Broken Prey

the other side of the man. If he shot the man, the bullet could go right through him into her . . .
    “That’s what people mean when they say that somebody’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off . . . Anyway, this is what dead is . . . when somebody puts his finger on your eyeball, you don’t even blink. I am going to shoot you when I’m finished talking, and you’ll feel all your blood run out, and then to make sure you’re dead, I will . . . don’t move. Just sit there. Just listen, or I’ll pull the trigger . . .”
    Jenkins pulled slowly back, listening to the beat of the words, checked his gun, turned to the game warden, and put his finger to his lips. He stood upright, carefully slipped off his loafers, took a breath, then took a quick long silent step into the room, then part of another before the man began to turn . . .
    Jenkins fired a single shot down through the Chase’s skull, from a range of nine inches.
    The game warden lurched through the door. Jenkins looked down at the dead man and said, “Fuckin’ amateurs.”
    They both stepped over to the woman. She was a staffer and wore a black name tag that said Bea; she was alive, and she twitched away from him.
     
    LUCAS SAT IN the stairwell, waiting for Sloan and Shrake to make their move on Biggie. The shooting had trailed off—maybe they were running out of ammunition? Lucas tried to think of how many bodies he’d seen in the hallways. Six? Eight? Plus the three in the cage.
    His arm hurt; not the worst hurt he’d ever felt, but it was bad enough. He was okay as long as he didn’t move . . .
    The brenk brenk brenk of the alarms suddenly stopped, and the silence was so shocking that Lucas got to his feet . . . and could hear what seemed to be a general, hospitalwide wail, people hurting, people afraid. There was a thump from somewhere below, the sound of feet in the stairwell . . .
     
    LEO GRANT DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been on the floor, but it had been awhile, he thought. He knew he’d been shot but couldn’t pin down the precise circumstances. His head wasn’t working quite right . . .
    He tried to push himself up, but his hands slipped. He couldn’t see well, but he looked at one hand, then smelled it, and tasted it. Blood, he was covered with blood. He couldn’t see very well, there was something wrong with his right eye . . .
    He tried again to push himself up, holding on to a window ledge. A door was open next to it, a battery-powered emergency light glowing in the ceiling. He stepped into a cell, then turned and looked at himself in the window—the mirrored inside of the one-way glass. Gaped at himself.
    His right eye was gone. The side of his head was a mass of blood . . . he put a hand to it. The eye was gone, and a piece of his eye socket, the outer rim. All gone.
    Not much pain yet; a stinging, headache sensation, with little points of pain coming with each step. He started walking, not knowing exactly where he was, or what he was doing. Armageddon, he remembered that. He remembered going into the room with the pistols, and then . . .
    Had Chase shot him? He seemed to remember that. Chase had taken the gun and had shot him in the head.
    “Crazy motherfucker,” he said. He dabbed at his head with his jacket sleeve. Crazy . . . exactly crazy. Why hadn’t they thought of that? All the planning, why hadn’t they thought of the possibility that one of them might try to kill the others? . . . But that seemed so unfair.
    He was out of the cellblock now, down the hall, into the stairwell. He looked both ways: a half dozen safety lights provided hardly more illumination than the same number of candles would have.
    He could feel the anger rising: he was supposed to be in on this. He was supposed to have a gun. They were his fuckin’ guns. They were supposed to walk down the hallways, shoulder to shoulder, taking who they wanted, letting other people live, people who begged good enough. Or maybe kill them even if they begged good enough, because it’d be fun to shoot the ass kissers.
    Now he didn’t even have a gun . . .
    He walked past the elevators to the stairway, opened the door, and started up the stairs, hands clenched to his face, trying to hold his head together.
     
    BIGGIE CALLED , “I got four of them in here. Gonna kill them one at a time. You ready? You want to count for me?”
    Sloan said to Shrake, “I’m going.”
    “He’ll be ready for