Nocturnal (75 page)

He’d forgotten he was in a psych ward.

“Bri-Bri, get me out of these!”

Bryan slid his left-hand five-seven through the slot in his back, clicking it into the holster. He reached for his pocket before he remembered — he’d left his handcuff key with Jessup.

A blur ripped through the door. Bryan raised his right hand to fire, but the thing ducked under the barrel. It hit him hard in the chest, wrapping him up and driving him to his back where they both slid across the floor. Bryan’s head smashed into the wall below the window. He felt the attacker slide up to straddle him. Bryan tried to bring his right hand up to shoot, but the attacker grabbed the gun with both hands, ripping it away with shocking strength.

The attacker drove its head forward. Bryan twisted his head to the right. A jagged pain ripped through his left cheek, fire-brand hot as it tore across his lower-left gumline.

The thing pulled back, trailing an arc of blood. Bryan saw the weapon — a sharp, blood-covered, hard needle-beak where a nose should have been. In a hundredth of a second, Bryan recalled Susan Panos’s chest, the gaping hole, the lack of blood. This thing was Susie’s killer.

The monster reared back to drive forward again, but before it could Pookie slammed into it, knocking it off Bryan. Pookie and the thing crashed into the foot of Erickson’s hospital bed.

Bryan lurched up, his right hand sliding into his left sleeve to grip the handle inside.

The beak-nose stood and turned just as Bryan stepped forward. Bryan drove the ceramic knife into the thing’s chest with all his newfound strength, punching through the breastbone and into the heart beyond. The eyes above the bloody, curved beak went wide with surprise. Bryan kicked low with his right instep, knocking the monster off his feet while simultaneously pushing down hard on the knife handle, driving the monster to his back.

“Pookie! Hold this in!”

Hands still cuffed behind his back, Bryan’s partner threw himself facedown across the stunned monster. Pookie’s belly pinned the knife in place.

Bryan grabbed his five-seven off the floor just as Sly’s big body came through the doorway. They fired at the same instant, the
cracks
of gunfire filling the small room. Bryan felt a round hammer into his right hipbone, twisting him back and making him miss twice, but he instantly corrected and put two shots center-mass in Sly’s chest.

Bryan’s five-seven’s slide had locked on empty — he was out.

He reached back for his left-hand gun. Before he even gripped the handle, Sly spun away from the door and back into the hall.

Bryan ejected the spent magazine from his right-hand weapon, slid his hand into a chest slot to grab a fresh one and slammed it home.

“Monster!”

Bryan turned. Jebediah Erickson was awake. He looked half drunk and as psycho-angry as an old man could be. Erickson reached to his left with both hands and grabbed a rolling table next to his bed. He hurled it back-handed. Bryan ducked the table, which smashed into the wall.

Now he had to fight Savior as well? “Knock it off, old man!”

“
Monster!
I’ll kill you!”

“Bryan! A little help here?” Hands still cuffed behind him, Pookie was trying to stay on top of the squirming beak-face. The monster fought, but it didn’t have much strength left.

Bryan walked over and stepped on its neck, pressing down hard. The creature tried to breathe. Its hands pulled weakly at Pookie’s jacket.

The clutching hands slowed, then fell away.

Something big smashed into Bryan’s head. He stumbled back. Erickson was throwing anything he could get his hands on. Bryan’s temper
snapped
.

He slid the five-seven into its holster as he stepped to the side of the hospital bed. Erickson groggily reached for Bryan’s throat. Bryan hit him in the mouth with a short right. Erickson sagged back.

“Sorry,” Bryan said. “I hope you’re as tough as they say, old-timer.”

Bryan bent at the knees. He reached below the bed, grabbed the heavy machinery underneath, then
lifted
. His arms and legs shook with the weight. He didn’t know how strong he really was, but this wasn’t the time to doubt it — he took three stumbling, running steps to the window, then
threw
.

The foot of the bed smashed into the bullet-ridden safety glass. The wire-embedded glass folded out like a stiff blanket. The bed, with Erickson still in it, sailed out into the night sky.

Bryan turned to grab Pookie, but before he came all the way around he had a glimpse of a massive, moving pile of brown fur — and then a tank smashed into him.

He flew backward out the window.

B
lanket still draped over his shoulders, Rex Deprovdechuk clutched his bleeding arm as he walked to the edge of the broken window. He’d been shot again, but
way
worse this time. He couldn’t move his right arm at all, and there was an awful lot of blood.

Down below, Savior’s hospital bed was a ghastly gray-white against the nighttime grass. The other man, the one in black who had killed Sucka, was facedown, not moving, still lying where he’d fallen after Pierre had knocked him out of the window.

“I got him,” Pierre said. “I kicked his ath.”

Rex turned back into the room. Sly was hurt bad, but he had one arm wrapped tight around the neck of a handcuffed man covered in Sucka’s blood. The man looked like he might crap himself. Rex couldn’t blame him. Rex used his good hand to pull papers out of a blanket pocket. He set them on the ground and unfolded them, his hand smearing the photo printouts with blood. The third sheet matched this man’s face.

“Pookie Chang,” Rex said. “Sly, that’s one of them.”

The man struggled, but Sly held him fast.

“I’m a cop, goddamit,” the man said. “Let me go!”

Sly squeezed, his bicep pressing into one side of the man’s neck, his forearm into the other. Chang’s eyes widened, then wrinkled shut. His legs kicked, but he couldn’t escape. His kicks slowed, then he went limp.

One-handed, Sly tossed the man over his shoulder.

“My king, we have to go,” Sly said. “I have to get you to safety.”

Sly had also been shot. His blue San Jose Sharks sweatshirt was soaked at his right shoulder, and also at two spots on his chest. He moved much slower than normal.

Rex pointed back to the window. “Savior is down there. I
want
him.”

“Let Pierre take him,” Sly said. “Zou said the police with the machine guns would be gone, but they weren’t. There could be more of them. I have to get you out of here.” Sly looked to his taller brother. “Pierre, can you finish the job?”

Pierre nodded rapidly. “Doth a bear thit in the woodth? I’ll kick his ath!”

Sly adjusted his blanket so it covered both him and the policeman on
his shoulder. He walked to the room’s ravaged door, turned and waited. “My king, we have to go,
now
.”

Rex had to trust his best friend. He pulled his own blanket over his head, his arm screaming with protest as he did. He grabbed his wound with his left hand to try and squeeze the pain away.

Pierre leaned out the broken window. “Hey, that guy I clobbered. I think he’th moving. And he’th one of
uth
, I felt it.”

Rex looked down again. The man in the black coat was struggling to rise to his knees. Chief Zou had said Bryan Clauser was like Savior, that he was actually one of Marie’s Children.

If so, he was a traitor.

“Pierre, make me proud,” Rex said. “Get down there and finish him. Then bring Savior back Home.”

Pierre smiled his happy-dog smile. His long tongue fell from his mouth and dangled on the right side of his skewed jaw.

“Yeth, my king.”

Rex followed Sly out of the room.

Get up, get up, get up
.

Bryan pushed himself to his knees. He was on grass. A little clearing in a wooded area. He heard sporadic traffic on the other side of a head-high brick wall not too far away. His left arm wouldn’t respond. Every motion he made ripped a stabbing sensation through the top of his chest. Broken collarbone. Had to be.

What had happened?
Pierre
had happened. Bryan ignored the pain as he struggled to his feet. He looked up at the mental health building. He remembered the gunfight, remembered how hard the brown-furred creature had hit him.

Motion from above. From out of the broken third-story window, Pierre sailed into the night air, a long blanket trailing behind him, a stockless shotgun with a drum magazine held in one huge hand.

Bryan looked to where Pierre would fall — fifteen feet away lay the bent and twisted hospital bed, and a few feet from that an unconscious Jebediah Erickson barely covered by a rumpled blue hospital gown.

Pierre landed with far more grace than Bryan had. The dog-faced man stepped toward Savior.

Gunfire opened up on Bryan’s left and his right. On his left, the cane-gun, fired by the wobbly old Alder Jessup. On his right, Adam, ripping off
short bursts from an Uzi. Pierre covered his face with an arm and turned away. Bullets tore through his blanket, shredding the fabric and spraying blood onto the grass.

“Bryan!” Alder screamed. “Get the creature, we’ll rescue Savior. Go!”

Bryan quick-glanced for his gun, but the flat-black weapon was nowhere to be seen on the dark grass. He didn’t think, he just ran, sprinting straight for the ducking Pierre.

The Uzi fire stopped — Adam’s weapon was empty.

Pierre turned and reached for Erickson. Before the big hands could grab the old man, Bryan closed in at full speed — his
new
full speed — and put his right shoulder into Pierre’s ribs.

The creature sailed backward and smashed against a tree.

Bryan had hit with his right shoulder, but his left suffered greatly from the impact. Something ground away inside his arm, his chest and his shoulder, liquid fire coursing all up and down his side and neck.

Pierre rolled to his knees. He smiled a dog smile, his pink tongue dangling down off the left side of his skewed lower jaw — he raised his shotgun.

Bryan turned away as the
bah-bah-bah
roar of the automatic weapon tore at the night air. Hammer blasts hit his right shoulder, his back, driving him to the ground.

Then the stuttering crack of the Uzi sounded once again.

Bryan fought through the pain and pushed himself to his knees. When he turned toward the threat, he saw the swirl of a dark blanket, a bit of blue hospital gown, and the pink of an old man’s naked ass disappearing over the head-high brick wall that bordered Potrero Avenue — Pierre, with an unconscious Erickson over his shoulder.

Just like that, they were gone from sight.

Bryan heard sirens approaching. How far away was the rest of the SWAT team? Would they have the same orders as Ellis? Would they try to arrest Bryan, or would
shoot to kill
be Zou’s new order?

A hand on his good shoulder, grabbing, pulling. “Cop,
get up
,” Adam said. “He got Erickson!”

Bryan leaned on Adam as he struggled to his feet. “I gotta go after him.”

“No!” Alder’s voice. The old man limped over, reloading his cane by taking a bullet from his pocket, putting it into a hidden slot, then twisting the silver wolf’s head handle with a click. “Bryan, you have to heal. There could be more of them.”

“But they’ll kill him!”

Alder shook his head. “He’s already dead.” His eyes showed he was resigned to an inescapable truth. “Jebediah is gone. The only variable is whether we have one dead Savior, or two.”

Bryan started to argue, but the railroad-spike pain driving through his neck and into his lung cut off his words. He couldn’t even give chase, let alone fight.

“Okay,
shit
.” Bryan let Adam help him toward the wall. “Where’s Pookie?”

Adam stopped.

Alder pointed his cane up to the broken third-floor window. “Your partner? Was he with you? Up there?”

Bryan looked up. Some of the safety glass hung loosely like a thick, stiff piece of cracked crystal cloth. “He didn’t come down?”

Alder shook his head. “Not yet. Bryan,
move
, we have to get out of here.”

Bryan stared, waiting to see Pookie’s face pop into view, waiting to hear him shout down some kind of obscenity. Pookie’s face didn’t show. He had to be in the stairwell, on his way out, or maybe he was already at the car.

“Adam, in my pants pocket, my phone.”

For once Adam didn’t make a smart-ass answer. He pulled the phone out of Bryan’s pocket. Bryan took it. With his right hand, he pressed the two-way button.

Bee-boop:
“Pookie! You there?”

There was a pause, then an answer.

Boo-beep:
“Hello?”

A boy’s voice.

Bryan’s body vibrated with instant, overwhelming emotions of
rage
and
fear
and
hate
and
loss —
he had to do something but he knew there was nothing he could do.

“Is this Rex?”

“Uh-huh.”

Bryan closed his eyes. He felt like he was there and not there all at the same time. “Is my partner alive?”