Blood didn’t reply.

  “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” Flesh bared his teeth. “We’ve been planning for this ever since we discovered this place.”

  “You’ve been planning for it. You. I’m fine with keeping things the way they’ve always been. If they hadn’t killed Rita and Larold—”

  Flesh grabbed Blood’s strong shoulders and shook her. “But they DID kill Rita and Larold. And here we are. And we’re doing this. We’re going to strap this girl to the operating table, and I’m going to take my carving knife—”

  My carving knife…

  Where did I leave my box of Japanese Yasuidesu knives?

  The apartment? The van?

  I left them in the van.

  I can’t do this without my knives.

  “Get her ready,” Flesh said, jogging for the rear building exit. “I’ll be right back.”

  PHIN

  Thanks, Elroy.”

  “No problem.” He tucked away his custodian keys and clicked on his work flashlight, pointing into the darkness of Ward C. “I should go with you.”

  “Go and follow Nurse Bantam,” Jack told him. Bantam had taken off like a shot the moment they said she was free. “Bring the police back.”

  “I’ve only been on this ward once. It’s confusing. There are two paths, and a rear exit. Funky monkey dunkers!”

  I didn’t want to stick around and argue. I wanted to save my daughter.

  “Go with Jack,” I told him.

  She gave me a look. That look.

  “I got two of these,” I answered, raising my fists. “You got one. Take Elroy.”

  My stubborn wife acquiesced for the first time in our relationship, and we hurried into the hallway.

  It smelled like mildew and plaster dust and fiberglass particles. I’d forsaken the bulletless gun and opted for my everyday carry; a very bright 1150 lumen Olight and a very sharp Microtech Kestrel automatic knife with a three-and-a-quarter-inch serrated blade. My hands were full when we reached the fork in the road.

  “Both corridors lead to the operating theater,” Elroy told us.

  “I’ll take this way.” I flashed my beam to the right. “Be safe, honey.”

  “You too, babe,” Elroy winked, and his face ticked.

  Props for being funny, but I needed a moment with my wife.

  “Let’s get our daughter.” Jack came in close, touched her forehead to mine.

  We stood there for a moment, and with everything going on, the chaos and the hurt and the worry, I felt her give me strength.

  I hoped she felt it, too.

  Then Jack and Elroy went left, blending into the blackness.

  The meth and adrenaline were no substitute for opiates, and as they wore off the pain came creeping back to fuck me hard.

  Not just the pain from the concussion and the bites, but new pain from my recent successful surgery. The skin grafts had to come from somewhere, and my back was a tightly-stitched crazy quilt of healing wounds that weren’t healing while I was running around.

  A noise cut through the hall and stopped me mid-step.

  A howl.

  Sounded like a frat boy whoop. I couldn’t tell if it came from ahead, or from behind, but I was heading forward and nothing was going to stop me from saving my little girl.

  “I’m coming, Samantha. Dad is coming.”

  JACK

  Phin looked even worse than I felt, and I turned around and watched him stroll into the darkness, trying to hide his limp.

  I hoped I found Blood before he did. Even though I only had one hand. My legs worked fine, I had several black belts in tae kwon do, and my bad arm was still numb from the surgical anesthetic.

  Not to say I didn’t hurt. But movement wasn’t torture for me. Phin, however, seemed about to collapse.

  I married one tough son of a bitch.

  The howl brought me and Elroy to a halt.

  “Is that a dog?” he asked. “A wolf?”

  “It’s a crazy person.”

  “Well. Funky monkey dunkers.”

  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  “I know which way to go. You can take off, Elroy. I can’t ask you to risk your life.”

  Elroy popped his mouth, and his face ticked. “I think your daughter is a good kid. She… treated me like I was a regular person. I want to help.”

  I nodded, and we pressed on.

  He rounded a corner, and I was about to ask how much more of the ward was remaining when I saw the light up ahead.

  A bright light.

  “The operating theater,” Elroy whispered.

  That meant someone was here. Probably Blood.

  I ran, getting ahead of Elroy, sprinting for the light, and then I was there in the operating room, a sunken stage surrounded by balcony seats, and Nurse Shelby with the polka dot scrubs was standing over Sam, my baby, and strapping her to the center table, and she didn’t seem to be armed but at that moment I didn’t give a shit what weapons she had because I was going to beat that bitch to death.

  But instead I restrained myself and raised the empty Glock as I continued to move forward.

  “Hands in the fucking air or I blow your fucking head off!”

  Nurse Shelby appear terrified, deer-in-the-headlights, and she raised her hands up and backed away and I ordered her onto her knees and Harry’s phone rang.

  The Destiny Drac seemed to be under control, so I answered, intending to tell him where we were, that we got her, and that he needed to alert Phin. But when I tried to talk, Harry McGlade—to the surprise of nobody—shouted over me.

  “I remember the patella case! I know why I was dreaming about it! We thought it was the wife! But she had a partner! She had a boyfriend who did all the heavy lifting, all the violent shit! That’s what my brilliant subconscious is trying to tell me! This isn’t split personality, Jackie! It’s two people!”

  That’s when fake Kertis bolted into the room, howling, with a steak knife in each of his hands, barreling into Elroy and cutting him so deep and hard that I got splashed with blood.

  And then he charged at me.

  FLESH

  After grabbing his knives and returning to Blood and their anticipated feast, Flesh became enraged that others had come.

  But worse than strangers breaching the sanctity of this private space was the fact that one of the intruders wasn’t a stranger.

  It’s her!

  She killed them!

  Flesh had been cool while meeting Jack, Phin, and Harry for the first time. Impersonating Detective Kertis. Playing the small town yokel cop.

  He even brought the bastards some good beer.

  It had been to set the trap. To find out what they knew, before killing them.

  But they’d proven worthy opponents. And they continued to surprise.

  That ends now.

  Now I finally pay them back for what they did.

  He easily took out the janitor with a slash of his Yasuidesu blade, and then turned to the old female cop.

  The one who ruined his life.

  BEGIN FLASHBACK

  Fritz sat up in bed. It was after 2 A.M.

  That was when the monster usually comes.

  Fritz couldn’t remember a time before the monster. She’d been visiting since he was a baby.

  He left the window open for her. Like always.

  Sometimes she brings him toys.

  Sometimes she brings him something to eat. Something dead but still wet.

  Sometimes she brings him pictures.

  She steals pictures from other houses.

  She also takes pictures. She broke into some house and stole a Polaroid; one of those cameras that develops the photos instantly.

  She gave Fritz pictures of him as a baby. From when he lived with her, in the dark basement.

  After she gave birth to him.

  She had an even earlier picture. Of her, riding his dad while he slept.

  Or while his dad pretended to sleep.

  Fritz never met his real father.

  But he knew his real mother. He left his window open for her every night.

  She was the monster that came to his room. The monster with the deformed face. Scarred body. Wild eyes.

  She taught him to eat flesh to stay strong.

  It runs in the family.

  Rita and Larold Goodall.

  Brother and sister.

  His biological mother and father.

  She told Fritz she had to give him up, because what she did with her brother was a sin, and she could never let Larold know. So Rita dropped him on the doorstep of the fake family that he lived with.

  But she never stopped loving him.

  Never stopped visiting.

  And young Fritz recognized how special he was.

  Rita passed her cannibal curse on to Fritz.

  The curse that was also a gift. A powerful, secret gift.

  That special night, when his mother the monster arrives, she gives him something that he will treasure forever.

  A box of five knives. Japanese Yasuidesu knives, made from Kagoshima steel.

  “They cut goooooooooooooooood,” said his mother, the monster.

  She showed him how good. Slicing off her earlobe. Feeding it to her son.

  And it was delicious.

  END FLASHBACK

  The custodian fell over, shouting and bleeding, and Flesh screeched as he sprinted at the ex-cop, his face a rictus of hate. “You killed them! You killed my parents, you goddamn bitch!”

  PHIN

  I heard yelling and screaming and then ran into the operating theater, seeing my baby on the center table, seeing Elroy down, and seeing my wife pistol-whip a kneeling Nurse Shelby in the side of the head, then execute a perfect spin-kick that caught fake Kertis in the face as he charged at her.

  But fake Kertis was twice Jack’s weight, and he kept coming at her. He slashed down at Jack with a butcher knife, and Jack blocked with her cast, and there was a clinking sound and his blade broke in half.

  This seemed to enrage fake Kertis, but I enraged him even further when I buried my knife in his goddamn kidney.

  Howling like the damned, he slashed at me with his other knife, and I leapt away, and then Jack dropped to her knees and uppercut his balls into his abdomen.

  Fake Kertis spun, suction ripping my knife from my grip, and he threw a knee that connected with Jack’s nose, bursting it like a thrown tomato.

  My wife covered her face, and fake Kertis tore the Glock away from her, aiming it at me and pulling the trigger as I leapt into the air in a flying kick.

  His gun didn’t have bullets.

  My foot didn’t need bullets.

  I kicked him in the gut and landed hard on my hands and feet and popped all sorts of stitches as he staggered backwards.

  But he recovered almost immediately, coming at me.

  Jack—somehow still conscious—reached for his legs and he kicked the woman I love in the face and she went down and I jumped at him and he slashed at me with his other knife. I got sliced across my ribs and gave him a brutal wrist chop, sending the blade clattering to the tile floor where it broke.

  Cheap knives.

  But my Microtech Kestrel wasn’t cheap, and he yanked it out of his side, along with a nice chunk of his kidney, and kept swinging it at me, making me dodge and retreat until I was backed up against a wall.

  He was bigger. Younger. Stronger. Healthier.

  But I had one thing on my side.

  I was a family man. Which gave me something wonderful to live for.

  He jabbed with the knife, and I raised up my palm and the blade went right through. I used my hand bones as leverage, trying to twist it away from him, pain be damned because I wasn’t going to let him hurt my ladies.

  But this man’s grip was preternatural. He tugged the knife out, howled like the devil, and then raised it over his head to stab me in the skull.

  And that’s when Harry McGlade rolled into the operating theater on my wheelchair.

  HARRY

  Hey! Giantpants! Leave my BFFs alone!”

  I pointed my Glock at fake Kertis and did a quick assessment of the carnage.

  Sam was on the center table, unconscious but breathing.

  Nurse Polka Dots—Blood or the Destiny Drac or whatever her real name was that I forgot—

  was on the floor next to Jack. Both breathing.

  The custodian guy whose name I couldn’t currently remember was down and gushing blood.

  Phin was also gushing blood.

  Fake Kertis seemed to be in pretty good shape. And I didn’t recall him being so big.

  But size didn’t matter in a poker game of wits. And I could play poker. I could bluff with the best of them.

  All I needed to do was keep this maniac at bay until the cops came.

  The giant turned on me, wielding a bloody knife.

  “That’s right, turdface. I have a gun. Do you have a stupid nickname like your buddy, Blood? Lemme guess. The Destiny Dildo. No? Meatboy? WolfBro? Small Dick the Frog Rapist?”

  “I’m Flesh,” the guy hissed, drawing the word out.

  “Yeah, well I’m high as Shaquille O’Neal’s balls, which means I like everything, and that name is still stupid as hell. How about you put down your knife and we all go and talk to the nice police officers that have surrounded the building?”

  “Is that gun loaded?” Flesh asked. “Or is it empty, like the one Jack had?”

  “Uh…”

  Flesh walked toward me, his knife extended.

  I held my ground.

  “You don’t scare me,” I told him. “I already died once today.”

  He didn’t slow down.

  I braced myself for another death, and hoped I hadn’t done anything in the last half an hour to piss Jesus off.

  SAM

  I was having a bad dream where fake Kertis was trying to kill me, and when I opened my eyes I saw fake Kertis. For real.

  But he wasn’t trying to kill me.

  He was trying to kill Uncle Harry, who was in a wheelchair.

  I didn’t know where I was, or how I got there. All I knew is that I was really, really scared.

  I needed to run. I needed to run fast and run far.

  But I didn’t run.

  Because I saw two Uncle Harrys.

  One of them was going to get stabbed by fake Kertis.

  The other one was in my mind’s eye. Telling me what he told me in the hospital room earlier. Playing out the scene in my head like a movie, my eidetic memory reciting it word-for-word.

  “Life is full of things to be afraid of, Samantha Adams Troutt-Daniels. You’re going to be scared of things. You’re going to be hurt by things. And someday you’re going to die. Just like everyone who has ever lived. We can’t avoid it. But we can decide how we’re going to face it.”

  “How am I supposed to face things I’m scared of?” I asked him.

  “Because if you don’t face them, they’ll kill you and everyone you love. And that’s even scarier.”

  And Uncle Harry was right. That was even scarier.

  But what was I supposed to do?

  In my head, Uncle Harry winked and said, “Distract him so he doesn’t get me.”

  So I got up off the table.

  And I ran at fake Kertis.

  I ran at him and I yelled at Uncle Harry, “Get away! Run!”

  And fake Kertis turned and looked at me and scared me so much but I was going to face it no matter how frightened I was because I was brave and that’s what brave people do.

  And Uncle Harry didn’t try to get away, like he said he would. He was brave, too. He swung his wheelchair around really hard and fast and hit fake Kertis in the leg with his bad leg, the one with all the metal pins sticking out of it.

  And fake Kertis screamed and fell over because now he had pins in his leg and then Dad ran up and hit him the throat so hard that I heard it break.

  BLOOD

  Things all went to hell so fast, like I feared they would.

  But in my worst nightmares I didn’t think Flesh could be hurt.

  Ever since I met him as a boy, when I still called him Fritz and he was small and sensitive, I knew deep down he was invincible.

  It was never romantic love. It was never about that. We didn’t think of each other as soulmates.

  We were friends. Good friends. Friends who understood each other. Who helped each other.

  Watching him clutch his neck, unable to breathe, I was wracked by a helplessness I’d never felt before. Even as beaten up as I was, my vision blurry and my head pounding from the uncalled-for beating that old ex-cop had given me, I managed to get to Flesh.

  And as a nurse, I knew what to do.

  Pulling the bloody knife out of Flesh’s hand, I gripped it tight.

  “You’re suffocating. You need a tracheotomy.”

  I lifted the blade toward his throat, and he caught my wrist, his eyes getting even wider.

  “Trust me!” I shouted in his face. “I’m saving your life!”

  That’s when I saw it. Underneath his raw panic, underneath his pain, he understood what I was going to do.

  I raised the knife, using my other hand to feel for his Adam’s apple, placing the point underneath it.

  I tried to ease the blade in.

  But Flesh’s flesh was thick. Muscled. He had a neck like a tree trunk, and I couldn’t even break the skin, let alone his trachea.

  “Hold still!” I ordered.

  I pushed on the knife—

  —hard—

  —and it was so sharp it slid in all the way up to the handle.

  I quickly yanked it back out, but I went too hard and too fast and I bisected his Adam’s apple, spraying myself in my best friend’s blood.

  His eyes bugged out, and he fell over, clutching the hole I’d made, and I realized I’d killed him, I killed Flesh, I killed Fritz, I killed the only person I ever cared about in my entire miserable life.