Another moan came from the dying man behind the
shelf. Carlos glanced between the stacks again and saw
an impact grenade clenched in shaking hands, the ring
already pulled; Carlos realized that the man must have
groaned to cover the sound, and some part of him ad-
mired the clear thinking, all in the instant before he
started to back up, hands still raised. The grenade was
an RG34, the same kind that Carlos had tucked in his
vest, and he wanted as much distance as he could get.
Make it look good...
"I'm an excellent shot, I have a generous nature, and
I floss every day," Carlos said, backing up another step, trying to appear that he was deeply afraid and covering
it up with bravado.
"Such a waste this will be," Nicholai said, smiling, extending his arm.
Throw the goddamn thing!
"Why?" Carlos asked quickly. "Why are you doing this?"
Nicholai's smile stretched into a grin, the same
predatorial grin that Carlos had seen him wearing on
the transport, what felt like a million years before.
"I possess leadership qualities," Nicholai said, and for the first time, Carlos could see the insanity in his
murky eyes. "That's all you need to know..."
"Die!" the bleeding man screamed. Carlos caught a flicker of motion behind the shelf, and then Carlos was
diving sideways, trying to get behind a table as a win-
dow broke and...
... BOOM, folders and books were airborne and ex-ploded materials rained down, wood and paper and chips
of metal, the heavy shelf tipping over with a thundering
creak. It slammed to the floor with a tremendous crash,
and then everything was quiet, and shit was everywhere.
Carlos sat up, one arm wrapped around his throbbing
rib cage, tears of pain in his eyes. He blinked them
away and got to his feet, grabbing the revolver he'd
dropped as he stood up.
Nicholai was gone. Carlos kicked his way through
the debris to the corner, remembering that a window
had shattered before the grenade exploded. Although it
was dark and rainy outside, Carlos could see the roof of
an adjacent building one floor below.
Bam! Bam!
Carlos jumped back as two rounds hit the outer wall,
hardly a hand's width from his face. He silently berated
himself for sticking his head out the window, like some
half-witted baboso. He backed away from the window
and turned, only to find himself staring at the burnt,
bloody remains of the grenade thrower.
"Gracias," Carlos said quietly. He wished he could think of something else to say, but then he decided it
would only be useless symbolism; the guy was dead, he
wasn't hearing shit.
Carlos walked back across the room, thinking, won-
dering how he was going to catch up with Nicholai. It
wasn't going to be easy, but there was no other
choice...
... and he saw the glint of metal from the corner of
his eye, and stopped. He blinked, feeling a kind of awe
as he realized what he was looking at - and then
scooped it up, a giant weight lifting from his shoulders
and from around his heart.
He was going to be able to save Jill. The crazy pen-
dejo had dropped the vaccine.
Nicholai moved quickly through the rain toward the
front of the hospital. Everything is fine, he's dead at the push of a button and I control it, I can shut down the
power and trap him...
He laughed out loud suddenly, thinking about the
containment tubes in the basement where the Hunter
Gammas were stored, each floating in its own see-
through womb. Shut down the power and there was au-
tomatic drainage so they wouldn't drown in the
unaerated fluid.
Die, or fight and die, Carlos. Nicholai had been smart, he'd thought ahead and now all he had to do was hit a
few switches and Carlos would be in the dark and the
amphibious Hunters would be squelching toward him,
and maybe Carlos would actually be dead before the hos-
pital was blown apart, but he was dead no matter what.
Jill was sleeping again, and she was sick. Hot and
achy, and her dreams were gone, pulsing, squirming
shadows in their place. Shadows with textures, rough
and wet. Nausea warred with an unfulfilled emptiness,
with a dying thirst and a growing heat.
She rolled to one side and then the other, trying to
find relief from the crawling itch that had embedded it-
self in every part of her, that made the ugly shadows
get bigger as she slept on.
Carlos found needles, syringes, and a half bottle of
Betadine in a doctor's office on the third floor. He also
found a cabinet full of drug company samples and was
trying to decipher the labels, looking for a mild
painkiller, when the lights when out.
"Shit." He put down the sample, trying to get his bearings in the sudden dark. It took him about a sec-
ond and a half to decide it was Nicholai, and a sec-
ond longer to decide he needed to get out, and get out
fast. Nicholai probably hadn't shut down the power
just to make him stub his toe in the dark. Whatever
Nicholai was planning, Carlos thought he'd take a
rain check.
He edged out of the room and into the hall, moving
slowly, his hands out in front of him. Just as he reached
the stairwell, the hospital's emergency backup lights
hummed into soft red life. The effect was otherworldly,
the light just bright enough to see by, casting every-
thing in murky shadow.
Carlos started down the stairs, taking them two at a
time, thumb on the hammer of the Python. He ignored
his aching side, deciding that he'd collapse later, when
he wasn't in such a hurry. He only knew of two options for getting out of the hospital - the window Nicholai
had jumped from and the front door. There were cer-
tainly more, but he didn't want to waste time trying to
find them; in his experience, most hospitals were
mazes.
The front door was his best bet. Nicholai probably
didn't think Carlos had the nerve to charge straight out
of the most obvious exit, or so Carlos hoped.
He'd reached the landing between the first and sec-
ond floors when he heard a door crash open somewhere
far below, echoing up the stairwell, making him freeze.
The sound that followed - the furious, piglike battle cry
of some distinctly mutant creature - got him moving
again. His feet hardly touched the steps, but he still
wasn't fast enough; just as he was bounding down the
last flight, a monstrous figure leaped in front of the exit
to the ground floor.
It was giant, humanoid, tall and wide and dripping
slime. Its body was a dark blue-green, almost black in
the dim red light. With its webbed oversized hands and
feet and its huge rounded head and mouth, it resembled
nothing so much as a mammoth, hideously squashed
frog.
Its powerful lower jaw dropped open, and another
piercing, squealing screech filled the stairwell, re-
bounding throughout. Carlos heard at least three more
answer the first, a fierce and freakish chorus erupting
from somewhere down below.
Carlos opened fire, the first round hitting the
metal door and creating a deafening tornado of
sound. Before he could squeeze the trigger again, the
amphibious creature was springing, squealing as it
leaped toward Carlos, stretching its muscular arms
wide.
Carlos reflexively dropped, firing as he slid down
several steps, rolling to his uninjured side so he could
follow the creature's descent. Three, four rounds
plugged into the shrieking frog-thing's slimy body as it
flew overhead...
... and it was dead by the time it landed, dark gouts
of watery, brackish fluid spuming from its spasming
body.
Carlos was on his feet running and halfway
through the door even as the creature's siblings began
their feral, earsplitting lament. Not too hard to kill,
maybe, but he didn't want to consider his chances
if there were three or more of them all leaping at
once.
Into the lobby and he slammed the door, saw that it
required a key to lock, and he turned to look for some-
thing he could use to block it...
... and instead he saw a tiny, blinking white light
from across the room, its brightness drawing his gaze
from the midst of a shady red ocean of trashed furniture
and dead bodies.
A blinking white light on a small box, the box af-
fixed to a pillar. A timer light for a detonating com-
pound.
Carlos tried to think of something else it might be
and came up blank, knowing only that it hadn't been
there when he'd arrived; it was a bomb, Nicholai had
put it there, and suddenly the frog monsters were a
much smaller deal.
His mind was curiously blank as he pounded through
the lobby, a thoughtless, wordless panic overtaking
him, pushing him to run fast and far, to not waste time
thinking. He tripped over a shredded couch and didn't
notice whether or not he fell or felt pain, he was mov-
ing too fast, the glass doors at the front of the building
all he could see.
Bam, through the doors, shining black asphalt
splashing under his feet, rain misting on his sweaty
face. Rows of smashed and abandoned cars, shining
like wet jewels beneath a streetlight. The drum of his
shuddering heart...
... and the explosion was so massive that his hearing
couldn't encompass it all, a kind of ka-WHAMM that
was as much motion as it was sound. His body was
thrown, a leaf in a hot and violent hurricane, the ground
and sky becoming connected, interchangeable.
He was skidding across wet pavement, tumbling to
a gritty stop against a fire hydrant, feeling the enor-
mity of pain in his side and tasting salt from a nose-
bleed.
Barely a block away, the hospital had been reduced
to a smoking ruin, smaller pieces of it still coming
down, cracking against the ground like deadly hail.
Parts were on fire, but a lot of it had just disintegrated,
matter blown to dust, the dust settling and turning to
mud as the skies continued to dump water on every-
thing.
Jill.
Carlos pulled himself up and started to limp back to
the clock tower.
Nicholai realized he'd lost the vaccine sample as he
was running away from the hospital, when there was
one minute left before all of it went sky high. When it
was already too late.
There was no choice but to keep running, and he did,
and when the hospital exploded, Nicholai paced back
and forth in the street three blocks away, lost in anger.
So lost that he didn't realize that the agonized moaning,
whining noise he heard was coming from him, or that
he'd clenched his jaw hard enough to crack two teeth.
After a long time, he remembered that he still had to
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