Sudden Prey

his right hand and his radio in the left, ran toward the door with white foam dripping down his chin and said into the radio, “Lucas? Lucas?”
    Lucas came right back. “Yeah?”
    Del was in the hall, running toward his wife’s room. “Something’s happening here, there’s some kind of alarm.”
    “Be there in one minute,” Lucas said. “I’m right straight down on Washington.”
    “Get some more guys coming . . .”
     
     
     
    FRANKLIN WAS ASLEEP when the alarm went off, but it shook him awake and he pushed himself up, reached for the bedside table and pulled his pistol out. He could hear people in the hallways, the night nurses, he thought. But the alarm made too much sense to him. They were coming, he thought, just like Davenport said they might, and there weren’t any cops between himself and the door. He’d have to do it alone . . .
    And then Del yelled, “Franklin, I’m in Cheryl’s room, you awake?”
    And he yelled back, “Yeah, I’m up now.”
    “Can you get to the door?”
    “Yeah.”
    Franklin pulled the IV from his arm and more or less fell off the bed onto his good side, winced at the impact, and low-crawled to the doorway. Two nurses were standing in the hall, looking up and down it, and he shouted at them: “Get out of sight. Get out of sight.”
    They saw the gun in his hand, froze for a second, then scurried into a doorway. Del peeked from the doorway across the hall two doors down. “Maybe it’s not . . .” he shouted.
    But as he said it, LaChaise peeked from his end of the hall. His face was clean-shaven but unmistakable, as was the hard black form of his rifle. Del snapped a shot, missing, and Franklin jerked one off and thought it’d probably gone into the ceiling. Then LaChaise was out of sight for a second, and the next second, the muzzle of the rifle came around the corner and began chattering down the hall, a ferocious up-close pounding followed by a hail of plaster from the walls, the bits and pieces of .223 slugs zipping past like bees, the sound of shattering glass, and then the quick hollow boom of Del’s automatic.
    With plaster pouring on him like rain, Franklin peeked down the hall, saw movement and fired three quick shots. Somebody screamed, “No,” a yelp, the sound of a man hit. Then the machine gun opened up again, and more plaster rained down, and the door above his head exploded in plastic and chipboard splinters.
    Del, across the hallway, heard the man scream “No,” and thought that Franklin had hit one of them. Franklin fired three more times and Del popped back out and fired three evenly spaced shots: Franklin was working a revolver, and he’d need time to reload. There was now so much dust in the hallway that Del could barely see the end of it. Then there was movement again and he jerked his head back and the walls came apart again and something slashed at his throat. He touched it, he could feel something sticking out. A bone? A piece of his jawbone? Shocked, he turned and looked at Cheryl, whom he’d rolled off the bed onto the floor. She was looking at him and began screaming and crawling forward, toward him.
    He was hurt, but he didn’t feel hurt: he popped out the door and fired another half-dozen shots down the hall, then snapped on an empty chamber.
    Franklin came in with two shots: Del groped for another magazine, dropped the empty out of the gun butt, and slapped the next one in and jacked a shell into the chamber. Cheryl was on top of him, trying to hold him, and he was trying to push her away, get back to the door.
    Franklin was yelling, and dimly, he heard, “Hold it, hold it. I think they’re gone.”
    Del looked down the hall, but saw nothing. Then Cheryl was screaming something he couldn’t make out, fear in her eyes, and she grabbed at his throat.
     
     
     
    MARTIN WAS HIT. The slug, a lucky shot, went through the inside part of his thigh, just below his testicles, catching mostly skin. There was a big artery there, he knew, and he pulled back and ripped open his pants leg. His leg showed a raw open wound but no heavy pulse of blood. He was bleeding, all right, but wouldn’t bleed to death—not in the next minute or so. LaChaise was screaming at him, “You hit? You hit?” as he slammed another magazine into the AR.
    “Yeah, I’m hit. This is no good, man.”
    LaChaise jumped into the hallway, fully exposed, like in the cop and cowboy shows, and blew the entire thirty-shot magazine down the halls, playing it like