It was.
"That's close by. Get cover, now. Please." Eddie moves over and stands to the right of the door.
"Who the hell do I call? 911? They'll be lunch," Dice whispers. "Danny Brady and Hafidha Gates are in the building, do I call them?"
"Try a text message," Natalie says. She's got a liter sport bottle of water and she's squeezing it like a baby doll.
Dice runs his thumbs over the keys, typing as fast as he can:
Tank sos no power 4th flr TV rm
The screen lights up when Daniel Brady replies with only one word:
Hide.
*
Hafidha found Sam on the way to the interview room where Brady should be with Saito. He's beyond help—beyond even comfort. Now his blood dries on her hands, too, black in the glow of the emergency lights. She moves fast, Leon's pistol at low safe. A ricochet in these old brick corridors could have disastrous results.
The door to the interview room stands open. There's Rufus, sitting against the wall with his knees drawn to his chest. Incapacitated, though Hafidha can't say for now just how. He's alive, though, and when he sees Hafidha backlit by the exit sign his eyes go wide. She starts to come to him, but he shakes his head and jerks a thumb down the corridor.
They went thataway.
And not long ago, either, if Rufus pressing his finger to his lips is anything to go on.
At least he's not curled in a puddle of his own red.
She catfoots around the corner in Emily Partridge's shoes and sees two men at the far end of the hall, just coming up on the fire doors. The smaller walks ahead of the larger, in that duck-walk shuffle of the shackled, and Hafidha's heart skips a beat in relief when the larger turns sideways against the hellish glow of the emergency exit sign. She'd know Brady's Robert Redford profile anywhere.
She reaches out to find Brady's phone—she doesn't need a network this close—and pings it.
He raises it without looking away from Saito, and she knows what he reads.
I'm in your six.
"Stop," he says, and Saito stops. Brady steps back, creating a triangle and putting Saito in between them now. Hafidha walks forward, leaving her gun low. As she comes up, Brady's eyes widen and Saito smirks.
So much blood all over her.
"So," Saito drawls—he learned his delivery and most of his dialogue from every crappy horror movie you've ever seen, "kitty found a plaything? I told you monsters don't get better, Danny-boy."
Brady doesn't shift his focus off Saito, but she knows he's seen her. And all that blood. "Motherfucker, Hafidha.
What did you do?
"
It stings. Even though she knows she deserves it—
Fuck you, Bug: it's you that deserves it, not me
.
"Hakes is out. He got Kat and Sam."
"Danny," Saito says. "Are you going to believe that?"
"What happened to Rufus?" she asks, ignoring Saito and his rattlesnake tongue. Ignoring the fact that Brady's eyes shift, for just a second.
Brady says, "Don't know. Total fear response. I couldn't move him and keep control of Jason, here."
"You have something to do with that, Saito?" Hafidha asks. "New manifestation? Practicing up?"
He shrugs. His shackles rattle. "Would you believe me if I said no?"
"I'm taking him back to his cell," Brady says. "Or I was—"
Something tickles in Hafidha. Sharp pain. Panicky. A splitting murder behind her eyes. She doubles over, nearly jerks her hands up to her face. Remembers Leon's Glock at the last second, keeps her hand down, gives herself a cookie for decent trigger discipline. Massad Ayoob and Solomon Todd would be proud.
Fear now, so much fear. Blossoming. She feels like a car in neutral with the accelerator pressed. Roaring, and going nowhere.
She wants to run. Curl up. Throw herself into a corner and die. Hide under a bed, a desk. Anything.
Shoot it. Shoot everything. There's a gun in her hand. There's a threat right in front of her. A threat that is moving. She hears the clink of his chains. His silky, silky voice.
The monster comes toward her. Shut it up, shut it up, shut it—
Vaguely, she hears grunts. Struggling. Heavy footsteps. Brady makes a noise of pain.
Blindly, groping, the fingers of her right hand find her left wrist. She hooks them through the elastic, pulls, snaps.
Zap.
Revision 1.21a.
And it is gone. The pain. the fear. Everything. Everything is slick and harmless and ironically interesting and so, so distant and cool. She looks up, a wary animal, and finds herself staring right into Jason Saito's eyes.
His wide, incredulous eyes. His nose inches inches from hers. He'd been leaning in, she realized. Captivated by the aroma of her fear.
Behind him, she glimpses Brady on the floor, heaving one knee under himself. Doubled over as he rises.
"Shit," Saito says. "You're just like me."
She pistol-whips him with the barrel of Leon's gun.
He staggers back, clutching his broken cheekbone—even a gamma notices another gamma's blow. And she would have been on top of him, swinging again, but Brady beats her to it. Barrels into Saito, scoops him up, lifting the smaller man on tiptoe and swinging him around. Hand to hand with a gamma. Hafidha sees Saito bent over, his neck locked under Brady's arm.
"Danny," Saito says, "you wouldn't hold it against me, would you?"
She doesn't follow the next move, exactly. But Brady goes down hard—a backward shoulder roll
over
Saito's head. And Hafidha Gates thinks that if she lives to be a thousand—world's oldest metabolic freak—she'll never get over the sound of Saito's skull hitting the floor, and the crunch of bone that comes with it.
Brady heaves himself up and shakes Saito by the head like a dog murdering a stuffed giraffe. Something snaps heavily and Saito's feet flop like a doll's. Kick like a hanged man's.
Brady drops Saito on the floor. Heavy, limp, like an armload of wet laundry. He heaves in a couple of breaths. Pushes himself up straight, painfully.
Looks up at her. Face so still.
"You had to," Hafs said. "What were we going to do, tie him up and leave him for Larry?"
Still, Brady shakes his head. "I would have thought that would be a lot more satisfying."
She nods. "I'll try not to enjoy it for both of us, then." A long pause. "You broke his neck."
"Maybe tore his carotid. It's pretty hard to break a neck. We'll ask Frost, if we get out of here."
He's still looking at her. Looking at her bright green shoes, not so green in the exit-sign hell-light. Looking at the blood. He holds his hands away from himself as if they were floury. Greasy.
"You okay?" he asks.
"Somebody put a whammy on me," she says. "Remember the reporter? I think I know why he drove into the tree."
"So we've got a hex
and
a gremlin." His eyes ask,
And you beat it how?
She touches the back of her head, where the bugzapper lives. "I turned off my fear."
"Is that a smart move?"
She shrugs. "No. But it's working for now."
She waits. Eventually, said into the silence of labored breathing, she asks him, "Do you want the gun?"
"How'd you get it?"
"Leon's," she says. "I told him to lock himself in."
Brady stares a little longer. Purses lips. Nods. "You keep it," he says. "You're a better shot."
"Somebody around here," she says softly, "has a panic button. And I think I know who."
She turns around and calls. "Emily? We don't want to hurt you. Why don't you come out, now?"
*
You run. Though you're dizzy with starving, you run.
You can't stop running. The monster's right behind you. And she's calling your name. She knows, she does know. And Ash can't help you. You sent Ash to her, and she... she's a ghost eater, a soul-eater. She swallowed Ash right up, fought her, shook her off, and won.
The monster is stronger than Ash.
You can't let her be stronger than you.
There's a cage here that can hold, her, though. All you need is to lure her into it.
You need bait.
And the perfect bait already lives in the cage.
You run.
*
Brady shadows Hafs as she slips back to Rufus. He's crawled under his desk. Motion, good. A positive sign.
And it's probably the safest place for him, if Bloody Larry happens to wander by.
Hafs crawls under the desk with him, comes back out with something. Rufus's headset and mic, battery-operated. She hands them to Brady, who puts them on without complaining. He watches as she goes to a locker—cool, efficient, without a wasted gesture—and pulls out a pair of gas masks. She tosses Brady one.
"You planning on—"
"There's the pepper spray," she says. "If we get juice back, I can fog for gammas."
"That's just gonna make Hakes angry."
"Line of sight," she says. "How's he going to target if I blind him?"
Brady mines a slow clap and pulls the gas mask over his head, checking to make sure it's got a filter. He leaves it around his neck for now. He'll hear the hiss if she uses the spray.
Hafidha pulls off her glasses and tucks them in her pocket.
"This is going to fuck up my accuracy," she says. She's been leaving a Hansel and Gretel line of Creme Egg wrappers behind her. Now she adds another to the trail.
She hands Brady her gun for a moment, adjusting the other gas mask on top of her head.
"Hold my gun and watch this," Brady mutters.
She laughs. "Easier without the braids," she says sadly.
He resists the urge to stroke her arm. "I wish Chaz was here," Brady says.
They share a tired smile. "I'm glad he's not," she says through his headset. "Bad enough that we are. Can you hear me?"
He nods. "Where are you going?"
"After Partridge," she says. "If she's opening cages... who's next worst? Say you wanted a WMD..."
"Hector?"
"Reyes has been getting through to him." Then her face does a strange thing—startled realization. But without any
fear,
exactly. "Shit. Mrs. Chow."
Brady nods. "Check on it. I got an SOS from Dice. I'm going to see if I can get the rec room evacuated. Then look for Hakes."
"And Henry," she says.
"Henry's not a threat for six months or so."
"Hakes is a threat to Henry. God, I hope Renee has the sense to stay in her room."
"Who?"
"Oh, very funny." She puts her hand out for the Glock, then pulls it back. "You know what? If you're going to get Larry... You keep the gun."
"Hafs?"
"Gamma," she says. "And anyway, Gray would never forgive me."
*
Renee should have stayed in her room. She wishes like hell she'd had the sense to stay in her room. But she didn't, and when she went to look for somebody she could ask about the power outage, she found the old white man wandering alone down a corridor in the dark. She knows by his clothes—scrubs and a bathrobe—that he's one of the patients, and one who should be on a locked ward. He's also wearing two cardigans, a knitted cap, and a scarf that looks like Hafidha knitted it for him.
She knows who this is. Not that they tell the other patients all about one another, but she spent enough time in the bullpen. And she knows she ought to be afraid of him.
But he looks harmless. He looks
confused.
And scared. And he shouldn't be left to wander around.
So she exerts herself to stay present for him, and she walks up and takes his hand. She's discovered that touching people makes her stay real for longer. It's the next best thing to having a door between them.
"I'm Renee," she says. His hand is cool and papery. He smiles. "Are you Henry?"
"I got lost. Something happened, and—" He looks down.
Her gaze follows his. His paper slippers are soaked in something dark.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," he says. "I'm not cold at all."
That's when the screaming starts, down the corridor to the left. The minimum security wing. Closest to the offices, and Renee's room.
Henry flinches. She holds his hand. "Stay with me, Henry."
He smiles at her mildly. "Hello, sweetheart. Who are you?"
*
The screaming stopped a long time ago, but Dice still hunches behind a flipped table, covering Susanna with his body. She keeps her hands pressed against the floor, beneath her, so she doesn't touch him accidentally. Next to her, wedged beside the wall, Natalie seems to contract like a shocked amoeba as she pulls herself in. Despite the cramped space, she manages not to let any portion of her body brush anyone else.
Ramachandran is across the room, behind the desk with two staffers. And Eddie—
Dice pokes his head up over the table edge. Eddie stands by the hinge side of the door, swinging his arms like a batter warming up outside the box. "Eddie," Dice hisses. "What the fuck are you doing?"
Eddie gives him a look, and a big fake grin. The same kind of bravado Dice remembers from when Eddie was seven and about to get himself in miserable trouble.
"Don't sweat it, big brother," Eddie says. "I got this."
And then, in the hall, singing.
Ragged, off-key. But cheery. Something from the seventies. Gordon Lightfoot, Dice realizes. "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
There are footsteps, too. And the sound of something metal tapped against the wall. This is not the voice of a cheery repairman. Dice realizes that somebody could see him through the window in the door and ducks down, way down. Flattening himself against Susanna.
Cramped though it is, he texts:
He's here.
Hits send, and puts the phone away as fast as possible. Wishes for a minute that he was still Catholic enough to pray.
Someone tries the door.
It's locked, so the handle rattles. Dice remembers the tapping metal, and doesn't expect that to hold whoever it is for long. He thinks about velociraptors in the kitchen, and stifles a hysterical giggle.
There's a thump. One, then another. Testing. Then a steady, rhythmic beat.