Madhouse

17

After a few hours of needed unconsciousness, I woke that evening, took a shower, and went where Niko was sitting on the couch looking at the paper spread out on our battle-scarred coffee table. He must've gone out to buy one, because he didn't tend to swipe the one from that asshole downstairs like I did. Always bitching to the manager about the noise, and I had to admit when you hit the floor after being thrown over your brother's shoulder, that does make some noise. So I played loud music when we sparred to cover up the floor pounding, lamps breaking, and tables overturning, but apparently he wasn't a fan of alternative music either. The manager came by and squawked at us once a week or so and the asshole under us lost a paper or three. Niko didn't approve but as Thou Shall Not Steal wasn't kissing cousins with Thou Shall Not Kick Your Brother's Ass in Sparring, I ignored him.

"What's up?" I asked. "You looking for 'Ninja needed, soy-eating, anal-retentive required' in the classifieds?"

"No." He didn't raise his eyes from the paper. "It seems Sawney finally received some publicity after all."

I sat beside him and took a look for myself. The picture wasn't so bad. Just a gurney and a full body bag. That's a helluva life to lead, isn't it, when a body bag is just one of those things? No big deal. The headline made up for it, though: eight slaughtered AT MANHATTAN PSYCHIATRIC CENTER…"Oh,…shit,"…I murmured.

It seemed two security guards and six of the mental patients had been killed. Two more patients were missing. Four were decapitated and the other four had their throats slit. All were sliced to hell and back. "Hell, we knew the son of a bitch does have a taste for the psychiatrically challenged." And for me. I read the rest of the article. The two missing patients were assumed to be responsible for the deaths…with what? Their damn fingernails? Those poor bastards had been taken away either dead to be eaten later or alive for Sawney's fun and games. I hoped for their sakes they were dead. "Want I should take a smell around?" I didn't see we could do anything else except make sure it was Sawney.

"I think that is an excellent idea." He refolded the paper and slapped it against my chest. "Take that down to Mr. Arnold. He's no doubt been looking for it."

My brother, occasionally he did surprise me.

We waited until around midnight until dressing in black—jacket and coat, shirt and pants—and took the train up to East Twenty-fifth Street. Niko had done some research online about the place, but standing across the street looking at the fence topped with concertina wire, I didn't get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about the mental health field. At least seventeen stories tall, the building was a brown looming mass straight out of a Stephen King book. Hundreds of glowing hungry eyes masquerading as windows, the double doors that took you in never to spit you out again, and the Kingster himself doing the body cavity searches. Then off you'd go to the double-lockdown ward where criminally insane was already preprinted on your name tag. Hi, my name is Cal! I like to knit and kill, and I have father issues.

I kept looking up at the place, hypnotized, then shuddered slightly and looked over at Nik. "Okay, if there's undercover work involved here," I said, "Sawney can eat everyone in the damn city."

Niko snorted and we crossed the street. There was still yellow police tape fluttering here and there, but the cops had come and gone. The hospital was bound to have upped the security, but if we couldn't avoid them, then we were in the wrong job. We found an area where the tall security lamp had a shattered bulb…courtesy of a silenced shot from my Glock. The Eagle I was saving for Sawney or any revenants. I doubted I'd need it—they'd come and gone, but you never knew. Niko pulled a pair of bolt cutters and we were through the fence in less than a minute. The grounds weren't all that big in and of themselves, but the building was huge. It took a while to circumnavigate the place while dodging the occasional guard, some of who looked pretty damn scared. Couldn't say I blamed them. Whether the killers came from inside or out, I doubted the scenario had been in the employment brochure. We were more than halfway around the place before I smelled him…Sawney and the revenants. I pressed close through the bushes, put a hand on the cold stone, and looked up.

"See it?" I asked.

"Yes," Niko responded. "I see."

About five stories up was a brand-spanking-new window. Crisscrossed with wire the same as the others, this one was a little more clear, a little less clouded with age. They had gone through there and back out again from the smell. The scent was strong, stronger than a one-way trip. "Did you want to ninja your way up the wall or something?" I dug my hand in my pocket. "I think I have some double-sided sticky tape in here. You could wrap it around your hands and—" I dodged the elbow only to end up with the heel of a calloused hand millimeters from my nose. Busted cartilage, bone shards into the brain…lesson learned for the day.

"You don't play fair," I grumbled.

"Have I ever.?" He dropped his hand and kept looking up at the window. "And there's nothing up there to see." He was probably right. Only freshly scrubbed tile floors and grout stained a bloody brown that wouldn't come clean again no matter how much bleach housekeeping used.

"Can you follow their scent? See where they left?"

"I'm not a supernatural Lassie." Hell, I wasn't even as good as your average beagle, much less bloodhound, but—"I'll give it a shot." Keeping an eye out for the guards, I moved across the grass. There was more than Sawney and the revenants to track; there was blood and lots of it. Soaked into the ground and the fading grass, it made itself known just as well. It led to the north side of the fence. Up at the top you could still see the mottled stains of blood on the concertina wire. "Up and over."

We went through, and from there I wavered. The slaughter had happened last night. A lot of people had come and gone since then. "Okay, you're going to have to offer me a Snausage or something, because I've lost it."

"Try harder."

"What?" I demanded. "No 'I know you've got it in you'? At least give me some sort of inspirational speech."

"I did." He repeated it: "Try harder."

Great. I scowled at him and did exactly that. I tried harder. To my surprise I picked up something … a faint spore. Blood, bone, and Sawney's coldly cheerful insanity. I only caught traces of it every fifteen or so feet for a block or so and then nothing. I stopped and looked down.

"Ah." Niko crouched and touched fingers to metal. "He's gone to ground."

More exactly, underground. It was a manhole cover.

More cold concrete, more water, more darkness. I exhaled, wished Sawney'd had a thing for tree houses instead of caves, and pulled the Eagle. Using the bolt cutters Niko pried up the cover, jumped several rungs down, and hung on the ladder for a split second, then kept climbing down. I followed, pulling the cover not quite in place, but enough to fool the casual eye.

It had rained a few days ago and I could hear the rush of water beneath us. It wasn't much better than the tunnels had been—NYC wasn't known for its pure mountain streams—and the only things I could smell didn't have anything to do with Sawney and everything to do with courtesy flushes. It was a storm sewer, not a waste one, but the things water swept off the streets weren't always lemony-fresh. I breathed through my mouth and kept moving down. When I hit the bottom, the water was cold, knee high, but it wasn't filled with floating dead body parts. In comparison to the SAS tunnels, we could grab a canoe and call this a vacation.

Still, dead body parts or not, Sawney might use the sewers as a home base. Cold, dank—it was a possibility, which was more than we had before. Now that we'd been at the Second Avenue Subway construction, he was bound to have left there. Sawney wanted his spider-hole secret. We didn't know whether he'd actually settled on that location or not before we'd shown up, but regardless we'd spoiled it for him.

Niko switched on his flashlight. "Do you remember when you were five and flushed your fish?"

"He was dead and that was in South Carolina." I sloshed through the water.

"Mmmm." The light dipped and I saw a sinuous shape beneath the surface of the water move past us. It was barely three feet long and it was not Freddy. Good thing too. Freddy had been a piranha.

We kept moving and truthfully I was surprised when we didn't come across any pieces of patients. Sawney wasn't the neatest of eaters. Unless he'd invested in a bib and a course in table manners, then this wasn't home or home was much farther down. I was really tired of tramping through tunnels and sewers, but it looked like this wasn't going to be an easy one. "Jesus. We might have days of this ahead of us," I said. "We'll have to get more help, bring paint to mark the off branches we cover, more lights." I turned and shot the revenant behind me in the stomach. "And get some rubber boots. My goddamn feet are freezing."

It fell in the water with a gurgle of blood and water rushing from its mouth. Its abdomen was pretty much gone—a bloody ruin of shredded flesh and the cartilage that passed for their bones. But there were still arms, a head and neck, part of a chest, and a frantically thrashing set of legs still joined, just barely, at the pelvis.

"I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to shoot it," Niko said, "or were thinking of giving it a piggyback ride instead."

I rolled my eyes. "Asshole. There's no pleasing you." I nudged the legs with my foot as the head went under water. "I think I should've used the Glock."

"It would've been more convenient for questioning purposes," Nik pointed out with mild exasperation as he dipped his hand under the water, grabbed the neck, and lifted the head up out of the water. "We would like to have a word with you, if you're not too occupied at the moment."

The head whipped back and forth, arms moved in jerky disjointed movements, the upper torso dripped fluid. Been seeing a lot of that lately. It was getting boring. "I can question the bottom half if you want, but unless it can do sign language with its toes, I think I'm out of luck."

An even more exasperated gray glance hit me, then turned back to the revenant. "Where is Sawney?" The gurgling turned to a scream, then a wheezing laugh. "Traveler."

There was another gurgle as the head went back under the water. Niko sighed as he held it under. "I'm a patient man, but this is all getting to be rather annoying." Corpse gray hands clawed at Niko's arms. He ignored them. "And if you can't use your explosive rounds responsibly, I'll have to take them away."

"It could've been Sawney," I defended. "I can't smell shit down here. Okay, that's not technically true. I can smell shit down here, but it really is sh…"

The gaze narrowed and I holstered the Eagle without finishing. "Yeah, anyway, he's looking a little more cooperative now," I said, nodding toward floating arms and a lack of air bubbles.

The head was jerked back up and shaken briskly by the neck. Water gushed from its mouth and over its chest. "Now"—Niko's fingers tightened around the neck—"you're obviously going to die. Regenerating is not much of an option for you, missing one-third of your body. However." He smiled, and even I felt the ice creep down my spine at the sight of it. "You can die now or you can die later. I think you'd much prefer now."

"Human." The word bubbled through the blood and water. "Worthless meat. I don't fear you."

That was all revenant there. A little bit arrogant and a whole lot stupid. He went back under. "I doubt that he knows anything," Niko said absently as he tossed me his light and used his other hand to draw his shorter sword—the tanto blade. "If he did, Sawney wouldn't have let him fall behind."

"Maybe the revenants are showing some more will now," I offered, catching the flashlight and holding it on the revenant. "They're not that bright and they've got an attention span …" I waggled my other hand back and forth.

"Much like yours, you mean," Niko suggested.

I glared but went on. "Sawney's feeding them some good stuff right now, but I doubt they're much into planning their future. He might be losing some of his control."

"Hmm. Interesting thought. Let us see."

It took a while.

I didn't think it was so much loyalty for Sawney as a hatred of humans. It'd be like a big-eyed lamb coming out of a field, kicking my ass, and making me its bitch. Revenant arrogance just couldn't believe it or give in to it. Not for a long time. Freddy and some friends showed up now and again to carry chunks of newly found fish food away in their mouths.

When it did talk, and with Niko it really was only a matter of time, it didn't have much to say. Yes, they'd taken the patients through here. We knew that. They were already dead when they'd been dropped into the water. It was the best that could be hoped for. As for the sewers and Sawney, it didn't know. Didn't know if he planned to stay or go. Didn't know if this was home or just another look at curb appeal.

It had wandered off from the others with a piece of flesh to gnaw on, gotten full and sleepy, and never followed the others on. Revenants were the same as people. There were smart ones (relatively), average ones, and there was this guy. Dumb as a fucking rock. But to give it credit—posthumous, but credit all the same—even a smart revenant might not be on to whatever Sawney was up to. That twisted brain— he would give an Auphe a run for its money. Murder, mayhem, and madness, and that was just what he saw in his rearview mirror. What was ahead, I don't think any of us could know.

But when we came back to the sewers we might just find out.