Nurse Fleigler was not pleasant, and it had not been improved by his recent excursion.
“What do you want?”
“What the hell’s going on? What’s that light out there?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Fleigler, I’m a paying customer here.”
“Nobody cares. We don’t like you. You’re a creep.”
“Please, Fleigler, gimme a break. What’s everybody looking at?”
“You haven’t earned any breaks. Sam’s still got a headache because of you.”
“Fairbrother did it!”
“Sam says you used some kind of a hold on him. Paralytic.”
“All right, I will kick this door”—he gave it three wall-shaking wallops—“until you tell me what in fuck’s happening out there!” He started in again, and, frankly, he could probably pop it off with a few more body blows.
“All right already! If you must know, it’s this really bright speck in the sky. Deep violet-red speck. It’s weird and I’m reading my Bible, so good night.”
Jesus God, what was it? The townspeople were supposed to be coming up, but who knew how they’d react to this? They were hungry, that was for sure, but this could frighten them into hiding.
It could be emitting energy, too. What if it totally killed his radio?
He had to face something here: this situation was deteriorating too fast, and changes in tempo were dangerous to missions like his. Unless some luck came his way, he was not going to succeed.
He went back to the desk and started scraping the paint away from the screws that held on the vent above it.
“I know you by your name,” he muttered as he worked. “You are Wormwood, come to collect the blood of man.”
He dissected carefully, so that there would be no evidence of anything when he returned. He’d seen the look in Glen McNamara’s eyes, baleful, the look of somebody who was just about an inch away from damn well blowing Mack Graham away. Sam, too, for that matter.
Had Caroline Light secretly taken over? She had to be above the terrified Dr. Davey-boy in the pecking order. That guy was a wet-behind-the-ears fool.
One nurse—Katie, that one—might not be on the side with them. She had a black spot, too; he’d seen it under her turned-up collar. He did not want to think about the damn things, though. What were you going to do about cancer now? And yet… something deep within him told him that this was not cancer. It told him that he’d be better off with a melanoma the size of a pie plate.
Then a welcome interruption to his thoughts: the grill came loose. Working carefully, he took it off and laid it on the desktop.
He had his route traced with measured care, every turning calculated, including the ones so tight that pushing too hard might snap his bones.
No doubt to save fuel, they’d turned off the air-conditioning an hour or so back, so the ducts would be stifling and he would have to hurry or potentially face heat stroke.
He lifted himself and raised his arms, drawing his shoulders together until his bones sighed. To get his head into the space, he had to turn it to one side with his arms straight out before him. Then he worked the rest of him in, twisting his hips until they were at a diagonal, which gave him just enough room to wriggle forward.
He felt his claustrophobia acutely now. If he got stuck in here he did not know how he could bear it. Just inches in, he knew that he was already essentially trapped, in the sense that he could only squirm ahead, not back. Lying along the duct, he began working his way around the first bend he had seen in the blueprints.
If he was successful, as far as the clinic was concerned, Caroline Light and David Ford would just disappear. Before they died, though, they were going to learn some new things about themselves, and what the human body can endure. If he failed, he would either suffocate in the ductwork or get back here and reseal his vent and nobody would be the wiser.
At the first turning, impossibly sharp, he felt his body growing warm from the effort of the stretching, then growing hot. He pushed against the aluminum corner in the smothering dark, and knew that his skull was being compressed really severely, because a storm of crazy images—a girl with a mouth like a cave laughing, a man dancing slow and burning, a dog serenading a dead child—began gushing through his mind’s eye as his brain was constricted, and bands of pain whipped his temples.
He lay along the duct gasping, his body an agony of muscle knots and popping cartilage.
A push with his toes brought some release to his head and his twisted hips. Another inserted his upper body into the larger feeder duct, giving him a pulsing rush of blood to his brain and a surge of relief.
He edged ahead now, pushing with his toes, thinking only of his objective. Another turn and he was above the nurses’ station. He worried that his movements would make too much noise until he heard the faint scratching of Fleigler’s iPod, which she was playing at its usual deafening level over her earphones. She must be trying to drown out reality. Good for her, good for him.
Finally, inching along, sweating, his eyes closed tight to minimize the feeling of being trapped, he reached the even wider sloping duct that led down to the air-conditioning system itself. Here, he could move easily and therefore go much faster. But when he pushed himself into the duct, he went into an unexpected slide, which resulted in a series of booming sounds. Worse, he went slamming headfirst into the fan, and would have been sliced to meat if it had been turning. As it was, he ended up with a painful gouge in his forehead.
The blueprints showed an access hatch here that was used to clean the fans, and he felt for it, his sense of confinement growing as his fingers sought edges that were not there.
Unless he found it, he would be trapped. There was no going back up that slope, which was far steeper than it had appeared in the blueprint. His heart sped up and he began to need to take deep breaths, but the air was foul. Without the system running, he thought he was in danger of suffocation, and it was not just his fear of confinement working.
He fluttered his fingers along the smooth duct, seeking for edges, finally touching a seam. Yes, oh, yes, he felt along it, felt hinges, felt the simple flat latch, pushed it—and it was tight, too tight to move. Wriggling, twisting, too frantic now to care about the noise he might be making, he got a quarter out of his pocket and slid it along until it stopped against the tongue of the latch. Pushing, he finally felt a shift, heard the rasp of it, felt it moving more.
Cool air rushed in and he found himself almost weeping with relief. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, he slipped out of the ductwork and into the dim basement.
Listening, looking around him, he detected no other human presence. Very well. With a predator’s quick and silent stride, he moved toward the stairs and ascended them.
Here was the supply room, its shelves mostly empty. Good, this would outrage the townies. Hopefully, they’d tear the place apart. He went to the door, then paused. He was watching the strip of light beneath it, because it was flickering.
So was somebody there, or was it the flickering of the sky tricking his eyes?
No choice but to find out, so he grasped the door handle and turned it slowly, making certain that the door did not creak as it opened.
Before him spread the kitchen, with its long row of gleaming stainless steel ranges, its ovens, its broad cutting tables. Stepping softly and quickly to the knife wall, he pulled down a cleaver, a nice one, beautifully weighted, sharp as sin. So he would be the classic madman with a cleaver. Except he knew how to use things like this.
What little of him that might have been decent, might have felt mercy or relented, now slipped into memory, became unreal to him, and finally went out like a dying candle.
He felt full of the dark, and was in a curious way comfortable in it, like a man who has entered a cave that appeared dreadful from the outside, but who, once inside, becomes used to its terrors.
He strode across the kitchen, pushing through the double swinging doors into the dining room. Here, all was elegance, the crystal stemware flaring with the wild light from outside, the silver seeming to jump on the place settings from the glowing sky.
It was different tonight, the auroras pulsating rather than flashing, and there were long streaks of light in the
