Contest

the open door to the stairwell.

Selexin spun to go back the other way but stopped instantly.

There behind them, stepping slowly into the narrow aisle, was the second hood.

Swain ran down the tunnel, toward a light around the bend.

It was a subway station. Which one, he didn't care.

10:01

10:00

9:59

Swain burst into the white light of the subway station and heaved himself up from the tracks onto the platform.

A murmur arose among the commuters standing on the platform. They all stepped back in horror as Swain pushed past them, oblivious to how he must have looked.

His jeans were covered with black streaks of grease, and his shirt -- filthy black with subway soot, elevator grease and hoodaya blood -- was ripped from neck to navel. A single vertical line of blood stretched down his chest, while his right forearm was soaked red from the deep gashes inflicted by the hood. The bloody red scar across his left cheek was indistinguishable on his black sooty face.

Swain barged through the crowd and raced up the stairs toward the surface.

'What do we do now?' Holly whispered fearfully.

'I don't know, I don't know,' Selexin said.

The two hoods stood at both ends of the aisle, trapping Holly and Selexin in the middle.

Selexin, four feet tall, and Holly, about the same, were scarcely bigger than the two hoods.

Selexin looked anxiously around himself, at the bookshelves that stretched up to the ceiling. They seemed to form an impenetrable wall on either side of the aisle.

The hood in front of them edged closer. The other didn't move.

Holly noticed why.

The second hood, the one preventing their retreat, had no left foreclaw. Just a bloody stump at the end of its bony black arm. It must have been the one that Balthazar had pinned to the railing with his knife up on the First Floor.

Holly jabbed Selexin with her elbow and pointed at the hood and he saw it, too.

Selexin edged away from the first hood, toward the injured one, still eyeing the impenetrable walls of shelves on either side of them.

Wait a minute, he thought.

He scanned the bookshelves again.

They weren't impenetrable at all.

'Quickly,' he said. 'Grab the books. The ones here,' he pointed to a low shelf. 'Grab them and start throwing.'

He reached down to the bottom shelf and grabbed a large hardback and hurled it at the able-bodied hood, striking it in the face. The hood snarled angrily back at him.

A second book hit it again. Then a third. The fourth book hit the injured hood.

'Keep throwing them,' Selexin said.

They kept hurling books at the hoods, who backed off slightly. Holly threw another and was reaching down for more when suddenly she understood what Selexin was doing.

He wasn't just using the books to keep the hoods at bay. He was using them to create a hole in the bookshelf. The more books they threw from the shelf, the bigger the gap in the shelf became. Soon Holly could see through to the next, parallel aisle.

'Are you ready?' Selexin said, throwing a book, hitting the injured hood on its wounded forelimb. The black creature howled in agony.

'I think so,' Holly said.

The able-bodied hood began to move in.

'All right,' Selexin said. 'Go!'

Without a second thought, Holly dived cleanly through the gap in the bookshelf and landed with a thud in the next aisle.

But Selexin continued to stand in the original aisle.

The injured hood stepped cautiously forward.

The two hoods closed in on either side of the little man.

'Come on!' Holly said from the next aisle. 'Jump through!'

'Not yet,' Selexin didn't take his eyes off the approaching hoods. 'Not yet.' He threw another book at the injured hood. It hit. The hood hissed angrily.

'Come on!' Holly said.

'Just get ready to run, okay,' Selexin said.

Holly looked frantically down her aisle. On one side she could see the stairwell. On the other...

She froze.

It was Bellos.

Striding down the aisle toward her with long strong powerful steps.

'Selexin, jump! Jump right now!' she screamed.

'They're not close enough yet...'

'Just jump! He's almost here!'

'He...?' Selexin was momentarily startled. The hoods were very close now.

'Oh! Him?' Realising, Selexin immediately dived through the gap in the shelf, landing in a heap at Holly's feet. She pulled him up and they ran for the stairwell.

Behind them, Bellos began to run.

They bolted down the aisle. Holly could hear the able-bodied hood grunting and snorting as it ran down the parallel aisle.

They hit the stairs running and climbed them two at a time.

Behind them they heard the distinctive scratching sound of claws on marble as the hood charged into the stairwell. That sound was quickly followed by a sudden thudding, crashing sound as the hood lost its footing on the slippery marble floor and slammed into the concrete wall.

Breathlessly, Holly and Selexin kept climbing and climbing until they could hear nothing behind them.

The stairwell was silent.

They kept hurrying upward.

And then there came a voice, from way down at the bottom of the shaft, echoing loudly through the stairwell.

'Keep running!' Bellos' voice boomed. 'Keep running, tiny man! We will find you! We will always find you! The hunt has begun, and you are the game. I will hunt you, and I will find you, and when I do, tiny man, you will wish to God that somebody else had found you first!'

The voice stopped. And as Holly and Selexin climbed higher, an evil laugh resounded throughout the stairwell.

----ooo0ooo------

'Here they come,' Levine said to Marshall as they stood beside his car.

A massive blue van rounded the corner and stopped behind Levine's Lincoln. It looked like a big TV van, with a revolving satellite dish on the roof and flashing blue police lights.

Levine shielded his eyes from the glare of the van's headlights as a barrel-chested man dressed completely in blue stepped down from the passenger-side door and stood to attention before Marshall.

It was Harold Quaid.

Commander Harold Quaid.