Page 38 of Psycho Obsession
Thud.
The sound is thick. Like a hammer hitting a ripe watermelon. He slumps, his fingers twitching in the red puddle growing around his ears. I leave a Joker card in his open mouth.
“Congratulations on the promotion,” I mutter.
I head for the stairs. Elevators are for people with destinations; I’m a man with a destiny.
The stairwell is a vertical slaughterhouse. My ‘Choir’ has been busy. Knuckles has been using a length of rebar to pin orderlies to the walls like butterflies in a collection. One guy is still kicking, his white coat soaked through, his eyes rolling back as he tries to breathe through a collapsed chest.
I ignore him. I’m climbing.
Third floor. The “Recovery” wing. It’s a riot of shadows and screaming. A nurse is running toward me, her face a mask of green-tinted terror. She trips on her own hem and slides toward my feet. I don’t look at her. I just step on her hand as I pass, the bones in her fingers snapping like dry twigs under my heel.
I reach the fourth-floor landing.
The air here is different. It’s colder. It’s quieter. This is where Aris keeps his secrets. This is where the world stopped for two hundred and fifteen days.
I see a shape at the end of the hall. It’s crawling.
It’s Aris. He’s missing a shoe. His expensive suit is shredded at the knees, and there’s a long, jagged tear across his cheek where a piece of glass must have found him. He’s dragging a heavy metal briefcase, his breath coming in wet, rattling gasps.
“The… the data…” he wheezes, not seeing me in the fog. “I have to… the project…”
I walk up behind him, my footsteps silent on the blood-slicked tiles. I reach down and grab him by the hair, yanking his head back until his spine groans.
“The project is canceled, Doc,” I whisper into his ear.
I take my serrated blade and drive it through his shoulder, pinning him to the floor. He screams—a high, thin sound that vibrates in my teeth. I twist the metal, feeling the teeth of the knife chew through the muscle.
“Where is she?”
“Cell… 402…” he gurgles, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “You can’t… she’s broken… I made her… I made her perfect…”
I pull the knife out with a wet shloop and kick him in the ribs, sending him skittering across the hall like a broken toy. I don’t kill him yet. I want him to hear what happens next.
I stand in front of the door marked 402.
My hand is shaking. Not from fear. From the hunger. I can feel her on the other side. The ghost. The Queen. The girl who’s been waiting for the punchline.
I lean my forehead against the cold steel of the door.
“Knock, knock,” I whisper.
I don’t look at the door yet. If I look at the door, I’ll lose my focus, and Aris deserves every bit of my undivided attention.
I grab the Doctor by his silk tie and drag him toward the centre of the hallway, right under the flickering emergency light. He’s heavy, a dead weight of cowardice and expensive cologne. I heave him up and slam him against the wall, driving a heavy upholstery needle through the webbing of his left hand and deep into the drywall.
“Stay put, Doc. We’re going for a walk down memory lane,” I snarl.
I reach into my coat and pull out a small, leather-wrapped kit. My hands are steady. I’m a craftsmantonight. I peel back his sleeve, revealing the soft, pale skin of his forearm.
“You remember the basement, don’t you? Sub-level four? The room with the drain in the centre?” I lean in, the green gas swirling between us. “I remember the smell of the ozone. I remember the way you hummed Mozart while you hooked the electrodes to my temples.”
I take a scalpel—his own, snatched from his pocket—and make a shallow, precise incision from his wrist to his elbow. Not deep enough to hit the artery. Just deep enough to watch the fat part like a zipper.
“You told me you were ‘remapping’ me,” I whisper, my voice a jagged rasp. “You said my brain was a messy draft and you were the editor. You spent three weeks trying to fry the ‘Jex’ out of me. Every time I screamed, you’d adjust the dial and say, ‘Now, now, Jex. Resistance is just an electrical byproduct.’”
Aris lets out a choked, wet sob, his head lolling against the wall. “I was… helping… you were a sociopath…”
