At first there was nothing to it. The elevator doors slid open and the men moved swiftly down the corridor. The first thing they saw was the body of a woman with her neck broken lying on the floor. Then they saw the others. There were maybe twelve of them who had begun to drift back to their individual apartments and who were scattered throughout the hallway and now were turning slowly and deliberately like hunters scenting new game.
Phil started firing and the first to fall was old Mrs. Strawn because she was closest and held an ice pick, the explosion in the middle of her blue housecoat shaking some of the curlers out of her hair as she dropped. The next was a young girl Tom didn't know, wearing pajamas, shot twice in the ribs.
By that time the others realized they had a problem here and started moving faster.
Dan stepped out three or four paces to the right of Phil and began working with the bat, cutting a path to Tom's door. Phil fired twice and a little naked girl went down beside him and a middle-aged woman fell to her knees clutching at her neck. Phil began reloading.
Tom stood ready with a knife in each hand but there wasn't any need. The bat was keeping them at bay. He watched three of them flee around the corner and recognized Mrs. Strawn's older sister — a carbon copy right down to the curlers except that the housecoat she wore was pink, not blue — waving a curling iron at him as she stumbled out of sight. A woman he knew to be a stewardess was backing away from Dan, who missed her once and then connected with her knee. When she fell to the carpeting he was on her with the bat like the bat was an axe and the woman was a log that needed splitting.
There were only two of them in sight by then and Phil had the gun reloaded. One was moving sadly, stupidly down the hall past Tom's door to the right where the hall dead-ended in front of the apartment next to Elizabeth's. Nowhere to go but straight to hell and that was where Phil put her. The other was just a teenager hissing and clawing at them with her back to the wall opposite. Phil walked in close and shot her execution-style in the forehead and she slid down the wall, her head bubbling a froth of blood.
They went to the door.
Phil reloaded the two empty chambers while Tom used his keys. The keys felt slimy in his sweaty fingers. The top lock was giving him trouble until he realized he was throwing it in the wrong direction, Jesus, it wasn't locked! it was only the bottom lock that'd been thrown. He slipped it out and fumbled through his keychain for the other one.
And that was when Mrs. Strawn's older sister stabbed him with her sister's ice pick.
She came out of nowhere, moving faster than any old lady had a right to move and for a moment they'd let their guard down, Tom working with the keys, Phil reloading, Dan concentrating on Tom and the door that was going to open momentarily — and the ice pick went into him at the collarbone near his shoulder and came out fast and down again into his neck and suddenly there was blood everywhere.
He felt no pain, just shock and fear that he was not going to make it, that he would never know what all the killing had been worth and what had happened to Andy. Andy, who had flogged him through a night of terror. The ice pick slipped into him a third time — into his chest — as Phil fired directly into her face scattering blood and brains across the hall.
No, he thought. It was not going to go down that way. He pulled the ice pick out of him and dropped it to the floor and stumbled to his knees.
He heard the echo of the pistol and then nothing, a vast empty silence. He struggled against a descending flood of color.
"Help me up."
He stared into Phil's eyes, read pity there. Real sadness. He focused on the eyes.
"Get me up."
They lifted him to his feet.
"Now. Give me the gun."
He saw them look at one another and knew what they were thinking. That it was crazy to give him the gun. He was probably a dead man already. But it was his son in there and his wife and it was his battle. He thought that as long as he could stand they couldn't refuse him. And he was standing.
"Please," he said.
He needed to dismiss the pain, the sense of something slowly trickling away. He put his back to the wall and held out his hand. He felt them hesitate. Then heard Phil sigh.
The .22 didn't weigh much. He had that to be thankful for anyway. He found the key on his chain and handed it to Dan, heard it in the lock.
The door swung open.
He moved inside ahead of them, the floor of his apartment bucking and rolling beneath his blood-soaked shoes.
He willed away the mist.