Chapter 3: Improvised Weapons

He came out of the supply room with the pack riding high on his shoulder, heavier than it had gone in, and he didn’t take inventory of it. The IV pole he carried flat in his left hand, base first, so its legs wouldn’t tick along the tile. The blanket was folded over his right arm. He went back down the corridor with his shoulder to the wall and his eyes on the far end, watching for the parts of the dark that moved.

The pole went up against the wall outside the station door, base wedged where a run of baseboard had come loose, top leaned back into the corner, near enough that a hand reaching out of the doorway would land on it without stepping clear of the frame. The blanket went into the washroom sink. He turned the cold tap on and left it running onto the cotton, and came back with his cuffs dark to the elbow.

Then he pulled the station door to and stood in the dark and listened.

The building gave him nothing. It kept on giving him nothing, which was worse than noise, so he moved.

The receiver hung off the edge of the desk on its cord where he’d left it. He got it up against his ear, found the cut in the phone line, and put the four copper ends back together in two pairs, pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

The dial tone came up like nothing had ever happened to the line.

He dialed nine-one-one. Holding the wires shut meant holding his hand still and the receiver sideways against his mouth, which meant standing in one spot. He stood in one spot.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“Murder.” He kept his voice down. “A nurse, dead, on three, under the desk in the nurses’ station. Whoever did it is still in the building. He’s got a goat’s skull over his face. Whole skull. Horns on it.”

The dispatcher stayed soft, the way they must train them. “All right. Stay on the line with me, and keep your voice just like that for me. Is he on your floor?”

“Somewhere in the building.”

He didn’t tell her about the drawer.

“Based on what you’re describing, this is coming in as an anomaly-related incident,” she said. “I’m routing you now to the Aerie. Do not hang up. Stay calm, and don’t make a sound.”

The line clicked twice into a dead kind of quiet and stayed there long enough that he checked the wires between his fingers.

Then: “Aerie.” A woman, level, in no hurry to fill anything in. “Location and count.”

The desk pad had a number in pencil on the top sheet. Printed under it in red, in a font older than the light fixtures, on every sheet in the stack: COLDWATER COUNTY HOSPITAL — RUSKIN, OHIO.

“Coldwater County Hospital. Ruskin, Ohio.”

“And the count.”

He’d heard one pair of feet cross the floor above him while he stood in the basement, and nothing else since, and this building had two ways to get from one level to another.

“More than one.”

Nothing came back. He took his fingers off the copper.

He could put the wires back together whenever he wanted. Talking was the part that cost him.

He leaned down and put his face under the desk.

The blood was there. Half dry, spread in the shape of somebody who had sat down against the panel and stayed there, and then pulled — a smear leading out from under the desk, across the tile, out the doorway, and off to the right where the corridor ran down to the far end.

So it had come back for her while he was in a supply room going through boxes in the dark.

The prints in the smear were the ones he’d already seen, twice now. Heel first, split, two points.

He stayed under there a second longer than he needed to, measuring the drag, and then stood up and used the computer.

The monitor woke on the first key. The only thing still signed in was the shared inbox, the address every department on the floor had its mail forwarded to and nobody had emptied since the hospital closed.

Top of the list: REPAIR — B1 morgue camera. Sent Monday, 09:00.

One reply under it, from facilities.

Acknowledged. A technician will be dispatched tomorrow during business hours.

The reply was stamped 85:00.

He looked at the two stamps, one over the other, and closed the mail and typed anomaly into the box.

The page took its time. It came in as an encyclopedia entry with a seal at the top, and he read it through twice.

Anomaly. In K-035, lightning touched off a fire at the Holloway Depot, a research and storage site northeast of Ruskin, where three hundred thousand tons of biohazard waste had been sealed underground off the books. The waste is hot. Objects exposed to it can develop a malformed concretion inside themselves — mineral, harder than the material it grows in — and stop dying at the rate they are supposed to. The result is called an anomaly. An anomaly holds to a fixed range and defends it. It also strays from that range, comes in where people live, and takes what it takes.

Core. The concretion inside an anomaly supplies its energy. Remove the core, or destroy it, and the anomaly dies.

A banner slid up over the bottom of the screen. IF YOUR LIFE IS THREATENED BY AN ANOMALY, CLICK THIS LINE TO CONTACT THE AERIE.

He let it sit there. He’d been on the phone with them four minutes ago and gotten a count question out of it.

Below the entry, everything else the request had pulled up, in a list.

*A thread: THE THREE BIG ONES, SIDE BY SIDE — response times, equipment, contract terms, which one’s people come home. Two years of replies under it. Halfway down, one poster had written it flat, in one line: you kill one while it’s on you, that’s self-defense, nobody charges you. He kept that sentence.

A company page: UNDERLINE — CAREERS. We have always held that the safety of the public comes first, and to that end our organization continues to bring in fresh blood at every level—* The text broke off there, where the page’s box ran out.

Local news, the Ruskin paper: WEIGHT-LOSS PATIENTS KEEP VANISHING FROM CLINICS. Health office says it’s watching closely. The comments had the word crawler* in them, and the article didn’t.

*And under all of it, the kind of post only a county group page has. MISSING — two breeding rams, Wren Hill Farm, County Road 9, hole in the fence Tuesday evening, they’re not mean, just big, if you see them don’t run them, call, thanks everybody.

He put the farm’s address into the search box. The map came back with the pin a quarter mile off the hospital’s back lot.

He looked at that for a while and then went back to the company page, where there was a phone number in the footer.

The receiver went up against his ear and the wires went back between his fingers, and he had the first digit in his head when steel started moving at the far end of the corridor.

The elevator had been parked on three with its doors open since he got out of it. Nobody had come up here to touch the panel.

He put the receiver down on its cord and stood still and listened to it run.

One end of the corridor was the elevator. The other end was the stairwell, and the drag mark and the prints went that way.

Between the two of them there was no corridor left to run down.

He looked at the supply cabinet lying on its face in the corner, steel, drawers sprung, wide enough that a person who folded small could get inside it. Then he looked at the ceiling, and at the heating pipe running up the wall through the corner of the room.

Something that found him by smell wasn’t going to be fooled by a cabinet. A cabinet was a can.

He climbed onto the desk, then onto the cabinet, and got a hand on the pipe. The tiles over the station were the drop kind, thin panels in a steel grid, and two of them lifted out in his hand without any noise at all. He went up through the gap. Above the grid it was black and full of old dust and hot air off the pipe, and he lay down along the length of it, a leg on each side, his back against the wall plate, and reached back and set the tiles in place except for a slot the width of two fingers, right over the station floor.

The pack strap he hooked over the pipe. His knife stayed in his fist, flat along his forearm.

The bell rang down at the end of the corridor.

Then the doors dragged open, and the sound came off the tile and up the walls, and the thing came out of the car and started toward him.

Two hits a step, hard, a fraction of a second apart, the second one landing before the first had finished, and no boot he had ever heard came down like that. He’d counted the spacing of those prints in the blood twice, and he had the stride off the floor noise before he ever saw the legs. Same length, heel to heel. It was walking up the middle of the corridor without hurrying, and there was only one of them. One pair of feet on the whole floor, as far as he could tell, and it had been down in the basement and up in this corridor and standing in a supply room in the dark while he lifted a lid.

The room he’d looked into on his way down the corridor stood diagonal to the station, and that was where it went first.

The door didn’t get opened. It got taken off. Then there was a sound like a dumpster coming off a truck, and the wall behind him moved, and a tile popped loose somewhere in the room and hung there, and it kept going — bed frame, pole, window glass against the bars, one piece after another, a whole room coming apart with no words in it at all. He could hear it breathing while it worked. Not heavy. Long. Slow, and moving a wall of air in and out.

Then it stopped, and there was no noise from the ward except glass settling.

He lay along the pipe with his leg muscles going and his palms flat on the grid and his mouth shut.

The station door, which he’d pulled to and hadn’t locked, got pushed in from the corridor.

Something came under the gap of light the monitor threw across the floor. Then a foot, then another, and the tiled floor took the weight and creaked at the seams. Both feet had two toes and no shoe under them. No boot, no sole, just the two thick toes, under a coat of hair, and the ankles went up into legs thicker than his waist. It had to turn its shoulders to get through the doorframe. Two meters if it was anything, and built like an offensive tackle, and the whole of it smelled like hay and manure and wet hide.

It stood there in the monitor light with its skull turned down at the room.

A goat’s skull. Whole, with the horns still growing out of it and a ridge of bone down the middle, and from where Ash lay he couldn’t see a strap or a seam or any way it stayed on.

Its jaw worked.

The cabinet was in its way and it didn’t go around it. When it brought the foot down, the steel folded, and the drawers came out of their channels and slid across the tile, and Ash lay above that with his chest flat against the grid.

If he’d been in there when that foot came down, he’d have been corned beef hash.

He didn’t breathe. He didn’t move anything. A loose patch of paint and skim coat by his right shoulder had been cracked since before the hospital closed, and the edge of his sleeve was against it, and when he shifted his arm by a finger’s width to take the weight off his elbow, it came off the wall.

He got his hand out fast and caught half of it. The rest went down, a slab the size of a plate, and hit the floor under him and broke.

He didn’t look down. He knew what the room did when something hit the floor in it.

The sound underneath him stopped.

Then it came forward until it was under the slot, and tipped its head back, all the way back, and the eyeholes came up and found him through the ceiling gap, and the two horns went through the air, and it opened its mouth and said Baa.

Loud. Wet. A real goat’s call, whole and true and far too big for the room.

It was still chewing. The jaw went, and something red beaded and ran on the bone, and a piece came off the tongue and out over the teeth and dropped and hit the tile and rolled twice and stopped in the light the monitor threw, where he could see it.

White on one end and red on the other, and the right length for the second joint of a finger.

The goat’s skull stayed tipped back at the ceiling. It didn’t look away.