Sudden Prey

Lucas and shook his head, his eyes wobbling.
    Cheryl turned to the nurses and shouted, “Hurry,” and to Lucas, in a calmer voice, “It goes all the way through, up in the roof of his mouth.”
    “Jesus, let’s get him . . .”
    The nurses came up and Lucas picked Del up and laid him on the cart. “Down to the ER,” one of the nurses said. The other one pointed at Cheryl: “And you’ve got to lie back down, you can’t be up . . .” And at Franklin: “You too . . .” She pushed Cheryl toward the bed behind them.
    Franklin said, “You get them?”
    “They made it out, but we got guys coming in all over the place.”
    “Shit.”
    “I hit one of them and you guys hit one. We’ve got one blood trail going in and out of the elevator, and another one starting in the lobby.” Lucas started to tremble with the adrenaline.
    “Good,” Franklin said, and he began to shake as well. He looked down at the wreckage of the hallway, and said to Lucas, “You know what it was like in here?”
    “What?”
    “It was like one of those scenes in Star Wars where the Storm Troopers are shooting about a million shots at the good guys and never hit anything. I mean, more shit went up and down the hall . . .”
    Lucas looked at him, covered with plaster dust, and said, “You know, you might want to sit down.”
    Franklin rubbed his chest, looked at Cheryl, now flat on her back and deathly pale, and said, “Yeah, I might.”

24
    MARTIN WAS RUNNING, staggering, turning the corner into the hall that would take him out past the emergency room, past the body on the floor, LaChaise a step behind, when the world blew up again, and a hail of glass and lead blew past them.
    LaChaise screamed, but Martin could sense him still moving, then another shot pounded past them and LaChaise turned and opened up with the machine gun and Martin went through the door out onto the sidewalk, half expecting to die there.
    But the car was waiting, idling peacefully. A woman was a half-block away, walking toward them carrying a bag. She stopped, suddenly, when she saw them, but Martin was already around the car; he threw the gun in the backseat and climbed inside. LaChaise piled in the passenger side and they rolled out of the lot, the passenger side door flopping open, then slamming as they slewed in a circle and headed south.
    “Hurt bad . . .” LaChaise moaned. “My fuckin’ legs . . .”
    “Fire alarm,” Martin said. He had one hand clamped over the wound in his leg, and he could feel the blood seeping between his fingers. “Sonsofbitches set off the fire alarm.”
    “How bad are you hit?” LaChaise asked, then moaned again as they bounced over a curb and around a corner. The streets were empty.
    “I’m bleeding heavy,” Martin said. “Christ . . . Hang on.”
    Martin was trying to turn into the side street that led to the garage. But he was moving too fast, and driving with one hand, and they hit a curb again, ran through a small bare tree, bounced off the parking strip and back into the street. LaChaise, groaning, reached over Martin’s head to the sun flap and pushed the button on the garage-door opener. Across the street, the door started up, and Martin horsed the car inside.
    Sandy Darling was there with the chain, her eyes wide as she moved behind the steel post, and Martin reached up and jabbed the garage-door opener again and the door started down.
    They had not been gone more than ten minutes, and were now no more than a minute and a half out of the hospital. Martin pushed his door open and climbed out, leaving the rifle behind, clutching his thigh, trying to stop the flow of blood.
    LaChaise was out, got the padlock keys. “Hurt,” he said. “Get your first-aid shit . . . we’re hurt.”
    “What happened?” Sandy asked, as LaChaise popped open the padlock at her waist.
    “Fucked up,” LaChaise said. “They were waiting.”
    “Are they coming?”
    “Don’t know,” LaChaise said. “Let’s get upstairs . . .”
     
     
     
    THE TWO MEN pulled off their outer clothes in the living room. Martin’s leg looked like somebody had carved out a golf ball-sized chunk of meat with a dull hunting knife: the wound was circular, ragged, choked with blood and chopped flesh, with pieces of thread from his pants mixed in the gore. Sandy handed him a heavy gauze wound pad and said, “Clamp that over the hole . . . let me look at Dick.”
    All of LaChaise’s wounds were in the back of his legs, the back of his arms and