Sudden Prey

by John Sandford

  ``All right, come out of there, and sit with these other people,'' Martin said. ``Keep your hands where I can see them.''

  They'd been inside for a little more than a minute.

  LaChaise pushed the elevator call button as the woman walked from behind the desk. Martin motioned her toward a chair, and as she went past him, struck her with the gun butt as he had the security guard. The butt hit the woman in the nose, which shattered, and she went down with a choppedoff shriek. The teenaged girl yelped at the same instant, but choked it off, a hand over her mouth. The two young men watched them with flat eyes that said they'd seen guns before.

  ``Anybody calls the cops, we come down here and waste them,'' LaChaise snarled. ``And you know we will.''

  The elevator car arrived and LaChaise and Martin backed inside. As the door closed, they heard people running.

  THE TWO MEN RAN FOR THE DOOR WHILE THE WOMAN tried to gather up her kids and start moving. She was screaming, ``Help us, help us...''

  The teenaged girl stepped to a wall-mounted fire alarm and pulled the handle down.

  Inside the elevator, the alarm went off like a bomb. La-Chaise freaked: ``Holy shit...'' and kicked the doors.

  ``Hang on, we'll be there in one second,'' Martin said. But it took longer than that, eight or ten seconds, with the alarm screaming the whole time.

  DEL WAS BRUSHING HIS TEETH IN A REST ROOM WHEN the alarm went off. He spat once, caught his pistol in his right hand and his radio in the left, ran toward the door with white foam dripping down his chin and said into the radio, ``Lucas? Lucas?''

  Lucas came right back. ``Yeah?''

  Del was in the hall, running toward his wife's room. ``Something's happening here, there's some kind of alarm.''

  ``Be there in one minute,'' Lucas said. ``I'm right straight down on Washington.''

  ``Get some more guys coming...''

  FRANKLIN WAS ASLEEP WHEN THE ALARM WENT OFF, but it shook him awake and he pushed himself up, reached for the bedside table and pulled his pistol out. He could hear people in the hallways, the night nurses, he thought. But the alarm made too much sense to him. They were coming, he thought, just like Davenport said they might, and there weren't any cops between himself and the door. He'd have to do it alone...

  And then Del yelled, ``Franklin, I'm in Cheryl's room, you awake?''

  And he yelled back, ``Yeah, I'm up now.''

  ``Can you get to the door?''

  ``Yeah.''

  Franklin pulled the IV from his arm and more or less felloff the bed onto his good side, winced at the impact, and lowcrawled to the doorway. Two nurses were standing in the hall, looking up and down it, and he shouted at them: ``Get out of sight. Get out of sight.''

  They saw the gun in his hand, froze for a second, then scurried into a doorway. Del peeked from the doorway across the hall two doors down. ``Maybe it's not...'' he shouted.

  But as he said it, LaChaise peeked from his end of the hall. His face was clean-shaven but unmistakable, as was the hard black form of his rifle. Del snapped a shot, missing, and Franklin jerked one off and thought it'd probably gone into the ceiling. Then LaChaise was out of sight for a second, and the next second, the muzzle of the rifle came around the corner and began chattering down the hall, a ferocious up-close pounding followed by a hail of plaster from the walls, the bits and pieces of.223 slugs zipping past like bees, the sound of shattering glass, and then the quick hollow boom of Del's automatic.

  With plaster pouring on him like rain, Franklin peeked down the hall, saw movement and fired three quick shots. Somebody screamed, ``No,'' a yelp, the sound of a man hit. Then the machine gun opened up again, and more plaster rained down, and the door above his head exploded in plastic and chipboard splinters.

  Del, across the hallway, heard the man scream ``No,'' and thought that Franklin had hit one of them. Franklin fired three more times and Del popped back out and fired three evenly spaced shots: Franklin was working a revolver, and he'd need time to reload. There was now so much dust in the hallway that Del could barely see the end of it. Then there was movement again and he jerked his head back and the walls came apart again and something slashed at his throat. He touched it, he could feel something sticking out. A bone? A piece of his jawbone? Shocked, he turned and looked at Cheryl, whomhe'd rolled off the bed onto the floor. She was looking at him and began screaming and crawling forward, toward him.

  He was hurt, but he didn't feel hurt: he popped out the door and fired another half-dozen shots down the hall, then snapped on an empty chamber.

  Franklin came in with two shots: Del groped for another magazine, dropped the empty out of the gun butt, and slapped the next one in and jacked a shell into the chamber. Cheryl was on top of him, trying to hold him, and he was trying to push her away, get back to the door.

  Franklin was yelling, and dimly, he heard, ``Hold it, hold it. I think they're gone.''

  Del looked down the hall, but saw nothing. Then Cheryl was screaming something he couldn't make out, fear in her eyes, and she grabbed at his throat.

  MARTIN WAS HIT. THE SLUG, A LUCKY SHOT, WENT through the inside part of his thigh, just below his testicles, catching mostly skin. There was a big artery there, he knew, and he pulled back and ripped open his pants leg. His leg showed a raw open wound but no heavy pulse of blood. He was bleeding, all right, but wouldn't bleed to death-not in the next minute or so. LaChaise was screaming at him, ``You hit? You hit?'' as he slammed another magazine into the AR.

  ``Yeah, I'm hit. This is no good, man.''

  LaChaise jumped into the hallway, fully exposed, like in the cop and cowboy shows, and blew the entire thirty-shot magazine down the halls, playing it like a hose. Martin had gone to the elevators. He pushed the ``down'' button and the doors slid back: ``Let's go!''

  ``One more,'' LaChaise screamed. He poured another magazine down the hall, then skipped across the hallway and piled into the elevator and the doors closed and they started down.

  ``Maybe somebody waiting,'' LaChaise said. He shovedhis last magazine into his rifle. The wells around his eyes were white, his nostrils wide as he gasped for breath: ``How bad is it?''

  ``Bad enough, but I ain't gonna die from it,'' Martin grunted. ``Watch the doors,'' LaChaise said, and they leveled their rifles at the opening elevator doors. Nobody.

  The lobby was deserted and they ran out toward the hall that would lead to the car.

  They'd been inside for little more than a minute.

  LUCAS SKIDDED TO A STOP IN THE PARKING LOT, ON the opposite side of the building from the emergency room entrance. Del's wife was screaming on the radio: ``Del's hurt, Del's hurt... they're going away, but Del's hurt...''

  Lucas had everything on the street headed for the hospital, and Dispatch said more guys were running down from City Hall. They'd be there in a minute, in thirty seconds... He jammed the truck into park and got the shotgun off the seat and ran toward the lobby doors. As he ran up, he saw the elevators open, and LaChaise and Martin lurched out, Martin hobbling.

  They turned the other way, not seeing him, heading down a hall that would lead to the emergency room exit. He was behind them, sixty or eighty feet away, on the wrong side of the hospital. He pulled at the door and nearly fell down: locked.

  Without thinking, he backed up a step, pointed the shotgun at LaChaise's back through the glass and fired. The glass exploded, and he pumped and fired through the hole, and pumped again, was aware that somebody was screaming, and then the glass panes ten feet to his left blew out and he could see the flash of a machine gun rolling toward him. He went down and automatically ducked his head, and the shattering glass ripped at his coat and pants.

  When the long play of the machine gun passed, he got to his knees and fired two more shots as quickly as he could, got no response and stood up.

  The hall opposite him was empty. There was a sudden, keen local silence, as though he had suddenly gone deaf. Then the sound of sirens faded in, and he stepped through the holes in the glass doors
and ran across the lobby.

  He ducked behind the wall at the reception desk, and saw a woman with a bleeding face looking at him from the floor where she'd crawled for cover. He waited, listening, then hurried down the hall, ready to take someone at the corner...

  Another body, the security guard, breathing but blowing bubbles of blood. There was a double blood-trail, going out the door, one stopping five feet from the curb, the other going all the way to the curb. They had a car, but they were gone.

  A cop car skidded into the lot, and Lucas stepped out with his hands up, waved, groped for his radio and said, ``They're on the streets... look for the brown car, the big brown car. They're not more than fifteen seconds out of the lot. They got machine guns, they're hit...''

  A doctor was running down the hall toward him. He glanced at Lucas, then bent over the security guard and shouted back toward the emergency room: ``We need a cart, get a goddamn cart.''

  Lucas said, ``There's another one by the reception desk.''

  The doctor screamed, ``We need two carts...''

  As the cops broke out of the incoming car, Lucas turned and ran back to the lobby. The elevator doors were open, the floor a pool of crimson blood. There was only one puddle, he noticed, with two footprints in it. The other man hadn't been hit yet, so he'd got him with the shotgun.

  He pushed two, rode up, and when the doors started to open, he yelled, ``Davenport coming in.''

  He could hear a woman shouting, and he hurried aroundthe corner toward Del's room. Del was on the floor, with Franklin and Cheryl, both in hospital gowns, bent over him. A nurse was hurrying down the hall with a cart.

  ``How bad?'' Lucas yelled as he came up.

  ``He's not gonna be as pretty as he used to be,'' Franklin said grimly.

  Lucas knelt beside Cheryl and Del looked up at him: a splinter of Formica, thin as a knife, and about the width of a pencil, was sticking through Del's neck, inside the lines of his jaw. He looked at Lucas and shook his head, his eyes wobbling.

  Cheryl turned to the nurses and shouted, ``Hurry,'' and to Lucas, in a calmer voice, ``It goes all the way through, up in the roof of his mouth.''

  ``Jesus, let's get him...''

  The nurses came up and Lucas picked Del up and laid him on the cart. ``Down to the ER,'' one of the nurses said. The other one pointed at Cheryl: ``And you've got to lie back down, you can't be up...'' And at Franklin: ``You too...'' She pushed Cheryl toward the bed behind them.

  Franklin said, ``You get them?''

  ``They made it out, but we got guys coming in all over the place.''

  ``Shit.''

  ``I hit one of them and you guys hit one. We've got one blood trail going in and out of the elevator, and another one starting in the lobby.'' Lucas started to tremble with the adrenaline.

  ``Good,'' Franklin said, and he began to shake as well. He looked down at the wreckage of the hallway, and said to Lucas, ``You know what it was like in here?''

  ``What?''

  ``It was like one of those scenes in Star Wars where the Storm Troopers are shooting about a million shots at the goodguys and never hit anything. I mean, more shit went up and down the hall...''

  Lucas looked at him, covered with plaster dust, and said, ``You know, you might want to sit down.''

  Franklin rubbed his chest, looked at Cheryl, now flat on her back and deathly pale, and said, ``Yeah, I might.''

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MARTIN WAS RUNNING, STAGGERING, TURNING THE corner into the hall that would take him out past the emergency room, past the body on the floor, LaChaise a step behind, when the world blew up again, and a hail of glass and lead blew past them.

  LaChaise screamed, but Martin could sense him still moving, then another shot pounded past them and LaChaise turned and opened up with the machine gun and Martin went through the door out onto the sidewalk, half expecting to die there.

  But the car was waiting, idling peacefully. A woman was a half-block away, walking toward them carrying a bag. She stopped, suddenly, when she saw them, but Martin was already around the car; he threw the gun in the backseat and climbed inside. LaChaise piled in the passenger side and they rolled out of the lot, the passenger side door flopping open, then slamming as they slewed in a circle and headed south.

  ``Hurt bad...'' LaChaise moaned. ``My fuckin' legs...''

  ``Fire alarm,'' Martin said. He had one hand clamped overthe wound in his leg, and he could feel the blood seeping between his fingers. ``Sonsofbitches set off the fire alarm.''

  ``How bad are you hit?'' LaChaise asked, then moaned again as they bounced over a curb and around a corner. The streets were empty.

  ``I'm bleeding heavy,'' Martin said. ``Christ... Hang on.''

  Martin was trying to turn into the side street that led to the garage. But he was moving too fast, and driving with one hand, and they hit a curb again, ran through a small bare tree, bounced off the parking strip and back into the street. La-Chaise, groaning, reached over Martin's head to the sun flap and pushed the button on the garage-door opener. Across the street, the door started up, and Martin horsed the car inside.

  Sandy Darling was there with the chain, her eyes wide as she moved behind the steel post, and Martin reached up and jabbed the garage-door opener again and the door started down.

  They had not been gone more than ten minutes, and were now no more than a minute and a half out of the hospital. Martin pushed his door open and climbed out, leaving the rifle behind, clutching his thigh, trying to stop the flow of blood.

  LaChaise was out, got the padlock keys. ``Hurt,'' he said. ``Get your first-aid shit... we're hurt.''

  ``What happened?'' Sandy asked, as LaChaise popped open the padlock at her waist.

  ``Fucked up,'' LaChaise said. ``They were waiting.''

  ``Are they coming?''

  ``Don't know,'' LaChaise said. ``Let's get upstairs...''

  THE TWO MEN PULLED OFF THEIR OUTER CLOTHES IN the living room. Martin's leg looked like somebody had carved out a golf ball-sized chunk of meat with a dull hunting knife: the wound was circular, ragged, choked with blood andchopped flesh, with pieces of thread from his pants mixed in the gore. Sandy handed him a heavy gauze wound pad and said, ``Clamp that over the hole... let me look at Dick.''

  All of LaChaise's wounds were in the back of his legs, the back of his arms and the back of his head, and most were superficial cuts from glass. When he first took off his pants and shirt, he appeared to be shredded. But blood was actively flowing from only one wound, and when Sandy dabbed at the rest of him, she said, ``I don't think you're too bad. Get to a hospital, and you won't die.''

  ``Kiss my ass,'' LaChaise groaned. ``Wipe it up or something.''

  ``On the other hand,'' she said, looking at the one wound that was bleeding, ``you've got a bullet hole in the back of your arm.'' She rolled his arm, and found a lump under the skin near the front. ``And that's the bullet, I think.''

  ``Cut it out,'' LaChaise said.

  ``It's pretty deep.''

  ``I don't give a fuck, cut it out.''

  ``Dick, I'd just hurt you worse.''

  ``All right, all right...''

  Martin stretched out on the floor and lay silent and motionless as she poured a glass of water over the wound, probed at it, shook her head and said, ``All I can do is put some more pads over it and bind it up. You need a doctor. You're going to get infected.''

  Martin's stomach heaved and she realized he was laughing: hysterical, she thought. Then again, maybe he thought it was funny. ``Infection'll take a couple days. We ain't got a couple days.'' He looked at LaChaise. ``We gotta keep moving, boy.''

  ``I'm really fuckin' hurtin', man.''

  ``They'll wonder where we went, and sooner or later, they'll kick their way in here. If we're gonna do any moredamage, we gotta move.'' He looked at the windows. ``Before light.''

  LaChaise groaned, but got to his hands and knees, looked sideways at Sandy and said, ``Tape me up where you can.''

  ``I don't have that much
tape.''

  ``Well, get the worst ones,'' he said. To Martin: ``That fuckin' shotgun. Somebody had a fuckin' shotgun and he had me dead, but that first shot missed. That fuckin' glass was like a hurricane... Second shot hit me in the vest.''

  Sandy said, ``I'll get a towel.''

  As she ran back to the bathroom LaChaise crawled across the floor to the bulletproof vest he'd taken off. A ragged pattern of pellet holes punctured the nylon back panel. ``

  Probably shooting triple-ought,'' he said. ``Christ, if he'd been a little worse shot and a little high, I wouldn't have a head.''

  Martin was on the phone, dialing.