Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (30 page)

“Dude, let’s get out of here!” He slapped me on the back, and I didn’t need any more convincing to follow him out into the corridor. The ghost of Jennifer was right on our heels, but she wasn’t the one I was worried about — that was Spiessbach, who was striding toward us with a scalpel in his hand and a look of murder in his eyes.

We all knew that he was more than capable of carrying out a murder or ten.

“Come on, boys,” Jennifer urged, breaking into a trot. After what she’d done to Spiessbach’s goons back there, I instinctively trusted her — at least, trusted her enough to follow her the hell out of here right now. We’d figure out the rest later.

“You don’t have to tell me twice!” Brandon agreed enthusiastically.

The ghosts of Long Brook’s dead were still peering out of their rooms on either side of the hallway as we ran, providing some of that spooky blue light to augment the small circle of harsh white that the lantern was putting out.

We hauled ass along the hallway, and I struggled to keep up with the athlete and the dead woman, huffing and puffing by the time we reached the stairwell to the next wing.

Brandon was the first to barrel through, slamming the door back hard against the wall.

“Oh, crap.”

“What, what?” I wanted to know. But then I saw for myself.

The stairwell was full of smoke; thick, dark smoke, rising up from below and making my already-stressed lungs want to hack up their contents like a TB patient would. It was also really warm in there, much too warm for the normal differences in temperature to explain away.

Smoke. Heat. I cursed.

“The building’s on fire.”

Brandon’s eyebrows shot upwards. It looked pretty comical in the lantern-light. “How did
that
happen?”

“Well, let me think,” I said snarkily. “Do you think it might have anything to do with
the meth lab in the basement?
You know, the one where we were involved in a
gunfight
earlier?”

“What are we going to do now?”

Jennifer’s answer left no room for argument. “Now we try one of the other stairwells. Come on, follow me.”

True to her word, she cut through the nearest patient room, pushing aside and ignoring the frightened old man who cowered in the doorway, trembling.

“Excuse us, sir,” I said politely, as I stepped right through his transparent body. I felt a sudden wave of coldness flood through my body as my flesh and blood form briefly shared the same space as his spirit body, and then I was through, out the other side, and it was over.

I broke into a jog to keep up with Jennifer, who by now was out on the balcony.

“Six floors up,” she said, obviously reading the part of my mind that was considering the possibility of jumping to freedom. “You’d die on impact. Trust me, I’m a nurse; and I used to be a damned good one.”

I didn’t doubt that for a minute.

Bracing myself against the safety rail, I leaned out to look over the parapet.

“Oh, that is so
not good.
”

Most of the ground-floor windows were venting out more of the same dark smoke that we’d encountered in the stairwell. Not the light, wispy gray kind you saw from your campfire; this was the black, ugly kind, which meant that something man-made was burning — in this case, that ‘something’ was probably the basement and ground level of Long Brook Sanatorium.

“We might still be able to make it down,” said Brandon doubtfully, his head appearing over the parapet next to my own. I wasn’t so sure. The flames seemed to have taken hold along pretty much the entire lower level of the building. In between the occasional gaps in the smoke, spiraling fingers of orange flame licked up and under the tops of the window-frames.

The fire was growing, and growing fast.

“Quit dawdling, boys. Pretty soon this place is going to be toast, and you don’t want to get grilled along with it.”

Jennifer was right. She broke into a jog, and we followed her eastward along the balcony, heading towards the doorway that would lead to the main staircase. I tried to ignore the jagged, red-edged hole in the back of her skull, where the bullet from Spiessbach’s pistol had obviously exited when he took her life.

It was heartbreaking to have to ignore the pleas from the patients who were now crammed into every room we ran past, but what exactly were we supposed to do to help them? Becky had tried to take down Spiessbach, had given it her best shot, but in the end it hadn’t been enough.

We were losers. We had failed.

Smoke was starting to reach our level now, filling the sixth-floor balcony. The air was getting warmer and harder to breathe, despite the fact that we were partly outdoors.

Glancing into one of the rooms on my left, I could see wisps and tendrils of smoke starting to push their way greedily through the cracks in the floor, filling the room with a light haze of smoke, like the mist on a cold winter’s morning. If
that’s
how conditions were on the sixth floor, how bad must they be on the floors further down below us?

That question was answered when we finally made it to the main staircase. Man, but it was
hot
on that landing, and the smoke was so thick and choking that there was just no way we were going to be able to get down.

“There’s no way we’ll make it down through
that
,” Brandon said, his words muffled. He had pulled his tee-shirt collar up over his nose and mouth in a game effort to filter out some of the smoke.

“Not alive, anyway,” I agreed. “I guess the only place left to go is on up to the roof.”

“I’ll go first,” said Jennifer, and just like that she was away, climbing the stairs and disappearing into the smoky haze.

I was starting to sweat; how much of it was because of the steadily rising temperature, and how much of it could be put down to pure fear, I couldn’t rightly tell you. Either way, this staircase was a dangerous place to be, and getting worse all the time.

I looked back down the staircase, and saw nothing but smoke and darkness.

The only way was up.

To say that what we found on the roof was a huge surprise would be the understatement of the year.

I almost fainted with relief when I saw that Becky had made her way up there after her escape. She was standing next to her grandmother, frantically waving us over towards a wide, flat spot that was located pretty much plumb in the center of the roof. Looking down, I saw that she had chalked an uneven circle, maybe ten feet wide, on the flat stone that made up the rooftop.

“Danny! Brandon!” She was practically jumping for joy. I knew just how she felt. I couldn’t keep from breaking out into a broad grin, and that was perfectly OK with me; we were stuck on the roof of a burning building out in the middle of nowhere, on the run from a team of angry ghosts, and right now I’d take any little ray of sunshine I could find.

In fact, I was
so
happy that when we took turns to hug Becky, I didn’t even mind that Brandon got to go first; I was just so relieved that all three of us had made it through the night in one piece.

So far, at least.

Ironically, it took Jennifer — the dead woman, who had two more holes in her head than she had been born with — to bring us crashing back down to Earth again.

“As much as I hate to break up this genuinely touching reunion, I have to point out that Marko is not a man that reacts well to failure.” Jennifer’s transparent body pulsed a brighter blue for a second, as if her comment had touched off some thought or emotion buried deep within her. “I don’t think you have much time to prepare.”

“Prepare?” I blinked, confused. “How are we supposed to prepare? We’re trapped up here. It’s not like we can just climb down or jump, is it? Not from six floors up. If Spiessbach’s coming to get us, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it…and even if he
doesn’t
find us up here, which is pretty freaking unlikely at best, there’s the small matter of
the whole damn building burning to the ground!
”

I was starting to get hysterical, I have to admit. Even I could hear it in my own voice. It was almost as though somebody else was speaking through my mouth. My mood had turned on a dime, changing from delight to despair in less time than it took to flick a switch.

For the second time in as many minutes, Jennifer became the voice of reason. She cupped my face gently in her hands, so tenderly that I hardly even noticed the coldness of her long-dead fingers.

“Danny, you have to listen to me. We may not have had much time to get acquainted, you and me, and even then the circumstances weren’t exactly the best…but you’re a friend of my grand-daughter’s, and that makes you practically family, so you’d best listen up.

“What you’re feeling right now…I’ve seen it before. Hell, I’ve
lived
it before. I’m not going into details, but this place — Long Brook — it gets under your skin, without you ever even realizing it; seeps into your damn bones, and when it’s there it won’t let go. It’s like a cancer. Once it has you, it wants to
keep
you. And it wants to
grow.

“I know you have to be feeling pretty low right now, Danny. We’re all in a very bleak place. But that voice you’re hearing, deep down inside you…it’s not the real you talking. All of the despair that these walls have seen, for years and years, it didn’t just
go away
, you know…some of it remained here. I’m starting to realize that Marko uses it for his own ends — to help him keep control of people like me. He’s been doing that since the day he put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.”

“Grandma, it’s okay.” Becky hugged her from behind.

The effect of Becky’s solid arms wrapping around Jennifer’s see-through body looked a little weird, like some CGI out of a movie. Jennifer sighed and closed her eyes, letting her hands fall away from my face.

“Thank you, honey,” she said quietly. A single tear streaked down her face. “You have to understand…it’s like the blinders have finally been taken away after all these years. I really thought I was
helping
those people, you have to believe me…”

“I
do
believe you, Grandma.We all do. Don’t we, boys?”

Brandon and I both nodded solemnly.

“He brainwashed you, Jennifer. That’s the only word for it,” I said.

“Oh, he did
far
worse than that, young man. For all the lives he ended on that operating table — and we tried to save them all, we really did — the one I can’t ever forgive him for is the one life he ended before it had ever even begun.”

She placed a hand gently on her belly, and the faraway look in her eyes made me suspect that Jennifer was looking backward towards a past that might have been, but was never allowed to happen.

I coughed. The smoke was starting to get noticeably heavier, coming up not only from the stairwell but also from both sides of the roof.

Suddenly the despair I had been feeling was replaced with something new: I was
angry.
Angry at the meth dealers who had been brewing up their poison in the cellar; angry at the disease that had caused so many people to have to come here in the first place, and die at the hands of old-school medicine; and most of all, I was angry at that monster named Spiessbach.
He
was the focal point of my growing rage, that smug face and annoying ‘hmmm?’ mannerism which just made me want to punch him over and over again.

“If this is our last stand, then so be it,” I said, feeling a new resolve starting to rise alongside the anger. “But I’m not going down without a fight.”

“Damn straight, brother.” Brandon slapped me on the back.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. Brandon, dump out all of our backpacks and figure out what we have that might be useful. You’re looking for weapons, lights, anything we could use to either call for help or protect ourselves.”

“Protect ourselves from ghosts?” he asked skeptically. “Like
what?
”

“I don’t know man, just
look!
” I turned my attention to Becky. “This chalk circle…I’m guessing it’s some form of protection?”

“That’s right, a protective circle.”

“How long will it take to be ready? Spiessbach could be here any minute.”

“It’d take a lot less time if I didn’t have to explain it,” she said pointedly.

“Point taken. I’ll leave you to it.”

“What about you, man — what are you going to do?” Brandon was down on one knee, rummaging through the shared contents of our backpacks. He set the food supplies aside.

Becky snatched a bundle of candles and some other mystical supplies from his rapidly-growing stockpile and set them inside her chalk circle.

I took a deep breath. “Me? I’m going to call for help...”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN