"Hey, easy, Doc."
"Easy my ass! We're talking about some sort of zombie here! It can't be! It's crazy! It can't fucking be!"
The monitoring room was silent as the three of them sat and stared at each other.
"What we gonna do with this guy?" Jordan said.
"He's a murder-one suspect," Renny said.
Jordan smiled. "Try him and fry him."
"Not in this state. Besides, with all the bullshit that's going down here tonight, he might walk."
The thought of that twisted Renny's insides. Nobody should get off on a head case plea after what he did to that kid.
"He's not walking anywhere tonight," Stein said. He turned to Jordan. "Wheel him out of there. I'm taking him back to the ER and no one—" He glared at Renny. "No one is moving him anywhere else until I've got plenty of witnesses to what's going down here."
As long as Loin remained in custody, Renny didn't care where he was kept. And when all this was over, maybe a few questions would get answered.
Like, where was Mrs. Lorn?
The waiting jvas killing Bill. The waiting and the incredible story Danny's surgeon had told. No blood? No anesthesia? Awake during the surgery? Feeling everything? How could that be?
He shuddered. What was happening here? This kind of brutal crime wasn't supposed to make sense, but what had been done to Danny—what was still being done to him, apparently—went beyond madness into—what? The supernatural?
Poor Danny. God, he wanted to see him, be with him, find some way to comfort him. Only one thing restrained him from making a scene and demanding, as his legal guardian—Some guardian—to be taken to him. The last words Danny had spoken to him in that almost-gone voice still echoed in his mind. Each syllable drove a nail into a different corner of his skull.
Why didn't you come, Father Bill? You said you'd come if I called. Why didn't you come?
"I did come, Danny!" he said aloud around the sob crammed into his throat. "I did! I just came too late!"
And then the phone rang. One ring that wouldn't stop. He'd never heard a phone ring like that. Was that the way hospital phones worked? On and on it went. Bill looked around, wishing someone would answer it. But he was alone in the doctors' lounge, as he had been all night.
And then it occurred to him that maybe it was for him. Maybe Danny was out of Recovery and they wanted him upstairs. But wouldn't they tell the cop outside first?
No matter. He had to stop that ringing. He crossed the room and lifted the receiver.
"Doctors' lounge."
There was a child on the line, a small boy, his voice pitched somewhere between a scream and a sob. Bill recognized it immediately.
Danny's voice.
"Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me. Don't let him kill me. I don't want to die!"
"Danny?" Bill said into the phone, his voice rising to a shout. "Danny, where are you?"
The voice started again.
"Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me . . ."
Bill tore the receiver away from his ear. The horror of the call was submerged in an almost overwhelming sense of deja vu. And then he remembered that this wasn't the first time for this call. Danny had cried and screamed those same words last night when he'd called from the Loms' house. His last words just before the phone went dead. His last words…
…just before Herb had—
Bill couldn't finish the thought. He slammed the phone down and headed for the door to the hall. Some sick bastard had recorded the call and was playing it back. Someone in the hospital. That could be only one person.
The cop named Kolarcik was sitting outside. He jumped to his feet as Bill stepped out in the hall.
"Whoa, Father! You can't leave the lounge, not until the sarge says so."
"Then find him! I want to go see Danny! Now!"
As the cop fumbled for his walkie-talkie he glanced up the hall.
"Hey, here he comes now."
Bill saw Sergeant Augustino and two other men, one white, one black, wheeling a fourth down the hall on a gurney. Their expressions were grim and their eyes held a strange look. As he started toward them Bill wondered what could have happened to make all three men look so strained.
"Sergeant, I want to—"
And then he saw who was on the gurney. It was the filthy, perverted son of a bitch who'd mutilated Danny.
Herb Lom.
Rage like a cold black flame blasted through him, igniting him, consuming him. There was no control, not the slightest consideration given toward control. Bill just wanted to get his hands on Lom. He lunged forward.
"You bastardV
He heard shouts, cries of surprise and warning, but they might as well have been coming from the moon. Kolarcik, Augustino, the two men with him, they had disappeared as far as Bill was concerned. There was only Bill, the hallway, and Lom. And Bill knew just what he was going to do: yank Lom from the gurney, pull him to his feet, and slam him against the nearest wall; and when he'd bounced off that wall he'd fling him across the corridor against the opposite wall, and then he'd do it again and again until there was nothing left of either the walls or Herb Lom, whichever went first. Somehow, it was a beautiful thought.
With his fingers hooked into claws he brushed off the hands that tried to stop him and dove at Lom, reaching for the front of his mint-green hospital gown. His hands slammed down against Lom's chest—
—and kept on going.
With a sickening crunch Lom's chest cavity gave way like weak plaster and Bill's hands sank to their wrists in the man's chest cavity.
And good God, it was cold in there. Far colder than ice… and empty.
Bill yanked out his hands and backpedaled until he hit the wall where he stood and stared at Herb Lom's chest, at the concavity in his hospital gown that dipped deep into it. He glanced around at Sergeant Augustino and the two men with him. They too were staring at Lom's chest.
"My God!" Bill said. His hands were numb, still aching with the cold.
Kolarcik skidded to a halt beside him and gaped at the gurney, gasping.
"Father! What did you do?"
And then Lom's body started to shake. Little tremors at first, as if he had a chill. But instead of subsiding they became steadily more pronounced, growing until his whole body was spasming, shaking, convulsing so violently that the gurney began to rattle.
Then Lorn seemed to collapse.
Bill noticed it first in his chest wall. The depression in the hospital gown began to widen as more of the green material fell into his chest cavity like Florida real estate dropping into a giant sink hole. Then the rest of his body began to flatten under the gown—his pelvis, legs, arms. They all seemed to be melting away.
Good Lord, they were melting away. A thick brown fluid was beginning to run out from under the gown and drip off the edges of the gurney. It steamed in the air of the hospital corridor. The stench was awful.
As he turned away, gagging, Bill saw Lom's head collapse into a mahogany puddle on the pillow and begin to stream toward the floor.
EIGHTEEN
Three days in hell.
That poor kid had spent the three days since Christmas Eve in unremitting agony, writhing and turning in his bed. His voice was gone but his open mouth, tight-squeezed eyes, and white, twisted features told the whole story of what he was feeling.
A story Renny could not bear to hear. And though he came by the hospital often he could not bring himself to enter that room more than once a day or stay more than a moment or two.