The Elephant of Surprise

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I leaned out with the gun and took a shot at him, but he was already moving, went over the side of the lower roof like Spider-Man.

  “Where the hell did he go?” Leonard said.

  “The ledge below, if he didn’t miss his footing.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  We pulled back into the room. I pushed the handgun into my windbreaker pocket, said, “Leonard, we’ll put her in the wheelchair.”

  Leonard went to pick her up while I pulled the chair away from the wall and unfolded it. Leonard brought her over and gently placed her in the chair, giving me a glimpse of her naked ass, the color of the moon on a clear summer night. He arranged the IV bag so that it hung on the back of the wheelchair. I wasn’t even sure if what was in it was getting into her.

  I grabbed a blanket off the bed and threw that over her to give her some warmth and some dignity.

  I sidled over to the door, pulled out the pistol, and peeked through the small glass square. Lot of darkness in the hallway. The little guy didn’t stick his eye against mine. The big man didn’t blow my head off with a shotgun.

  I unlatched the door and opened it, stepped gingerly into the hall, listening to my heart pound.

  Leonard pushed the wheelchair into the hall. The wheels squeaked a little.

  “Maybe if we use the elevator, that’ll fool them,” I said. “They might not expect that.”

  “Why wouldn’t they? They might also expect the stairs. Only thing they wouldn’t expect is someone to drive a tank through the wall and evacuate us.”

  “We’re on the third floor.”

  “We’ll have to use the elephant of surprise. I’ll punch the elevator down, but we’ll take the stairs. You lead with the gun. I’ll lift the chair and carry her down. She’s light as a feather.”

  Leonard went to the elevator, pushed the button. By then I was turning down the stairs, the gun pointed in front of me.

  10

  With my heart still beating like a drum, I moved carefully. I had gone down one flight and was on the second-floor landing when the auxiliary lights went out.

  I assumed someone had gotten to the backup generators, reasoning that if it was dark, we might not find our way so easy, but whoever it was hadn’t considered my trusty cell phone. I took it out of my pocket and—

  The battery was dead.

  Shit. I put the phone in my pocket.

  I put my hand on the railing and eased along until I had nearly made the bottom of the stairs. If it was like I thought, one of them would be waiting at each stairwell. The elevator was near one set of stairs, so whoever was there would have that covered. No matter which way we came down, they had us trapped.

  I thought for a moment, then started up the stairs again. I met Leonard carrying the wheelchair with the girl in it.

  “Turn around,” I said.

  We went back up, me helping Leonard lift the chair. On the second-floor landing I told him what I thought.

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s how I’d do it if I was them.”

  “But you’d think to bring snacks.”

  “Of course.”

  The girl hadn’t moved. She could have been on Mars or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon for all she knew.

  “I got an idea,” I said. “Stay here.”

  There was a large trash can at the far end of the hall. I padded down there and picked it up. It was a little heavy, but right then, scared as I was, I had adrenaline strength. When I got to Leonard, I let the can rest on a stair step.

  “Look here,” I said. “Follow close with her, and when it starts, you push her like you’re jet-propelled.”

  “All right,” he said. “But what’s the plan after that?”

  “Push her toward the front door, but wheel around the desk and head for the side door to the parking lot.”

  “That’s not much of a plan. Front door’s closer.”

  “It works electronically. My guess, that generator went dead, so did the door. It’s locked up for the night. Go out the back emergency exit, it’s just a push-bar door. And hey, maybe they won’t expect it.”

  “And maybe they got people waiting out there.”

  “Maybe they don’t.”

  “Maybe shit don’t stink if the wind blows just right,” Leonard said. “That plan sucks.”

  “It’s what we got.”

  “What say we push her into a closet and try to take out these guys by ourselves, without her being in the line of fire?”

  “A closet?”

  “She won’t fit in my pocket.”

  “I don’t know, man. We get killed, then she’s in a closet somewhere. They could kill us and still find her. If we don’t have her, they know she’s somewhere in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Leonard said. “Okay. This plan of yours is going to be back to our usual elephant of surprise, I suppose?”

  “I don’t know how large an elephant it’s going to be, but if you mean half-assed but energetic, then yeah. But I got a little something in mind.”

  “In case things go south, nice knowing you, bro.”

  11

  I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my trash can, leaning slightly against the wall. I could see through the gap leading off the stairs and into the main hallway. The lady who had been behind the desk was now on the floor near the front door. Blood was flowing out from under her head. Probably shot her so she couldn’t get away and bring help. Poor lady.

  That meant at least one of them was downstairs again, as we’d suspected.

  I somehow lifted the heavy can above my head without it crushing me flat like an accordion and tossed it as hard and as far as I could. It hit the floor and bounced. A shotgun roared and the can jumped and the lid snapped free and trash popped out.

  With the gun drawn, I stepped into the hall, turning in the direction from which the shot had come, thinking, Little Guy, don’t be behind me, and I fired at Big Guy, who I could see standing, the shotgun lowered now, a look that might possibly pass for surprise on his face.

  My shot hit him in the chest and knocked him down. Behind me I heard Leonard, who had been creeping down the stairs with the girl in the chair, rolling the wheelchair out of the stairwell and into the lobby. The wheels squeaked as he went. He swerved around the lady on the floor and charged past the desk toward the hallway and the rear exit.

  I kept the gun on Big Guy. I went over and grabbed the shotgun he had dropped, saw him twitch a little, open his eyes, start to get up. I realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest. As he moved, the now-flattened slug I had fired rolled off his chest.

  I should have shot him again. But I had his gun and we’d gotten the girl, so I figured we were ahead for the moment. No reason to kill someone if I didn’t have to. Instead, as he put his hands and knees under him, I kicked him under the chin. It was like kicking a concrete block, but he went down again, rolled over on his back, twitched like a dying carp, then quit.

  I put the pistol into my coat pocket, backed away from him holding the shotgun. I glanced at Leonard, saw him galloping toward the side door, pushing that chair.

  I ran after them. Leonard wheeled the girl around and hit the door with his back; the door popped open, and out he went. I was exiting after them, pushing the door as it started to close, when a big blast of power hit it. A bullet. It had whizzed over my shoulder and torn a hole in the door about the size of a cabbage.

  I ducked and wheeled back the way I had come. It was Big Guy, up and ready with a revolver about the size of a howitzer in his hand. I should have killed him when I’d had the chance. Leonard would have.

  I cut down on him with the shotgun, but he was way down the hall and already moving to the side and behind the reception desk. Damn, he was swift for someone so big. I heard my shot rattle against the elevator.

  I backed against the press bar of the door and went out into the parking lot, the chill wind howling and limbs and debris flying around me. I felt like I was in Dorothy’
s tornado.

  Leonard was at the car, practically bouncing up and down on his toes. I knew why. I had the key in my pocket, if “key” is the right term for it; you have to indulge us older folks with all this new electronic equipment.

  I reached them and touched the door and it automatically opened, needing only for me to have the key in my pocket. We got the back door open and got the girl slid into the seat. Leonard hung the IV bag on the laundry hook above her door. Outside, he popped the hatch up, folded the wheelchair, and put it inside. Part of it stuck over the backseat. That was all right. The girl didn’t have to worry about headroom. She was asleep on the seat, blissfully unaware of all that was going on around her. You couldn’t have stirred her with a brass band and a pack of howler monkeys.

  While this went on, I was facing the emergency door with the shotgun. It was a good piece between us and it, but not as far as the hallway shot had been.

  No one came out.

  I eased around to the driver’s side as Leonard slipped into the front passenger seat. When I got in, I gave him the shotgun, then I started the car and rolled down our windows so we could use our weapons if we had to. The cold and the rain blew into the car, but right at that moment, I found it refreshing. I was all het up.

  I took the handgun out of my windbreaker pocket and put it on the seat between my legs. Leonard poked the shotgun out the window, said, “Show a head, you sons of bitches.”

  I pulled out of the lot, and when I reached the street, I had only one way to turn. To our right was a tree that was old and thick when Davy Crockett passed through this area on his way to his fate at the Alamo. It had been uprooted by the storm and fallen across the road, blocking an exit that way.

  I turned left and started down the street through a whirlwind of leaves and limbs, dirt and rain.

  I felt relieved for about ten seconds.

  In the rearview I saw a car come sailing out of the lot and turn after us. It was a big white Lincoln. I didn’t think it was a coincidence someone else from the hospital had decided to leave and come in our direction at a high rate of speed.

  “Haven’t these assholes got something better to do?” Leonard said.

  “Apparently not,” I said.

  Then I saw the street ahead of us was blocked. Two cars had smashed together at some point, and the drivers had abandoned their vehicles.

  I said, “Hold on to your ass,” jerked the wheel right, and hit the curb. The Prius bumped over it with all the grace of a tricycle going over a railroad tie.

  Into the yard we went. The tires spun in the grass, dipped into the soft earth, and for a minute, I thought we were screwed and double screwed.

  Then the tires caught and the Prius moved. We bumped over some rough spots, hit a driveway, and then I turned back into the street, just beyond the cars that had blocked the road.

  Now we had something of a clean run, at least as far as I could see in the headlights. Leonard turned in the seat and looked behind us and laughed.

  “What could be funny?”

  “They’re stuck in the yard,” he said. “That’s what’s funny.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That is amusing.”

  Our bad luck held. We got to the end of the street and another large tree had fallen across it.

  Simultaneously we both said, I think appropriately, “Damn.”

  “Go through the yard,” Leonard said.

  I looked at the yards on both sides of it. Only one side was possible, the one where the tree ended almost at the front door of the house.

  “Here we go,” I said, and bounced over the curb and drove with hope. As I passed between the tree and the front-door steps, the car scraped limbs on my side with a nauseating grate, and on Leonard’s side I heard one of the tires against the concrete steps; it made a sound like an electric can opener for a moment, then we were on the wider part of the yard and around the tree. I kept going, across the yard and off the curb and into the street, past the middle school, the yard of which was festooned with all manner of limbs and papers and even a tumbled-over car.

  Damn, what a storm.

  Back on the main street, I gave the car the gas, turned left when another pile of broken limbs and unidentifiable debris kept us from going forward. On down the narrow street I went. We sailed over a bridge with water running over it, and the water caught us and moved us to the right. The door on Leonard’s side screamed as the concrete bridge gave it a body job, and then we were over the bridge and on the road, where there was less water.

  To our right, a water park was now surely a water park. Floodwater had filled the pools and the whole place was a lake with metal tubing and metal platforms rising out of it. It reminded me of the skeletal ruins of a long-dead dinosaur.

  Straight ahead was all we had as a way of escape. We drove by my dentist’s office on the left, but I didn’t honk, and continued with only the headlights to show us the way.

  On we went, toward the loop, but when we got there, a left turn was out of the question. Cars were stacked there like tumbled dominoes. It looked as if they had been washed down from the parking lots of a housing division just above the loop. On the right, there were limbs and unidentifiable wads of debris. All routes were blocked except for a squeeze-through path on the right side of the road, around a turned-over tractor-trailer. It had most likely been trying to make the corner too fast in too much water.

  We took that route, brushing up against the tractor-trailer, scraping some more paint off the left side of the car with a noise like fingernails on a chalkboard, and then we were around it.

  I let out a satisfied sigh. Looked like smooth sailing for quite a way. Then the tire that had scraped concrete earlier blew out.

  12

  The car spun on the wet concrete and I tried to correct it with a gentle nudging of the brakes and a slight turn into the skid as Leonard said, “About par.”

  When I finally got the car to stop spinning, we were facing in the wrong direction, toward the overturned tractor-trailer. I popped the hatch, and me and Leonard got out, and set the wheelchair out and pulled up the back flooring to get to the spare and the jack. The tire was a temporary tire, because the car manufacturer was too special to put a real tire back there. It was small and thin, like a life preserver for a three-year-old. The jack was one of those kinds I hate. I missed the old sort where you just stuck it under a spot on the car, put on the emergency brake, jacked the car up, and changed the tire. Now you had to put a rod in a hole under the car and crank it. It was a little like a mastiff trying to get his dick into a Chihuahua. It took patience, something I was short on at that moment.

  Leonard said, “I hate everybody and everything.”

  I eventually got it in position with a lot of cussing and encouragement from Leonard. I offered to let him do it, but he declined, twice. He seemed to think he was better in a coaching capacity.

  The rain beat on us like galley-slave whips, but we got the tire off and changed, threw the jack, such as it was, into the back of the car, rolled the tire into the street, put the wheelchair in, and closed the hatch. Then we saw car lights sliding out onto the highway, moving toward the overturned tractor-trailer.

  Through a gap in cab and trailer, we could see the white Lincoln. They had gotten out of the rut and past all the crap, and since there was only one way to go, they knew that’s the way we had to have gone.

  We jumped into the Prius, and I turned it around and drove hard as the car would go, that little tire making the car feel like it was limping on a short leg. I reached the end of the road. Billboards had been knocked down and laid into the street along with their metal racking, so I took a left, which was not a choice but the only path, as to the right there was a giant sycamore lying across the highway.

  If something else fell into our path, we were pretty much boned.

  We knew it wouldn’t take the Lincoln long, with a little scraping, to get around the tractor-trailer, but it might take them a bit longer than it took us. The
Prius was small and maneuverable, the Lincoln less so, but when it came to motor power, we were riding a bicycle and they were riding a jet.

  As expected, in minutes, we saw the Lincoln’s lights pop up behind us. They were far back, but soon they would close. We had the shotgun and the pistol I took from Big Guy, and there was the gun I had placed in the glove box, but I had a feeling they had a lot of heavy armament, and I had no idea how many were in the car. Was it just Big Guy and that creepy little fuck, or were there more? The Lincoln had room for quite a gathering.

  “Hey, are there train tracks up here?” Leonard asked.

  I knew there weren’t but immediately understood why he had said that. I could hear what sounded like a train. I rolled the window down, heard that pathetic tire bumping uncomfortably over the road, and then I saw the trees to our left part, and out of that came a howling black wind and a wet whistle of rain—a twister, nature’s freight train.

  13

  When I came to, the car was upside down.

  In the rush not to have our heads blown off by our friends at the hospital, none of us had put on seat belts. I lay on the ceiling of the car with the girl lying over my chest. The IV had come out and something wet from the IV bag had run over me and made me feel sticky and cold. Leonard lay with his legs across mine. He wasn’t moving.

  It was light outside, but it was a muted light, and there was still rain, but not like before, and the wind was no longer howling. The tornado train had come and gone.

  I gently got out from under the girl, trying not to put my hands on her naked ass—she was pretty exposed in that hospital gown—and then I eased over to Leonard.

  “Goddamn,” he said as I touched him.

  “You hurting anywhere?”

  “Question ought to be, where am I not hurting? But I think I’m okay. You?”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  “The girl?”