Only the Hunted Run (22 page)

He pointed the remote at them, like it was a weapon. He smiled, almost beatifically now, his gaze still resting on Sully. “But what I have always needed, these years of planning, I only learned recently, to truly make my work known, was my very own . . .
reporter
.”

He pressed the button.

The explosion blew the chairs across the room and the people out of them. It rocked the concrete-block walls and collapsed the ceiling. Fire and smoke billowed in the abyss above, advanced in waves down toward them, then retreated before coming forward once again, with more force, hungrily sucking up the oxygen. The overhead light fixtures dropped,
shattering, sparking, noise lost in the shock waves. Blackness fell, electric blue light shot through the air.

Sully was thrown back against the wall, then scrambled on all fours back in the direction of the table, but hit the crown of his head on the edge. He went down hard. He covered his head and scrunched his legs under him, trying to present a smaller target. He rolled over a body that was not moving. No idea where George was, his recorder gone; his notebook, history. But even then, over the smoke and reverberating air, over the sound of debris collapsing, over the screams from the front of the room, over the sound of chains moving and the metallic click of the door swinging open into the hall, he could hear Lantigua's strangled cry: “Get him, goddammit!”

GLOOM AND MOANS
came from outside the door. The sputtering of dying light fixtures. Flames. Figures staggering down the hallway.

Then the door swung back shut and everything went black. The totality of it swept over Sully, leaving him grasping to the left and right, trying to get his bearings. The collapsed overhead fixture flared again. His eyes began to adjust. The exposed hole in the ceiling was giving off a faint orange glow, flames licking in the distance.

Debris, from the air vents above the room, shards of jagged iron pipe. Behind him, the camera was overturned, on its side, the red “recording” light still on and the man beside it, on his back, his head gashed open above the forehead. He didn't move and Sully crawled toward him until he could make out the deep cut in his neck, the real bleeder, shrapnel, some piece of flying metal taking him out. Then he stopped crawling that way. Ezekiel lay against the far wall, facedown. Jamal, he could see now, was lying on the floor in the rear of the room, not moving.

Janice Miller, flat on her back, eyes open, dark blood coming out of her ears, a spike of pipe buried in her chest.

The door, the door.

Fire, smoke, George, the other patients in the ward—all of that was loose and deadly and on the other side, but staying put was a death
sentence. Any fool could tell that from the flames advancing above, the smoke descending now into the room in a thick, deadly cloud, causing him to retch and spit.

What he needed was a straight line to the exit . . . which was where? How had they come upstairs? His mind was foggy; steps and elevator, both?

The door was illuminated by the ghastly orange from above. Crawling forward, tapping each hand and knee to the floor to test it for glass, he made it to the wall. Then, sliding along it, to the door. He groped upward, and yanked it open. He stayed on his knees, below the smoke.

Streetlights from outside, coming in from the big scenic window, gave the room illumination. Sirens, in the distance. A revolving red emergency light hanging from the ceiling. From somewhere below, boiling up the stairwells, came an indecipherable roar, loud but not enough to muffle the screams in the distance, the clanging of what sounded like a metal tray dropped on the floor. Scurrying figures ran past him. The control room looked like it had taken a direct hit from a shell, shatterproof windows spider-webbed with cracks, its once-locked doors standing open.

“Sly,” he hissed. “Sly
Hastings
.”

There was a gunshot a moment later. Then two. There was a rumbling to his right and a herd of patients came stampeding down the hall. Their faces distorted, the leaders slamming doors shut in front of them as they ran, the doors bouncing back, the herd still coming, bearing down on him, smoke billowing behind them.

He braced himself against the wall and they swarmed past him in a rush until one man reached out, grabbed his sport coat, and pulled him forward and off balance, the man holding on to his jacket, pulling them both down and rolling onto the floor. Feet tripped over them, more bodies falling. Sully rolled and got himself back up but not before the patient rolled with him, Uncle Reggie rolling over him, screaming, “White devil! White devil!”

Sully got two hands on the man's chest and pushed him, hard, and Reggie was back up and scrambling, running down the hall after the rest. Sully sat up, cursing, breathing, lost as to where to go, the explosion still ringing in his head.

From the darkness, from a shadow in the corner of the ruined room, a tall, lanky figure advanced on him. No rush to his movements. The features of Sly Hastings emerged as he came closer, his baseball cap gone, a long, thin cut on his right arm. He kneeled into a squat beside Sully, looking up at where the ceiling had been, the flames above them. Loosely, in his right hand, handling it as casually as if it were a cup of going-cold coffee, was a semiautomatic.

“The fuck,” Sully shouted, making himself heard over the dull roar, the pops, the yelling in the deep recesses in the building, and, aware of it only now, smoke detectors
beep-beep-beeping
. He ran a hand down his leg—it was stinging—making sure there was no gash.

“Gas line, boiler,” Sly shouted back. “Brother down the street from one of my properties wanted to get the insurance. Cut a gas line. It went about like this here.”

“Where's Harper?”

“Who?”

“The crazy fuck we're here for!”

“That Indian? Got none. That thing blew, me 'n Uncle Reggie got thrown halfway to the televisions. Great big hole in the floor opened up. Ceiling collapsed. Motherfuckers running.”

“You see anybody else from that room? Lantigua? The lawyers?”

Sly shook his head. “You hear them gunshots, though?”

“Counted three,” Sully said, waving his hand to the right. “If that's what they were. Could have been another floor. Could have been the stairwell. George set this fucking place to blow. He's got a remote, it's pegged to some sort of explosives. On the gas lines, like you say.”

“Why he want to do that?”

“His mom. Died hard in here. I think he took it personal.”

Sly surveyed the damage. “You don't say.”

The flames were lighting up the outside of the building now, flickering below. The floor, he could see now, had sagged. The wiring above them was hissing. Smoke began to appear as thick ropes in the air.

“You know how to get out of here?”

Sly jerked his head toward the control booth, the observation station, whatever it was, and the mass of collapsed debris that filled the hallway behind it. “Used to.”

Sully cursed, then tried to stand. “Help me up, brother. Damn.”

Sly pushed off the balls of his feet and rose above him, offering a hand. Once on his feet, he leaned backward, tested his arms, coughed.

“The smoke,” Sly said.

They started down the far hall, away from the control booth, moving deeper into the building, stepping over a blown-off door, chunks of ceiling. Water was now running in a slow stream over the floor.

Sly, slowing, bending down, then rising back to full height, wincing. “Sewer line.”

Fifty feet farther on, Sully turned into a darkened stairwell as a piece of ceiling fell behind them, collapsing in flame. When he turned back to look? The control room had started to burn.

He hesitated, though. There was no way to tell if, or when, police or firemen were coming. It was probably less than an hour before he and everyone else in the place would die of smoke inhalation, and that was without another explosion atomizing them all.

The firefighters might break open the doors, blow out the reinforced glass at the entrance. They might do that, sure. But they were not going to come rushing into a burning building filled with the criminally insane, rapists, child killers and throat chokers, knife-wielding cocksuckers and necromancers, grown men who once-upon-a-time had carried their prepubescent nieces from the car to the beach so that they could finger-fuck them while pretending to just have their hands under their hip.

No, no, no. The cavalry wasn't coming. They'd let Canan Hall burn
to smoking rubble and call it a public service. He and Sly would be two more crispy critters at the bottom of the pile when the smoke cleared.

They got down the stairs at as good a clip as they could muster, given the darkness and the smoke. But as they came down one flight and then the next, the noise grew louder and more frantic. Sully was in the lead by a step until, before he had fully realized what was happening, they had caught up and run into the herd.

The patients were stacked up against a double door, a large red
EMERGENCY EXIT
sign above it. Forty or fifty of them. They were leaderless and scared and angry, all of them talking, some yelling. The crowd was milling at the edges, packed in tight at the core.

Sully pushed his way forward, twisting to slide through a narrow gap of flesh here, lowering a shoulder to push through a narrower opening there, thinking the door ahead was open and the crowd was bottlenecked. It was one of the times he was glad to be next to Sly Hastings, except that when he realized the door was still locked, and turned to move backward, Sly was no longer there.

Instead, not six inches from his face, loomed the gaunt and wizened features of a patient, pressed up against him in the crush. He was, unlike the rest, utterly calm.

“Locked emergency exits,” he said, looking Sully in the eye, “and they call
us
crazy.”

Another explosion rocked the building then, the sound of shattering glass and flying steel somewhere above and behind them, the blast waves drowning out everything else. The patients scattered, some pounding against the door with renewed ferocity, the rest turning and clambering over Sully, pushing him backward, stampeding now for the steps back up, toward the flames.

Trapped in the tidal surge, he ran with them, helpless. “Sly! Sly!” It didn't matter. No one heard. No one paid attention. Keeping his feet moving, picking them up at the knees—he did not want to fall down in
this bunch—they all came back up one flight. Half the tribe banged open the entry door and took off down the hallway. The flames were licking up the side of the walls. The other half kept to the stairwell, heading up to the third floor, where he and Sly had just come from. Sully started after them and heard two, three gunshots, all in quick succession. The patients turned as one and came roaring back, nearly knocking him over. He hung onto the railing, survived the flood, and made it up to the third-floor landing.

“Sly!” Nothing.

He tried it one more time, louder. He could make a run for it on his own straight down the hall, looking for another way out, but running into the herd again filled him with dread. So he stayed bent over, running quick for the control room. Something in there had to show the exits. Ten, twelve steps down the hall, his right foot and then his left caught on a heavy weight in the middle of the floor. He cursed and went tumbling, falling hard, landing on his chest, barely able to get his arms out in front of him. He slid and rolled over.

He came to a stop on his back and looked up, the orange and yellow lighting, the flames and the darkness. Standing over him and pointing a gun at his head was Sly Hastings. After a second, he pulled the gun back.

“It being hard to see up in here,” Sly said, “maybe you and me ought to stick closer.”

Sully pushed himself up and made out two bodies on the floor, both wearing the white patient uniforms, both shot in the head. “You did this?”

“It got bottled up downstairs,” Sly said, looking down at the bodies. “I yelled at you to come on and thought
you
was right behind me. I get up here, something blows, and these dudes,” he nudged the body of the nearest with a toe, “come running out the door. The lead two, them right here, they come at me full tilt. So I took what you call executive action.”

The fire was on the floor now, down the hall, licking at the ceiling.
Panels that hadn't been blown out were now smoldering, then puffing into flame.

Sly, taking it all in, calculating. “You don't think that motherfucker locked us all in.”

“Actually,” Sully said, “I'm giving eight to five he did.”

THE BACK STAIRWELL
had no emergency lights. When Sully opened the door, the blackness gawped at them, swirling with dust and smoke trails.

“We gonna choke, we go down there,” Sly said, stepping back. “We get down there, the basement? And that door is locked? We fucked.”

Sully looked into the blackness. “Prop this door open. Here. With that thing, whatever it is. That's going to let some air out, give us something to shoot for if we have to come back up on the hot foot. It's seven or eight steps to a landing, two landings to a floor. So two right turns equals one floor, am I right?”

“So?”

“We need four floors to get to the basement, so that's eight right turns. The doors are all straight out from the stairwell. Eight right turns, plow straight ahead, we'll hit the door.”

“Then what?”

“We're in the basement.”

“This goddamn building start collapsing though—”

“Like your options here, do you? Try to shoot out shatterproof glass and jump fifty feet? Put your shirttail over your nose. It ain't going to take us fifteen seconds to be at the basement door.”

They ducked into the stairwell, a deep breath into blackness. Sully led,
reaching out to find the railing and then, with that in hand, rushed down the steps, spinning at each landing, and then down, down again. The smoke was thickening. His eyes were burning. He took a slight breath and the air burned his mouth and throat. He retched. And then he was at the bottom level and he walked forward hurriedly like a blind man, one arm extended, until it hit the basement door. His hand found the bar to open it and he leaned a shoulder into it, shoving hard and, sweet baby Jesus, it opened onto a wide hallway of concrete-block walls and a low ceiling.

It was, by comparison to the upper floors, quiet, save for the sound of a steady, hissing rain. It came down on his head. The sprinklers. Here, way down here, the sprinklers had kicked in. Emergency lights, too, the floor in a dull, sickly glow. It was a long, wide hallway, opening onto several rooms. Down the hall, at the entrance to one room, lay two bodies, one of them bearing the white jumpsuit of a patient, the other a business suit, almost on top of each other. With Sly above him, gun raised, Sully turned the bodies over.

Head shots, the both of them, entrance wounds in the forehead. The second corpse was that of Wesley Johnston, the AUSA. “Holy shit,” Sully whispered. “Wes.”

“Walked right up on them,” Sly said. “They didn't see him coming. Or didn't expect no shit from him. The Indian have a gun?”

Sully, eyes fixed on Johnston for a moment—the top half of the man's head was just gone, splattering along the walkway and walls behind him—tried to picture how it had gone down.

“He's not an Indian. He didn't have a gun upstairs, but he's been in the building before. All this, it's been a setup. So he hid a piece. Wes, here? He was either trying to get out, or to get George.” He looked up. “Our boy is down here or he just left.”

Sly nodded. Sully stood. They moved forward slowly, Sly in front, Sully two steps behind. Fifty feet down, they came to a swinging double door with a porthole window set in each. Stealing a glance through the
left window, the room inside looked familiar, but not something Sully could immediately place. He hissed at Sly, who flanked the other door.

Sully eased his door open a few inches. By the pale dim emergency lights overhead he could make out not a storage room or exit ramp but what at first appeared to be an operating theater. It was empty. They both went in. The small row of elevated seats and the operating table, stainless steel with a hole in the middle. The table could be tilted, up or down. It dawned on him.

“The autopsy room,” he said to Sly. “Where the good doctor Freeman used to string them up on meat hooks.”

“What?” Sly said, but only half listening. He moved ahead, halfway across the room, stopping. “You see this shit?”

Sully came forward, moving off to Sly's right in the half darkness. “See what shit? I mean, it's just—”

He stopped, both in forward movement and advancing thought.

The body of Eduardo Lantigua was on the far side of a gurney, one arm caught in a strap. A steel ice pick had been driven through his right eye and protruded, sticking up a good six inches. As Sully stared, transfixed, horrified, Lantigua's mouth opened in a soundless gawp. The waist of his suit was dark, the table under him wet. The fingers slowed, scratched at the underside of the stainless steel table, finding no purchase. His remaining eye wandered, untethered from reality.

The mouth opened wider.

Sly raised his right hand and fired, one, two, three times, into the man's chest, blowing holes in flesh and vital organs, the sound echoing in the tile chamber like a series of detonations.

“The f—”

“No way,” Sly said, looking at the corpse, “I'm listening to anything that comes out of that mouth.”

Sully hissed at him. “George is down here,” he said, “and you, you shooting, you're telling him right where we standing.”

A cold, taut shiver worked its way up his spine, the first tingling of panic. There had to be an exit. Had to. But George Harper was somewhere between them and it—if he wasn't already gone, locking them in behind him.

This part of the building, it had to open onto a drive of some sort, an alley. St. E's was a century old. Canan Hall, it was built on the sloping, western grounds. This basement—its very architecture argued for there being a delivery entrance.

“The bodies,” he said aloud, finally. “The autopsies. They wouldn't have brought the bodies up through the building. There has to be an exit off this room. Gotta be there.” Gesturing forward to the far set of double swinging doors.

Sly nodded. He moved to the rear set of doors, paused to look through one of the porthole windows, and slipped through.

Sully stayed by the base of the gurney, waiting. In spite of himself, he looked down at what had become of Lantigua. Forty-five minutes earlier, the man had been in charge of this particular universe. Now, look.

He heard the door swing open. He looked up to see Sly slip back into the room from the same set of double doors he'd just left.

But something was wrong. Sly's features had gone wrong. Something was off. His nose appeared here and his eyes there and there was a sheen—

The mist, the sprinklers

—and Sly Hastings, the killer of so many men in so many places, kept walking and walking toward him and the gun wait what was coming up no Sly was looking at Sully with eyes lit from within but not making eye contact and—

“Sly? You find the ex—”

—the gun was leveling, the barrel the barrel deep and dark and unending—

Nononono not not not

—and the last thought to fly through Sully Carter's mind before Sly
Hastings fired three rounds from twenty feet away was that this is how his mother had died. Her killer looking into her eyes. The bullets slamming into her face, her forehead, scissors flying, knocked out of one of her shoes, crumpling dead onto the pathetic linoleum floor of her pathetic beauty salon in their pathetic town. None of it meant anything and never had.