In all the time he’d spent in recovery centers observing patients who’d given up their lives to controlled substances, over the course of the many years spent in psychiatric wards charting the symptoms of PTSD, grief, and mental illness, Keene had never heard a scream like the one that rang down the hall from the galley.
The scream had straightened him up in his seat and he’d snatched open the door before he was even aware that he was standing. Paralyzed, he stood in the doorway, aware of a commotion down the hall to his left, but unable to command his body to move. A moment later, Hanratty, Deb, and Taylor were running down the hall to his left. Their backs were stiff, body language alarming. He called for them to stop or explain, but they ignored him.
As he watched the trio disappear, a feeling of finality came over him, the sensation that something he’d been waiting for had finally shown its face. A flush of blood curled from his scalp to his scrotum. He savored the feeling, analyzing it. Is this what terror feels like?
He debated with himself. Follow and identify the danger? Ignore it at his own peril? Follow . . . better to know than not. He turned to close his door—what a curiously civilized, meaningless gesture —and found that his hand was shaking. He hurried down the hall.
The group was gathered outside the door to the galley’s kitchen. Hanratty and Taylor were both shouting, trying to restore some kind of order, but managing only to increase the tension. A second scream rang out, then, a true banshee’s wail, starting low and rising almost out of hearing. The flush he’d felt moments before came back, but it seemed to well out of his heart and rush upwards to the tips of his ears. He realized he’d bared his teeth and his hands were balled into fists. Keene slowed as he approached the group, unable to tear his eyes away from the scene.
A pool of blood had run out into the hall from the kitchen doorway, filling in the gap between a pair of legs resting akimbo. Several people had gotten too close; the pool now had footprints along its edge, the tread marks making the scene somehow more horrific. A handful pointed beyond the body, hands to mouths. Intrigued despite himself, he moved so that he could see what had captured their attention. Taller than most, he could look over the crowd directly into the galley kitchen.
The room was a tableau of hell.
Blood bathed the sinks and counters and appliances; it had clumped with flour or salt to form obscene cakes on the floor. The source was the back of what was left of a man’s pulped skull, unidentifiable due to the damage and the small mercy that he was lying facedown. Boxes and bins of food were scattered everywhere, their contents littering the floor and tabletops, thrown into corners and draped over chairs. Farther inside the kitchen sprawled another body, a woman possibly, although it was hard to tell. Ron Ayres and Beth Mu?ez were working frantically on the inert form.
The scream rang out a third time, jerking his attention back to the group. The source of the scream was a woman bundled in the center of the crowd, with an almost unobstructed view into the kitchen. Keene realized with a start that it was Carla Bjorkholm; her face, twisted with horror, had been unrecognizable at first.
The sound seemed to galvanize the knot of people. Heads turned to confront Hanratty and Taylor. Faces were contorted, pale and red and purple, squinting with anger. Voices, low and ugly, sheared off into the hysterical, screaming for answers. Taylor, with his limited, one-gear mentality, was barking at people, assuming he could clear them out and restore order through sheer force of will. Keene almost felt sorry for the man, who didn’t understand that bullying only worked on a population receptive to it. A crowd of people driven by anger or fear to ignore authoritarian hierarchies was not just immune to being shouted at, it was inflamed by it.
Keene watched as Taylor, frustrated by the lack of response, shoved Dave back from the pool of blood. Dave cursed and grabbed the security chief’s wrist. Taylor, moving fast, reached out and twisted the fuelie’s entire hand upside down. Something in the wrist seemed to give, Dave’s face went white, then the big man bellowed in pain.