Sudden prey

AR.

''Yeah, I'm hit. This is no good, man.''

LaChaise jumped into the hallway, fully exposed, like in the cop and cowboy shows, and blew the entire thirty-shot magazine down the halls, playing it like a hose. Martin had gone to the elevators. He pushed the ''down'' button and the doors slid back: ''Let's go!''

''One more,'' LaChaise screamed. He poured another magazine down the hall, then skipped across the hallway and piled into the elevator and the doors closed and they started down.

''Maybe somebody waiting,'' LaChaise said. He shovedhis last magazine into his rifle. The wells around his eyes were white, his nostrils wide as he gasped for breath: ''How bad is it?''

''Bad enough, but I ain't gonna die from it,'' Martin grunted. ''Watch the doors,'' LaChaise said, and they leveled their rifles at the opening elevator doors. Nobody.

The lobby was deserted and they ran out toward the hall that would lead to the car.

They'd been inside for little more than a minute.

LUCAS SKIDDED TO A STOP IN THE PARKING LOT, ON the opposite side of the building from the emergency room entrance. Del's wife was screaming on the radio: ''Del's hurt, Del's hurt… they're going away, but Del's hurt…''

Lucas had everything on the street headed for the hospital, and Dispatch said more guys were running down from City Hall. They'd be there in a minute, in thirty seconds… He jammed the truck into park and got the shotgun off the seat and ran toward the lobby doors. As he ran up, he saw the elevators open, and LaChaise and Martin lurched out, Martin hobbling.

They turned the other way, not seeing him, heading down a hall that would lead to the emergency room exit. He was behind them, sixty or eighty feet away, on the wrong side of the hospital. He pulled at the door and nearly fell down: locked.

Without thinking, he backed up a step, pointed the shotgun at LaChaise's back through the glass and fired. The glass exploded, and he pumped and fired through the hole, and pumped again, was aware that somebody was screaming, and then the glass panes ten feet to his left blew out and he could see the flash of a machine gun rolling toward him. He went down and automatically ducked his head, and the shattering glass ripped at his coat and pants.

When the long play of the machine gun passed, he got to his knees and fired two more shots as quickly as he could, got no response and stood up.

The hall opposite him was empty. There was a sudden, keen local silence, as though he had suddenly gone deaf. Then the sound of sirens faded in, and he stepped through the holes in the glass doors and ran across the lobby.

He ducked behind the wall at the reception desk, and saw a woman with a bleeding face looking at him from the floor where she'd crawled for cover. He waited, listening, then hurried down the hall, ready to take someone at the corner…

Another body, the security guard, breathing but blowing bubbles of blood. There was a double blood-trail, going out the door, one stopping five feet from the curb, the other going all the way to the curb. They had a car, but they were gone.

A cop car skidded into the lot, and Lucas stepped out with his hands up, waved, groped for his radio and said, ''They're on the streets… look for the brown car, the big brown car. They're not more than fifteen seconds out of the lot.

They got machine guns, they're hit…''

A doctor was running down the hall toward him. He glanced at Lucas, then bent over the security guard and shouted back toward the emergency room: ''We need a cart, get a goddamn cart.''

Lucas said, ''There's another one by the reception desk.''

The doctor screamed, ''We need two carts…''

As the cops broke out of the incoming car, Lucas turned and ran back to the lobby. The elevator doors were open, the floor a pool of crimson blood. There was only one puddle, he noticed, with two footprints in it. The other man hadn't been hit yet, so he'd got him with the shotgun.

He pushed two, rode up, and when the doors started to open, he yelled,

''Davenport coming in.''

He could hear a woman shouting, and he hurried aroundthe corner toward Del's room. Del was on the floor, with Franklin and Cheryl, both in hospital gowns, bent over him. A nurse was hurrying down the hall with a cart.

''How bad?'' Lucas yelled as he came up.

''He's not gonna be as pretty as he used to be,'' Franklin said grimly.

Lucas knelt beside Cheryl and Del looked up at him: a splinter of Formica, thin as a knife, and about the width of a pencil, was sticking through Del's neck, inside the lines of his jaw. He looked at Lucas and shook his head, his eyes wobbling.

Cheryl turned to the nurses and shouted, ''Hurry,'' and to Lucas, in a calmer voice, ''It goes all the way through, up in the roof of his mouth.''

''Jesus, let's get him…''

The nurses came up and Lucas picked Del up and laid him on the cart. ''Down to the ER,'' one of the nurses said. The other one pointed at Cheryl: ''And you've got to lie back down, you can't be up…'' And at Franklin: ''You too…''

She pushed Cheryl toward the bed behind them.

Franklin said, ''You get them?''

''They made it out, but we got guys coming in all over the place.''

''Shit.''

''I hit one of them and you guys hit one. We've got one blood trail going in and out of the elevator, and another one starting in the lobby.'' Lucas started to tremble with the adrenaline.

''Good,'' Franklin said, and he began to shake as well. He looked down at the wreckage of the hallway, and said to Lucas, ''You know what it was like in here?''

''What?''

''It was like one of those scenes in Star Wars where the Storm Troopers are shooting about a million shots at the goodguys and never hit anything. I mean, more shit went up and down the hall…''

Lucas looked at him, covered with plaster dust, and said, ''You know, you might want to sit down.''

Franklin rubbed his chest, looked at Cheryl, now flat on her back and deathly pale, and said, ''Yeah, I might.''