Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Nothing.

Then the door came bouncing back to him and, as it did, he caught it with his right hand, putting the pistol in his left, and pushed it back, coming in quick and low behind it, bent at the waist until he was in the hallway.

The blood drops led straight across the hall into a room behind another set of double doors. He blew through those doors, finding himself in a huge, dark supply room. On his right was a long row of tall steel racks, packed with ancient tools and saws and knives and steel pans. He cut that way, throwing his right leg out front and tucking his left beneath him and sliding across the water-slicked floor behind the racks.

Still nothing.

He got to his feet and peered through the racks back into the open walkway of the room. The blood stains that had fallen there still led forward, drop by drop. The even intervals showed a steady pace, the man neither running nor averting his path. He knew where he was going and wasn’t hurried, not even after taking a bullet.

“Damn,” he whispered. George had been setting this up for God only knows how long. He knew where he was headed. He knew the exits. Sully, unconsciously, tapping the gun against his hip, his equalizer, his security blanket.

The emergency lighting overhead flickered, a bulb exploded to his left, and he raised the gun, nearly firing on reflex. Fuck fuck fuck , he thought, peering at the blood drops. Had to move. He walked as silently as possible around the racks, now stepping parallel to the blood drops, moving deeper in the storage room. He was tracking Harper as he would a wounded bobcat.

This lasted the length of about a dozen steel racks. Here, the blood stopped dripping and turned into a stagnant puddle. George had stopped here. Kneeling now, head up, Sully scooted to the top side of the puddle. Two feet farther on, there were more drops. He followed them for ten feet, twelve, getting close to far door-and then they stopped. He walked all the way to door, another fifteen feet. Nothing.

He went back, getting down on his knees. The floor was dark and wet. Three reddish maroon drops, a neat little trail of plasma popcorn. The drops were fat at the bottom and thin at the top. The droplets radiated outward-back toward the way he’d just come.

“Fuck me,” he whispered.

The little shit heel had doubled back.

“HEY, GEORGE?” HEcalled out, pushing back through the door of the storage room. The sound of the fire above was distant but there were crashing thumps every now and again, the building collapsing, coming down above him. There was no longer any way out above, he knew that now. There was only straight ahead. He wondered if Sly had escaped before George had doubled back. He raised his voice, louder. “George? It’s me, Sully. Remember our bond? Let’s talk about it.”

Three steps, four, five, eyeing the blood drops as he moved. The walkways in the supply room formed a Y around the junk and storage that had accumulated over the past century. Nothing looked like it had been used in a decade. Cabinets and cases and carts and gurneys stacked high with boxes and crates, all under a thick coat of now-wet dust, the walkways barely wide enough for a gurney to be pushed.

Harper had come to the crux of the Y, stopped and then moved off to the right, toward the far side of the autopsy room. This lead to the hallway outside the double doors Sly had gone through and found… the exit. Of course. The building blueprint popped into his head, a schematic as drawn from above. Supplies had long ago come in this rear door, while the bodies had gone out.

George hadn’t retreated. He’d just looped around the autopsy room and gone around them.

Along the wall to his right were warped cabinets, lined with bottles and glasses. He reached over, grabbed one by the neck, turned and underhanded it high in the air, back down behind him, the bottle rotating end over end backward, until it crashed into the floor, shattering on impact. Then he did the same with another bottle, leaving it a little short of the other, then smashed two more right behind him, the floor now a carpet of glass shards.

With his back protected, Sully moved forward once more, gun up. Soft as the rain, he slipped through the swinging doors, sliding his head and chest through, then shuffling his feet. This gave him a clear view of the hallway. It stretched fifty, maybe sixty feet to the exit.

The steel double doors, leading outside, were slightly ajar.

The night and sounds of sirens, the waaannhh waaannhh waaannhh , poured through the gap, flashes of the rotating red and blue lights of the police and ambulances and fire trucks splashing onto the yard from the street above.

Just before the door, in the middle of the hallway, sat an orange plastic chair. It looked to be a refugee from the late 1960s. In the slightly curved seat stood two legs. These led to the jumpsuit-clad torso of George Hudson Harper. The white fabric was stained with dark blood at his chest and the left leg.

Sully blinked. George had removed the cheap fiberboard panel of the ceiling and was working at something above. His head and shoulders and arms were up there. The upper left leg was heavily bound, the blood from the bullet hole still oozing. George kept his weight off of it, just a toe touching the chair.

Sully crept forward, transfixed. It became apparent the blood on the chest was splotched from the outside but not pulsing from the inside. It wasn’t his. Lantigua’s, likely.

It was a surreal scene-a bleeding, headless apparition in the hallway of an insane asylum, standing daintily, like a beauty queen bringing up her heel to better display the calves.

From the ceiling, a cluster of wires dangled, suspended in air, ending in some small black blob. Sully blinked, took two silent steps closer. It was an egg timer.

“Hey, Boo,” he said.

The headless body in front of him froze. Then the shoulders stooped and George’s face appeared below the fiberboard. He had a large cut on his right cheek, which wasn’t bleeding. It was just a red stripe. Their eyes held and George’s were dilated and wild and then he stuck his head back into the ceiling.

“Your friend left a few minutes ago. I thought you already had. He left the door open. You need to go.”

Sully walked around him to the double doors, pushing one of them all the way open, making sure Sly wasn’t dead on the pavement out there, an ice pick sticking up from his face. Then he turned back. “George. It’s over. This is over. You, you, you fucked this up. They, this place, they were terrible to your mother and you had them and then, sweet Jesus, you’re as sick as the rest of them. Now get the fuck down.”

“Sixty seconds, Sully.” George brought his head and arms down out of the ceiling again, his wiring finished. He put one hand on top of the chair back for balance and stepped down, bringing the wounded leg down lightly. The connecting cord to his plastic cuffs had been sliced through. The cuffs were still on each wrist, like jailhouse jewelry.

“I need you to leave,” he said. “You, you, you owe it to my mother, to tell her story.”

George dragged the chair across the floor to the side of the wall, metal legs scraping. The man was weirdly calm, the energy of earlier dissipated and gone, now sounding more like a tired husk than a mass killer.

“Nobody knows it but you, Sully.”

He had not expected this. The mother, Frances Harper, she did deserve some coda, some measure of justice. The dead didn’t get that from courts or the law. They got it only from stories that outlived them. He was the person who could do that.

“Goddammit, George, don’t make me kneecap you. You’re not blowing any more shit up.” He glanced up at the wiring, the egg timer. “Cut that cord. Turn it backward. Or off or whatever.”