Chapter 51 #2
“Get them out of here,” I croak. “I don’t care how you do it.”
“With pleasure.”
He’s gone for maybe twenty minutes. When he comes back, he’s looking awfully pleased with himself.
“So?” I ask.
“Told them you died,” he says, dropping into the chair beside my bed and kicking his boots up on the mattress. “Massive infection. Couldn’t save you. Very tragic.”
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it, which immediately turns into a cough that makes my throat sob with pain. Griffin’s there with water before I can reach for it.
I doubt they bought it. Reporters are roaches. You can stomp on them all you want, but they never go away. Hopefully, this will keep them away until I can get back to the house.
Griffin gestures at the TV. “So, Grease today?”
No journalists are prowling around on day eight, probably busy writing their theories and rumors into huge clickbait articles.
When I’m discharged on day ten, I’m strong enough to wheel myself to the van without getting dizzy.
I put on a surgical mask and one of DJ’s floppy sun hats that Griffin brings from home in case any journalists are hoping to snap pictures of my body, dead or alive.
My arm is in a sling, and my hand is bandaged so much that I can almost pretend I still have fingers under there.
I’m feeling okay at the beginning of the ride back to the house, but my stomach doesn’t cooperate for long. The three hours pass in a blur of rest stops and me throwing up ginger ale on the side of the road.
Bob is waiting as soon as Griffin opens the door.
I start crying the second I see him. Full body sobs that hurt my tender throat on the way up. Bob runs to the edge of the wheelchair, not letting his cast slow him down, wiggling and whining because he can’t get to me.
I push myself out of the chair and onto the ground, holding my arm out to scoop him onto my lap.
He braces one paw on each of my shoulders and licks all over my face, his cone scratching my chin, and we sit there in the entryway, both of us trembling because it’s just him and me again.
People beat us and tried to kill us, but we’re still here.
I love him more than anything in the world.
“He barely ate while you were gone,” Griffin says. “He wouldn’t come out of your room. Benji fed him strips of chicken by hand.”
“I taught him how to spin, and he does it seventy-five percent of the time,” Benji says, stepping through the living room door. “Mental stimulation is good for relieving symptoms of anxiety.”
I’m surprised Benji got him to spin that quickly. Bob didn’t know any tricks when I rescued him, but I managed to teach him ‘sit’ and ‘lie down.’ We’re still working on ‘paw.’ Bob doesn’t like me touching his feet.
Griffin helps me back into my chair, and I lift Bob up onto my lap.
“I’m going to make us lunch,” Griffin says. “Hope you’re in the mood for mediocre grilled cheese and canned tomato soup. Genius Boy insisted I buy the fancy cheese.”
“It’s aged gruyère,” Benji protests. “The aging process creates flavor compounds that enhance the melting profile. You know how to cook. You should know this.”
Griffin claps Benji on the shoulder as he passes. “I’m more of a government cheese guy myself.”
Bob chows down on a big bowl of kibble as I eat my grilled cheese. I give him pieces of the crust when he’s done.
I set up camp on the couch because going upstairs to my room feels like climbing a mountain.
Griffin brings me a change of clothes and a bag of my toiletries, and even goes out to buy me wet wipes I can use to clean up.
I’m too woozy to even think about making it through a shower, especially one-handed.
Griffin sleeps in the armchair. The living room is pitch dark, but there’s a light on in Donny’s apartment outside.
His windows are yellow squares in the night.
I never went up there, but I can picture him in his green tartan robe and slippers, sitting with a cup of tea.
Imagining it makes my chest all tight and achy.
I wonder if Dad has said thank you to Donny for protecting his girl.
In the morning, Griffin helps me clean my stump.
“I’m kind of an expert on this, not to flex.” Griffin pulls back the gauze and I openly stare at the wound, examining every black stitch jutting out of my bruised flesh. “Once this baby is healed, I’m going to make you a rad prosthetic.”
I’m so glad to be alive that I don’t even care that I’m down a hand. I can still give as many thumbs-up as I want.
Zoey appears in the doorway with her laptop tucked under one arm.
“I found seven possible locations,” she says without preamble, dropping onto the armrest of the couch. “Four abandoned hospitals. Two asylums. One psychiatric facility that closed in the nineties. All within an hour’s drive of the gas station you called from.”
Three thousand seven hundred and eighty-four seconds comes out to roughly an hour. It sure felt longer.
I sit up on the couch, pausing Hairspray. “Do you have pictures?”
“Of some of them.”
She angles her laptop screen. The first image shows a sprawling brick building with boarded-up windows and graffiti covering the lower floors. The windows are wrong. There are too many of them.
She clicks through the images, and each one makes my pulse spike before I realize it’s not the place. By the time we finish going through the pictures, my hands are shaking.
“I couldn’t find interior shots of these four,” Zoey says. “Or good exteriors, honestly.”
“So, we go check them out in person,” I say.
I hear Griffin make a sound from down the hall that’s somewhere between a cough and a laugh.
“Fat chance,” he says, appearing in the doorway with a dish towel slung over his shoulder. “You can barely make it to the bathroom on your own.”
“Good thing I won’t be on my own then,” I say. “You guys can wear body cams, and I’ll watch from the van.”
Griffin opens his mouth, but Zoey cuts him off.
“It’s a good idea.” Zoey looks at me. “You sure you’re up for it?”
“Yes.” I don’t hesitate. I need to do something.
Griffin unshoulders the dish towel, wringing it between his hands. “Nico wouldn’t like this.”
“Nico’s not here,” Zoey counters.
Benji comes down the stairs, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. “Technically, DJ is in command after Nico,” he says. “You should ask her.”
DJ says yes, on the condition that I turn around if I start feeling like crap. I feel like crap anyway, so I might as well feel like crap in the field.
We go in the morning. I bring Bob for emotional support. If he starts coming on missions, I’m going to have DJ teach me how to sew him a doggy jumpsuit.
The first location is forty minutes away, an old psychiatric facility in West Virginia that closed in 1987 after a patient abuse controversy.
Griffin and Benji disappear inside while Zoey pulls up the body cam feed from the passenger seat.
I get the delayed realization that Benji is going into the field without Nico.
I wonder if he changed his mind about only shadowing Nico after Donny died, or after Nico and I were almost killed.
If I were Benji, I’d want to make sure I was as prepared as I could be, in case I could stop anyone else from getting hurt.
I watch with my heart in my throat as Benji and Griffin move through hallways that look like they have the right tile. It all looks different during the day and, you know, when I’m not running for my life. But as soon as they go to the lower level, I know immediately it’s wrong.
“It’s too cramped,” I say, pointing over Zoey’s shoulder at the image of the hallway.
We move on to the next location, but it’s not right either. By the third building, I’m starting to worry that my memory isn’t reliable. The panic and fear could have muddied everything until I invented details that don’t exist.
The fourth location is an old state hospital in Maryland, near the highway.
Five stories of red brick and broken windows, surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Even though it’s winter, it’s easy to tell how overgrown the grass is and that it’s been matted down.
There are a couple of speed bumps in the parking lot.
Griffin and Benji push through a gate in the fence while I watch the feed, pressing my lips absentmindedly to Bob’s neck.
Griffin uses a pry bar to break the lock on the door. The camera feed bounces as Griffin walks, showing glimpses of graffitied walls and old tiles that crunch under their boots. They find a stairwell, and a cold rush comes over me when I glimpse faded red lettering on the door.
Griffin’s voice comes through tinny over the comms speaker. “Going down.”
Just because it has faded lettering on the door doesn’t mean it’s the same place.
They turn on their flashlights as they descend the staircase, Benji mumbling something too quiet for me to make out as each step takes them deeper.
The paint on the walls is peeling in places.
The camera pans down the wide corridor lined with empty door frames on both sides.
They round a corner past an old circulation desk.
I grip Zoey’s arm. She straightens in her chair as she reports into the comms mic.
Morrow abandoned all his trial locations after he was done. He never reused them. But all the unpredictable things he’s done since he died keep flashing through my mind, and every part of me wants to scream at them to get out of there.
One flashlight pans across a dark hallway. Light scatters back like stars in a night sky. Shards of glass litter the floor. The flashlight pauses on the streaks of dried blood on the concrete.
Benji pushes open the door into the main playing area.
Tile covers the floor in that light gray and white checkerboard pattern.
Square columns stand at regular intervals.
The pole stands in the center with its chains coiled on the ground.
In the corner of the screen, barely visible in the sweep of the body camera, a tiny red light blinks.
I scramble over the center console, pulling the mic down from over Zoey’s head and pressing the button. “Griffin, Benji, get out of there.”
What if Morrow is watching right now? What if he’s in there, waiting in some corner for Griffin and Benji to walk past? The hospital is huge. There are a million places to hide.
“Eden, don’t look at this,” Griffin says.
Why aren’t they running out?
I go to yell at them again, but Zoey calmly takes the mic out of my hand and tells me to sit down. I feel stupid for forgetting the cameras, especially when Nico told me he guessed there were more outside the playing area.
Griffin and Benji leave the playing area. My eyes are glued to the screen as the world gets hazy at the edges. They find the control room. Morrow had one computer screen on a table in front of a cushioned rolling chair. The screens are off. An empty bag of chips is crumpled in the corner.
Griffin uses a residue scanner across the chair. The LED flashes an angry red.
“He was here recently,” Griffin says.
“Considering this ectoplasm has begun to crust over, I’d wager it was within ten and twelve hours,” Benji adds.
Bob licks my chin in rapid strokes. I must be breathing hard if he can tell how much this is bothering me. Zoey’s eyes are fixed on the screens, but she touches my arm, holding it for a few seconds before pulling back. I wipe at my eyes with my good hand, pretending the tears aren’t there.
“There’s a liquor store between the abandoned hospital and the highway onramp,” Zoey says that afternoon as she boots up her computer in her room. “It’s got a camera. I’m hoping it catches the road.”
I watch her from where I’m propped up on her bed, surrounded by pillows and a fat cow stuffed animal I would’ve never guessed she owned. I was shocked when she offered to let me hang out in here with her for the afternoon, and even more shocked that she let Bob come up on her bed with me.
Zoey pounds back energy drinks, and her focus never wavers as she pulls up camera after camera, rewinding and fast-forwarding through grainy footage of empty roads and the occasional passing car.
I fall in and out of sleep. It’s getting later in the afternoon, and my hand is throbbing under the bandages. As hard as I try to find an angle that makes the pain stop, no such angle exists.
I imagine Nico’s fingers threading through my hair, the way they did when I was drifting off to sleep.
I can almost feel it now, the gentle scratch of his nails against my scalp, the weight of his hand cupping the back of my head, the careful way he’d gather my hair between his fingers.
I want to be in that hospital bed with him.
I should be there when he opens his eyes so the first thing he sees isn’t some sterile room but me, so he knows we made it.
Zoey gasps, and a sudden bout of cursing makes me sit up.
She leans out of the way. “Is this him?”