Shattered

he wished that he had never left the room.
        He was still too far away from the doors to make a run for either of them. Before he could have crossed the open floor and gained the threshold, he would almost certainly have felt the ax blade bite down between his shoulder blades…
        Rain dripping from his clothes, the stranger moved in on Doyle, quiet and swift for such a large man. The noises which he had made outside, on the steps and promenades, could not have been accidental. He had been luring Alex along those shadowy corridors, drawing him to a place where he might be trapped.
        A place like this.
        Now only the wooden bench separated them.
        “Who are you?” Doyle asked.
        The stranger was no longer smiling when he stopped on the other side of the waisthigh bench. In fact, he was frowning intensely, even wincing, as if he were being cruelly pinched or jabbed with pins. What was it, what was on his mind? More than murder, now? He was annoyed considerably by something ; that much was obvious. His mouth was set in a tight, straight, grim line, and he appeared to be struggling desperately to choke back a reaction to an inner pain.
        “What do you want from us?” Doyle asked.
        The man only glared at him.
        “We've never hurt you.”
        No answer.
        “You don't even know us, do you?”
        Even though his voice was weak, an involuntary whisper, and even though the terror that it betrayed might have goaded the madman into even bolder action, Doyle had to ask the questions. All of his life he had been able to settle other people's anger with sympathetic words, and now it became essential that he elicit some response - at least contrition - from this man. “What have you to gain by hurting me?”
        The madman swung the ax horizontally this time, from right to left, trying to chop Doyle's torso from his legs.
        It was close. His long arms had sufficient reach and strength to make the trick work, even with the bench between them. But Doyle saw it coming just in time to avoid it. He scrambled backward, out of the murderous arc.
        Then he tripped over a large metal toolbox which he had not noticed. He windmilled his arms in a hopeless attempt to recover, lost his balance altogether. The room tilted around him. In that instant Doyle knew that he probably did not have a chance of getting out of this place alive. He was not going to return to Room 318, where Colin waited for him, was never going to finish the drive to San Francisco or see the new furniture in the new house or begin his wonderful new job with the agency or make love to Courtney again. Never. Falling, he saw the tall blond man start around the end of the workbench.
        He did not stay down on the floor any measurable length of time, not even a second. The moment he hit, he pushed to his feet and staggered backward, trying to keep out of the madman's reach for at least one more precious minute.
        In three short steps, however, he backed straight into the pegboard wall where the tools were hung.
        Even as Doyle realized that he had nowhere left to run, the stranger stepped in front of him and swung the ax from right to left.
        Doyle crouched.
        The blade skimmed the pegboard above his head.
        Rising even as he heard the ax whine by him, Doyle grabbed a heavy claw hammer which dangled from a hook on the wall. He had it in his hand when he was knocked sideways and down by a blow from the ax.
        The hammer clattered across the floor.
        But losing the hammer, Doyle thought, was the least of his troubles. The oppressive, pulsing pain in his side and chest made him all but helpless. Had he been cut up? Torn open? The pain… pain was terrible, the worst he had ever endured. But please, God, no… Please, please, not this. Not death. Not all the blood and having to lie in all the blood while the ax rose and fell and methodically dismembered him. Not death, dammit. Anything else. All he could see on the other side of death was nothingness, perpetual blackness; and the vision was so complete and vivid and horrifying that he never even recognized the incongruity and futility of praying to a God in whose existence he did not believe. Just: God, God, please… Not this. Anything but this. Please…
        All of this flashed through his mind in a fraction of a second, before he realized that he had not been caught by the ax