Ought to try that ER door, he thought. Just to make sure it’s still open.

But that was crazy, too. Why wouldn’t the ER entrance be open? It was the only way in or out of the hospital now. Nobody would’ve locked it down, unless—

Unless they wanted to keep Snow from escaping.

He cut left, through a set of double doors, leaving the main concourse and entering the ER. The silence felt deeper here, heralding an admixture of isolation and despair. Empty rooms had their own unnatural spaciousness, but they looked particularly bare with half the equipment removed. The paint inside had become dingy gray, peeling, like corpses’ skin, under the fluorescent lights. In the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of one of the room’s floors, and it looked filthy with dried brownish footprints, as if someone had shuffled a drunken two-step through an immense pool of their own blood.

Up ahead was the ER nurses’ station, where no phones rang and nothing moved. Mike walked faster, wanting to put that behind him. He was aware of his shoes squeaking on the floor, his breath quickening in his lungs, and for the first time he felt a sensation of heaviness looming over his shoulder.

Someone was watching him.

He stopped, jerked his head around, and looked back up the long, vacant hall. On either side, the doors of the ER rooms gaped stupidly open. Overhead, one of the light tubes flickered and went out. He held his breath. Nothing stirred; nothing made a sound. Yet the feeling of being watched had only grown more intense, less a sensation and more a certainty.

His heart was hammering, and not just because of his fast hustle down the hall. He swallowed, and had to do it three times before finding enough moisture to lubricate the back of his throat. He knew it now, right in his nerve endings: Snow was following him. He’d followed him down from upstairs, and he was hiding in one of the rooms, just out of view.

Panic swelled in his throat, and he stuffed it down.

Don’t panic. Stay cool. Just get out of here. You can call Sarah once you get outside.

Up ahead, some thirty paces in front of him, he saw the steel door where Calhoun had let him in not even two hours earlier. Alongside it to the right was the ER waiting room, where you could normally look out at the rotunda where the ambulances picked up and dropped off, but that was all dark now, the fishbowl windows shuttered by big sheets of plywood. The only light came from the overhead fixtures.

Walking swiftly, not quite running, Mike cut the distance between himself and the door down to twenty feet, ten feet, five, and then he was there, both hands gripping the metal bar that would unlatch the steel door and release him into the open air of the early July evening. He pushed it.

The door didn’t open.