Rob Thurman - Madhouse

It was a low blow, and it was meant to be.

"Robin," I growled.

"No."

"Goodfellow…," my brother insisted.

"No."

"You tiny-dicked piece of shit." I curled my fingers into a fist.

"Not very inventive, proven false, and no."

"This is a serious matter." That was Nik again with the calm reason.

"No."

"Loman."

He looked at me, but he didn't say no this time. He didn't say anything at all. There was nothing but silence from him until we gave up and left. From a puck… silence.

Which meant, for now, we were shit out of luck.

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.