Broken Prey

you, shooting at the doorway,” Shrake said.
    “I don’t give a fuck, I’m going. Too many bodies,” Sloan said.
    “Tell me when,” Shrake said.
    “Now.”
    They went at once, and just before they got to the door, Shrake vaulted ahead, crossing the opening in an instant; there was a reaction flash and a bullet pounded itself into the wall opposite.
    Sloan peeked, saw Biggie across the room, alone. There were no hostages, just the two bodies in the outer room. Biggie now with his hands up, gun on the floor, smile on his face.
    “No, no, no, no!” Biggie shouted. “I’m all out. I give up.”
    Sloan did another peek. Biggie stood there with his hands above his head. “Sloan? That you?”
    Sloan turned the corner. “Yeah.”
    “I quit.”
    “Yeah, right, Biggie,” Sloan said, and he shot Biggie Lighter twice in the heart. One of the slugs went cleanly through, shattered on the wall, and fragments of it ricocheted around the room. A piece of hot metal like the ripped-off rim of a dime hit Sloan in the lip and hung there, protruding from the skin. Sloan peeled it off and flicked it away, tasting the blood in his mouth.
    Shrake nodded. “Good shooting.”
     
    LUCAS HEARD THE BOOM of the gun, turned his head that way. Then he caught the movement coming up the stairwell, turned back, and saw a man coming toward him. The man’s head was a mass of blood, and he seemed to be trying to stanch the bleeding with his hands.
    Lucas said, “Just sit down, the doctors are . . .” and the man jumped at him, screaming, grabbing Lucas by the broken arm, and Lucas screamed back, swung awkwardly with his .45, and then they both went down the concrete stairs, rolling over and over each other.
    Grant, or Roy Rogers, or whatever the fuck his name was. His face was shattered, but Lucas recognized the good half. Grant was soaked in blood, holding to Lucas’s broken arm with one hand, swinging with the other, screaming incoherently. Lucas hit the stairs upside down, tumbled, Grant falling over him; he squeezed the trigger of the .45 involuntarily, and the flash lit the stairwell and the surprise and the pain from the broken arm and the recoil pulled the gun out of his hand and he heard it clattering down the stairs.
    Grant was underneath him now and they turned again and Grant was on top, scrambling, and Lucas pulled him down and they rolled across the landing and Grant smashed Lucas in the nose; blood flooded into Lucas’s mouth and he sputtered, came up close to Grant’s face, sprayed blood into Grant’s good eye, and they were turning again.
    Grant was above him, then, and Lucas saw that he was going for something, the gun, probably, and Lucas managed to tangle up Grant’s knees and Grant went down again and Lucas rolled up on top of him. Got his good arm around Grant’s neck, got his legs around Grant’s body, locked them at the ankles so that he had Grant in a scissors hold.
    Grant tried to pull away along the long axis of their bodies, trying to knee or kick Lucas, and they turned again, upside down on the stairs, and he heard the gun clank, thought, “He’s got it,” and heaved upward as his body weight pushed Grant down.
    The gun went off, a flash and a boom, then Lucas got his feet braced against a step, groaned and lifted Grant’s head up, gave a final desperate jerk . . .
    Grant’s neck snapped like a tree branch.
    He went limp, and Lucas fell on top of him.
    Around them, he thought, was nothing but pain and silence: but he was wrong about the silence. In a second or two, when he’d caught his breath and had gotten upright again, he began to hear the screaming, and realized it was coming from everywhere.

27
    THE HOSPITAL WAS A SHAMBLES.
    A half dozen fires and two dozen fights added to the chaos of the shootings. When the smoke got dense in one wing of the security section, maintenance men used a forklift to break through a locked door to the outside, and frightened, angry, and medicated patients scattered over half a square mile of woods and farmland.
    The Big Three, with Grant, killed six people and seriously wounded eight more. The final death toll, including the four killers, was ten.
    Of the three people in the cage, one, a woman, had survived because Beloit had gotten to her quickly enough to keep her from drowning in her own blood. The bullet had gone through her cheekbone, her palate, and out through a jawbone, taking along a couple of upper teeth.
    The shooting was ending when the