“There’s a stretcher out in the hallway.” Hank pointed a thick finger at Mike. Ten minutes in the company of another human being had put him firmly back in cop mode. “Take your flashlight and bring it back here.”

“What are we doing?”

“Making a battering ram.”

A battering ram, why hadn’t he thought of that? Mike brought the stretcher back. Hank’s plan was simple. They bent down and hoisted one of the sofas from the middle of the waiting room, setting it on top of the stretcher and strapping it down with canvas restraints.

“Here’s the idea,” Hank said. “You’re gonna get behind this thing and push. I’m gonna be up front and steer. We’ll get this fat-ass bitch going as fast as we can and send her right through there—” He pointed his flashlight at a big sheet of plywood covering the window to his immediate right. “You got it?”

Mike nodded. Grunting, he and the cop rolled the stretcher to the far side of the waiting room, clearing thirty feet of distance between the stretcher’s launch point and the point of impact.

“What about our flashlights?” Mike asked. “We need to see where we’re going with this thing.”

“Prop ’em up over there.” Hank nodded at a wooden shelf thirty feet away, where the waiting room’s TV had once sat. “Just aim ’em toward the window.”

Looking back on this moment, Mike realized he’d entered into the endeavor with the worst kind of foreboding. It wasn’t until afterward that he understood this feeling for what it was: dread so dense that it bordered on a premonition. He and the cop took their places on either end of the stretcher and started pushing it, walking first and building up to a run. Within a dozen paces they’d gathered more speed than Mike had thought possible, the wheels clacking and whacking away.

As they careened through the flashlight beams, Mike caught sight of a skinny, familiar silhouette standing off to the right of the stretcher’s path.

Calhoun? Was it—

It had to be, the security guard halfway down the hall leading to the private ER rooms, and now Mike saw he was waving at them, pointing, saying something he couldn’t quite hear over the racket of the wheels and his own breathing. It sounded like—

It sounded like he was telling them to run.

Mike was never exactly sure what happened to Hank. He was only aware of a swift black blur flying into the front end of the stretcher from the direction Calhoun was pointing, slamming it sideways and knocking it over so the sofa hit the floor with a crash. Following it was a shriek, high and womanly, that never quite seemed to end, instead merely withering down to a wet rattle.

Pivoting, he looked back at Calhoun. The security guard was still there—riveted to the spot, staring at the place where the stretcher and the sofa had fallen, his hands clasping either side of his face. Mike had never seen an expression quite like it before, a combination of revulsion and profound dismay merged with the look of someone who had just stuck a fork into an electrical outlet. As Mike watched, Calhoun turned and burst into a rambling scarecrow run.