Only the Hunted Run

by Neely Tucker

  “It being hard to see up in here,” Sly said, “maybe you and me ought to stick closer.”

  Sully pushed himself up and made out two bodies on the floor, both wearing the white patient uniforms, both shot in the head. “You did this?”

  “It got bottled up downstairs,” Sly said, looking down at the bodies. “I yelled at you to come on and thought you was right behind me. I get up here, something blows, and these dudes,” he nudged the body of the nearest with a toe, “come running out the door. The lead two, them right here, they come at me full tilt. So I took what you call executive action.”

  The fire was on the floor now, down the hall, licking at the ceiling. Panels that hadn’t been blown out were now smoldering, then puffing into flame.

  Sly, taking it all in, calculating. “You don’t think that motherfucker locked us all in.”

  “Actually,” Sully said, “I’m giving eight to five he did.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE BACK STAIRWELL had no emergency lights. When Sully opened the door, the blackness gawped at them, swirling with dust and smoke trails.

  “We gonna choke, we go down there,” Sly said, stepping back. “We get down there, the basement? And that door is locked? We fucked.”

  Sully looked into the blackness. “Prop this door open. Here. With that thing, whatever it is. That’s going to let some air out, give us something to shoot for if we have to come back up on the hot foot. It’s seven or eight steps to a landing, two landings to a floor. So two right turns equals one floor, am I right?”

  “So?”

  “We need four floors to get to the basement, so that’s eight right turns. The doors are all straight out from the stairwell. Eight right turns, plow straight ahead, we’ll hit the door.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’re in the basement.”

  “This goddamn building start collapsing though—”

  “Like your options here, do you? Try to shoot out shatterproof glass and jump fifty feet? Put your shirttail over your nose. It ain’t going to take us fifteen seconds to be at the basement door.”

  They ducked into the stairwell, a deep breath into blackness. Sully led, reaching out to find the railing and then, with that in hand, rushed down the steps, spinning at each landing, and then down, down again. The smoke was thickening. His eyes were burning. He took a slight breath and the air burned his mouth and throat. He retched. And then he was at the bottom level and he walked forward hurriedly like a blind man, one arm extended, until it hit the basement door. His hand found the bar to open it and he leaned a shoulder into it, shoving hard and, sweet baby Jesus, it opened onto a wide hallway of concrete-block walls and a low ceiling.

  It was, by comparison to the upper floors, quiet, save for the sound of a steady, hissing rain. It came down on his head. The sprinklers. Here, way down here, the sprinklers had kicked in. Emergency lights, too, the floor in a dull, sickly glow. It was a long, wide hallway, opening onto several rooms. Down the hall, at the entrance to one room, lay two bodies, one of them bearing the white jumpsuit of a patient, the other a business suit, almost on top of each other. With Sly above him, gun raised, Sully turned the bodies over.

  Head shots, the both of them, entrance wounds in the forehead. The second corpse was that of Wesley Johnston, the AUSA. “Holy shit,” Sully whispered. “Wes.”

  “Walked right up on them,” Sly said. “They didn’t see him coming. Or didn’t expect no shit from him. The Indian have a gun?”

  Sully, eyes fixed on Johnston for a moment—the top half of the man’s head was just gone, splattering along the walkway and walls behind him—tried to picture how it had gone down.

  “He’s not an Indian. He didn’t have a gun upstairs, but he’s been in the building before. All this, it’s been a setup. So he hid a piece. Wes, here? He was either trying to get out, or to get George.” He looked up. “Our boy is down here or he just left.”

  Sly nodded. Sully stood. They moved forward slowly, Sly in front, Sully two steps behind. Fifty feet down, they came to a swinging double door with a porthole window set in each. Stealing a glance through the left window, the room inside looked familiar, but not something Sully could immediately place. He hissed at Sly, who flanked the other door.

  Sully eased his door open a few inches. By the pale dim emergency lights overhead he could make out not a storage room or exit ramp but what at first appeared to be an operating theater. It was empty. They both went in. The small row of elevated seats and the operating table, stainless steel with a hole in the middle. The table could be tilted, up or down. It dawned on him.

  “The autopsy room,” he said to Sly. “Where the good doctor Freeman used to string them up on meat hooks.”

  “What?” Sly said, but only half listening. He moved ahead, halfway across the room, stopping. “You see this shit?”

  Sully came forward, moving off to Sly’s right in the half darkness. “See what shit? I mean, it’s just—”

  He stopped, both in forward movement and advancing thought.

  The body of Eduardo Lantigua was on the far side of a gurney, one arm caught in a strap. A steel ice pick had been driven through his right eye and protruded, sticking up a good six inches. As Sully stared, transfixed, horrified, Lantigua’s mouth opened in a soundless gawp. The waist of his suit was dark, the table under him wet. The fingers slowed, scratched at the underside of the stainless steel table, finding no purchase. His remaining eye wandered, untethered from reality.

  The mouth opened wider.

  Sly raised his right hand and fired, one, two, three times, into the man’s chest, blowing holes in flesh and vital organs, the sound echoing in the tile chamber like a series of detonations.

  “The f—”

  “No way,” Sly said, looking at the corpse, “I’m listening to anything that comes out of that mouth.”

  Sully hissed at him. “George is down here,” he said, “and you, you shooting, you’re telling him right where we standing.”

  A cold, taut shiver worked its way up his spine, the first tingling of panic. There had to be an exit. Had to. But George Harper was somewhere between them and it—if he wasn’t already gone, locking them in behind him.

  This part of the building, it had to open onto a drive of some sort, an alley. St. E’s was a century old. Canan Hall, it was built on the sloping, western grounds. This basement—its very architecture argued for there being a delivery entrance.

  “The bodies,” he said aloud, finally. “The autopsies. They wouldn’t have brought the bodies up through the building. There has to be an exit off this room. Gotta be there.” Gesturing forward to the far set of double swinging doors.

  Sly nodded. He moved to the rear set of doors, paused to look through one of the porthole windows, and slipped through.

  Sully stayed by the base of the gurney, waiting. In spite of himself, he looked down at what had become of Lantigua. Forty-five minutes earlier, the man had been in charge of this particular universe. Now, look.

  He heard the door swing open. He looked up to see Sly slip back into the room from the same set of double doors he’d just left.

  But something was wrong. Sly’s features had gone wrong. Something was off. His nose appeared here and his eyes there and there was a sheen—

  The mist, the sprinklers

  —and Sly Hastings, the killer of so many men in so many places, kept walking and walking toward him and the gun wait what was coming up no Sly was looking at Sully with eyes lit from within but not making eye contact and—

  “Sly? You find the ex—”

  —the gun was leveling, the barrel the barrel deep and dark and unending—

  Nononono not not not

  —and the last thought to fly through Sully Carter’s mind before Sly Hastings fired three rounds from twenty feet away was that this is how his mother had died. Her killer
looking into her eyes. The bullets slamming into her face, her forehead, scissors flying, knocked out of one of her shoes, crumpling dead onto the pathetic linoleum floor of her pathetic beauty salon in their pathetic town. None of it meant anything and never had.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  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 an
d 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.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “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.