As he climbed from the hospital basement to the ground floor, he listened to the wind gusting through the upper reaches of the hospital, slamming doors and rattling gurney carts down vacant corridors. And he listened for the voice of the storm itself, a tympani growl, alive, organic, pervasive.
It was out there devouring his town. Uprooting it and devouring it.
He thought of Jim and Lillian Bix, wholly changed and wholly alien, inhabiting their paper-thin bodies only long enough to consummate some process he didn’t understand or wish to understand, the translation of Lillian’s unborn child and the delivery, incidental and trivial, of its derelict hulk. He supposed Jim and Lillian had abandoned their own skins by now. Their skins, like so many others, must have been carried up by the typhoon wind, perhaps to the high atmosphere, somewhere peaceful above the rain.
Matt shook away these troubling thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.
Pharmaceuticals were stored at various key points around the hospital so that each floor had an accessible supply. These caches were locked—the drugs stored there included narcotics—but Matt had been carrying a key and a duplicate since September. He followed the corridor from the stairwell and cursed himself for not having had the wits to bring a flashlight. Kindle had hooked up a gasoline generator in the basement, but it was only feeding the emergency lights, incandescent bulbs at ten-yard intervals.
The drug cupboard, a room approximately large enough for one person to stand in without touching the shelves, was dark as night. Inside, Matt stood blinking, hoping his eyes would adjust, boxes and labels would reveal themselves in the faint glow leaking from the corridor. They didn’t.
He stepped back into the hallway, pondering the problem. He could go back for a flashlight, but there was an element of time here. He didn’t trust that elevating rumble of thunder, the new intensity of the storm.
He hurried to the nursing station down the corridor. For years, Hazel Kirkwood had been the clerical day nurse on this station. She had her own desk at the rear, away from the busy corridor. Nurse Kirkwood, Matt recalled, had been notorious for her ten-minute breaks every hour, when she would duck outside—or into the stairwell, furtively, in bad weather—to indulge a cigarette habit.
He rummaged in Nurse Kirkwood’s desk drawers. He found an abundant supply of Bic pens, paperclips, and knobby pink erasers; a stapler and a pocket calculator and a single, lonely, plastic-wrapped tampon… and lastly, at the back of the bottommost drawer, a package of filter Kents with a matchbook tucked into the cellophane.
He took the matchbook into the supply cupboard. One match to home in on the propranolol for Paul Jacopetti. Another match to empty a cardboard box of tongue depressors; a third match as he filled the box with anything nonperishable he hadn’t already crammed into his Gladstone bag: antibiotics, painkillers, a bag of sterile cotton. All the while berating himself for not having done this before the storm.
A last match to double-check his work… then he turned and found Joey Commoner blocking the doorway.
He was too weary to interpret this—Joey’s presence merely baffled him—until he saw the knife.
It wasn’t a big knife, but it caught the faint light from the hallway; the blade glittered as it trembled in Joey’s hand.
Joey said, “I want you to stay the hell away from her.”
His voice was shrill and barely controlled, and it occurred to Matt that, whatever else might be troubling him, Joey was also very frightened of the storm. “You shouldn’t be up here. It’s dangerous up here.”
“I don’t want you near her,” Joey said.
“Can’t we talk about this later?” There was a guncrack of thunder above the general dull roar. “We could end up with a wall on top of us.”
“Fine,” Joey said. “Just tell me you’ll stay away from her and we can go downstairs.”
Matt was suddenly, deeply tired of all this. The storm, Miriam, Jacopetti, Joey. It was all a single phenomenon, and it was too much; it made him weary. He dropped the pharmaceuticals and stepped forward.
Joey thrust the knife wildly. The blade nipped his forearm, slicing his shirt, digging into the skin beneath—a vivid, immediate pain.
Matt stepped back and came up against a shelf. The walls were mercilessly close, there wasn’t room to swing his arms, and Joey was poised at the entrance like a snake.
But Mart’s resentment was irresistible. It propelled him forward. The situation was childish, inappropriate, a frustration not to be borne. He kept his eye on Joey’s knife hand and thought about getting inside the periphery of it, knocking Joey out of the way. In the corridor he would have room to maneuver.
He took a second step forward. Joey shrieked, “Don’t make me do this,” and slashed the air. The knifepoint missed, but narrowly. “Just say you’ll stay away from her! That’s all you have to do! That’s—”
He didn’t finish his sentence. There was suddenly a taller silhouette behind him—Tom Kindle.
Kindle twisted Joey’s arm up behind his back until Joey yelped and opened his hand.
Matt came out of the supply cupboard and backed away from the two men.
Kindle pushed Joey against the wall of die corridor and let him go. Joey spun around. Slowly, Kindle moved away, hands spread. Then he bent and picked up the knife. Peered at it.
“Swiss Army knife,” Kindle said. “Real good, Joey. After you kill him, you can trim his nails.”
“Fuck,” Joey said, rubbing his abused arm, “I didn’t come up here to kill anybody.”
Matt clamped his hand over the cut on his forearm. It was superficial but messy. He’d left a trail of blood spots on the green linoleum floor.
Kindle shook his head. “You came a little too close, in that case. Stupid thing to do. Wave a knife at somebody! There’s only ten of us in town, Joey, is that too many for you?”
No answer.
“Is there some reason you came up here?” Joey nodded. “He fucked Beth.”
Kindle did a small double take. Then he pocketed the knife. “Matt? Any truth to the charge?”
“I taught her CPR,” Matt said. “She’s been getting first-aid training.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Joey said.
“What do you hear?”
“I hear the doctor’s fucking her.”
“Who told you that?”
Self-righteously: “Beth did.”
There was a momentary silence… if you could call it silence, Matt thought, with the wind banging the walls.
Kindle said, “Joey… a woman might say a thing and not mean it. Especially if she thought she was being neglected. A woman might think, What would piss off Joey the most? What could I say to really aggravate this asshole who hasn’t even asked me the time of day since Christmas?”
Joey seemed to ponder the idea. Maybe, Matt thought, on some level, he was flattered by it.
“I just wanted to warn him.…”
“Warn him what? That you’ll kill him if he hangs around your ex-girlfriend?”
“Fuck you,” Joey said mildly.
“Fuck me because I don’t want the town doctor knifed by a jealous asshole? Christ’s sake, Joey, how is it even your business what Beth gets up to? She’s not your wife, and even if she was, adultery’s not a capital crime. You were pissed off and you wanted to wave that knife and make yourself feel better. But that’s so stupid—in the situation we’re in, that’s absolutely suicidally stupid. And that surprises me, frankly, ’cause you’re not as stupid as people think.” Joey looked up, wary of a trap, not sure whether he’d been insulted. Kindle went on: “I know what people say. What they used to say. Nobody held Joey Commoner in high esteem. But that’s changed a little, maybe you noticed. You set up the radio—”
“That shithead Makepeace took it over,” Joey said. “I don’t get close to it anymore.”