“Wait!” he said, but she was not looking at him.
This time it was Emily who pulled Jack down. He turned as he fell, looking back along the corridor at the two Choppers who had appeared at its junction with the hotel's central core. They were the same man and woman he had seen talking to Miller outside the room door.
Bullets ripped along the corridor, slicing into the plaster walls, blowing jagged splinters from door frames, filling their world with violence and noise once more.
Rosemary braced herself against the wall, then looked down at her gun, turning it this way and that.
“Safety?” Jack shouted, because he really had no idea either.
The shooting stopped. “That's them!” a voice hissed.
“Okay,” the woman said. “Just get the old bitch.” The two soldiers ran along the hallway, guns raised, and when the woman stopped and braced into a firing position, the male Chopper jerked to a halt and shot his companion in the leg.
She grunted and flopped to the carpeted floor, dropping her gun and rolling immediately onto her back.
The tall soldier seemed to be fighting with his weapon, yanking it this way and that as if someone invisibly was holding the barrel. He pointed it at the woman writhing on the floor before him, shaking his head and moaning, “No, no…”
A shape appeared behind him at the corridor junction. Puppeteer.
“No!” the soldier shouted, and he shot his friend again.
Jack turned away, but he still saw her head whip back, and blood splash across the floor and up the corridor walls.
“Come on,” Rosemary said. She nodded briefly to Puppeteer, then pushed the fire exit door open.
Jack hustled Emily through first, following her and turning around. As Rosemary let go of the door and its closer pulled it shut, he saw Puppeteer approaching the remaining Chopper, right hand held out and fingers playing the air.
The soldier screamed as his feet left the floor and his head was crushed, slowly, against the elaborately corniced ceiling.
“Jack,” Emily said, “I should have got that on film.”
“Kids,” Rosemary said. “So resilient.”
Jack barked one loud, harsh laugh, and then followed Rosemary down the stairs.
“Safety catch,” he said.
Rosemary shook her head. “Dear, I honestly don't know if I could ever shoot another human being.”
“Even if they're trying to shoot you?” Emily asked.
They reached the ground floor and continued down to the basement level. There were no windows here, no viewing panels in the doors, and the stairwell was dark and functional. Jack took a small torch from his rucksack and lit their way.
“Something has to set us apart from them,” the woman said. And though Jack was still angry with her, his respect for her doubled.
The hotel's basement corridor was illuminated by a few narrow, dirty windows at high level. They looked out past iron railings at the street before the hotel. Something was burning out there, and Jack thought it was one of the Choppers’ trucks.
“What the hell are those two Superiors doing?” he asked. “How can they take on an army?”
“I doubt there were just two,” Rosemary said. “And they have such powers, Jack! I know of a fire starter, a woman who can confuse senses so that she's almost invisible, and someone who can change the colour of things.”
The sounds of fighting had ceased for now, but the air was heavy inside the hotel, as though people with death on their minds still stalked its corridors and searched its empty rooms.
“I hope Sparky and Jenna are okay,” Emily said, voicing a fear which Jack had been harbouring since seeing them exit the stairwell. Jenna had been wounded, and he hoped that Sparky would be sensible; no heroics, and no revenge for his dead brother. Not yet.
“They'll be fine,” he said.
“And Lucy-Anne,” Emily added, but Jack could think of no easy way to respond to that.
“We should leave,” Rosemary said. She was gasping for breath, but looked like she would never give up. “If your friends made it down this far, they'll be waiting for us behind the hotel.”
The basement was warren of store rooms, cupboards and corridors ending at closed doors. The air was grimy and grey. Emily pulled a penlight from her rucksack and it complimented Jack's torch, giving them enough light to find their way to a set of doors to the outside.
“Wait,” Jack whispered. He held out his hands for the gun.
“Jack…” Emily said.
“Dear…”
“I'd rather shoot them and be damned, than be dead and morally superior,” he said.
Rosemary handed him the weapon. He'd never fired a gun, but he knew the basics. He checked that the safety was off and held it in both hands, finger resting across the trigger and guard. It made him feel safer. It made him think he could do something to protect Emily, if he really had to.
He remembered Gordon's head flipping back as the bullets took his face apart.
He thought of the soldier he'd just seen shot, the blood and other stuff splashing from her shattered skull.
Slowly, he nudged the door. It was unlocked. It creaked open into the courtyard he'd seen from the hotel room. They could be hiding anywhere, he thought. Ready to take us to Miller, just me and Emily. The fact that the Chopper had said he wanted at least one of them alive did not make him feel the slightest bit safer.
He listened for Lucy-Anne; crying, shouting, screaming. She was not there.
They heard more shooting. It seemed to come from the front of the hotel, the shots echoing from abandoned buildings and giving them voice for the first time in years. There were shouts, yet more gunfire, and then a heavy whump as something exploded.
“Jack!” Sparky said. He appeared from behind one of the cars, and Jack almost did not recognise him. His denim jacket was darkened with blood, his hands red with it, and the look on his face was that of a child. I'm scared, it said. None of this is happening…none of this is real…take me home…
“Sparky! Where's…?” But Sparky had already turned and looked down behind the car.
“Oh, shit,” Jack said. He ran across the courtyard, nursing the gun across his chest as he went.
“Jenna?” Emily called. Jack heard her following him, and he hoped that she had put her camera away, because some moments were meant to be private.
Jenna was on the ground behind the car. It was an old Mazda 6, Jack saw, with one of those fish badges on the back that signified the owner was a Christian. Wonder if it did them any good? he thought, because Jenna was a believer too, he knew. And there she was, dying in a pool of her own blood.
She'd been shot in the stomach. Her hands were pressed there now, as if trying to penetrate to remove the foreign object. She could not lie still; her legs were raised and tensed, her shoulders lifting and falling alternately, and even though her eyes were open, Jack was not sure she could see him. She was in an awful amount of pain, biting her lower lip until it bled to prevent herself from crying out.
“Jenna.” He knelt beside her and leaned over, trying to catch her eye. She saw him, and he knew that she saw. But she was doing something far more difficult than trying to communicate. Every breath she had, every shred of strength, was spent trying to keep herself alive.
“What happened?” Jack asked Sparky when his friend knelt next to him.
“We'd made it down to the ground floor. Stupidly thought we should run across the foyer.” Every word was a gasp. “Someone was waiting behind the desk. Started shooting. She…fell. I dragged her into a doorway, down some steps, then I heard more shooting from up above. Screams. Whoever shot at us didn't follow us down. That's it. Been trying to stop the bleeding, but…” He shook his head. “You seen Lucy-Anne?”
“No,” Jack said. “Rosemary!”
“Is the bullet still in there?” She stood behind them. Emily was beside her, trying not to look at the blood but unable to look anywhere else.