Eat the Dark by Joe Schreiber

Author:Joe Schreiber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345502513
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2007-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

29.

Jolie’s camera, the one she’d brought in to snap pictures of the hospital, was a silver Olympus Stylus—hardly the most expensive model on the market. She’d bought it a year ago to take on a cruise and barely removed it from its box, but the cute Best Buy salesman had done his job. It had all the basic bells and whistles, autofocus, turbo-zoom, along with a bunch of features she probably hadn’t even discovered.

Tonight the only thing that mattered to her was the battery and the built-in flash. It had gotten her this far, to her current location on the fourth floor of the South Wing.

Intent on discovering the source of the explosion earlier, she had only just stumbled onto the sixth floor when the power had gone out. At that point common sense had won a brief scrimmage with curiosity, and Jolie had slowly made her way back down the stairs only to discover that the way out was locked.

Now, repeating the ritual that had allowed her slow progress through the darkness, she raised the camera’s streamlined shape in front of her face and pressed the button, triggering the flash. A silent, two-beat electrical storm battered the hallway in front of her, engraving its layout on her retinas before the blackness swept back over it.

After her pupils readjusted, she looked down at the camera’s small glowing screen, studying the photo that she’d just snapped. It showed a long straight corridor with a row of doors on either side. To her right was a stretcher, a fire extinguisher, and, farther down, a bag of laundry, her outermost landmark. The number of the nearest door was 4117.

She was getting close.

Her motivation for heading to the psych ward, up on the fourth floor, was so simple it was almost laughable. It had an open-air exercise court. Jolie thought if she could get up there, she’d at least be able to get out, even if it was only into starlight. Her head would clear. And she could climb—

Don’t think about that yet. Just see what you find.

Staring at a digital image on the back of the camera, she brought her foot forward again, tapping the edge of her toe against the bag of laundry that appeared in the left lower corner of the screen. It was odd navigating the hall by a still photo; she almost expected to see herself step into the picture.

She stopped and snapped again, flooding the hall with another pulse of light.

In the new image, the hallway looked shorter. A sepia-encrusted canvas straitjacket lay right in the middle of the floor. Up ahead she could see the doorway off to the right, forty feet away, that led to the outdoor exercise area. It had been built on top of one of the hospital’s many low-level additions, three stories up, a full-sized basketball court for the psych patients, completely enclosed in twenty-foot-high chain link. Jolie had been up here only once before, to pick up a paranoid schizophrenic for a

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