The Witch of the Wood (24 page)

The basement area was vacant, thank God: empty corridor, lecture hall with two columns of spare chairs stacked to the side of the podium, darkened classrooms, bathrooms, broom closets. There was a pallet jack sitting by a linen storage space, and the distinct hum of industrial cooling fans at the end of the hall in the generator room. Rudy took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, where Caroline had said her mother was residing. When the doors slid open with that little
ding,
Rudy was relieved to find the entrance suite dark and unoccupied. There was a floor guide in a glass case, and he saw “Oncology / In-Patient Services” listed as down the hall and to the right, the nurse’s station in the middle of the floor.

He was fairly sure that most of the staff had been reassigned to the downstairs emergency space and the floors right above it, but he was taking no chances, detouring through the radiation lab and a waiting area, all dimly lit as the generators were obviously set to power only what was absolutely necessary. He risked a brief stop in a supply closet for a flashlight, and then another in one of the examination rooms, where he proceeded to open cabinets and route through the drawers as noiselessly as was humanly possible. He realized that he was holding his breath and let it out in a shaky hiss. The animated parts breakdowns of the pancreas and colon were staring down from the walls like grinning omens:
“You coming up on fifty, friend? We’re just dying to get your attention,”
and he laughed back at them, a bit too heartily. Finally, he found the implement he’d been looking for and stuck it in his breast pocket. He backed off and opened the door a sliver, looking out cautiously. No one.

The hall bent around twice, and at the end of it was a set of swinging double doors, the directional PVC signage on the wall by his head announcing “Cancer Ward” in charcoal block lettering.

Rudy followed the arrow, walked the long hall, pushed through the doors.

There hadn’t been anyone up here in awhile, he could tell by the smell. And it was blatantly clear why they didn’t use this space to house those with broken arms and twisted ankles. It was the epitome of hopelessness and decay, darkened, two to three beds per room-space, each divided by a set of curtains, most of them opened. The patients were skeletons twisting on their cots, blue lips, dark sunken eyes, skin mottled and sagging and spotted with age. Most of them were bald, arms riddled with bruisings left by multitudes of injections. There was a woman to the right hooked to her infusion pump, and she had no nose, just a stringy blue void with a bone dividing it down the middle. There was a man twitching and squirming, lips curled back, purple gums worn so thin his teeth were exposed to their bottom roots like some hideous version of the 70s “Alien.” There were face nodules and head craters, black bumps and brown patches, lesions, blotching, and sores reddened at the edges, pregnant with pus.

There in the back corner, three beds from the end on the left, was Caroline’s mother.

She was bone-thin, black knit cap on her head, wide-set eyes like those of her daughter. She was lying on her stomach, head where her feet should have been, and her gown was open in the back revealing a body shriveled and shrunken off a knotted spine. She saw him and clawed at the air, clearly in pain, saliva coming off her bottom lip in a long thread. Rudy almost wept. It was easy to tell that she’d been beautiful once, sharp nose, long proud jaw. She was the type who’d probably been really regal when she was angry, pretty as all hell, now ancient and desperate.

Rudy approached, many around him moaning in disappointment as he passed them. He got to the bed and stood there.

“The . . . Great . . . Father,” she said, looking up with lidless eyes. “And he’s come to pay what is owed The Provider.”

“I have,” Rudy said.

She surrendered to a wave of nausea with a short bout of dry retching, then a rattling cough and a couple of swallows.

“And you’ve brought the Healing Blood?” she said finally.

Rudy patted the cooler under his arm.

“Right here, ready to go.”

She looked up with a grin and actually licked her lips.

“Then give it to me.”

Rudy put up a finger.

“Are you aware that this is only temporary? That it is no cure, just a massive stimulant?”

“Are you aware,” she spat back hoarsely, “that they haven’t emptied the commodes in here for a day? That the diarrhea is so bad I’m afraid to eat a piece of toast, that the shooters rip through me like barbed wire? I don’t care if it’s temporary.”

“Caroline says it causes unexpected surges of adrenaline, spikes in bodily strength difficult to channel.”

“I’ll work it off in the gym.”

“Heightened emotionality.”

“I’ll see a psychiatrist.”

He sat on the bed next to her, careful not to weigh down the edge enough to have her roll into him. He took a deep breath and looked off to the side.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.” He gazed down at her. “The good news, Marilyn Shultz, is that you’re going to get a dose of the healing blood, tonight, right now.”

“And the bad?” she rasped.

Rudy reached into his breast pocket and got out the implement he’d just stolen from the examination room with the organ breakdowns on the wall.

It was an eye-dropper.

She actually bared her teeth when she understood.

“That’s not fair.”

“Things rarely are.”

“That can only dispense enough for an hour.”

“But that hour will be your finest.” He opened the cooler and pushed stuff aside, careful not to disturb the bag of dark blood, and drew out Caroline’s iPad. “I want to show you something,” he said. “A recording you might find of interest.”

He cued up the witch-burning scene at the cornfield. Marilyn Schultz watched it in a numbed silence, and others in the room were craning their necks for a view.

Brian Duffey tossed another Heineken empty into the pit and let out a long belch. This sucked. Lighting them up had become a chore, and there weren’t even people cheering anymore. It was dark back here away from the fire, and since Coach Sullivan had insisted that Duffey was the man to clean up the stuff under them with a shovel, he’d been wheelbarrowing that stinky, bloody shit over to the hole all night. He had a bandana over his face, and he felt like a trash man. Wasn’t he co-leader? Why couldn’t they get Junior Shipley to do this for awhile, or Rex Cunningham, or one of the police officers over by the tent island, or the home-boys from the Air Force base, sitting behind the sandbags up front showing off their rifles? He’d been killing these monster-bitches all day, and he was tired. He wanted to grab something to eat, make a move on one of the single moms, cop a feel off Heather Doyle or Robyn Stein, right under the ass palm-up as he passed. New rules, right?

There was a rowdy-shout off to the left. Three big dudes with buzzcuts were challenging some long-haired biker types to funnel chug. A fat kid was crushing cans on his head. Some thick guys with tattoos on their necks were throwing knives into an uprooted stump, and there was a ring of shirtless men over by the grub area starting a fight club.

Duffey took the ancient wristwatch Sullivan had given him out of his pocket and held it every which way, trying to pick up a reflection off the fire. The orders were to burn one bitch every five minutes, and it was coming due again. Tempted for the millionth time, he gazed off far left toward the supply area by the reeds and ferns. There under the lean-to were the gas cans. Why couldn’t they just do a massive douse and blaze right now, anyway?

“It’s symbolic,”
Sullivan had said, and Duffey hadn’t understood him even a little bit.

“We have to show we’re not scared to sacrifice them in broad daylight,”
he’d then said, and Duffey had gotten that loud and clear. But back then (and it seemed like years ago now) his bad ankle hadn’t been throbbing, and his back hadn’t gone sore right down to the tailbone. He ambled over to the back side of the fire and reached for his torch rammed there in the ground, the layers of sweat socks they’d pulled over the big end almost burned down to the grains underneath. Duffy looked in the rag bucket and saw that no one had bothered tossing in any more clothing; it was getting colder outside by the minute and people were skimping, avoiding him. Duffey ground his jaws together, took off his shirt, and stuck the shank of the torch between his legs, tying it off tight up top, coming around again with the sleeves for a double knotting.

Assholes.
Someone
was going to come to back here for burn-duty if it killed him, and he was going to take a well-deserved turn smoking a blunt and chilling. And he was going to switch up the goddamned tunes. Sullivan had hooked up a system that could work off an iPod, and the old heads had been hogging it, playing Golden Earring and Steppenwolf garbage.

He stuck the torch in the fire, gave it a swivel, and stalked back to the dark swell of corn, working in between the crosses three rows deep where he’d left off. The women closest to him started talking again, begging, pleading, moaning in hot whispers, promising him things, trying to make dirty deals, and for the millionth time he was about to scream for them to shut the fuck up when he got to his fresh one.

It was his mother hanging there in the dark.

“Brian,” she croaked. “Don’t do this to me, please.”

“Bitch!” he screamed, whapping the torch into her face and throwing a brilliant cascade of blue and white sparks. The witches behind got showered, and they struggled violently, pulling at their restraints, bleeding on the ropes. The witches behind reacted and it was a domino effect, all of them twisting and writhing, shrieking in desperation and pain.

The one Duffey hit had regressed to her form as a blank slate again, but her broken nose had caught fire, spreading across her face, consuming her in a quick campaign south and lighting up the area in blue phosphorescence. All of them were thrashing there in the brightened dark now, whitecaps, wriggling vermin in a massive trash pit, and two rows down, seven girls over, Duffey saw something funny, not funny as in “ha-ha,” but funny like “wack.”

One of the monster-bitches was doing a gymnastics trick, similar to one of those straddle-sit positions on the uneven bars. It looked so goofy Duffey almost burst out laughing despite himself. She’d gotten her feet loose, spread them wide, and was trying to get to the left wrist with one of her toes, straining with it, making her neck cords bulge.

Not funny at all.

She hooked it and pushed outward, making an extra millimeter of clearance, next pulling her hand through, bunching and ripping the skin.

More movement now, but this was at the periphery of Duffey’s vision, outside the mass of cornhusks and crosses. He turned to it, staring as if from down a long corridor, squinting, trying to focus on the disturbance out there across the short field and behind the lean-to where the forest once was. Something was flooding the landscape and advancing.

It was one of those “zoo-rushes,” where a pack of animals did that stampede thing. He could see them loping and bobbing over the logs and fallen timber, coming right at him down the dark slope toward the west edge of their campground. Instinctively, he looked back the other way, and out through the corn he saw another pack, this one smaller and wider spread, galloping toward him from the east across the meadow from the Blue Route, catching the light of the moon.

They were dogs, all types, some of them house dogs; he could see the name tags gleaming.

Brian Duffey burst out of the corn and ran around the rim of the broad fire, shouting to no one in particular. He’d had an emergency whistle, but had taken it off when it picked up heat from the fire and scorched him.

Everyone seemed to be partying in slow motion, and Duffey charged into the heart of the campground, a few heads turning in mild uninterest, a couple of guys raising their beer cans to him as if to toast what looked like one of those drunken bum-rushes dudes sometimes did for attention, showing off their happy mo-jo. The guys on watch up front were leaning back against the sandbags, sitting with their knees spread, guns butt-down, muzzles pointed skyward. They were laughing and cheering because a woman with long brown hair and a bad case of horse face was taking off her top, moving her hips. Someone had just switched the music on the iPod system, and Duffy recognized it as “Cold Hard Bitch” by Jet. He burst into the circle and grabbed someone’s rifle. There were “Hey’s!” and “What the fuck’s!” and he turned back toward the western slope, taking a knee.

Now there were hollers of hoarse recognition all around him as the “sentries” and others around them scrambled for positions to defend against the onslaught coming upon them from both sides of the corn.

Duffey fired his weapon. One of the dogs curled down and skidded, and the sky exploded.

It began with a wide burst of blue and red, a flowering fountain six hundred feet across, flickers, shimmers, a flash, and then a loud boom that sent Duffey flat on his ass. People were shouting, swarming around him like driver ants looking for cover, and he willed himself not to go down to his stomach covering his ears. A couple of the slutty older girls who’d been thinking of joining the horse-faced stripper were pointing upwards with wonder and glee, and a particularly big German shepherd from the zoo-rush smashed into one of them, bringing her to the ground in a hard spray of dirt and sending the other one away screaming. The dogs were on them now, jumping, clawing, going for pant legs, ripping at arms, snapping for throats.

There was a heavy screeching, followed by a harsh whistling like “incoming” in a World War II movie, then a blast of greens and yellows shooting across the sky sideways, a bombardment, five consecutive detonations that sparkled and crackled, then fizzled, only to give way to silver twirlers that made lassoes in the night, hearty bangs one after the other, then the exclamatory “boom” that shook the ground and rattled the camp gear. There were a series of popping sounds, glitter cascades in aqua and pink, and people were scrambling, tripping over things, pushing each other, lying on the ground wrestling dogs off them, running off to the west woods, to the Blue Route.