Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Hurry the fuck up, Hot Wheels!”
Laurence Parsons. Guy was a fucking prick but he was one of the few people who didn’t think my chair was contagious, even if he made fun of it every chance he got.
He turned back to look at me over a shoulder and grinned. “Can’t that thing go any faster?”
Like I said, a fucking prick.
“Maybe if the wheels weren’t practically rusted through,” I grunted.
Briarwood may have looked pretty on the outside, with all the fancy carved statues and white pillars and fresh paint, but that was only to cover all the corners they cut on the inside. Most of their equipment was older than I was.
“Where the fuck are we going anyway?” I called out to him.
Lint-licker Larry—he looked like the kind of freak who’d lick anything—didn’t bother looking back at me this time. He just shrugged a shoulder. “You’ll see. But keep it down, will ya? You’re going to get us caught.”
I rolled my eyes. Caught by who? The nurses were short-staffed today, like most days.
Didn’t even have anyone stationed on this floor.
Guess they figured us invalids couldn’t get very far if they took all the walkers and chairs and crutches with them.
I knew where to find a spare and I wasn’t above crawling to get to it.
The fucker in front of me could have helped. But he’d rather watch. And I was above begging.
He didn’t stop sprinting down the hallway until we got to the staff elevator. Then he pushed the button, shoved his hands into the pockets of his white pants, and waited for me to follow him inside.
It wasn’t easy guiding this rickety piece of shit over the lip and turning it around, but I did it without help. Not that the lint-licker woulda done it even if I asked. Had a sadistic streak, that one.
I guess I did too or I wouldn’t have made friends with ?em so quickly.
He tapped his hands against the metal railing the entire time the cable car creaked its way down. Floor after floor. They also put the most crippled of us on the highest level—now tell me that wasn’t intentional either.
I side-eyed Larry, who just continued to grin. “Where we going?” I tried again.
“The basement,” he hummed like he knew something I didn’t. Which he did and it pissed me off.
“What the fuck we going to the basement for?”
“You’ll see,” he repeated just as cheerily.
The elevator finally stopped moving when it couldn’t move anymore, and Larry stepped out into blackness. He didn’t pause to see if I’d follow him. He knew I was too nosey not to.
Fucker could be leading me to my death for all I knew. Smelled like death, that was for sure. Like piss and rot and something else… The only light coming off whatever was flickering in the distance. It was clear none of the bulbs had been replaced in ages.
To be honest, I didn’t really care where he was leading me, though. Neither one of us had much to lose in that case.
I forced my chair forward, listening to the sound of crunching when I rolled across the floor, as I tried to keep my focus on where Larry was going.
He had this weird limp, which had him dragging one foot whenever he wasn’t running.
Probably why the fucker ran everywhere. He’d say it was because I was slow but I think he was self-conscious about the weird way he walked.
Once again, he didn’t stop until he was turning a corner that opened up to a large room. I stopped too but for a completely different reason.
“Who the fuck are they?” I whispered out the side of my mouth, my eyes glued to the various metal beds and cages. Whoever wasn’t in one of those was chained to the wall, lined up one after the other.
Larry lifted a shoulder but answered me anyway. “The basement patients.”
“What do they do to them?”
“Whatever they want,” he grunted. “As far as anyone knows, these fuckers don’t exist.”
I should have been horrified at the shit I was seeing as a kid. But the thing was, I’d already seen worse. I was as numb to it as the rest of me was to pain.
“Come on. I wanna show ya something,” Larry said. He was moving again, stepping past the clumps of shit on the floor that I had no choice but to roll over.
“This wasn’t it?” I asked, and Larry didn’t answer me again.
My glare caught on a giant of a guy hunched in the corner.
So big I was pretty sure he had to hunch to keep from hitting his head on the ceiling.
He didn’t have any clothes on, likely because they didn’t have any hospital gowns or scrub pants large enough to fit him, and he was holding on to what looked to be a stuffed rabbit missing one of its ears.
“Who’s that?”
Larry peered to his left but kept walking. “Oh, that one doesn’t have a name. Most of ?em down here don’t. Just numbers.”
“Right.” The people who worked here found it much easier to treat us like objects when we didn’t have names attached to us. It didn’t work as well when you were able to speak up and remind ?em. Which was why they liked to keep us drugged out of our minds most of the time.
Larry stopped short when he came to another room, this one full of women and young girls. Some curled up on beds and others crying in the corner. “They just showed up one day. No one knows where they came from. But they ain’t like the others. There don’t seem to be anything wrong with them.”
He grinned and dropped his pants. A few of the girls screamed, and Larry rushed over to clamp a hand over one of their mouths. The older women were already doing the same to the others. “Remember what happens when you make noise,” he whispered into the girl’s ear.
“What happens?” I asked, more out of curiosity again.
Larry pushed his chin out, gesturing behind me. Back towards the large room with all the cages. “Your friend in the corner breaks free… and, well, he ain’t as gentle as me.”
He licked the girl’s ear. She whimpered against his hand but she didn’t fight him anymore after that.