Fixer (25 page)

A half-remembered safety tip sprang to mind, something about crawling when there was a fire. That was to keep from breathing smoke, and there wasn’t any, but he kind of liked the idea of making himself as small as possible. So he crouched down and started to crawl along the wall to his left. He chose the left because he’d seen sunlight through the windows of the public room, and it was the afternoon, which put the sun on the side of the building where he was heading. He was kind of proud of himself for having figured this out.

Crawling turned out to be an excellent decision a few seconds later when a screaming man wearing absolutely no clothing whatsoever sprinted past. As the man was sticking to the center of the corridor, Corry did not have to worry about the possibility of being touched by a naked man, something he anticipated never wanting to experience.

A little further along, he came across another body. This one looked to be a patient, and as he got closer—he was eye level with the body—he realized it was one he knew. 

It was Mr. Conway. He was lying on his side, staring down the hall, looking like his last breath was spent screaming. 

The back of his head was missing. Corry didn’t know what might cause such a thing to happen, but thought that maybe if you hit someone real hard back there, the head could cave in and look something like what he was seeing. 

As far as horrible things went, it was just about the horriblest thing he had ever looked at, or it would have been if he was still feeling anything. But by this point, whatever was inside of him that was meant to help him register and process shocking things had either fainted dead away or died from overuse. The lifeless expression on Mr. Conway, a person he happened to like a good deal, would come to haunt him in the coming days, but at that moment it meant nothing.

Nobody killed him
was the only thought he could muster, hearkening back to Mr. Monsters’s strange warning. Patting his friend on the shoulder, he crawled around him and kept moving.

He was still thinking about Mr. Conway as he crawled along at a brisk pace, not at all paying attention to the Secret Future—
stupid
—which was how the broken glass took him completely by surprise. He discovered it in the worst possible way, with a sharp pain in the palm of his left hand. 

Letting out a little yelp, he jumped back against the wall, dropped the key ring, and pulled his hand off the ground. A half-inch-long shard of glass had been driven right through the middle.

“Oh God, oh God,” he muttered, staring at the wound. The glass was thin and curved, and had a crosshatch pattern on the part of it that wasn’t sticking into his hand. It was part of the spotlight. He had gone and crawled under one of the disabled lights and hadn’t even taken into account what might have happened to the glass once it was shattered.

The Punctured Wonder,
he thought, grimacing.

There was only one thing to do. He had to pull the glass out. Already, his blood was leaking out through the sides, and he was sure once the glass was removed, more would come out, but he also couldn’t use the hand as long as the glass was in there. So he clenched his teeth, gripped the glass carefully between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, and pulled.

It didn’t hurt half as much as he thought it would. That was the good thing. The bad thing was that it bled even more than he’d expected, so much so that he was genuinely alarmed by the sheer quantity of it all. For a few seconds he just sat there watching it drip down his hand, past his wrist, and onto the floor.

Bandage. I need a bandage.
 

But there weren’t any bandages anywhere. Corry didn’t know what would happen if he let it just bleed—he’d never actually cut himself before but understood that bleeding nonstop led to something bad—so he pulled the bottom of his T-shirt out from his pants and tried to tear a strip off it. This turned out to be impossible to do with only one hand, and he succeeded only in getting his own blood all over his shirt.

“Dammit,” he said quietly. He was crying. He barely even realized he was doing it, and once he did, rather than stopping, he moved into full-sob mode. Soon his shoulders were shaking, and he was gasping for air and trying not to make too much noise, and still he couldn’t stop crying. “Nnno,” he grunted through the sobs. “Heroes don’t cry . . .”

His hand hurt like hell, he smelled like shit, he didn’t know where he was going, and he was going to bleed to death. And he still didn’t know where his mom was or what in the world was going on in the hospital. He just wanted to go home.

His eyes, tear-streaked and blurred, drifted over to Mr. Conway, and then he got a brilliantly stupid idea. He pulled himself together a bit and proceeded to hop and crawl back to his dead friend, who loved to talk about science on good days and on bad days bore the marks of his psychosis.

After a couple of minutes of searching, he found what he was looking for, a thick wrap of gauze spun around Mr. Conway’s left upper arm. 

“Lucky it wasn’t a Band-Aid today,” he said as he unwound the gauze as fast as he could. At the bottom of it was a thin cotton pad that still smelled of alcohol and below that was a long thin cut that would never bleed again anyway.

Corry flipped the cotton pad over and folded it in half, and then he stuffed it into the palm of his left hand and held it there with his thumb while he wrapped it up in the gauze. When he was finished, his hand looked like a Mummy hand, but that was okay; at least he’d managed to stop the bleeding for a while.

Solving the problem of his hand made him feel much better. He didn’t feel like crying anymore . . . it was time to move on.

He wiped his eyes clear and crawled back to the edge of the glass, stopping when he reached the key ring. He picked it up and pulled himself to his feet—a little dizzy, but not too bad—took a couple of deep breaths, and jumped over the glass. 

This caught somebody’s attention.

“Hey. Boy.”

Corry looked around, puzzled. His eyes were adjusted to the poor lighting, but despite that he couldn’t see anybody around.

“Over here.”

Mr. Conway was still dead behind him, and ahead of him there were two more apparently dead bodies along the opposite wall.

“Where are you?” Corry asked, his heart rate picking up and causing his hand to throb harder.

One of the bodies in front of him waved. “Under Elton,” he said.

Corry walked closer, squinting. “What are you doing under there?” he asked. It wasn’t two dead bodies. It was one, with a living one underneath it.

“Keep your voice down!” he barked. “Lie on the floor, against the wall. Go on.”

Picking a spot on the opposite wall, he did as he was told. “How’s this?”

“Not bad. But you should really find a body to hide under if you can. I think there’s one over there.” He pointed to Mr. Conway.

Distantly, someone was laughing. It was an unsettling sound, more like the Joker than the Carol Burnett studio audience. “Why are we doing this?” Corry asked. He had fervently hoped that the person he was talking to was sane. He sounded like it at first, but the fact that he was wearing a dead person didn’t help his cause.

“He won’t hurt us if he thinks we’re dead.”

“Oh. Guess that makes sense.”
Corpse Boy
. “Who won’t hurt us?”

“Look out. Here comes Marty again.” Marty, the screaming naked man ran past a few seconds later. This time Corry took note of the fact that his feet were bleeding; probably cut them on some of the same glass that got his hand.

“What happened to his clothes?” Corry asked.

“He hates clothing and he likes young boys, not necessarily in that order,” said his new friend. “Don’t let
him
see you either.”

“Either?”

“Marty won’t kill you, but he might hurt you. The other one, he’ll probably just kill you.”

“What other one is that?”

“The one who did all this.”

“Well, who is it?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen him.”

“I can’t tell,” Corry said. “Are you a patient?”

“So they tell me,” he said. “Does that surprise you? Should I perhaps do something wildly insane so that you might be satisfied?”

“Sorry,” Corry said, as he’d evidently offended the man. “Just saying, because you seem okay.”

“Thank you. To be honest, I’m actually enjoying this. It’s much easier being insane in a world equally so. Don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Corry said. He sniffled a couple of times; his nose was still running from the earlier bawl-fest.
I don’t have time for this,
he concluded. “Listen, I’m thinking I’m gonna keep moving. D’you know where the public room is from here?”

“You’ll be much better off if you just lie where you are until it’s over.”

“I want to find my mom and get home, mister,” he said, climbing back to his feet. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Get down!” the man urged.

“But I can’t find her if I just lie on the floor.”

“She’s probably dead already.”

“Shut up!” Corry said, louder than he wanted.

“Don’t—”

“No! This is stupid,” Corry said. “You know what? I’m starting to think this is all over and nobody knows it yet.”

“Keep your damn voice down!”

“Seriously, somebody’s s’posed to have a gun, right? So where are they?”

“They’re invisible.”

“Oh, don’t
you
start with that!” he snapped.

Corry had started off the day with a certain respect for the difficulties of the insane, but that understanding had been worn away to nothing over the past hour or two—or however long it had been. Now they believed in the boogeyman, which was fine for them, but he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. And the boogeyman couldn’t hurt you if you didn’t believe in him.

“Quiet! Quiet! Quiet!” the man screamed. Someone, somewhere on the floor, echoed his words. A loud bang—the sound of glass shattering—soon followed.

“What was that?”

“
HIM!
” the man said.

“Tell me where the public room is,” Corry said.

“He’s coming!” the cowering man cried. And for a second, Corry started to think maybe there really was somebody coming.
No,
he thought.
Not real.

“Quickly, mister,” he said. “The public room. Tell me or I’ll shout some more.”

“Down the hall and around the corner. It’s the second door on your left. Hurry, before he gets you.”

“Thanks,” Corry said.

“Goodbye,” he said. “It was nice to have known you.”

*  *  *

Corry had to go past another possibly dead person and step aside for Marty the screaming naked guy’s third circuit, but aside from that, the trip to the public room door was uneventful. It seemed—again, aside from Marty—that all of the Really Crazy people on the floor were acting more like the guy who had given him the directions. They were hiding somewhere, waiting for it all to end. 

The way Corry figured it, if a twelve-year-old kid could make it from the emergency exit to the public room, then all the adults inside could easily make it from there to the exit. So he was feeling pretty good about himself, seeing as how he’d found a way to be heroic without doing much more than wandering past crazy people. Maybe that’s all there was to being a hero—not being afraid to keep going.

Then he opened the door.

Mr. Nilsson was standing in the middle of the room on top of one of the tables, and at first, Corry was so happy to see a familiar face that he didn’t even notice the gun in his hand. 

He was spinning around in a slow circle with the gun pointed more or less all over the place, aiming at either nothing or everything, depending on one’s perspective. His shirt was torn and stained with blood, his feet were bare, and his pants had drifted slightly south, revealing the top of his underwear. His expression was weirdly calm, like the face on someone reading an especially exciting book.

“Oh no,” Corry said.

“Master Corry,” he said, although he never, it seemed, actually looked at Corry. “Thank God you’re here. I’m going to need your help.”

Corry knew all too well that there was something slightly unhinged about Harvey Nilsson, but it never would have occurred to him that
he
was the one behind everything going on that day. It never occurred to him that it could be anybody he knew, actually, because everyone he knew was so nice.

Of course it was worse than that. Mr. Nilsson was the one person in the entire world he’d ever seen move in a way he could not foresee in the Secret Future. And he was waving a gun around. 

Get out, get out, get out,
he thought. His body turned and tried to do just that.

“Corry?” It was Violet’s voice, and hearing it made him hesitate. “Oh, God, Corry get out of here!”

He heard the door close behind him, and the lock engage.
Oops.
“Door’s locked,” he announced. He turned back around. Mr. Nilsson was still spinning slowly atop the table. Corry kept his eyes trained on him while speaking, as this seemed to be a wise thing to do. “I have a key, but . . . Mom, where are you?”

“Over here,” she said. She was, as he’d thought, behind the chairs. There was a whole bunch of people back there with her, mostly along the floor beneath the windows.

“She’s safe, Corry,” said Mr. Nilsson. “Don’t worry; I’ll protect her.”

“Um, okay,” Corry said. He backed up until his butt was against the door, and then edged along the wall. Feeling the sturdy concrete behind him was a comfort at a time when his knees didn’t want to hold him up. “Safe from who?”

“It’s one of them,” Mr. Nilsson said. “It came here for me.”

“Harvey, let the boy come over here,” said somebody from behind the chairs.

“Dr. Ames, I told you before to be quiet,” said Mr. Nilsson. “I meant it.”

Corry didn’t know what to do but decided leaving was probably out of the question, as it would take him a long time to get the door open, and he didn’t think Mr. Nilsson would want him to try. He could join Violet behind the chairs, but he was pretty sure once he got back there he wouldn’t want to get out again, and being trapped like she was didn’t strike him as all that exciting or necessarily all that safe. So he decided to pretend there was no gun and just talk.