Into the Inferno Page 34

  The collision propelled us both away from Stephanie and against the wall in the corridor, where we crumpled into a heap.

  I weighed a hundred ninety-seven pounds—or I had at the beginning of the week—yet hitting Donovan had been like butting my head into the bole of a two-hundred-year-old tree.

  While he was still trying to get up, I struck him at the base of the nose with my palm. The blow tilted his head backward and yielded a spurt of blood. He cocked his head back and gave me a hellish look. His glasses were askew, the frame broken.

  “Out of here, Stephanie!” I said. “Get out! Now!”

  Before I could step away, Donovan swung his heavy leg around in an arc and knocked me off my feet.

  Ian Hjorth, who studied martial arts, had once brought in a video that showed a karate expert killing a steer with a single blow to the head. Donovan’s hands looked capable of that, thick and heavy and callused. I’d learned a couple of tricks from watching Hjorth’s videos; one was that if you could help it, you didn’t want to get into a fight with someone who’d trained for street fighting. I certainly didn’t want my elbows, wrists, or fingers broken backward, my eyeballs gouged out, my ears ripped off. I didn’t want my lungs collapsed. I didn’t want anybody inserting his fingers into my nostrils, yet I had a feeling I was headed for some or all of it.

  Before I could regain my feet, Donovan clubbed me across the side of my skull. It felt like I’d been hit with a four-by-four chunk of lumber.

  The blow lifted me off the ground; it also silenced the ringing that had been in both ears all day, silenced my left ear completely, so that I was now hearing in mono.

  “Run, Jim!” Stephanie called out, a note of hopelessness in her voice.

  “You run,” I said, the words coming to my ears with a weird little echo as if from inside a jar. “Get the hell out.”

  Donovan and I were on our feet now, squaring off. Somewhere along the line he’d lost the gun, though the room still reeked of gun smoke.

  It took fifteen seconds to figure out what he was waiting for. Then it occurred to me. He was waiting for me to regain my senses. He wanted me alert and aware. He wanted me to feel each blow.

  I was three or four inches taller than Donovan, yet he outweighed me by a muscular forty pounds. On his side he had bulk, power, strength, cunning, years of training, and a desire to inflict maximum damage; on mine I had reach, leverage, and a willingness to suffer. He was a black belt in karate; I had walked away from any schoolyard challenge reciting: “ ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ” In other words, I was accustomed to being laughed at but not to fighting.

  Extending his fists, he spoke softly. “Now you’re going to hurt.”

  I didn’t even see the blow. It knocked me into DiMaggio’s office, where I staggered, tripped, did a backward somersault, and got to my knees and then to my feet in one motion.

  I stood up in time to take a blow to the face.

  Inside the office, Stephanie was cowering behind the door, a hypodermic syringe clutched in her hand.

  Taking short, quick steps, Donovan stepped forward and hit me in the face again, hard. There was no telling how I kept my feet under me. I was seeing stars now. Lots of them.

  My jaw and mouth were numb and felt watery.

  Something hit the floor at my feet. At first I didn’t want to look down because I was afraid it was one of my teeth. When I did look down, I found I was wrong.

  It was two of my teeth.

  More loose teeth were floating around in my mouth.

  When he threw his next punch, I ducked and his fist connected with the top of my skull. I wanted to drop to the floor and scream in pain, but by sheer force of will I kept my feet under me, swaying in place like a drunk.

  “Shit!” he said, cradling his fist with his free hand. He threw another punch with his uninjured hand, but I stepped back and he missed. He missed another punch, this also with his undamaged hand. Maybe he wasn’t going to kill me after all.

  Then something hit me in the mouth.

  I landed heavily on my right side, rolled, managed to get to my hands and knees. After choking for a few seconds, I coughed up an object that had been lodged in my throat.

  A molar.

  The left side of my face was swollen and tight. My jaw was broken.

  I recalled once reading about a man in a bear attack who’d been besieged by the same feeling of disbelief that was now gripping me. In his wildest dreams he’d never imagined himself getting eaten by a bear. In my wildest dreams I’d never imagined getting beaten to death by a chemist.

  61. STEPHANIE GETS INTO DONOVAN’S BRAIN

  I knew after he finished with me, he would start on Stephanie. I knew also that there wouldn’t be a thing I could do to stop him.

  Not that I was having much luck stopping this.

  The thought of Stephanie forced me to my feet. Broken and bleeding, the least I could do was keep him occupied. Give her time to flee.

  He stood well back while I propped my legs under me like a newborn calf, wobbly and wet and trying not to stumble.

  Stephanie said, “For God’s sake, stop it. You’re killing him.”

  Startled by the nearness of her voice, Donovan relaxed his martial arts stance for a moment and turned toward her. “Baby, you haven’t seen a thing.”

  “Leave him alone, you big creep.”

  “Your boyfriend broke my hand. It’ll be a while before I’m through with him.”

  Their brief exchange distracted Donovan long enough for me to run at him, head down, building up speed.

  I tackled him just above the knees. My thought was that he’d go over backward, but it was like hitting a wall. If I’d had any teeth left, I might have sunk them into his thigh, but there was only wind and fluid where my choppers had been.

  And then, without warning, he toppled over and I was on top of him, my fists moving like a blur of jackhammers. Or so I wanted to think.

  Eventually one of my blows found the family jewels. Donovan yowled and curled into a fetal position.

  Stephanie took a step toward us. “No,” I said. “Stay back.”

  He rolled over and grasped me with both meaty hands, tearing at my clothes. The hospital top ripped apart. I might as well have been wrestling a gorilla—one of those big boys turning truck tires into pretzels behind the glass at Woodland Park Zoo.

  Somehow he got one arm around my neck, and his grip grew tighter. We struggled, rolling across the floor, crashing into the desk, knocking over a chair, rolling across the room to the vault.

  When he tightened his arm around my neck, the pain became unendurable.

  It was a strangely intimate position, his breath warm and moist on my face, the blood from his nose trickling into my eye. I could feel the warmth of his arm around my neck. Could hear his heartbeat thumping on my back as he slowly closed off my airway.

  He cinched his arm tighter, crushing my windpipe a quarter inch at a time. After some moments of this, he loosened his grip enough for me to get a snatch of air. He didn’t want me to die too quickly.

  We were on the floor, my eyes bulging, face itchy, limbs shuddering like a dying wildebeest. Big cats didn’t kill their prey by ripping them apart. Not like you’d think. They clamped their jaws on the victim’s throat and waited while the kicking victim exhausted the air in its lungs. It was revolting to watch, but not nearly as revolting as when you were doing the kicking and shuddering yourself.

  “Run, Steph,” I gasped.

  As I began to black out, a shadow passed over us. For a moment I entertained a feeble thought that Stephanie was going to stab the bastard with the hypodermic she’d been holding. Or that she’d located his gun and was moving closer so she could put a slug into his brain stem.

  Instead, she stabbed me. Hard.

  In the buttocks. The needle went in so deep, I swear it hit bone. Despite the fact that I was on the brink of death, it hurt like hell.

  A moment a
fter the pain in my butt subsided, Donovan screamed.

  Realizing his grip had slackened, I wrenched myself out of his arms and rolled free. Climbed to my feet.

  My neck was so stiff I could only turn a few degrees in either direction, and even that produced pain. I’d never had a broken neck, but if pain was any indication, I had one now. Along with the broken jaw.

  On the floor, Donovan whimpered. Strange to hear him actually whimper. It was easy to see why. Stephanie had buried the syringe in his right temple. It was hanging there like an errant dart.

  When Donovan grabbed the syringe and yanked it out, the needle broke off in his skull.

  He looked up at Stephanie, his pale eyes burning, and for the first time since I’d met him, his tone of voice actually sounded menacing. “I’m going to keep you alive, doc. I’m going to keep you alive all night.”

  By now I was at the desk searching for a weapon. I was clutching a pen when he grabbed me from behind, knocked me down, got hold of my scrubs, and, as I kicked at him, pulled one pant leg off, then the other. The cloth caught on my foot and he dragged me across the room by the pants.

  Once clear of the mess around the desk, he stood over me like a big-time professional wrestler, The Chemist, arms held high. Then he fell on me. It was almost in slow motion. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop him. I had only enough time to raise the pen before he landed on me like a sack of steer manure.

  Oddly, his weight sagged. It took a moment for me to realize what happened.

  I pushed him off and rolled across the floor.

  His breathing was heavy and ragged.

  Propping himself upright on the floor, he peered about the room with one eye. The pen was protruding from his other eyeball, a good four inches of it buried in his socket. He hadn’t quite figured it out yet. I was finding it difficult to believe, myself.

  When he began crawling toward me, I noticed a trickle of clear fluid dribbling down his cheek.

  “Stop right there,” I said. “It’s over.”

  “Not bloody likely. I’m gonna tie your guts around your neck and use ’em for a choker,” he whispered, reaching for me.

  A single Bible lay on the floor between us. I grabbed it with both hands and hit him in the face with the flat of it.

  The blow drove the pen in, so that now only the tip showed.

  “Shouldn’t have done that,” he said, toppling over sideways. He stopped breathing for a while and then started again.

  I turned to Stephanie. “You think he’s going to make it?”

  “I’ve seen people take that much trauma to the brain and live.”

  We stood on either side, watching his chest heave.

  My own breathing was rapid and shallow, my voice hoarse, my pulped mouth dripping blood and saliva. Two fingers of my left hand were beginning to stiffen at unnatural angles. Several of my remaining teeth teetered back and forth when I ran my tongue over them. No matter. After tomorrow only a numbskull would feed me solid food.

  “Why’d you stick me?”

  “I had to give you the antidote.”

  “You have the antidote?”

  “I found it in the vault while you were in the shower. Right before I heard him coming.”

  “Couldn’t you have used a smaller needle?”

  “It was the only one I could find.”

  “Are you telling me I’m going to be okay?”

  Stephanie held up a bottle of clear fluid. “The instructions on the inside of the vault claim it’s ninety percent effective if taken within the first hour of infection. Eighty if taken on day two. Seventy on day three. And so forth. It’s a linear progression.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not up to the math,” I said, leaning against DiMaggio’s desk.

  “You’re on the evening of day six. That gives you a forty percent chance. Maybe thirty.”

  “They must have gone through a shitload of victims to have it worked out so meticulously.”

  “Or a trainload of chimpanzees.”

  “Does it say anything about afterward? For people like Holly?”

  “Zero cures after the first seven days.”

  “They had the antidote all along. Your aunt. This clod. Any of them could have handed it to us.”

  “I’m sure that’s why Achara was killed. I know she wanted to help you.”

  Donovan was crawling across the floor now in what appeared to be a random pattern. Like a slug on a sunny sidewalk.

  “What about him?” Stephanie asked.

  “After we get out, we call the police. Anonymously.”

  Except somebody had already called the police.

  We heard sirens and reached the window in time to see Marge DiMaggio and two coworkers leap out of a Ford Expedition below us. They dashed through the front door of the building just as a police cruiser pulled to a stop behind the Ford, blue lights flashing. A second and third cruiser were coming in fast. When I stepped back from the window, my foot touched Donovan’s semiautomatic on the floor.

  “Hide in the other room,” I said, picking up the gun. “Once I get them in here, go out the back way.”

  “I’m not going to desert you.”

  “We get in a dither with the police, what do you think is going to happen to that?” I gestured to the vial Stephanie was holding. “Karrie needs it. Maybe you, too. That stuff is all over the room.”

  “I didn’t touch any of it.”

  “Let’s hope not. I’m going to keep your cell phone. When I know you’re safe, I’ll surrender.”

  Sixty seconds later DiMaggio and two underlings I recalled from our earlier visit popped into the doorway, huffing and puffing as if they’d run the whole way. Stephanie had concealed herself in the smaller room off to the side. The police remained outside.

  “Good God!” Marge DiMaggio said, bursting into the room.

  “Stay out. We’ve got D number fifty-six all over the place.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Donovan moaned. The coworkers, a woman and a man, followed DiMaggio through the spill area, muttering about getting out of the building, that I had a gun, that I was berserk. After the fight with Donovan and the threats to Stephanie’s life, I felt berserk.

  “What’s wrong with his eye?” DiMaggio demanded, kneeling next to Donovan. “What did you do to him?”

  “Just a little less than he was trying to do to me.”

  62. EXECUTIVE ANNIE OAKLEY ENDS

  MADMAN’S MIDNIGHT TERROR SPREE

  I pointed the gun at Marge DiMaggio and told all three of them to stand in the corner behind the desk, an area I knew to be free of the chemical. The coworkers complied, but DiMaggio was the kind of woman who could get herself killed over a two-for-one pizza coupon. And she wasn’t about to take orders from me.

  “Over behind your desk, Mrs. DiMaggio.”

  “You go to hell.”

  “He’s got D number fifty-six on him. By now you have it all over yourself.”

  Neither of the coworkers could take their eyes off the puckered puddle that had been Donovan’s eyeball.

  If the police were inside the building, I couldn’t hear them, but then I was stone-deaf in one ear, so it wasn’t likely I’d hear the sound of footsteps. “I was in your safe. Some of the D number fifty-six spilled on the floor.”

  DiMaggio got up and tried the vault handle, then smiled. She had the encyclopedia of smugness down pat. “You don’t expect me to believe you’ve been inside this?”

  “Achara gave me the combination.”

  “Did she now?” Amusement flitted in her dark eyes.

  I might have recited the combination, but my head was ringing so badly I couldn’t have spelled my middle name. Could barely remember it. Jerome. James Jerome Swope.

  “If you’re going to prevaricate, Mr. Swope, at least be reasonable. Achara didn’t know the combination any more than the security guard out at the front gate knows that’s a Paul Klee on the wall. Try again. I don’t believe you.”
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  There was more police activity in the parking lot below the window, men giving orders, car doors slamming, the sounds of radios. The office walls jumped with blue lights.

  “Fine,” I said. “Kill yourself. In the meantime, go over to the window and tell the police you three are hostages and we need a medic unit. While you’re at it, tell them to stay out of the building.”

  “The police have been instructed to remain outside, at least until our security personnel call them in.”

  I caught my reflection in the office window.

  The too-small hospital blues I’d put on after my shower had been shredded and torn during my combat with Donovan, so now I was naked. I pulled the remaining strands from around my hips and off my neck. The clothes I’d worn from the hotel were contaminated. There were more hospital blues in the shower facility, but I wasn’t going to turn my back on DiMaggio to get them. I would just have to be naked.

  I figured she had a gun hidden either in her desk or on her person and would use it on me the moment I looked away. What better opportunity to silence a critic?

  EXECUTIVE ANNIE OAKLEY ENDS MADMAN’S MIDNIGHT TERROR SPREE. She would be a heroine.

  There was a 40 percent chance the substance Stephanie had injected into me would reverse the syndrome, which meant there was a 60 percent chance it would not.

  I’d been living with this syndrome for six days, but it felt like six months. Or six years. Time had sped up and slowed down, compressed and expanded. I was prepared to leave this world, conditioned to give up the ghost through either the death of my body or the loss of function in my central nervous system.

  No matter what happened, my view of life on this planet would never be the same. I would take nothing for granted. Not after burying Harold Newcastle and Stan Beebe. Not after seeing Joel McCain, Jackie Feldbaum, and Holly Riggs turn into nerveless lumps. Not after escaping Caputo’s trailer explosion, watching my house burn down around my ears, not after thinking my children were dead. After hammering a writing utensil into a man’s brain. Nothing would be the same.