The other writers were looking around in confusion. She had to get them out of the office. The only exit that didn’t lead to the hall was the door to the stairwell.
“Everybody!” Her scream cut through the babble of voices. “The stairs. Take the stairs!”
She hustled them toward the red Exit sign. The gunshots were closer now.
“What’s going on out there?” Monica was asking. Her black bangs flapped wildly. “Why are they screaming?”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Kirsten shouted. “The Gryphon?”
Wendy nodded once and heard Monica moan.
They reached the stairwell and streamed through the doorway as Wendy hurried them along. Kirsten was last in line. She looked at Wendy, standing outside the door, making no move to follow.
“Come on!” Kirsten shouted.
Wendy shook her head. “It’s me he’s after. If I go with you, I’ll get you all killed. And…” Another gunshot racketed down the hall. “And enough people have died for me already.”
“Wendy-”
“ Go!”
Kirsten went. The door banged shut behind her.
Then Wendy was alone in the room under the grid of fluorescent panels, with the deep, guttural coughs of gunfire closing in on her like the throaty growls of a hungry animal.
She ran toward the cubicles, thinking vaguely that she could hide in that maze of compartments, knowing her plan was hopeless, and then Franklin Rood rushed in through the open door, and his gaze swept the room and came to rest on her.
For a moment they both stood paralyzed, facing each other across a distance of thirty feet. Then Rood made a sound that might have been laughter.
“Got something for you, Wendy! Got a present for you!”
The shotgun bucked in his hands. She dived to the carpet, and the spray of shot whipped past her, cutting the windows at her back into a litter of jigsaw pieces. She snap-rolled behind the row of cubicles. Half-stumbling, half-crawling, she tried to outpace the hail of buckshot punching holes in the compartments’ thin particleboard walls. The hinged units swayed and fell like card houses. Computers exploded in showers of pinwheeling sparks.
The gunfire grew louder, nearer. Rood was circling around to the rear of the cubicles, chasing her down. At any second he would turn the corner and have her in his sights.
She reached a narrow aisle between two rows of partitions and cut through it to the front of the room. The doorway to the hall was unguarded for the moment. She ran for it, gasping.
Then she was racing down the corridor toward the reception area a million miles away. She wouldn’t make it. Couldn’t. Once Rood realized she’d eluded him, he would be after her again. He needed only one clear shot.
A blurred shape came up fast and nearly tripped her. She looked down and saw the body of a security guard sprawled in an office doorway. A revolver lay beside him, its cylinder open, a scatter of. 38 cartridges near his outstretched fingers.
She stooped, grabbed the revolver and a handful of cartridges, and then gunfire boomed behind her.
She vaulted the guard’s body and landed on one knee inside the office. She twisted to her feet and looked around. The office was small and empty save for a dead man in a business suit slumped over his desk, facedown on a blotter soaking up Rorschach patterns of blood. She recognized him-he was named Brady, and he’d had something to do with client relations-but she had no time to think about that now.
There was no way out other than the door to the hall. She would have to make her stand here. At least she had a gun, but, oh, God, such a little gun, no match for that cannon of Rood’s. She looked at the cartridges in her hand. Three. That was all she’d had time to snatch. She tamped the rounds into the chambers, leaving three of the charge holes empty, and snapped the cylinder shut.
To have any hope of fighting back, she would have to ambush Rood somehow. She looked around and saw nowhere to hide except the obvious places. Inside the closet. Behind the desk. She looked up at the fluorescent lights, the checkerboard of acoustic ceiling panels.
Then she knew what she had to do.
Jamming the revolver into the waistband of her skirt, she climbed onto the desk.
Rood stopped a few yards from the office doorway. The bitch had a gun; he’d seen her grab it. He had to be cautious, very cautious. It would hardly be fair if he lost the game now.
He fed more shells into the magazine, worked the slide handle once, then crept toward the open door. Hugged the doorframe. Listened. Heard nothing, nothing anywhere, except some anonymous victim’s distant, dying moans.
With a high, warbling yell he pivoted into the doorway, straddling the dead guard, and opened fire.
The office window vanished in a haze of sparkling dust. A geyser of glass and mineral water erupted from what had been a water cooler. Rood blasted the desk, hoping the bitch was concealed behind it. The dead man was thrown upright as if shocked awake. His swivel chair spun gaily, and his necktie flapped like a dog’s lolling tongue.
Rood fired till the gun was empty, then stepped back and reloaded. Warily he entered the office, turning in a full circle. He saw a closet door and punched a gaping hole in it with another burst of buckshot. Then he kicked in the door and peered inside. The bitch wasn’t there.
Behind the desk, then. That was where she’d hidden.
He circled the desk, booting the swivel chair out of his way.
She wasn’t there either.
But it didn’t make sense. He’d seen her take cover in this room, and he hadn’t seen her leave. She had to be here someplace, dammit, simply had to be.
It had taken Wendy only a few seconds to push one of the large two-by-three ceiling panels out of its frame, then grab hold of the wooden beam behind it and hoist herself off the desk. There was a bad moment when she was sure she couldn’t do it, couldn’t pull her body all the way up. Then a fresh jolt of adrenaline recharged her muscles. Grunting with strain, she hauled herself onto the beam and lay flat on her stomach. She slid the panel back into place, leaving a narrow aperture to see through.
Seconds later Rood was demolishing the room. Glass and noise everywhere. She tugged the gun free of her waistband and held it in two shaking hands, the hammer cocked, muzzle pointing through the slot. She wanted to fire, but she didn’t trust her aim; she had to wait till he was closer.
Finally he seemed satisfied that he’d killed her. He looked first in the closet, then behind the desk. He shook his head slowly.
As she watched, he moved to the front of the desk, still glancing around, his head tilted quizzically.
He was almost directly beneath her. She would never have a better opportunity.
Do it, she ordered.
She took a breath, gritted her teeth, and squeezed the trigger.
Click.
The gun hadn’t fired.
An empty chamber-oh, Jesus-she’d hit one of the empty chambers.
Rood heard the faint metallic click and whirled. He stared up at the gap between two of the ceiling panels and saw the gun barrel poking out, the suggestion of a pale face behind it.
She was above him, the bitch, the fucking bitch.
He raised the shotgun.
Wendy saw the shotgun come up fast. She pumped the trigger a second time.
Click.
Come on, come on.
She had time for one more try.
Her index finger flexed once.
The shock of recoil nearly threw her off the beam. The gunshot rang in her ears like an explosion. Rood staggered, blood blossoming on his chest.
She fired again. Another bullet slammed into Rood’s chest and sent him reeling back. He collapsed on the floor, the shotgun flying from his grasp to boomerang into a corner, and then he just lay there, his glasses canted at a ridiculous angle, groaning and rolling his head from side to side like a child in the throes of a nightmare.