CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

 

 

Emergency response rotation was fickle. Sometimes you worked two days straight without sleep. Sometimes you got a handful of hours to stretch out on a break-room sofa and cover your eyes.

Damien got lucky. Without Bobbi around to shoot the shit, there wasn't much left to do but rest.

It was closing on the end of Damien's shift when screams jerked him awake.

He was on his feet in seconds, taking stock. Past midnight. Skeleton crew only. Where the fuck was Bobbi? No time to figure it out. He ran for the doors. Screams weren't uncommon, he told himself. Usually patients post-surgery, that bone-deep fire that kept them howling and thumbing the morphine button until someone in the next bed felt sorry for them and told them it was a placebo.

Doctors and nurses screaming wasn't as common. But he knew those voices: Steven and Yasmin, two of the emergency-room nurses. They'd been taking the same shifts, jostling assignments so they'd be stationed in the same departments. And they were solid, unafraid. Took shit from the worst patients Damien had ever seen and didn't flinch. Mopped blood and bile and worse from the floors, laughing about how the drops of peppermint oil smeared inside their paper masks failed to cut the stink. Watched on as Rustwood's lead surgeon - their only surgeon, truth be told - sewed up gaping wounds and siphoned plasma from ruined flesh.

Now they sounded afraid.

Steven came through the doors first, backing away, hands over his face. His scrubs were stained yellow from knee to neck with pus, and he stank so bad that Damien gagged into his clenched fist. "The fuck's going on?"

Steven's eyes were wide, animal. Terrified. He looked at Damien but didn't meet his eyes - he was looking through him, unable to focus, pupils huge. He was biting his thumb so deep a prick of blood rose on his teeth. "Bobbi," he managed.

"Bobbi what?"

"Bobbi," he said again, and turned back to the doors. "She grabbed Yasmin. I ran. Shouldn't have run." One breath, and he was back in control. "Call security. Lock everything. She's a biohazard, man. She went upstairs. Get a mask!"

Damien stared. The words were reaching him through a fog of shock, but a couple registered: biohazard. Mask. Upstairs. "The blisters?"

"Get a goddamn mask!" Steven was shrieking now, pushing past Damien in a mad sprint for the aid station. Every floor had biohazard gear tucked away, although Damien hadn't seen or used it since orientation. It was the sort of problem best left to other people - he kept his focus on the ambulance, the location of every ampoule, the straps, the syringes, the adrenaline and bandages. The hospital was someone else's job.

Even so, he stayed on Steven's heels as his colleague ran for the closet at the rear of the aid station. It was a mess back there - management had been promising to modernize and streamline the equipment for years - and Steven was up to his waist in gear before he found a face mask.

"Steve." Damien knew he should be back at the door, out in the hall, anywhere useful, anywhere but here... but he couldn't bring himself to open those doors. The screams were growing louder. More pained. "What happened to Yasmin?"

Steven paused, mask in hand. The buckles rattled in his shaking grip.

"It got in her eyes," he said, and the doors banged open.

It took Damien a moment to recognize the figure standing there, drenched in blood and poison. Barely a woman any more, soaked through to the skin by pus, her features blurred like running wax, sickly fluids running from the ends of her fingers. It looked like she'd fallen into a mud pit and come out slick from head to toe, features barely visible through the muck.

"Christ," Damien whispered. "What did you do, Bobbi? The hell did you do?"

She held her hands close to her chest, as if there was something cupped there, protected. One wobbling step. Another. Damien didn't realise he was backing up until his shoulder blades hit the wall. Beside him, Steven swore under his breath, struggling with the straps on the face mask, fumbling as he tried to pull it over his head and failing every time.

Bobbi stopped five paces away. Her hair was glued to her neck and her scrubs were a virulent yellow, sticking to her curves, bunching over her hips, sodden with whatever she'd bathed herself in. "I followed the voice, Damien."

"Stop there. You've done something stupid, but that's okay." Benzos, he told himself. Or amphetamines, or one of the fifty other prescription drugs the night crew used to keep themselves upright through double-shifts. She'd flipped, crossed some border of psychosis, stabbed patients, rubbed herself in...

The blister sickness...

...something terrible. But that was okay. He could manage this. All he had to do was calm her down, get her into a shower. Scrub all the bad shit away while he waited for someone to arrive with restraints. "You'll be fine, Bobbi. We'll take care of you. Just sit down over there, okay? Sit down and I'll get you a coffee. I'll get you anything you want. Just-"

"I found it," she said. "I found it, bud. What the crow was trying to show me. Come here. I want you to see. Come over here." Her hands lowered from her chest, and Damien saw she was holding a clot of blood the size of a baseball. It was speckled with hair, thudding like a heart.

Breathing. Alive.

"The queen's been waiting for us," she said, and reached for his face. "You first. Then Jacinta. We should've done this a long time ago."

 

The rusted fire escape didn't creak as Peter Archer stepped off the top step and levered open the window of his dead wife's New York apartment.

All was silent as he crept through the living room, past a table strewn with takeaway containers and three empty bottles of Evan Williams Kentucky Bourbon. The apartment was thick with the greasy stink of Chinese noodles. He edged around a paperback abandoned on the floor, pages down, spine bent outward past the point of repair.

The author was Philip K Dick. The title was nonsense. Still, Peter respected fiction. Kimberly had taught him that. He stepped around the book on his toes, still moving zephyr-quiet, and entered the bedroom.

The stranger, Kimberly's lover, was asleep in bed. A curled lump beneath the covers, knees to chest, the eggshell-white sheet pulled over his head. Only his fingers protruded, still gripping the sheet tight, like he'd dragged it over his face in a desperate effort to hide from the world.

Little silver blister-packets were scattered across the scuffed boards. Painkillers? Maybe something heavier, something to take the edge off a recent loss. Peter crouched low, turned one packet over in his hands. Valium. Benzos, Peter had always called them. For weak people, people that couldn't get out of bed, stand in front of the mirror and look themselves in the eye.

At least, he'd thought that. Back before Curtis was born. Before Kimberly went all strange. A week after she'd first run from their bedroom, he'd found himself at the local drugstore with a prescription. Hadn't abused the pills, no sir. Didn't even take them every night. But they were enough to smooth over the hard parts of life. Like waking up each morning and meeting your lover's eyes, and seeing a stranger reflected back.

But the new queen, his queen, had taken all that and twisted it around. Turned depression into anger, into laser focus.

Now anger was his guide. A roadmap when the world grew too loud.

Anger had brought him to his wife's lover's apartment, in search of blood.

A full-height mirror leaned against the far wall of the bedroom, and Peter caught a flicker of his reflection as he advanced on the bed. No, not just a flicker. As he met his own eyes, he thought something blurred in his expression, like he'd drawn a cloth of gauze around his features, obscured his lips and eyes.

Then he blinked, and he was Peter again.

Maybe an illusion. Exhaustion messing with his perceptions. The further he got from the queen, the more of himself he lost. If he didn't open this path back to Rustwood soon...

Soon. Maybe even tonight.

All he needed was enough blood.

The man in the bed stirred, grumbled, rolled over. A sigh. The sheet dropped, and one hand rose up to wipe at his face.

Of course. He'd been crying. Mourning Kimberly. And who wouldn't? She'd been such an amazing woman, before she turned crazy. Before the hobo stole her away.

No! Men don't steal women. You don't own women. You never owned her.

But the new queen's voice said different. The new queen's voice said she was yours. She broke your trust. She betrayed me. She had to be dealt with.

It was an easy voice to believe. Anger felt good. It washed away guilt. Made the worst crimes easy to swallow.

One step closer to the bed. The floorboards didn't creak.

No, no, no, no, no!

The voice in the back of his head that was the old Peter Archer was dimming now. He'd beaten it down, one protest at a time. Taken the voice and buried it deep. He didn't know how deep he needed to press that voice down before it suffocated altogether, but he could feel it getting weaker. A little longer and it'd be too starved to shout any more.

And then what? Then you're just whatever this queen tells you to be. You used to have a wife! You loved her!

Used to. She was dead.

You had a child! Where's Curtis? Where'd you leave Curtis?

With the new queen, now. Safe. Where he was supposed to be.

This isn't you!

But, as Peter approached the bed, the sharpened bones sliding free of the cavities in his wrists, he thought it was him. Maybe this was who he'd always meant to be.

Not the quiet husband. The nice husband. The always-in-attendance husband. This was who he'd been pushing into the shadows for so many years. The righteous fury. The man denied.

He was owed, damn it, and he'd take what was his.

Starting with satisfaction.

The man in the bed was just settling back into sleep when Peter pressed the tip of the bone blades into the apple of his throat.

A gasp.

The stranger's eyes snapped open, bulging, wheezing. Air rushed out but not in.

Blood on his teeth. He grabbed at his own neck, at Peter's arm, at the sheets. His nails clawed down Peter's cheeks.

Peter felt nothing. Not even the heat of blood splashing thick on his wrists.