Shattered

spaced and too small to effectively conceal a man, especially a man as tall and broad-shouldered as the one whom he had seen crossing the courtyard earlier in the night.
        Doyle walked farther into the room and was halfway to the second door, only fifteen feet from it when he suddenly understood the full implications of the missing ax on the pegboard. He almost froze in place. Then, warned by some sixth sense, he crouched and turned with more speed and agility than he had ever shown in his life.
        Looming immediately behind him, nightmarishly large, the wild-eyed blond man raised both hands and swung the gardening ax.
        

    Thirteen
        
        Not once in his entire thirty years had Alex Doyle been in a fight - not a fist fight, wrestling match, or even a juvenile push-and-shove. He had never dealt out physical punishment to anyone, and neither had he taken any himself. Whether coward or genuinely committed pacifist or both, he had always managed to avoid controversial subjects in casual discussions, had avoided arguments and taking sides and forming relationships which might conceivably have led to violence. He was a civilized man. His few friends and acquaintances had always been as gentle as he was himself, and often even gentler. He was singularly unprepared to handle a raging maniac who was wielding a well-sharpened gardener's ax.
        However, instinct served where experience failed. Almost as if he had been combat-trained, Alex fell backward, away from the glittering blade, and rolled across the grease-stained cement floor until he came up hard against the two riding lawn mowers.
        His intellectual acceptance of the situation lagged far behind his automatic physical-emotional realization of the danger. He had heard the ax whistle past, inches from his head, and he knew what it would have done to him if it had found its mark… Yet, it was inconceivable that anyone could want to take his life, especially in such a sudden bloody fashion. He was Alex Doyle. The man without enemies. The man who had walked softly and carried no stick at all-the man who had often sacrificed his pride to save himself from just this sort of madness.
        The stranger moved fast.
        Dazed as he was, numb with surprise at the suddenness and extreme ferocity of the attack, Alex still saw the man coming.
        The stranger lifted the ax.
        “Don't!” Doyle said. He barely recognized his own voice. He had not lost all of his new-found courage. However, it was now tempered by a healthy fear which put it in the proper perspective.
        The five-inch razored blade swept up, reached the top of its arc in one smooth movement, almost a precision instrument in those strong hands. Sharp slivers of light danced brightly on the cutting edge. The blade hesitated up there, high and cold and fantastic-and then it fell.
        Alex rolled.
        The ax dropped in his wake. It made the moist air whistle once again, and it thudded into a solid rubber tire on one of the lawn mowers, splitting the deep tread.
        Doyle came to his feet, and once more powered by a mindless drive for self-preservation, vaulted over one of the workbenches, clearing the four-foot width with more ease then he would ever have thought possible. He stumbled, though, and nearly fell flat on his face when he came down on the other side.
        Behind him, the madman cursed: a curiously wordless, low grunt of anger and frustration.
        Doyle turned, fully expecting the ax to cleave either his head or the surface of the wooden bench behind him. He had, at last, come to terms with his predicament. He knew that he might die here.
        Across the room, the stranger hunched his ' r broad shoulders and put all his strength into them, wrenched the blade free of the solid, uninflated tire in which it had become wedged. He turned, his wet shoes scraping unpleasantly on the concrete floor, and he clutched the ax in both hands as if it were some sacred and all-powerful talisman which would ward off evil magic and protect the bearer from the work of malevolent sorcerers. There was something of the superstitious savage in this man, especially in and around those enormous dark-ringed eyes…
        Those same eyes now located Doyle. Incredibly, the stranger bobbed his head and smiled.
        Alex did not return the smile.
        He could not return it. He was almost physically ill with premonitions of death, and