warning to be gone before the night shift.
Ah, well. As long as he had his uniform and mop, they wouldn't know any better than day shift had that… that…
Matt stopped breathing.
Leaned close to the monitor, eyes wide.
'Oh… crap.'
The front entryway had filled with eight or nine men. They crowded around the front desk, signing in on the clipboard. The were big guys, bull necked, muscle-bound. A different breed from second shift. But that wasn't what made his breath catch in his throat.
It was their faces.
The grainy display may have had shit resolution, but it was still clear enough that he could see the dead flesh scrolling off the cheeks of the first aide to strut from the desk to the back hallway. And the second had a jagged hole where his nose should have been. The third had corroded skin hanging in tatters from his lower jaw. The fourth had no lower jaw. The fifth was awful. The sixth was worse. The seventh was indescribable.
'Fuck me.'
Every single member of the night shift showed a hefty helping of Mr. Dark's rotting touch.
What had Maloria said?
Them fucked-up niggahs workin' midnights? They don't play.
He believed it.
And he believed he had to get out. Now.
Palms sweating, Matt hefted his rucksack, slung it over his shoulder, and spun around right into Darak's fist.
'Jesus.' Matt staggered back into the console, clutching his eye.
'Think that was funny, motherfucker? Sendin' me all over the fuckin' place?' Darak, a black blur in his Wu- Tang outfit and dollar-sign do-rag, closed in quickly, using a bowlegged karate stance. 'How funny you gonna find this?' He swiveled backward, and Matt ducked just in time to avoid having his head taken off by a completely respectable roundhouse kick. He could feel the wind of it ruffle his hair as it flew past.
Matt wasn't in the mood for a cage match, so he tried to shove past Darak and bolt for the door.
He almost made it. Almost.
Instead, Darak grabbed him by the collar from behind, said, 'Oh, no you don't, bitch,' and flung him into the 'Treatment Plans / Overflow' file cabinet.
The back of Matt's head hit the metal cabinet with a hollow boom. He hit so hard that when he bounced off, the metal drawer slid out on its rollers.
'Guess you felt that,' Darak laughed, closing in again in a low crouch as Matt backed up, head ringing, his shoulder brushing the open metal drawer. 'And I got more where that came from. Guess you didn't know I'm a black belt, huh? Well, I am.' Darak gripped the lip of the open metal drawer, leveraging himself for another kick. 'Pay attention, bitch: I'm about to demonstrate the Flying Dragon, which goes a little like-AAAH!'
His threat morphed into a high-pitched scream as Matt shouldered the metal drawer closed on his hand. Darak spun around towards the cabinet, trying to pry his hand free, and that's when Matt punched him in the side of the neck. Darak gagged. Matt grabbed the back of his head and drove his face into the file cabinet. When he rebounded with a wail, Matt used his momentum to swing him by the hair across the small space, trip him with an outstretched leg, and drive his fall into the surveillance console.
Darak crashed into the low steel shelf with a deep groan. He slid to his knees, leaving a trail of blood across the control panel.
Matt grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him to his feet. He was about to reintroduce Darak's face to the console when a blur of movement caught his eye.
Shit, he thought. What now?
It was the monitor showing the hallway to the women's dorm in Module One. The grainy, black-and-white relay from the security camera showed two male aides dragging a young girl out of the women's dorm. He recognized her: it was Annica, the not-so-telekinetic blonde with the smeared makeup. She was fighting their grip, but it was no use. Together they dragged her across the hall and into the women's washroom. A third aide sauntered behind them casually, and then stood in the open doorway, arms crossed, on guard.
'Goddammit.' Matt dragged Darak over to the closet. Darak's eyes rolled his way, and he made a feeble attempt to claw Matt's face. Matt rewarded his efforts with a brief but meaningful head butt, then said, 'Pay attention, Darak: I'm about to demonstrate the Flying Foot, which goes a little like this.' He buried his steel-toed Carhartt in Darak's crotch and shoved him into the closet.
'Namaste,' he said, 'you fuckhead.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
'About time,' Dindren hissed as Matt came barreling out of Admin. 'What'd you do in there, take a nap? I think I may have caught hypothermia standing out here in the- Hey, where are you going?'
'Module One,' Matt said. 'Girl needs help.'
'Well, this girl isn't going into any modules,' Dindren panted, struggling to keep up. 'The night shift is here. I'm making for the meditation path. It leads into the amphitheater in the woods, and away from this hellhole. If you have any sense, you'll do the same.'
'Meet you there in three minutes,' Matt said, running up the steps to Module One.
'I doubt it,' Dindren said, his voice rising with a wild elation as he ran for the foggy shadows at the end of the quad, his pink, daisy-print scrubs flapping behind him, 'but thanks anyway. And remember: ask the question, or forever hold your peace!'
Matt let himself into Module One, forced himself to slow down, and cautiously crossed the entryway to the common room. No aides. The TV was blaring a nasty Adult Swim cartoon, which was being watched by two slack- jawed male residents that Matt had never seen before. The guy who had drawn a maze on the wall earlier was still there, only now he was kneeling in front of it, banging his forehead into the center of the design again and again, making a mewing sound. No sign of the huge Ojibwe with the flame tattoos. On the table he'd been standing on were an empty pizza box and a spilled bottle of meds.
Nice.
Over the blare of the TV Matt heard a muffled shriek, and then another. They came from the hall leading to the women's dorm. He crossed the common room quickly, unnoticed, grabbing the mop Maloria had left behind that afternoon.
A few seconds later he was walking down the dimly lit linoleum corridor he'd seen on the Control Room monitor. As he got closer, he saw that the third aide was still standing in the washroom entryway, but instead of watching the hallway, he had turned inward to check out the action.
' That 's it,' he laughed as the girl's shrieks rose in pitch, ' take that shit off.'
Matt came behind him, moving fast. He knew he couldn't waste much time with the lookout, so he restricted himself to kicking him as hard as he could in the side of his knee. The guy went down like a bag of sand. A loud bag of sand.
His yell of pain was lost in the TV's blare as Matt entered the women's bathroom. It had a tiled shower area and five open stalls, one of which had a toilet with a nasty overflow problem. The other two aides had dragged Annica into the communal shower area, under a sputtering spigot. Her torn-off T-shirt lay on the floor. The only things she still had on were a pink sports bra and flannel pajama bottoms, and those were half off. An aide who looked like a plus-size Captain Morgan-complete with piratical goatee and gold earring-had her wrists pinned to the tile wall, while his weaselly pal gripped her raised ankle with one hand while the other pried her pajama pants down to midthigh, revealing star-spangled boy shorts beneath.
She was hysterical. Captain Morgan was alternately shushing her and laughing, and Weasel was saying, 'It's all good, girl, it's all good.' Matt saw that if he took them both on at once, she might get hurt-and he might not do
