by Garton, Ray
Kaufman still couldn’t determine the sex, but the person was talking quite rapidly to him- or herself. He noticed the hands. They closed into fists, released, the fingers extended rigidly for a moment, then clenched into fists again. That was repeated over and over as he watched, then the arms came up and the hands clawed furiously at the air, as if scratching someone’s eyes out. They were thick wrists. He decided he was dealing with a very skinny man.
He lifted the mike to his mouth and depressed the button again, but he didn’t speak. He looked beyond the skinny man crossing the road and saw the hospital’s gate. It stood open outward, but not quite all the way, and it was bent and twisted.
A voice shouted from Kaufman’s right and he turned to see another figure similar to the first one—thin, wearing a denim coat over what might have been a flimsy hospital gown—was pointing at him. Behind him, another one appeared from a door in the boiler house.
Why are they coming out of the boiler house? Why are they in the boiler house? What the hell is going on here?
The man who was pointing at him was also shouting at him, but Kaufman couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly, he quickened his pace and when he was on the verge of breaking into a jog, Kaufman noticed that the man was not simply pointing at him, he was pointing a gun at him.
Kaufman moved to duck into the car a fraction of a second before the gun fired.
The bullet struck the windshield and a tiny web of cracks appeared, and Kaufman dropped the mike as he pulled his leg into the car. Then they were running toward him, both of the figures approaching from the boiler house. The one with the gun kept his arm extended and fired again as Kaufman pulled the door closed.
A crashed gate, strange people wandering around in a hurricane—there was definitely some kind of situation at Springmeier, and he needed backup immediately. He started the engine, then reached for the mike. It wasn’t in its holder. He’d dropped it as he was getting into the car. The cord stretched down to his legs. He clumsily reached for it, but the guy with the gun was now in front of the car and aiming at him.
Kaufman put the car in gear and slammed his foot on the accelerator.
The man jumped onto the hood as the car lurched forward and for the first time, Kaufman heard what he was shouting.
“—not gonna let you get away with it, you cocksucker! I saw her first, you son of a bitch! I saw her first!” He looked and sounded like an escaped mental patient, but this hadn’t been a functioning mental hospital in over a decade.
Kaufman remembered the voice of the woman who identified herself as Dr. Fara McManus talking about the virus they’d created and what it would do.
Kaufman hit the brake and the man on the hood slid off as another one began to pound on the passenger side window with something hard and heavy. Kaufman suspected a rock.
The one who’d crossed the street had turned back and was pointing at him, glaring at him through the side window, and shouting at him in a hoarse, roaring fury.
He hit the accelerator again. The car surged forward and humped over something on the ground, first the left front tire, then the left rear tire. Up and over, up and over.
“Shit,” Kaufman muttered, his voice tight, as he thought of things like being fired, or charged, or sued, and the inevitable crucifixion in the media no matter what happened.
He reached down with his left hand and tried to find the mike. The curled cord ended at the bottom of the door. The mike was hanging out of the car.
“Shit!” he shouted.
Suddenly, two fists were pounding on the windshield and an upside-down face was screaming at him and suddenly Kaufman, whose nerves had been stretched tight, was screaming, too, and the car swerved to the right.
The patrol car crashed into the guardhouse.
“Bursell! Castillo!”
They had to be able to hear him because Delgado could hear them. Or him, if it was just one voice. He still couldn’t tell. But it was closer.
He’d passed a lot of doors, closed and opened. The beam of his headlamp finally fell on a wall up ahead as he approached a T intersection. The voices were coming from the left. He rounded the corner.
A face lunged toward him out of the dark, a face so white and stark that Delgado first thought it was a mime. Another emerged right behind it, and a hand holding a knife slashed across him diagonally, and Delgado felt the blade cut his skin as he jogged clumsily backwards and started to fall, mouth yawning open silently, arms flailing—
Don’t fall don’t fall that’s all just don’t fall don’t fall!
—and the hand slashed again and Delgado felt the blade cut, and he got his footing and threw himself to the left. Then he was running back the way he’d come.
They were behind him, chasing him, shouting angrily, cursing, even growling like animals, and they were fast, their bare feet slapping on the tile floor, fast enough to get closer. And closer. He fumbled for his gun as he ran, but his hand seemed to be a piece of dead meat at the end of his arm.
He came to the stairwell door and pushed through it hard, then spun around and threw himself against it to shut it. It wouldn’t close. His two pursuers hit the door on the other side and shoved, gibbering furiously.
Delgado looked over his shoulder at the stairs. As soon as he stepped away from that door, they were coming through. He unholstered his Ruger, steeled himself, then turned and ran up the stairs, shouting, hoping they would hear him up there.
“They’re down here!” he shouted. “Down here!”
He made it up the first half, grabbed the rail and spun himself around to go up the second half, hearing their feet behind him. As he rounded that rail, he raised his right hand, aimed the gun in their direction and fired once, twice. There was a scream of pain behind him. He didn’t stop moving. Up, up, his shoes clopped on each step.
“They’re down here! Down here!”
Hands on the backs of his legs, grabbing his pant legs, clutching.
He was almost at the top, he could see the door up there, the door that opened on the corridor that led to Dr. McManus’s office to the left and the gathering at the intersection on the right.
“Down here!”
A hand got a solid hold and pulled hard.
Delgado tripped on the stairs and went down.
“Down here!”
They were on him and he felt the knife entering his back, his arm, his neck, again and again, the fist hammering, the blade stabbing into him—
“Down here!”
—pulling out, stabbing in, pulling out, stabbing . . .
PINNACLE E-BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2014 Ray Garton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
PINNACLE and the P logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3404-8
First electronic edition: February 2014
