Praying for Sleep

a horror film.
    “Say, meaning to ask—you bumping uglies with Psaltz?”
    “Adler’s secretary?” Stuart Lowe snickered. “Like that’d be a real smart thing to do. I’m really thinking we should’ve bitched more. Didn’t either of us have to come. We ain’t cops.”
    The men were large—both muscular and tall—and sported crew cuts. Lowe, a blond. Frank Jessup was dark. They were easygoing and had neither hatred nor love for the troubled men and women under their care. Their job was a job and they were pleased to be paid decent money in an area that had little money for any work.
    They were not, however, pleased about this assignment tonight.
    “Was a honest mistake,” Lowe muttered. “Who’d’ve guessed he’d do what he done?”
    Jessup leaned against a pine tree and his nostrils flared at the aroma of turpentine. “How ’bout Mona? You fucking her? ”
    “Who?”
    “Mona Cabrill. Mona the Moaner. The nurse. From D Ward.”
    “Oh. Right. No. Are you?”
    “Not yet,” Jessup said. “I myself’d slip her a dose of thiopental and jump her bones the minute she conked out.”
    Lowe grunted disagreeably. “Let’s stay focused here, Frank.”
    “We’d hear him. Big fellow like that can’t walk past without knocking something down. She didn’t wear a bra last week. Tuesday. The head nurse sent her home to get one. But it was Tit City for a while.”
    There was a faint scent of campfire or woodstove smoke in the damp air. Lowe pressed a thick palm into each of his eye sockets while he examined exactly how scared he was. “My point is, they pay cops for this kind of stuff.”
    “Shhh,” Jessup hissed abruptly. Lowe jumped, then—at the bark of laughter—hit his partner very hard on the arm. “You son of a bitch.” They sparred for a moment, rougher than they meant to be because they were bleeding off tension. Then they started up the valley once more. The men were spooked, true, but it was more the setting than the escapee; both men knew Michael Hrubek. Lowe had supervised him for most of the four months the patient had been incarcerated at Marsden State hospital. Hrubek could be a real son of a bitch—sarcastic, picky, irritating—but he hadn’t seemed particularly violent. Still, Lowe added, “I’m thinking we deep-six it and call the cops.”
    “We bring him back, we keep our jobs.”
    “They can’t fire us for this. How was we to know?”
    “They can’t fire us?” Jessup snorted. “You’re dreaming, boy. You and me’re white men under forty. They can fire us ’cause they don’t like the way we crap.”
    Lowe decided they should stop talking. They proceeded in silence thirty yards up the cold, suffocating valley before they noticed the motion. It was indistinct and might have been nothing more than a discarded grocery bag shifting in the breeze. But there was no breeze. Maybe a deer. But deer don’t walk through the forest, humming singsong tunes to themselves. The orderlies glanced at each other and took stock of their weaponry—each had a container of Mace and a rubber truncheon. They adjusted their grips on the clubs and continued up the hill.
    “He doesn’t want to hurt anybody,” Lowe announced, then added, “I’ve worked with him plenty.”
    “I’m pleased about that,” Jessup whispered. “Shut the fuck up.”
    The moaning reminded Lowe, who was from Utah, of a leg-trapped coyote that wouldn’t last the night. “It’s getting louder,” he said unnecessarily, and Frank Jessup was far too spooked by now to shush him again.
    “It’s a dog,” Lowe suggested.
    But it wasn’t a dog. The sound came straight from the thick throat of Michael Hrubek, who with an astonishingly loud crash stumbled into the midst of the path twenty feet in front of the orderlies and froze like a fat statue.
    Lowe, thinking of the many times he’d bathed and coddled and reasoned with Hrubek, suddenly felt himself the team leader. He stepped forward. “Hello, Michael. How are you?”
    The response was mumbled.
    Jessup called, “Hey, Mr. Michael! My fave patient! You all right?”
    Except for muddy shorts Hrubek was naked. His face was outlandishly alien—with its blue tint, pursing lips and possessed eyes.
    “Aren’tcha cold?” Lowe found the voice to say.
    “You’re Pinkerton agents, you fuckers.”
    “No, it’s me. It’s Frank. You remember me, Michael. From the hospital. And you know Stu here. We’re the fuckin’-A orderlies from E Ward. You know us, man.