And fell straight to the floor as his paralyzed feet and ankles buckled beneath him.
He lay there on the floor, wondering how long it would be before he finally, deep down, accepted the truth of his condition and would plan accordingly. For a second he did nothing but lay there, enjoying the feel of the cool tiles and scanning the room from his new vantage, but the distant thunder of gunfire reminded him that he needed to keep moving. His braces were nowhere to be seen so it looked like his travels would be by hands and knees. Trying not to make a sound, he got up and crawled in the darkness between his bed and the wall toward the closet.
As he reached the end of the bed, another idea floated up through the haze of his drug-clouded mind.
A low counter ran along the wall opposite his bed, with doors below the counter surface where towels and bed sheets were stored. It offered the advantage of being long enough to possibly contain him, and also the added bonus of being somewhere he could crawl to. In his current state, that would have to be good enough. He could already feel himself slipping back toward unconsciousness.
Dragging himself over to the nearest door, Adam grabbed the handle and pulled it open. The cabinet within was divided into two levels and half filled with towels. He had the presence of mind not to pull any of the towels out onto the floor, but to push them in as he started forcing himself into the lower level of the cabinet. Fortunately, the nurses had apparently not restocked it recently, and he managed to shove what remained aside so he could fit.
With a final effort, he pulled his feet in and the door closed itself behind them.
He lay there in the darkness, surrounded by the smell of linen and detergent. It gave him that freshly made bed feeling and he discovered himself to be quite comfortable. His arm felt slimy, causing him to idly wonder how much blood he had lost. In his current state he couldn’t seem to work up too much emotion about it.
There was nothing he could do about it now.
His last thought was about how all the sheets were going to be a bloody mess in the morning. Then the drugs reasserted themselves, and he passed out within seconds of wedging himself in to his new hidey-hole.
A minute later the ceiling tile directly over his bed fell to the mattress below.
###
Officer Harold Kwan released the mic and clenched his pistol, wondering if he would live through the next ten minutes.
The concrete planter he hid behind wouldn’t last much longer. The crazy woman with the cannon had already shot the first one to pieces, and had put a bullet into his chest when he dove for the next one. What saved his life was the special body armor his mother bought him back when he served in Iraq.
His mom had read news reports of regular issue body armor failing the troops in Fallujah and swore her son wouldn’t be one of those casualties. So she read up on the matter, bought a higher quality suit, and shipped it to him. Her letter accompanying it had begged him to wear it every day, and come home alive.
He had worn it ever since.
The other officers in this squad were wearing Level II body armor, while his rated a Level III. It was designed to stop a 5.56 NATO round, not only pistol rounds. Even so, he knew it couldn’t take another round or two of whatever this unholy bitch wielded.
He was already bleeding from a shoulder wound gained when he ducked back around the corner of the hallway after missing her with his initial burst of shots. The memory of her almost casually stepping aside and returning fire still shocked him. Then just as he prepared to step out again, she shot him through the wall!
He fell and started to crawl away, when the small concrete planter between his head and the wall exploded from another shot. What the hell? She was aiming at him through the damned wall! And accurately!
If the planter hadn’t been there, she would have blown his head apart.
Since then he had been in a desperate fighting retreat, diving from planter to planter. And each time she seemed to know exactly when he was getting ready to move. That’s how she plugged him with her last shot.
And as big and powerful as her weapon was, it should have kicked like a mule. Yet she handled it effortlessly, and held it rock steady when she fired. One handed. Either it weighed less than it appeared, and didn’t kick at all, or she was a whole hell of a lot stronger than she looked. Even as tall and big-boned as she was, the hand cannon she wielded should have moved her arm at least a little bit.
Now he found himself forced to make a dive for the next planter while firing a volley of his own shots in order to hopefully throw her aim off. Everybody else lay hugging the floor, but he still prayed he didn’t hit an innocent with a stray bullet. Gathering his nerve, he made his next leap for cover.
This time, he didn’t make it.
Just as he hit the ground and started to scrunch up behind the last planter, he felt a powerful blow in the region of his calf. Looking down he saw a large part of the meat between his knee and ankle was missing. Pink bone protruded from a gap that looked like a shark had bitten a chunk out of his leg. Blood flowed into a growing pool on the white tiles, and he immediately felt the first symptoms of shock begin to set in.
He needed to apply a tourniquet now, but he didn’t dare release his grip on his pistol in case she came around to shoot him from another angle. That only left him with one alternative. Since loss of blood would drop him in the next minute, he knew he needed to make one last try to take her down. One final burst of bullets in her direction before being forced to either deal with his leg or pass out. Gathering his strength for the effort, he rolled out from behind the planter and brought his gun up…
…only to have it caught in a vise-like grip.
She had been standing on the other side of the planter!
Kwan found himself hauled upright by his wrist until he hung face to face with the tall madwoman, his feet swinging about four inches off the floor. Her strength was unbelievable…and that wasn’t all that beggared belief. A snarl covered her face, but her eyes were what captured his horrified attention.
They were inhuman.
No hint of iris or white showed on their surface. They were just two large black pupils in solid red orbs, surrounded by rage suffused features.
“I have had enough of you,” she hissed right in his face, “and playtime is over. Now I’ve got a man to kill, so stay the hell out of my way!”
With that, she twisted the pistol out of his hand as easily as taking a toy from a child. Then she shifted her grip to the front of his vest and threw him through the nearby bathroom door with enough force to splinter it.
Kwan slammed against the bathroom wall and then landed on the floor with a shattered scapula, a broken arm, and two broken ribs to add to his collection of injuries. His whole universe seemed to be constructed of pain.
“You!” he faintly heard her bark at a nurse cowering against the wall, “Get in there and stop his bleeding. He’s the only one of you garbage I’ve met worth leaving alive.”
Then Kwan passed out to the receding sounds of her boots on the hard tile floor.
###
“Now stay in here, until one of us comes back and says it’s okay to come out.”
Officer Theodore Gilbert closed the door on the frightened faces in Room 322. The nurses had gathered the three cardiac patients on the floor in there, and now hovered over them in the crowded room, ready to pounce on any stress induced problem. Gilbert felt slightly guilty, as if somehow he shared the responsibility for endangering these people by bringing Sellars and his security situation here.
Not that he existed anywhere near the end of the totem pole making those kinds of decisions.
Still, it now fell to him to put himself between them and the onslaught his department had brought down on their heads. He heard Kwan’s warning over his own radio, and the fact he hadn’t called in again wasn’t lost on him. When the gunfire below ceased, and Kwan’s silence continued, the rookie knew all he needed to know about how that battle ended.
The
y were now down to half their squad.
Gilbert wanted to rejoin the lieutenant and Gonzalez, but Asprin had ordered him to go to Sellars’ room and stay there. He understood the strategy behind the order, but chafed at the idea of staying with an unconscious man while his fellow officers engaged an armed killer. If this woman had already taken down Vargas, McEntyre, and Kwan, then it made more sense to him to meet her as a group.
“Lieutenant,” he muttered into his mic, “I’ve got the nurses secured in room 322 with the patients they requested. Now I’m headed to Sellars’ room. You sure you don’t want me joining you two after checking on him?”
“Stay with Sellars,” Asprin’s voice came back, “we have to be sure this woman doesn’t have a partner coming at him from a different direction. We’ll take care of her. You make sure Sellars stays put and stays alive.”
Gilbert grumbled acknowledgment and walked over to Sellars’ room. Pushing the door open a crack, he saw the lights were still out.
“Mr. Sellars? Are you awake?”
No answer.
“Mr. Sellars?”
He pushed the door open wider and stepped into the dark room. A steady electronic chirp issued from the darkness and he recognized it as the sound of a pulse monitor’s alarm. The thing must have either gotten unplugged or come loose, and no nurses were available to come and set things right again. Sellars had probably rolled over in his sleep and jerked the sensor free.
“Mr Sellars?”
Gilbert really didn’t expect an answer by now, figuring the man to probably be drugged into unconsciousness. He moved slowly into the room, trying to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the dim light in here. He feared turning on the light due to the possibility it might cause this room to stand out from the others and attract the assassin if she made it this far. Moving quietly, the policeman carefully made his way over to the bed.
It was empty.
The IV tube lay loose on the bed, and a few small droplets of blood were visible on the sheets. But no Adam Sellars.
For a moment, Gilbert stared stupidly at the empty bed. Then he saw the ceiling tile lying up near the pillow.
What the hell?
He looked up and saw the black rectangular hole where the tile originated. How the hell had that happened?
Then he put the pieces together.
Sellars must have been wakened by the gunshots after all. Fearing for his life, he had decided to escape. Since there were police officers outside his door, he chose to make his attempt through the ceiling. Gilbert started to turn away and go report this to the lieutenant when a bit of motion caught his eye.
The sheets were hanging mostly off the other side of the bed, and they shifted as something between the bed and the wall moved against them.
“Mr Sellars?” He squinted in the gloom. “Is that you? What are you doing?”
Then Gilbert remembered Sellars was crippled…which explained everything. The man must have attempted the ceiling escape only to fall. Unable to stand without his braces, much less land properly, he had then rolled off the side of the bed. Now the idiot must be floundering, half addled from the drugs, on the floor.
“Wait a second, Mr Sellars. I’ll come around and help you back into bed, and then you…”
Gilbert paused, trying to discern the form starting to emerge over the edge of the mattress. He only caught a glimpse of it, but the way the shadow moved caused every hair on his body to stand on end. It moved all…wrong.
“Mr Sellars?”
He started to reach for his gun, but it was already too late.
The horror that came over the bed at him was not Adam Sellars.
Officer Gilbert didn’t even have time to scream.
###
“Kwan! Come in!”
Asprin looked at Gonzalez and shook his head. The two of them stood there in the hospital hallway, guns out and trying to keep an eye on both the stairs and elevator at once.
“It’s down to you, me, and Gilbert now, Pete. You think I ought to call him up here with us, or leave him back there with Sellars.”
“Leave the kid back there, Greg.” Gonzalez unholstered his pistol and eyed the nearby stairwell.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, we don’t need more bullets than necessary flying around this hallway. Besides, the two of us ought to be able to handle this. She got the drop on Vargas and McEntyre, and probably got lucky against Kwan, but we know she’s coming.”
Asprin hoped he was right, and was in the act of pulling his own gun when a new voice came in over his radio.
“Hello? Hello? Can anybody hear me up there?”
Asprin snatched at his mic. “Who is this? How are you on this frequency?”
“This is Mathilda Ruiz…um… I’m the receptionist in the emergency room. I’m using Officer…what is it…Kwan’s radio. He’s hurt really bad, but we’re trying to help him. But I called to tell you that she’s heading your way! She just went in the door to the stairwell!”
Well, that answered that.
“You got that, Pete?” he shot at Gonzalez, “Stairwell!”
“I’m on it.”
“Okay, Mathilda,” Asprin returned to his mic. “Thank you very much, you’ve been a big help. I need to know one more thing, was there anybody else other than the one woman doing the shooting?”
“Um…no, sir…it was only that one woman.”
“Okay, thank you, Mathilda. You did great. Now I need you to clear this channel, so we can hear our backups when they get here. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.” The line went dead.
It was now down to them.
“Showtime,” Asprin muttered to himself, and instantly felt foolish doing it. This was no game.
Gonzalez had taken a shooter’s stance, across the hall and at a forty-five degree angle from the stairwell door. With a nod in his direction, Asprin mirrored his stance. Now whoever opened the door would be in a crossfire, and both were out of the direct line of the doorway in case their perpetrator decided to chance a shot through the door itself.
“You still don’t want the kid up here with us? The more the merrier,” Asprin quipped while leveling his sights at the door.
“Nah,” Gonzalez shifted and settled into his stance, “I’m twitchy enough without having to worry about a rookie panicking and shooting me in the ass when somebody slams a door.” He flashed a tight grin at Asprin, the type one gives when they don’t feel much like smiling at all.
Then his head exploded.
Asprin stared in bewildered horror as the corpse of his friend and colleague toppled, spewing gore like a fountain from its ruined head. It landed in a clumsy heap and jetted bright red blood across the white tiles. At the same time his mind registered the muffled boom from below, and the hole that appeared in the floor between Pete’s feet. He put two and two together real fast.
She was shooting them from below!
That murderous bitch was on the second floor, shooting up through the ceiling, and she was dead on target!
Asprin spent a precious second assimilating the situation, then he turned to run back down the hallway toward Sellars’ room. He knew his only hope now lay in grabbing Sellars and the rookie, and getting them out of here. If nothing else, they could lead the assassin away from all the other patients and staff in the hospital. Or at least buy time till the backup arrived.
“Gilbert!” He yelled down the hall, “I’m coming your way. Grab Sellars and meet me at the door! We’re getting…”
He didn’t make it.
The bullet blasted up through the floor and hit him in the heel. It tore up through his leg, traveling directly alongside his tibia, before exiting through his knee and taking his kneecap with it. It then struck and shattered his elbow, before traveling on up to the ceiling above.
Lieutenant Asprin hit the floor with a strangled cry. His pistol skittered across the tiles ahead of him, dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. Raw agony engulfed his right leg and arm, causi
ng him to squirm in the forming pool of his own blood. He smeared it across the floor in a futile effort to crawl after the dropped pistol.
With all the gore from him and Gonzalez, the once pristine hospital hallway now resembled a slaughterhouse.
“Gilbert!” he gasped as loud as he could, “I’m hit! Get Sellars and get out of there!”
No answer came from the room down the hall. The rookie should have already had Sellars to the door by now, but Asprin saw no sign of him.
“Gilbert!”
Either Gilbert couldn’t hear him, or something was terribly wrong.
“Goddammit, Gilbert!” He now yelled into his mic. “Where the hell are you?”
No reply.
Behind him, Asprin heard the sound of the stairwell door opening. It hadn’t taken the shooter much time at all to get up here. She must have headed up as soon as she shot him. There was something almost arrogant in the way she simply assumed success. He could tell by the steady clump of her boots that she entered the hallway without even bothering to check for an ambush.
“Gilbert!” he shouted, hearing her footsteps approach from behind, “She’s coming!”
The footsteps reached him, and the woman strode past without even casting a glance down in his direction. He made a weak grab for her ankle but she contemptuously kicked his hand aside. He could do nothing but watch as she stalked toward the door to Adam Sellars’ room. To him, she looked like some kind of homicidal Valkyrie…with a really big gun.
She didn’t even hesitate, but walked straight into Sellars’ room where Gilbert should have been ready for her. The lieutenant prayed the rookie had been lying low and waiting in ambush, but he had already started to doubt it. She entered unchallenged, as he didn’t hear any shouts or orders from Gilbert to drop her gun. Nothing but silence for about ten seconds.
Then two thunderous shots rang out.
Asprin closed his eyes, and lay there in his own gore. He had failed. His men were all either dead or seriously wounded, and the man under his protection now executed. A single woman had shot her way right through his entire squad and who knew how many innocent people. And he couldn’t stop her.
Spiderstalk Page 6
