"I pity you."

She hawks up a gob of phlegm. She's about to spit it into his smiling mouth.

Then –

Down the hall, they appear. Like two shadows. Two demons.

Frankie in his black suit. Harriet, not in her turtleneck but in a dark red blouse, a Christmas blouse, even though it's almost July.

They have pistols.

Miriam sees them, and Ashley doesn't, not at first. But his eyes follow her eyes, and when he finally realizes –

"We're dead," he says, a hoarse, panicked whisper.

Miriam is not prepared. Normally, she'd have this place cased out. She'd know her exits. Her corners. Her safe places and vulnerabilities. Being with Louis made her slow, lazy. When she was a child, her mother used to walk her through the store holding her hand, gripping it so hard Miriam thought her knuckles might break. But she eventually learned not to fight, because that way her mother would relax her grip – and then, oops, Miriam could slip her grasp and run off to the candy or cereal aisle. This is like that. She relaxed her grip.

Right now, she has only one real option: the emergency exit to her right, at the end of the hall. While they stalk down the hall, she'll flee into the open lot.

Everything seems to move in slow motion, like she's got chains around her arms, legs, waist, pulling her back, halting her escape.

She pivots –

Ashley tries to lurch to his feet, but he's weak, beaten –

Miriam's running, but behind her the two killers move without hesitation, hands up, pistols up –

They're twenty feet away now and closing –

Ashley can't stand. He's on all fours, scrabbling like a panicked animal trying to clamber up a rocky escarpment. He's crying out –

Fifteen feet now, maybe less. She can't tell; everything seems wrong –

Miriam feels something dart by her ear; she jerks her head left as a wire with two metal probes on it tinks against a fauxgold wall sconce. She doesn't know what it is until –

Ashley cries out, a stuttering wail through closed teeth; his body seizes, goes rigid, eyes wide like a pair of headlights –

Taser, she thinks, not pistols. Tasers, they missed me –

Her shoulder crashes into the emergency exit, throwing it wide. No alarm goes off; no alarm ever goes off, no matter what the warnings say. In places like this they never seem to be hooked up to a goddamn thing. She tastes the evening air; she sees the highway ahead of her –

Wham.

An arm in a white sleeve clotheslines her trachea. Her heels go out from under her. Her back cracks hard into the exit door, slamming it shut behind her.

She looks up, gasping for air.

"You," she wheezes.

The man seems taken aback. A smile plays at the edges of his lips.

"We have not met," he says.

Bam. Someone – Frankie, Harriet, both – hits the emergency