City of Endless Night

63

Standing at the door, Ozmian turned on his flashlight. This was a seriously fortified steel door, as was merited to protect these once-sensitive archives. Examining the lock, he saw the only recourse was to shoot through it, despite the expense of rounds that might necessitate.

He ejected the now-empty magazine, slapped in the second one, then positioned himself and aimed with both hands for the cylinder, letting his heart slow down. His quarry had once again put several rounds within inches of his head. That fusillade unnerved him, but it also meant — if his count was right — that his quarry had only one round left to his eight. He believed the man was now fully on the run and out of options. An ambush with only one shot was close to suicide. He checked his watch: twenty minutes until Pendergast’s pal D’Agosta was nothing more than hamburger on the walls of Building 44. No wonder he was losing it.

Bracing himself, he fired — and the round punched out the cylinder. He examined it, tried the door, found that part of the lock was still jammed in, and used a second shot to blast it free along with the bolt. The door swung open to reveal a long, empty basement hallway.

Six rounds left.

He headed into the hall, following the tracks into the very back wing of the basement. Pendergast was no longer even bothering to step lightly or try to confuse his trail. He simply didn’t have any more time. This was the point in the chase when the hunted animal began to feel really pushed. Hunting a man, he mused, was really no different from tracking a wounded lion; the more he pressed and worried the prey, the more it panicked, lost its ability to think rationally, and became a reactive bundle of nerves. Pendergast was now in that stage. He was a man who had run out of ideas as well as rounds. At some point he would do what all hunted animals did in the end: stop running, turn, and make his final stand.

As Ozmian moved down the aisle, following the trail, he noted how grim this part of the basement was, how strangely unsettling, with unpainted cinder-block walls streaked with damp, regularly punctuated by lime-colored windowless doors along both sides. Each door was numbered in order, with a dirty label:

What did they mean? What were these rooms?

The tracks came to a halt at the door marked EECT-9. He examined the floor in front of the door, reading the spoor: his quarry had paused, then opened the door and gone in, still making no attempt at deception, shutting it behind him. While Ozmian had no idea what was in the room, he sensed it was small and almost certainly a dead end, with no escape for Pendergast. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. But then, Ozmian reminded himself, his quarry was exceptionally clever and must not be underestimated; anything could be awaiting him on the other side of that door. And the man had one round left.

With infinite care, standing to one side, Ozmian gave his quarry a little test. He touched the door handle and eased it down, knowing Pendergast would see the movement on the far side.

BOOM! Just as he hoped, Pendergast had wasted his final shot firing blindly through the door. Now his quarry was unarmed, save for the knife. He looked at his watch: eight minutes to go before his partner was blown into bits.

It had been a memorable hunt, but the end was nigh.

“Pendergast?” said Ozmian, speaking through the closed door. “I’m sorry you wasted your last round.”

Silence.

No doubt the man was waiting with knife in hand, like that wounded lion crouched in the mopane brush, ready for a final desperate struggle.

He waited.

“The minutes are ticking by. Only six minutes left until your friend gets turned inside out.”

And now Pendergast spoke. His voice was shaky and high. “Come in and fight then, instead of hiding behind the door like a coward.”

With a sigh, but not lowering his guard in the slightest, Ozmian raised his gun and gripped his flashlight against the barrel with his left hand, so that it pointed where the gun was aimed. Then, with one ferocious kick, he slammed open the locked door and spun inside, covering the room in a split second, expecting a desperate and futile knife attack from any quarter.

Instead he heard a voice speaking gently and kindly from the darkness:

“Welcome, brave little man, to the room of happiness.”

The unexpected words were like a knife driven into the deepest part of his brain.

“How are we today, my brave little man? Come in, come in, don’t be shy! We’re all friends here, we love you and are here to help you.”

The words were so instantly familiar and yet so grotesquely strange that, like a great earthquake, they split apart the bunker of his memory and a hot flood of recollection came pouring out: boiling, incandescent, forming a whirling maelstrom inside his skull, obliterating all in its path. Ozmian staggered, hardly able to remain upright.

“All of the kind doctors here want so much — so very much — to help you and make you feel better so that you can go back to your family, go back to school and your friends and live the life of a normal boy. Come, come, brave little man, and take a seat in our happiness chair…”

And at that moment a light snapped on and he found himself staring at a sight both outlandish and weirdly familiar: a padded leather reclining chair, unbuckled straps on the arms and legs, with a swiveling steel table next to it. Laid out on the table were special accoutrements: a rubber mouth guard, rubber sticks, buckles and collars, a black leather mask, a steel neck brace — all softly illuminated in the pool of yellow light. And looming over all, disembodied, was a stainless-steel helmet, a gleaming dome festooned with copper nipples and curly wires, attached to a jointed, retractable arm.

“Come, my brave little man, and have a seat. Let the nice doctors help you! It won’t hurt, not in the slightest, and afterward you’ll feel so much better, so much happier — and you’ll be one step closer to going home. The best part of all is that you won’t remember a thing, not a thing, so close your eyes, think of home, and it will be over before you know it.”

Ozmian, as if in a hypnotic trance, closed his eyes. He felt the doctor gently remove something heavy from his grasp, and then those sympathetic hands guided him into the leather seat; he took his place unresisting, his mind a blank; he felt the buckles and straps go around his wrists and ankles, felt them tighten, felt the brace go around his neck with a click of the steel lock, felt the leather mask snugged over his face; he heard the creak of metal joints as the steel helmet descended upon his head, icy cold yet strangely reassuring. He felt the doctor slip something out from his chest pocket, and he heard a faint clicking noise.

“Now close your eyes, my brave little man, it is about to begin…”