Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

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.