56

 

Ward C, the abandoned ward of the Hawk Ridge Institute, was a one-story building in the shape of an L, with a brick exterior and a flat roof and not a single window, barred or otherwise. Access was afforded by doors on the north and east sides.

When it had been in use, Ward C had been known variously as the barred ward, the violent ward, the forensic ward, the disturbed ward. The hard cases had been interred there. Kaylie McMillan, murderess, had been one of them.

She was here again, not a prisoner now, only a hunted animal, crouching in a tight cluster of fear on the tile floor of the corridor, precisely at the midpoint of the building, the bend in the L.

There was no light in the ward. She hugged herself in the utter dark.

Her garments had been scratched and torn by brambles and cactus spines. She was dirty, rank with sweat. Her hair lay pasted to her scalp in a dense mat. Nausea bubbled in her gut. Her teeth chattered softly, though she was not cold.

Perhaps she had intended to come to this place. Perhaps it had been her plan to hide here. Equally likely, she had come only because she sought shelter, temporary concealment, with no strategy, no longer range in view.

Whatever she had done, she’d had no conscious reason for it. Her last instance of rational planning was the moment when she heard the squeak of rubber-soled shoes in the hallway outside her cell and knew the nurse was coming. Then she slipped her head into the noose she’d so carefully prepared, wedging her hand in also to relieve the deadly pressure on her throat.

Everything that happened since had been instinct, reflex, the blind impulse to survive. No thoughts. No identity. Only terror, panic, the brutal slamming of her heart against her ribs.

She had been a person once. A fugitive concocting aliases. Justin’s widow. Anson’s daughter-in-law. She had been someone real, an individual, all quirks and insecurities and self-doubts and loneliness and proud perseverance and determination.

All of that was gone now, just gone. Where the woman named Kaylie McMillan had been, there was only this dirty, exhausted, tattered, desperate thing, kneeling on cold tiles, hunched with fear, drawing shallow breaths that could not feed her lungs.

The voices, at least, had left her. Confusion and conflict had been banished. She had no alternatives to debate, no decisions to reach. She existed purely in and for the moment, without a yesterday or a tomorrow.

She would stay here, crouched like this, waiting like this, for as long as she had to, an hour or a week or a lifetime. She would never move, ever, until her heart stopped racketing in her chest and she felt safe.

From the end of the corridor, thirty yards from where she knelt, came a rasp of metal.

She looked up, her eyes straining in darkness.

There it was again—the noise—low but audible.

She knew that noise.

A sharper tremor passed through her, and a new squeeze of fear cramped her belly.

Hinges.

The rusty hinges of the exterior door, the north door, the door she’d unlocked with the ring of stolen keys.

Hinges creaking now as that door opened for a second time.

Panic impelled her upright, and she retreated around the bend in the corridor, and then she was running to the door on the east side, the only other exit.

A hard carom off a wall, and with a gasp she came up short against the steel door, yanking furiously at the handle before remembering that all the doors in the hospital wards were locked on both sides, and a key was required to enter or exit.

She had keys, they were in her left hand, and she fumbled with them, jamming one after another into the keyhole until she found the key that fit, then twisting her wrist clockwise.

The bolt, strangely loose, seemed to yield immediately, as if it had never been secured at all.

She tugged the handle again, pulling the door inward. Still it would not open.

Stuck.

Somehow the door was stuck, wouldn’t open, and she was trapped in here, no way out.

* * *

Cray stepped out of the night into the north corridor of Ward C, then clicked on his flashlight. The red-filtered beam wavered over the tile floor and concrete walls, reaching halfway down the hall.

She was not within sight. But her tracks were. The prints of muddy shoes, tracing an irregular, panicky path away from the door.

He breathed in, out. There was a calmness in him, the strange calm before the gale.

He had her. She could not escape.

True, she had a passkey that would unlock the east door. But the bolt on that door had been broken years ago, and rather than bothering to replace it, Cray had merely ordered the door padlocked.

Padlocked from outside.

The door could not be opened from within, a fact Kaylie no doubt had discovered by now.

She could double back and run straight into him. Or hide at the farthest end of the east corridor and wait for his arrival.

Or she could scream. Scream for help.

He would like that. He had never heard her scream.

No one would answer her cries, if there were any. Screams were common on the grounds of the institute. The staff had long ago learned to ignore such distractions.

Cray turned and shut the north door behind him, then carefully locked it with his passkey.

Then he pivoted to face the corridor again and advanced, guided by a beam of red, into the beckoning dark.

* * *

Kaylie stumbled away from the door that would not open, her hands slapping blindly at the side wall in search of an escape route, finding the door to the last cell in the row, not a good place to hide, but the only place left.

The press of a button released the pneumatic lock. The door swung wide, and she slipped into the room, then shut the door and looked for a latch on this side, but there was none, because in rooms like this, patients were locked in. They could not lock others out.

In the mesh window of the door, a faint red light appeared.

Flashlight. Still far away, but growing brighter.

Cray.

He had turned the corner, rounding the bend in the L, and he was closing in.

* * *

Cray aimed his flashlight down the east hallway, alert for any blur of movement.

Nothing.

He scanned the floor. Her tracks, increasingly faint as the dirt was pounded off her shoes, disappeared a few yards away.

She must have run to the exit and found it locked. After that, she would have backtracked. But how far?

No way to tell. The only certainty was that she was hidden ... and close.

Rows of closed doors lined both sides of the corridor. Rooms where patients had been domiciled—stalls for cattle, pens for sheep.

Kaylie had been kept in one of these rooms, many years ago.

It was right for her to die here.

He would take her face, peel it from the subcutaneous tissue that wrapped her skull, and in the flashlight’s red glow he would display it to her, the bleeding mask—her own face, disembodied, the last thing she would see.

Later—tomorrow night, perhaps—he would bury her in the woods. She would never be found. Another successful escape, or so the world would think.

But first he had to find her.

Behind which door was his prize?

He moved to the nearest one, thumbed the button, aimed the flash inside.

Empty.

To the door on the opposite side. Same procedure. Same result.

There were twenty more doors. He would open them one by one. The task would not take long.

His sense of calm receded. A new force grew in him, wild and strong. A keening exultation.

He had known it before. On the hunt with Justin, and later, hunting alone. He had known it each time he tracked his prey in the sallow moonlight.

It was an inner heat, an excitement of the blood, a sudden rush of pure stimulation that sharpened his sight and hearing, even his olfactory sense.

He was a predator. And he knew in this moment—a transient thought, lost before it could be captured—but for one moment only, he knew that on those nights when he stripped bare the mask, the first mask he cast off was his own.

John Cray was nothing and nowhere. There was only the driving heartbeat, the itch of need, the flash and eddy of unfiltered sensation, and the knife, sharp as teeth, the knife and the urge to use it as he opened the next door and the next.

He lifted his head, and losing himself entirely, he bayed at shadows, a wolf under the moon.

* * *

Kaylie heard the noise, echoing on stone, on tile.

A coyote’s howl. But not a coyote, of course.

Him.

Some answering panic rose in her own throat, and she nearly let loose a fatal scream that would draw him instantly to this room.

But that was what he wanted, wasn’t it?

Not just her death.

Madness.

I strip away the mask, Cray had told her in the desert. A human being is an onion, layer upon layer .... Peel the onion, strip off the mask, and what’s left is the naked essence. What’s left is what is real.

First he took his victim’s mind and spirit, and then, only then, would he take her life.

She understood all this, saw it clearly, and with a snap of altered perspective she came back to herself—not entirely, but enough.

She knew who she was. She was Kaylie McMillan. Not a hunted animal. She was a person. She mattered. She couldn’t give up yet.

That howl again. Closer.

Cray must be searching each room in turn.

This room was last in line. Even so, he would not take long to reach it.

Kaylie backed away from the door, retreating into a corner, putting distance between herself and Cray.

She had keys. Sharp. She could fight him. Go for his face, his eyes. She—

Her hip banged against cold steel.

A commode, still embedded in the floor—invisible in the dark, its shape apparent only to her touch.

She’d stood on a commode like this on several nights many years ago, fumbling at the grille over the air vent, straining to loosen the screws that held it in place, with nothing but a strip of torn elastic from her mattress cover to improve her grip on the small, devilishly slippery screw heads

The job had taken hours, nights.

But now—

Keys in her hand.

A key could turn a screw.

Nearby, a steel door clanged. Cray was at least halfway down the hall.

She stepped onto the commode bowl’s lidless rim, reaching blindly for the vent cover in the ceiling. Her fingers touched the grille, velvety with dust. Four screws secured the cover to the ceiling. She found the first of them and struggled to insert a key into the notch in the screw head.

The key was too big. Wouldn’t fit.

Another door clanged, closer.

She tried another key, thinner than the last.

It fit. She wrenched her wrist counterclockwise, and the screw turned, loosening.

From the hall, a wild baying and another slam of steel.

The screw unwound another few turns and dropped into the dark.

Three left.

Not enough time.

She found the second screw and worked it free.

Glanced back.

Red glow in the mesh window of the cell door.

His flashlight, very near.

Another door swung open and crashed shut. She felt the vibrations through the stone wall as she fumbled for the third screw.

He was perhaps two doors away. Coming fast, too fast.

The third screw was caked in dust, hard to discover by feel alone, but she found it and jammed the key into the notch.

It wouldn’t yield. It was implanted too tightly in the frame.

The door directly across from this room creaked open.

Cray would look in here next.

She gave up on the third screw, found the fourth.

It was loosely set in its hole, easily dislodged with a few turns of the key. She let it fall.

The door across the corridor banged shut.

She threw away the keys, and with both hands she reached overhead and grabbed hold of the grillwork, tugging with her full strength, and the vent cover, fastened by just one screw, shuddered and pulled free of the ceiling.

It clattered on the floor.

Red light in the room.

Cray, beaming his flash through the mesh window.

She didn’t look back, not even when she heard the thunk of a pneumatic bolt retracting and knew the door had opened.

Into the vent, scrabbling, clawing for purchase on the dusty metal, her legs swinging as she hoisted herself up and bellied in—grunt of exertion and blind panic—she was in the duct, prone in the horizontal shaft, but her legs still hung out the opening, and she squirmed forward, grabbing at the smooth metal sides of the passageway, pulling herself all the way in, and there was pain, pain in her leg, like biting teeth—knife—Cray’s knife slashing her, too late, because with a final effort she hauled herself completely into the shaft and then she was plunging ahead.

She’d made it.

But not for long.

The duct trembled, groaning with new weight.

Cray, lifting himself into the hole.

Following.

Red glare behind her. The flashlight.

She shouldn’t look back, shouldn’t look back, but she did, and there he was, scrambling in pursuit, the flashlight in one hand, knife in the other.

She heard his fast, hysterical breathing, or maybe it was her own.

Forward. Go.

There was nothing for her then but a smeared impression of her elbows and knees in furious motion. Speed and panic and pure darkness ahead, red death behind.

She’d done this before—crawled like this, through this ventilation duct—crawled when she escaped from Hawk Ridge. Only then no monster had been chasing her, and she had crawled slowly, silently, afraid of being heard. Crawled to the midpoint of the ward, the bend in the L, where a vertical shaft intercepted this duct and rose a few feet to an opening in the roof.

Ahead she saw a faint fall of starlight, the roof exit, her one way out, her last chance.

Yards away.

Too far.

Cray was closing fast, and she wouldn’t get there.

She kept going, terror drumming in her chest. She was all fear now, nothing but fear, as Cray was nothing but hunger.

He grabbed her ankle.

With a gasp of panic she shook loose. Drove herself forward, pawing at the shaft, her hands gummy with old dust, the light from the rooftop opening still too far away.

Behind her, Cray sped up.

He had her scent in his nostrils now, the flavor of a fresh kill tingling in his mouth, and with feral quickness he came on fast, chuffing hard, the flashlight abandoned, the knife bared like teeth, and Kaylie almost in range for the final, lethal pounce.

She crawled for the light, the exit, and then the light was gone, blotted out—she didn’t understand how, and there was no time to think about it, because she heard Cray snarl, a low indrawn sound packed full of menace, the sound a dog would make in the instant before it leaped, and she knew he was tensing for the kill.

Directly ahead, something dropped into the shaft.

A human figure.

Twisting toward her—a man—and in his hand, a gun which rose for a shot he could not try, because Kaylie blocked the target.

“Take it!” he shouted, and he pitched the gun at her, a handgun, sliding along the shaft.

A gun that was just an illusion, like the man himself, a mirage out of nowhere.

Cray sprang.

The pistol completed its slide, spinning into Kaylie’s grasp, and remarkably it was real—as tangible and solid as the gun that had killed Justin many years ago—and with the gun in both hands she twisted onto her back, face to face with Cray as he fell on her, and she fired one shot directly into his heart.

Cray shuddered all over. Kaylie looked up into his eyes in the dim ambient light, eyes that widened with sudden intelligence, the shocked awareness that somehow, impossibly, she had beaten him.

Then she saw darkness filling those eyes, a flood of darkness, extinguishing the light, and Cray saw it too, she knew he did. He saw the dark tide that was fast flowing in to wash him away, and for the first time he was frightened by the dark, afraid like a child, afraid and alone.

She saw all this, in the moment when their gazes locked for the last time, and then the last living part of him was devoured by the dark, and everything was gone from his eyes, forever.

Cray sagged, a limp, dead thing, the knife in his hand as harmless as a toy.

Kaylie let go of the gun. It clattered in the vent with a hollow sound.

She made no further movement. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think.

“Kaylie?”

A familiar voice. She’d heard it before, but when? Oh, yes. On the night of her arrest.

It was Detective Shepherd’s voice. He was the man who’d materialized out of nothingness and saved her life.

She had no idea how he’d gotten here, no strength to ask. Later she would make him tell.

Later.

“Kaylie? You all right?”

He had crawled to her. Blinking, she looked at him.

“I’m fine,” she said, as if it were a summer day and she had merely responded to a casual pleasantry. “Just fine.”

He released a long-held breath. “Thank God.”

“Cray’s dead.”

“I know. Let’s get out of here.”

“Cray’s dead,” she repeated for no reason.

“There’s an exit to the roof.” Shepherd took her hand, gently coaxing her forward, away from the dead sprawl of John Cray. “Come on.”

She eased free of Cray’s loose, boneless limbs. “I know about the exit,” she whispered. “I used it to escape from this place once before. But ... not really.”

Abruptly she lifted her head, searching for Shepherd’s gaze in the faint light, wishing to make eye contact, feeling suddenly that it was very important for him to understand about the years of running, the scared-rabbit hiding, the night dreams and daytime fears.

“I never really escaped,” Kaylie said quietly.

Shepherd tightened his grip on her hand. “This time you did.”