Apparently Chrissie was uncertain too. She stopped running and said, "Where, Sam? Where?"
From behind them Tessa said, "Sam, the doorway!"
For an instant he didn't understand what she meant. Then he saw the door swinging open at the end of the hall, about thirty yards away, the same door by which they had entered. A man stepped inside. The siren was still wailing, drawing nearer, so there were more of them on the way, a whole platoon of them. The guy who'd come through the door was just the first — tall, six feet five if he was one inch, but otherwise only a shadow, minimally backlighted by the security lamp outside and to the right of the door.
Sam squeezed off a shot with his.38, not bothering to determine if this man was an enemy, because they were all enemies, every last one of them — their name was legion — and he knew the shot was wide. His marksmanship was lousy because of his injured wrist, which hurt like hell after their misadventures in the culvert. With the recoil, pain burst out of that joint and all the way back to his shoulder, then back again, Jesus, pain sloshing around like acid inside him, from shoulder to fingertips. Half the strength went out of his hand. He almost dropped the gun.
As the roar of Sam's shot slammed back to him from the walls of the corridor, the guy at the far end opened fire with a weapon of his own, but he had heavy artillery. A shotgun. Fortunately he was not good with it. He was aiming too high, not aware of how the kick would throw the muzzle up. Consequently the first blast went into the ceiling only ten yards ahead of him, tearing out one of the unlit fluorescent fixtures and a bunch of acoustic tiles. His reaction confirmed his lack of experience with guns; he overcompensated for the kick, swinging the muzzle too far down as he pulled the trigger a second time, so the follow-up round struck the floor far short of target.
Sam did not remain an idle observer of the misdirected gunfire. He seized Chrissie and pushed her to the left, across the corridor and through a door into a dark room, even as the second flock of buckshot gouged chunks out of the vinyl flooring. Tessa was right behind them. She threw the door shut and leaned against it, as if she thought that she was Super-woman and that any pellets penetrating the door would bounce harmlessly from her back.
Sam shoved the woefully dim flashlight at her. "With my wrist, I'm going to need both hands to manage the gun."
Tessa swept the weak yellow beam around the chamber. They were in the band room. To the right of the door, tiered platforms — full of chairs and music stands — rose up to the back wall. To the left was a large open area, the band director's podium, a blond-wood and metal desk. And two doors. Both standing open, leading to adjoining rooms.
Chrissie needed no urging to follow Tessa toward the nearer of those doors, and Sam brought up the rear, moving backward, covering the hall door through which they had come.
Outside, the siren had died. Now there would be more than one man with a shotgun.
19
They had searched the first two floors. They were in the third-floor bedroom.
Harry could hear them talking. Their voices rose to him through their ceiling, his floor. But he couldn't quite make out what they were saying.
He almost hoped they would spot the attic trap in the closet and would decide to come up. He wanted a chance to blow a couple of them away. For Moose. After twenty long years of being a victim, he was sick to death of it; he wanted a chance to let them know that Harry Talbot was still a man to be reckoned with — and that although Moose was only a dog, his was nevertheless a life taken only with serious consequences.
20
In the eddying fog, Loman saw the single patrol car parked beside Shaddack's van. He braked next to it just as Paul Amberlay got out from behind the wheel. Amberlay was lean and sinewy and very bright, one of Loman's best young officers, but he looked like a high-school boy now, too small to be a cop — and scared.
When Loman got out of his car, Amberlay came to him, gun in hand, visibly shaking. "Only you and me? Where the hell's everybody else? This is a major alert."
"Where's everybody else?" Loman asked. "Just listen, Paul. Just listen."
From every part of town, scores of wild voices were lifted in eerie song, either calling to one another or challenging the unseen moon that floated above the wrung-out clouds.
Loman hurried to the back of the patrol car and opened the trunk. His unit, like every other, carried a 20-gauge riot gun for which he'd never had use in peaceable Moonlight Cove. But New Wave, which had generously equipped the force, did not stint on equipment even if it was perceived as unnecessary. He pulled the shotgun from its clip mounting on the back wall of the trunk.
Joining him, Amberlay said, "You telling me they've regressed, all of them, everyone on the force, except you and me?"
"Just listen," Loman repeated as he leaned the 20-gauge against the bumper.
"But that's crazy!" Amberlay insisted. "Jesus, God, you mean this whole thing is coming down on us, the whole damn thing?"
Loman grabbed a box of shells that was in the right wheel-well of the trunk, tore off the lid. "Don't you feel the yearning, Paul?"
"No!" Amberlay said too quickly. "No, I don't feel it, I don't feel anything."
"I feel it," Loman said, putting five rounds in the 20-gauge — one in the chamber, four in the magazine. "Oh, Paul, I sure as hell feel it. I want to tear off my clothes and change, change, and just run, be free, go with them, hunt and kill and run with them."
"Not me, no, never," Amberlay said.
"Liar," Loman said. He brought up the loaded gun and fired at Amberlay point-blank, blowing his head off.
He couldn't have trusted the young officer, couldn't have turned his back on him, not with the urge to regress so strong in him, and those voices in the night singing their siren songs.
As he stuffed more shells into his pockets, he heard a shotgun blast from inside the school.
He wondered if that gun was in the hands of Booker or Shaddack. Struggling to control his raging terror, fighting off the hideous and powerful urge to shed his human form, Loman went inside to find out.
21
Tommy Shaddack heard another shotgun, but he didn't think much about that because, after all, they were in a war now. You could hear what a war it was by just stepping out in the night and listening to the shrieks of the combatants echoing down through the hills to the sea. He was more focused on getting Booker, the woman, and the girl he'd seen in the hall, because he knew the woman must be the Lockland bitch and the girl must be Chrissie Foster, though he couldn't figure how they had joined up.
War. So he handled it the way soldiers did in the good movies, kicking the door open, firing a round into the room before entering. No one screamed. He guessed he hadn't hit anyone, so he fired again, and still no one screamed, so he figured they were already gone from there. He crossed the threshold, fumbled for the light switch, found it, and discovered he was in the deserted band room.
Evidently they had left by one of the two other doors, and when he saw that, he was angry, really angry. The only time in his life that he had fired a gun was in Phoenix, when he had shot the Indian with his father's revolver, and that had been close-up, where he could not miss. But still he had expected that he would be good with a gun. After all, Jeez, he had watched a lot of war movies, cowboy movies, cop shows on television, and it didn't look hard, not hard at all, you just pointed the muzzle and pulled the trigger. But it hadn't been that easy, after all, and Tommy was angry, furious, because they shouldn't make it look so easy in the movies and on the boob tube when, in fact, the gun jumped in your hands as if it was alive.