Nina was scanning the room again, shoulders tense and eyes gone hard and hyper-vigilant.
“If your gunman isn’t here,” she said, voice low and constricted, “And he couldn’t have gotten out without passing us, then...”
“You’re not police.”
The new voice came from the doorway, flat and dull as the concrete floor. They turned. A man was standing there. Stocky, sturdily built, with an unremarkable yet familiar face.
He was aiming a rifle at them.
Walter blinked. The killer must have gone up to the fourth floor, then waited to see who they were. Clever, and frighteningly calm.
“What do you...”
He cut off abruptly, his bespectacled gaze flicking wide-eyed between Walter and Bell, Bell and Walter. His calm faltering for a critical second.
“It’s you,” he said, voice barely more than a breath.
As he hesitated, to Walter and Bell’s stunned surprise, Nina pulled a small handgun from her fringed suede purse and drew a bead on the killer.
“Drop it,” she hissed.
“Well,” the man replied, flashing a thin reptilian smile like a cut throat. “This is an interesting development.” He made no move to lower the rifle, aiming right between Walter’s eyes. “I never would have guessed that the bitch would turn out to be the one with the balls. What do you say, Annie Oakley? Think you’ve got balls enough to shoot me in cold blood before I pull the trigger on your boyfriend?
“Or...” He shifted his aim to Bell. “Is this your boyfriend?”
Nina gaze shifted from the killer to Bell and back again. There was a gloss of sweat on her quivering upper lip. Walter was desperate to do something, say something, anything—but his whole body felt frozen, throat clenched tight as a fist.
“Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.” The killer was chanting, shifting from Walter to Bell and back again. “Catch a hippie by his toe. If he hollers let him go. Eenie, meenie, miney...”
Instead of saying moe, he made a lightning fast lunge toward Nina, gracefully sidestepping her gun hand and whacking her above the ear with the butt of his rifle. Nina sagged bonelessly to the floor, gun skittering away across the concrete.
Anger swiftly overcame Walter’s fear and natural disinclination to violence, and he launched himself forward, arms flailing. Bell followed him in, trying to pin the stranger’s arms and prevent him from shooting Nina where she lay.
Their desperate and poorly coordinated attacks failed. The killer was as strong and precise as they were weak and uncertain. He kicked Bell in the chest, sending him crashing into the wall, then knocked Walter’s strikes away with the gun butt and punched him in the face.
Walter had never been punched in the face in his life. He’d never even been slapped. The shocking impact of it jarred his skull, short-circuiting his thought process and filling his eyes with blinding tears. Then the hot wave of pain washed over him and his legs buckled, the world black and spinning.
Still he managed to grab at the killer’s shirt, clawing at him, trying to drag him down.
“Walter!”
Bell lunged in again, and the killer shoved Walter away, spinning to face him. Walter hit the unforgiving concrete in a cloud of dust and something cracked him across the face, precisely where the stranger had hit him before.
The rifle. It was lying across his chest. Somehow he had managed to come away with it as the killer had turned.
Bell slammed down beside him, raising more dust, and the killer turned back to Walter, reaching for the rifle. Nina rolled and grabbed the killer, locking her fingers around one of his booted ankles.
“Shoot him, Walter!” she screamed. “Shoot him!”
Walter crabbed back toward the door and staggered up as the killer drove his heel into Nina’s mouth.
He trained the rifle on the killer.
The killer held out his hand.
“Give it to me,” he said.
Walter swallowed, dry throat clicking and clenching on nothing as he edged back, finger on the trigger. In that moment, even when confronting a ruthless killer, Walter was ashamed to find himself hesitating. He had never fired a gun, let alone had a reason to take a life, and he hoped to live out the rest of his natural days without ever doing so.
Even if he could find the courage to pull the trigger, and got lucky enough to hit his target, would the man go down? He looked so calm, so completely without fear, that Walter wondered if he might somehow be invulnerable. Or perhaps he could read Walter’s mind.
Perhaps he knew.
Well, there’s only one way to find out.
Walter sucked up a little half-swallowed sound he hoped wasn’t really a whimper, and backpedaled into the stairwell. He turned to the rail, then dropped the rifle down the well in the center of the stairs.
A solid body smashed into him, pushing him against the handrail, crushing his ribs. Hard knuckles punched him in the back of the head. The world turned to blur and static, but a voice cut through it, hissing in his ear.
“Smart,” it said. “I’ll give you that. Too bad it won’t be enough.”
Then Walter slumped back onto the cold metal floor of the landing, wincing and wheezing as footsteps rang away down the stairs, fast and steady. A moment later— at least it might have been a moment, it was hard to tell— fuzzy black shapes filled the door to the third floor and he heard a gruff curse from a familiar voice.
“Walter. Are you alright?”
The fuzzy shapes came closer, and knelt beside him. It was Bell and Nina. Nina had retrieved her gun but she looked terrible, with a long gash on her forehead and a split lip that had bled down to her chin.
Bell was pretty bad off, too. He had a bruise forming on his left cheek, and was as white as Walter had ever seen him.
“Help me.” Walter reached up to them. “We have to go after him.”
Bell gave him a flat look.
“And when we catch him, then what?” he asked. “More of the same?”
“But he must...” Walter tried to sit up, stabbed by a vicious pain in his ribs that nearly stole his breath. “...be stopped!”
Bell and Nina took his arms and helped him up. Nina squeezed his arm.
“We stopped him from killing those people,” she said. “That’s something to be proud of, isn’t it?”
Walter winced as his ribs twinged again, an echo of the earlier sharper pain. It still hurt to breathe.
“Of course,” he said. “But it won’t be enough. He said so. He’s not going to stop. He’s going to do something else. Kill someone else.”
“Well, we can’t be the ones to stop him.” Bell spread his arms, and looked down at himself. “We tried, and look what he did to us with his bare hands. He knows what he’s doing. We don’t.”
“So maybe we’re still the same ineffectual wimps we were back in the schoolyard when we were kids,” Walter said.
“Speak for yourself,” Nina muttered under her breath.
“I’ll be the first to admit that a life of reading and lab work does not a warrior make,” Walter continued. “But that doesn’t mean we just give up. We can’t give up! We saved the people on this particular bus, but what about the next one? And the one after that?”
He started down the stairs, cringing with every step as his battered body protested.
“But... but he could be down there right now,” Nina called after him. “Waiting. With his gun.”
“And how long do you propose we wait to go down?” He looked up at her from the landing. “Will it be safe after an hour? Two hours? Five? And who else will he have killed while we were waiting?”
Nina sighed.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I see your point. But let’s go slow and quiet this time, alright?” She raised the gun. “And let me go first.”
“But...”
“Listen. If he’s running, he’s already gone. We’ll never catch him. If he’s down there, waiting, pounding down the steps like stampeding buffalo will only let him know we’re coming. He’d pick us off one by one as we came through the door.”