It hurt to look higher but he did. Calhoun dangled a foot off the ground, impaled to the wall of the tunnel on a long steel spear. His face was a portrait of crucified insanity, a half-mad messiah who had died with only a passing knowledge of the circumstances that had ultimately brought him low. Almost before Mike’s eyes, the first shadows of familiarity began seeping back into Calhoun’s face as the last of his life drained out. The dark scarlet puddle beneath his feet spread wider, reaching out in all directions to encompass the floor.

Calhoun raised his head. Some final ember of lucidity glittered in his eyes, as if he’d just remembered a name or some detail that had escaped him until now. He gazed at Mike and his lips moved briefly, webbed by blood.

“Mike…” He hesitated and his head slumped forward, his voice ground down to less than a whisper. Mike wouldn’t have heard it if he hadn’t been so close. “Tunnel…locked…at the other end—” A bubble of blood swelled on his lips and burst. “I did it…I’m s-sorry—”

“So we’re trapped?”

Calhoun shook his head, held out one hand. It seemed to require all he had. Mike watched as the security guard opened his fingers, giving him the key ring, pointing at the big bronze key—the ER door upstairs.

“What happened to Sarah and Eli?”

Calhoun shook his head, mouthing one word.

Snow.

CHAPTER 50

50.

“Give me the boy.”

Sarah turned with Eli in her arms. With Dr. Walker out of the picture, she had no protector, no weapon, no shield except her own body. After everything that had transpired throughout the hospital, upstairs and downstairs, in the dark and in the light, it had boiled down to this.

What happened to Walker had been a bad surprise, perhaps the worst yet. Somehow, despite everything, Sarah had expected him to come through for them in the end. But she had never seen someone rise up so recklessly, or go down so fast.

When Snow had made his move on Calhoun a few moments earlier, Walker had hustled her and Eli up the tunnel, despite her protestations of leaving Mike behind. They hadn’t gotten far at all before Snow had caught up to them, devouring the expanse like a harsh and vengeful wind. There was something of the forces of nature in him now, Sarah was sure of it, nature’s dark side, at least, a cruelty he’d absorbed from less than human influences. It had all happened so rapidly—and in retrospect, so inevitably.