Vicious Grace

I didn’t know when I’d started thinking tactically, but clearly I had. I spent a few minutes judging whether, in the event, the skinny guy in the Christian Academy Crusaders T-shirt was more likely to reach me before the red-haired girl with her head on her knees. In the hall, a stretcher came through the high-security double doors and a couple of large men lifted the can’t-breathe lady onto it. Animal Planet came back, promising more tales of mutilation and death. I thought about walking back out, but if I slipped now, I wasn’t sure I’d have the nerve to come back in. I gritted my teeth and waited. I checked the time, willing Oonishi to get there.



And then, as if I’d summoned him, he appeared. He saw me, nodding as I stood up. He wore a pale gray button-down shirt starched to within an inch of its life and black slacks. I wondered if I’d gotten him out of some late church service. He was dressed for Sunday. He came close, bending down toward me as if four fewer inches of air would give us some kind of privacy.



“Where’s Chogyi?” he asked.



“Not here,” I said. “He has other lines he’s investigating. I’m just doing a little legwork.”



Oonishi frowned. Over his shoulder, I could see Nurse Receding Hairline watching us with interest.



“If you’re going to be in my lab, I’d prefer that he come himself,” Oonishi said. “It looks a little strange, taking unaccompanied women in when there’s no actual work going on.”



I smiled.



“If they ask, I’ll tell ’em you’re trying to bang me, but you haven’t had any luck,” I said.



To give the man credit, he had the grace to look abashed. I pulled my backpack onto one shoulder.



“Okay,” I said, “let’s—”



“Hey.”



The voice was weak and miserable. I turned back. The red-haired girl was looking up at me. She was pale, and her skin had a yellow, waxy look to it. I was pretty sure there was vomit caked on the ends of her hair. Her focus seemed to come in and out, seeing me then looking past into nothing, and coming back again.



“Be careful,” she said. “It knows you’re here.”



“That’s all right,” I said. “I know it’s here. Keeps us even.”



The girl nodded deliberately and let her head sink back to her knees. Oonishi stared at me, his mouth actually open.



“What?” I asked.



“You know her?”



“Never seen her in my life.”



“And you told her about this?”



“Of course not.”



“How does . . .” He stopped, looked around, bent in for another inch of false privacy. “How does she know, then?”



“Spirits,” I said. “You should take me to your lab now.”



On the television, a bear began savaging a bunch of campers as the waiting patients looked on, drifting in and out of their misery. Oonishi looked at them all. His pockmarked skin and carefully cut hair weren’t enough to keep him from seeming lost and out of his depth. Welcome to my world, I thought.



“I hate this,” Oonishi said, digging in his pocket. He came out with an ID tag clipped to a blue nylon lanyard like the ones Kim and Aubrey had. He pointed to a small blue door marked Staff Only. “This way.”



Leaving the emergency department for the hospital proper was like stepping into a different world. Dim corridors passed empty, darkened clinics. Our footsteps echoed back on us, leaving me with the sense that someone else was walking just ahead of us or else just behind. Instead of simple, straight passages, the hallway bent, looping back on itself like something grown instead of built. The walls stepped in closer to one another, squeezing us together until I was almost walking behind him, and then just as suddenly they spat us out into a huge courtyard with couches and tables and a clear roof three stories above us. I paused, watching the almost invisible waves of rain sluicing down the glass. I had the sudden, brief sensation of terrible pressure, like I was forty feet underwater and looking up toward the air.



“Over here,” Oonishi said. “It’s a little hard finding the way.”



I trotted after him. We passed the chapel: a length of wood-paneled wall with the holy symbols of half a dozen faiths worked in bronze. An empty cafeteria opened out behind five sets of lowered bars. A bank of darkened windows showed desks glowing with the blue almost-light of computer monitors that hadn’t turned off. Oonishi stopped at an alcove, swiped his ID card at a weirdly narrow elevator door, and gave me a polite, uncomfortable smile.



There had been years when the prospect of being alone in an elevator with a strange man—especially in territory I didn’t know and he did—would have scared me. My mother had always drilled into me that, my father excepted, men weren’t trustworthy; that just because you didn’t see the demons of lust and violence in a man’s eyes didn’t mean they weren’t there. In retrospect, it was a little surprising I’d ever risked kissing a boy. Getting into the narrow elevator with its white plastic walls and recessed fluorescent lights, I had only the vague echo of unease. Oonishi seemed to pick up my thoughts; I noticed him being careful not to stand too close to me or look at me for too long.



“The lab is actually on this first floor, but you can’t get there without going up one level or down two,” Oonishi said. “It’s a terrible design.”



The elevator’s panel buttons counted down from thirty to one, and then fell into letters. G. L. B. B2. SB1. SB2. SB3. R. It was like reading the legend off a map in an unknown language. I tried to remember how many floors there were underground. If I had the blueprints from the condo, I could look it up. A lot, anyway.I’ve got the boy, boy, boy, boy down in the dark Down in the dark, he’ll stay



The elevator chimed. The door slid open. We stepped out into a waiting area just wide enough to turn a gurney around in. Oonishi headed right. I followed him through a set of double doors that warned us only authorized personnel were allowed. The long, cool hallway had doors like a hotel. Some were open, the two beds beyond them occupied by men and women, curtains and flickering televisions with the sound turned down. In one, the patient was a young man with the darkest skin I’d ever seen and an open, bloodless belly wound with what looked like a clear plastic vacuum sucking at it. Another had a woman lying perfectly flat, not even a pillow under her head, and arms at her sides, palms up. An old man in a dark suit stood by her side and looked up as we passed without saying anything. Someone nearby was groaning and calling for help in the tired, doomed voice of someone who knew no help would come. The high desk of the nurses’ station glowed with the light of a little desk lamp, hidden away beneath it. It lit the night nurse’s thick face from below like she was the bartender from The Shining.



“How’s it going, Annie?” Oonishi asked as we walked by.



“Restless, Doc. No one’s sleeping here tonight.”



“Bad weather,” Oonishi said over his shoulder. The night nurse looked me up and down, her eyes dead as a fish on a slab. I smiled sweetly and kept moving.



The next unit was Cardiac Care. I braced myself, waiting for the red-haired man who’d headed the first attack to pop out of a closet or from behind a desk. I didn’t know if the growing feeling of being watched was the rider, the hospital, my own fear, or all three. After another set of double doors, the hallway split, Oonishi heading to the right and then left into a long hallway totally empty of doors or windows. Every fifth light was on, leaving long stretches of unrelieved darkness between the pools of gray. We turned a corner that wasn’t quite a right angle, and the corridor split again in an intersection so like the ones we’d passed, I felt a rush of déjà vu. Oonishi went left, past a green steel door with a red exit sign above it, through the pale door beyond it, and to a bank of elevators. While we waited, I tried to think how I’d retrace our steps back to the emergency department. I was pretty sure I couldn’t.



Oonishi’s lab was tucked in the back of a much larger sleep disorders center. The door took not only Oonishi’s card but also two separate keys in double dead bolt locks. He walked in and turned on the lights with the air of a man showing off a really nice bachelor’s apartment.



“Here you go,” he said. “Six separate imaging suites. One per subject. Once the study’s done, they’ll be available for other patients to use, but right now, they’re all mine.”



I looked into one of the rooms. The round, white-and-gray machine dominated the space: a huge donut shape that went from floor to ceiling, with a platform big enough to lie down on that could slide a body into the donut hole. Looking at it, I couldn’t imagine sleeping on the thing.



“It’s been a bitch of a study,” Oonishi said. “These things are really loud and uncomfortable. We have to strap the heads in tight. You can’t let them move around. And we didn’t want to sedate people if we could help it. It took us eight months to find six subjects. Got funding for all six machines, though.”



I had the feeling I was supposed to be impressed, but I didn’t have the spare attention. I leaned over, looking into the dark tube of the fMRI, and shuddered. Being fed into it would have been like being buried alive.



“There was one woman we got as far as training, but she developed heart trouble. The pacemaker they put in wasn’t MRI-safe.”



“Okay,” I said. “What else have you got?”



A monitoring room with a server rack to show the data streams from all six suites and a wide white board hatched in green marker with names and dates listed in black and red and blue. A couple bathrooms where the test subjects could change into pajamas or whatever. A closet filled with cheap hospital blankets and plastic-wrapped pillows. Oonishi’s own office. No couches, no cots. I sighed, dropping my backpack onto his desk.



“All right,” I said. “I’m good. You can go if you want.”



“Go? You’re staying here?”



“I’m sleeping here,” I said, walking back to the supply closet. If I laid out two or three of the blankets, it would be sort of like having a thin mattress.