She squirmed across the floor, propelling herself with her knees, groping blindly ahead of her with both hands. The tips of her fingers touched the edge of something cold and hard, a curved surface. She groped for it and it rolled away, but she lunged and caught hold of it again, by the handle at the top and the thick rim at the bottom.
“Now then,” Loomis grunted. She grabbed Jess by the hair and pulled her sharply around. Jess brought the fire extinguisher with her and used the momentum as she swung, two-handed. The steel cylinder buried itself in Loomis’s body, somewhere around waist height. The big woman made a plosive buh sound like a baby’s first word and suddenly let Jess go again.
Jess shifted her grip on the extinguisher and thrust it forward like a battering ram. This time she got a different result. The extinguisher hit something hard that stopped it dead. There was a dull, terrible crunching sound.
Something flailed and scuffled in the darkness. The fire extinguisher was knocked out of Jess’s hands. She scrambled to her feet and fled.
Her eyes were just beginning to adjust to the dark, but it was too little, too late. She saw the blacker rectangle of a doorway at the other end of the corridor and headed straight towards it. She ran hard into the open door, which was edge-on to her and invisible. Her legs went from under her. A second impact, with the floor, took away what breath she had left.
For a moment she just lay there, staring straight up, concussion filling up her eyes with blurry lens flare. Then lights – real lights – flickered three times above her, on-off-on-off-on. Jess blinked blood and fog out of her eyes. She twisted her head to see Earnshaw ten feet away, turning from the light switch to glare down at her.
Beyond her Loomis lay full-length, her forearm and shoulder one continuous curve, like the back of a beached whale.
Jess tried to stand, but she wasn’t even sure where her legs were. Her feet scrabbled against the concrete floor, but she stayed where she was as Lizzie advanced, fists raised in front of her like an offering.
“I am going to fucking kill you,” she growled. She took a step forward.
Alex moved in between them, facing Earnshaw with his small fists clenched. Leave her alone! he yelled. Don’t you touch her!
Earnshaw stumbled to a halt, staring at the dead boy in bewilderment. Something strange and frightening happened to her face. Terror and astonishment passed across it in a sluggish wave.
“No,” she said. And something that sounded like “isn’t.”
Isn’t what? Isn’t possible? That was actually funny, Jess thought. Who stands and argues the toss when the impossible rears up and smacks them in the face?
It was Alex who was advancing now, raging at Earnshaw at the top of his silent voice. Go away! Get away from her! Leave her! His arms windmilled like a farmer herding sheep.
Earnshaw took one step back, then a second. But she reached out a hand with the fingers spread wide. To touch the apparition? To push it aside? To supplicate it?
Alex was beyond caring and beyond thought. He swatted the hand aside.
No. Of course he didn’t. But he swiped at it as though he’d forgotten, in the heat of that long moment, that he couldn’t touch it. The tips of his fingers, for a tangled heartbeat, were where Earnshaw’s fingers were. Neither of them seemed to like the result.
Earnshaw gave a keening wail, her mouth gaping asymmetrically as though she were undergoing a stroke.
Alex flickered like a candle flame in a strong wind. He seemed suddenly terrified, panicked. He tried to dodge around Earnshaw, to the left, to the right, but the corridor was too narrow. Breeze-block walls presented no obstacle to him, but he acted as though they did. Finally, in desperation, he ran right through the shrieking woman.
Earnshaw’s eyes rolled back in her head, showing – for a single sickening moment – pure white. She fell to the floor and lay twitching, a little white foam bubbling on her lower lip with each ragged out-breath.
Jess climbed to her feet. She did it very slowly. There was a continuous tone sounding in her ears, a dentist-drill tocsin. The day-bright neon that now shone down on the corridor showed Loomis lying still, her eyes wide and her lower jaw askew. One side of her head had gone from convex to concave. The fire extinguisher, smeared with blood, lay next to her. Earnshaw was moving without volition, in convulsive shudders, the steel toes of her boots tapping arrhythmically against the floor.
Jess let herself out the way she’d come, finding – thank God! – no trace of Lovett when she opened the door and stepped out. She vomited behind the overflowing dumpster, but there wasn’t very much for her to bring up because she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.
She walked back across the yard as the sun dipped below the horizon, and found the fire escape door by which she’d left central admin. It ought to have slammed shut behind them, but somebody – most likely Devlin – had covered the lock plate with six layers of duct tape earlier in the evening to allow Lovett to come and go without having to swipe his ID card. The door was still open.
74
When Moulson walked back into the infirmary, Sylvie Stock almost had a cardiac event just at the sight of her. Moulson closed the door behind her, came on over to the desk and pulled up a chair. She sat down facing Stock.
Acting on pure instinct, Sylvie grabbed for the phone, but as soon as she had the receiver in her hand, she thought through the implications of Moulson’s return to the fold and froze there, mouth half open.
Slowly she put the phone down again.
“Is there a Plan B?” Moulson asked. “Someone else coming for me? Or do you want to take me on by yourself?” The reconstructed side of her face was a snarl, the good side deadly calm.
Stock shook her head dumbly.
“Well, then, you’d better listen, because I’m going to tell you what you have to do now. There’s a dead woman on the ground floor of G block, in one of the corridors behind the ballroom, and there’s another one in a very bad way. I think you probably know who they are and what they’re doing there. What everyone else gets to know depends on you.”
Sylvie thought, Dead woman? Who could the dead woman be? Where was Dennis Devlin? Who had died? “I’m not… I don’t understand,” she faltered.
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Moulson said. “But try. I left my fingerprints on everything over there. A fire extinguisher. A door. Walls and floor and I don’t know what else. I bled a fair bit too, as you can see. So there’s a great big trail that leads from that dead body in G block all the way over here to me, and where do you think it leads after that?”
“Oh Jesus!” Sylvie whimpered.
“No, Jesus is clean. But you’re in dead trouble, Nurse Stock. You conspired with Harriet Grace and Dennis Devlin and that other man – Lovett? – to have me killed. I think you should go on over there with a mop and bucket, don’t you? Just as soon as you rip up all your paperwork and stamp whatever needs stamping so I’m still officially right here where I belong.”
Stock stared at Moulson in blank-eyed horror, and Moulson stared right back. The woman Stock hated had up to now been a fairly abstract creation. This creature sitting opposite her, painted in her enemies’ blood, was frightening in a very different and very concrete way. If this was how Moulson pushed back, then Stock wished to God she’d never pushed her. “But… I didn’t kill anyone,” she stammered. “You did it. You can’t…”
But Moulson could. Of course she could. If there really was a woman lying dead in G block, then Moulson could unravel the whole story and there’d be evidence enough to blow all of them to the moon. From Grace to Devlin, Devlin to Lovett and Lovett back to Stock herself. One big fuse burning backwards, like the one in the title sequence from Mission: Impossible, until the final whiteout.
“Please.” The word was forced out of her under pressure. “Please don’t tell.”