Only the Hunted Run (23 page)

BULLETS SPLIT THE
air. He felt the
pfftttt pffttt pfftt.
It knocked him from his feet.

The world fell away. The back of his head hit the wet concrete.

After a moment, to his surprise, he felt little rain drops on his face. Mist.

He found he could open one eye. His head was turned to the side. Sly's Air Jordans, right in front of him were smeared with bright red blood.

“You gonna want to get up,” he heard Sly say, sounding far away, like he was calling out down a tunnel.

It became clear, after a moment, that Sly was talking to him. He found that he couldn't roll to his right, so he rolled left, flat on his back, the mist from the sprinklers falling onto his face, into his eyes. Sly was standing over him but not looking at him.

Sully, blinking, looked over to his right.

There, no longer breathing, not fifteen feet from the corpse of Eduardo Lantigua, sprawled on his back, his white jumpsuit drenched in blood, was the bear-sized bulk of Reggie Hastings.

His hair was thick with blood and specked with gore. He had taken one round to the forehead, just off center.

Sly dropped to a squat beside the body, rubbing a hand across one jaw, looking at the mess that had once been his uncle. The last link to his own generations, what he'd said. Sly looked wrong. He looked hollowed out.

Sully coughed. He worked a hand to the back of his head, a lump rising. “Jesus, Sly.”

Sly didn't say anything. He leaned over and flicked at Uncle Reggie's left hand. It still held a jagged sharp of iron pipe. “He come in the back door there. Must have been tracking us from upstairs. Holding a finger up to his mouth, telling me to be quiet. Coming up back of you.”

Sly, still looking at his uncle, the blood flowing across the concrete floor. It was mixing with the water from the sprinkler now. The mist, it was beading up on Uncle Reggie's face, which was untouched below the eyebrows. Tiny dewdrops, clean, pure, little bubbles of absolution that held and then dissolved and ran.

“Thought you were a devil,” Sly said. “Said it the other day. Upstairs, he saw you come in again? Said you had talons coming out your sleeves. Claws.”

“But—”

“Didn't mean, like a, a like, bad white person. He mean, like you had red eyes and could fly and possess people and shit.” He paused, still looking at the corpse. “Think. The world, you get up every day of your life? There's winged things and people who can't die. Fangs. They, all of 'em, can talk inside your head without nobody else hearing. That's, you know, not a sentence. It's everything you're ever going to be, to have.”

Sully pushed himself up. He coughed again and looked at Uncle Reggie and Lantigua and felt like he was going to vomit.

“You, you didn't have to do that,” he said, closing his eyes against the sudden vertigo.

“Didn't do it for you,” Sly Hastings said, as tenderly as Sully had ever heard him say anything.

*  *  *

“I'm walking out of this place, the last time,” Sly said, standing. “Them back doors, you were right. Down the hallway, big double door.”

“It's not locked? George, he forgot it?” He felt himself coming around, standing.

“Ask him, it's his escape hatch.”

“Why you say that?”

“Because I just shot him. He was following Uncle Reggie there, ten steps back, like he was using him for a guard. Maybe he told Unc he'd get him out. Come through the door, looked real surprised to see me.”

Sully, jolted, whipped around. There was nothing, no one, just the shadows and the mist from the sprinkler. “Where—”

“Winged him,” Sly said. “Hit the floor, scrambled back out. Missed the next shot, him falling like that, and then he was up and gone.”

“Then, he's, he's—”

“Somewhere back thataway,” Sly said, nodding toward the darkened halls leading back into the asylum. “Which is why we're going out thisaway. My experience with shooting people, they don't like to get shot twice.”

Sully was still wheezing, trying to keep up. “Yeah, yeah, but . . .”

“But nothing. I ain't studying this shit no more. Half the police, the fire department, they're up there on King Avenue. You'n go up there, you want. But Lionel's down the hill there, edge of Simple City.”

Simple City, it dully bounced across his mind. Sly, using the name for Benning Terrace, the housing projects just beyond the boundary wall of St. E's, where he'd come of age—and where no one would ever say that they had seen him, this night or any other.

“I can't,” Sully said. “Gimme that gat, you going.”

Sly turned. “Say what?”

Sully stood, woozy, the idea coming to him, making a fetching motion with his right hand. “The Glock. Gimme. George, he wants to flatten this whole place.”

“So?”

“Can't. Can't let him. There's . . . there's people still upstairs. He's using me. Used me. To set this up.”

Sly shook his head. “This ain't—”

“I don't got time, brother. Come on. Come on now.”

Sly shrugged his shoulders and shook his head and underhanded the Glock to him.

“Hey shit,” Sully said, “don't—”

“You not going to shoot him with that.”

“Don't sell me short,” Sully said. “I got business with this little bastard.”

*  *  *

There was a blood trail.

Thick red drops, spreading on the wet floor, led back through the swinging double doors. This presented him with a problem before he was ready to consider it: Smash through on a dead run? Turn sideways and slide through? There was no way to tell where George was on the far side, whether he was deep in the bowels of the building or bleeding out just a few feet farther on. Sully came to the near left side of the doors, reached his right arm out and pushed the swinging door as hard as he could, then flattened against the wall.

Nothing.

Then the door came bouncing back to him and, as it did, he caught it with his right hand, putting the pistol in his left, and pushed it back, coming in quick and low behind it, bent at the waist until he was in the hallway.

The blood drops led straight across the hall into a room behind another set of double doors. He blew through those doors, finding himself in a huge, dark supply room. On his right was a long row of tall steel racks, packed with ancient tools and saws and knives and steel pans. He cut that way, throwing his right leg out front and tucking his left beneath him and sliding across the water-slicked floor behind the racks.

Still nothing.

He got to his feet and peered through the racks back into the open walkway of the room. The blood stains that had fallen there still led forward, drop by drop. The even intervals showed a steady pace, the man neither running nor averting his path. He knew where he was going and wasn't hurried, not even after taking a bullet.

“Damn,” he whispered. George had been setting this up for God only knows how long. He knew where he was headed. He knew the exits. Sully, unconsciously, tapping the gun against his hip, his equalizer, his security blanket.

The emergency lighting overhead flickered, a bulb exploded to his left, and he raised the gun, nearly firing on reflex.
Fuck fuck fuck
, he thought, peering at the blood drops. Had to move. He walked as silently as possible around the racks, now stepping parallel to the blood drops, moving deeper in the storage room. He was tracking Harper as he would a wounded bobcat.

This lasted the length of about a dozen steel racks. Here, the blood stopped dripping and turned into a stagnant puddle. George had stopped here. Kneeling now, head up, Sully scooted to the top side of the puddle. Two feet farther on, there were more drops. He followed them for ten feet, twelve, getting close to far door—and then they stopped. He walked all the way to door, another fifteen feet. Nothing.

He went back, getting down on his knees. The floor was dark and wet. Three reddish maroon drops, a neat little trail of plasma popcorn. The drops were fat at the bottom and thin at the top. The droplets radiated outward—back toward the way he'd just come.

“Fuck me,” he whispered.

The little shit heel had doubled back.

“HEY, GEORGE?” HE
called out, pushing back through the door of the storage room. The sound of the fire above was distant but there were crashing thumps every now and again, the building collapsing, coming down above him. There was no longer any way out above, he knew that now. There was only straight ahead. He wondered if Sly had escaped before George had doubled back. He raised his voice, louder. “George? It's me, Sully. Remember our bond? Let's talk about it.”

Three steps, four, five, eyeing the blood drops as he moved. The walkways in the supply room formed a Y around the junk and storage that had accumulated over the past century. Nothing looked like it had been used in a decade. Cabinets and cases and carts and gurneys stacked high with boxes and crates, all under a thick coat of now-wet dust, the walkways barely wide enough for a gurney to be pushed.

Harper had come to the crux of the Y, stopped and then moved off to the right, toward the far side of the autopsy room. This lead to the hallway outside the double doors Sly had gone through and found . . . the exit. Of course. The building blueprint popped into his head, a schematic as drawn from above. Supplies had long ago come in this rear door, while the bodies had gone out.

George hadn't retreated. He'd just looped around the autopsy room and gone around them.

Along the wall to his right were warped cabinets, lined with bottles and glasses. He reached over, grabbed one by the neck, turned and underhanded it high in the air, back down behind him, the bottle rotating end over end backward, until it crashed into the floor, shattering on impact. Then he did the same with another bottle, leaving it a little short of the other, then smashed two more right behind him, the floor now a carpet of glass shards.

With his back protected, Sully moved forward once more, gun up. Soft as the rain, he slipped through the swinging doors, sliding his head and chest through, then shuffling his feet. This gave him a clear view of the hallway. It stretched fifty, maybe sixty feet to the exit.

The steel double doors, leading outside, were slightly ajar.

The night and sounds of sirens, the
waaannhh waaannhh waaannhh
, poured through the gap, flashes of the rotating red and blue lights of the police and ambulances and fire trucks splashing onto the yard from the street above.

Just before the door, in the middle of the hallway, sat an orange plastic chair. It looked to be a refugee from the late 1960s. In the slightly curved seat stood two legs. These led to the jumpsuit-clad torso of George Hudson Harper. The white fabric was stained with dark blood at his chest and the left leg.

Sully blinked. George had removed the cheap fiberboard panel of the ceiling and was working at something above. His head and shoulders and arms were up there. The upper left leg was heavily bound, the blood from the bullet hole still oozing. George kept his weight off of it, just a toe touching the chair.

Sully crept forward, transfixed. It became apparent the blood on the chest was splotched from the outside but not pulsing from the inside. It wasn't his. Lantigua's, likely.

It was a surreal scene—a bleeding, headless apparition in the hallway of an insane asylum, standing daintily, like a beauty queen bringing up her heel to better display the calves.

From the ceiling, a cluster of wires dangled, suspended in air, ending in some small black blob. Sully blinked, took two silent steps closer. It was an egg timer.

“Hey, Boo,” he said.

The headless body in front of him froze. Then the shoulders stooped and George's face appeared below the fiberboard. He had a large cut on his right cheek, which wasn't bleeding. It was just a red stripe. Their eyes held and George's were dilated and wild and then he stuck his head back into the ceiling.

“Your friend left a few minutes ago. I thought you already had. He left the door open. You need to go.”

Sully walked around him to the double doors, pushing one of them all the way open, making sure Sly wasn't dead on the pavement out there, an ice pick sticking up from his face. Then he turned back. “George. It's over. This is over. You, you, you fucked this up. They, this place, they were terrible to your mother and you had them and then, sweet Jesus, you're as sick as the rest of them. Now get the fuck down.”

“Sixty seconds, Sully.” George brought his head and arms down out of the ceiling again, his wiring finished. He put one hand on top of the chair back for balance and stepped down, bringing the wounded leg down lightly. The connecting cord to his plastic cuffs had been sliced through. The cuffs were still on each wrist, like jailhouse jewelry.

“I need you to leave,” he said. “You, you, you owe it to my mother, to tell her story.”

George dragged the chair across the floor to the side of the wall, metal legs scraping. The man was weirdly calm, the energy of earlier dissipated and gone, now sounding more like a tired husk than a mass killer.

“Nobody knows it but you, Sully.”

He had not expected this. The mother, Frances Harper, she did deserve some coda, some measure of justice. The dead didn't get that from courts or the law. They got it only from stories that outlived them. He was the person who could do that.

“Goddammit, George, don't make me kneecap you. You're not blowing any more shit up.” He glanced up at the wiring, the egg timer. “Cut that cord. Turn it backward. Or off or whatever.”

George was limping toward him, slowly. “You can't reach the timer or the wiring, Sully. Forty-five seconds. You're going to die in here, you don't leave. You can do something for our mothers. You're the last one.” Sounding exhausted.

Sully dropped the barrel of the gun and pointed it at George's good knee and pulled the trigger. He flinched, expecting a detonation, but heard only a click. The Glock did not kick. He pulled the trigger again and got the same dry-firing snap.

The thing was empty. That was what Sly had been trying to tell him.

“God—”

He saw the open O of surprise and fear curling up at the edges of Harper's mouth give way to open-faced confusion, the features twisting, the eyebrows coming down, and then George bull-rushed him, plowing into him with a lowered shoulder.

Sully's knee gave way, the force of the tackle knocking him backward, gun flying out of his hand, hitting the wall beside him. His shoulder crashed into the double doors, knocking them wide open. They both stutter-stepped outside, into the rain, an awkward dance pair, and then Sully fell, his ass hitting the pavement before his head snapped back, cracking against it. George grunted and rolled off him. Sully blinked, vomit bubbling in his throat. George was up, running back through the doors, pulling them closed behind him.

Sully fought to get to his knees. The revolving lights of the police and ambulances and fire trucks spun at the far end of the building, the
vertigo returning. He stood and careened sideways, nearly falling, nausea sweeping over him. He righted himself and lurched back to the doors.

They were locked.

“George!” He bellowed, tugging at the handles. His hand, wet, slipped. He wobbled backward, struggling for balance, pinwheeling his arms, and then he turned, seeing the free-floating forms of the patients in their white jumpsuits wandering the grounds, in the grass, aimlessly heading this way or that, the lights of the city off to his right over the river, and then he got his feet under him and he was staggering downhill, down toward the cemetery and the dead and he tripped and fell face forward, the mud and soaked grass rushing up at him and then the world blew up behind him, the sad lost dead world of George and Frances Harper and Reggie and the nameless rest, the dark orange flames billowing high into the night.