A rear door in the storage closet opened into a second lab that seemed to double as a biology classroom. Anatomy charts hung on one wall. The room offered no better place to hide than had the previous lab.
Holding Chrissie close against her side, Tessa looked at Sam and whispered, "Now what? Wait here and hope he can't find us … or keep moving?"
"I think it's safer to keep moving," Sam said. "Easier to be cornered if we sit still."
She nodded agreement.
He eased past her and Chrissie, leading the way between the lab benches, toward the door to the hall.
From behind them, either in the dark chemical-storage room or in the unlighted chemistry lab beyond it, came a soft but distinct clink.
Sam halted, motioned Tessa and Chrissie ahead of him, and turned to cover the exit from the storage room.
With Chrissie at her side, Tessa stepped to the hall door, turned the knob slowly, quietly, and eased the door outward.
Shaddack came from the darkness in the corridor, into the pale and inconstant pulse of light from her flash, and rammed the barrel of his shotgun into her stomach. "You're gonna be sorry now," he said excitedly.
27
They pulled the trapdoor down. A shaft of light from the closet shot up to the rafters, but it didn't illuminate the far corner in which Harry sat with his useless legs splayed out in front of him.
His bad hand was curled in his lap, while his good hand fiercely clasped the pistol.
His heart was hammering harder and faster than it had in twenty years, since the battlefields of Southeast Asia. His stomach was churning. His throat was so tight he could barely breathe. He was dizzy with fear. But, God in heaven, he sure felt alive.
With a squeak and clatter, they unfolded the ladder.
28
Tommy Shaddack shoved the muzzle into her belly and almost blew her guts out, almost wasted her, before he realized how pretty she was, and then he didn't want to kill her any more, at least not right away, not until he'd made her do some things with him, do some things to him. She'd have to do whatever he wanted, anything, whatever he told her to do, or he could just smear her across the wall, yeah, she was his, and she better realize that, or she'd be sorry, he'd make her sorry.
Then he saw the girl beside her, a pretty little girl, only ten or twelve, and she excited him even more. He could have her first, and then the older one, have them any which way he wanted them, make them do things, all sorts of things, and then hurt them, that was his right, they couldn't deny him, not him, because all the power was in his hands now, he had seen the moonhawk three times.
He pushed through the open door, into the room, keeping the gun in the woman's belly, and she backed up to accommodate him, pulling the girl with her. Booker was behind them, a startled expression on his face. Tommy Shaddack said, "Drop your gun and back away from it, or I'll make raspberry jelly out of this bitch, I swear I will, you can't move fast enough to stop me."
Booker hesitated.
"Drop it!" Tommy Shaddack insisted.
The agent let go of the revolver and sidestepped away from it.
Keeping the muzzle of the Remington hard against the woman's belly, he made her edge around until she could reach the light switch and click on the fluorescents. The room leaped out of shadows.
"Okay, now, all of you," Tommy Shaddack said, "sit down on those three stools, by that lab bench, yeah, there, and don't do anything funny."
He stepped back from the woman and covered them all with the shotgun. They looked scared, and that made him laugh.
Tommy was getting excited now, really excited, because he had decided he would kill Booker in front of the woman and the girl, not swift and clean but slowly, the first shot in the legs, let him lie on the floor and wriggle a while, the second shot in the gut but not from such a close range that it finished him instantly, make him hurt, make the woman and the girl watch, show them what a customer they had in Tommy Shaddack, what a damned tough customer, make them grateful for being spared, so grateful they'd get on their knees and let him do things to them, do all the things he had wanted to do for thirty years but which he had denied himself, let off thirty years of steam right here, right now, tonight….
29
Beyond the house, filtering into the attic through vents in the eaves, came eerie howling, point and counterpoint, first solo and then chorus. It sounded as if the gates of hell had been thrown open, letting denizens of the pit pour forth into Moonlight Cove.
Harry worried about Sam, Tessa, and Chrissie.
Below him, the unseen conversion team locked the collapsible ladder in place. One of them began to climb into the attic.
Harry wondered what they would look like. Would they be just ordinary men — old Doc Fitz with a syringe and a couple of deputies to assist him? Or would they be Boogeymen? Or some of the machine-men Sam had talked about?
The first one ascended through the open trap. It was Dr. Worthy, the town's youngest physician.
Harry considered shooting him while he was still on the ladder. But he hadn't fired a gun in twenty years, and he didn't want to waste his limited ammunition. Better to wait for a closer shot.
Worthy didn't have a flashlight. Didn't seem to need one. He looked straight toward the darkest corner, where Harry was propped, and said, "How did you know we were coming, Harry?"
"Cripple's intuition," Harry said sarcastically.
Along the center of the attic, there was plenty of headroom to allow Worthy to walk upright. He rose from a crouch as he came out from under the sloping rafters near the trap, and when he had taken four steps forward, Harry fired twice at him.
The first shot missed, but the second hit low in the chest.
Worthy was flung backward, went down hard on the bare boards of the attic floor. He lay there for a moment, twitching, then sat up, coughed once, and got to his feet.
Blood glistened all over the front of his torn white shirt. He had been hit hard, yet he had recovered in seconds.
Harry remembered what Sam had said about how the Coltranes had refused to stay dead. Go for the data processor.
He aimed for Worthy's head and fired twice again, but at that distance—
about twenty-five feet — and at that angle, shooting up from the floor, he couldn't hit anything. He hesitated with only four rounds left in the pistol's clip.
Another man was climbing through the trap.
Harry shot at him, trying to drive him back down.
He came on, unperturbed.
Three rounds in the pistol.
Keeping his distance, Dr. Worthy said, "Harry, we're not here to harm you. I don't know what you've heard or how you've heard about the project, but it isn't a bad thing. …"
His voice trailed off, and he cocked his head as if to listen to the un-human cries that filled the night outside. A peculiar look of longing, visible even in the dim wash of light from the open trap, crossed Worthy's face.