Come Little Children (39 page)

Ding
. Main floor.

She ruffled her wiry hair in front of her face and patted the wrist tube one more time.

Ding
. Second floor.

Her heart dropped with every inch of the shaft. This was as far as the plan went; she had no idea what awaited her through the quarantine doors—and no idea how to get out again—but
she pushed those thoughts away and concentrated on the electric floor indicator instead.
Focus on getting in first
.

Ding
. Third floor.

Her hands smoothed out her gown and she wilted as the elevator doors parted open.

Mick stirred at the end of the hall. He sat up with his heavy assault rifle, alert, at the unexpected arrival.

“Hey!” he shouted. “You’re not supposed to be up here.”

Camilla didn’t respond.

“Get back down, all right?”

She stayed dead still, her eyes nothing but slits as her breath sucked the surgical mask in and out, in and out, like someone hyperventilating in a brown paper bag. She told herself to slow her breathing, but it felt like the bottled air might rupture her lungs any second.

A chair scraped across the floor, and a set of boots came stalking down the hallway. She heard the rifle strap loosen off Mick’s shoulder, and then his shadow fell directly over her.

He recognizes me. Dear God he recognizes me, he’s loading his gun and he’s bringing it up and he’s…

A calloused hand came down and snatched her wrist. It took everything she had not to scream.

“Well, well. We got ourselves another
X
.” He hacked back a throat full of phlegm and hocked a loogie on Camilla’s head. “Welcome to the third floor. Freak.” He sniggered and took the handles of her wheelchair, rolling her out of the elevator into the hall.

Camilla closed her eyes as the glob of mucus ran down her forehead and along her left temple. Never before had she wanted to move so badly—to wipe off the snot and shove it back down The Prick’s throat—but her muscles stayed frozen
as the slime continued slipping across her cheek and into the corner of her lips.

The door to the palliative care unit clanked open and the wheelchair pushed through the tarp flaps. Instantly she smelled something awful. It wasn’t pungent or rancid; it was a warm staleness that dried out her mouth and got caught in the back of her throat, like fungal thrush. The wheelchair stopped and Mick walked off again—this time, she noted, a bit quicker. Other than the footsteps the room was silent.

As soon as Camilla heard the door close, her hand shot up and wiped the loogie off her face.

She opened her eyes: there were a few distorted shapes beyond her ruffled bangs. Suddenly a sixth sense went off—
someone’s watching me
—and she brushed her hair aside, turning to see an old man standing right beside her. His pupils were glazed over with a thin, milky film, but something mean flickered behind the haze.

Camilla leaned back but the man didn’t move. His IV was filled with a real sedative, and she surmised that he was too stoned to even blink.
Thank God
.

There were a dozen other people parked haphazardly around the space—some in beds, some in wheelchairs, some on benches—all staring at her with their flickering, grabby eyes.

She knew immediately that this had been a bad idea. These people didn’t want to help her; they wanted to kill her. There was no doubt in her mind that they would have tried too, if they weren’t tranquilized like rabid beasts.

The rot spreads…it gets worse…it must be abolished
.

She pulled the IV out of her arm and pressed the tape to stop the bleeding. A drop of blood escaped and dripped to the floor; in unison, all of the eyes in the room flitted to the blood,
then back up again as fast as the flap of a moth’s wings. It was singularly the subtlest, creepiest thing Camilla had ever seen.

She got out her wheelchair—careful not to make a sound—and slipped past a few of the bodies, moving to the edge of the room. The patients’ pupils followed her every step. There was a needle disposal bin mounted on the far wall, and beside it was a two-foot-by-two-foot stainless-steel hatch. She pulled the handle back and stared inside a metal duct that sloped downward into a black void. The smell of trash wafted up—a potent mix of soiled linens, discarded sanitary bags, molding compost, and used colonoscopy bags. Never in her life was she so happy to smell the stink of a garbage chute.
Bingo
.
Let’s get the hell out of here
.

“You’ll never find her,” a voice croaked.

Camilla whipped around and stared back at the eyes that were watching her. She couldn’t tell who had spoken.

“You’ll never find her,” it repeated.

She met the gaze of the patient who had arrived just before her. He was grinning with the blood of his last victim still crusted around his lips and lining the gaps of his teeth. “You’ll never, never, never find her…” His voice got quieter on every “never” until it faded to nothing more than lip movements.

Camilla hesitated. She stepped away from the garbage chute and crossed the room toward the man slumped in the chair.

“Where is she?” she whispered.

The man’s lips were still moving, but no sound came out.

She edged closer and knelt down to his seated level, searching his milk-white gaze for the answer she desperately wanted. Then for one of the few times in her life, Camilla Vincent missed a vital observation. Even when her knee touched the pool of liquid on the wet floor, she was too distracted to notice
that the man’s IV had been chewed clean through, and that the sedative was dripping into his lap and down the spokes of his wheelchair instead of into his veins.

“Where is she?” Camilla pressed.

The man curled his lips into a bloodstained smile. “I cut her up and ate her. Ate my wife and drank her blood.” The cloudy film vanished from his eyes. “And you’re next.” He lunged out of his wheelchair and seized Camilla’s arms, tackling her to the ground.

Camilla screamed as the cannibal gnashed at her with his razor fangs. His surprising strength had returned, and it took every band of muscle to stop him from sinking his teeth into her neck.

The door crashed open and Mick ran in, squaring his rifle with the cannibal’s forehead. Three shots exploded in the air, but the cannibal whirled around in time to scamper out of the way and ram a wheelchair across the room. The chair caught Mick and buckled him to the floor, sending the rifle sailing out of his hands.

“Help!” Mick screamed into his walkie-talkie. “Backup! Help!”

The officer and the cannibal lunged for the gun at the same time and wrestled tooth and nail for the handle. Another round of shots rang out and sparks showered over the room, plunging the space into strobing darkness.

Camilla was blinded. She groped around the wall for the garbage hatch while more blasts erupted behind her, exploding the windows and TV sets and security cameras like glass bottles in a high-powered rifle gallery.

Her hand bumped the familiar stainless-steel handle, and she winced with relief, ripping it open as a gust of cool, rancid air whooshed into the room.

There was another flash of sparks and something slammed against the wall beside her. She looked over in horror to see Mick’s dead eyes staring back, parts of his nose and lips torn off with blood gushing down the front of his face.

A hand grabbed Camilla’s shoulder—she screamed and turned around to see the cannibal still chewing on the officer’s flesh. His sinewy hands seized her neck and she had to cling to his fingers to stop from choking to death.

Somewhere in the distance the elevator
dinged
and more officers could be heard scrambling to the unit. The cannibal’s guard fell for a split second, but it was all Camilla needed; she reached over and yanked the plastic container of discarded hospital needles off the wall, then slammed it upside down over the cannibal’s head. He screeched and let go just as the other policemen came bursting into the room.

Camilla didn’t wait to see what happened next. She flung herself headfirst into the garbage chute and disappeared down the metal duct as three, four, five more shots exploded behind her.

The chute opened up on an industrial-size dumpster and dropped her into a sea of debris. Gunfire was still echoing through the duct, but she didn’t stop to listen. She clawed her way over the mounds of garbage bags and tore off into the trees behind the hospital, all the way back to the crypt, just as the last rays of the sinking sun cast a bloody hue over every inch of Nolan.

29

St. Luther’s

T
he night was cloudy and the colorful streaks of northern lights had vanished from the sky. Not even the crescent moon shone through the cracks in the crypt as Camilla sat there, alone in the dark, hearing the hiss of the old cannibal in her ear.
I ate her. Ate my wife and drank her blood. And you’re next
.

A water driblet plopped somewhere in the darkness, and Camilla pictured her own blood hitting the hospital floor. She saw the milky eyes flitting down and flitting back up again, hungry for a taste of flesh.

She shuddered. The hospital gown was drawn over her body like a paper blanket offering imaginary warmth, and as a deadly chill crept into her skin, she felt her feet going numb in the plastic booties on the cold tomb floor. She had left her shoes and her jacket at the morgue—
and my hair, God, my hair
—but that wasn’t all that was absent. She had also lost her last cantle of hope.

A patter of rodent claws scurried past her head and broke her train of thought. She
knew
she would never sleep again. Not in here, at least. Not in this mental twilight zone where the stony surfaces were worse than padded walls and the cold air squeezed
like an icy straitjacket. If she didn’t get out now, she realized it wouldn’t be long before she drowned in her own stream of consciousness and went completely insane. Yes, insanity itself suddenly seemed like a tangible river that she was dipping her toes into. Every second she stayed in the tomb was another swish forward, and the drop-off point, which was invisible from above the current, could be twenty feet away or as close as one step ahead of her. It was a testament of her willpower, her incredible luck, or substantive proof of a higher existence that she had made it this far already, but in any of those cases there was a fine, fine line between persistence and stupidity. This was it, the breaking point on the precipice of madness: stay and freeze to death or try to survive.

The pot lights in St. Luther’s were left on at quarter brightness. The ceiling fans were off, the altar was bare, and the smell of incense still steeped the air long after the thurifer had swung his censer earlier that morning. Even though the building was empty, the floorboards creaked and crackled as if invisible members of the congregation were moving about the benches.

Camilla emerged from the shadows at the back. She stepped down the aisle and suddenly felt as small as a church mouse in St. Peter’s Basilica. As she tiptoed farther inside, she spied the doorways and the corners of the room to make sure she was alone, and when she got to the middle of the sanctuary, she awkwardly genuflected—
do Anglicans do that?
—and took a seat in one of the pews.

The goose bumps smoothed over her skin as the warm room thawed her frozen limbs.

Her neck cracked.

The backs of her legs burned like fire.

She ran a few sheaves of her wiry hair through her trembling hands and massaged the scab where the IV had been.
I’ve put myself through hell
, she thought,
and for what? What do I have to show for it? Nothing
.

Her whole body trembled, and the tears started falling. They flowed harder than ever and dripped down the back of the pew in front of her, pooling on the bench like a light, dappling rain.

She clamped her hands together and leaned forward, resting her head on top. It felt alien, but she forced herself to do it anyway. It was the only approach left—the only method she hadn’t tried yet—and there was nothing left to lose. No pride. No personal philosophy. No scientific pretentiousness. As Jasper had once told her, she was
outside the realm of science now
, and
there are no atheists in foxholes
.

As Camilla closed her eyes, the truth finally sunk in. She hadn’t been smart enough. She had followed her only lead to a bloody ending where at least two more people were slaughtered, and still she had no idea of her own daughter’s whereabouts. Cut to a church and the image of her sitting with her head in her hands, weeping, on the brink of begging for help and forgiveness from something that she had always dismissed as empty air.
If there really is a God
, she thought,
I don’t deserve anything from Him
.

She sniffed.
Still
, a distant thought nudged her,
what about mercy and forgiveness? If all these Christmas-Eve Christians can get into heaven by showing up at candlelight services and singing “Silent Night” once a year, why can’t I get a little help when I really need it?

Camilla looked up at the stained-glass wall above the altar and tried to see it for more than what it was. She leaned back, taking in the window as a whole—as more than thousands of carefully arranged fragments—and tried to find God somewhere in the glass. She stared longer, unblinking, but nothing
appeared. Even if Father Almighty could transfigure Himself as some mystical stereogram, she considered, she still had no idea what on heaven or earth she should say.

Stop expecting Him to put on a show and just pray like a normal person
.

She clasped her hands together again, as if somehow it might strengthen the frequency of her prayers, and bowed her head. Her lips and mind were quiet.

“Dear God,” she started. Her voice cracked, echoing in the rafters. “Forgive me. Please. I’ve been in denial. In doubt.” Her hands reached up and squeezed her head, frustrated at not finding any of the words that she wanted. “Help,” she settled on. “Please…I need help.”

The balcony at the back of the church groaned, sending a ripple of crackles throughout the rest of the building. She looked over her shoulder and wondered for a cynical moment if something other than the wind had caused it to creak, but there was nothing in the shadows.