Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Ambush.

This one word bloomed in Cunningham’s mind, and then Kaylie’s two legs came up together, bending at the knees, and with two slippered feet she kicked the nurse squarely in the face.

Dana Cunningham was a large woman, horse-strong, but the double kick caught her off balance, and she went down in a swirl of vertigo.

Kaylie cast off the noose and dropped to the floor.

Cunningham snatched blindly at Kaylie’s ankle, seized hold, yanked the girl to one knee. Got her, she thought with a flash of triumph, before Kaylie spun sideways and hefted the plastic chair and slammed it down on Cunningham’s head.

Pain dazzled her. She forgot Kaylie, forgot everything except the orderly’s name. “Eddie!” she screamed as Kaylie scrambled past her, out the door.

The orderly was still on the phone with security when he heard a crash from the far end of the ward, then Cunningham’s cry, and he knew there was worse trouble than a suicide.

“Got a situation here,” he said into the phone. “Sounds like — oh, shit.”

He saw her sprinting along the hallway, straight at him — Kaylie McMillan in her blue cotton trousers and blouse.

Behind one of the locked doors, some other patient started a furious rant, roused to excitement by the activity in the hall.

The chief security officer was saying something over the phone, but Eddie didn’t care. He dropped the handset and sidestepped away from the desk into the middle of the corridor, blocking the exit.

“You’re not going anywhere, lady.”

He was sure he could take her. She was only, like, five foot four, hundred pounds, and the drugs she was on ought to make her sluggish, dopey.

Then he saw her face, and there was fever in her eyes, something feral and inhuman.

She ran straight at him. He tensed for a collision. He wished he wore glasses. If she went for his eyes—

At the last instant his nerve faltered just slightly, and he stepped to the side and tried to tackle her as she blew past. He got both arms around her waist, spinning her around, slamming her against a wall, then felt a hot blast of her breath on his face, and he was fumbling for her wrists, fighting to control her hands before she found a way to hurt him.

Worried about his eyes, he forgot his groin, until she reminded him with a sharp knee thrust that bent him double.

“Fuck,” he coughed. “Fuck… bitch…”

He took a swipe at her face, catching her cheek, and suddenly her fist came at him, and with a grunt of rage she shattered Eddie’s nose in a rush of bloody mucus.

Pain dropped him to his knees. He clutched his face, amazed at all the blood, humiliated and angry and too dazed to do anything about it.

Distantly he heard her mumbling a low, repetitive chant, urgent and monotonous.

“Time to go. Time to go. Time to go…”

When he looked up, he saw her retrieve something from the desk — the keys, damn — she needed the keys to unlock the ward door, which was key-operated on both sides.

As she tried each key on the ring, he lurched to his feet.

She spun, wielding the keys as weapons, their sharp teeth protruding from between her knuckles.

He thought of his eyes. “You win,” he whispered, backing off.

The next key she tested was the right one. The ward door opened, and she ran outside, slamming it behind her.

Somewhere the distressed patient was still shouting, his cries ululant and surreal.

“Eddie…?”

That was Nurse Cunningham, emerging from Kaylie’s room far down the hall, a glaze of red on her forehead.

“She’s gone,” Eddie said, finding it hard to talk while breathing through his mouth.

“Well, chase her.”

“She took the keys.”

Without the passkey he and Cunningham were locked in, and to be honest, Eddie was just as glad about that. He didn’t want to tangle with the McMillan woman again. She’d been pumped up, more than just crazy. It was like — hell, like she was on speed or something.

Cunningham registered his statement, then slumped against a wall. “Call them.”

Eddie still didn’t react, until the nurse fairly screamed the order.

“Call security, you idiot!”

Security. Damn. He still had the chief officer on the phone.

Eddie stumbled to the desk, found the handset dangling from its cord, and spoke four words into the mouthpiece:

“There’s been an escape.”

Cray pulled on his black slacks and shirt, then smiled at himself in the bedroom mirror.

Black. His favorite color. Camouflage for a predator.

Camouflage that was unnecessary tonight, of course — but he felt the need to clothe himself in darkness.

It had been months since he’d taken Sharon Andrews from the parking lot outside the auto dealership. The deepest part of him, the elemental self that announced its presence only in the dark, was restless for blood sport.

What he’d done to Walter had sated his urges not at all. He needed a worthy victim. Kaylie. That was the prey his blood required. And he would have her. In mere minutes, she would trouble him no more, ever.

He checked his shirt pocket for the cigarettes, the lighter. The only other item he would need was a syringe filled with sedative. Then he would be ready for this special kill.

With his hair combed back, his heart beating fast and steady, he descended the stairs to the living room. Mozart played on the stereo system wired throughout the ground floor of his house. He found the music relaxing, and he preferred to be relaxed before the start of a nocturnal outing.

The piece now playing was the Requiem. It had been composed as a tribute to things spiritual — the majesty of God, the highest aspirations of the human heart. In Mozart’s era, so long ago, such notions had not yet been rendered laughable and quaint. People had believed, back then. They had yearned.

Cray knew better. He was a man of the new millennium. He believed in nothing but brute facts, measurable, reducible to numbers. He yearned for nothing high, great, or noble. He knew that Mozart’s gift had been no more than the excited firing of neurons, his moments of highest passion merely a surge of stress hormones — adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol — triggered by electrical overstimulation of the brain. Cray himself could duplicate this neurological phenomenon quite easily in the operating room adjacent to the anteroom of Ward B, where he sometimes performed electroconvulsive therapy on the most recalcitrant patients. By passing a hundred joules of voltage through a patient’s two cerebral hemispheres, he could produce a storm of excitation equal to anything Mozart had experienced.

But he could not produce the Requiem. This stray thought, irritatingly provocative, teased him as he went into the den and turned off the stereo.

The house was silent, Mozart’s hymn muted.

Cray was leaving the den when the phone rang.

“Yes?” he answered, hoping it was nothing important, impatient to get going.

“Sir, it’s Blysdale.” Bob Blysdale was the Institute’s chief security officer, and he sounded nervous. “Got a problem. The new patient, the forensic case — McMillan.”

Cray stiffened. Kaylie.

Was it possible she’d accepted his advice? Taken her own life? Part of him would be almost sorry if she had. Although it would simplify matters a great deal, he would prefer to take care of her personally.

“What about her?” Cray asked, proper concern in his voice.

“She broke out.”

Cray heard this, but it made no sense. It was some sort of unintelligible message in another language, or a joke, or insanity.

“What?” he breathed.

“She ambushed the RN and a tech. Got out into the yard. She’s on the loose right now.”