Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (20 page)

It turned out that it wasn’t a wall at all, but rather the man-mountain called Mister Long Brook, who I’d forgotten was bringing up the rear along with Polly. The little girl squealed and simply disappeared into thin air, followed a second later by her protector. That was a handy little trick, if you could swing it. I was flesh and blood, though, and fully intended on staying that way.

I knew that I couldn’t run to either end of the corridor without running towards a gun, so that left me with no other real choice. I dived head-first through the nearest open window.

At least I landed on dirt and weeds rather than concrete, but it still knocked most of the air out of me in a
whoosh
. I rolled sideways, stalks of thick wild grass whipping against my face and stinging my cheeks.

From the sound of it, Becky must have had the same bright idea, though she would have implemented it way more gracefully than I did. I could hear a pair of feet land lightly in the grass behind me.

“Danny, come
on!”
It was Becky alright. She grabbed the back of my shirt in a bunched fist and half-dragged, half-carried me to my feet and into a run.

“You kids come back here!” one of the men yelled. “We ain’t gonna hurt you!”

Three
crack-crack-cracks
coming in rapid succession showed that for the lie that it was. Fortunately the bullets didn’t come anywhere close to us, and we could hear them zipping their way merrily through the tree branches away to our left.

Becky and I just kept running. We zig-zagged towards the wrecked Blazer. Don’t ask me why; maybe in my mind, I just thought it would make a decent shield against the random gunfire. Maybe we were just being drawn to it like moths to a flame.

Behind us, the two men let loose another couple of rounds. These came closer than the first shots had, but still missed us by a good ten feet or so.

Whoever these guys were, they weren’t among the dead former patients of the sanatorium. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on them being trespassers, the same as us. But if that was the case, why would they take potshots at a group of kids doing the same thing that they were? Being caught trespassing here was hardly worth
killing
us over, surely…what was it that they were so desperate to hide?

“Into the trees!” Becky hissed. Taking cover (or at least concealment) seemed like a great idea to me, so I followed her through the treeline and up the heavily wooded slope.

After we had climbed maybe a hundred feet, I realized that our pursuers would never be able to find us now, not until it was daylight at least. There was barely enough light from the stars and tiny crescent of moon for us to see by, so I began to feel a little more secure. Heck, Becky and I could barely see one another. “Who were those people?”

“No idea,” I shrugged invisibly. Then reality brought me crashing back down to Earth, and I added, “but I think they shot Brandon.”

“Oh my God…” Becky sounded close to tears, and frankly I couldn’t blame her.
I
felt close enough myself. This was supposed to be a fun and mildly scary overnight adventure (with hopefully a little romance thrown in), and now one of us might be dead. I felt myself slowly turning cold and numb inside, as though some great heavy rock was sitting in my guts.

Lamiyah tried to warn you,
I thought guiltily, s
he told you there was great danger. Why couldn’t you have been more careful?

I felt a pair of arms around me, and realized that they were trembling. Then I realized that
I
was trembling too. For I don’t know how long, Becky and I just held one another, standing there underneath the canopy of leaves and branches on the hillside behind the sanatorium.

“So what are we going to do?” I said at last.

“Leave and get the cops,” she replied in a small, quiet voice.

“We can’t. We don’t know if Brandon is still alive, but I know that if we leave him, those men will be gone by the time we get back with the cavalry, and they’ll almost certainly have taken him with them.” I deliberately left out the part at the end that would have gone “or his body.”

“So what, then?” She sounded frustrated. I knew just how she felt.

“I think we have to go back.”

“Danny, those men have
guns
!” she hissed.

“I know, but it’s either that or risk losing Brandon forever. Besides, I don’t think he’s dead.”

“You don’t?” Sudden optimism blossomed in Becky’s voice. “How can you tell?”

“Well, I can’t be
sure,
” I hedged, “but I’m pretty sure that if Brandon had been killed, his spirit would have made contact with me by now...or I’d be able to
sense
it, at least — and it hasn’t. Not a peep.”

“Then we have to try and find him,” she said defiantly. “Maybe those men think we’ve made a run for it by now. It’s what anybody with any common sense would have done.” Becky laughed, more than a little hysterically, I thought. It was a little forced, but if it was intended to keep my morale up, it was sort of working.

“It’s a really big building, but we can’t risk splitting up. We’ll go in through the front door this time, and just search floor by floor,” I decided on the spur of the moment. “Maybe I can ask Polly and Mister Long Brook to help out. We’ll cover much more ground that way.”

As plans went, it was hardly original (or particularly brilliant) but it was the best we had to work with.

There was just enough starlight for us to work our way carefully out of the trees without getting poked in the eye by a branch, though I did accidentally snap one or two of them in the process. Each time I heard that telltale crack of breaking wood I would stop and strain my ears to listen, but nobody ever came to investigate.

Hugging the very edge of the treeline in order to provide a little concealment from hostile eyes, Becky and I skirted around the eastern edge of the sanatorium until we were positioned parallel to the front of the building. Seeing nothing obviously amiss, we made our way cautiously toward the front door, crouching in a duck-walk which was actually pretty pointless in terms of stealth value but at least made me feel a little bit better about being so exposed.

The front door was still wedged open, exactly as we had left it, with the chain still coiled neatly beside it. Remembering how loudly the door had creaked when we had opened it earlier that afternoon, I led Becky further along towards the western wings and clambered through the first window I found there, helping her through behind me.

The familiar, rounded shape of the stage told me that we were back in the dining hall again. Moving mostly by touch and feel this time, we ran the gauntlet of chairs and tables in order to get to the far end, where another doorway led to a long access corridor that was pretty similar to the one we had followed on the opposite side of the building.

I tried really hard not to think of it as “the hallway where Brandon got shot,” hoping for all I was worth that my friend was still alive.

The shells of smashed-out windows ran along our left side, and on the right were a string of interior doors, spaced at fairly regular intervals. A lot of them opened out onto the same rooms that we had glanced into from that other hallway; the same kitchen from with the armed stranger had helped ambush us, laundry rooms, and administrative offices. All of them were dark and deserted, with no signs of life at all.

Finally we came to the first western stairwell. “Keep going west, or check the upper floors?” I whispered to Becky. Frankly, I had no idea what the right thing to do next was. It seemed like a coin-toss decision, and wasn’t like I could ask Lamiyah any more. She had been forced out by whatever malevolent presence held the sanatorium in its grasp.

“Let’s try upstairs,” Becky shrugged, obviously as clueless as I was. We climbed carefully to the second floor, keeping to the sides of the staircase as much as possible, and prowled westward along the south-facing balcony, looking inside the first patient room that we came to.

It was every bit as empty as it had been when we had passed it in the fading light of the afternoon, yet I couldn’t help but notice that there was a subtle energy in the air that hadn’t been there before, kind of like an electro-static charge or the sort of ionization you get when there’s a thunderstorm on the way.

Something was building, I reminded myself. Long Brook was waking up, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be here when it did.

“Hey,” Becky grabbed my arm to stop me from walking past the first room. “Why don’t we take the central hallway?” She was right, and I could have slapped myself for my own blind stupidity. Sticking to the north and south balconies might have given us a little more ambient light, but it would take twice as long to check all of the rooms. If we went down the pitch-black inner hallway, on the other hand, we’d be able to peek into the north and south patient rooms at practically the same time and clear them twice as fast.

“Good idea.”

Leading the way, I stepped past the remains of the cast-iron bedframe and through the doorway that led out into the central corridor. Not a thing was moving.

I indicated that Becky should take the rooms on the north side, while I stuck to the south.

We worked our way methodically from doorway to doorway, peeking inside and clearing it. I don’t know why I thought that we might find Brandon up here, but we had to do
something
, and covering at least
some
of the vast amount of square footage in the sanatorium in search of our friend qualified in my book.

Lost in my own thoughts, I was jerked to a sudden stop when Becky grabbed my arm again. Annoyed, I was about to ask her just what the heck she thought she was doing, when I saw that she had a finger pressed firmly to her lips, giving me the universal sign for ‘
shush!’
Obediently, I quit moving and just listened.

Then I heard it.

Oh crap,
I thought. The sound of footsteps was slowly approaching, coming towards us from the far end of the central hallway. I couldn’t
see
anything yet, which was good news — if I couldn’t see the person making those sounds, hopefully they couldn’t see us either.

This time, it was my turn to grab Becky’s arm, and pull her gently but deliberately into the patient room on our ride. We could both hear the heavy, measured tread getting louder and louder as it approached.

“Under the bed!” I hissed, dropping to my knees and slithering underneath the bedframe. It
stank
under here, and my knee started to get cold and damp. I must have slid into a small puddle of water.

I fit snugly under there, but there was no room left for Becky. Thinking on her feet, she quickly darted through the south-facing door and out onto the balcony. I caught a glimpse of her disappearing to the right, and realized that she was going to conceal herself under the bed in the neighboring room.

The fact that we were only going to be separated by a single brick wall was both comforting and strangely disconcerting; we were both so near and yet so far away from one another, and all that we could really do now was hunker down and hope for the best.

We didn’t have long to wait. I could hear the footsteps getting closer and closer. Every seven or eight steps they would stop, and I surmised that their owner was looking inside each room, perhaps checking it in the same way that we had.

From my hiding place, I had a pretty good view of the lower third of the room’s inner doorway. The shadowy figure of a man appeared in outline there, a dark shape against an even darker background. He seemed totally solid and didn’t have any spirit color to his outline, suggesting to me that he was a living, breathing human.

Apparently seeing nothing amiss in the room, the man walked on. He suddenly began to whistle, a low, melancholic tune that grated on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Was this guy playing with us? Did he know that we were here, or was he just breaking the uncomfortable silence with a few whistled off-key notes?

All that and more went through my mind as I lay there, afraid to move a muscle, with just the pounding of my own heartbeat in my eardrums and the stink of who knew what as my only company. Knowing that Becky was behind that wall in the next room was admittedly a comfort, but a very small one indeed.

The whistling gradually receded into the distance, and I heard the jarring creak and slam of the southern balcony’s stairwell door opening and closing again. I let out the breath I had been deliberately holding, counted to fifty just to make doubly sure, and slowly slithered out from underneath the bed.

“And just what do you think that
you’re
doing under there?” said the voice, almost making my jump halfway out of my skin.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I think that I deserve a lot of credit for not screaming my lungs out. As it was, the sudden shock almost stopped my heart stone cold dead, and I swear I must have jumped three feet into the air when the old woman spoke to me.

She was sitting up in bed — the same bed that I’d been hiding under — and watching me with great interest.