Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

One body, that of a man in a brown suit, lay in almost the center of the floor. Another, in seersucker, was across the way, the blast to the face taking out the back half of the man’s skull, the body facedown. Wet speckles and clumps of gore, gray and red and brown, were everywhere, like grotesque confetti that had showered and settled. The two officers lay on their backs a few feet apart. They were both just inside the House entrance to the room, not forty feet in front of him, slightly to his left. They had come running from the Senate corridor, Sully thought, shot from the front. It indicated the shooter or shooters were in the House wing, to his right.

The screaming burst out again. It had sounded like a woman when he was coming up the steps but now that he was here, he could see that it was a young man. Slumped against the far wall, half hidden behind a tall marble statue, the kid kept his left hand on his right shoulder, trying to slow the spewing. Blood came up through his fingers and over his suit. He had to be a page, an intern. His wing-tip-clad feet were clawing at the floor, trying to push himself farther into the wall.

The shriek lasted until he ran out of breath. Then, chest heaving, still looking at the bloody pulp of his shoulder, he started up again. A long, high-pitched wail, seeming to start at the base of his lungs and, shuddering once in the open air, to bounce off the walls, until he coughed, and coughed again. Vomit bubbled out of his mouth, onto his suit. He spat. Then he started another wail, half an octave higher than the one before.

Sully got his eyes up again, scouting for an arm, a rifle, a gun held over one of the balconies above. Nothing. Then he came out of his crouch at a full clip, running, sidestepping one body, ignoring the others, his eyes fixed on the bleeding kid by the Grant statue until he was right up on him, dropping into a half slide, like he was coming into second base, slamming into the wall with a grunt.

The kid’s lips were slightly apart, dried out. The tongue was pulled back in the mouth. Sweat drenched his forehead, dampened his hair, dropped from his chin. He had pissed himself, given the aroma, but Sully accorded him the dignity of not looking.

“Hey, hey now,” Sully whispered, forcing his voice to be heard over the alarm. “You good? You hear me okay?”

This was greeted with a blink and the bobbing of the kid’s Adam’s apple.

“Where,” he said, a little louder, “where did they go?”

The kid looked at him, his blink-blink brown eyes looking like a puppy’s on the front porch. Sully put his age at twenty or twenty-one. The kid licked his sweating upper lip and looked at Sully like he was an escaped zoo exhibit. At least he had stopped screaming.

“You hear? The words coming out of my mouth, you hear that?”

The kid blinked and licked his lips again and nodded.

“Okay. Kinda crazy weird, hey, you know?” Sully smiled and ran a hand through his hair, letting the kid know it was a long day, okay to be tired, okay to be a little freaked. The kid was so deeply in shock that if Sully bounced a basketball off his head, all he would do is nod.

“Can you tell me your name? Try it out.”

The kid shook his head, no. Now he was staring at the scars on Sully’s face.

“That’s cool. That’s cool. For real. But hey, you’re going home now, you know that? You’ll be home before dark. Okay? Okay? Home before dark. We’re going to get you on your feet and outside.”

The kid was nodding, exhaling a little, his body still clenched tight. Enough flashed through Sully’s mind. Soldiers were younger than this. Guys with guns who would shoot you at a hundred and fifty meters and then come over and pop another in your brain, they were younger than this.

“But, seriously, how many, man? I got to know, you see that? How many men with guns we talking about today?”

The kid held up one finger.

“One. What he look like, this guy?”

“He had a gun.” The voice, tremulous, halting, but it was there.

“Right. Tall, short, white, black, wearing what?”

“The gun.”

“Okay. Okay. That’s good. We can deal with one gun, right? Now. What I want you to do, you’re going to head down this hall right behind us, okay? You’ll see some stairs? You go down them, you see a long hallway, you get outside. Tell the police that the first floor is, like, clear, and what we’re probably talking about is the second floor, House wing.”

The kid nodded and did not move.

“Guy, gun, House, wing,” Sully said.

The boy had on a purple tie. It was still knotted. He was hit high on the right shoulder. It probably burned like hell but the rest of everything around it should be going numb. It wasn’t serious. Still, without a foot up his ass, the kid might sit there until the next term was over, still saying “gun.”

Sully leaned over and took off the kid’s shoes, one by one, slip-ons with little tassels-the fuck was that even about. The kid looked at him and Sully said, “So you don’t make any noise running, okay?”

Then Sully stood in front of him and bent into a crouch and lifted him from under the armpits until he, too, was standing.

“Time to go home,” he said. “Go for the stairways. Back there. Quick like a bunny rabbit. Now.” Sully pushed him, gently, and then harder. The kid stood there, immobile.

“Run, goddammit,” he said, finally, shoving, and the kid staggered away, stiff-legged and straight upright, knees barely bending, one palm clapped on the bullet wound. But he was moving, out of the Rotunda and down the steps, silent as a cat on the kitchen counter, leaving Sully behind.

IT WOULD HAVEbeen better if he knew a goddamn thing about the building layout. He cursed himself for his ignorance but he had always avoided Congress like it was an infectious disease, a parliament of prostitutes, the building ostentatious beyond belief. He’d been in red velvet French Quarter whorehouses that had more restraint. Jesus, you’d get a wart on your dick, hanging out in places like this.

That last pop pop , two, three, minutes ago, that had come from somewhere near Statuary Hall. But the alcove just before you got to it led to a hallway that led to the Capitol office of the Speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency. He knew that much, but Christ, you couldn’t miss it. A wooden sign above the hallway designated it as such. The problem was that it was a corridor, a shooting gallery. You went down that, the guy was waiting? You were fully ventilated and done.

Now the hitch in his throat, the tingle of urine at the tip of his cock. Fear.

He blinked and all the paintings on the walls shifted from heroic scenes of the Revolution and Freedom to grotesqueries by Greco or Bosch or the murderous masterpieces by Caravaggio-the blood running, the perspectives shifted, the world tilting off its axis, nightmares painted on the walls in colors that ran and bled and spread over the luminous tile floors in front of him, the sunlight streaming from the arched windows above going from sunshine yellow to a sclerotic orange.

“God dammit ,” he said, rubbing his forehead with the palms of his hands, pain building behind the temples. Cupping his hands in front of his mouth, a deep breath. Another.

On the exhalation, he pushed off and came out from behind the Grant statue, sticking to the wall, humping it around the statues, keeping an eye on the upper reaches of the Rotunda. By the time he reached the corridor to the Speaker’s office, he’d made up his mind. Full tilt and no excuses, all the cards on the table. Halfway down, suddenly, there was a door on his right. He lowered a shoulder and reached for the handle, timing it just right, barreling into a meeting room with a long wooden conference table and chairs in front of him, a chandelier, the walls painted Republican red.