Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

The damned door creaked as I opened it. Why, I don’t know, it hadn’t on my way in, but maybe I was a little more impatient this time. Anyway, it creaked, and then they were pouring past me into the darkness, little cries of disbelief and pleasure, surprise that it was dark, shuddering gasps of clean, night-scented air.

And then the lights went on.

“Go!” I said. Harry was last, with the woman on his back, and he hesitated. “Go, get her out of here!” I shoved him into the night, and then reached forward to slam the door shut, closing him out. Closing me in.

I jumped for the nearest side door, which was closed but not locked. An office of some kind, windowless of course, nice and dark. I left the door open a crack, pressing my ear to it, and about three seconds later I heard voices.

“—like the outside door.” A man, his voice high, by nature or with tension.

“I’ll check it.” This man sounded big, his voice deeper and slower; younger, maybe. I heard footsteps approaching; they sounded heavy; my hand got ready on the gun.

“Not the door,” snapped the first one. “Downstairs first, so we know if any of them are loose.”

The footsteps paused; a door opened and I heard a pair of feet descending the metal stairs. The older man stayed at the top, but the voice that rang up from below was perfectly clear:

“They’re gone! All of them!”

The older man’s curses retreated down the corridor until they were drowned out by the racket his partner made, pounding up the steel stairs. When he reached the top, he shouted, “You want me to go after them?”

“Get a shotgun, and wake up Andrew and Mannie. Christ,” he said in a lower voice, “I knew we should have a dog.”

I was glad about the dog, not so happy about the shotgun. I shifted to put my eye to the crack, and eased it slightly wider until I could see a large back going away from me. My legs twitched with wanting to dive for the door, but I stayed put.

If I was on the outside, I couldn’t know how many of them there were. Outside, I could keep them from coming out that one door, but there were two others, and in no time at all, they’d circle around me. Outside, I’d be safer, but the others wouldn’t.

Oh hell, admit it: I’d shut the door to force Harry and the rest to run.

I’d shut the door because I wanted to climb down the throats of these animals and tear them apart from within.

In fact, although I hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly when I made my choice, it wasn’t altogether idiotic. There was a good chance these guys would all make a dash for the door at once, allowing me to pick them off, or at least pin them down. I’d brought enough bullets to keep things hot for a while.

And for a minute, it looked like it would be okay. A clot of men appeared at the far end of the corridor, milling around and shouting at each other. Then they started in my direction.

I waited, counting heads: four. It was hard to tell exactly where they were in relation to the building’s front door, but I could see enough to know when they passed the door to the prison stairs. I gave it a few seconds, then opened the door wide enough to fit my gun arm through.

I’d hoped the older voice, the guy in charge, would be first, but I figured he was probably the man I’d seen drive up in the red Jeep, and sure enough, the head of white hair was barely visible past various shoulders. The big guy whose back I’d seen was at the front, carrying a shotgun. The two other guys, both with that rumpled look of being dragged out of bed, seemed like people who spent their days in a lab torturing mice, more at home with scalpels and microscopes than with the weapons they carried.

Didn’t matter: They were all targets.

I opened fire. The big guy saw me a split second before my finger went down and dove through a doorway—I thought I winged him, but it was one of the scientists behind him who fell. The white-haired guy and the skinny assistant on the left vanished into other doorways.

A shotgun went off, spattering the hallway but not making it through my wooden door. There was a lot of shouting and cursing, and finally a sharp order from that first voice I’d heard. Silence. Then: “Who is there?”

“Guess,” I called.

“Which one of you is that?”

“Oh, I’m a whole new nightmare for you.”

Silence again.

“I don’t know what you want, young man, but—”

“What do I want? I want you to die, in a whole lot of pain.”

Silence, longer this time.

“Well,” he said at last. “You can probably understand that we don’t wish to oblige you.”