Dean Koontz - Velocity

He left the nurses in confusion and followed the corridor toward the west wing.

At first he hurried, but within a dozen steps, in the dark, he collided with a wheelchair, grabbed at it, felt the shape of it.

From the chair, a frightened old woman said, “What’s happening, what’re you doing?”

“It’s all right, you’ll be okay,” he assured her, and went on. He didn’t move as fast now, arms in front of him like a blind man feeling for obstructions.

Wall-mounted emergency lights flickered on, then off, pulsed again and died.

An authoritative male voice calmly called out, “Please stay in your rooms. We will come to you. Please stay in your rooms.”

The emergency sconces tried to function again. But they pulsed at onethird brightness, and erratically.

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These flares and leaping shadows were disorienting, but Billy could see well enough to avoid the people in the halls. Another nurse, an orderly, an elderly man in pajamas, looking bewildered…

A fire alarm issued an electronic ululation. A recorded voice began to give evacuation instructions.

A woman in a walker intercepted Billy as he approached her, plucked at his sleeve, seeking information.

“They’ve got it under control,” he assured her as he hurried past. He turned the corner into the west wing. Just ahead, on the right. The door stood open.

The room was dark. No auxiliary sconce in here. His own body blocked what little light pulsed in from the west hall.

Slamming doors, a cacophony of slamming doors, which weren’t doors at all, but his heart.

He felt his way toward the bed. He should have reached it. He went two steps farther. The bed wasn’t here.

He pirouetted blindly, sweeping his arms through the air. All he found was the barstool.

Her bed was on wheels. Someone had moved her.

In the hallway again, he looked left, looked right. A few of the ambulatory patients had come out of their rooms. A nurse was marshaling them for an orderly exit.

Through the dance of light and shadow, Billy saw a man pushing a bed at the far end of the hall, moving fast toward a flashing red EXIT sign. Dodging patients, nurses, phantoms of shadow, Billy ran.

The door at the end of the hall banged open as the man slammed the bed through it.

A nurse grabbed Billy by the arm, halting him. He tried to pull loose, but she had a grip.

“Help me roll some of the bedridden out of here,” she said.

“There’s no fire.”

“There must be. We’ve got to evacuate them.”

“My wife,” he declared, though he and Barbara had never married, “my wife needs help.”

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He tore loose of the nurse, nearly knocking her off her feet, and hurried toward the flashing exit sign.

He shoved through the door, into the night. Dumpsters, cars and SUV’s in a staff parking lot.

For a moment, he didn’t see the man, the bed. There. An ambulance waited thirty feet away, to the left, its engine running. The wide rear door stood open. The guy with the bed had almost reached it.

Billy drew the 9-mm pistol but didn’t dare use it. He might hit Barbara. Crossing the blacktop, he holstered the pistol, fumbled the Taser out of an inner coat pocket.

At the last instant, Steve heard Billy coming. The freak had a pistol. He fired twice as he turned.

Billy was already coming in under Steve’s arm. The gun boomed over his head.

He jammed the business end of the Taser into Steve’s abdomen and clicked the trigger. He knew it would work through thin clothing, a shirt, but he had never checked to be sure that it contained fresh batteries. Zillis spasmed as the electric charge cried havoc along the wires of his nervous system. He didn’t merely drop his gun but flung it away. His knees buckled. He rapped his head on the bumper of the ambulance as he fell. Billy kicked him. He tried to kick him in the head. He kicked him again. The fire department would be coming. The police. Sheriff John Palmer, sooner or later.

He put his hand to Barbara’s face. Her breath feathered his palm. She seemed to be all right. He could feel her eyes moving under her lids, dreaming Dickens.

Glancing back at Whispering Pines, he saw that no one had yet evacuated through the west-wing exit.

He rolled Barbara’s bed aside.

On the ground, Steve was twitching, saying, “Unnn, unnn, unnn,” in a bad imitation of an epileptic fit.

Billy zapped him again with the Taser, then pocketed it.

He grabbed the freak by his belt, by the collar of his shirt, hauled him off the blacktop. He didn’t think he had the strength to lift and shove Zillis into the back of the ambulance, but panic flushed him with adrenaline.

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The knuckles of the freak’s right hand rapped uncontrollably against the floor of the ambulance, as did the back of his skull.

Billy slammed the door, seized the foot rail of Barbara’s bed, and pushed her toward Whispering Pines.

When he was less than ten feet from the door, it opened, and an orderly appeared, leading a patient in a walker.

“This is my wife,” Billy said. “I got her out. Will you look after her while I help some others?”

“It’s covered,” the orderly assured him. “I better get her a safe distance if there’s fire.”

Urging the man in the walker to keep pace with him, the orderly pushed Barbara away from the building but also away from the waiting ambulance. When Billy got behind the wheel and pulled the driver’s door shut, he heard the freak drumming his heels against something and making strangled noises that might have been fractured curses.

Billy didn’t know how long the effect of a Tasering lasted. Maybe he was wrong to pray for convulsions, but he did.

He found the brake release, the gear shift, and he pulled around to the front of the building. He parked beside his Explorer.

People were coming out of the building, into the parking lot. They were too busy to wonder about him.

He transferred the cooler with the severed hands to the ambulance and then got away from there. He went two blocks before he could locate the switch for the emergency beacons and the siren.

By the time he passed the fire trucks, coming out from Vineyard Hills, the ambulance was in full flash and voice.

He figured the more he called attention to himself, the less suspicious he appeared. He broke every speed limit going through the northeast end of town, and turned due east on the state route that led to the Olsen house. When he was two miles out of town, with vineyards to both sides of the road, he heard the freak muttering more coherently and banging around back there, evidently trying to get up.

Billy pulled to the shoulder of the road, parked, but left the beacons flashing. He climbed between the seats, into the back.

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On his knees, clutching the bracketed oxygen cylinder, Zillis wanted badly to get to his feet. His eyes were bright, like those of a coyote at night. Billy zapped him again, and Zillis flopped, twitched, but a Taser wasn’t a deadly weapon.

If he shot the freak, blood might spray over all the life-support equipment, an ungodly mess. And evidence.

On the wheeled stretcher were two thin foam pillows. Billy grabbed both. Flat on his back, rolling his head from side to side, Zillis had no muscle control whatsoever.

Billy dropped on his chest with both knees, driving the breath out of him, cracking more than one of his ribs, and shoved the pillows over his face. Although the freak fought for life, he fought ineffectively. Billy almost couldn’t finish it. He made himself think about Judith Kesselman, her lively eyes, her elfin smile, and he wondered if Zillis had shoved a spear-point iron stave into her, whether he had cut off the top of her skull while she was alive and handed it to her as a drinking cup. Then it was over.