always happened at the end of the action movies he and Rolf had liked to watch a thousand years ago, back when he had been a real kid. It was lit by fluorescent bars behind wire mesh that cast shadows and gave the ward an eerie undersea look. There were long, narrow windows covered by heavier mesh. There were no beds, only bare mattresses. Some of these had been pushed into the aisles, a couple were overturned, and one leaned drunkenly against a bare cinderblock wall. It was splotched with yellow gunk that might have been vomit.
A long gutter filled with running water ran alongside one cinderblock wall, where a stenciled motto read YOU ARE SAVIORS! A girl, naked except for a pair of dirty socks, squatted over this gutter with her back against the wall and her hands on her knees. She was defecating. There was that rasping sound as cloth rubbed across the phone in Maureen’s pocket, where it was perhaps taped in place, and the image was momentarily blotted out as the slit the camera was peering through closed. When it opened again, the girl was walking away in a kind of drunken amble, and her shit was being carried down the gutter.
A woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform was using a Rinsenvac to clean up what might have been more puke, more shit, spilled food, God knew what. She saw Maureen, waved, and said something none of them could pick up, not just because of the Rinsenvac but because Gorky Park was a looneybin of mingled voices and cries. A girl was doing cartwheels down one of the ragged aisles. A boy in dirty underpants with pimples on his face and smeary glasses sliding down his nose walked past. He was yelling “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya” and hitting the top of his head on every emphasized syllable. Luke remembered Kalisha mentioning a boy with zits and glasses. On his first day at the Institute, that had been. Seems like Petey’s been gone forever, but it was only last week, she had said, and here that boy was. Or what was left of him.
“Littlejohn,” Luke murmured. “I think that’s his name. Pete Littlejohn.”
No one heard him. They were staring at the screen as if hypnotized.
Across from the gutter used for eliminatory purposes was a long trough on steel legs. Two girls and a boy were standing there. The girls were using their hands to scoop some brown gunk into their mouths. Tim, staring at this with disbelief and sickened wonder, thought it looked like Maypo, the cereal of his childhood. The boy was bent over with his face in the stuff, his hands held out at his sides, snapping his fingers. A few other kids just lay on their mattresses, staring up at the ceiling, their faces tattooed with the shadows of the mesh.
As Maureen walked toward the Rinsenvac woman, presumably to take over her job, the picture cut out and the blue screen came back. They waited to see if Maureen would appear again in her wingback chair, perhaps to offer some further explanation, but there was nothing else.
“My God, what was that?” Frank Potter asked.
“The back half of Back Half,” Luke said. He was whiter than ever.
“What kind of people would put children in a—”
“Monsters,” Luke said. He got up, then put a hand to his head and staggered.
Tim grabbed him. “Are you going to faint?”
“No. I don’t know. I need to get outside. I need to breathe some fresh air. It’s like the walls are closing in.”
Tim looked at Sheriff John, who nodded. “Take him out in the alley. See if you can get him right.”
“I’ll come with you,” Wendy said. “You’ll need me to open the door, anyway.”
The door at the far end of the holding area had big white capital letters printed across it: EMERGENCY EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND. Wendy used a key from her ring to turn off the alarm. Tim hit the push-bar with the heel of his hand and used the other to lead Luke, not staggering now but still horribly pale, out into the alley. Tim knew what PTSD was, but had never seen it except on TV. He was seeing it now, in this boy who wouldn’t be old enough to shave for another three years.
“Don’t step on any of Annie’s stuff,” Wendy said. “Especially not her air mattress. She wouldn’t thank you for that.”
Luke didn’t ask what an air mattress, two backpacks, a three-wheeled grocery cart, and a rolled-up