26

GRANT WAS HURT: the pain narrowed his focus. Maybe everybody at the hospital knew about him, but it was home. He was wanted there. Needed. He could reach the glory…

And the cops had only been asking for information. Maybe they hadn't made a move yet. If they had, it was all over anyway; yet if he was ready, he could still reach the glory, there in the administrative wing, even if he couldn't make it to the Gods.

He screamed out of the apartment parking lot, down through the quiet streets, past a couple of girls on Rollerblades, out to the highway. He turned north and saw, on the other side of the highway, an SUV and a sedan coming south, fast, the sedan with a flasher on the roof.

Was the sedan chasing the SUV? He slowed, automatically thinking, Cop, and watched as the two vehicles went past. In the first, in the driver's seat, he recognized Davenport.

They were coming after him. Going to the apartment…

"Go," he shouted to himself. "Go, go, go, go…"

The odds of getting to the Gods Down the Hall suddenly seemed slimmer. Yet… there was no choice, really. Go for the hospital, go for glory, or die on some highway like a dog.

He gripped the steering wheel, focused, saw the Gods waiting for him, as though in a vision, and chanted, "Go, go, go, go, go…"

UP THE HILL. Past the reception building: empty parking lot. Flags limp on the flagpole, blue sky behind it, Postcard of aNuthouse… Guy mowing yard to the right, lifting a hand…

He jammed the car into the handicapped space nearest the door. He had the smallest pistol, a 9mm, in his pocket, two more in his briefcase. He hurried toward the steps…

And bumped into Dick Hart coming out. Hart held up a hand: "Hey, Leo, did you see that in-bound file on Mark North? Somebody stuck it somewhere."

Grant shook his head, sidled past. "Haven't seen it. I had to run out… Anything going on?"

Hart shrugged. "The usual. Gary decided to pee down thehalls again, God only knows what we did." "Somebody ought to wire that guy shut," Grant said. He turned and started back up the steps. Hart called, "You coming Saturday?"

"I kind of doubt it," Grant called back. "I've got a lot going on."

HE PUSHED THROUGH the tall doors, and as he went through, the space of the hospital narrowed farther, a tunnel red around the edges, rough, and he was walking down to the mouth of it. One goal, now: the cage. The congenial exchange with Hart spurred him on. They didn't know. He couldn't believe it: they didn't know.

He was hurrying down the tunnel of his own vision, passing the various administrative offices, brushing past people, feeling the walls close down, suppressing the urge to jog. He had the coin in his pocket, the gun in his jacket. Right now, he could still turn and run.

But not really, he thought. Because… he felt so good. He'd been made for this. Yes. Everything would be resolved now. Everything. He would break out of the closed room of his life… He was free.

GRANT WALKED UP to the outer barred door, pushed the buzzer button, put his ID on the scanner box, and waved to Justus Smith inside the glassed-in cage. The stress was going to his head. He felt as though he were underwater and hadn't taken a breath in too long. He relaxed, took a breath, took another…

The outer door rolled open. Instead of walking straight ahead, through the security scanner, he turned right, toward the cage, took his hand out of his pocket, and held it up to Smith. The outer door rolled shut behind him.

Smith looked at the coin through the thick yellowish glass and said, "Hey-where'd you get that?"

"Internet. Could you take a look?" Smith was a big coin investor. He said coins would be good for two or three years, would probably double in price. And he reveled in his specialist knowledge, never lost a chance to show off.

"Yeah. Just a sec…" Against policy-but it was done occasionally, the strict safeguards breaking down, especially when the guy outside the cage was a trusted staffer, a professional, a doctor in a white coat…

Smith stepped over to the cage's security door, as Grant and the Gods knew he would, and popped it open. Grant had his hand on the 9mm, Safety off, finger on the trigger. Last chance to turn around…

Smith popped open the door, an expectant eye-raised smile on his face. "Which Web site did you…"

GRANT HAD THE 9MM OUT, eight inches from Smith's heart. Smith's eyes just had time to widen, his mouth to open a quarter inch, and Grant pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening; Smith went down like a punctured balloon, and then Grant was inside the cage.

Marian LeDoux had a husband and three children and brown mousy hair and beautiful turquoise eyes. She knitted when nothing was going on and had once had a brief affair with the manager of the cafeteria. She was at the board, and she swiveled and stood up, eyes widening, reaching for a red alarm button, and Grant shot her in the face from three feet.

Jack Lasker built furniture in his home workshop and always had cuts and nicks on his hands; he was famous for his Band-Aids. He was in the monitoring room, and he fell as he tried to get to the door, to wedge it shut, his watery blue eyes up and looking at the gun, he said, "No, Leo," and Grant shot him in the neck and then, when he went down, again in the chest.

Grant stepped back to the board, breathing hard now, feeling his heart beating against his rib cage. He opened the inner doors, and then unlocked everything in the building. He could see people running on the other side of the outer doors, but nobody with a gun.

Couldn't seem to hear anything except his own words running through his mind: Go, go, go…

He ripped all the wires he could see out of the monitoring rooms, and all the monitoring screens went black; and now he had blood on his hands, literally, where he'd torn skin loose. He felt the pain, but ignored it. There were a number of stereolike consoles on a rack, and he threw the rack to the floor, grabbed more connection wires, ripped them loose.

Back in the main room, he physically ripped the control panel loose, reached into it, and began pulling all the wires he could see. Some sparked, but most didn't. What else? He wanted as much chaos as he could get…

Somebody was shouting at him, Leo, Leo, Leo…

He was about to leave when he saw the circuit-breaker panel. He opened it, loosened the two plastic nuts that held on the inner panel, ripped it off, saw the main lines coming through, took, the risk: fired three shots into the main lines, the wires sparking, bits of lead and in sulation flicking back into his face.

With the third shot, the power went out, and all the lights that he could see. A few seconds later, emergency lights came up automatically, along with an alarm that sounded like an elevator door was stuck: brenk, brenk, brenk…

Good enough. He left the cage, ran through the open door into the interior of the hospital.

Behind him, a woman shouted, "Leo, Leo…"

People were coming out of locked rooms, most standing wonder-ingly in the doorways. He saw two staff members running toward a refuge room, and he continued running himself, past the elevators, into a down-stairway. Down two flights into the security wing.

The Gods should be out of their cells, waiting.

Armageddon…

LUCAS SHOUTED TO NORDWALL, "Grant's at the hospital- he's killing people. Get the guys, get my guys up there, get them to the hospital. Get everybody you can up there…,"

He turned and ran for the truck, jumped in, did a tight circle, and roared toward the street. He was on the north outskirts of town; the hospital was probably seven or eight miles away. Since he'd be slowed going out to the highway and off the highway up the hill to the hospital, just about that many minutes away. Eight minutes: a hundred people could be dead in that time…