"Owen! Up here, quick!" Julie shouted from the fourth-floor balcony. She had her pistol in one hand and was guiding a strait-jacketed man with the other. Doctor Joan was behind them, aghast at the destruction being visited upon her facility. I clambered up the stairs toward them. I heard Julie order the doctor to take her father, and then gunfire broke out as she tried to slow the climbing gargoyle.

"Down that hall." Julie gestured with her head as I reached her position. She was inserting a new magazine into her 1911. She dropped the slide. "Elevator. Hurry." My pursuer was about to reach the fourth floor. More noise rang out from the opposite corridor as another gargoyle tore its way through the building's walls.

I ran a few yards down the hall, gunshots banging away behind me as Julie tried in vain to slow the monster. I took up position, and waited for her to leapfrog past. She fired until her pistol was empty, and then turned and sprinted past me. At least three thousand pounds of unnaturally animated, living-stone destruction and pure evil came bearing at me, blank eyes wide, stone mouth gaping. I slowed it down as I placed bullets into its knees and elbows, splashing molten rock onto the walls, which immediately began to smoke and smolder under the superheated fluid.

The monster stumbled, limbs temporarily buckling, and face planted into the balcony floor. The sudden blow brutally shook the fourth-floor balcony. The old wood structure tore away from its supports with a dust cloud and a screech of bending nails and breaking boards, spilling the gargoyle over the edge. It clawed at the ledge, but the thing was far too heavy, and its talons pulled through the building materials. It fell silently, lacking the room to spread its huge wings, and a second later I was rewarded with a massive echoing crash as the gargoyle smashed through the floor tiles and into the basement.

"So long, sucker!" I shouted as I ran for the elevator. There was still another gargoyle on this floor. I could hear it breaking its way through the narrow halls to reach us, and there had been a third one on the roof that could be anywhere by now.

The ceiling exploded. A porous rock claw grasped at my head. I dodged under it and dived into the waiting elevator. Doctor Joan stabbed at the buttons frantically as Julie fired on the monster's arm. We had found our third gargoyle.

"Going down?" I asked as I rolled over and patted my pockets searching for another en-bloc clip. I was out.

"You got a better idea?" Julie asked. It was taking the doors forever to close. The nearest gargoyle was battering its way in from the roof; tiles and wood splinters rained down as it applied its bulk and fury against the feeble barrier. We only had seconds.

Gradually the door closed. Pulleys whirred as the elevator started down.