Nicholai moved quickly through the rain toward the front of the hospital. Everything is fine, he's dead at the

push of a button and I control it, I can shut down the power and trap him…

He laughed out loud suddenly, thinking about the containment tubes in the basement where the Hunter Gammas were stored, each floating in its own see-through womb. Shut down the power and there was au-tomatic drainage so they wouldn't drown in the unaerated fluid. Die, or fight and die, Carlos. Nicholai had been smart, he'd thought ahead and now all he had to do was hit a few switches and Carlos would be in the dark and the amphibious Hunters would be squelching toward him, and maybe Carlos would actually be dead before the hos-pital was blown apart, but he was dead no matter what. Jill was sleeping again, and she was sick. Hot and achy, and her dreams were gone, pulsing, squirming shadows in their place. Shadows with textures, rough and wet. Nausea warred with an unfulfilled emptiness, with a dying thirst and a growing heat. She rolled to one side and then the other, trying to find relief from the crawling itch that had embedded it-self in every part of her, that made the ugly shadows get bigger as she slept on. Carlos found needles, syringes, and a half bottle of Betadine in a doctor's office on the third floor. He also found a cabinet full of drug company samples and was trying to decipher the labels, looking for a mild painkiller, when the lights when out. "Shit." He put down the sample, trying to get his bearings in the sudden dark. It took him about a sec-ond and a half to decide it was Nicholai, and a sec-ond longer to decide he needed to get out, and get out fast. Nicholai probably hadn't shut down the power just to make him stub his toe in the dark. Whatever Nicholai was planning, Carlos thought he'd take a rain check. He edged out of the room and into the hall, moving slowly, his hands out in front of him. Just as he reached the stairwell, the hospital's emergency backup lights hummed into soft red life. The effect was otherworldly, the light just bright enough to see by, casting every-thing in murky shadow. Carlos started down the stairs, taking them two at a time, thumb on the hammer of the Python. He ignored his aching side, deciding that he'd collapse later, when he wasn't in such a hurry. He only knew of two options for getting out of the hospital – the window Nicholai had jumped from and the front door. There were cer-tainly more, but he didn't want to waste time trying to find them; in his experience, most hospitals were mazes.

The front door was his best bet. Nicholai probably didn't think Carlos had the nerve to charge straight out of the most obvious exit, or so Carlos hoped. He'd reached the landing between the first and sec-ond floors when he heard a door crash open somewhere far below, echoing up the stairwell, making him freeze. The sound that followed – the furious, piglike battle cry of some distinctly mutant creature -got him moving again. His feet hardly touched the steps, but he still wasn't fast enough; just as he was bounding down the last flight, a monstrous figure leaped in front of the exit to the ground floor. It was giant, humanoid, tall and wide and dripping slime. Its body was a dark blue-green, almost black in the dim red light. With its webbed oversized hands and feet and its huge rounded head and mouth, it resembled nothing so much as a mammoth, hideously squashed frog. Its powerful lower jaw dropped open, and another piercing, squealing screech filled the stairwell, re-bounding throughout. Carlos heard at least three more answer the first, a fierce and freakish chorus erupting from somewhere down below. Carlos opened fire, the first round hitting the metal door and creating a deafening tornado of sound. Before he could squeeze the trigger again, the amphibious creature was springing, squealing as it leaped toward Carlos, stretching its muscular arms wide. Carlos reflexively dropped, firing as he slid down several steps, rolling to his uninjured side so he could follow the creature's descent. Three, four rounds plugged into the shrieking frog-thing's slimy body as it flew overhead…… and it was dead by the time it landed, dark gouts of watery, brackish fluid spuming from its spasming body. Carlos was on his feet running and halfway through the door even as the creature's siblings began their feral, earsplitting lament. Not too hard to kill, maybe, but he didn't want to consider his chances if there were three or more of them all leaping at once. Into the lobby and he slammed the door, saw that it required a key to lock, and he turned to look for some-thing he could use to block it…… and instead he saw a tiny, blinking white light from across the room, its brightness drawing his gaze from the midst of a shady red ocean of trashed furniture and dead bodies. A blinking white light on a small box, the box af-fixed to a pillar. A timer light for a detonating com-pound. Carlos tried to think of something else it might be and came up blank, knowing only that it hadn't been there when he'd arrived; it was a bomb, Nicholai had put it there, and suddenly the frog monsters were a much smaller deal. His mind was curiously blank as he pounded through the lobby, a thoughtless, wordless panic overtaking him, pushing him to run fast and far, to not waste time thinking. He tripped over a shredded couch and didn't notice whether or not he fell or felt pain, he was mov-ing too fast, the glass doors at the front of the building all he could see. Bam, through the doors, shining black asphalt splashing under his feet, rain misting on his sweaty face. Rows of smashed and abandoned cars, shining like wet jewels beneath a streetlight. The drum of his shuddering heart…… and the explosion was so massive that his hearing couldn't encompass it all, a kind of ka-WHAMM that was as much motion as it was sound. His body was thrown, a leaf in a hot and violent hurricane, the ground and sky becoming connected, interchangeable. He was skidding across wet pavement, tumbling to a gritty stop against a fire hydrant, feeling the enor-mity of pain in his side and tasting salt from a nose-bleed. Barely a block away, the hospital had been reduced to a smoking ruin, smaller pieces of it still coming down, cracking against the ground like deadly hail. Parts were on fire, but a lot of it had just disintegrated, matter blown to dust, the dust settling and turning to mud as the skies continued to dump water on every-thing.

Jill.

Carlos pulled himself up and started to limp back tothe clock tower.Nicholai realized he'd lost the vaccine sample as hewas running away from the hospital, when there wasone minute left before all of it went sky high. When itwas already too late.There was no choice but to keep running, and he did,and when the hospital exploded, Nicholai paced backand forth in the street three blocks away, lost in anger.So lost that he didn't realize that the agonized moaning,whining noise he heard was coming from him, or thathe'd clenched his jaw hard enough to crack two teeth.After a long time, he remembered that he still had tokill two more people, and he started to calm down.Being able to express his anger would be constructive;

it wasn't healthy to keep feelings bottled up. The Watchdog operation was his interest. The vac-cine had been an extra, a gift – so in a way, he hadn't really lost anything. Nicholai told himself that several times on his way to get Davis Chan; it made him feel better, though not as good as when he remembered that he'd had his hunting knife sharpened just before he'd come to Raccoon. He was sure Chan would appreciate it.