Nikki’s entire left side throbbed, not from when she’d fallen out of her seat in the dining room but from slipping in the hallway outside. Paulo had been waving her along, his big arm a pinwheel moving with football coach urgency. “Come on!” he mouthed.
Nikki did her best to hustle and promptly had her legs swept out from under her, her shoes leaving the ground with a squeak. If she hadn’t had enough of her husband’s blood smeared on her by Harriet, she now had one side of her body coated in a stranger’s.
It was still warm.
Paulo offered her a hand up and shuttled her into a doorway, out of sight of the rest of the first-floor hall. Using the back of his hand he lifted her chin and made eye contact, pleading with his dark eyebrows. He was giving her a silent pep talk, and it worked, to some extent. She didn’t scream, didn’t lose it, but instead just listened to the sounds of Mercy House.
There was action all around them; thankfully none of it spilling into the hallway. There were yells and cheers from the rec room behind them, the clatter of plates and utensils from the cafeteria to their right. It was as if they’d time-traveled in the hour they’d been in the dining room, Mercy House coming alive as if it were midday, not approaching night. But if the other residents had been given the same brand of get-up-and-go as those who’d just attacked them in the dining room, Nikki and Paulo would need to flee the building without being spotted.
Paulo had locked the doors behind them, but the dining room had separate exits into the kitchen, and from there to the rest of the building.
Nikki forbid herself from thinking they were locking Don in there with them, the monsters. Don was gone. She wanted to cry and scream and yell about it, and she would, later. Now the world around her carried the patina of unreality; this was a gruesome dream and a movie and a video game all at once, and she would not feel the repercussions of it until she woke up.
She knew enough about grief and shock to be aware of what the chemicals in her brain were doing right now. She’d seen the same symptoms present themselves in children a few times, in especially bad cases, but this was her first experience from the inside looking out.
There was a pause in the chaos around them. Nikki could hear her own teeth grinding and had to force herself to unclench them, her jaw sore as she did. She was so flooded with endorphins that she could have had both hands in a waffle press and have no idea, but for the smell.
“We hit the front door,” Paulo whispered, “and then we don’t stop running until we find someone to take us into town, okay?” Neither of them had their car keys; hers were with Don, and Paulo’s were upstairs in the locker room, he explained.
Paulo moved his hand from her cheek and took up a batch of her hair, a motion that felt too intimate for someone she didn’t know, but Nikki then realized that he was wringing the blood out of her curls. Her hair felt heavy and she wondered how much fluid from how many different people was weighing it down.
They crept through the hallway, one of the two double doors to the cafeteria propped open, but none of the residents inside seemed concerned with them as they zipped by. Apparently there had been a recent mass exodus from the rooms upstairs, all the residents at once deciding to grab a midnight snack. Nikki was able to spot a man using his hand to spoon orange goo into his mouth from an industrial-size can of Cheez Whiz. Other men and women in the room helped themselves to the steam trays while standing on the wrong side of the counter.
While the men and women in the cafeteria were certainly uninhibited, this group did not seem as violent as Harriet, Beatrice, and friends, and Nikki allowed herself to wonder why that might have been. Was it a kind of mass hysteria? Did they feed off each other’s vibes? The tenor of the dining room had been hostile before whatever murder switch had been thrown. Did that explain the mutilation and blood drinking? Or were the residents in the cafeteria just taking a break, building up their energy for a big night?
After the cafeteria, it was one set of double doors and then a straight shot to the atrium/waiting-room area where Don and Nikki had entered this afternoon. As they walked, the lights above them blinked and then fought to reignite briefly before falling back dead. Red emergency lights replaced them, but offered very little to see by.
Paulo scoffed. It was a small sound from which Nikki was able to interpret volumes of exasperation, disappointment, and fear. Yes, it did figure. It was just their luck.
Offices lined the hallway. Some of them had their blinds shut, some open. With the darkness, it was impossible to tell if the glass housed attackers on the other side, waiting in the impenetrable gloom. But that wasn’t likely, was it? Whatever was happening, it was affecting only the residents, so far. Any Mercy House staffers still in the offices, working after hours, would probably have been spared the madness. Was it something in their food? A disease? A biological attack by extremist geriatrics? It didn’t much matter.
Paulo hooked his ear to the crack in the doors that led to the anteroom and listened, and even Nikki was able to hear the movement on the other side, echoing in the big room.
“I wouldn’t,” a voice hissed in the darkness. They both turned to the doorway beside them, but there was nobody visible. The door was open a crack and the voice continued. “They’re in there. And I’m in here trying to wait them out.”
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.