“COME ON, FINN. Run with me.”
The echoes. The white walls that move. Her voice. Young and high and calling me.
“Finn. Come on, Finn.”
The room is shifting, the echoes longer, farther away. I’m losing her to the darkness, the white walls shifting quickly to shadow. My mother’s voice gone. Little Emma calling me.
“Run, Finn.”
I’m staring down at my own hands, bloody and torn. Something sticky there. Something mixed with the blood.
Cloth?
Hair.
I scratch at my own hands with long nails—not nails—claws. Pulling at bits of stuff. Stuffing. Fluff. I’m bursting at the seams like Dr. Rhodes’ fucking chair. I claw deeper, skin splitting and tearing away like paper. There is no more blood. No blood, just thick white hair.
Fur.
Dressed of fur and fierce of tooth.
The scream comes from deep inside my throat and bursts from my nose, my mouth, my eyes.
My hands are in front of my face, out toward the distance. I’m staring down the long hallway, between the white fur of my hands, ribbons and scraps of paper-skin left dangling like streamers from my clenched fists.
The screaming. The blood. They begin like another echo, down that long hallway.
I blink, and my eyes open wide in new light. I’m under the bed now, watching, as they change.
Two people. Naked. A man and a woman. She is beautiful. Like the little girl, dark hair and olive eyes. He is tall and thick with muscle, covered with thick hair.
She claws at his face as he grips her arms, both drawing crimson trails beneath their fingertips. Their faces are twisting, breaking, falling apart in front of me, faces falling away to reveal gnashing fangs beneath. Nothing but teeth. So many teeth.
I hear screaming. Loud and piercing. Like a thousand crows calling in unison, screeching with all their might. It’s coming from inside me. I feel a touch against my hand. I don’t recoil. I don’t start. It’s warm, comforting. Tiny fingers wrapping around mine. She is beside me. I turn and look into those olive eyes, so deep and calm. There are vast forests inside the green of those eyes.
“Run, Finn,” she says. “Run away home.”
I WAKE TO white hot fluorescent light.
My eyes open and stare at the water-stained, pockmarked tile ceiling of a room that scares me. Deep in my bones, I feel that this place is wrong. Dangerous. False.
Machines clicking. Beeping. A cavalcade of noise beyond the walls. Crying. Pleading. Groaning. Shouting voices.
And the smells. So many smells. Cleaners. Harsh and poisonous. Shit and piss. Vomit and blood. I’m in a hospital. Whether it’s a hospital, or a hospital, remains to be seen. Whichever kind of place this is, there is death here, I can smell it.
I can smell him. The ape-man. The unwashed man, sweaty and dirty, no chemicals and perfumes on this one.
I try to move, twisting at my wrists, heaving against thick leather straps at my wrists, ankles, thighs, and chest. My head is free, with enough give in the straps to strain a few inches to turn and look at the man standing against the wall, his stink sheathed in light blue hospital scrubs. His face is tan and leathery, his cheeks and neck textured with a scrub of thick stubble. His long dark hair is tangled behind him with some sort of leather strap. Not the sort of man who works in a hospital, or wears light blue.
“Where the fuck am I?” I croak, in someone else’s broken voice, “Tied down.”
“Yes, mate,” the man warbles back. Kiwi? Aussie? “The doctors think you might pose a spot of trouble, I reckon.”
“Please?” I groan, tugging weakly at the straps.
“Oh I couldn’t do that, Jim. Not yet.” He grins a mouth of yellow teeth, blank spaces here and there, like a broken fence. He’s flipping through pages on a clipboard. “Says here you puked up some bloody fingers, mate! Fingers! That must have been a bitch to bring up.”
“I didn’t . . . what am I?”
“What are you in for?” The man chuckles, “All I know, son, is that they’ve been out there in the hall talking about your Doctor Rhodes. Something about second time this week, and mandatory psych evaluation. Whatever it is you did, they think you’re bonkers!” He sits down next to me on the bed, reaches out, and playfully pats my head. When he raises his arm, the smell of him punches me right in the face. I try to twist away from it, feeling a mad terror spread through my body like wildfire, welling up in my chest and bleeding out into my limbs, twitching at each spot that was locked down against me.
“Now!” this fake orderly continues, “I have been tasked with making sure that your paperwork is correct, Jimmy-boy!”
Australian. Definitely Australian, and badly in need of a bath, or a firehose.
I know his smell. The smell that has followed me for weeks. Who the fuck is this guy? Where the hell am I?
“Finn Bar MacTyre, aged thirty-five . . .” he grins again, showing me all the spaces in his face, “Now ain’t that a bloody handle?”
“Finn. Jimmy Finn. James.” I cough, “You’ve got the wrong fucking guy!”
“Not what it says here, boy-o. Age thirty-five. Next of kin, one Barry MacTyre—father—Bensonhall, British Columbia.”
Bensonhall. I twist at the word, hard, and feel something crack in my side. I choke back a sharp breath.
“What did you say?” I bark at him, “Bensonhall? What does that say? Where did you get that? Why are you following me?” I’m straining with everything I have against the straps. All the strength I had this morning, sucked away with whatever put me here.
“Tut-tut-tut, Jimmy!” The orderly pats my head again, absently, without even turning from the clipboard in his hand. “You’re going to attract attention, Jim. You don’t want those doctors getting the wrong idea about your mental state, now do you?”
I tighten up again, yelping as the crack in my side becomes a red-hot knife between the ribs, forcing the air out of me, laying me flat and stiff, breathing slow and shallow.
“That’s a boy. Now,” the orderly leans over me, putting his dark face in close and taking a long sniff running up the length of my face, “Yeah. You’re the one all right. I can smell it in you. It’s right there, under the skin, just dying to get out, ain’t it, Jimmy-boy?” He smiles wide and terrible, a foul stench of stale beer and something fishy wafting out between those broken teeth.
I wince and feel the stab of the blade in my ribs again.
“I guess it won’t hurt none to loosen these straps a little. You’re not going to do something foolish, like try to escape, now are you, Jimmy? Wouldn’t want you to run off on us, now would we? No.”
The orderly stands, slowly and methodically moving from strap to strap, unbuckling me, starting with my chest, then each leg, and finally the arms. He steps carefully away and lets me fumble loose the last wrist strap myself. I sit up slowly, struggling through the cramping pain in my side. I drop my feet to the floor and notice the jagged scar across the outside of my thigh. It looks like an old scar, white and faded, still thick. I know I didn’t have that scar before. I run my hand across it to feel the ridge, make sure it’s real.
“Nothin’ a change and a good hunt won’t fix I reckon, eh?”
He’s already backing toward the door.
“Injury report says you’ve got some broken ribs. They’ll heal up fast too, but they’re gonna slow you down some for now. Jimmy be nimble. Jimmy be quick.”
He winks at me then takes one quick glance over his shoulder, out the tiny window in the dirty white door.
“I’ll just be going now, Jim. You’d be best to do the same. Heard tell of shock therapy. I didn’t think they were allowed to do that anymore in a place like this.” He grins his gap-tooth grin again and tips an invisible hat as he slips into the hallway.
“Get a move on, Jimmy-boy. Go see your ol’ dad. That’s my advice.”
The door flaps in his wake, sending waves of his musk back to haunt me.
THERE’S A PILE of clothes at the foot of the bed. New, and clean, still ripe with the chemical smell of the factory. All my size. Jeans, boxer shorts with the tags still on them, wool socks rolled together, a black t-shirt, a canvas field jacket, a hooded sweatshirt. There’s a wallet in the pocket of the jacket. My wallet. The wallet that I know damn well is sitting on my kitchen counter. I flip through it, looking for somebody else’s cards, somebody else’s ID. Everything is there, everything that proves that I’m Jimmy Finn, thirty-five, five-foot-nine and one-hundred eighty pounds. Everything where it belongs, plus five hundred dollars cash that sure as hell didn’t come from my chronically overdrawn bank account.
The work boots on the bottom of the pile are a size too big, but they’ll do to get me out the door.
I chance a look through the tiny window, only to see the orderly loitering at the end of the hall. He gives me a wave and a bounce of the eyebrows before he reaches behind him and tugs at something on the wall. The quiet is shattered with the wail of a fire alarm. Spigots across the ceiling of the hallway begin to sputter and spray. He waves me after him as he disappears around the corner.
I make one painful step in the clunky boots before remembering the clipboard, roughly tearing the sheets from it and shoving them beneath the new jacket before zipping it up tight and limping out the door.
I’m sure as hell not waiting around for Rhodes, or any other doctors. No cops. No judges. No court-assistance lawyers.
No electrodes bolted to my head. No walking coma for weeks on end while they poke and prod and explain why I need to be locked away. Why they need to break me more—break me again, and again—so that I can be remade. No thank you. Not Again. Not Ever.
Time to run.
And now I finally have somewhere to run to.
Bensonhall.