Ring of Knives

CHAPTER SEVEN

"About time," Dindren hissed as Matt came barreling out of Admin. "What'd you do in there, take a nap? I think I may have caught hypothermia standing out here in the- Hey, where are you going?"

"Module One," Matt said. "Girl needs help."

"Well, this girl isn't going into any modules," Dindren panted, struggling to keep up. "The night shift is here. I'm making for the meditation path. It leads into the amphitheater in the woods, and away from this hellhole. If you have any sense, you'll do the same."

"Meet you there in three minutes," Matt said, running up the steps to Module One.

"I doubt it," Dindren said, his voice rising with a wild elation as he ran for the foggy shadows at the end of the quad, his pink, daisy-print scrubs flapping behind him, "but thanks anyway. And remember: ask the question, or forever hold your peace!"

# # # # # #

Matt let himself into Module One, forced himself to slow down, and cautiously crossed the entryway to the common room. No aides. The TV was blaring a nasty Adult Swim cartoon, which was being watched by two slack-jawed male residents that Matt had never seen before. The guy who had drawn a maze on the wall earlier was still there, only now he was kneeling in front of it, banging his forehead into the center of the design again and again, making a mewing sound. No sign of the huge Ojibwe with the flame tattoos. On the table he'd been standing on were an empty pizza box and a spilled bottle of meds.

Nice.

Over the blare of the TV Matt heard a muffled shriek, and then another. They came from the hall leading to the women's dorm. He crossed the common room quickly, unnoticed, grabbing the mop Maloria had left behind that afternoon.

A few seconds later he was walking down the dimly lit linoleum corridor he'd seen on the Control Room monitor. As he got closer, he saw that the third aide was still standing in the washroom entryway, but instead of watching the hallway, he had turned inward to check out the action.

"That's it," he laughed as the girl's shrieks rose in pitch, "take that shit off."

Matt came behind him, moving fast. He knew he couldn't waste much time with the lookout, so he restricted himself to kicking him as hard as he could in the side of his knee. The guy went down like a bag of sand. A loud bag of sand.

His yell of pain was lost in the TV's blare as Matt entered the women's bathroom. It had a tiled shower area and five open stalls, one of which had a toilet with a nasty overflow problem. The other two aides had dragged Annica into the communal shower area, under a sputtering spigot. Her torn-off T-shirt lay on the floor. The only things she still had on were a pink sports bra and flannel pajama bottoms, and those were half off. An aide who looked like a plus-size Captain Morgan-complete with piratical goatee and gold earring-had her wrists pinned to the tile wall, while his weaselly pal gripped her raised ankle with one hand while the other pried her pajama pants down to midthigh, revealing star-spangled boy shorts beneath.

She was hysterical. Captain Morgan was alternately shushing her and laughing, and Weasel was saying, "It's all good, girl, it's all good." Matt saw that if he took them both on at once, she might get hurt-and he might not do so great, either.

So he didn't attack.

Instead, on impulse, he walked over to the stall with the backed-up toilet and began mopping up floaters. Whistling as he did.

"What…" The commotion let up a little. "Who the-who the fuck is that? See who the fuck that is!"

Matt kept mopping.

"Hey! Hey!"

Matt looked up. Weasel was standing in the stall entryway, his hands on either wall, glaring. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"This." Matt swung the mop so that a brown arc of crap splattered Weasel square in the face. After a split second of shocked silence, Weasel let out a strangled wail of disbelief and flattened his palms against his eyes. Which was a huge mistake, because it let Matt ram almost the entire mop head into his mouth and drive him across the room and into the hard tile wall with a satisfying ka-thunk.

"Oh, you fucker, it is so on," yelled Captain Morgan behind him. Matt knew Captain Morgan was shoving the girl aside to charge him. He knew Captain was much bigger than Weasel, and that being wacked with a mop wouldn't mean much to him. So when he jerked the mop head out of Weasel's mouth, Matt made sure to shift his grip, raise the other end high, and bring it down on Weasel's head twice as hard as he really needed to.

With a great crack, the blow KO'd Weasel.

But more important, it split the mop handle.

Hearing Captain's roar behind him, Matt again adjusted his grip, pivoted, and gave a fast thrust-just as Captain crashed into him. The two hit the floor hard; Captain crushed the breath out of Matt, flattening him like a steamroller. Matt's ribs creaked; he groaned, twisted, and rolled the big man off him.

Matt staggered to his feet, gasping for breath, shaky, his chest aching. Whatever he's gonna do next, Matt thought, struggling to stay upright, I'm not ready for it.

But as it turned out, he was. Because Captain's next move was to stare stupidly at the jagged end of the mop handle that pinned his right hand to his chest like a 4-H blue ribbon.

The guy let out an astonished whoop, and then an even louder one, and on and on until pretty soon he sounded like a love-struck gibbon.

"I coulda handled that myself, you know."

Brushing himself off, Matt turned to face the blonde. She'd pulled her pajama bottoms up and had retrieved the torn wet top, which she clutched to her chest. Her kohl-smeared eyes were wide with fear and defiance.

"Right. Well, I appreciate you letting me have a piece of the action."

Annica bit her lip. "I do have psionic powers, you know. I do. I was just about to unleash them."

Sure, he thought, if by "psionic power" you mean bladder. But he didn't say it.

"Look," he said. "This is no place for you, okay? So I want you to follow me, real close." And with that, he stepped around the shish kebab that had been the Captain and walked past the flattened Weasel.

"Oh my God, he's got a knife!" the blonde cried.

In the entryway, Matt saw that the lookout was upright again, kneeling on his one good leg, dragging the damaged one behind him. He clutched a butterfly knife in his hand. His face was a mask of pain and fury.

"Stay behind me," he said to the girl. "C'mon. Here we go."

He walked to the entryway. He didn't even slow down when the lookout took a wild swipe: just raised his right boot, and when the knife stuck in the sole, he pinned it and the guy's hand to the floor. Pivoted, and drove the steel toe of his left boot into the lookout's good knee.

The guy's ACL, when it tore, sounded like stomped-on bubble wrap. He immediately flung himself to the floor, wailing and flipping like a holy roller.

"After you," he said politely, taking Annica's hand and guiding her past the wailing aide. Her hand was small and warm in his, and he held it tightly as he led her down the hall, through the common room, and out into the fog.

# # # # # #

Hooh-ooh, ooh-HOOH.

Hooh-ooh, ooh-HOOH.

"What's that?" Annica pressed close to him as they jogged across the quad's wet grass, heading for the dark line of trees at its north end.

"Just an owl. Don't be scared-everything'll be okay. We're gonna head out the back way, up the meditation path."

"I'm not scared," she said. "One of my wild talents is precognition. You ever heard of precognition? It means I can tell the future. And I can tell the meditation path will be totally deserted at this time of night. So, yeah: I'm fully aware that it's gonna be okay."

He looked down at her. She'd wept away most of the kohl, and without it she looked a lot younger than he'd thought. Fifteen, maybe? Fourteen?

"You believe me, right?" she asked.

"Of course," he lied.

But as the two of them tramped through the tall, wet grass, he wasn't at all sure that her confidence in him wasn't just as misplaced.

In the washroom he'd been possessed with a weird certainty: he had to come to her aid; there'd been no question in his mind about it, and once he'd committed to doing so, the solution to every problem after that had appeared to him clearly, larger than life, in three dimensions. It was like how George Brett described his tunnel vision during his hitting streak with the 1980 Kansas City Royals: every pitch looked like a beach ball rolling towards him in slow motion.

Matt wondered if his confidence in the washroom, his quick thinking, were at all related to his accident. He'd been in a few bar fights in the past, mainly with drunks-some friends, some not-who'd been too dumb to know when to quit, and he'd done okay. He'd even done some light boxing at the gym-just sparring, messing around. But he'd never felt so alive, so hyperaware, as in the moments after he'd seen the girl being dragged down the hall on the monitor. Maybe it's my function, he thought. What I'm meant to do. Why I came back.

Or not. Because out in the chilly, vaporous fog, his certainty, his confidence, was quickly ebbing away. Should they-like Dindren-escape through the meditation path, or double back to the parking lot, and so avoid the woods, but risk running into the night shift?

He didn't know. They were probably screwed either way.

Fuck it: head into the woods. Especially since, as they passed the Admin Building, he saw a dark shape in the FA's window, staring out at them. Matt stared back. Something was odd about the shape of its head. Wearing a hat? Who the hell knew. But it turned to watch them pass.

Not good.

"C'mon," he said, picking up the pace.

"Cold out here," she said, rubbing her arms as she ran. And then: "Where are you taking me?"

"Away."

Hooh-ooh, ooh-HOOH.

Hooh-ooh, ooh-HOOH.

# # # # # #

Soon enough they reached the flagstone path that led into the woods. There was a concrete birdbath on one side of the trail, and from it hung a poster-board sign, which said in puffy letters,

Carthage MHC Proudly Presents

Forest Friends:

Willy Willow and Betty Birch Meet the Head Tree!

Bottom of the Netflix queue for that one, Matt thought as he pulled the girl into the woods. The path grew soft with pine needles, and with less fog to reflect the light, it became darker. Here and there pale shrouds of moonlight shafted between the trunks, leaving jagged shadows on the forest floor.

"I think someone's following us," the girl said in a strangled voice.

Matt looked over his shoulder. For a split second he saw two coin-sized glimmers, like the reflecting eyes of a cat, then one, then none.

Had they passed behind a tree?

Had they been there at all?

Off to his right he heard a knocking sound, like a woodpecker at work. But did they do that at night? He hadn't thought so.

"Oh my God…" Her voice was so high he almost couldn't hear it. He looked where she was looking. To the left, moving behind a deadfall, was someone moving on all fours. Or something.

"About that precognition…," he said.

"It's not as well developed as my disruption of electrical systems," she whispered.

He had several responses to that. He didn't say any of them.

Footsteps behind them, fast and light. Matt sped up, dragging the girl by the hand. They rounded a boulder covered in black moss and came to a small clearing containing an amphitheater of cut stone. But between them and the amphitheater was something unexpected: a glowing oak. Someone had strung white Christmas lights all along its thick trunk and low-hanging branches.

The girl began to scream uncontrollably.

Matt almost joined her.

The oak: it wasn't Willy Willow or Betty Birch. It was definitely the Head Tree.

Why?

Because it was hung with heads.

Every bough seemed to have one. Matt recognized the silver-bearded facility administrator, eyes rolled back into his skull, slack jawed, black tongued, bloody chinned. And the dark-skinned CMO with the white mustache, now a lot less dignified than in his portrait in Admin. And the head nurse, her brow still furrowed, her mouth a dismayed slash, her neck hanging in strips from her jaw like the tentacles of a jellyfish. And there were a dozen more dangling from the tree's glowing limbs, garish ornaments for a holiday in hell.

A pattering sound: one of the heads was new, was still dripping.

Matt spotted it, recognized the one dark eye, the slanting teeth, the bee-stung lips…

"Dindren," Matt whispered.

Above him, a flapping sound.

Looked up.

Wings outspread… glowing eyes…

No time!

Impact.

Darkness.