Chapter 25
She heard the first distant burst of fully automatic fire while she was searching Valentine’s pockets. It didn’t sound like
much: a flat and steely banging that brought to mind that wind-up toy that looked like a pair of chattering teeth. She found
the key to the bondage gloves, undid them from her wrists, and threw them under the sink. She felt lightheaded, with a mix
of exhaustion and hypervigilance, had the twitchy, overcaffeinated sensation she remembered from college all-nighters. She
stuck her head out of the bathroom.
“Hey, Salem,” she called. “Don’t you hate when the guests arrive early?”
There was nothing from the hallway. Somewhere men were yelling. There was another steely, mechanical clattering of a machine
gun—and then, very close, there was a great thud, and the building shook.
Donna remembered the thud from earlier in the day, the thud that had been the sound of her brother falling down a stairwell
to smash his head open. This was less like a falling body, more like a falling truck. The picture window rattled in its frame.
She waited, tense with anticipation. Something boomed and the building shook again. She could feel the shudder of it in her
teeth.
When she heard King Sorrow scream, it was a long way off, and still a great shock of sound that seemed to go through the whole
structure.
That was followed an instant later by a bottle rocket whistle, then another, then a series of rippling detonations. Shoulder-mounted
rocket launchers, perhaps. The fluorescent lights flickered, held—and went out again, this time for good.
Donna fumbled around on the tiles and found the gun. Something several floors above her came apart in a series of tinny crunching sounds, as if a tornado had struck one of the Quonset huts and was peeling it apart.
She heard a choked, raggedy scream, and a pair of polo shirt soldiers stumbled past in the hall. One of them had an arm around
the waist of the other, was helping him to stagger along. Only he lost his grip: his comrade went down with a cry, striking
the window and leaving an ocher smear across the glass. His buddy kept going, reeled a yard down the hallway, then half turned
and looked back at the injured man.
“I’ll come back for you, bro!” he shouted, and ran on.
He never came back.
Donna crossed the bedroom as dust trickled from the white drop ceiling, as if people were jumping up and down above her, having
a house party. She reached the picture window and looked out into the hallway, not trying to be secretive about it, not taking
cover in any way. By the pumpkin-orange glow of the emergency lights, she could see the polo shirt soldier on the floor. His
left leg had been torn off at the upper thigh. Strings of black, blood-soaked khaki hid the worst of the injury. She didn’t
see anyone else out there. She tried the door, but the bolt was secure and it wouldn’t open.
Donna stepped back and pointed the gun at the glass. The 9-millimeter jumped in her hands and the flat wham of it half deafened her. The slug slammed into the glass and produced a fractal spiderweb of slivered cracks. She fired again
and a third time, planting the other bullets close to the first, watching jagged lines leap through the glass. Then she dropped
the gun on the bed, picked up the toppled chair, and threw it at the window.
The glass exploded and sound rushed in. She heard men screaming, yelling, heard the idiotic stammering of machine gun fire.
There came another whistling shriek and the CRUMP of detonation.
She inhaled the dizzying stink of burning chemicals: it smelled like a bonfire made out of old tires.
She smelled burnt hair too, as if someone had tried to incinerate a cat.
Donna got the gun and clambered through the broken window, carefully stepping around the dying man on the floor.
She thought he was unconscious, but when she tried to walk away, he reached out and grabbed her ankle.
“Help me!” he said. “Help me, lady! I don’t want to die down here in the dark!”
She ripped her ankle free and left him behind.
There was smoke in the hall. She didn’t know what was on fire and didn’t intend to stick around and find out. She had a sense
of where the elevator was and the stairwell beside it.
In the gloom and the haze, she didn’t see the men running toward her until they were almost on top of her. One of them was
some kind of mechanic in oil-stained overalls, his face slick with sweat. There were two polo shirt soldiers right behind
him, running for all they were worth. The mechanic hit Donna dead-on, spinning her on one heel and dropping her to the floor.
Someone stepped on her wrist. Someone else stepped on her back, going right over her.
“Guys!” one of them was screaming in a thin, boyish voice. “Guys, don’t leave me! I got a cramp!”
Donna crawled a few feet, her ears ringing, feeling a wetness right under her hairline. She thought she had smacked herself
in the face with the gun when she was knocked down. The gun. She didn’t realize she had dropped it until she was all the way
down the hall, and she didn’t trust herself to find it if she went back.
She went around a corner and saw the elevator through the acrid pall of smoke. The dragon screamed—the closest he had been
yet, the sound so piercing she instinctively shrank low to the floor, sticking in place for an instant. Then she was moving
again, pushing herself off the wall and zigging toward the door into the stairwell.
Only in the haze and the darkness she had got herself turned around.
She opened the door to a deep custodial closet, took one step forward, and bumped into Dr. Patrick.
Dr. Patrick swayed backward and then swung forward, to draw Donna in an embrace.
Her hands were cold. She had hanged herself with an electrical cord, tied off to an exposed pipe, part of the sprinkler system.
The cable was sunk so deeply into her wiry neck, it had almost disappeared into bruised flesh.
Her tongue was a fat sausage sticking out of her open mouth, and there was a white froth down the silky front of her blouse.
Donna screamed as the doctor’s dead hand swished across one of her breasts.
She had pinned a note to her short tweed coat. jesus forgive me.
“Maybe he will,” Donna said. “I won’t.”
She backed out of the closet and pushed the door shut. The stairwell was on the other side of the hall. It was dark in there.
She glanced to her right at the bottom of the steps, couldn’t stop herself, looking for some sign of the impact her brother
had made when he struck the floor, but if there was anything to see, she couldn’t make it out in the poor light. Two floors
above her, guns blatted, sometimes in great flurries, and went silent. Men hollered to one another. There was a great THWAM as if the roof had dropped on one of those Quonset huts. She took the railing and began to climb toward the sounds of war.