Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Farrell stopped at the next doorway and turned to him, but didn't say anything.

"What is it?" Barraclough whispered eagerly. "Did you hear something?"

"No," Farrell whispered apologetically. "But we've been at this for over an hour."

Barraclough glanced at his watch. It was true.

Farrell said, "I think it might help if we brought the two boys into this. We might want to have at least one of them waiting for her at the other end."

Barraclough clenched his teeth to stifle his annoyance. He didn't want to wait for people to move into position - he wanted to finish this himself now - but Farrell was right. She had already led them too far to have any hope of getting back to her car. She was heading for the far end of the factory. "Give me the radio."

He took the radio and pressed the talk button. "Unit Two, this is Unit One." He listened to the faint crackle of static. He put the speaker against his ear but could detect no voice. "Come in, Unit Two." He looked at Farrell, letting a little of his impatience show.

Farrell said quickly, "It's got to be the buildings.

There's a hell of a lot of brick and steel between them and us. Let me try it outside."

Farrell trotted to the next loading dock, slipped the bolt, and pushed the big wooden door aside so he could stand out in the open air. "Unit Two, this is Unit One. Come in." He listened to the static. "Unit Two, come in." In spite of the temperature, he felt a wave of heat begin at the back of his neck and wash down his spine. He knew his two trainees were probably in the car listening to a radio they had turned off by mistake. He walked back into the building and shook his head. "Nothing."

Barraclough's voice was quiet and cold. "Go back for them. I'll be up ahead somewhere."

Farrell handed Barraclough the radio, then set off to retrace his steps through the factory. After four steps, he broke into a run.

As he heard Farrell's steps receding behind him, Barraclough started into the next big room and turned on his night-vision scope. This building was different from the last. The big row of square enclosures built into the side wall must have been furnaces. The cement of the floor had holes at the edges of big rectangles where heavy machines had once been anchored, and overhead were networks of steel beams that must have held chain hoists, and brackets for vanished devices he could only imagine now. This place must have seemed like hell once, he thought - deafening noise, unbearable heat from the open-hearth furnaces, molten slag running into big buckets. He stepped close to the row of furnaces and shone his flashlight into each one as he passed it. He moved through room after room, seeing few relics, only traces that were less comprehensible than the stones of some ancient city dug out of the ground.

After half an hour the radio in Barraclough's coat pocket squawked and startled him. Farrell's voice said, "Unit One, this is Unit Two."

Barraclough crouched against the wall so the noise would not make him vulnerable and kept his eyes ahead of him on the portal to the next room. He pushed the button and said quietly, "Go ahead."

"I'm at the car," said Farrell. "The reason they didn't answer is that they're dead."

"How?"

"It looks like they left the motor running to keep warm. There's a hose running from their own exhaust pipe right back into the cab through the taillight. Looks like she cut the hose from under the Pathfinder."

Barraclough tried to sort out the implications. "Are all the cars still there? Hers too?"

"Yeah," said Farrell. "I don't know how she got all the way back here past us, but - "

Barraclough gripped the talk button and shouted, "Then get out! She's still there!"

But Farrell had not released his button. Barraclough heard a swish of fabric as though Farrell were making a sudden movement, maybe whirling to see something. Whatever he saw made him voice an involuntary "Uh!"

Barraclough heard the report of the weapon over the radio. He had time to press his transmitter button and say "Farrell?" before the delayed reverberation reached his ears through the air. The sound was fainter this time, but without the speaker distortion he could tell it was the elongated blast of a shotgun.

Barraclough had already begun to put the radio into his pocket before he remembered there was nobody left to talk to. He hurled it into the darkness toward the corner of the big empty room. He was standing in a dark, icy labyrinth three thousand miles from home. The three men he had brought here with him were corpses. But the biggest change was what was standing between him and the cars. He didn't even know her real name, but he had thought he knew what she would do: she would run, and he would catch her.

He flicked on his flashlight and slowly began to walk away from the sound of the shotgun, his mind working feverishly. Where had the shotgun come from? She had not taken a shotgun off the body of either of the dead trainees, so she must have brought it with her. If she had, then she had known he was coming. This was not what he had expected at all.

Maybe she had not made a mistake and turned her car into the first place along the road that was big enough to hide it. It almost seemed as though she had been in this factory before. As Barraclough traced the logic backward, he began to feel more uneasy.

She had been shuffling credit cards and names for ten or twelve years. Why would she suddenly forget how it was done and take the chance of using accounts he might know about all the way to her own doorstep? Because that house in La Salle wasn't her own doorstep. He had not traced her to her hometown and right up to her house. She probably lived a thousand miles from here. He had followed her into an ambush - a killing ground.

Barraclough decided to run. The beam of his flashlight bobbed up and down wildly, making shadows that crouched in his path, then sprung upward to loom fifty feet tall. He had to remind himself over and over that there couldn't be anyone in front of him. What he had to worry about was behind him.

Was running the best thing to do? It was taking him farther away from the cars. But running made use of the only facts he could be sure of. He had heard the shotgun go off within a few feet of Farrell, so he knew where she was... no, he knew where she had been for the instant when she had pulled the trigger. His attempt to state it accurately invited doubts to creep into his mind, but he fought them off. She was half a mile behind him, he was sure. She had the shotgun in her hands, and she was walking through the dark line of empty rooms after him.

As he thought about her, a picture formed in his mind, and in the picture she was not walking. She had the shotgun in both hands across her chest, and she was running, taking long, loping strides. He increased his pace. The clapping of his boots echoed in the cavernous spaces and the rasp of his breath grew louder and louder. As he ran, he tried not to think about the shotgun. A double-aught load was twelve pellets, each the size of a .38 round. From across one of these big rooms they would hit in a pattern about twenty inches wide.

Barraclough calmed himself. All he had to do was keep her half a mile behind him and get out of this horrible place. As though a wish had been granted, his flashlight swept up and down the gray wooden surface of a door in the wall ahead of him. He dashed to it and tried the knob, but it spun in his hand without moving the catch. He pulled on it, but the door would not budge. He stepped back and ran his flashlight along the doorjamb. He could see a few puckered places in the wood where big nails had been driven in. He swept the flashlight's beam around him. The windows in this room were all twenty feet above him. When had that changed? Maybe the windows had been that way for the past half hour. He began to run back the way he had come. The windows in the next room were the same, and the room after that. But at the portal between the next two rooms he saw the doors of another loading dock.