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Furniture was minimal. The greeting cards on the wall added a nice touch, but some of them had fallen, and now lay haphazardly on the ground, making it clear that decorations were not a high priority for the staff. Well, why should they be? There was no need for comfortable amenities here. The two soft chairs and the hotel-grade painting on the wall weren’t there for the patient, they were there for visitors, to make them feel comfortable. None of it mattered to the living dead.
Allie forced herself to look at the figure in the bed before she lost her nerve. The sight took her breath away, as she knew it would.
It was bad, but not that bad.
It was shocking, but not all that shocking.
The girl in the bed was remarkably close to her memory of herself. Still, it was chilling. It was like seeing a ghost before you actually believed in them.
“Hello, Allie,” she whispered.
Allie-in-the-bed did not respond. A feeding tube ran into her nose, but she had expected that. Her skin was pale, almost translucent. She had expected that, too. What she didn’t expect were the painted nails and the state of her hair—not a gnarled mess, but brushed back from her face. A series of machines beeped and clicked and whirred. One machine had fat tubes stretching to each of her extremities, and pumped up rubber bladders of air, then let them go flat again with a slow hiss. Allie realized it was to help her circulation, but it gave the illusion that her arms and legs were moving ever so slightly.
The car accident had left its mark on her. There was a long, jagged scar across the right side of her forehead that went down her right cheek, and seemed to go under her hairline—but it was long healed. Other than that, her body and face were intact.
As she stepped closer, she began to feel the pull, like a secret undertow, tugging her forward. The closer she got, the stronger it became.
“Come home,” her body silently said to her. “My flesh is yours. I ache for you. I long for you to come home, dear sweet Allie, and make us both whole again.”
And now, in the presence of herself, she finally realized what she feared above all else. She feared the call of her own flesh.
“Come back to me, Allie. Be me, Allie.”
The call of her body was now a riptide so strong she felt she would abandon the struggle against Mary just to leap inside it and be whole again. Would she leave Mikey, to grow up and grow old without him? And if she did, would she be able to live a normal, fulfilling life, knowing of all the things that existed in the places she couldn’t see? Or would she spend her life trying to find the rabbit hole that would get her back to her own peculiar wonderland?
“You want this. It’s right. It’s natural. Leave this u
But the voice wasn’t coming from the bed at all, it was coming from her mind. And yes, everything it said was true, but some things were more important than fixing her own divided self. So she stood there within the nurse, keeping her spirit away from her body. It was painful. It was heart-rending. But still she resisted the riptide until she knew she could resist it as long as she had to.
Now she finally understood why she had to come. Until she faced herself, she was only ru
“Something wrong?”
Allie was startled by the voice behind her. She turned to see the other ward nurse standing in the doorway. Short cropped hair and a tired smile. “I saw that you weren’t at your station,” the other nurse said. “Is there a problem with this patient, Daisy? Do you need some help?”
“No, no,” said Allie, and she knelt down. “I was just picking up some of the cards that had fallen. It’s a shame—she’s so young.”
The other nurse sighed. “There’s no rhyme or reason to these things. All we can do is make her comfortable.”
“Right. And who knows, maybe she’ll wake up someday.”
The other nurse gave her that tired smile again. “Stranger things have happened.” Then, seeing the tears in Allie’s eyes, she said, “Go back to your station, Daisy. I’ll pick up the rest of those cards.”
Allie left, but she didn’t go back to the nurse’s station. She walked straight to the elevator, and took it down to the lobby. She would be happy to be out of this place, and in a different body—one that didn’t remind her of hospitals. She looked down at her nurse’s uniform, where the name “Daisy” was brightly embroidered on her breast pocket, and she resolved to skinjack the first nonmedical person she saw once she stepped out of that elevator . . . but the only person there when the elevator door opened was another nurse getting in. That’s when Allie noticed something. . . .
The name “Daisy” was on the other nurse’s uniform too.
As the elevator closed behind her, Allie realized that Daisy wasn’t her name at all; it was the name of the company that manufactured the uniforms. Any other nurse would have known that.
Unless that nurse was being skinjacked.
* * *
Rotsie didn’t like being in a woman’s body, but it was the only one available, and a good soldier uses every resource at his disposal. He had never met Allie the Outcast, but his image of her had been larger than life. Yet here, lying on the bed before him was an ordinary girl. She was not larger than life at all. She was fragile, and easily put out of her misery.
It had all been easy enough until now. He had learned of her location by simple trial and error. He located the original accident report, and by skinjacking various people in various accounting offices, he followed the paper trail from an emergency room, to a hospital in New Jersey, to this hospital in Memphis.
At first he thought he might use a weapon—something suitable for an execution—but, although he would never admit it, he wasn’t too keen on the sight of blood. In the end he decided a simple suffocation would do the trick. No mess, no noise. He leaned over Allie’s body, took a pillow from behind her head, fluffed it a bit, then pressed it down over her face, already imagining how he’d a
The elevators were too slow, so Allie raced up five flights of stairs. The nurse she was skinjacking was not in the best of shape, and she was out of breath and dizzy by the time she reached the fifth floor. Allie could feel something happening to her, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the nurse’s body reacting to Allie’s own panic or the feeling of her real body dying.
She burst out of the stairwell and raced down the hallway to room 509. In the room, the nurse who had sent her out was suffocating Allie with a pillow. The body in the bed was bucking and quivering, but at least that meant she was still alive!
Allie didn’t waste a moment. She let loose an angry wail and hurled herself at the nurse, knocking her over and taking her down to the ground. The pillow went flying. They struggled on the ground, but Allie had an advantage, having caught her by surprise. She hit the woman over and over until the murderous nurse’s eyes went from steely anger to confusion and panic. Allie instantly knew the skinjacker had left her.
Then, before Allie could reassess, she was lifted off the ground by a very big, very bald male orderly who had the same look of determination the nurse had a moment ago.
“Mary wants you dead,” the skinjacked orderly said, and pushed her up against the wall. “And I always complete my mission.”
Allie didn’t answer him. Instead she leaned forward and bit his nose so hard that he screamed. The pain was enough to knock him out of the orderly. Allie peeled out as well, to get a good look at the true face of Mary’s assassin.