The gun went off, disintegrating the Baggie, and the bullet screamed off the floor. Then the gun fell to the carpet, where it discharged again.
Stu was afraid he could count on only one more blow with the chair before Elder fully recovered himself. He determined to make it a good one. He brought it around in a high hard arc, a Henry Aaron home run swing. Elder tried to get his broken right arm up and couldn’t. The legs of the chair crashed into the hood of the white-suit. The plastic faceplate splintered in Elder’s eyes and nose. He screamed and fell backward.
He rolled onto all fours and scrambled for the gun lying on the carpet. Stu swung the chair one last time, bringing it down on the back of Elder’s head. Elder collapsed. Panting, Stu reached down and grabbed the gun. He stepped away, pointing it at the prone body, but Elder didn’t move.
For a moment a nightmarish thought tormented him: What if Elder’s orders had not been to kill him but to release him? But that made no sense, did it? If his orders had been to release him, why the talk about no whimpering and whining? Why would he have termed the orders “not so hot”?
No—Elder had been sent here to kill him.
Stu looked at the prone body, trembling all over. If Elder got up now, Stu thought he would probably miss him with all five bullets at point-blank range. But he didn’t think Elder was going to get up. Not now, not ever.
Suddenly the need to get out of there was so strong that he almost bolted blindly through the airlock door and into whatever lay beyond. He had been locked up for over a week, and all he wanted now was to breathe fresh air and then get far, far away from this terrible place.
But it had to be done carefully.
Stu walked to the airlock, stepped in, and pushed a button marked CYCLE. An air-pump went on, ran briefly, and the outer door opened. Beyond it was a small room furnished only with a desk. On it was a thin stack of medical charts… and his clothes. The ones he had been wearing on the airplane from Braintree to Atlanta. The cold finger of dread touched him again. Those things would have gone into the crematorium with him, no doubt. His charts, his clothes. So long, Stuart Redman. Stuart Redman would have become an unperson. In fact—
There was a slight noise behind him and Stu turned around fast. Elder was staggering toward him, crouched over, his hands swinging loosely. A jagged splinter of plastic was lodged in one oozing eye. Elder was smiling.
“Don’t move,” Stu said. He pointed the gun, steadying it with both hands—and still the barrel jittered.
Elder gave no sign that he had heard. He kept coming.
Wincing, Stu pulled the trigger. The pistol bucked in his hands and Elder stopped. The smile had turned into a grimace, as if he had been struck with a sudden gas pain. There was now a small hole in the breast of his white-suit. For a moment he stood, swaying, and then he crashed forward. For a moment Stu could only stare at him, frozen, and then he blundered into the room where his personal effects were piled on the desk.
He tried the door at the far end of the office, and it opened. Beyond the door was a hallway lit by muted fluorescents. Halfway down to the elevator bank, an abandoned gurney cart stood by what was probably the nurses’ station. He could hear faint groaning. Someone was coughing, a harsh, ratcheting sound that seemed to have no end.
He went back into the room, gathered his clothes up, and put them under one arm. Then he went out, closed the door behind him, and started down the hall. His hand was sweating against the grip of Elder’s gun. When he reached the gurney he looked behind him, unnerved by the silence and the emptiness. The cougher had stopped. Stu kept expecting to see Elder—creeping or crawling after him, intent on carrying out his final directive. He found himself longing for the closed and known dimensions of his room.
The groaning began again, louder this time. At the elevators another corridor ran at right angles to this one, and leaning against the wall was a man Stu recognized as one of his nurses. His face was swelled and blackened, his chest rising and falling in quick spurts. As Stu looked at him, he began to groan again. Behind him, curled in a fetal position, was a dead man. Farther down the hall there were another three bodies, one of them female. The male nurse—Vic, Stu remembered, his name is Vic—began to cough again.
“Jesus,” Vic said. “Jesus, what are you doing out? You’re not supposed to be out.”
“Elder came to take care of me and I took care of him instead,” Stu said. “I was lucky he was sick.”
“Sweet bleeding Jesus, you better believe you was lucky,” Vic said, and another coughing fit, this one weaker, tore loose from his chest. “That hurts, man, you wouldn’t believe how that hurts. What a fuckup this turned out to be. BleedingChrist .”
“Listen, can I do anything for you?” Stu asked awkwardly.
“If you’re serious, you can put that gun in my ear and pull the trigger. I’m ripping myself to pieces inside.” He began to cough again, and then to groan helplessly.
But Stu couldn’t do that, and as Vic’s hollow groans continued, Stu’s nerve broke. He ran for the elevators, away from the blackish face like the moon in partial eclipse, half expecting Vic to call after him in that strident and helplessly righteous voice that the sick always seem to use when they need something from the well. But Vic only went on groaning and that was somehow worse.
The elevator door had shut and the car was already moving downward when it occurred to Stu that it might be booby-trapped. That would be just their speed. Poison gas, maybe, or a cutout circuit that would disengage the cables and send the elevator careering down the shaft to crash at the bottom. He stepped into the middle of the car and looked around nervously for hidden vents or loopholes. Claustrophobia caressed him with a rubber hand and suddenly the elevator seemed no more than telephone-booth-size, then coffin-size. Premature burial, anyone?
He reached out a finger to push the STOP button, and then wondered what good that would do if he was between floors. Before he could answer the question, the elevator slid to a smooth, normal stop.
What if there are men with guns out there?
But the only sentinel when the door slid back was a dead woman in a nurse’s uniform. She was curled up in a fetal position by a door marked LADIES.
Stu stared at her so long that the door began to slide shut again. He put his arm out and the door bounced obediently back. He stepped out.
The hallway led down to a T-junction and he walked toward it, giving the dead nurse a wide berth.
There was a noise behind him and he whirled, bringing the gun up, but it was only the elevator door sliding shut for the second time. He looked at it for a moment, swallowed hard, then walked on. The rubber hand was back, playing tunes on the base of his spine, telling him to hell with this walk-don’t-run bit, let’s get out quick before someone… some thing … can get us. The echoes of his footfalls in this semidark corridor of the administration wing were too much like macabre company— Coming to play, Stuart? Very good . Doors with frosted glass panels marched past him, each with its own tale to tell: DR. SLOANE. RECORDS AND TRANSCRIPTS. MR. BALLINGER. MICROFILM. COPYFILE. MRS. WIGGS. Perhaps of the cabbage patch, Stu thought.
There was a drinking fountain at the T-junction, but the warm, chlorinated taste of the water made his stomach turn. There was no exit to his left; a sign on the tile wall with an orange arrow beneath read LIBRARY WING. The corridor seemed to stretch away for miles that way. Some fifty yards down was the body of a man in a white-suit, like some strange animal cast up on a sterile beach.
His control was getting bad. This place was much, much bigger than he had first assumed. Not that he’d had a right to assume much of anything from what he’d seen when he was admitted—which had been two halls, one elevator, and one room. Now he guessed it to be the size of a largish metropolitan hospital. He could stumble around in here for hours, his footfalls echoing and rebounding, coming across a corpse every now and then. They were strewn about like prizes in some ghastly treasure hunt. He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot. The words written on each arrow said: YOU ARE HERE. They put those up so people wouldn’t get lost. Like he was now.Lost . Oh baby, this was bad. This was so bad.
“Don’t go tharn now, you’re almost home free,” he said, and his words echoed back, flat and strange. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, and that made it worse.
He turned to the right, setting his back to the library wing, walked past more offices, came to another corridor, and turned down that. He began to look behind himself frequently, assuring himself that no one—Elder, maybe—was following him, but unable to believe it. The hallway ended in a closed door that said RADIOLOGY. A hand-lettered sign hung on the knob: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE RANDALL.
Stu went back and peered around the corner and back where he had come from. The dead body in the white-suit was tiny with distance now, hardly more than a speck, but seeing it there so changeless and eternal made him want to run away as fast as he could.
He turned right, setting his back to it again. Twenty yards farther up, the corridor branched into another T-junction. Stu turned right and went past more offices. The corridor ended at the microbiology lab. In one of the lab carrels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk. He was comatose, bleeding from the nose and mouth. His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.
And then Stu did begin to run, turning from one corridor to another, becoming more and more convinced that there was no way out, at least not from this level. The echo of his footfalls chased him, as if either Elder or Vic had lived just long enough to put a squad of ghostly MPs on his trail. Then another fancy crowded that out, one he somehow associated with the queer dreams he had been having the last few nights. The idea grew so strong that he became afraid to turn around, afraid that if he did he would see a white-suited figure striding after him, a white-suited figure with no face but only blackness behind a Plexiglas plate. Some dreadful apparition, a hit-man from beyond sane time and space.
Panting, Stu rounded a corner, sprinted ten feet before he realized the corridor was a dead end, and crashed into a door with a sign over it. The sign read EXIT.
He pushed at the bar, convinced it would not move, but it did, and the door opened easily. He went down four steps to another door. To the left of this landing, more stairs went down into thick darkness. The top half of this second door was clear glass reinforced with crisscrossed safety wire. Beyond it was only the night, the beautiful mellow summer night, and all the freedom a man ever dreamed of.
Stu was still staring out, transfixed, when the hand slipped out of the darkness of the stairwell and grasped his ankle. A gasp tore at Stu’s throat like a thorn. He looked around, his belly a freezing floe of ice, and beheld a bloody, grinning face upturned in the darkness.
“Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful,” it whispered in a cracked and dying voice. “It’ssoooodark—”
Stu screamed and tried to pull free. The grinning thing from the darkness held on, talking and grinning and chuckling. Blood or bile was trickling from the corners of its mouth. Stu kicked at the hand holding his ankle, then stomped it. The face hanging in the darkness of the stairwell disappeared. There was a series of thudding crashes… and then the screams began. Of pain or of rage, Stu could not tell. He didn’t care. He battered against the outside door with his shoulder. It banged open and he tottered out, whirling his arms to keep his balance. He lost it anyway and fell down on the cement path.
He sat up slowly, almost warily. Behind him, the screams had stopped. A cool evening breeze touched his face, dried the sweat on his brow. He saw with something very like wonder that there was grass, and flowerbeds. Night had never smelled as fragrantly sweet as this. A crescent moon rode the sky. Stu turned his face up to it thankfully, and then walked across the lawn toward the road which led to the town of Stovington below. The grass was dressed with dewfall. He could hear wind whispering in the pines.
“I’m alive,” Stu Redman said to the night. He began to cry. “I’m alive, thank God I’m alive, thank You, God, thank You, God, thank You—”
Tottering a little, he began to walk down the road.
Chapter 30
Dust blew straight across the Texas scrubland, and at twilight it created a translucent curtain that made the town of Arnette seem like a sepia ghost-image. Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco sign had blown down and lay in the middle of the road.