Nikki took two bites of the Devil Dog and heaved, not much coming up. They had all the food they could want, but her body wasn’t ready to process the taste of a Drake’s cake.
She was hungry but she couldn’t get the sight of Don out of her mind. She didn’t believe in the afterlife, and had resigned herself to the fact that when they killed him, she’d never see his face again. She’d been wrong.
After finding them in the basement, they’d marched them through the hallway and turned in to the dining room.
“Don’t look,” Paulo said in front of her as they entered the room, but all that did was make her more curious as to what he could be trying to shield her from.
He was right, she shouldn’t have looked.
The resident with the mustache crossed himself as they passed the effigy of Christ.
She thought of the rings of hell, moving deeper and deeper as it got worse. Martin and his video game had been right, that was the way it worked. Once she realized who she was looking at, his face swollen and mottled so that it was hard to recognize him in the red half-light, she had closed her eyes. But even then she was able to smell him.
The processed chocolate of the Devil Dog did little to wash the stink of her dead husband out of her mind, and she considered pushing the cake and frosting up her nose, if she weren’t able to get it down into her stomach.
They’d been left in the walk-in fridge, the air still chilly a day after the power had cut off. There was a large Coleman lantern in the fridge, balanced on one of the shelves, and it took Nikki’s eyes minutes to adjust to it.
They were not alone. There was another woman in the room with them, but no guard. Nobody in here but us humans.
Nikki wanted to like the girl, but with no guard to keep them from raiding the stockpile around them, she had an irrational fear that the woman wasn’t a fellow prisoner but a secret warden. It kept her from talking to the girl right away. The girl was plain, in her late twenties or early thirties, with mismatched scrub top and bottoms, one blue, one green. Her hair was twisted in a greasy ponytail, and she had eyes that pointed up and down but never at Nikki when she asked her what her name was.
“Sarah,” she said, wincing at the sound of her own voice. “I’m a nurse. Was a nurse.”
“How long have you been in here?” Nikki asked, wanting to know everything now that the silence had been broken. She dabbed Paulo’s forehead with a cloth she’d taken from one of the shelves. He was burning up, his sweat chilling the moment it hit the air. Was that how you got pneumonia or was that an old wives’ tale?
“Not long. I was…” She paused. “I was with a different group.”
“What happened to them? Where are they? Did you find a way to call for help?” Nikki asked, the questions spilling out of her.
It took Sarah a moment to speak again, looking confused by Nikki’s questions.
“Oh no, not another group of”—she didn’t say humans or survivors, she just whirled a finger around to indicate the three of them—“I meant a group of them.”
Nikki nodded that she understood and then chose her words carefully. “I hate to ask, but: better or worse?”
“Worse,” Sarah said.
Well, that was something, at least.
Paulo coughed. It was wet, and Nikki looked around for something that could help. She opened a box filled with individual bottles of PediaSure and twisted the cap off one. Yes, it was odd to have a drink meant for children in an old persons’ home, but Nikki imagined that the formula had some kind of health benefits for the elderly, too. The alternative, that there was a nursery or a daycare in Mercy House, was too grim a possibility to think of.
“You should drink this,” she said, and Paulo’s eyes moved underneath his lids. Maybe a yes, or maybe just part of a dream he was having. She parted his lips and poured in a sip; he coughed, sputtered, and then swallowed it down.
“I haven’t touched the food. I don’t know if we’re allowed,” Sarah said, shivering.
“Fuck ’em. I’ll keep the trash over by me. They won’t punish you for it.” Nikki gave Paulo another sip and his eyes opened and he smiled. He was her sweaty, outsized baby.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Sarah said, her tone accusatory. But she didn’t elaborate.
For a nurse, Sarah seemed unconcerned with helping Paulo. Did nurses take the Hippocratic Oath? Nikki didn’t know.
“Do you—” Nikki started, but was shushed.
“Hear that?” Sarah asked. Nikki strained but couldn’t hear anything. This lady might have seen too much, could be a basket case. Suddenly the walls of the walk-in fridge felt too solid, like they were locked in here with the girl, not away from the drooling residents who’d been eyeing them in the hallway.
If the woman was right and there was something going on out there, if she had grown more accustomed to listening to the world beyond their heavy prison door, then Nikki wasn’t going to her death with an empty stomach.
Nor was she going to die without a fight.
Resting Paulo’s head on a bag of rice, Nikki hurried over to the corner to select a weapon from one of the piles. The troopers had picked the hardware over, and left nothing too menacing in this pile, but Nikki settled on a honing steel. The ceramic and metal bar was about a foot long, with a molded plastic grip and dull tip. She wouldn’t be able to stab with it, but it was heavy enough to double as a combat baton.
Nikki had been close to putting a similar item on their wedding registry, but a Wüsthof knife set had seemed excessive to Don, even if they were getting it as a gift.
Sarah didn’t move from her spot opposite Paulo, but she did crane her neck to get a better look at Nikki’s bandage job on his arm.
“That’s going to get infected,” she said.
“We know,” Nikki said, a bit more curt than she wanted, but if the woman wasn’t going to help, she shouldn’t be backseat nursing.
“It’s not perfect, but hand me one of those bottles and we can rinse it, at least, re-dress it with those towels,” Sarah said, pointing to one of the jugs of water behind Nikki.
The girl was coming out of her shell; maybe she’d had the same fears of Nikki that Nikki’d had of her. It was possible that’s what situations like this—if there were any comparable situations—did to people: raised their suspicions to unrealistic levels, a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome that turned good guys into bad guys. Nikki thought back to her job. Even though she’d been sitting in her office less than forty-eight hours ago, it felt like a different world. The kids that got it the worst tended to give it right back, to their classmates, teachers, and counselors.
When she’d finished bandaging, it hadn’t taken much convincing to get Sarah to have something to eat. They knelt over Paulo, alternating mopping his brow, watching the light slowly come back into his eyes, and eating Nutri-Grain bars.
Outside, the muted sounds of hell beat against the door.