Mask of Flies (39 page)

“
Where
are you taking me,”
Rick pushed, trying to break
through.

“Relax Angeni, we are
just taking a short trip to Autumn Hall,” The woman answered Rick's
question for the first time. “You'll have the hall to yourself.
Tony thought it would be easier for the transfer and all,” She said
with a heavy Minnesotan accent.

* * *

“What the hell took
you so long?” Haynes stared at Tony's ill-fitting pants with a look
that was part disgust, part amusement. “Autumn is already
transferred . . . the hard part will be getting the other halls out.”
He pointed at Tony matter-of-factly with a yellow Motorola two way
radio in hand.

“The roads are…”

“Eh.” Haynes made
the universal hand gesture that meant
shut
your mouth
. In exasperation he reached in his desk and
pulled out a twin radio and handed it to Tony. “You got Summer.
Kaja has Spring. This thing needs to go smooth, so let's keep the
communication flowing.”

Tony nodded his head.
Just like Jim to bark of orders from a distance.

“I need you to get everyone out of
Summer first—we have transportation from the hospital waiting on
you,” Jim said. “Once they're all out, Detective Douglas and her
team will scour the place . . . for the source of this mess.

In Summer Hall, five
orderlies waited for the go ahead to begin. As Tony approached the
hallway he heard one of them ask the others ‘Are we gonna’ be
diggin’ for clams?’

The group broke out in
laughter. Tony tried to ignore the remark, but the blood flowing to
his face marked his embarrassment for all to see.

“Hey Tony,” a
similarly red faced temp said with breath tainted with booze. “Where
d’we start?”

“At the base of the
hall, get all the high risk patients out of here first.” Tony
didn’t recognize any of the caretakers in the mix, all were Jim’s
scabs. “Was Helga working before the transfer?”

A lanky, bald temp
furrowed his brow, looking like he was staring at the sun. “That
burly woman? She takes up in that room at the end of the hall with
that disfigured woman.”

Tony said nothing and
made his way down the hall and into room 137. He had never met Helga
face to face—apparently an acquaintance of Kaja—and only had some
email correspondence, standard reports for the hallway.

Inside the stale
smelling room, the bed was empty. Angeni or Helga, nowhere to be
found.

The fire alarm rang out
loudly. The cry of the banshee.

He rushed out of the
room and came to the dumbstruck orderlies in the hallway. “Alright,
we have to get everyone out of here, double time.”

* * *

The fire alarm
blared, but the warning ahead of its time. Underneath Elias's bomber,
he carried an opaque fluid in an empty bottle of Seagram's Seven,
clutching it with his hand inked from the fire alarm's lever. The
blue substance smeared severely when he tried to wipe it off on his
jeans. He kept his other hand in his pocket, wrapped around the
handle of his pistol and walked through the storage area. The doorway
leading to Autumn Hall was left open a crack, looking out he didn’t
see a soul. He felt the sweat on his hands as he gripped the doors
handle. If all went according to plan, Angeni would be sitting alone
close by.

Pulling the alarm was a
last minute decision. The Hallway would be transferred out and most
likely empty, but pulling the alarm would make this assumption more
of a certainty. But there was still margin for error—somebody would
eventually come for Angeni. Under the best circumstances only the
woman, Helga, knew—and whoever else she told. Elias also knew he
had time and thought Tony wouldn’t be a factor since he immediately
deleted the bogus email traffic, to and from Helga.

What
if Helga and Tony bumped into each other and talked face to face
before I get there?

Shaking the thought, he
cleared the door. The plan wasn't perfect but it's all he had to work
with. If the cops were waiting in room 104 of Autumn Hall, there was
nothing he could do about it now.

That familiar
oppressive energy clutched him a few steps in, and he knew she was
close. Room 104 stood in front of him. He stepped forward. The wooden
floor creaked loudly. Out of the corner of his eye room 106 popped
open. A stringy silhouette emerged from the room.

Its face was caked in
filth, the thing held a chunk of something in its oversized mitt. The
figure emerged grotesquely disproportionate. Its lanky frame, that
appeared to be over six and a half feet tall, seemed burdened to keep
itself upright. In the florescent hallway light, the meat it held was
indeed a human hand, severed at the wrist. The hand eater’s feral
eyes regarded Elias, and then it flashed its fangs in an awful smile.

Elias stepped back,
fumbling for his pistol but then abandoned the idea. He broke off
into a galloping sprint, wincing with every transfer to his swollen
knee. 30 yards down the hallway, he slipped into an opening with
plastic strip doorway that led into an industrial kitchen.

He seemed to have lost
the thing.

The alarm blared
idiotically but no smoke—it wouldn't be long before the fire
department showed up to determine that there was no threat, or maybe
they would run into the thing from 106, no doubt a manifestation
brought about by his dear Angeni. Either way, Elias knew that his
window of opportunity was running out.

The kitchen was a mess.
It looked like the contents of the refrigerator were being prepped
for transfer: large tin containers of miscellaneous food stuffs were
lined up on a stainless steel table. Three containers were knocked
over onto the floor. The dropped food mashed and swirled, like
somebody began finger-painting madly.

The large walk in
cooler was left partially open, and the light was on inside. A wet
whimpering sounded within. Inside Elias found a large black man
sitting in the corner. His cook's uniform was filthy, splattered in a
blush of caked blood—the name sown in cursive on his chef coat read
“Tuck”. The chef was pressing on his leg where the fabric of his
pajama like pants was saturated in blood.

“Help me,” the man
said faintly. “They saving me for later.” he leaned forward but
was restrained by a purple bicycle lock that bound his torso,
diagonally, to the cooler's built in metal shelving.

Elias initiated the
motion of kneeling next to him, but his knee rang out in pain. He
winced and remained standing. “What did this to you, one of those
stretched things?”

“Ye-yeah, fuckin
thing came down from the vent over the good stove when I was gettin’
the food ready for transfer. It pulled me into this room and chewed
up my leg. It was an old bitch, old as dirt and thin as a rail. The
sight of her almost made my dick die,” said Tuck, smirking through
blood and tears.

The hunting knife on
Elias's belt could easily cut through the bike lock that was wrapped
around Tuck's torso. But Elias left it at his side and headed towards
the cooler door.

“Where the fuck you
goin’?”

“It will all be over
soon. I will be back for you when it’s done.” Closing the thick
steel door almost damped the wounded man's yelling to a tolerable
level.

In the far corner of
the kitchen, a stove was slid out from the wall, a gas supply line
with a lockout tag around the lever. Elias went over and cracked it
open, twisted it fully open until the screw on handle was free from
the shank and put it in his pocket. The Pepto-Bismol smell of natural
gas overpowered the room. Something for the fuzz to deal with while
he figured out how to bypass Angeni's guard.

Metal crashed on the
floor from the other side of the kitchen. Through the shadows, the
ceiling looked like it collapsed, and then something long and
horrible moved out from scattered debris.

The thing walked into
the light, had the semblance of a woman, larger and more aggressive
than the hand eater. She approached on all fours, stalking Elias like
a barn cat would a cornered mouse.

Elias pivoted on his
bad knee in attempt to escape to the door with the plastic flappers,
but the thing reared behind him and clawed down at his shoulder. His
knee buckled, and he fell to the ground.

* * *

The patients lined up
outside around the two gazebos on the east side of the facility, as
outlined in the emergency procedures. Tony was able to get the
residents out of Summer Hall fairly efficiently, considering the
quality of help. Most of the patients had to be wheeled out in their
beds, lined up in rows, pallid faces under tucked under heavy wool
blankets. Tony looked for one patient in particular.

He saw Kaja at the
adjacent gazebo. “Where is Helga?”

“She went home. I ran
into her in the hallway when she was transferring Angeni.” Kaja
annunciated the 'Angeni' like it was a chronic skin disease.

“Transferred Angeni?
Why would she do that?”

“I was going to ask
you the same thing. She said you sent her an email ordering her to
transfer her immediately.”

“I never—” Tony
stopped himself midsentence and began walking towards the building,
but stopped halfway.

“Kaja, where the hell
did she take her?”

“Autumn Hall. I
didn't ask what room,” she stopped and grinned. “Nice pants.”

Indeed,
bitch.

During the hike back,
his undersized wind pants rode up uncomfortably. He had to adjust
himself several times to correct the precarious bunching of his
underwear into his nether regions. When he reentered the facility,
sirens were heard from a distance. He had a short time to grab Angeni
before the gaff was brought to Jim’s attention.

Moving through the
admin foyer, he heard the guttural roar of something bestial coming
from Autumn Hall.

* * *

The stretched woman
mounted Elias while he lay prone on the ground. He slammed the heel
of his palm into her forehead. Her fangs frothed with silver threads
of slaver onto him, with decaying breath and the odor of a caged
animal.

Elias scrambled and
propped his back up against the steel prep table, but the fiendish
woman swung her oversized hand, clocking him in the ear. It knocked
him over the heavy table, pans full of food crashed onto the floor in
a cacophony of metal meeting ceramic tile. Ringing pinched out all
other sound. Shards poked into Elias’s skin from underneath his
coat. The broken Molotov oozed the pungent gel onto his skin.

Before he could attempt
to get to his feet, he was lifted up, talons dug into the back of his
neck and underarm, and slung over the beast-woman’s shoulder. She
hunched down precariously to clear the freezer door and dropped Elias
next to the wounded chef named Tuck.

It pressed Elias
against the cold wall. Tuck writhed, screamed, and kicked, shaking
the shelving. It was enough to grab the beast woman’s attention.

The monstress's grip
loosened as she turned, and Elias found he was able to move his right
hand enough to unlatch the buttoned fastener on his hunting knife
from his beltline. As she leaned forward to retain control of him, he
shifted all his weight to the right, gave a good push to create a
little distance, and unsheathed the knife. He stabbed upward into the
scarce meat of the things bicep. She screamed dreadfully, the sound
produced was more birdlike than human. Despite her agony, she
wouldn't let go. Elias twisted the blade, so the serrated edge was
facing bone.

Adrenaline surged, the
bitch bawled and snapped jaws at him, but as she came forward, he
pulled his left hand free, and slammed his fist into the bridge of
her bulbous nose, smashing it flat in an explosion of rusty blood.

Elias took the
opportunity, lunging up clumsily, his bad leg now numb as can be, and
violently sawed at her arm with leverage. Blood gurgled, then gushed
out of the wound, a viscous orange red. It splattered on Elias's
face, into his mouth, tasted like sulfur. He felt the thing's grip
lessen, then release completely. Bone snapped through skin.

The monstress staggered
back, affording the opportunity for Elias to rip away and make his
way out of the door, leaving the woman-beast with her prisoner, and
then, again, shutting the cooler door behind him.

The Adrenaline surge
ended, leaving Elias exhausted and in excruciating pain. His lungs
burned, his head swam, and, most of all, his knee throbbed with an
intensity of seven suns.

The aroma of gas
increased, surely to the point of filling the conjoining hallway. He
lurched through the kitchen, pushing off the wall, doing his best to
keep the weight off his unusable leg. The hunting knife was caked
with the foul blood that coursed through the monstress's artery. It
shook in his hand, as he held it out in front of him with the
intention to skewer anything that gets in his way.

Outside, in the hallway
lights were turned off, darkness muted only by the subtle orange glow
of the street lights through the windows. Quick raspy breathes
emanated from further down the hallway. It could be the hand-eater or
another one, worse. In his current state, he would be no match for
it.

The Pepto Bismol smell
of gas now overpowered the musty odor of urine and old plaster that
Elias smelled upon entering. He pawed the walls to find his bearings
in the darkness, down the hallway towards his great grandmother’s
room and the sound of the breathing. The back of his neck burned were
the beast-woman ripped him upward with her talons. He could feel the
back of his collar damp with blood.

The end of the hallway
was pitch black and silent. The hand-eater could have shut off the
hallway lights, opting to take Elias off guard. He was unsure if the
creatures he faced were capable of such calculation.

Turning his head
slowly, Elias made out a tangled figure in the shadows, contorted to
fit unobtrusively in a neighboring doorway. Two blood red
incandescent orbs flicked open, greeted him with a predator's regard.
The shade sniffed loudly, followed by smacking of lips. It smelled
something it liked. Elias knew that it was him.