The House of Thunder (30 page)

She tucked the mezuzah in a pocket of her jeans, even though it was proof of nothing to anyone except her.

She went to the door and put her head against it, listening. She couldn’t hear anything from the other side.

After a moment of nervous hesitation, after she wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, she pushed the door open. Just a crack. Peered into the well-lighted hallway. Opened the door a few inches farther. Stuck her head out. Looked right. Looked left. There was no one in sight.

The corridor was silent. It was so silent, in fact, that in spite of the highly polished tile floor and the spotless yellow walls and the dust-free fluorescent ceiling lights, it seemed as if the building had been abandoned and had not known the sound of human activity for ages.

Susan left the room, easing the door shut behind her. She stood for a breathless moment with her back pressed flat against the door, afraid to step away from it, prepared to turn and scurry inside again, into her bed and under the covers, dispossessing the crudely formed dummy, at the slightest sound of an approaching nurse.

To her left lay the junction of the corridors, where the two short wings connected with the long main hall. If there was going to be any trouble, it would most likely come from that direction, for the nurses’ station was around the corner and halfway down the longest corridor.

The silence continued, however, disturbed only by the low, distant rumble of the storm.

Convinced that further hesitation was more dangerous than any action she could take, Susan moved cautiously to the right, away from the confluence of corridors, directly toward the large fire door at the end of the short wing, where there was a red EXIT sign. She stayed close to the wall and kept glancing back toward the center of the building.

She was acutely aware of the squeaking noise made by her rubber-soled shoes on the highly polished tile floor. It wasn’t really a loud sound, but it had the same nerve-grating quality as did the sound of fingernails scraped across a blackboard.

She reached the metal fire door without incident and opened it. She winced as the push-bar handle rattled under her hand and as the big hinges rasped, creaked. Quickly, she stepped across the threshold, onto a stairwell landing, and shut the heavy door behind her as quietly as possible, which wasn’t nearly quietly enough to suit her.

The stairs were bare concrete and were dimly lighted. There was only one small bulb on each landing. Here and there between the landings, the concrete walls were draped with shadows like webs of dust and soot.

Susan stood perfectly still and listened. The stairwell was even more silent than the second-floor hallway had been. Of course she had made so much noise with the door that any guard who might have been stationed on the stairs would now be frozen, listening, just as she was.

Nevertheless, she was sure that she was alone. They probably hadn’t posted guards because they didn’t expect her to try to escape; they didn’t know that she was aware of their trickery. And the hospital staff—or the staff of whatever kind of institution this was—most likely used only the public and the service elevators, leaving the stairs for emergencies when the power failed.

She stepped to the black iron railing and leaned over it, looked up, then down. Four more flights of steps and four more landings lay above her. Two flights, one landing, and the bottom of the stairwell lay below.

She went down to the bottom, where there were two fire doors, one set in the inner wall of the stairwell and apparently opening onto a first-floor corridor, the other set in the outer wall. Susan put her hands on the push-bar and cracked open the outer door two or three inches.

Cold wind forced its way into the rough concrete vestibule and capered around Susan’s legs. It seemed to be sniffing at her as if it were a large, excited dog trying to make up its mind whether to wag its tail or bite.

Beyond the door, a small rain-swept parking lot lay in the yellowish glow of a pair of tall sodium-vapor lamps, each of which bore two globes like luminescent fruit. It didn’t look nearly large enough to be the public parking area. But if it was the staff’s lot, where were all the cars? Now that visiting hours were over, the public lot would be virtually deserted, but there should still be quite a few cars in the staff’s parking area, even at night. There were only four vehicles: a Pontiac, a Ford, and two other makes with which she was not familiar.

There was no one in the parking lot, so she stepped outside and let the fire door close behind her.

The rain had nearly stopped falling now, as the storm entered one of its quieter moments. Only a thin mist floated down from the night sky.

The wind, however, was fierce. It stood Susan’s shaggy blond hair on end, made her eyes water, and forced her to squint. When it gusted, howling banshee-like, Susan had to stand with her head tucked down and her shoulders drawn up. It was surprisingly cold, too; it stung her exposed face and cut through the sweater she was wearing. She wished she had a jacket. She thought it seemed much
too
cold for September in Oregon. It was more like a late-November wind. Or even December.

Had they lied to her about the date? Why on earth would they have lied about that, too? But then again—why not? It made no less sense than anything else they had done.

She moved away from the emergency exit, into the shadows by a bristling evergreen shrub, where she crouched for a minute while she decided which way to go from here. She could head toward the front of the hospital and follow the road that led directly downhill into Willawauk. Or she could go overland and into town by a more cautious, circuitous route, to avoid being spotted by anyone at the hospital.

Lightning pulsed softly, and thunder crashed like a train derailing in the darkness.

No matter which way she went, she was going to get very wet. Already, the light mist had begun to paste her hair to her skull. Soon, the rain would be coming down hard again, and she would be soaked to the skin.

Then a frighteningly bold course of action occurred to her, and she launched herself upon it before she had time to think about it and lose her nerve. She ran out into the parking lot, toward the nearest car, the green Pontiac.

There were four cars in the lot, four chances that someone had left a set of keys in an ignition or under a seat or tucked up behind a sun visor. In rural towns like Willawauk, where almost everyone knew everyone else, people weren’t worried about car thieves nearly so much as were people in the cities and suburbs. Trust thy neighbor: That was still a rule that people lived by in a few favored places. Four cars; four chances. She probably wouldn’t have any luck, but it was worth taking a look.

She reached the Pontiac and tried the door on the driver’s side. It was unlocked.

When she pulled the door open, the ceiling light came on inside the car. It seemed as bright as a lighthouse beacon, and she was sure that she had given herself away and that alarms would begin ringing at any moment.

“Damn! ”

She slipped into the car, behind the steering wheel, and quickly closed the door, not concerned about the sound it made, just worried about shutting off that damned light.

“Stupid,” she said, cursing herself.

She scanned the parking lot through the blurry, water-spotted windshield. She saw no one. She looked at the lighted windows of the four-story hospital; there was no one standing in any of them, no one watching her.

She sighed with relief and took a deep breath. The car reeked of stale tobacco smoke. Susan wasn’t a smoker herself and was usually offended and sometimes even sickened by such odors. But this time the stench seemed like a sweet perfume to her, for at least it was not a
hospital
odor.

Increasingly confident that she was going to make good her escape, Susan leaned forward, thrusting one hand under the seat, feeling along the floor for the car keys—

—and froze.

The keys were in the ignition.

They glinted in the yellowish sodium-vapor glow that came through the car windows.

The sight of them rocked Susan. She stared at them with a mixture of elation and apprehension, and she found herself arguing with herself.

—
No
,
things are just finally going my way for a change.

—
It’s too easy.

—
This is what I hoped to find.

—
And it’s too easy.

—
In small towns, some people do leave keys in their cars.

-In the
very fzrst
car
you
checked?

—
What’s it matter whether it’s the first or the fourth or the three hundredth car?

—
It matters because it’s too easy.

—
Just luck. I’m overdue for some good luck.

—
It’s too easy.

Sharp ax blades of lightning chopped up the pitch-black sky, and there was a bellow of thunder. Rain fell in spurts at first, then in a sudden, terrible flood.

Susan listened to the rain pounding on the car, watched it streaming down the windshield in rippling ribbons of sodium light, watched it as it continuously shattered the mirrored surfaces of the puddles on the pavement, and she knew that she wasn’t going to walk all the way into town, which was as much as a mile away, longer if she went in a roundabout fashion. Why struggle through a cloudburst when she had a perfectly good automobile at her disposal? Okay, so maybe it was a little too easy—all right, so there wasn’t any “maybe” about it; too easy by far—but there wasn’t any law against things going smoothly and easily now and then. It was easy, this finding a key straight off, but it was also just a stroke of good fortune, nothing more than that.

What else
could
it be?

She twisted the key in the ignition. The engine came to life instantly.

She switched on the headlights and the windshield wipers, put the car in gear, and released the emergency brake. She drove out of the parking lot and around to the front of the hospital. She came to a one-lane, one-way drive, and turned the wrong way into it because the right way out would first take her beneath the brightly lit portico, where someone at the front doors might spot her. She reached the end of the short accessway without encountering any oncoming traffic, and she paused where the drive intersected the two-lane county road.

Glancing back at the four-story building from which she had just escaped, she saw a large sign on the well-manicured, rolling lawn. It was eight feet long and four or five feet high, set on a stone base, flanked by low shrubbery. Four small floodlights were evenly spaced along the top of the sign, their beams directed down upon the bold white lettering, which was set against a royal-blue background. Even through the heavy, wind-driven rain, Susan could read that sign without any difficulty:

Susan stared at those three words in disbelief.

Then she raised her eyes to the building again, regarding it with confusion, cold fear, and anger. It wasn’t a hospital at all.

And wasn’t the Milestone Corporation supposed to be located in Newport Beach, California? That was where she lived. That was where she was supposed to work.

Get the hell out of here, she told herself urgently.

She turned left and drove downhill, away from the Milestone Corporation.

Through the rain and through the thin fog that blanketed the lowlands, Willawauk was visible as a collection of soft, fuzzy lights, none of which had clear points of origin, many of which bled together into yellow and white and pale pink blobs.

Susan remembered that Dr. Viteski had said the town boasted a population of eight thousand. It had to be exactly that: a boast. It just didn’t look that big. At best, it appeared to be half that size.

Past the midpoint of the long hill, leaning over the steering wheel while she drove, squinting between the thumping windshield wipers, Susan watched a change come over the lights of Willawauk. Now they seemed to shimmer and wink and ripple and blink as if the entire town was an enormous, intricate neon sign. Of course that was only an effect of the weather.

One thing that did not change was the impression of size that the lights imparted. The town still appeared to be considerably smaller than eight thousand souls. Maybe even smaller than four thousand.

The county road took a hard turn to the right and descended a last slope, past the first houses in town. In some of them, lights shone at the windows; others were dark; all were obscured by the rain and by the eddying fog.

The county road became Main Street. They couldn’t have picked a more bland or more apt name for their primary avenue. The heart of Willawauk was like ten thousand other towns scattered across the country. There was a pocket-size park with a war memorial statue at the entrance of it. There was a bar and grill named the Dew Drop Inn; its sign was fashioned out of orange neon, and the D in Drop was flickering on the edge of burnout; the windows were decorated with other neon advertisements, all for various brands of beer. The town supported a lot of small businesses, some local enterprises, some minor outlets of major national chains: Jenkin’s Hardware; Laura Lee’s Flowers; a Sears storefront that dealt solely in catalogue orders; the Plenty Good Coffee Shop, where Susan could see about a dozen customers seated in booths beyond the huge plate-glass windows; two dress shops; a men’s store; the First National Bank of Willawauk; the Main Street Cinema, which was currently playing a double feature comprised of two of last summer’s comedies,
Arthur
and
Continental Divide;
Thrift Savings and Loan, with its big electronic time-and-temperature sign; an intersection with three service stations—Arco, Union 76, and Mobii—and with a computer games arcade, Rocketblast, on the fourth corner; Giullini Brothers, TV and Appliances; a small bookstore and another bar and grill on the left; a drugstore and a G. C. Murphy’s five-and-dime on the right; a funeral home, Hathaway and Sons, set back from the street on a big chunk of property; an empty storefront, a hamburger joint, a furniture store...