Джош Малерман - Inspection

J stood up quick.

“So let’s not let them!”

A cracking sound from out in the hall and J and Warren froze.

“It’s the Parenthood,” Warren whispered. “Still breathing.”

They stared at the door a long time.

“We have to try to get out of here,” J said. “When they come. When the door opens.”

Warren shook his head. “Go ahead and try. And my God I hope you succeed. But me? I don’t deserve to get out of here. I’m one of the monsters who lied to you.”

“But you tried to help!”

“A little too late.”

J stepped to him in the dark, thinking instinctively that he needed this man to help him, that he couldn’t make it out of this room without the help of an adult, a man, a member of the Parenthood.

Still looking for the Parenthood to protect him.

But the Corner door opened before he reached him.

J turned fast, squinting at the light from the hall. Warren spoke first, and the fear in his voice scared J more than the hooded figure that entered.

“Couldn’t look us in the eye, you coward? Had to wear a hood?”

“You,” the figure said, pointing a tool at Warren. “Go stand in the corner.”

J recognized the tool from one of K’s drawings. But he didn’t know what it could do.

He inched away from it, toward the corner of the room.

“Not you.”

Warren stood up. “You’re gonna have to kill me standing as I am. I’m not standing in the fucking corner.” Then, “Who are you? Collins? Jeffrey?”

The figure raised the tool level with Warren’s head.

“No!” J hollered. “Please! He tried to help me! He tried to help !”

“That’s the last thing they wanna hear right now,” Warren cried. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Go on! Do it!”

But the figure lowered the tool and turned its hooded head to J. As it did, J smelled something sweet enough to break through the despair.

He had no way of knowing the pillowcase was worn the same way Marcia Jones had worn it in Judith Nancy’s White Lies. But he could’ve picked that smell out of a forest.

“K?”

“No,” the voice said. The unmistakable voice of a girl. “I’m Q.”

She removed the pillowcase, revealing only the third woman J had ever seen in his life.

Warren opened his eyes.

“Is K okay?” J asked, astonished, breathless.

“Who is he?” She nodded toward Warren.

J saw that Q’s face was streaked with as much blood as K’s had been on the other side of the wall in the tunnel. He understood she’d already killed today. Maybe many.

“This is Warren Bratt,” he said. “He’s on our side.”

She stared at Warren. “Can you get us out of here?”

“You mean can I get you to the real world?” Warren asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes. I can do that.”

“All right,” Q said. She lowered the tool. “Get us out of here, then.”

Warren went to the Corner door.

“Where’s Richard now?” he asked her. And the way he asked it, J understood that Warren planned to kill today, too. Maybe many.

“We have a plan,” she said.

“We?”

Q nodded. “We got everyone else.”

Earlier that morning, as J still slept the troubled sleep of knowledge, K slipped quietly out of his rooms. She was not worried about encountering any of the staff. If someone saw her, she would kill him.

She got the chance before leaving the building.

Passing through the Body Hall, through the swinging kitchen door, she stopped and stood motionless, facing a man holding a plate, water filling a sink behind him.

“Whoa,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

K walked toward him, a direct line, as if there was nothing he could do to frighten her.

She saw the way his eyes shifted from one side of the kitchen to the other, perhaps looking for help.

She saw the way his lips parted, as though ready to call out, to announce the arrival of a girl in the boys’ Turret.

And she saw, too, as she slashed his neck with a knife from a magnetic rack less than a foot from where he stood, the way the skin of his neck split easily.

He fell to his knees.

K took hold of him by the back of his white shirt, dragged him out through the garbage door and into the Yard. It wasn’t until she had him buried in pine needles and snow that she allowed herself to think, You’ve killed your first adult.

She was grateful for the man in the kitchen. For teaching her how easily it could be done.

She was ready, she knew, to do more.

Within two hours of returning to her Turret, she knew that most of the Letter Girls were, too.

Some girls refused to believe what they were hearing. Some believed but wouldn’t partake. In total, four decided to stay in W’s bedroom until it was over. G stood guard to make sure none of them attempted to reach M.O.M.

E was especially hysterical. The news went against her nature in more ways than one; she’d modeled her entire self-image after M.O.M. Down to how she responded to the insane information.

“K,” she said, attempting to maintain a civil smile. “You are scaring me.”

K didn’t have time to convince. Rather, pressing the point of her knife to E’s back, she forced her sister into the dog area of the fifth-floor Check-Up room. She didn’t say anything encouraging upon exiting, didn’t try to calm her.

There was simply no time.

Q helped a lot. Including removing B from quarantine, which consisted of unlocking a first-floor room and letting B out. B, finding it difficult to let go of her former life, despite siding with K and Q, said she had a game of Boats scheduled with M.O.M.

“Not anymore,” Q said. “Never again.”

They started in the basement of their Turret. At first, some of the girls ran from what K and Q did. But the bloodletting revealed more than the colors running through the veins of the Parenthood staff; with each office they entered, the Letter Girls saw more and more evidence of the lies K, B, and Q were convinced of. A thing called a “Burt Report” removed more doubt. And the paltry marker for their sister J (in the Corner!) took the rest.

With the other Letter Girls on board, the job of killing the adults went much faster. But it wasn’t without its emotional repercussions.

Crying, Q and P slit the throats of two women who worked in a room labeled PRINTING. In ACCOUNTING, F and H held down a much older woman as B stabbed her repeatedly in the chest. A whistling janitor was clubbed in the nose by a shrieking R. Z strangled a nurse with her bare hands. Then shook for the five minutes following.

They chanted as they worked, unified by a mantra K had given them, their voices marred by terror:

“Take…it…back.”

The three words could be heard in almost every hall of the basement, as the staff was swarmed by Letter Girls armed with everything from knives to paperweights.

Blood erupted in the offices, the women who were yet unaware that the Parenthood had been sliced open. Blood on the cobblestone walls. Blood on the supply-closet doors. Bloody handprints on every door.

On Floor 1, they slaughtered the cooks, the teachers, the cleaners. B gutted a nurse with a billhook. Q half-beheaded Professor Ullman with a spade. They spent a lot of time hiding. Waiting in the shadows of the halls. Hiding in the corners of doorways. Listening to the otherwise everyday movements and motions of the Parenthood.

They searched, too.

K found Inspector Krantz in the same staff bathroom they’d passed through on their way up from the basement.

She recognized the boots under the stall door and didn’t hesitate to kick that door in. The flat metal cracked the Inspector’s nose, bringing K the immediate satisfaction of immediate blood. As Krantz brought her hands to her face, K shattered her skull with a hammer. Then she shattered it again. And again. Until the woman had completely fallen to the side of the toilet, squeezed between it and the stall wall.