John Sandford: Broken Prey

“Is this it?”

“This is it. That goddamned Davenport got me.” Grant reached into the briefcase, saw Taylor behind Biggie, gave Biggie a pistol, and passed one to Taylor. “Is Chase. .?”

“He’s fucked up, but he’s walking around.” Biggie peered at the gun. “How many shots?”

“Eight,” Grant said. “They jumped me, and I didn’t have time to get more clips.” He looked past him at Taylor. “You’ve got ten. Both of them are loaded and ready to go. Push the safety off and pull the trigger.”

Taylor nodded. “I’m familiar with this model.” They heard somebody talking, loud, and Taylor looked over his shoulder. “Here comes Chase.”

Biggie scuttled off down the hall, toward the doorway. “I’m going up to three. I’m going to shoot Morris Knight. See you in hell.” Taylor went after him, calling out, “I get Landis. I get Landis.” Grant watched them go, took his own pistol out of his pocket as Chase pushed through the door.

Chase stared at him for a moment, his eyes shifting to the pistol. He said, “Good. Give it to me.”

“This is mine,” Grant said. “Come on with me, and we’ll get you one upstairs.”

“Mine,” Chase screamed, and he launched himself at Grant; Grant wasn’t ready for it, and they went down to the floor, Grant’s head snapping back against the terrazzo.

Stunned, he struggled to keep the gun, but Chase had it with both hands, Grant had only the one hand, and Chase wrenched it free.

Grant scrambled to his feet. “Give me the goddamned-”

Chase screamed, “Shut up,” and pointed the pistol at Grant’s face.

“Don’t do that. .” But Grant saw the developing flinch in Chase’s eyes and jerked his head away. He was smashed in the face, felt a separate impact when his head hit the floor again, never heard it, never heard the gunshot, then everything went red, and a lightning stroke of pain ripped through his body. .

Lucas went into the stairwell intending to go down to the isolation area, but heard another shot, and it seemed to be up. He went up instead, leading with his pistol. He could hear people screaming, several of them.

At the top of the flight, he got to his knees and did a quick peek both ways down the hall, then a longer look. Two people were lying prone in the hallway, two or three others running away from him, and four or five were either standing or crouched against walls, two with their hands wrapped over their heads.

Two guys were fighting; rolling around, screaming at each other, but were apparently armed with nothing but their fists. The alarms were still belching out the raucous, enervating brenk brenk brenk , and he could smell smoke but not see any. Two emergency lights were working far down the hall, but closer by he could see glass from two more, shattered.

Then a shot came from his right, and there was more screaming, and he ran that way. Three people ran toward him, and then past him, shrinking from his gun. He was halfway down the hall when a man lurched into it, seemed to have a gun, was walking in a predatory way. Lucas shouted, “Drop the gun,” and the man pivoted into a gunfighter’s stance and Lucas fired and the other man fired at the same time, and Lucas went sideways and hit the wall and landed on his face and the man tumbled back through the doorway and out of sight.

Lucas didn’t think he’d hit him and kept his pistol on the door, could hear somebody sobbing. Then a woman began a high-pitched keening and then another. A man lurched from another doorway, a slender man in a hospital gown, nobody Lucas had ever seen, and he seemed confused and Lucas began shouting, “Stay back, stay back,” but the man continued walking, stepped in front of the doorway where the shooter had been, and Lucas heard somebody yell, “Hey, Don.”

The man pivoted toward the doorway and a shot ripped through him and he staggered and went down and Lucas jumped to his feet and ran softly, half crouched, down to the door.

A half second away from it, he fired a single shot at the in-slanted steel door and then did a quick head-peek inside. He’d hoped that the single shot would have jarred the man on the other side, and it had: Taylor stood there in a combat stance but with the pistol pointed at the other side of the door.

The instant he saw Lucas, he lifted his gun to fire, but Lucas jerked back, felt bullet fragments and maybe pieces of wall tile cut his face, dropped, and came in low. A shot banged the door above his head and he pushed his arm and face low around the door frame, center mass, and fired two quick shots into Taylor’s body.

Taylor sagged and struggled to control his weapon and Lucas brought the.45 up and fired a third shot, from three feet away, into Taylor’s forehead. Taylor went down, dead.

There was a dead woman inside the room with Taylor, and another woman, apparently shot but still alive, huddling under a bed, whimpering. Lucas turned back to the hallway, looked both ways, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, found Cale’s number, and rang him. Busy. He tried Sloan’s, got him.

“Where are you?”

“Just inside, Jesus Christ. .”

“Shut up. Listen to me. The Big Three are out, and they’re armed. They have pistols. I just nailed Taylor. I’m on the second floor, right above the stairway that goes down to the isolation area. . You know where I’m talking?”

“Yeah, we’re coming that way, me and Jenkins and Shrake. .”

“Okay, but Biggie and Chase and Grant are still out there. Be careful, there are guys with guns all over the place. I’m going down to the bottom, down to the isolation unit. Before you come in, tell somebody that there are a couple wounded, maybe dead, in this hallway. . next floor above the main floor.”

“Wait and I’ll back you up.”

“Can’t wait. There are three more guys and they’re killing people, we’ve got to cover as much as we can as fast as we can, we’ve gotta knock these guys down. . gotta knock ’em down, be careful, man, be careful. And tell Beloit before you come in that there’s a wounded woman in two ninety. In two ninety.”

Then he was up and running down the hall, the smell of blood in his nose, with the odor of smoke and human waste and the deafening brenk brenk brenk. .

Into the stairwell: he nearly shot a man halfway up the second flight, the man jumping with fear as Lucas jerked his.45 at him, Lucas lifting his finger off the trigger at the last possible second when he realized that he didn’t know the man, that the man wasn’t armed.

The man curled against the wall, his hands cupped at his temples, and Lucas shouted, “Find a room, lock yourself inside,” heard a boom from somewhere, then another, couldn’t decide where the shots came from, but it felt like they were up again.

He’d thought to go down, but again he went up.

There really wasn’t much down below, he realized-not many people. If the Big Three and Grant were determined to do as much damage as possible, they’d be on the first floor, or the second or third. He continued up to three, heard another boom. Peeked down the hallway, saw more people down. Two people crawling along the hallway, two lying motionless. More smoke, thin, veiling. Shouting from the left. Doors banging, another boom.

His phone rang; he wanted to ignore it, but it could be information. He pulled it out, poked the answer button. Sloan: “We can hear shooting above us, we’re on the way to three.”

“I’m already there. I went up instead of down.”

“We’re on the front steps. .”

“I just came up the back. I’m moving into the hallway, you’ll be looking right at me, for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot me. .”

Two more boom s and a man screaming and Lucas couldn’t wait, a shattering of glass, more glass breaking, more screaming, and then laughter. Lucas ran to the doorway where the sound seemed to be coming from, did a peek: a man was battering at a thick glass window with a plastic chair.