The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [164]
“The place is crawling with that filth from the park!” said another voice. Female.
The first guy now: “I don’t know where your daughter went. Or Russo.” They were inches away, walking right past the closet door. Wayne could see shadows on the carpet.
“Goddammit. I was right. We should have done this at a hospital. Or the clinic. This whole plan was screwed from the beginning.”
“Calm down. We’ll find her.”
“Downstairs. She must be running.”
“We’ll have to search every—”
They were gone. Wayne opened the door a crack, saw the hallway was empty. He ran up the carpet runner and collected the pennies from the open doorway. Then he crawled back to his closet, shut the door, and, just as he heard more footsteps, put the penny lock on the inside, so no one could open the door from the hall.
He sat on the floor, knife in his hands, breaths in and out like a bellows.
67
A CORKSCREW in the middle of her head was drilling through her brain, pushing, grinding hard against the top of her skull.
The instant the doctor pressed the last digit of code into his remote, the nanosecond after two tiny pieces of metal kissed inside his little black box, she felt the pain advance along the wiry paths of her spider’s legs and Nada shrieked and held her ears and collapsed at the knees. She felt her face twist into a horrible mask, heard the matches hit the ground beside her. No doubt they could hear her screaming downstairs.
Now this was what it was like to want to die.
The doctor stood up, staring at her. His face looked half worried for her, but his body was turning away, hand on the door. She growled at him between screams.
“I’m sorry,” he stopped to say.
It felt like she was being tasered from the inside, like the robot part, the half of her she was trying to save, was trying to kill off the flesh part. And now her brain was pushing on the backs of her eyeballs, pushing her eyes, those eyes that always saw everything, right out of their sockets, and she fought back, shutting her lids tight.
She couldn’t lie here forever waiting for the pain to subside. The doctor would bring them right to her—Jameson and her mother and the rest of them, whoever they were. They were all trying to kill her.
Nada forced herself to her feet and pried her eyelids apart. Her vision was blurry, but she could see up close. She climbed up on a folding chair and pawed through a cabinet of cleaning supplies. She found furniture polish and a bottle of disinfectant, other household cleaners. She squinted at the labels, looking for familiar-sounding chemical endings from high school science class, which started coming back to her in perfectly organized sets.
Footsteps in the hall just outside. She grabbed the gallon bottle of concentrated bleach and crouched on the floor, still blinking at the agony behind her eyes.
The door opened. Not the doctor. Someone bigger than he was.
Someone with a gun.
She swung the arm with the bottle once, twice, three times. Chemicals splashed toward the door in waves. The big man, almost as big as Wayne but not Wayne, screamed a profanity as he covered his face and ducked. She heard a smack against the Pergo floor and she dove toward it, feeling with her hand until she came up again with the gun.
“Fuck!” said the man.
She rubbed her eyes with the inside of her elbow—her hands reeked of chemicals—and she tried to point the weapon with authority while her vision slowly cleared. The gun smells of powder, she thought between the screams in her head. The man was dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. Boots. He had a knife in his hand.
“Who are you?”
“A friend,” he said.
Nada’s life was coming back to her in chunks and pieces as her spider was rebooting. “You look familiar.”
The big man listened at the door and then said softly, anxiously, “I work at the casino. With Wayne.”
She leveled the revolver more seriously. The gun seemed familiar, too, which was crazy. She began to wonder if any of this was real. If she was still in the hospital bed. Still under sedation. If they were doing the operation