The Shibboleth (12 page)

“New kid,” he says. “Shreve Cannon.” He checks his clipboard. I hear the slow, lumbering squish of nurse's shoes in the hallway, and I have a sneaky suspicion that Buster is standing behind me now. I turn slowly and he's there, all five thousand pounds of him, arms akimbo, looking down at me. Even Buster wears a Taser now. He looks like a different person from last night, when he showed me the news. His skin is waxy and loose. Piggy eyes sunk into the swampy flesh of his face.

“Gotta say, boss, you look like you could use a nap.”

He nods, too tired to threaten me. “Going off shift here in a few, kid. Just rolled around to make sure you take your candy.” He blinks and looks at Steve-O. “You got his dosage ready?”

Steve-O turns to an area hidden behind the open window of the dispensary, and when he turns back, he's holding a small paper cup that he places on the cracked and spotted lime-green linoleum sill. I pick it up.

A keening sound hits the ears. High-pitched and female.

She's started. I sense more than see Buster turning to her. Two gigantic pills in the paper cup stare up at me like twin
pupils in a paper eye. I crumple the cup in my hand as Steve-O mutters, “Oh, shit,” and hustles around to the locked door, throwing it open.

I have to see. I turn. Rollie's standing there, looking directly at Buster with a furious expression like oil spreading across her features, legs spread in a wide stance. Near her foot is a growing pool of urine, and the sharp smell of it stings my nostrils as she launches herself at Buster with a growl and quick—
scary quick
—she snatches at his arm, his clothes, and scurries up his body to scratch like a madwoman at his eyes and lurch forward with teeth wide and gnashing to bite at his nose, his cheek. She's devolved into some furious primate, and Buster's overmuscled arms flail for seconds before he can get one of his ham-hands on her writhing form. When he does, the fat fingers bunch in her robes, and with a great tearing motion, he tosses her away.

Rollie smacks the tiles of the floor at the center of the
X
that marks the cross of ward wings, right in front of the plexiglass nurse station. Two women I don't recognize stand, alarmed, as Rollie slides across the floor and bumps the wall, where she begins to seize, like an unoiled engine catching and burning out. She jitters, she spasms. Her mouth froths and it's flecked with blood and I don't even know if it's her blood or Buster's from where she bit his cheek, which now streams crimson down the curve of his neck and discolors his uniform.

She shudders and bows her back, only her feet and head touching the floor.

Buster falls to his knees at Rollie's side while the two female nurses and Steve-O rush forward to help.

Holy crap.

Now's my time to skedaddle. I knock back the water, turn to hot-step away while their attention is fully on Rollie.

And run smack-dab into Dr. Sinequa.

He holds out his hand, obvious.

I don't hold out mine, keeping it bunched tight at my side. The nurses have sedated Rollie now and call for a stretcher. She must've cracked something good in her fit. Buster rises from his hams, and Steve-O is already taking his place back behind the dispensary door.

“This one,” says Dr. Sinequa, “plans on skipping his medication today. Mr. Smith, please ensure this does not happen. Actually, let's move him to injections rather than oral dosage. We don't want any more”—he smiles—“distractions.”

Uncanny how he picked that word out. Almost as if he'd been listening to us. I'm paranoid, but I can't get that paranoid. Can I?

Buster puts his hands on my shoulders, keeping me still. Dr. Sinequa says, “I'm thinking another hundred milligrams of Haldol. Let's settle this one down. He's got the candy in his right hand.”

Buster yanks up my arm and begins digging at my closed hand, and I push away from the warm trunk of his body, flailing at his bulk. He barks out a short laugh as my free hand claws at his chest and then my trapped hand is pried open and the candy falls, with the crumpled paper cup, to the floor with two bright little pings and silence.

They're moving Rollie out of the ward now in a bustle, and I hear a volley of acronyms being spouted: EKG, MRI, ASAP
and the good old favorite, STAT. But the word I hear most is
ISOLATION.

Rollie, that was one helluva performance. Now they're putting you in a closet.

Steve-O makes the long pilgrimage back out of the dispensary, hefting a syringe in his mitt. He eyes me warily. I feel Buster's hands clamp down hard on both my arms, and his buddy darts in and jabs me in the gluteus maximus.

The drugs hit me like a tidal wave, and I swoon, a tsunami of drugs flooding my system. I feel tremors building in my limbs, like some itch I can't scratch, but that itch breeds in the muscles of my arm, my biceps and triceps, my quads and laterals. My body quakes and my heart staggers into a sitting position. Temples pound. Hands numb as my tongue. As my soul.

How much has the wild blue yonder affected me? Those etheric heights that Quincrux spoke of—now I miss them terribly, even with the responsibility and weight that accompanied the shibboleth. I miss it.

I am become small now, inconsequential. I was before infinitesimal, but like a spark, active and shimmer-bright. Now I'm a piece of ash falling from dead skies, carried along by the soft eddies of wind and the suck of gravity.

Dr. Sinequa says, “Yes, I think that will do. Notate his chart that he's due for another dose in eight hours.” He brushes his hands together, sweeps back his doctor's coat, and puts his hands in his pockets. He whistles tunelessly as he strides off.

Stuck in the meatsuit for the duration.

We're gonna have to do this the hard way.

It's a good thing I'm a thief.

Eventually, Buster stops glaring at me and tromps away, and the nurses return to their stations. All of them shoot me varying degrees of stink-eye as I stand there, swooning in the tide. There's a moon in the same sky as the sun, today.

I make my way back to my cot. I try to keep the dull smile from creeping across my face. The flesh of my cheeks, my lips, feels numb, masklike.

When I'm at my cot, I carefully place the key card I've held so tightly in my left hand underneath my cot's sheets. Clipped while he was yanking me around and I scrabbled at his chest. It reads
Sylvester Smith, RN, PMHN
.

Time to blow this dump.

It's night now, or what passes for night in this echo chamber of a building. It's not quiet; the patients are restless and muttering, barking, making birdcalls and strange ululations.

I didn't see Rollie for the rest of the day, and I looked for her as they gave me my second dose of Haldol—a sharp pinprick in my ass and then the sucking tide of numbness as Dr. Sinequa and two frowning nurses watched. The juice almost blotted out my feelings of remorse; with Rollie gone, I was left to imagine the horrors she'd be exposed to by the staff here. All because she helped me.

Sometimes I'm such a selfish prick. I'll set the world on fire and burn everything down to get exactly what I want. The terrible realization of my selfishness is muted and dull in the vast cathedral of antipsychotics. I got what I wanted. But Rollie paid the price.

I wish I could tell her I'm sorry.

One of the nurses has walked down the hall, spraying air freshener, so now the hallway stinks of mold, feces, urine, vermin, sweat, and Ocean Fresh Scent with Oxidizer.

Two cots down from me a boy is singing, softly, over and over,
I am you and you are me, though we always disagree, me is you and you is she, two makes one and one makes three.
The same song the girl was singing. It reminds me of the old poem, “Yesterday,
upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there, he wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away …” Something about the verse tugs at me, reminds me of the shibboleth.

It's a long hall—dimly lit now to promote sleep for those who can get it—and I'm two-thirds of it away from the entrance to the main psych ward and nurse station. Those patients in the mental ward that actually do have rooms, tonight they're on lockdown, incarcerado. One big bull-nurse sits in a chair at the far end of the boy's ward, face illuminated by his smartphone—he's obviously playing some game, the way his torso occasionally twitches. He's at the farthest point away from the entrance, watching the zomboids and shamblers as they don't sleep. The door to the stairwell is beyond him, with the key card system.

I am you and you are me, though we always disagree, me is you and you is she …

At this point, I can't feel anything except the dull tug of flesh and my personal need for sleep. Yet the tension in the hall seems palpable. The temperature has risen, and the air is so muggy it feels like we're submerged in some sluggish underwater seascape. I move slowly, shifting in the cot, watching, sheened in sweat.

It's time to go.

The boy stops singing as a thin young man approaches and stands over him, saying something under his breath that I can't make out.

“
I am you and you is she
—” the boy says, loud enough for me to hear.

I glance at the bull, who's lifted his face away from his phone, squinting past me down the length of the hall.

The standing boy raises his hands, and I can see now that
he's got a pillow clutched in them. His silhouette is almost the caricature of a murderer, a logo for the Smotherers Association.

But the boy pops up, off the cot, faster than you can imagine, screeching, “
THOUGH WE ALWAYS DISAGREE
—” and barrels into the other one, their faces coming together with a thud and twisting into something looking like a manic homecoming kiss. He's pushing him back against the far wall, hands drawing him tight into an embrace, pushing his face into the boy's, mouth to mouth. The lanky boy makes a muffled bellow, falling backward, and I realize it's not a kiss. But I guess the bull realizes the same thing and he barrels past me, hand going to his Taser, bellowing himself.

I don't wait to see if he's bitten the poor fucker's tongue completely off. I fumble under my cot's covers until I have the card in my hand, and I move as quickly as I can, a slow sluggish shamble, toward the exit.

There's yelling now behind me, and I feel like I should look, see what's happening, if there are any bulls coming after me. I reach the door—feeling like I've just swum through fifteen feet of molasses—raise my fist, clutching the key card, and swipe it. It's an eternity before the little light at the top of the keypad turns green. I pull the door open and step through.

I haven't really thought this out.

Once the door shuts behind me, sending echoes up and down the stairwell, I realize I have no idea where these steps lead and no time to figure out where I'll exit. But I head down the steps—I can only hope that there are windows I can peek through so I don't have to open doors blindly.

The clack and swoosh of a door opening below me and the sound of the footfalls and heavy breath that comes with climbing steps reaches my ears. I retreat, heading back up. Who the hell would take the stairs when there are elevators?

I keep following the stairs up, making left turn after left turn, trying to stay quiet and get a glimpse of the person below me in the gap between flights. But I can't see anything except a white hand on the balustrade and a flash of nurse's blues. Can't tell if it's a man or woman. But it doesn't matter anyway.

I remember, once, another chase in a stairwell, with Quincrux and his multitude of slaves streaming blood from their noses, marching after me with limps, and that gives me a little tremor.
Things happen in patterns, child
, Quincrux said.

I've had to use people—I've taken and used them just like Quincrux to
escape Quincrux
. But this time the shibboleth is locked away, and I'm tired and underfed. This time I just have to sack up and get out, alone.