She points to the table behind me.
“Inject yourself. With the hypodermic needle on the table. It’s filled with concentrated people fluid, more than twice what you need. Use it, and within a minute it’ll all be over. All the running. All the hiding. You’ll no longer be prey. You’ll be like all of us. And the Hunt will at long last be over. And we can finally be together.”
I raise the gun until it is pointing to the top of the Panic Room. All I need to do is pull the trigger and the glass between us will shatter.
“No, Gene!”
I close my eyes. “If everything you said is true, maybe it really is over. I’ll let you end it. You can have me.”
“Gene!”
The sound of a gun fired.
But not from my gun. The explosion muted, distant. From a few floors below.
From Sissy’s gun.
Screams break out from below. Then, another sound—Sissy shouting, her voice filled with fright and fury.
And at that, I’m running, ignoring Ashley June’s pleas, ignoring the sound of her hands slapping against glass behind me.
Forty-four
SISSY
THE ELEVATOR PINGS. There are duskers inside. She knows this with a clean, cold certainty. And in the fraction of a second before the doors open Sissy considers her options. She can duck out of sight behind one of the stacks, then take them out one by one. She can leap to the corner, use the walls to funnel the duskers toward her, erase them as they converge on her. She can try to make for the exit door, close it before they get to her.
And in the next fraction she plays out the inevitable failure of each option, all of them eventuating in her death, ranging from five to fifteen seconds away. Because as long as the duskers have darkness and space and numbers, her death is a mathematical certainty.
And so she plays the only option that remains. It is not necessarily the best option. It could, in fact, be the worst. But she doesn’t have time to think it through.
She sprints right at the elevator, drawing her weapon.
Her legs cut through the air, speeding along the line of desk lamps.
And now the doors start to open. Dusk light pours through. No wider than an inch, but already she’s aiming between the doors. She fires off a shot. Cocks the weapon, fires off another. Hears the far wall of the elevator shatter as a bullet smashes through it. Glass shards falling like raindrops into the atrium. She shoots again. And again, running, sprinting.
All three duskers are maniacally trying to squeeze through the still-opening doors. They want her. And they want to get away from the glass elevator—it is an oven to them, filled with the searing rays of the setting sun. Wisps of smoke curl up from their skin.
A bullet catches a dusker right in the forehead, snapping its head back. The next bullet punches a black hole into its Adam’s apple. The dusker is propelled backward, knocking against another dusker. Both duskers fall out of the elevator, tumbling through the space made vacant by the shattered far wall.
Sissy empties the handgun at the last remaining dusker, but her aim, jostled by panic, is off. One shot hits a panel by the side of the elevator doors, and the floor elevator doors suddenly freeze in place. But the opening is wide enough for the last dusker to leap out, howling with pain, its eyes scrunched shut. Slip, slide, gone. Into the darkness of the floor, scurrying along the walls, finding shade, finding shadows, finding darkness.
It’s weakened. Not by a bullet—Sissy knows she missed—but by the blinding dusk light. Its time inside the elevator was pure torture, hellfire scorching the marrow of its bones. But here in the darkness of this floor, it has found a haven in which to recover.
Sissy goes after it, loading a new magazine. Light is pouring through the jammed elevator doors, and she is able to see a leg dragging like a lizard’s tail, banging into stacks and furniture as it scuttles away. The dusker is trapped now, caught in a corner where two bookshelves meet. It starts climbing up, frantic feet and hands gripping the shelves like rungs on a ladder, leaving trails of melted flesh dripping from shelf to shelf.
Sissy cocks her weapon, aims—
It’s vanished.
She doesn’t dote on her missed opportunity. Or on her now-evident folly in going after the dusker. She simply turns and sprints for the elevator. The doors are still stuck halfway open, but whatever damage her wayward bullet caused, it’s apparently had no effect on the elevator itself. She watches in dismay as the elevator disappears down the wall of the atrium.
A snarl behind her, deep in the shadows of the floor. She spins, half-expecting to see the dusker coming after her. But she sees only the line of mercurial lamps shining before her. Follow them, she knows, and they’ll lead her right to the door on the far wall. Her escape.
But one of the lamps on the far end blinks out. It could be coincidence—the bulb going out right at that moment. But more likely, it’s the dusker darting in front of it.
Because the dusker has recovered now. Vision regained, advantage restored. Now cutting off her escape route. Sissy stops. Turns back around, races to the precipice of the atrium wall. She stares down. Sees the glass roof of the elevator descending into the atrium. Her only other escape option disappearing by the second.
A howl from behind. Sissy spins around. Two beads shine at the edge of darkness—the dusker’s glowing eyes.
She doesn’t hesitate. Not anymore. She steps one foot out into the atrium and drops into the void. She falls, lands with a loud smack on the descending elevator rooftop. The glass roof holds, even as she half-bounces, half-skids across its slippery surface, almost falling off the edge. She spreads out her legs, arms, holds herself flat. The atrium wall beside her rushes by, floor numbers shooting up past her, as the elevator continues to descend. She raises her arms, gun clasped tightly, and aims up. First sign of the dusker peeking its head out to look down and she will empty the gun into its skull.
And then the elevator starts slowing. Not even halfway down to the lobby, it comes to a stop. She holds her breath, fear clutching her throat.
The elevator bounces slightly under her. Bodies getting on the elevator, piling in under her.
She hears teeth gnashing, fingers scratching the glass walls with agony. It’s the dusk light. Its rays might be fading and weak to her, but to them the rays are blades of razor pain. A small price to pay for the taste of heper flesh.
The elevator starts moving again. Upward.
And still, they haven’t seen her.
Slowly, she turns her head. Looks down from the corners of her eyes.
There are five of them. She sees the tops of their heads, flicking from side to side in a rapid, jerky motion. One of the duskers is smashing the elevator buttons with frenzied impatience, over and over, deposits of melted flesh sticking to the buttons. They’re all in anguish, their flesh already beginning to sizzle, their eyeballs burning like pots of boiling water. Any moment now, they’ll do what she suspects people do when heading up a glass elevator with great impatience and anticipation. They’ll look up.
But, as it turns out, they don’t need to. They smell her first. The whole back wall of the elevator is gone, and her odor is pouring in unimpeded like a waterfall.
As one, with terrifying speed, they flick their heads up. Their eyes meet hers.
They’re confused, shocked, slack-jawed, and in this small slice of time Sissy points the gun down—
One of them leaps through the space where the back wall used to be. Its hands slap down on top of the roof, its legs swinging up and over. As soon as its pale face crests over the roofline, like the rising moon, Sissy is ready. She fires a round right into its face.
Its head disappears in an explosion of white spray.
Yet its headless body still holds on. Legs scrabbling for purchase on the elevator roof, its arms swinging at her. Claws, black and razor sharp, miss her face by millimeters. Sissy kicks out, thumping it on the chest. The headless dusker falls down the glassy throat of the atrium, its arms still swinging, legs still kicking.
A smack from below. With such force, Sissy is bounced off the roof a few inches.
She flips herself on all fours, facing down. She aims the gun at the duskers beneath, is pulling the trigger. Then stops. If she shoots through the glass ceiling, it’ll shatter and she’ll fall into their very midst.
But it doesn’t matter, because in the next instant a dusker leaps up. Its head crashes through the glass roof as if surfacing out of water. The whole roof shatters, splintering into a thousand pieces and raining down on the duskers below. Sissy, screaming, falls into the interior of the elevator car, now really only a horizontal platform, without ceiling, without walls, still ascending.
The force of the fall pushes her right through them. Her back thunks against the hard floor, dislodging the gun from her grasp. It bounces once off the floor, then falls into the atrium. Walls of white-pale flesh tower over her; she’s trapped in the tangle of their legs, ankles, shins. There’s no way out. She’s penned in.
It’s strange, the things she observes. It’s not the obvious. Not the gleam of wet desire in their eyes, the dripping fangs, their cheeks wobbling wildly, smacking loudly against rows of teeth. But she instead notices the vibration of the elevator engine humming against her back, the wall on her right rushing past her as the elevator continues to ascend. The glimmers of dusk light slipping through the tiny gaps between their enclosing bodies. She is looking everywhere but at them because, she realizes with the slow-motion clarity of one knowing the end is near, she doesn’t want her last vision to be of duskers.
She thinks of Ben.
And David.
Epap.
Jacob.
Gene. Her lonely Gene, her sad Gene, her unreachable Gene. Years ago, when she was only a child, she dreamed a dream. Of a boy she had never seen and did not know. She woke up and stared through the glass dome at the starry sky. For the first time, her little girl’s heart felt its own emptiness. She never believed this boy was anything more than a figment of her imagination, and over the years the memory of this dream faded. Until that day about a fortnight ago when she saw his stick figure walking toward her, a wavering, trembling dark line on the desert horizon, a mirage gradually, miraculously, filling out and finding form. His bangs blowing in the wind, his teeth so white, his eyes so haunted and real.