There was a commotion. But that wasn’t news; there seemed to be a perpetual commotion in the recreation room. The cafeteria used to be where the action was, but now that everyone had been fed, or maybe more accurately because the room had run out of food, the bulk of Mercy House’s surviving residents had gathered in the rec room.
Many of the room’s old attractions had been dismantled and moved against the walls to either side. Chess- and Chinese checkerboards went ignored, the games too complex or slow-paced, and were piled up on upturned foosball tables.
The computer screens from the south wall were smashed and put into a pile, less an attempt to break down communication with the outside world—there was no electricity—than a protest against the twenty-first century. The last fifteen years had brought nothing but bad news and rotten memories for the residents of Mercy House. Even if they did not realize this on a conscious level, and had been here so long that they’d begun to crave captivity, their disdain for modernity was obvious to an outsider like Harriet.
For example, the games in the recreation room were all throwbacks. They were games that Harriet recognized from her own childhood: marbles, with an occasional glass eye pitched as a stand-in; double Dutch with IV tubing; and, for some of the residents who lost interest in these, vigorous games of doctor—the oldest pastime of all.
How did Harriet know all this without participating? Without being one of the community? The tribe, all its members seeking the same primordial release that they’d needed after being locked up for so long. Harriet kept a close eye on the rec room because this was where Nikki was going to show up, hopefully alive, if Harriet wasn’t the one to catch her first.
Earlier in the night, when there had been more living captives to take, more gruesome games had been played: real-life Operation, strip poker where the cards didn’t seem to matter and the competitors were forced to take off more than their clothes, and less-structured forms of torture. Harriet had little interest in these games, these blood sports, and she had observed them only to make sure that Nikki wasn’t a participant.
Nikki was hers and hers alone. Not the rabble’s.
Now that all their captives had been killed, the residents of the rec room had mellowed. There were still cheers, the occasional accusation of cheating that resulted in a fight, the rest of the room looking up from their games to watch.
There was a nonsensical economy instituted in the rec room. Trivial Pursuit cards and Monopoly money approximated cash, while game pieces from Mouse Trap and Risk assumed the role of change, placed on the games and fights, handfuls of this wampum exchanged with no clear conversion rate. But there were winners, and a hierarchy had asserted itself, with those able to tack the most useless junk to their bodies becoming the chieftains.
Harriet found these men and women pathetic. They had undergone a profound physical change but were content with attempting to recapture their childhoods, albeit without the white picket fences, domestic abuse, and casual alcoholism. With Pick’s, there were days when Harriet’s memories would bend and shift; she’d spent hours and days back in 1965. And she had no real desire to return there.
Unlike the residents, Harriet wanted to look to the future. She wanted to relish about five to ten minutes of it, the amount of time it would take for Nikki to bleed out. After that, who could tell how she’d want to spend her time? Maybe once she’d imbibed enough of the girl’s blood, she would find herself in possession of her black magic. Maybe she’d find a way out of Mercy House, go find her old house in East Passyunk, kill whatever bright young things had taken it over as the area had become up-and-coming and squeezed out the old residents.
That was the problem with Mercy House. These people had been here so long that they lacked vision, could not conceptualize the world outside. They all had their various interests— violence, sex, Tiddly Winks—but none of them wanted to seek out passions beyond these walls.
Oh yes, the commotion. This commotion was different from a heated game of hopscotch or a schoolyard brawl. There were about fifteen or twenty naked men involved and it was taking place outside the rec room. That alone caught the attention of some lookie-loos, Harriet included, once she had taken a sweep of the rec room and realized that Nikki wasn’t being stashed anywhere, dead or alive.
There were murmurs among the crowd and Harriet didn’t need to be able to discern what they were saying: She could smell it.
There was a girl hidden within that group of naked men, headed by a naked woman, her body long and lank and more desirable than anyone else’s, it seemed. Harriet was stricken temporarily envious; she wanted to shed her own clothes to check how her body had changed, if she looked like that, whether her muscles and curves had melted, resolved, and reconfigured themselves into something approaching that.
She was incensed. They were marching into the pharmacy and she needed to know who they were transporting in their doubled-up ranks. Harriet pushed to the front of the doorway, right up to the edge of the threshold, just in case these naked warriors were averse to the people of the rec room, a gathering among which Harriet would be embarrassed to be counted.
Using her nails, Harriet dug into the molding of the doorway, hooking herself up so she could reach the top of the frame and then performing a pull-up and looking over her shoulder to see over the heads of the men. Some of them watched her with expressions of suspicion, fixed lips that warned her not to try anything. But there was no need for her to: The girl they were trying so hard to protect had flat, dark brown hair, not Nikki’s dyed tips and natty curls.
Harriet dismounted with a modicum of grace, a three-point landing using a knee, a foot, and the tips of two fingers. It was a maneuver that gained her a few hoots from the men behind her, who’d stopped their games to watch the parade pass. She hissed at them, not shy to crack a skull or three if it meant she’d avoid molestation. But none of the men cared that much. Some of them spilled into the hallway to see what was happening in the crowded pharmacy, but the majority of them returned to shooting dice and breaking each other’s wrists in arm wrestling matches.
Minutes ebbed, fewer and fewer observers filling the doorway until there was only Harriet. She locked eyes with one of the naked men standing guard in front of the pharmacy, his arms crossed and chest puffed so she could see as little of what was going on behind him as possible. There were three cracks, sounds that reminded her of construction sites, for some reason, of her husband and her boy, and then she heard a group exhale, the inhabitants of the pharmacy gasping together and then going silent.
Someone was dead in there; how she knew this was a mystery, but she did and could almost see the soul flash and then float into the hallway and up through the ceiling.
After that, the men and the woman left without a word or grunt, the woman cradling pill bottles, the girl nowhere in sight. They could have at least given her a bag to carry her goods in, if she had traded them a live girl for however many tablets. The parade of oversexed bodies disappeared up the stairs, ready to continue their business until the pills ran out, the woman let them go, or they starved, whichever came first.
But that wasn’t the end of the excitement. There was an electronic chirp in the pharmacy, some words exchanged, and then a torrent of disappointed residents kicked out into the hallway immediately thereafter.
Once they had cleared out the room, the two army men stepped out into the hallway. Their shoulder sashes were loaded with various equipments and they looked intimidating. Harriet hadn’t forgotten that the taller one had laid hands on her earlier, when she was so sure she had cornered Nikki in the waiting room. If he weren’t so well armed, if he didn’t seem so in charge of his faculties, where the rest of Mercy House seemed like drooling morons, he could have been next on her hit list; but he would have to keep until she’d finished with Nikki.
The other one, shorter maybe by an inch but still huge, and with a scuzzy mustache, turned back to the pharmacy and replaced the door on its hinges after laying down some caltrops made from the ends of hypodermic needles braided with twine. Smart. There were some other forward thinkers among the residents.
The tall one looked into Harriet’s eyes, the exchange of two sharks regarding each other through a sea of minnows. Maybe there was a shred of respect there, but there were also all those teeth, barely tucked out of sight beneath gray lips.
Yeah, Harriet wanted to say, tried to beam to him without averting her glance, maybe I will follow you, see what you’re up to. Don’t worry, I’m not after your little white girl.
If he got any of this, he didn’t show it, but waited until his lackey was finished and then pushed past her into the rec room. He grabbed one of the table legs that had been stacked against the wall, slung it over his shoulder like a bat, and walked out.
The shorter one rattled as he walked, his pockets loaded with change or keys or something, his tread not exactly stealthy. He walked with his legs spread wide, trying to keep the waistband of his sweatpants over his skinny hips.
She waited until the tops of their heads disappeared down the stairwell before following them.