Mask of Flies (37 page)

The current state of
matters in this facility are dire. I believe it was Ms. Roux’s
intent to burn down the entire facility: the worms, Angeni, and
everyone involved, but I never smelled the smoke, and Roux was never
heard from again. Perhaps she was carried away by the lurking
abominations, or perhaps she simply decided to leave without going
through with it. Albeit, I don’t believe a woman like that is
capable of running away once her mind is made up.

I fear that something
terrible has happened to her. All I know is that it stopped her from
burning this place to the ground, which I think, in the end, will
prove to be a good thing. At least our missteps here can be utilized
as a reference point for the future progression of this program.

Angeni, our faithful
test subject that we undoubtedly pushed too far, has vanished. I was
able to enlist some impoverished farmers to examine the lower levels.
With the level of employee abandonment, strains on the payroll budget
have decreased dramatically, allowing for some creative utilization
of the remaining funds. After their expedition, only three of the
seven men returned. They reported feeling the earth move before the
missing men were drug off into the darkness screaming.

The surviving men said
that they found the testing chamber completely empty, and the
security door wide open. Grateful for their effort, I bumped their
wage from 22 cents an hour to four dollars. The compensation seemed
sufficient for them.

What perplexed me about
the door is that the only way to open it is from the outside, so
somebody must have decided to free Angeni. Why anybody would want to
do such a thing is beyond me. Hired mencarried out on the upper
levels, and she was nowhere to be found.

Without Ms. Roux, this
facility is left without a director. I relinquished my station to her
when my health no longer permitted me to administer my duties. Out of
over a hundred men we started with, I have only a handful
left—including the hired farmers. I still give orders from my
bedside to a few capable men. My main concern at this moment is
containing this worm infestation, and corralling the larger ones into
the empty test chamber. So far, we have been partially successful in
our pursuit by utilizing herding livestock through the halls, but we
have yet to entice the monster. One of my men had an idea to use
human bait to catch the big ones. I should have thought of that
myself and since hired an immigrant man that speaks bad English. He
won’t be missed, and perhaps we can catch the big one.

I requested that my men
bring me a small specimen. Being an amateur entomologist, I decided
to keep it under glass. It began asexual reproduction at a rapid
rate. I stopped feeding them to deter further spawning. But then the
largest began to eat the weaker ones, and became even larger. The
specimen was too volatile for me to keep in my condition and I had no
choice but to discard it.

I am currently awaiting
the direction from program on how to move forward. My time is running
out and it will be up to them to pick up where we left off.

The whole day was his
for the wasting. There was a certain relief to be away from the
Bermuda Triangle for geriatrics, Oak Leaf Retirement Community, but
no peace. He attempted to conjure enough focus to read a chapter of
Keith Richards’ autobiography and sipped his char-boiled coffee.

Keith
would say fuck it.

But the bills needed
payin’. Tony made his money managing a retirement home, an ordinary
person, living an ordinary life. If he started partying like Keith
Richards now, he would probably keel over from a massive cardiac
arrest after his first line of coke, just like Len Bias did when he
made it to the big show.

The image of Marsha’s
misshapen body climbing into the ceiling burrowed its way past the
forced distraction, slipping through the empty thoughts that Tony
attempted to fill his head with.

It all started with the
woman, Angeni Kingbird—perhaps her great grandson was telling some
truth about her being a beacon of malicious influence. At this point,
the large Seneca’s argument seemed almost plausible.

They
simply do not pay me enough for this shit.

But no worry, Jim would
most likely shit-can him after this, he thought, citing collapse of
common sense and sound judgment during time of crisis as cause for
dismissal. Tony had never been on the hot seat with an employer,
always opting to acquiesce and play nice. The paper on the table
caught his eye, and he wondered if anybody searched the job
classifieds anymore.

After pouring himself a
bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, he made his way to the couch to begin
a PS3 gorge. He pushed aside a basket of dirty laundry, choosing to
take his passive aggression out on the prepubescent school skippers
in pretend gunfight land.

Tony couldn’t believe
some of the things these kids said. “You kiss your mother with that
yapper?”

“No but you can suck
my dick. Shouldn’t you be at work, loser?” a voice said over
Tony’s headset, breaking from low to high pitch at the end.

Tony ripped his headset
of and turned off the game. Sitting there for a minute, bum lethargy
settled in, sitting there like he did with Vanessa, the ex, binge
watching the movies he never got to pick: Legally Blonde, movies
based on Nicholas Sparks novels, and those starring J-Lo. But he did
it in an attempt to stay close to her, and pretended to enjoy it.

The prospect of
pirating some internet porn made its way to the forefront of his
schedule, but his cell abruptly sounded off with a synthesized
shriek; robo chimes was the name of the ringtone if he remembered
correctly.

“Hello?” Tony felt
somewhat embarrassed about answering the phone semi hard.

“Tony, it’s Jim.”

At the sound of the
brusque voice of his boss, Tony regressed to a flaccid state
immediately.

“Listen some things
have happened today and our asses are in a sling over here. We’re
going to need you to come in,” Jim said unapologetically.

“I-I don’t
understand. You told me a few hours ago to take vacation.” Whatever
was going on at Oak Leaf he knew that it wasn’t good.

“We are evacuating
all of the patients and really need your help.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I’ll shoot
straight with you,” Jim said. “Two workers, putting together the
offices on the third floor, were killed. They were starting to frame
one of the corner offices, and when the foreman stopped in to check
in on their progress, he saw that not a lick of work was done, and
the two workers were nowhere to be found . . . He noticed the ladder
to the attic was partially opened. When he went up, he found a bloody
mess.

“We got the police
out here immediately. They found the worker’s bodies and a skeleton
picked clean up there. We don’t know who or what did it, but we are
taking the necessary precautions so this doesn’t happen to anybody
else. We are moving the able bodied patients over to the Silver Creek
Facility for the time being, and Summer and Spring Hall are being
transferred over to the hospital.”

Tony didn’t have a
choice. “Who does the skeleton belong to?”

“The police haven’t
gotten that far yet. The only thing that the pathologist was able to
tell us was that it was female,” Jim said in a gruff voice.

Since Tony saw the
elderly woman Marsha, very much alive and transformed, that only left
one possibility: Lydia, the caretaker of Spring Hall that went
missing. He decided to keep it to himself, for now.

“That’s horrible .
. . I can be there in a few.” Tony thought of the fiendish woman
that he saw in the kitchen, that once was Marsha Gillium, an elderly
woman with advance Alzheimer's, waiting quietly to die.

The conversation was
ended by Jim grunting and hanging up the phone

Tony hopped in the
shower, dreading of going back in. Before he could rinse the shampoo
out of his hair, the phone was ringing again.

Hang
on; I’m getting there as fast as I can.

Jim was not a patient
man, and Tony knew that, but this was ridiculous. Tony almost lost
his footing as he scurried soaking wet across the tile floor of his
kitchen naked.

“H-hello?” Tony
answered partially out of breath.

“Mr. Delgado, this is
Elias Kingbird, the Great Grandson of Angeni. I tried to reach you at
your office, but no one picked up . . . I apologize if I disturbed
you, but this matter is of great urgency. “

The tone of Elias’
voice was more even than the last time they met.

“Mr. Kingbird, what
can I do for you?” asked Tony.

“I want to check out
my Grandmother. Will that be possible?”

“It’s doubtful.
This case has garnered attention from the state. The auditor they
sent is under the assumption that you abandoned her,” said Tony.

“I know that you
don’t trust me, and I know that you think I’m full of shit about
my grandmother being some kind of monster, but I bet you’ve seen
some things . . . Some strange things must have happened?”

“Yes, to say some
strange things have happened would be an understatement, but branding
your great grandmother as the root of the problem is not fair. There
is something else.”

Elias said nothing.

“If you want to visit
her, she will be at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Williamsville. I
just got the word that all the patients in your Grandmother’s hall
are being transferred there.” Tony had no reason to beat around the
bush. He would most likely be having this same conversation with all
of the family members of the patients in the facility.

“Something really bad
must have happened to go through all that trouble. I hope nobody got
hurt.”

“Well, how do I put
this . . . three people are dead from unnatural causes, and we still
have missing persons. We want to clear the patients from the facility
while the police investigate.”

“So you have no idea
what could be doing this? You’re the facility manger, I’m sure
you must have noticed something out of the ordinary, no?”

“I have seen plenty,
but it’s in the police’s hands now.” Tony wasn’t sure what
Elias was trying to get out of them, perhaps affirmation that
something was seriously wrong with his great grandmother, beyond her
physical maladies. Tony wasn’t about to make any more conjectures.

“If you move her, the
cycle will continue all over again. The plague in your facility will
follow her into the hospital. She will feed and grow stronger. There
is no telling how far she will go.”

“Like I said, it’s
in the police hands now.”

“The police can’t
help.” Elias’s voice grew louder. “They don’t know how to
stop what is going on, and they will refuse to believe that the
killer is an elderly woman incapable of talking, or walking. You know
I’m right but are too fearful to accept it.”

“What do you want
from me Elias?”

“During the transfer,
I want you to leave Angeni behind. I just want to say goodbye. This
is the only way.”

“What are you
implying?”

Tony heard a bang
followed by a dial tone in the receiver. Elias was going to be a
problem, a real problem in the chaos of the transfer. He would have
to get the word out around the facility.

The dresser in Tony's
bedroom was mostly baron, most of its contents residing in the dirty
hamper in the bedroom. Tony produced a wrinkled polo, stuffed in the
bottom of his underwear drawer. Searching for pants proved to be
fruitless. The only viable option was a pair of old windbreakers from
high school that now were officially high-waters; the bottom of the
pants came down to the bottom of his calves. He didn't have a choice.

He rushed to the door
with his pants riding up in all the wrong places, looking like he
truly woke up in a laundry hamper.

A loud knock at the
door jolted Elias awake at the desk in the small room in the Leolyn.
His torso and right arm numb with pins and needles and his knee on
fire. He lurched to his feet and unsteadily made his way towards the
door. It was Calvin and Nicolette with a box of Tim Horton’s donuts
and a tray of coffee.

“Figure this would
help shake the cobwebs,” Nicolette handed Elias a cardboard cup of
coffee. “So, did you contact the manager of the home?”

Nicolette and Calvin
left around 2am the night prior. Both of their parents didn’t hold
them to a strict curfew, but pulling an all-nighter was out of the
question, especially for Nicolette. Before they left, she made Elias
promise her that he would call over to the retirement home to check
on the situation before rushing off to do anything stupid.

Elias took a sip of the
coffee and nodded in approval. The plastic taste produced from the
cheap coffee maker in the room was not satisfactory, the fresh roast
a much needed reprieve.

“Yes. I must’ve
dozed off after talking to him.” Elias rubbed his face lined with
sleep lines.

Calvin made himself
comfortable on the roughshod leather sofa against the wall. “I'm
sure staying up all night decoding that book didn't help. So, anyway,
you left us hanging. What did the manager have to say about your
Grandmother?”

Elias looked down. “He
refuses to believe . . . He says there are three dead and three
missing from the home but has no reason to believe my great
grandmother has anything to do with it, at least he won’t admit it
to me . . . I tried to set up a time to visit her, to get her away
from that home, but apparently there is some state caseworker that
thinks I’m unfit for visitation.”

“I don’t blame them
. . . So what's your plan?” asked Nicolette, more severe than
normal.

Elias sat at the desk
and took another gulp of the coffee and hung his head. “I don’t
have a plan. I know I have to get her out of there, away from
everyone, before it gets worse. That’s all I got. ” Elias didn’t
know what worse could escalate to. He didn’t even want to think
about the possibility, but thought the situation was most likely
already there. Worse. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, you’ll
think I’m crazy.” He set down his cup.