer your question, why I didn’t help? I had my hands full. Did you pass the cafeteria? Did you see what happened to the girl who works the counter?”

  Nikki said that they didn’t, then thought back to how relatively calm the residents in the cafeteria had been.

  “Lucky you,” Dr. Dane said, and no longer content to squat he sat on the carpeted floor and crossed his legs. That was why the residents in the cafeteria were calm. They flew into their rage only when there was someone around to kill.

  Paulo found the key he was looking for and after he turned it in the lock, Dr. Dane seemed to relax, and Nikki couldn’t help but hate the man for his nonchalance. He perceived himself as safe, thus the crisis was over for the time being, no matter who else was in danger beyond that locked door.

  “You said ‘they’ were in there. Who’s they?” Nikki asked, pointing to the doors of the waiting room.

  Dr. Dane looked her over, with the expression of someone who wasn’t sure if he’d met her, but they’d just met an hour ago and had spent some time talking about the prognosis for Pick’s disease.

  “Men, both of them. They had weapons, where they found them so fast is beyond me. They were patients. I remember running the mini mental-status exam on one of ’em, guy was a fucking turnip. Didn’t recognize the other, they all look different in the face.” Dr. Dane fished a small canister out of his coat pocket as he talked, taking a pill and replacing the container. “I didn’t do much besides hide in here when I spotted them at the end of the hall, coming up from the stairwell.” He was talking with the pill rattling around his teeth.

  “You didn’t want to end up like the lunch lady,” Nikki said.

  “Fuck no,” Dane said, dry-swallowing whatever he was taking.

  “Or my husband.”

  Dane looked at her, his eyes confused, and then he appeared to realize what she must have meant, the accusation there.

  Paulo was listening at the door, possibly keeping tabs on their conversation, but more concerned with whatever was going on in the foyer.

  “What do you think they’re doing in there?” he asked.

  Nobody offered an answer.

  In her front pocket, Nikki’s phone buzzed, the sensation frightening her and then giving her a bright yellow spark of hope.

  “Shit,” she said, trying not to yell, but unable to mask the excitement in her voice.

  “What?” Paulo asked.

  “We can call the cops on this,” she said, taking it out and letting the glow of the screen fill the room.

  “Cover it!” Dane hissed, diving to put his hands over the phone.

  Keeping it under her shirt, Nikki checked the screen. The vibration was a push notification from one of the games the kids had installed on her phone, apparently it was time to harvest her carrots. She wasn’t sure how to turn them off, fucking things sucked down her battery. Nikki made a pledge that when she got out of here she was changing her policy of letting kids mess with her iPhone.

  Going to the dial screen, she thumbed nine-one-one and the phone put itself into its red-screen emergency mode. But there was no ring. No signal.

  “AT&T?” Dane asked. Before she could answer, he took a phone out of his own pocket, the screen showing the identical red background. “You aren’t getting a call out, not even a text. No Wifi anymore either, without the power.”

  “Figures you would keep yours on you,” Paulo said, ignored by both of them. If the big man wanted to start a fight, he was going to have to wait.

  “Just in here?” Nikki asked. She looked toward the south wall, noticing there were no windows to the outside. This office was in the middle of the building; there had to be reception elsewhere.

  “Not even on the fucking roof. And don’t think I haven’t tried it on smoke breaks. I used to think Donner was jamming the signal, to keep us all diligent, but I guess not.”

  “Verizon works, kinda,” Paulo said, not moving from the door. The noises had stopped.

  That’s when the tears came.

  Not from seeing Don’s arteries spill open, or watching his breathing slow, or his mother suck his blood, but from remembering how he’d insisted on keeping his wireless carrier after they’d gotten married, the squabbles they’d had over it.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Dr. Dane stuck a finger in Nikki’s direction. Paulo detached himself from the wall and put an arm around her.

  That made it worse.

  “Don has Verizon. I tried to get him to switch so we could stop having two bills, but he wouldn’t.” He had claimed that on work sites he needed a phone he trusted, that it was more superstition than anything else, but if there was an accident he wanted the phone he was used to.

  Paulo’s hand was over her mouth before she could react. There was no shushing, just the sound of the hallway door opening and heavy footfalls. Shadows fell over the windows facing the hallway, one of them getting larger, a dark blot on the red glow of the blinds. The doorknob jiggled, the lock holding.

  The shadow moved closer to the window, so close that Nikki could hear the man breathe, in through his mouth and out his nose, the double stream from his nostrils hitting the glass. The shape changed as an arm was raised, looking ready to strike at the glass with whatever he was holding.

  “No,” a voice said from the hallway, a single command that stopped the man from breaking the window. The arm dropped and the shadow receded. The footsteps continued down the hallway, back toward the cafeteria, rec room, and dining room.

  They all waited in silence, until there was nothing else to hear.

  “You have a car, Dr. Dane?” Nikki asked.

  “No,” Dane said. “I have a BMW.”

  They both smiled at that, even Paulo, who looked like his smile was the kind that preceded a bar brawl between two guys who had been needling each other the whole night. Nikki guessed that Paulo’s dislike for Dr. Dane was a preexisting condition, and had manifested itself long before being stuck in this room.

  “Good. Let’s get out of here,” Paulo said.

  There were no objections.

  Chapter 14

  Six weeks. Mrs. Sampson hadn’t moved a muscle in six weeks.

  There had been the occasional eyelid flutter, the moan of air escaping from her various crevasses, but that stuff was common with all vegetables or soon-to-be vegetables. There was never any voluntary movement. Certainly never any violence.

  Maybe she was waiting six weeks for this, Sarah thought, touching the cut on her neck, the tip of her finger coming back wet. Greta had certainly come out swinging.

  Sarah had been huddled under the desk of the nurses’ station for fifteen minutes now and her knees and shins were beginning to throb. She didn’t dare move, though, not while every so often a door would open, a resident or three exchanging broken threats and come-ons before settling on the word food and walking down the stairs. Presumably—hopefully—they were headed to the cafeteria.

  Once there hadn’t been movement in the third-floor hallway for at least a hundr
ed Mississippis, Sarah allowed herself to stretch her legs out and search the drawers nearest her for some hydrogen peroxide, gauze, and a bandage. One of the perks of her slightly obsessive organization of the workplace: She knew exactly where these three items were.

  After a slow but still not expert patch job on her neck, wincing every time she tipped the bottle of peroxide not only at the pain but at the glug it made, Sarah was ready to try calling for help. The phones and computers at the desk were useless, and Flores had taken her phone with her to the dining room, so Sarah would need to get to her own phone, which meant making her way to the staff locker room on the second floor.

  But before she could do that, she would need to work up the courage necessary to stand up from the nurses’ station and reveal herself to whomever or whatever was still on the third floor. Taking the excuse for an extra minute of safety, Sarah rubbed the life back into her legs, extending them out on the floor and massaging them like she had for so many of the bedridden patients who’d previously inhabited the rooms around her.

  She needed to hit the gym and work on her thighs. The thought brought her mind to Kate Hines, how a little cardio might have saved her, and Sarah had to remind herself not to let her eyes linger while checking that end of the hallway. She had no desire to see the crumpled mess that Kate’s attackers had left behind.

  There was no time like the present and no residents on this floor with her, from what she could tell by a silence that was only sporadically punctuated by hoots and screams floating up the stairwell. Sarah rose from under the desk, rolling away the chair she had propped over herself for flimsy cover. She looked left, down the main hallway toward the stairs. There was nothing but open doors and black handprints on the wall. She guessed that they appeared black only because of the lighting.

  Steeling herself for the sight of Kate’s corpse, she turned her head to the right. The space in front of the elevator was empty as well, not even a broken heap of former nurse. They took her with them, she thought, then tried not to think anymore.

  Putting one foot in front of the other was difficult at first, not from the physical fatigue but from the fear, the hesitance that made her want to dive back behind the desk and try to wait this whole thing out…and pray that someone had called the police before the power had been cut.

  Sarah Campbell hadn’t built her life around luck, though. She’d built it around doing what she had to do to get where she wanted to be. Right now, where she wanted to be was in the back of an ambulance with a blanket around her and new bandages on her left hand, sobbing as she was driven to safety.

  The hallway was no problem, once she’d built up momentum.

  Nothing dove out at her from the open doorways, but she’d kept her distance just the same, her legs ready to spring. The only time she stopped was to check both of the ancillary hallways that peeled off before she got to the stairs, and she saw that besides a couple of deserted wheelchairs there was nothing but empty hallway.

  The stairwell was a different story. Poking her head over the railing she could see movement on the bottom landing, in front of the basement door. What they were doing down there and how many there were, she couldn’t tell. But they were residents. She watched as long, liver-spotted arms hoisted up unknown bundles and then climbed the stairs to the first floor.

  Her vantage and the echo of their movement was such that it was hard to tell how far up some of them were climbing, whether any of them were going to the second floor. She waited, glancing over, terrified that her young head of brunette hair would be spotted hanging over the edge. Eventually, the small parade dispersed, or at least slowed to a drip, some of the men and women taking longer in the basement than others.

  When no one was visible or audible, she started her run downstairs, taking the steps two at a time, worrying only once she got to the landing that her erratic movement could be a tip-off that she was a staffer, not a resident. That she was prey. The sound of something shuffling on the first-floor landing put a thrill in the pit of her stomach. It was a special kind of fear, like thinking someone was following you to your car as you fumbled with your keys.

  The sounds of imagined pursuit were so unnerving that she didn’t think twice before flinging open the door to the second-floor main hallway, didn’t check to see if it was inhabited first.

  Sarah was greeted by an empty passageway, with no one in the skinny ancillary halls to her left and right, either. To one side of the main hallway there was a disheveled linen cart. Whatever nurse had been pushing it around had left it unattended, mid-rounds.

  The second floor was how she had remembered it this afternoon, excepting the new paint job of vulgar stick figures and misspelled curses scrawled in blood and excrement over the wallpaper. The words and doodles were more graffiti and less modern cave painting, the intention of the piece reading more childish than it did threatening.

  There were more sounds from the stairwell and Sarah stopped admiring the new decor and ducked behind the linen cart, pulling the tail of her coat flush with the edges, hiding from the window facing the stairs.

  When the coast seemed clear she began to wheel the cart toward the middle of the hallway, pulling it after her toward the hydrotherapy room. The cart crept down the hallway, her heart jumping with every noise, her eyes bouncing to every shadow.

  She looked up at the red emergency lights, their glow only slightly better than darkness. To think that a half hour ago she was cursing the fluorescent bulbs of Mercy House, popping Advil, and rubbing her temples. Now she’d kill to have them back. Maybe not the best turn of phrase, she never wanted to think of killing again.

  There were footsteps behind her, something tall passing between stairwells. Sarah curled up, the cart rolling to a stop behind her, and waited until she couldn’t hear it any longer. If she could work her way to the staff lockers, she’d have her cell phone, could call for help.

  Reaching to her pocket, Sarah winced at the clatter of her key ring. The residents were strong, but did they have super hearing? Was she about to be descended upon, beaten to death by someone who a few hours ago had to subsist entirely on pureed beets?

  Most of the second-floor rooms were connected by service hallways, which meant she could get to the lockers through the hydrotherapy room.

  There were more footfalls headed down, coming from the stairwell. Apparently there had been more stragglers on the third floor with her, residents she’d lost count of who were now venturing out of their rooms, moving deeper into the facility. Sarah had no way of knowing for certain, but she could not shake the feeling that they were on a hunt.

  Gripping the top of the laundry cart, Sarah leaned her weight against it, feeling the wheels stick and free as she moved down the hallway, angling the cart and herself toward the door to the hydrotherapy room.

  Stopping the cart a foot from the door, Sarah directed her attention back to the stairs. The tall shape was back, walking up from the first floor, dragging something, someone, with him by their leg.

  “No,” Peter cried, his voice dazed. Sarah had always liked Peter. He was a teddy bear of a nurse, strong enough to flip any patient by himself but gentle enough to clean out the buildup from a seventy-pound old lady’s ears while listening to her endless stories about the glory days, back when she could dance the jitterbug.

  “No, no,” the thing that had Peter’s leg parroted back in a deep voice. It yanked at the nurse’s leg and watched Peter’s head bounce against the stairs. Why was the transformed resident bringing Peter all the way upstairs? Did the creature have a desire for privacy? Sarah pushed all the possible scenarios out of her mind.

  She was at the door to the hydrotherapy room and couldn’t stand to wait anymore. She remained crouched, pressed the key into the door, and stumbled into the darkness of the room. The air was warm and moist, the darkness was absolute, and the chlorine burned her nostrils even worse than usual.

  Neglecting to install emergency lights in this room had clearly been an oversight. Th
e legal fees associated with having staff members and patients stuck in the whirlpools during a power outage would probably far outweigh the cost of hooking up the extra lights. But that was Mercy House: cheap but flashy. Money in the budget to buy two Jacuzzis that no patient would ever use, but none left to light the room for safety.

  Sarah took the penlight from her shirt pocket and clicked it on to find her way across the room. Can you follow the light for me without moving your head? The penlight was meant for eye exams and wasn’t exactly a lantern.

  The room had four pools, a row of showers against one wall, and a line of safety railing bolted into the tile. With her light, there was no reason to use the railing and hug the wall. It would be quicker to cut across the center of the room.

  Passing the slender beam of light back and forth over the floor was not ideal, but it did stop her from falling into the endless lap pool, a fixture that only a handful of patients possessed the upper-body strength to use, and then only for a short period of time.

  There were sounds from the hallway and Sarah shut off her light, listened. Between the occasional bubble of air escaping from the powerless filters and pumps, she could hear female laughter.

  She pressed the end of the penlight into her calf, punishing herself. It would have been so easy to lock the door behind her. Too late now, she thought, clicking on the light, the laughter getting closer, right behind the door now.

  Taking two leaping steps, Sarah entered one of the showers and pulled the curtain shut.

  She cut off her light just in time as the door swung wide and the room was bathed in emergency red, the low light turning the whirlpools into inky black holes by contrast.

  With one eye placed against a break in the curtain, Sarah watched.

  There were two figures blocking the door, a man and a woman.

  Sarah recognized them, but didn’t.

  The woman was Beatrice Kent. The nurses called her Queen Bea, a red-haired octogenarian seductress who bragged about the sexual conquests of her youth while dating every eligible man on her floor. And they were all eligible, even those that weren’t.