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“Help me out of here, fatty. I’m an old man.”
I want to yank the prick to his feet, but I’m afraid of pulling off his arm. I give him a hand and let him pull himself upright. He adjusts his conical headdress and looks around the lobby.
“Not bad,” he says. “In my day, some families took their unstable relatives deep into the woods and left them there to die. Some became tengu. Most were just fox food.”
“Can you smell?” I say.
He nods.
“I can smell this place.”
The stink of the place is like a kick in the face. Shit, sweat, piss, and the disinfectant they used to try and mask it all. But riding on top of it all is the sweet reek of bad meat and the coppery aroma of blood. Wells pulls a surgical mask from his pocket and slips it on over his head.
“You don’t deserve it, but do you want one of these?”
I shake my head.
“It’s too late for that. I’m going to be smelling this place until New Year’s.”
He nods in something that actually looks like sympathy.
The Vigil boys and girls start piling in around us. Each new wave puts on surgical masks and respirators as they hit the lobby.
Wells talks to what looks like some team leaders and splits his crew into three squads. They fan out through the building carrying their ridiculous Vigil forensic gadgets. The mix of Pentagon high tech and angelic add-ons gives them a look like fifties science fiction crossed with eighties video games. Some devices float down the hall in front of the operator, while others hang around agents’ necks. Others they wear like exoskeletons. They look like they’re off to a Forbidden Planet masquerade ball.
Wells’s cell phone rings. The Shonin and I start inside without him.
The place looks like a regular hospital reception area if you don’t know what to look for. There are holes in the ceiling above the intake counter where bulletproof glass covered it back in its prisoner incarnation. Pull up the beige carpet and you’ll find scratch marks from the metal detector and two sets of gates. You go to the first and have to be buzzed through the second into the prison area. Once you’re past that first gate, if the guard on the second gate doesn’t like your look, he can lock down his side and you’ll be trapped in a steel cage.
There’s a long hall beyond reception that leads past the old prison cafeteria. They’ve transformed it into a homey dayroom with better furniture than any agent in this building has. Past that is a lockdown ward where the old prison doors have been left in place.
All the other doors have ten-key pads and card readers, including the employee restr
ooms. The real giveaway that the place used to be a prison is the other restrooms. Pure jailbird stuff. Clear plastic doors with a clear view of the toilet so the orderlies can make sure the patients aren’t using drugs or each other. Maybe this place helped its patients, but I bet it made its staff a little crazy.
Wells comes up behind us with a piece of paper he must have picked up in reception. It’s a sketchy map of the hospital layout. So far, nothing looks out of place.
“The initial report was that all the rodeo was down in the chapel,” he says, and consults the map. “This way.”
We find it around another corner. Like a lot of hospitals, it’s a quiet nondenominational place. Back before the fun and games it might have been pretty. It’s big enough to hold a congregation of maybe a hundred people. Not anymore. Someone pulled all the pews out of the floor and tossed them into the hall. All that’s left of the original chapel are the stained glass windows and the altar. The rest is slaughterhouse chic by way of the Sistine Chapel.
Half finished, maybe rejected chop-shop bodies lie in piles on either side of the chapel doors. Body parts—arms, legs, internal organs, and more—are grouped together around the walls like some kind of cannibal food court. A worn gurney crusted with dried blood sits in the center of the room, a discarded woman’s arm and a heart tossed on top.
Like the meat locker, the chapel has been transformed into Angra party central. The place has thirteen naves. In each hangs a naked chop-shop body crucified upside down. The cover on the altar is gone. In its place is a stitched-together sheet of human skin. Here and there you can see moles. Old scars. Tattoos.
Aldridge said there were around ninety people inside the building, but there’s no way there are ninety bodies now. There aren’t enough parts left to make twenty. Saint Nick didn’t just play butcher boy here, he took some of his trophies home with him. Worse, from the look of the bodies’ decomposition, they weren’t all killed at the same time. It’s been maybe a day or a day and a half since the slaughter was really rolling along. Enough time for fresh bodies to enter and pass through rigor mortis and for the fresh meat to turn greenish-blue. Those are fresh kills. The patients and staff. But some of the bodies are swollen and the flesh raw and blistered. That takes around three days of decomp, which means Saint Nick didn’t just kill this bunch. He stockpiled bodies from another kill and brought them here. This is a busy, organized boy. I bet his record collection isn’t alphabetical. It’s a freaky, obsessive system by year and genre and probably color. Something only he understands. God help you if you put the Dead Kennedys near the Dictators. East Coast goes here. West Coast there.
But it’s not the corpses Saint Nick dragged here from his playpen that get to me. I keep wondering about the staff and patients. What would it be like to be the last person to go under the knife? To see almost ninety other people killed, gutted, and sewn back together again. I saw a few things during my years in Hell, but nothing like that. Maybe they party like that in one of the really shitty regions where guys like Stalin end up. The House of Knives, maybe.
In a weird way, I guess I was kind of lucky when torture time rolled around. I was never the last to get beaten or cut or spun around a Catherine wheel. The Hellions wanted to make an example of me, so I always went first. I never thought about that before. I didn’t have to wait and piss myself watching everyone else get hammered. I guess if you can get lucky being tortured, I was lucky.
The Shonin and I walk around the room, checking out the piles, trying to make sense of things. Wells stands in the doorway, arms crossed. The poor sap can’t come in. He’s a God-fearing guy, and if there’s any place I’ve seen in this world that says God’s away on business, this is it. At least when Aelita went batshit, she was just one angel and he could imagine a Heaven full of other good and true halo polishers. But this is a bad, bad place. Wells got the Vigil back together, circling the wagons of true believers, and this is what he finds. The wagons are burning. Everyone is wounded and the cavalry isn’t coming. Maybe that’s why he put on the surgical mask. He didn’t want his people to see him reciting Hail Marys.
I go over to the Shonin.
“Old dead mixed with new,” I say.
He nods his tea-colored skull.
