The scuttling became a whisper, then a voice talking into his ear. Mlinko, it was saying. Tell us what happened, Mlinko. Mlinko, please pick up the telephone.
He listened for a while, finally said, "This isn't Mlinko."
The whispering stopped. For a moment, he thought the line had gone dead.
When the voice came back, it was no longer a whisper, but still flat, uninflected.
"Mr. Kline," the voice said.
"Yes," said Kline.
"Would you mind putting Mlinko on?"
"Mlinko seems to be dead," said Kline.
"Appears or is?"
"Both," said Kline.
"You've caused a lot of trouble," the voice said.
"I didn't ask for any of it," he could not stop himself from saying.
"Yes," said the voice. "In that case, you must remember how the rest of the conversation goes. We're still coming for you."
V
Later, once he made it to the loading dock, he wasn't quite sure how he had managed. Only the first part was clear. He had dropped the receiver and then tried to bend down to search Mlinko's pockets, but before he was even bending his knees, he realized that there'd be no getting up again.
He looked for something on the bedside table to use as a weapon, but there was nothing. He pushed off the bed and made slowly for the door. The pain in his eye was still there, more a constant pressure than a lacerating pain as long as he made no quick movements with his shoulder.
He shuffled toward the doorway, feeling as if he were moving underwater. Once there, he balanced against the posts and then moved through the slick of blood. Davis was lying to one side, face up, throat slit, neck cricked back. Two of his fingers had been severed and removed. The blood felt warm through Kline's socks.
He slipped and almost went down, then nearly blacked out and started to go down again. He came to himself clinging to the desk of the nurses' station, on the other side of which were a pair of nurses, both with their throats cut, hands hidden so he couldn't tell if any of their fingers had been freshly amputated. One was the nurse who had answered the telephone earlier. The other he didn't recognize.
He pushed off and started down the hall, his breath coming out in throbs, his shoulder pulsing. The knife was back in his eye, sharp and long. Things began to come in bursts. Suddenly, he was farther down the hall than he thought and he could see a door at the hall's terminus, and without opening it he was on the other side. A scattering of faces reared up around him, frozen and static, like cutouts, stricken with odd expressions, falling quickly away. Another stretch of hall, a slowly descending ramp, then a tight staircase that he tumbled down as much as walked down. Somehow he was still standing when he reached the bottom. Another stretch of hall, this one dimly lit, a series of broken beds lined along one wall, followed by a series of sealed blue plastic bins. Then a double set of swinging doors. By the time things started happening in sequence again, he was slumped over a railing, staring down at the sewer grate below, on some sort of loading dock. Now what? he wondered. The dock was empty, no vehicles to be seen. If he followed the railing in one direction, there was a set of stairs he could go down. He could take them down and then climb the incline of the drive out of the hospital. It wasn't too steep, but he still wasn't sure he could make it. In the other direction, the railing ended just before a large green dumpster. There might be a gap between the dumpster and the far wall. Perhaps he could squeeze in.
He was still trying to decide what to do when he realized two figures had started down the drive and were coming quickly, shadows reeling in closer behind them with each step.
He turned and shuffled toward the dumpster. He could hear the dull echo of their footsteps now. I've been seen, he thought, but kept moving anyway, slower and slower it felt. He could see the gap better as he came closer, but still wasn't sure if it was big enough.
When he reached it, he saw that it wasn't.
He backed into it as far as he could and waited. It was a little darker there, but not dark enough to hide him. He'd probably been seen. Or maybe, he told himself, they aren't looking for me.
They came up the loading dock stairs and right to him.
"You're Kline," one of them said, the dark-haired one. He was missing an eye and most of the fingers on one hand. The other hand had been replaced by a gun prosthetic. An ear was gone as well. The other man, blond, lagging slightly behind, seemed only to be missing a hand, his right. His other hand held a gun.
Kline nodded. The inside of his head felt bruised.
"What did you do to Mlinko?" the dark-haired man asked.
"You mean specifically?"
"I mean where is she?"
"She's not anywhere," said Kline. "She's dead."
The man lifted his gun-arm, pointed it at Kline's head. "I suppose you know we've come to kill you," he said.
"I can't say I'm surprised," said Kline.
"Any last words?" asked the blond man, lifting his gun as well.
"I don't know," said Kline.
"You don't know?" said the dark-haired man, raising his eyebrows.
The blond man, Kline realized abruptly, had taken a step back and was now well behind the dark-haired one. He was no longer pointing his gun at Kline: it seemed to be slowly drifting away. A moment more and it was aimed at the dark-haired man's head, just behind his range of vision.
"Yes," said Kline quickly. "I do have something to say."
"What is it?" said the dark-haired man.
Kline opened his mouth but didn't speak, just kept looking from one man to the other, waiting for whatever would happen next.
"Too late," said the dark-haired man. "Time to die," he said, and then he was shot in the head by the blond man. He fell, gargling and frothing until the blond man pushed the snout of his pistol against the other man's ear and shot him again.
The blond man kicked the body once and then put his pistol away. "He cometh not with an olive branch but with a sword. He smiteth," he said, then moved toward Kline, smiling.
"Mr. Kline," he said, holding out his hand. "What a pleasure it is to finally meet you."
PART TWO
~ ~ ~
He could hear the sound of cars ahead, at some distance-or perhaps only something that sounded like cars. Perhaps only the wind. It was hard to know what he was hearing and what he only hoped to hear. He limped toward the sound.
There was a brief rise and then a dip and then another rise. Something was scraping the lining of his skull. He came out of the scrub and went down into the dip and stopped in a sickly stand of cottonwood edging a dried streambed. After that, there was no cover, only sparse dry grasses and dirt.
He leaned against the tree awhile. Yes, he thought, almost certainly cars. He tried to imagine climbing the rise and seeing asphalt at the top, but he couldn't imagine it. Before he knew it, his body had slipped and he was sitting, stump throbbing. He wasn't sure he'd be able to stand up again, let alone make it up the rise.
With his remaining hand, he unwrapped his stump. Its extreme showed the dead circles from the burner, pus seeping through where he had burnt it too deeply, two lumps just below the elbow that must have been the sheared bones. He covered it up again.