Come Little Children (38 page)

The morgue was deserted. A row of stainless-steel body drawers dominated the right-hand wall like a grid of polished gym lockers; the rest was a series of adjustable ceiling lamps, industrial sinks, and washing stations. The only decoration in the entire room was a grinning Kit-Cat Clock hanging beside the door, its black pendulum tail
tick-tock
ing with the gaping cartoon eyes that had seen more death in one day than most people see in a lifetime.

Camilla unbuttoned her blazer and crossed the room to a laundry hamper. She snagged a green hospital gown and slipped out of her shoes and socks, rolling up the cuffs of her pants and dress shirt, and slung the gown over her shoulders. Her skin prickled as the fabric settled down; even Camilla, who was used to everything morbid and macabre, got the heebie-jeebies thinking about the fact that the gown had been worn by a corpse not that long ago. She reached around the back and worked the strings into a little bow, then gathered up her jacket and shoes and stalked across the chilly linoleum.

A freezer compartment swung open and a pair of wrinkled feet popped free. She slid out the tray and folded back the white
shroud to unveil a shriveled arm with a hospital bracelet looped around the left wrist. The limb was so emaciated that Camilla was able to reach down and slide the band clean off.

Isobel K. Zuckerman
.

She forced it around her own wrist, then placed her jacket and shoes on Isobel’s chest before sliding the compartment back in and shutting the door.

Finally Camilla moved to the cupboards and found a pair a shears in the nearest drawer. With a deep breath, she bunched up her hair in one hand and made a monstrous
snip
with the scissor blades. Ten inches of red locks rained over the trash can and disappeared in its rumpled black mouth. Roughing out what was left of her truncated hairdo, she allowed herself one wince before ducking below the sink and searching for phase two of the disguise.

Disinfectant wipes, Dawn Power Dissolver, mildew remover, cotton swabs, latex gloves, hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, all-purpose cleaner, rubber gloves...

She took a pair of rubber gloves and put them on, then retrieved the peroxide and ammonia and cracked them open above the sink.

Her hands hesitated. “Don’t wimp out now.”

Camilla craned her neck over the basin and tilted her head forward, closing her eyes as peroxide and ammonia came trickling over her skin and sloshed down the glugging stainless-steel drain.

The door of the morgue peeked open and Camilla stepped through...

She was wrapped in an aqua hospital gown with a paper surgical mask covering her mouth and nose. Her hair, which
typically hung below her shoulder blades, was barely to her jawline now, and its rich red color had transformed to a dull, washed-out dirty blonde. Thanks to the corrosive concoction of diluted ammonia and hydrogen peroxide, the strands were fried in all directions and her scalp burned like hell.

She ruffled her bangs, but it was a lost cause. A few loose tufts fell to the floor and settled on the tiles.
I think I’m going to be sick
.

She choked back the urge to vomit and climbed the stairwell to the first floor, pausing outside the door to the main lobby. There was a clique of nurses around a circular check-in desk, and behind them hung a list of wards with tiny arrows giving directions down the appropriate hallways. Cafeteria to the right, outpatients to the right. OR straight ahead. Imaging to the left. Recovery ward second floor.

Second floor it is
.

She stepped away from the door and took the flight of stairs up another level.

The second floor had a triage desk and a common area situated in front of the elevators, followed by a long hallway with recovery rooms flanking either side. A handful patients were watching an episode of
Divorce Court
on the old tube TV in the corner, while a few others pretended to partake in higher forms of entertainment—newspapers and crosswords and issues of
The Economist
—when, really, they too were glued to Judge Lynn Toler’s hammer of justice in between commercials for Freddy’s Fun Fry Chicken Wings and rainbow Snuggies.

At first when Camilla stepped into the room, she thought she could hear the fluorescents humming above the silence, but then she realized it was just the sound of her blood in her ears.

The receptionist barely glanced up. As Camilla walked by, she noticed in the reflection of the nurse’s glasses that the woman was too busy sorting through an online shopping cart to notice anything short of a power outage.

Camilla’s heart rapped harder and harder against her chest as she passed an elderly man with a
Midnight Sun
lying in his lap. The front page showed Camilla and Abigail’s picture underneath the giant headline:
VINCENTS ACCUSE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF CRIMES AGAINST NOLAN
. The photo, with Peter cropped out, was taken in their courtyard two summers ago. She imagined Moira hacking apart the picture and her blood began to boil. How long had it taken the old hag to rush to an album and find the appropriate snapshot she wanted to cut up? And how much satisfaction had she felt when she finally got to slice the two of them—the cancerous, rotted limbs—off her family tree, despite seven years of living together and claiming to love them as much as the rest of the family?

Camilla pressed on, not entirely sure what she was looking for but hoping she would know it when she saw it.

As she stepped past the recovery rooms, she peeked inside and saw most of the patients passed out on their mattresses, or looking lazily out their windows at nothing in particular.
Is it supposed to be this quiet in here?
The thick silence combined with the atrophied, degenerated looks in the Nolaners’ faces reminded her not of a recovery ward, but of a palliative care unit.
Or worse, death row
.

She got to the end of the hallway and arrived at the hospital’s neonatal unit. A large windowpane was fixed in the wall so that excited parents could look inside and watch their newborns doze peacefully in their incubators.

Except all the incubators were empty.

She touched the fingerprint smudges on the glass and imagined hundreds of parents pressing themselves against the window to be as close to their children as possible. The Mullards, the Pinktons, the Corys. Herself. No parent could predict what would become of those little bundles any more than they could see their own futures, but they had all stood there the same, wishing and praying for the best. Camilla shook her head. The best doesn’t always come to pass.

“Hey! Stop it!”

Camilla spun around as a monstrous
crash
thundered through the hall. Someone was screaming inside one of the rooms.

The nurse at the front desk snapped out of online-shopping mode and started pecking numbers on her phone like a terrified hen. Barely ten seconds later, two burly orderlies came bursting out from the stairwell and went running into the room where the shrieking was coming from.

Camilla slunk to the doorway. Inside, the orderlies had a man—a skeletal, white-haired patient—pinned to the floor. He was thrashing like a 60-pound walleye with a hook caught in its face, and his scraggily arms pulsed with sinewy strength that was difficult to restrain, even for two fully grown men.

But his veins weren’t the only parts of him rushing with blood. There were lines of crimson trickling down the corners of his mouth, and when he roared at the top of his lungs, the spaces between his teeth flashed the same sanguine bloodstains. Camilla gaped in horror at how much the man’s dark, screaming rictus reminded her of the Cory sisters’ demonic faces.

The blood trailed across the floor to another man: the one who was shrieking the loudest. He was rocking against the far
wall in a mortified fetal position, a chunk of his cheek bitten clean off. One of the nurses was trying to wrap a bandage around his face, but he wouldn’t stay still.

“Fucker bit me! I was sleeping, and he just bit me! Just—just bit me!”

“I’m comin’ for the rest!” The man with the blood in his teeth gnashed.

“Hurry up!” shouted an orderly. “Stick ‘im!”

A syringe flashed through the air and plunged into the attacker’s wrist. The man wailed, but the staff kept him down while they pulled over an IV cart and fought with the tubing. Finally they got a drip going, and it wasn’t ten seconds later that the deranged patient lost his edge, then another five before he was out cold.

Without a moment’s pause, the orderlies lifted the unconscious cannibal off the floor and dumped him into a wheelchair. They marked a big black
X
on his hospital wristband, then gathered the cart and wheeled him out of the door. Camilla stepped back as they took the sedated man to the elevator and punched the Up button, then disappeared inside.

Just like that, the chaos was over. The perpetrator was gone in three minutes flat, and the receptionist was already on
amazon.com
again, browsing second-hand designer clutches and all the related accoutrements. No one else seemed phased in the slightest. Someone had turned the volume of
Divorce Court
up a few notches, but otherwise it seemed like everybody was used to this kind of occasional ruckus.

I’ve got to know what happens next
.

Camilla strode briskly through the common area and ducked into the stairwell, taking one more flight of steps up to the top of the building.

The handle was locked from the inside.

Camilla spied through the window in the door: the third floor was darker than the second. Two banks of fluorescents were out, which left one strip of lights pulsing at the end of the hall. It was completely deserted, except for one person: Officer Mick “The Prick” Logan. He was stationed at the far end with a semiautomatic rifle tucked under his bony arm, and behind him was a glass wall that someone had covered with a tarp and spray-painted NO ACCESS across in thick, red lettering. Beside him was a direct telephone line with no keypad or turn-dial, its cords trailing haphazardly across the room and disappearing into the far wall.

The elevator dinged and the two orderlies appeared with the sedated patient from the second floor. As they rolled the catatonic man down the corridor, the staffer doing the pushing had to jerk the chair to the right every five or six steps to keep it on course. Apparently one of the wheels had a screw loose, just like the man it was ferrying.

When they got to the far end, Mick reached down and checked the patient’s wristband. He saw the black
X
and stepped away from the door, giving a small nod as the orderlies pushed the rickety wheelchair into the tarp-covered area and disappeared through the sliding glass. Just as the doors coasted shut, the elevator dinged again.

“Wait!” someone called out. The nurse from the second floor sprinted down the hall.

Mick cocked his rifle dangerously.

“It’s his watch,” came the nurse’s voice again. “The bugger dropped it in the room.”

“He’s gone now, sweet cheeks,” Mick said.

“Come on. Please. Let me give it to him.”

“No can do.”

“But he
just
went inside. I can still see his shadow…”

The nurse reached for the door, but Mick cut her off with the barrel of his gun. “’Fraid not. You know the rules.”

The nurse huffed. She leaned in, quieter, and Camilla strained to hear her whisper. “You don’t understand. He was my neighbor growing up. It’s—it’s his dad’s. It’s all he’s got left. Please, would you give it to him?”

The nurse held out a wristwatch.

“I’m sorry,” Mick said, taking the heirloom and examining the band, “but
you
don’t understand. He’s gone. There ain’t nobody to give this to.”

He threw the watch into a metal trash can, and there was a
smash
of shattered glass. The look on the nurse’s face cracked too. Her mouth bunched up and she was twitching so hard that it seemed she might slap the cop any second, but then she spun on her heels and stormed back down the hall before anything turned violent.

Camilla ducked below the window as the nurse charged past. She waited until the whir of the elevator gears started up again before looking back through the door.

That’s it. It has to be
. Her eyes focused on the tarp.
The quarantine unit
.

She knew Abigail wouldn’t be there—she had known that before she set foot in the hospital—but maybe someone inside had seen her or heard something in the last two days.
It’s a blind shot, but it’s the only one I’ve got
.
I have to take it
.

She started down the stairs again, two with every leap, and by the time she reached the basement, she had most of the next phase fleshed out. All the break-in required now was a wheelchair, a marker, and enough guts to get through one more round of self-mutilation.

Camilla sunk the needle into her skin and pierced the nearest vein. As she wiggled an IV tube into her arm and taped it down, she felt the cool trickle of saline drip into her bloodstream. She squirmed, but then it felt normal, even exhilarating.

Her hand reached up and turned the label of the saline pouch to the inside of the cart. She was suddenly reminded of college when her and her friend Vickie would give each other homemade IVs after too many vodka screwdrivers during finals season; the perfect solution was a mixture of water and salt to a .9 percent concentration, then injected for a near instant hangover cure.
If only other students realized how handy chemistry could be
.

Camilla took a marker and stroked a black
X
through Isobel K. Zuckerman’s name on her wristband. She stared at the mark and felt a twinge of fear, knowing that she had just signed her own death warrant. “You live in a crypt,” she muttered to herself. “You’re dead already.” Her palms closed around the handles of the wheelchair she had taken from under the stairwell and rolled it to the elevator.

Ding
.

The gunmetal doors peeled open, and Camilla guided her chair inside. She pressed the top button with a shaky finger and took a seat in the apparatus, adjusting her IV. The elevator lurched upward.