Creepers

60

The noise, Balenger warned himself. Ronnie can't possibly fail to hear it.

Abandoning the rope, Balenger drew his pistol. But as he aimed along the green-tinted balcony, he became aware of a roar inside the hotel. It came from the storm's vibrations. The sound of the room collapsing was merely part of the larger rumble. It was nothing that Ronnie would have thought suspicious.

Balenger surveyed the hotel's hollow core. Rain from the broken skylight formed a veil. Nonetheless, he was able to see toward the opposite balcony. Flames emerged from the fifth-floor wall over there while smoke wafted from the sixth.

Amanda. Vinnie.

He shifted down the corridor that led to the emergency stairs. The noise of the storm muted any sounds he made climbing the stairs. At the fifth level, he crept to the balcony, hoping to glimpse Ronnie above.

No sign of him.

Something dangled onto Balenger's head. Roots. The tree that grew through the ceiling. Hours earlier, it had seemed strange. Now, compared to everything that had happened, it felt normal.

He returned to the emergency stairs and went higher. The door was open. He left the stairs and inched along a short corridor. Across from him, the smoldering balcony seemed deserted. The flames would soon reach the penthouse. Despite his increasing urgency, he forced himself to go slowly, to make sure he didn't get careless. At the end of the corridor, he peered onto the balcony. Still no sign of Ronnie. Except for Danata's suite, every door was open. Ronnie could be in any of the rooms, listening for sounds above him.

To the left was the tree. In front of it, smoke drifted from a doorway. Ronnie wasn't listening for sounds above him, Balenger realized. He was starting another fire.

Movement separated the smoke. As a figure backed from the room, Balenger tightened his finger on the trigger. A tall man in a suit wore night-vision goggles and held a pump shotgun. Ronnie! Balenger raged at the memory of his futile conversations with the man two years earlier. "And that was the last time you saw her?" "Yes. When she left my office at noon." But somehow the monster looked different, not as thin as Balenger remembered him or when he'd appeared on the surveillance monitor a while ago.

As Ronnie turned in his direction, Balenger shot twice, hitting him in the chest. The reports coincided with thunder, Ronnie jolting back. Before Balenger could shoot a third time, Ronnie's backward momentum lurched him into the tree. Wood cracked. That part of the balcony, weakened by roots, collapsed. Arms flailing, branches snapping, Ronnie and the tree plummeted through the hole.

Balenger hurried to it. Now he realized why Ronnie wasn't as thin as he ought to be. He wore a bullet-resistant vest.

Balenger aimed down through the hole, determined to get a head shot, but the only target was an arm as Ronnie frantically rolled away. Balenger had only three rounds left. He couldn't risk wasting a bullet. He knew that by the time he charged down the emergency stairs to the fifth level, Ronnie would be impossible to find- too many rooms, too many other emergency stairs, too many secret doors.

Balenger acted before he realized what he was doing, jumping through the hole, dropping to the balcony below. Since it hadn't collapsed from Ronnie's impact, he believed it would hold him. He landed, bending his knees to absorb the shock, tucking and rolling the way he'd been taught in jump school. Avoiding the tree, he rose to a crouch and searched for a target. But his unsteady footing alarmed him. The balcony wavered.

Five doors away, he saw Ronnie aim his shotgun. As the balcony swayed, throwing Balenger to his knees, it jerked Ronnie off-balance also. The shotgun roared, pellets whistling over Balenger's head.

Before Ronnie could pump another shell into the chamber, Balenger charged. They collided, crashing to the floor, and at once, Balenger felt his stomach rise, the impact of their combined weights making the balcony drop.

A section tilted, crashing down onto the next level. It formed a slide onto which Balenger and Ronnie tumbled over each other, hitting the bottom. The impact made that balcony waver.

Ronnie's hands found Balenger's throat. He remembered Amanda's insistence on how strong Ronnie was. Ronnie's hands were certainly strong, expertly squeezing Balenger's windpipe, but after all, the monster had years of practice.

The balcony vibrated. Or perhaps Balenger's mind was swaying. As his green-tinted vision turned gray from the effect of strangulation, he tried to shoot, but the only angle available to him was toward Ronnie's chest, toward his bullet-resistant vest.

Balenger pulled the trigger. Although the vest blocked the bullet, it couldn't muffle the shock of the impact. As if struck by a sledge hammer, Ronnie fell back. Balenger dove for the solid floor of a hallway. An instant later, the remainder of the upper balcony collapsed onto this one. Ronnie screamed amid rubble as the balcony fell away, struck the next one, and caused a chain reaction, the rest of the balconies crashing to the lobby, splashing into the water.

From the solid footing of the hallway, Balenger gaped down at the wreckage. Dust rose, only to be flattened by the rain pouring from the open skylight.

Amanda. Vinnie. He holstered his gun and raced for the emergency stairs. One level. Another. Coughing from the smoke, he emerged onto the sixth floor and tried to figure how to get to the penthouse. The door to Danata's suite was barricaded. Were there secret doors in any of the other rooms? Was that how Ronnie got into the stairwells and rigged the traps? Where were the doors?

Choosing a room away from the new fire Ronnie had set, Balenger hurried in. The bureau caught his attention. It would be easy to hide a door behind there. He yanked the bureau down, but all he found was an apparently solid wall. He took the crowbar from his knapsack and whacked it against the wall. He struck again and again, his frenzy mounting, his desperation making him wail. The hole got larger, revealing a gap between two-by-fours, a hidden corridor. He walloped as hard as he could, widening the space. One more fierce blow, and he could squeeze through.

He put the crowbar in his knapsack and entered the corridor. At once, he saw the dangling spiral staircase, its moorings pulled from the wall. My God, I'm under the penthouse dining room. Amanda, Vinnie, and I tried to come down these stairs. They have hardly any support.

He put his weight on the stairs. They wobbled. He eased upward, trying to move smoothly, to keep the staircase steady. Again, it wobbled. Please, he thought. He stepped higher, gripping the curved banister. He felt as if he were on the unsteady deck of a wave-tossed sailboat. Unable to get enough air into his lungs, he reached the trapdoor and pounded. Twice. Three times. Once.

The trapdoor opened, Amanda looking at him in relief. "There's a second fire."

"I know." Balenger crawled from the staircase. The pressure of his shoes pushing him away from the stairs was enough to send them crashing down.

The penthouse was filling with smoke. As they rushed to Vinnie in the kitchen, Amanda said, "I was afraid I'd have to open the shutter and put Vinnie outside, then join him. At least we'd have been able to breathe, even if we got hypothermia or the damned building collapsed."

"Help me get him to the bedroom. We'll take him down to Danata's suite."

"Ronnie. What about-"

"I don't know. Maybe he's dead."

"Maybe?"

"I hope. Can't be sure."

They put Vinnie's arms over their shoulders and dragged him toward the bedroom, no longer caring if they made noise.

They set him down at the bedroom's trapdoor. Then Amanda unlocked and lifted the hatch while Balenger aimed into it. Only two rounds left, he thought. Can't waste them. But all he saw was green-tinted smoke.

The moment he entered the staircase, he hesitated. "Wait a second." He took a step upward and grasped the block of plastic explosive he'd set aside when disarming the bomb.

"What can you do with that?" Amanda asked.

"Don't know."

"You said it was useless without a detonator."

"It is." He stuffed the explosive into his knapsack. Just below the opening, he waited with his back turned. Amanda slid Vinnie onto him. He carried Vinnie down to Danata's living room and again set him on the floor. With effort, he and Amanda tugged the heavy tables and chairs from the door. He aimed as Amanda opened it.

Flames rose on the other side of the hotel's core. They also spread from a room on this side.

"It was dark for so long, I thought I'd give anything if I could see." Vinnie was appalled by what he faced. "Now I wish I couldn't."

"Help me get him on my back," Balenger told Amanda. "Vinnie, hang on to the straps on the knapsack. Can you do that?"

"My legs are messed up, but there's nothing wrong with my hands."

They worked their way into a corridor and reached the entrance to the emergency stairs. Again, Balenger aimed. Again, there wasn't a target. Bent forward with Vinnie, he climbed down as quickly as he could without losing his balance. Fifth level. Fourth. Third.

"I hear water," Amanda said.

"So many roofs to collect it. So many holes. The place is flooding," Balenger told her.

Second level. First.

They were submerged knee-deep as they tugged a door open. The water chilled them, but not as much as what they saw: the chaos of the lobby. Now Balenger understood why furniture piled up, tangled against columns and doors. The force of the water falling from the upper levels was dismaying, the din overwhelming. Any object that wasn't anchored got swept away.