Broken Prey (29 page)

“Don’t do that . . .” But Grant saw the developing flinch in Chase’s eyes and jerked his head away. He was smashed in the face, felt a separate impact when his head hit the floor again, never heard it, never heard the gunshot, then everything went red, and a lightning stroke of pain ripped through his body . . .

LUCAS WENT INTO the stairwell intending to go down to the isolation area, but heard another shot, and it seemed to be up. He went up instead, leading with his pistol. He could hear people screaming, several of them.

At the top of the flight, he got to his knees and did a quick peek both ways down the hall, then a longer look. Two people were lying prone in the hallway, two or three others running away from him, and four or five were either standing or crouched against walls, two with their hands wrapped over their heads.

Two guys were fighting; rolling around, screaming at each other, but were apparently armed with nothing but their fists. The alarms were still belching out the raucous, enervating
brenk brenk brenk
, and he could smell smoke but not see any. Two emergency lights were working far down the hall, but closer by he could see glass from two more, shattered.

Then a shot came from his right, and there was more screaming, and he ran that way. Three people ran toward him, and then past him, shrinking from his gun. He was halfway down the hall when a man lurched into it, seemed to have a gun, was walking in a predatory way. Lucas shouted, “Drop the gun,” and the man pivoted into a gunfighter’s stance and Lucas fired and the other man fired at the same time, and Lucas went sideways and hit the wall and landed on his face and the man tumbled back through the doorway and out of sight.

Lucas didn’t think he’d hit him and kept his pistol on the door, could hear somebody sobbing. Then a woman began a high-pitched keening and then another. A man lurched from another doorway, a slender man in a hospital gown, nobody Lucas had ever seen, and he seemed confused and Lucas began shouting, “Stay back, stay back,” but the man continued walking, stepped in front of the doorway where the shooter had been, and Lucas heard somebody yell, “Hey, Don.”

The man pivoted toward the doorway and a shot ripped through him and he staggered and went down and Lucas jumped to his feet and ran softly, half crouched, down to the door.

A half second away from it, he fired a single shot at the in-slanted steel door and then did a quick head-peek inside. He’d hoped that the single shot would have jarred the man on the other side, and it had: Taylor stood there in a combat stance but with the pistol pointed at the other side of the door.

The instant he saw Lucas, he lifted his gun to fire, but Lucas jerked back, felt bullet fragments and maybe pieces of wall tile cut his face, dropped, and came in low. A shot banged the door above his head and he pushed his arm and face low around the door frame, center mass, and fired two quick shots into Taylor’s body.

Taylor sagged and struggled to control his weapon and Lucas brought the .45 up and fired a third shot, from three feet away, into Taylor’s forehead. Taylor went down, dead.

THERE WAS A DEAD WOMAN inside the room with Taylor, and another woman, apparently shot but still alive, huddling under a bed, whimpering. Lucas turned back to the hallway, looked both ways, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, found Cale’s number, and rang him. Busy. He tried Sloan’s, got him.

“Where are you?”

“Just inside, Jesus Christ . . .”

“Shut up. Listen to me. The Big Three are out, and they’re armed. They have pistols. I just nailed Taylor. I’m on the second floor, right above the stairway that goes down to the isolation area . . . You know where I’m talking?”

“Yeah, we’re coming that way, me and Jenkins and Shrake . . .”

“Okay, but Biggie and Chase and Grant are still out there. Be careful, there are guys with guns all over the place. I’m going down to the bottom, down to the isolation unit. Before you come in, tell somebody that there are a couple wounded, maybe dead, in this hallway . . . next floor above the main floor.”

“Wait and I’ll back you up.”

“Can’t wait. There are three more guys and they’re killing people, we’ve got to cover as much as we can as fast as we can, we’ve gotta knock these guys down . . . gotta knock ’em down, be careful, man, be careful. And tell Beloit before you come in that there’s a wounded woman in two ninety. In two ninety.”

THEN HE WAS UP and running down the hall, the smell of blood in his nose, with the odor of smoke and human waste and the deafening
brenk brenk brenk . . .

Into the stairwell: he nearly shot a man halfway up the second flight, the man jumping with fear as Lucas jerked his .45 at him, Lucas lifting his finger off the trigger at the last possible second when he realized that he didn’t know the man, that the man wasn’t armed.

The man curled against the wall, his hands cupped at his temples, and Lucas shouted, “Find a room, lock yourself inside,” heard a
boom
from somewhere, then another, couldn’t decide where the shots came from, but it felt like they were up again.

He’d thought to go down, but again he went up.

There really wasn’t much down below, he realized—not many people. If the Big Three and Grant were determined to do as much damage as possible, they’d be on the first floor, or the second or third. He continued up to three, heard another
boom.
Peeked down the hallway, saw more people down. Two people crawling along the hallway, two lying motionless. More smoke, thin, veiling. Shouting from the left. Doors banging, another
boom.

His phone rang; he wanted to ignore it, but it could be information. He pulled it out, poked the answer button. Sloan: “We can hear shooting above us, we’re on the way to three.”

“I’m already there. I went up instead of down.”

“We’re on the front steps . . .”

“I just came up the back. I’m moving into the hallway, you’ll be looking right at me, for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot me . . .”

Two more
boom
s and a man screaming and Lucas couldn’t wait, a shattering of glass, more glass breaking, more screaming, and then laughter. Lucas ran to the doorway where the sound seemed to be coming from, did a peek: a man was battering at a thick glass window with a plastic chair.

In the dim light, he couldn’t see who it was, but he thought it might be Lighter. Lucas shouted, “Hey,” and the man turned, and Lucas saw that it wasn’t Lighter, that he didn’t recognize the man at all. Then he saw movement on his right and pivoted and saw a flash, was hit hard in the left arm, taking in the
boom
, felt himself falling and jerked two shots in the direction of the flash and crawled back out through the doorway into the hall. There was crouching, combat-style movement down the hall and he shouted, “Help!”

Sloan shouted back, “Where are you?”

“Down here. I’m hit.”

“Ah, Jesus . . .”

Sloan ran to him in the dim light; the smell of smoke was stronger now, and Sloan came up, Shrake a step behind.

“How bad?” Sloan asked.

The pain was coming on. “I think my arm’s busted. Left arm,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy in there to the right. At least a couple people down. I don’t think I hit him when I fired back.”

SHRAKE DID A PEEK, then put his left arm through the doorway, with his face, ready to fire. Sloan was cutting at Lucas’s sport coat with a jackknife. “Let me see . . . ah, man, you got a hole. It’s not bleeding too bad, but it’s right below your biceps, right in the middle.”

“Yeah, that’s what it feels like,” Lucas groaned. “I can feel a piece moving . . . We gotta take this guy.”

“You’re out of it,” Sloan said.

“I can move okay,” Lucas said. He stood up, almost fell, propped himself against the wall. There was smoke now, another fire, the hallways clear except for a man at the far end, dragging a mattress for some reason. “Look: I’ll go back down and sit in the stairway, block it off. You guys gotta keep this asshole penned up, or take him. There’s somebody in there hurt.”

“You know who it is?”

“No. Could be Biggie,” Lucas said.

“That motherfucker,” Sloan said. “You go on. We’ll take him.”

“Get some more support up here,” Shrake said. “Jenkins went off with that crappie cop, they could hear something down on one.”

“Cell phone,” Lucas said. “I can’t use mine . . .”

“Get your ass down to the stairwell,” Sloan said. “We’ll take care of this.”

JENKINS AND THE game warden, whose name was Deacon, saw the flash of the gunshot and moved slowly down the inside wall of the hallway, closing on the door. They found Chase sitting on the shoulders of a dead man, as though the dead man were a low stool, talking to a woman who had propped herself up against a wall. They could hear Chase’s voice before they saw him; a low chatter that continued between the
brenk brenk brenk
of the alarms. When they got right next to the door, they could hear his voice distinctly, as he talked over the racket around them.

“. . . is dead, because if he wasn’t dead, he couldn’t stand it when I put my finger on his eyeball like this. But see, he doesn’t even blink. There’s still some blood running out, but that’s gravity, is what it is. Just like when you cut a chicken’s head off, the blood keeps coming for a long time, but the chicken is dead. Have you ever seen anybody do that? No? It’s pretty exciting. You get the chicken and you hold it by its legs, and you rub its stomach and it’ll get real quiet, then you lay the neck on a block and then really quick, chop, and the head flies off. If you let go of the chicken, the body will run all over the place without a head. It’s pretty funny, when you see it . . .”

Jenkins risked a peek. The room was fifteen-by-fifteen feet and the man was sitting with his back to Jenkins, not more than seven or eight feet away. He was pointing a pistol at a woman against the far wall, who sat motionless, head down; she had blood on her blouse. Jenkins was not sure she was alive. He had to assume she was, though, and she was also directly on the other side of the man. If he shot the man, the bullet could go right through him into her . . .

“That’s what people mean when they say that somebody’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off . . . Anyway, this is what dead is . . . when somebody puts his finger on your eyeball, you don’t even blink. I am going to shoot you when I’m finished talking, and you’ll feel all your blood run out, and then to make sure you’re dead, I will . . . don’t move. Just sit there. Just listen, or I’ll pull the trigger . . .”

Jenkins pulled slowly back, listening to the beat of the words, checked his gun, turned to the game warden, and put his finger to his lips. He stood upright, carefully slipped off his loafers, took a breath, then took a quick long silent step into the room, then part of another before the man began to turn . . .

Jenkins fired a single shot down through the Chase’s skull, from a range of nine inches.

The game warden lurched through the door. Jenkins looked down at the dead man and said, “Fuckin’ amateurs.”

They both stepped over to the woman. She was a staffer and wore a black name tag that said Bea; she was alive, and she twitched away from him.

LUCAS SAT IN the stairwell, waiting for Sloan and Shrake to make their move on Biggie. The shooting had trailed off—maybe they were running out of ammunition? Lucas tried to think of how many bodies he’d seen in the hallways. Six? Eight? Plus the three in the cage.

His arm hurt; not the worst hurt he’d ever felt, but it was bad enough. He was okay as long as he didn’t move . . .

The
brenk brenk brenk
of the alarms suddenly stopped, and the silence was so shocking that Lucas got to his feet . . . and could hear what seemed to be a general, hospitalwide wail, people hurting, people afraid. There was a thump from somewhere below, the sound of feet in the stairwell . . .

LEO GRANT DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been on the floor, but it had been awhile, he thought. He knew he’d been shot but couldn’t pin down the precise circumstances. His head wasn’t working quite right . . .

He tried to push himself up, but his hands slipped. He couldn’t see well, but he looked at one hand, then smelled it, and tasted it. Blood, he was covered with blood. He couldn’t see very well, there was something wrong with his right eye . . .

He tried again to push himself up, holding on to a window ledge. A door was open next to it, a battery-powered emergency light glowing in the ceiling. He stepped into a cell, then turned and looked at himself in the window—the mirrored inside of the one-way glass. Gaped at himself.

His right eye was gone. The side of his head was a mass of blood . . . he put a hand to it. The eye was gone, and a piece of his eye socket, the outer rim. All gone.

Not much pain yet; a stinging, headache sensation, with little points of pain coming with each step. He started walking, not knowing exactly where he was, or what he was doing. Armageddon, he remembered that. He remembered going into the room with the pistols, and then . . .

Had Chase shot him? He seemed to remember that. Chase had taken the gun and had shot him in the head.

“Crazy motherfucker,” he said. He dabbed at his head with his jacket sleeve. Crazy . . . exactly crazy. Why hadn’t they thought of that? All the planning, why hadn’t they thought of the possibility that one of them might try to kill the others? . . . But that seemed so
unfair.

He was out of the cellblock now, down the hall, into the stairwell. He looked both ways: a half dozen safety lights provided hardly more illumination than the same number of candles would have.

He could feel the anger rising: he was supposed to be in on this. He was supposed to have a gun. They were
his
fuckin’ guns. They were supposed to walk down the hallways, shoulder to shoulder, taking who they wanted, letting other people live, people who begged good enough. Or maybe kill them even if they begged good enough, because it’d be fun to shoot the ass kissers.

Now he didn’t even have a gun . . .

He walked past the elevators to the stairway, opened the door, and started up the stairs, hands clenched to his face, trying to hold his head together.