Джош Малерман - Inspection

Q slammed Inspector Rivers’s head in a classroom door until Rivers stopped crying out for help.

K used a saw on Judith Nancy.

The leisure writer was asleep in a bedroom not far from M.O.M.’s quarters. She woke to a prickling sensation, then all-out pain, as K broke the skin on her belly, the saw going back and forth, digging, digging.

“What’s going on ?” Nancy cried. Then, “You.”

As if, even under unfathomable duress, she’d admitted to having seen this moment coming.

B and Q stabbed Nancy in the eyes. The ears. The mouth. K broke her fingers and, crying, said, “You’ll never write again!” But the woman was already dead by then.

So much killing done, the Letter Girls congregated outside the Body Hall. For the first time in their lives, they felt the power of numbers. K sent B to release E. To tell G to let the other four out of W’s room. There was nobody left for the Letter Girls who weren’t involved to warn.

Let M.O.M. know. Let her come looking for K.

Twenty minutes later, just as the first slash of gray interrupted the sky and sent word through the glass hallway that the sun was on its way down, M.O.M. exited her quarters to find a band of Letter Girls, armed and bloody, their eyes unfathomably without innocence. But Marilyn knew better. Her girls were looking at her, for the first time, out the front of their eyes, having been shown the light by someone, someone who had unearthed the truth of their lives.

She didn’t need Richard to have told her it was K. That was clear when K spoke to her first.

“Upstairs,” K said.

M.O.M., twelve years used to giving commands, twelve years used to molding their minds how she deemed fit, did not make to move. Rather, she made to scold.

“Who do you think you are?” she said. “Conduct yourself like a lady this instant.” Then, perhaps because nothing changed in the eyes of the girls, and certainly not in K’s, she made to turn back to her office, but B sliced her hand to the bone with a tool Marilyn recognized as being used often in the Yard. As the blood spilled to splash the outfit she’d picked for a game of Boats with the very girl who’d cut her, she screamed. A brief and horrible sound the girls never expected to hear from her lips.

“Upstairs,” K repeated.

THE SEVERITY OF the situation was self-evident, but Marilyn was still thinking of her hand. Thinking of B, who had cut it. B, who should have been in quarantine. B, who should have been sent to the Corner last night, when she confessed. Had she and Richard lost their minds? Had they been blinded by the very children they’d worked so hard to raise?

“A,” K said, addressing her sister that had the most mature voice. “You stay in the office. If the phone on the desk rings, pick it up. Pretend to be M.O.M. Okay?”

“Okay.”

A, covered in blood, entered M.O.M.’s office and, after a moment’s hesitation, sat in a big chair at a big desk. Some of the other girls stared into M.O.M.’s quarters—still, even now, awed.

Then K had a knife to M.O.M.’s back. Marilyn didn’t need to be told again. She let the girls lead her to the elevator. Q pressed the button. When the doors opened, M.O.M. removed her glasses and turned to smile at her girls. Her eyes looked much older than even the last time they’d seen them.

“What’s upstairs?” she asked.

“We can lie to you,” K said. “For twelve years if you’d like. We can make up something that’s up there. We can hide words from you and pretend we’re not going to do what we’re going to do. Or you can get in now and get it over with.”

M.O.M. scowled. “And who do you think is responsible for you being so smart, K? Who made it so you can plan at all? Your mother, your real mother, was prepared to butcher you.”

V held the elevator doors open.

“In,” K said. “To the roof.”

“The roof?” M.O.M. asked. More than one girl gasped at the fear in her eyes. L even pointed at it. “And why the roof, dear?”

B slashed at her belly. Blood rose to the surface of her white pantsuit. M.O.M., still gripping her hand, screamed again.

Then many girls shoved her into the elevator at once. But only K, B, and Q rode up with her.

As the doors closed, the remaining girls’ stoic expressions vanished and Marilyn knew this had all been planned. Even this. The three girls and herself. Riding up.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve been in an elevator,” she said to K.

An eleventh-hour attempt at diplomacy?

It was Q who had pressed the highest floor and it was Q who got out first, holding a long blade to M.O.M.’s chest as K and B forced her out of the elevator.

“Upstairs,” K said, acknowledging the ladder at the end of the hall.

“The roof,” M.O.M. repeated.

“You can see the Placasores from there,” B said.

“Don’t get cute with—”

Q slashed M.O.M.’s ankle with the blade. M.O.M. cried out.

“Upstairs,” K repeated.

Marilyn attempted to walk with dignity, her shoulders square, her chin level with the floor. But her ankle, her wrist, her belly, all brought her to stumble.

B climbed the ladder first.

“I want you to think very hard about what you’re doing,” M.O.M. said. Q made to slash her again, and she slapped the girl’s hand away. “I’m going. I’m going. ”

K and Q followed her up.

On the roof, the sun’s descent was even more evident. K thought, Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

“To the edge,” she said.

“No,” M.O.M. said, her chin higher than level now.

Q slashed her thigh.

Marilyn fell to the roof floor. She tried to grip her leg with both hands, but the one B had cut simply wouldn’t work. She cried out, eyes to the sky, as Q slashed her chest.

Then, perhaps born of an instinct greater than her breeding, Marilyn tried to crawl for her life. The girls did not marvel at her will to live. Rather, they nodded as she got closer to the very place they wanted her to be.

Once there, M.O.M. seemed to recognize, distantly, that she’d reached the furthest point she could. She smiled. It was perhaps the warmest expression the girls had ever seen on her face.

She had crawled to the Corner.

“Spoiled rotten,” Q said. The other girls did not laugh. Below, however, voices could be heard, some more lively than others.

When M.O.M. looked over the edge of the Turret, her one good hand gripping the corner where the two ridges of concrete met, she saw the faces of the other Letter Girls staring up. They were standing around a hole in the ground, a big one, and her first thought was, Would you please look into this, Krantz?

But it was M.O.M. who looked into it, as some life remained in her head, even after K had severed it from her body with an ax.

She could almost count the bricks of the Turret as her head fell down to the Yard.

The last thing she saw was a makeshift marker in the hand of one of the girls—which girl she could no longer tell. It was certainly an unworthy tombstone for a woman such as herself. The marker had three lowercase letters and no more upon it:

m.o.m.

She had just enough time remaining to attempt an understanding, to sound the three letters out, before the life finally left her, her brain run dry, and her head landed with a wet thud in the dirt. Had she one more half minute of thought, she might have noted the perfect arc of the fall, the precise depth of the grave.

All a perfectly executed experiment, conducted by her brilliant, precocious, and undistracted Letter Girls.

After J was shoved into the Corner, Richard, flanked by both Inspectors, returned to the tunnel’s entrance, where the phone was set in the stone wall.