Not true, a mournful voice replied. It was his fault, all of it, only his—

“That’s not right.” He forced himself to stare at the strange party on the landing. “The son of a bitch took them from me. He set me up here. I don’t know why but it’s not my fault. Wherever you all came from, he was the one who let you out. He started this. You’re here, all of you, because of him, not me. I’m going to get my keys back and then I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

The group regarded him flatly, already losing interest. The thing that had disguised itself as Sarah picked up the cop’s head and began tossing it in the air. When the boy leaped up and tried to grab it from her she clubbed him with her elbow and took an enormous proprietary bite from the skull, grinning at Calhoun in a way that made him wish he’d never been born. He could hear her chewing. It sounded like someone eating broken glass.

One by one they faded from view.

Calhoun could actually feel them vanishing back inside what remained of his mind. He knew everything now: the hospital was alive. He was trapped inside it, but it was inside him, too. That was the hell of it. Everything, every fucking thing, was wrong with this picture, and guilty or not, he would do whatever it took to escape from it. Even rats knew when to abandon ship, and he and pride hadn’t been on speaking terms for a long, long time.

Even so, it’s too late. It’s inside you, too. You’ve been bought and paid for.

Except Snow had provided him with a way out, hadn’t he? In his note in the whiskey bottle he had told Calhoun where to go and exactly what to do and Calhoun intended to follow those instructions to the letter. Could he trust him? Did it matter?

No. Even if it meant throwing away every scrap of what made him human, sacrificing his soul itself…nothing was going to stop him from getting out of here.

With that in mind he went through the door to the sixth floor and into Pediatric Intensive Care.

CHAPTER 43

43.

Mike and Jolie arrived at the nurse’s station on the sixth floor, Pediatric ICU, neither of them speaking. The air still stunk of unnatural smoke and ash. Jolie coughed but said nothing. Except for the fabric-on-fabric out-of-synch shuffle of their footsteps, they traveled in absolute silence, not meeting each other’s eyes.

There was a bloody circle drawn on the top of the nurses’ desk. Mike set the camera inside the circle.

Jolie cleared her throat. “Look.”

He glanced up, unable to do otherwise. The smoke-stained wall above the station was slashed with two red arrows pointing in opposite directions.

One pointed to the right. It was marked M.