Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Trapped in the tidal surge, he ran with them, helpless. “Sly! Sly!” It didn’t matter. No one heard. No one paid attention. Keeping his feet moving, picking them up at the knees-he did not want to fall down in this bunch-they all came back up one flight. Half the tribe banged open the entry door and took off down the hallway. The flames were licking up the side of the walls. The other half kept to the stairwell, heading up to the third floor, where he and Sly had just come from. Sully started after them and heard two, three gunshots, all in quick succession. The patients turned as one and came roaring back, nearly knocking him over. He hung onto the railing, survived the flood, and made it up to the third-floor landing.

“Sly!” Nothing.

He tried it one more time, louder. He could make a run for it on his own straight down the hall, looking for another way out, but running into the herd again filled him with dread. So he stayed bent over, running quick for the control room. Something in there had to show the exits. Ten, twelve steps down the hall, his right foot and then his left caught on a heavy weight in the middle of the floor. He cursed and went tumbling, falling hard, landing on his chest, barely able to get his arms out in front of him. He slid and rolled over.

He came to a stop on his back and looked up, the orange and yellow lighting, the flames and the darkness. Standing over him and pointing a gun at his head was Sly Hastings. After a second, he pulled the gun back.

“It being hard to see up in here,” Sly said, “maybe you and me ought to stick closer.”

Sully pushed himself up and made out two bodies on the floor, both wearing the white patient uniforms, both shot in the head. “You did this?”

“It got bottled up downstairs,” Sly said, looking down at the bodies. “I yelled at you to come on and thought you was right behind me. I get up here, something blows, and these dudes,” he nudged the body of the nearest with a toe, “come running out the door. The lead two, them right here, they come at me full tilt. So I took what you call executive action.”

The fire was on the floor now, down the hall, licking at the ceiling. Panels that hadn’t been blown out were now smoldering, then puffing into flame.

Sly, taking it all in, calculating. “You don’t think that motherfucker locked us all in.”

“Actually,” Sully said, “I’m giving eight to five he did.”

THE BACK STAIRWELLhad no emergency lights. When Sully opened the door, the blackness gawped at them, swirling with dust and smoke trails.

“We gonna choke, we go down there,” Sly said, stepping back. “We get down there, the basement? And that door is locked? We fucked.”

Sully looked into the blackness. “Prop this door open. Here. With that thing, whatever it is. That’s going to let some air out, give us something to shoot for if we have to come back up on the hot foot. It’s seven or eight steps to a landing, two landings to a floor. So two right turns equals one floor, am I right?”

“So?”

“We need four floors to get to the basement, so that’s eight right turns. The doors are all straight out from the stairwell. Eight right turns, plow straight ahead, we’ll hit the door.”

“Then what?”

“We’re in the basement.”

“This goddamn building start collapsing though-”

“Like your options here, do you? Try to shoot out shatterproof glass and jump fifty feet? Put your shirttail over your nose. It ain’t going to take us fifteen seconds to be at the basement door.”

They ducked into the stairwell, a deep breath into blackness. Sully led, reaching out to find the railing and then, with that in hand, rushed down the steps, spinning at each landing, and then down, down again. The smoke was thickening. His eyes were burning. He took a slight breath and the air burned his mouth and throat. He retched. And then he was at the bottom level and he walked forward hurriedly like a blind man, one arm extended, until it hit the basement door. His hand found the bar to open it and he leaned a shoulder into it, shoving hard and, sweet baby Jesus, it opened onto a wide hallway of concrete-block walls and a low ceiling.

It was, by comparison to the upper floors, quiet, save for the sound of a steady, hissing rain. It came down on his head. The sprinklers. Here, way down here, the sprinklers had kicked in. Emergency lights, too, the floor in a dull, sickly glow. It was a long, wide hallway, opening onto several rooms. Down the hall, at the entrance to one room, lay two bodies, one of them bearing the white jumpsuit of a patient, the other a business suit, almost on top of each other. With Sly above him, gun raised, Sully turned the bodies over.

Head shots, the both of them, entrance wounds in the forehead. The second corpse was that of Wesley Johnston, the AUSA. “Holy shit,” Sully whispered. “Wes.”

“Walked right up on them,” Sly said. “They didn’t see him coming. Or didn’t expect no shit from him. The Indian have a gun?”

Sully, eyes fixed on Johnston for a moment-the top half of the man’s head was just gone, splattering along the walkway and walls behind him-tried to picture how it had gone down.

“He’s not an Indian. He didn’t have a gun upstairs, but he’s been in the building before. All this, it’s been a setup. So he hid a piece. Wes, here? He was either trying to get out, or to get George.” He looked up. “Our boy is down here or he just left.”

Sly nodded. Sully stood. They moved forward slowly, Sly in front, Sully two steps behind. Fifty feet down, they came to a swinging double door with a porthole window set in each. Stealing a glance through the left window, the room inside looked familiar, but not something Sully could immediately place. He hissed at Sly, who flanked the other door.

Sully eased his door open a few inches. By the pale dim emergency lights overhead he could make out not a storage room or exit ramp but what at first appeared to be an operating theater. It was empty. They both went in. The small row of elevated seats and the operating table, stainless steel with a hole in the middle. The table could be tilted, up or down. It dawned on him.

“The autopsy room,” he said to Sly. “Where the good doctor Freeman used to string them up on meat hooks.”

“What?” Sly said, but only half listening. He moved ahead, halfway across the room, stopping. “You see this shit?”

Sully came forward, moving off to Sly’s right in the half darkness. “See what shit? I mean, it’s just-”

He stopped, both in forward movement and advancing thought.

The body of Eduardo Lantigua was on the far side of a gurney, one arm caught in a strap. A steel ice pick had been driven through his right eye and protruded, sticking up a good six inches. As Sully stared, transfixed, horrified, Lantigua’s mouth opened in a soundless gawp. The waist of his suit was dark, the table under him wet. The fingers slowed, scratched at the underside of the stainless steel table, finding no purchase. His remaining eye wandered, untethered from reality.

The mouth opened wider.

Sly raised his right hand and fired, one, two, three times, into the man’s chest, blowing holes in flesh and vital organs, the sound echoing in the tile chamber like a series of detonations.

“The f-”

“No way,” Sly said, looking at the corpse, “I’m listening to anything that comes out of that mouth.”

Sully hissed at him. “George is down here,” he said, “and you, you shooting, you’re telling him right where we standing.”

A cold, taut shiver worked its way up his spine, the first tingling of panic. There had to be an exit. Had to. But George Harper was somewhere between them and it-if he wasn’t already gone, locking them in behind him.