Creepers

  Balenger rushed to the empty compartment. Aiming, he shouldered the door all the way open. As his headlamp dispelled the shadows, he studied the ceiling but didn’t see a trapdoor through which Ronnie could have squeezed up and hidden himself. He now realized that the compartment wasn’t totally empty, though. On the floor, in a corner, mocking him, were the five bottles of urine that had been abandoned on the fourth level.

  “Vinnie, use the weights to keep this door and the gate from closing! As long as they’re open, the elevator can’t go down.” Balenger turned toward Cora and Rick. Rick was on top of her, gasping from pain. She struggled to get free. Balenger turned Rick over and saw that the fall had rammed the spike deeper into his chest. Rick’s lung made a whistling sound. His front teeth were broken away. His lower left arm projected at a right angle to his side.

  “Jesus,” Cora said. “Rick.” She wiped his blood-smeared forehead. “Baby.”

  Vinnie hurried to prop a weight against the elevator door.

  Cora stroked Rick’s face. His eyes were unfocused. His chest heaved, continuing to whistle.

  Balenger looked over his shoulder toward the medical room. “Help me get him on the exam table-”

  Together, he, Amanda, and Cora lifted him. Rick moaned. Cora pressed his shoulders down to keep him from rolling off the table.

  Amanda propped the flashlight on the counter. “We’ll need more light. I’ll get the candles from Vinnie’s knapsack.”

  Balenger used his knife to cut open Rick’s Windbreaker, sweater, and shirt. As Amanda and Vinnie lit candles, the increased illumination showed an alarming amount of blood streaming from Rick’s chest.

  “The spike’s all the way through,” Balenger said.

  “Hang on, baby,” Cora told Rick, stroking his brow. “Hang on.”

  But Rick didn’t seem to hear.

  “If I take out the spike, he might hemorrhage worse than he is now. But if I don’t…”

  Rick’s groan communicated his agony.

  “Can’t we at least help him with the pain?” Cora begged. “The morphine.”

  “No. It’ll kill him,” Balenger said.

  “Surely just a little—”

  “Morphine depresses heart rate and blood pressure.” Balenger felt Rick’s wrist. “I can hardly find a pulse as it is.”

  “Pull the spike out. Use duct tape to stop the bleeding the way you did with the professor.”

  Balenger couldn’t think of an alternative. “See if there’s rubbing alcohol in that cabinet.”

  Vinnie yanked open the glass door.

  “Wait,” Balenger said.

  “But—”

  “Never mind,” Balenger said.

  Rick’s lung stopped wheezing. His chest became still.

  “No,” Cora said. Frantic, she stared into Rick’s eyes, searching for a sign of consciousness. She opened his mouth and breathed into it. In horror, she stopped when the air whistled past the spike in his chest.

  “Twice.” She sobbed. “Oh, baby. Oh, Jesus, twice.” Weeping uncontrollably, she held Rick’s head against her chest. “Twice.”

  Amanda put an arm around her.

  Thunder rumbled. In its aftermath, they heard the crackle of static. Balenger frowned toward his equipment belt and then toward Vinnie’s.

  More static.

  “What the—” Vinnie stared down.

  It came from the remaining two walkie-talkies. Balenger’s mind swirled. With a sense that he shifted deeper into madness, he raised his unit to his mouth and pressed the transmit button.

  “You took a walkie-talkie from one of the men you killed,” Balenger said.

  “As you’ll learn, I’m resourceful.” The voice was smooth, calm, neutral, in the tenor range, its pronunciation precise, with a hint of an elitist accent. It made Amanda jerk a hand to her mouth. “Your friend didn’t drop all the way to the lobby. I found him in a pile of wreckage two levels down. He actually had the strength to help me put him in the elevator. Remarkable. How is he progressing?”

  “He isn’t,” Balenger said into the walkie-talkie.

  “Ah,” the voice said.

  Static.

  “You’re violating my home,” the voice said.

  “It’s not as if you had any No Trespassing signs around the place. The only good thing is, if we hadn’t come in, we never would have been able to rescue Amanda.”

  Cora raised her tear-streaked face from Rick’s body.

  “Amanda has no need of being rescued,” the voice said. “I treat her with the greatest respect. Many women would envy her.”

  “Except for being molested.”

  “I never touched her that way ever.” For the first time, the voice contained a hint of emotion. “If she told you I did, she lied.”

  Balenger frowned. He remembered several puzzled questions Vinnie had tried to ask her. Was Ronnie telling the truth?

  “What about your other girlfriends?” Balenger asked into the walkie-talkie. “What are their names? Iris, Alice, Vivian.” Abruptly, something about the list troubled him. The names. Something about the names. But so much was happening, he didn’t have time to figure out what bothered him.

  “I’ve been honored with an abundance of female companionship.”

  “Is that one of them dead in the downstairs corridor?”

  Static.

  Dreading the answer, Balenger forced himself to ask, “What did you do with my wife?”

  Static.

  “If you surrender, I promise you won’t feel pain,” the voice said.

  Abruptly, Cora grabbed the walkie-talkie. Furious, she yelled into it, “You prick, I promise you something.” Pacing angrily in front of the medicine cabinet, she shouted, “When I get my hands on you, I’ll—”

  The floor exploded.

  Balenger lurched back. Wood disintegrated at Cora’s feet. As a shotgun roared from below, blood sprayed from Cora’s abdomen. Another roar slammed her against the medicine cabinet, shattering glass. A third blast. A fourth, more wood erupting from the floor, buckshot tearing Cora open.

  She dropped to her knees, agonized surprise contorting her face. She toppled to the gaping floor, her blood spreading, dripping through the holes. A candle fell with her, but her blood extinguished it.

  The startling moment lengthened. As the smell of burnt gunpowder drifted up through the holes, Balenger’s reflexes took control. He tugged Amanda and Vinnie to the outside wall, his frenzied heartbeat making him light-headed. “He’s on the balcony below us,” he whispered. “Cora shouted so loud, he heard where she was.”

  From below, through the holes in the floor, Balenger heard a shotgun being reloaded. Cora’s headlamp lay on the floor. He stretched to reach it, then gave it to Amanda. He raised a finger to his lips, urging her and Vinnie to be silent. He motioned for them to follow him into the bedroom. His muscles contracted, anticipating more shotgun blasts through the floor.

  He reached the bedroom, his headlamp crisscrossing the darkness. Something else was wrong. Tod. Where was…The last Balenger remembered, Tod was groaning on the floor, holding his head where Balenger struck him with the pistol. Now Balenger turned and scanned with his headlamp. Tod was gone.

  As Balenger looked at Vinnie to warn him, the longing on Vinnie’s face made him pause. Staring toward Cora’s body, Vinnie was devastated, tears streaming down his cheeks, the woman he loved gone forever. Vinnie’s anguish intensified Balenger’s own grief. To lose the person you loved. He understood all too sharply the hell Vinnie suffered.

  Balenger tugged Vinnie’s sleeve, urging him to move. For her part, Amanda seemed to have passed through an emotional frenzy, incapable of anything except a desperation to survive. She followed Balenger’s lead as they crept through the surveillance room and into the library. They’d been forced to abandon the flashlight that Amanda set on the counter next to the examination table. Now all they had were three headlamps.

  The lights converged on the library’s trapdoor, which to Balenger
’s surprise was open. Tod must have hurried down the staircase while Ronnie was distracted, Balenger realized. A further thought gave him hope—maybe Tod can be a distraction for us. Maybe he’ll make enough noise to lead Ronnie away.

  Balenger locked the trapdoor and moved softly into the kitchen. He drew his pistol and aimed toward the trapdoor there. Vinnie lifted it. But the only thing their headlamps revealed was another empty staircase.

  Balenger descended first. He had to move slowly, probing the air with his pistol to test for razor wire. They crept downward, constantly turning. The revolving flash of headlamps was dizzying. The stairwell amplified the noise from the storm. Approaching the fifth level, Balenger heard water streaming, then realized that the sound didn’t come from the rain outside but from something in the stairwell. His headlamp reflected off a torrent rushing along a hidden corridor.

  A flash of lightning revealed a huge hole in the roof, the water on the upper levels channeling into it. The crash of water cascading down the stairwell reminded Balenger of a cistern being filled. At once, his headlamp showed an object floating along the corridor. A corpse. Amanda gasped when she saw it. A desiccated woman. Dressed. Holding a purse. Blond. Diane? Balenger wondered in dismay. But before he had a chance to see more, the stream carried the corpse into the stairwell, and it disappeared into the roaring darkness.

  We can’t get out this way, Balenger realized. For all he knew, Ronnie was on the opposite side of the wall, about to blast a hole with his shotgun. He motioned for Amanda and Vinnie to retreat to the penthouse. They didn’t need encouragement, and he followed them as they scrambled through the hatch. In shadows, breathing hoarsely, they sank to the kitchen’s floor.

  “We’ll try another staircase,” Amanda murmured.

  “Maybe,” Vinnie said without conviction. He raised his head slowly. “Or maybe we don’t need to do a thing.”

  “What do you mean?” Balenger asked in confusion.

  “The professor left a note with a colleague. When the professor doesn’t call him by nine this morning, the colleague’s supposed to open the note and tell the police where to send help.”

  They were so close to the outside wall that the pounding of the rain cloaked their muted voices.

  “No,” Balenger said. “Bob didn’t leave a note.”

  “But…”

  “When Bob got fired, he stopped trusting people in his department. He assumed the colleague would open the note and show it to the dean to get brownie points. Bob was afraid we’d all get arrested.”

  Vinnie tried another plan. “How about this? The salvagers come on Monday. They’ll rescue us. All we need to do is wait for a day.”

  “Ronnie can arrange plenty of surprises if we give him that much time. I told you before, if we’re passive, we’ll lose.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  Static crackled from the walkie-talkies.

  “He’s trying to get me to talk.” Balenger spoke softly. “He’s hoping he’ll hear my voice and have something to shoot at.”

  “That could work the other way around,” Amanda murmured. “If you hear him talking, you can shoot at his voice.”

  Balenger debated. “Tell me more about this bastard. Was he lying when…”

  “He never touched me.” Amanda shuddered. “He always treated me with terrifying politeness. I had the sense that something was building in him, that he struggled against it. The last time I saw him, when he brought me the nightgown, he stopped being polite. He yelled. He threw things. He called me a bitch and a whore. It was like he hated me because he felt aroused.”

  From the walkie-talkie, more static taunted Balenger.

  He shut off Vinnie’s unit, then lowered the volume on his own, put it to his lips, and pressed the transmit button, keeping his voice down. “I don’t understand why you use different names, Ronnie. Why do you call yourself ‘Walter’?”

  Static.

  “Is your last name really Harrigan?” Balenger didn’t dare remain in one spot too long. He shifted into the dining room. Again, he whispered into the walkie-talkie. “Ronnie, what’s your last name?”

  No answer.

  “What’s your last—”

  “Carlisle,” the voice said.

  Amanda and Vinnie crouched, trying to determine where the voice was below them.

  “That’s not true,” Balenger whispered. “Carlisle didn’t have children.”

  “He’s my father.”

  Continuing to move, Balenger eased into the exercise room, where weights propped open the elevator’s door.

  “No,” Balenger said. “He’s not your father.”

  “He acted like one.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Sometimes, it’s all there is.”

  “What about you?” Balenger asked. “Did you act like a good son?”

  Balenger shut off his headlamp before shifting into the candlelit medical room. Amanda and Vinnie did the same. Otherwise, their lights would show through the holes in the floor. The sight of the two bodies made him feel cold.

  “You’re moving cautiously,” the voice said, “but the candles react to the air you displace. Through the holes, I see them flicker.”

  Abruptly, Balenger realized that Ronnie stood directly below him. He barely had a chance to step back before a shotgun blast tore through the part of the floor where he’d been.

  Balenger aimed toward the fresh hole, about to shoot, only to decide Ronnie wanted him to do that, to waste ammunition on a phantom target.

  “Did you disarm the explosives up there?” the voice said from the walkie-talkie. “I assume a former Ranger has the ability to do that.”

  Balenger forced himself to stay quiet.

  “You wonder how I know your background?” the voice asked. “It’s not just because I heard you talking to the others. The first time you came to my office and questioned me, I knew you were trouble. When you showed up the next time, I had a stack of information about you. A shame about that Gulf War syndrome. At least you had someone to take care of you. Your wife made clear how devoted she was.”

  The reference to Diane struck Balenger like a punch in the stomach. His emotion bent him forward. At once, rage took the place of pain and loss. He aimed toward where he thought the voice was below him. With all his heart, he wanted to shoot. No! he warned himself. Not till you’re sure. Don’t let him goad you into making mistakes.

  Desperation crept over him. Our lights, he thought. We shut them off so Ronnie can’t see them through the holes in the floor. But we can’t get out of here without using them. And he has night-vision goggles.

  Reluctantly, he understood what needed to be done. What he didn’t want to do.

  Drawing Amanda and Vinnie to another room, he kept his voice low. “You need to distract him for me. Vinnie, have you ever fired a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Hold it with both hands. Like this.” Balenger curled Vinnie’s right fingers around the grip. Then he curved the left fingers over the opposite side, the tips overlapping. “Aim along the top of the barrel. Keep your fingers tight on the grip. There’s a kick. When you shoot, you don’t want to get startled and drop the gun.”

  “When I shoot?”

  “Go back to the medical room. Count to fifty. Then turn on your walkie-talkie. Increase its volume. Set it on the floor and back away. My voice will distract him. When he shoots, shoot back. You won’t hit him, but we don’t care about that. Just make sure he doesn’t hit you.”

  “But what about—”

  “I’m going to try to get the other night-vision goggles.”

  Vinnie nodded, but Balenger couldn’t tell if it was in hope or despair.

  “Amanda, lock the hatch behind me.” Balenger spoke with desperate softness. “Don’t open it unless you hear two taps, then three, then one. Can you remember that? Two, three, one?”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “Vinnie, fifty seconds after your first shot, throw
something on the floor of the exercise room. Make sure you’re a distance away. Try to make him shoot again. Then shoot back and move to another room. Keep distracting him. But don’t use more than one shot each time. We need the ammunition. Can you do this?”

  “Don’t have a choice.”

  “If I can get those night-vision goggles, we’ll have a lot of choices.” Balenger hoped he sounded convincing.

  Far from the holes in the medical room’s floor, they could safely switch on their headlamps. Balenger moved quietly through the kitchen, the library, and the surveillance room, finally coming to the bedroom. He stared at the locked trapdoor. In theory, the door to Danata’s suite remained barricaded, so Ronnie couldn’t get in and shoot at anyone coming down the staircase.

  In theory.

  Balenger took the pistol from Vinnie, then motioned for Amanda to unlock and open the trapdoor. He aimed as his headlamp pierced the darkness of the stairwell. No one. Breathing slightly easier, he gave the gun back.

  “Start counting to fifty.” He climbed into the stairwell and motioned for Amanda to close it. As he heard her lock the hatch over his head, he had the terrible sense of descending into hell.

  The coppery odor of the professor’s blood filled the exposed passageway and Danata’s living room. Balenger counted the seconds just as Vinnie did: three, four, five. Guided by only one source of light, feeling the darkness crowd him, Balenger crept lower. The furniture remained piled in front of the door, giving him slight encouragement. He unholstered the hammer from his utility belt and descended from the sixth level toward the fifth and its secret corridor, waving the hammer in front of him, testing for razor wire. He listened for water streaming into the stairwell but didn’t hear it, the roofs in this section of the hotel evidently remaining intact.

  He aimed his headlamp along the darkness of the fifth corridor. Something seemed to be in there, something seated motionless that filled him with suspicion, but he didn’t have time to investigate. He kept counting: eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The air felt colder as he reached the fourth level and went lower.