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“Tough.”
“Apart from our deaths, why did you come?”
“Because you’re a monster, and monsters need to be slain.” I don’t know why I said that. Probably because it didn’t matter what I said: The longer he talked, the farther his lab rats could scurry.
“And you are our modern-day hero, rescuing the creatures?”
“They’re people. Unlike you.”
“They’re valuable resources, whose unique heritage could save countless lives. Think of all the soldiers whose limbs might be regrown, the blind who might see, the—”
“Yeah, and because Hitler’s doctors and dentists learned things in the concentration camps, that justifies Dachau and Buchenwald? What say we put you in a lab and pull you apart, see if we can find a cure for evil?”
Jesus, I thought; stay here any longer and I’d start singing “Kumbaya.”
He answered, his voice all sad and patronizing. “I can see your mind is made up. Although I’m sorry your little friends have abandoned you here.”
“My choice.”
“And now you’re trapped.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Oh, very well. Andrew, you get ready to shoot our visitor when he puts his head around that doorway. Jonah, you’re on his blind side of the hallway: when I give the word—”
My gun went off, six times. The first tore up the floor next to the nose of Andrew’s gun and made it jerk back; the rest of them took out the four lights overhead, leaving a couple down at the far end.
I slapped in another clip and risked putting my eye to the crack, but nobody was moving.
“There,” I said. “Now it’s nice and dark, like creatures prefer.”
“Um, boss?” Andrew said. “What do we do now?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the boss man. He sounded annoyed, more than anything, which made me nervous. I strained to hear, but I couldn’t tell what he was up to—until his voice came again, tal
king. On a phone.
“Manny? Dr. Curtis here. We have an intruder, with a gun. He’s in the office just inside the west door, the first room to the left. If you open the door, you and Jack can stand back in the darkness and blaze away, you can’t possibly miss him. But make sure you take care, we’re right down the hallway. How long? Okay. Yes, we’re not going anywhere, but then, neither is our intruder.”
That put a whole different picture on the situation.
I sighed, and reached for the knapsack.
When I was ready, I watched Andrew’s doorway. I didn’t figure him for a patient man, and indeed, after a minute the end of his shotgun eased around the frame. I let it come four inches, and then fired, at his door and at the other two for good measure. And once they had all ducked back in their holes, I stepped into the hallway, and threw.
Andrew’s curses almost hid the first sound of breaking glass. But my second bottle, aimed ten feet farther down the hallway, made an unmistakable noise, and the third one as well.
Dr. Curtis figured out what it meant first. I could feel him staring at the dim hallway, looking at the liquid and smashed glass, and then he must have smelled it.
He waited just long enough to see that the bottles had all landed on the far side of his door, long enough to figure out what I had in mind, long enough to make his choice between a chancy bullet and a sure burning to death. The old guy came out of his doorway so fast I almost wasn’t ready.
Almost.
The lighter in my hand snapped into life, the rag in the top of my last bottle flared, and I backhanded it into the corridor. Before the bottle hit the wall, the corridor exploded into a wall of flame.
The doc screamed as he ran, and he might have gotten the door open if I hadn’t managed to get off a couple of shots in that direction. A slightly more solid shape among the flames went down, and although I had to slam my own door shut then, I could hear him screaming for a while before he went still. A few minutes later, the others stopped, too.
And some time later, so did I.
