Sarah’s muscles sprung up of their own volition. She jumped to her feet and took Eli’s hand, getting ready to start running for the far end of the tunnel. Off to the side, she saw Snow looking for where the ax had been.

But the ax was gone.

She turned, thinking automatically that there’d been a miracle, that the doctor had regained consciousness to save them all. But it wasn’t Walker.

It was her husband.

It was Mike.

CHAPTER 51

51.

Seeing Snow from the back, Mike had felt the handle of the ax on the floor practically flying into his grip like a natural extension of his arm, trembling from shaft to blade with the slamming thump of his heart. All fear and pain disappeared. His thoughts, moments earlier a jumbled scrawl, became a single broad brushstroke across an otherwise blank canvas.

He watched Snow, caught off-guard, turning with his whole body, a shuffling, graceless roundelay. In one smooth movement, knowing exactly what was required, he raised the ax and swung it down with all his strength.

There was a dull, bone-rending chop from deep inside Snow’s upper musculature. He arched forward, an incoherent shriek, sprawling to the floor with the ax lodged deep within the muscles of his back. For a split second Mike thought he felt the entire hospital tremble, its enormous, multichambered heart splintered at the core by the blow he’d dealt, like a pond with a crack in the center, spreading outward. In the mirror of his own mind, he imagined he glimpsed a hole in the darkness big enough for them to crawl through, a hole the size of Frank Snow’s body.

Mike put his arms around Sarah and Eli. “You’re all right?”

“Eli and I are.” Sarah lowered her eyes and Mike saw Jolie’s body for the first time, fallen into shadow, motionless. “Jolie…She put herself in harm’s way for us.”

“What about Walker?” Mike reached for him and felt the doctor forcing himself to his feet, cringing away from Mike’s attempts to help him up. Something had silenced him, an intolerable lapse of personal responsibility that could not be countenanced in the face of the man’s formidable ego. Maybe it was the simple fact that his inability to stop Snow had not yet cost him his life. Whatever the case, Mike could feel shame radiating off the man’s skin like fever.

He glanced back up at Sarah. “Hold Eli,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Sarah glanced deeper into the tunnel. “Back that way?”

“No.” Mike shook his head. “It’s locked at the other end.”

Walker spoke quietly. “How do you know?”

“Calhoun.”

“Is he…?”

Mike nodded. “We have to go back.”

“How are we going to get out?”

Mike held up the security guard’s keys.

CHAPTER 52

52.

At the entrance to the tunnel, where the green doors gave way to the rest of the hospital, Walker spoke again.