More labored breathing, and a loud crash, like someone had smashed a vase or a lamp. I crept closer to the door.
“People are going to ask questions,” said the woman, and I heard another crash. The gasping breather grunted, only to succumb to a fit of coughing so bad he might have been vomiting. I wondered how her sickness-shunting power worked—if she had some way of increasing the intensity. An ancient goddess of plagues, amping up a common cold until it destroyed a grown man’s lungs in minutes. “Some of the parents are already suspicious, they have been for years, and now you come in and add more fuel to the fire. ‘Nurse Gardner killed my daughter! She’s a vector of disease; she’s Typhoid Mary!’” Another crash. I stood by the edge of the door, my back pressed against the wall, the knife raised to my chest so I could strike out in a split second if I had to. Maybe I already had to; I couldn’t think clearly. I wanted to attack her, to stab her and twist the knife and feel her hot blood pumping out on my hand—but for that very reason I knew that I shouldn’t. There was a threshold here, and I didn’t dare to cross it. Potash grunted again, like he was trying to speak, but his voice was nothing but a broken wheeze, so painful it made me cringe just to hear it.
“I wanted to leave you for Rack,” said Mary. I heard a click of what could only be a gun, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I gripped the knife tighter, screaming silently at myself to stay and go at the same time. “You deserve a death so much worse than I can—”
I swung around the doorjamb, saw Mary Gardner’s back as she stood over Potash’s body, and plunged my knife in with a strangled shout. It was exactly like I’d dreamed it: a sudden slowing as the blade met flesh, the metal sinking into the meat, glancing off a bone, jarring my hand like a thrill of pleasure. She stiffened and screamed, hanging for a moment in midair before her strength disappeared and she started to collapse. The weight of her body fought against my grip on the knife, but I grit my teeth and held my hand firm, and the body slid off with a slow, bloody slurp.
I’d killed her.
She landed in a lifeless heap, and I felt a sickening rush, like water flowing into a void. All that work, all that waiting, all that planning and dreaming and imagining what it would be like, and … that was it? My peripheral vision seemed to disappear, tunneling in on this one single body. I dropped to my knees, reaching out my left hand to touch her back, but shying away at the last moment. Her pale blue nurse’s shirt was slowly turning red as her blood spread across it. Should I roll her over? Should I see her face? Should I say something or do something or punch her or bite her or—
My breath became shallow, my heart hammered in my chest. How many times had I dreamed about stabbing someone? I used to dream about stabbing Brooke, or Marci, or even my mother; shameful, terrifying fantasies I’d tried for years to get free of, killing everyone who was close to me. I’d dreamed about killing my father so many times I’d lost count. And now I’d finally done it, knife and all, to this … nobody. And it meant nothing.
I felt a greater rage than I’d ever felt before.
My knife was in her back again, before I even knew how it got there, then I saw my arm raise and the blood drip from the knife and I screamed and drove it in a third time, piercing flesh and snapping bone, and again and again, up and down, my teeth clenched in a frenzy of stabbing and hacking until the body dissolved around my knife, the flesh turning black, the air filling with the acrid stench of burning grease, the body discorporating into ash and sludge and slime. It sunk into the carpet, a smoldering, shapeless blob—and still I stabbed it, until the knife stuck deep in the floor and the jolt knocked my hand away. I gasped for breath. Mary’s gun, lost under her body when she fell, became visible again as the sizzling ash sizzled away around it.
A grunt. I looked up at Potash, who was too weak to breathe, propped against the wall like a broken doll.
He’d seen everything.
5
I volunteered to embalm Kelly, but I don’t think they took the offer seriously. Instead we holed up in our office, waiting for the world to calm down.