He pushed the bar again, harder. It didn’t budge. Even as he shoved it down and threw his hip against it, he knew the truth. The door wasn’t stuck. It wasn’t rusty. The hasp wasn’t catching on something inside the jamb.

The door was locked.

Standing in front of it, still grasping the bar in his hands, he experienced the swimmy sensation of the unthinkable becoming the inevitable. Some part of him had known all along that the door would be locked, but his conscious mind, that well-intentioned housemother, had elected to spare him the unpleasantness. It was probably the last thought a chronic drunk driver had as his car veered across the double yellow into the oncoming lights of a semi: Of course, this is how it has to end.

Behind him, the soft rustle of footsteps.

Mike spun on his tiptoes with a startled squeak. Terror sent the copper taste through his mouth and sandbagged his belly. The sound had been very close, but he saw nothing, only the empty nurses’ station and the empty hallway, the empty rooms and the fluttering overhead lights.

Something nearby had moved, stealthily but not that stealthily, as if it wanted him to hear it.

In the space of a heartbeat, he scanned his surroundings for possible weapons. His eyes fell on a steel IV pole lying on the floor and he grabbed it, backing away slowly from the direction he’d heard the footsteps.

He couldn’t stay here. Two possibilities: the hall going to the right of the nurses’ station, straight back to the main concourse; and the more indirect one to the left, back through the ER, the way he’d come. Either way he knew he had to pick a direction and go for it, run, had to abandon the false comfort of the door. The door was just another wall now, like all the other walls that surrounded him here, holding him in.

A hand grazed his hip, featherlight.

Mike’s entire body jerked with a galvanic shrug and he flung himself forward in the opposite direction as if fired from a cannon, pumping his arms, pounding his feet, running up the hall to the left so fast that his body felt weightless, insubstantial, lighter than air.

He hit the doors to the main concourse without breaking stride, crashing through them and hooking right again. The IV pole in his hand caught on the doorjamb and he left it there, sprinting to the far end of the corridor, all the way to the west stairwell.

He didn’t stop running until he opened the door to the stairs and pulled it shut behind him. Pressed to the wall, he was suddenly acutely aware of the peculiarity of his own flesh pulled tight over muscle and sinew. His lips felt numb, eyes glassine, unable to blink. The fear was fully disorienting, like the first taste of some ancient alcohol, an overwhelming spirit whose elemental effect on his species had not changed for thousands of years.