to get away. She couldn’t move Arkeley—he outweighed her considerably and she couldn’t drag him—so she decided she would have to leave him there on the floor. If the bad guys killed him out of spite she would hate herself forever but she imagined they would be too preoccupied trying to kill her.
Waving her light around she found the exit from the ward and slipped along the wall of the corridor beyond. The Glock stayed in her holster so she wouldn’t waste a bullet if she jumped at the first sight of her own shadow. That was an Arkeley kind of thing to do and she was proud of thinking of it. Of course, Arkelely would already have a plan by this point. He would already be putting it into effect.
“Think,” she said, trying to break the layer of fear that covered her brain like frost. “Think.” What could she hope to realistically achieve? She didn’t consider herself tough enough to take on another vampire and an unknown number of half-deads on her own. She’d only beaten Reyes because of Vesta Polder’s amulet, and Scapegrace had died of surprise, not any special quality she possessed. So if she couldn’t fight, what could she do?
She could run. She could get out of the hospital, get to some place where she could call for backup. It was the only realistic plan. The half-deads would try to stop her, she knew. She tried to think like a faceless freak. They hadn’t attacked her directly yet—no, they wouldn’t. They were cowards. Arkeley had told her as much.
They would fall back, take away her ability to see and her ability to communicate.
They would try to flush her out, to make her walk right into their traps. The half-deads would have secured the main entrance. Going out the way she came in would be suicide. She ducked down the first side corridor she saw.
She remembered her first visit to the sanatorium. She’d thought it was a big spooky maze then. With the lights out it was a lot more unnerving and a whole lot harder to find her way around. She knew generally what direction she was headed: southeast, toward the greenhouse wing. Yes, that would be good. If she could just get outside she would feel much safer. The moonlight might actually let her see something useful.
Her flashlight speared out before, illuminating a lot less than she would have liked.
The corridor it lit up was a gallery of dim reflections and long shadows. Anything could be ahead of her, waiting for her. Anything at all. She kept her back to the wall and edged forward, a step at a time. There was nothing else for it.
She was halfway down the corridor, her eyes watching every doorway, when she began to hear a noise like something moving around inside the wall at her back. She shied away from it and heard it dash away from her, as if they’d scared each other off. It was a rhythmic skittering sound, or rather a whole group of sounds, the patter of tiny claws on wood, the thumping of a soft body dragging across broken plaster.
Ahead of her, down the hallway, something oozed out of the wall and dropped to the floor.
She swung her light around and speared a rat with her flashlight beam. Its tiny eyes blazed as it looked back at her. Its nose twitched and then it bolted away.
“Nothing,” she said, trying to reassure herself. It came out a little louder than she’d meant it to.
Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, a half-dead hissed, “What was that?”
She stopped in her tracks. She stopped breathing. She switched off her flashlight.
There was a tiny bit of light coming in through square inset windows in the double doors at the end of the hallway. A shadow moved across that light, a shadow like a human head.
“Did you see that?” someone else asked, with the same kind of squeaky, rat-like voice. Another half-dead. “Somebody had a light on and they switched it off.”
“Get the others,” the first voice said.
The double doors slammed open then and what looked like a never-ending stream of human silhouettes flooded into the hall.
55.
Caxton reached for her weapon but then stopped. She could hear dozens of feet pounding down the corridor towards her. She only had five bullets left. There was no way she could take on all the half-deads using the gun.
She switched on her light and pointed it at them. Their torn faces and their glassy eyes reflected the light perfectly. They were dressed in filthy clothes. One wore eyeglasses. A couple were missing hands or arms. There had to be at least twelve of them and they were all armed with kitchen knives, with sharpened screwdrivers, with hatchets or cleavers. One had a pitchfork. When the light hit them their mouths went wide and they ran at her even faster.
If she stayed where she was they would simply cut her down. She flicked off the light and dashed sideways, toward an empty doorway. The door itself lay flat on the floor of the room beyond as if its hinges had rotted away.
There was a window at the far end of the room but she could see instantly that it was barred. The room looked like a jail cell—what had it been, the psychiatric ward?
She could hear them coming. She’d run into the room on pure instinct, just trying to get away. Had they seen her? She didn’t know if half-deads saw any better in the dark than human beings. Had they seen her? She threw herself against the wall to one side of the door and breathed through her mouth. She heard them outside in the hall, their feet pounding on the linoleum tiles, their hands thumping against the plaster walls. Had they seen where she went? They had to be close. They had to be getting closer.
They went right past her. She couldn’t be sure but she thought they’d walked right past the door—she had to be sure.
She leaned out a little into the doorway to get a look and found one of them staring right back. His face was striped and raw where he’d torn away his own skin.
His eyes were less hateful than pathetic, full of a weary sadness more profound than anything she could imagine.
Without even thinking about it she reached up with both hands and grabbed his head and twisted and yanked and pulled. He screamed but his flesh tore. It felt less like grappling with a human body than as if she were pulling a branch off a tree.
Bones crackled inside his neck as his vertebrae gave way and then she was suddenly holding a human head. The eyes looked right into her—sadness transformed entirely into fear—and the mouth kept moving but it no longer had the breath or the larynx to scream with.
“Ugh,” she said, and threw the head into the room’s shadowy corners. Out in the hall his body kept walking but it had lost all its coordination. It was just muscles twitching with no purpose. Guilt and disgust erupted inside of her and she thought she might throw up. She glanced in the dark corner, wondering if the head was still moving. Wondering how much that hurt, to be beheaded but not killed outright.
Then she remembered the half-deads who had taunted her on the roof of Farrell Morton’s fishing camp. She thought about the one who attacked her with a shovel—and the one who had stood outside her window and tricked Deanna into cutting herself to ribbons. Then the guilt flew away on moth wings.
The headless body kept walking and soon enough it came up against a wall and started beating itself to pieces, its shoulder digging into the wall as if it wanted to push its way through.
The rest of the half-deads turned to look. They stood in the hallway in loose formation, their weapons out and ready but not pointed at her. They had walked past without knowing she was in the room—if she hadn’t looked, they might have gone right past her. It was hard to tell in the deeply dark hallway but she thought they looked surprised.
The pitchfork the headless body had been holding on to fell to bounce with a jangling sound on the floor. She scooped it up in both hands and felt its weight. It was heavy and over-balanced, the metal tines drooping low to the floor when she tried to lift it. It was a ludicrous weapon and one she’d never been trained to use.
She dropped it. It clanged on the linoleum. Then she drew her Glock.
The crowd of half-deads moved backwards. Away from her. That was good.
Some of them raised their hands, though they didn’t drop their weapons.
She pointed the handgun at one of them, then another. She made them wince.
They couldn’t know how many bullets she had left. She stepped out into the hallway, keeping them covered. She would shoot the first one that moved. Maybe that would scare them enough that they would scatter like
