Broken Prey

lines, the wires sparking, bits of lead and insulation flicking back into his face.
    With the third shot, the power went out, and all the lights that he could see. A few seconds later, emergency lights came up automatically, along with an alarm that sounded like an elevator door was stuck: brenk, brenk, brenk . . .
    Good enough. He left the cage, ran through the open door into the interior of the hospital.
    Behind him, a woman shouted, “ Leo, Leo . . . ”
    People were coming out of locked rooms, most standing wonderingly in the doorways. He saw two staff members running toward a refuge room, and he continued running himself, past the elevators, into a down-stairway. Down two flights into the security wing.
    The Gods should be out of their cells, waiting.
    Armageddon . . .
     
    LUCAS SHOUTED TO NORDWALL , “Grant’s at the hospital—he’s killing people. Get the guys, get my guys up there, get them to the hospital. Get everybody you can up there . . .”
    He turned and ran for the truck, jumped in, did a tight circle, and roared toward the street. He was on the north outskirts of town; the hospital was probably seven or eight miles away. Since he’d be slowed going out to the highway and off the highway up the hill to the hospital, just about that many minutes away. Eight minutes: a hundred people could be dead in that time . . .
    Past kids on the sidewalk, nearly T-boning a red Taurus, losing it on a turn, over a sidewalk, onto a lawn, off the lawn back onto the street, down a hill to the highway, right, flooring it, the truck screaming in grief, his cell phone ringing, ringing. He ignored it through the set of curves, shifted into the vacant oncoming lane, and blew past a Harley with a bearded old man on it. He picked up the phone on a straightaway. Sloan: “You know what’s going on?”
    “No, but it’s bad. Cale called, he was freaked. Grant’s inside shooting, there are at least three down, I’m coming up on it, I gotta go . . .”
    “We’re two minutes behind you . . .”
    Off the highway, up the hill, down the approach road, burning past the entry building, fumbling in the seat console for extra .45 clips. There were two of them, and he put them in his jacket pocket. He topped the last rise to the main parking lot, cut past a man on a four-bottom lawnmower, serenely chopping grass, and found a sheriff’s car and an official-looking SUV parked facing the steps to the main entrance, their doors open.
    Lucas jammed the Lexus in beside them and jumped out, ran up the steps, his eyes catching an insignia on the SUV, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. A game warden . . . and then he was through the front doors and down a dark hallway to the cage.
    Cale was there, with a deputy, a game warden, two armed guards, and two orderlies who were opening the outer doors with a manual crank. A half dozen administrative types stood back, clustered, silent. Lucas saw Beloit on her knees in the cage, behind the bars, with another orderly, working over a body—she must have been caught inside. Cale, face white, eyes crazy, shouted, “We’ve heard shooting . . . all we’ve got is emergency power, the fire alarms are going off . . .”
    “You got staffers in there?” Lucas asked.
    “There are a couple dozen of them, we know there are twelve or fourteen in refuge rooms, there are some more, I don’t know how many, locked in patient rooms, we’ve more coming in, they’re calling on cell phones, all we got is cell phones, we got people shot, Davenport, we got people shot . . .”
    The outer door was opening, an inch, two inches. Lucas pulled his .45, popped the clip, checked it, jacked a shell into the chamber, and asked, “Does anybody know where Grant went?”
    One of the administrative types, a woman in a powder blue jacket, said, “He went to the stairs way down on the end. I think he was going down to the security cells. That’s what I think.”
    Lucas said to the deputy and the game warden, “Get all the guys with guns and put them in the stairwells. The elevators won’t be working. I don’t know whether they’re trying to get out or on some kind of suicide run, but we can’t let them run us around. We have to move in on them and finish them in a hurry.” The two men nodded, and the game warden pulled his pistol and checked it. As he did, they heard two muffled explosions and turned that way.
    “Big gun,” the warden said. His voice was cool.
    Lucas