NICHOLAI HAD HIM, DEAD TO RIGHTS. CAR-los dropped the revolver and raised his hands. He had to buy some time.

Talk to him, get his attention. Jill needs you to comeback, with or without the vaccine."Hola, dickhead," Carlos said lightly. "I wondered ifI was going to see you again, after our ride out of towngot blown to shit. A monster did it, believe it or not. So,what's your story? Kill anything interesting lately?"

From behind the tall shelf unit jutting out from one wall, somebody groaned in pain. Nicholai didn't look away, and Carlos could see that he'd taken the right tact. Nicholai was smug, irritated... and intrigued.

"I'm about to kill you  - so no, nothing interesting. Tell me, has Mikhail died yet? And how is your bitch friend, Ms. Valentine?" Carlos glared at him. "Both dead. Mikhail died on the trolley, and Jill contracted the virus. I... I had to put her down just a few hours ago." He probably wasn't going to walk away from this, and he didn't want Nicholai going after Jill; he quickly changed the sub-ject. "You shot Mikhail, didn't you?" "I did." Nicholai's eyes sparkled. He reached into his front pocket as he spoke, pulling out what looked like a metal cigar holder. "And as luck would have it, this is the cure to what killed your other friend. If only you'd come sooner... in a way, I suppose you could say I'm at least partly responsible in both deaths, couldn't you?"

The sample. The only thing that could save Jill now, and Carlos was being held at gunpoint by the madman who had it.

Think! Think of something!

There was another gruff wail of pain from behind the shelf. Carlos tilted his head and could see a man slumped in the back corner of the room, just visible be-tween two stacks of files. Carlos couldn't see his face, but the man's lower half was drenched with blood. "And that guy makes three," Carlos said, desperately trying to keep the conversation going, trying not to stare at the silver case that Nicholai held up. "Aren't you a go-getter? Tell me, is this a means to an end, or do you like killing people?" "I enjoy killing people who are as useless as you,"

Nicholai said, slipping the vaccine into an open pocket.

"Can you think of one reason you deserve to live?"

Another moan came from the dying man behind theshelf. Carlos glanced between the stacks again and sawan impact grenade clenched in shaking hands, the ringalready pulled; Carlos realized that the man must havegroaned to cover the sound, and some part of him ad-mired the clear thinking, all in the instant before hestarted to back up, hands still raised. The grenade wasan RG34, the same kind that Carlos had tucked in hisvest, and he wanted as much distance as he could get.

Make it look good..."I'm an excellent shot, I have a generous nature, andI floss every day," Carlos said, backing up another step,trying to appear that he was deeply afraid and coveringit up with bravado."Such a waste this will be," Nicholai said, smiling,extending his arm.

Throw the goddamn thing!

"Why?" Carlos asked quickly. "Why are you doing this?"

Nicholai's smile stretched into a grin, the same predatorial grin that Carlos had seen him wearing on the transport, what felt like a million years before. "I possess leadership qualities," Nicholai said, and for the first time, Carlos could see the insanity in his murky eyes. "That's all you need to know..." "Die!" the bleeding man screamed. Carlos caught a flicker of motion behind the shelf, and then Carlos was diving sideways, trying to get behind a table as a win-dow broke and...... BOOM, folders and books were airborne and ex-ploded materials rained down, wood and paper and chips of metal, the heavy shelf tipping over with a thundering creak. It slammed to the floor with a tremendous crash, and then everything was quiet, and shit was everywhere. Carlos sat up, one arm wrapped around his throbbing rib cage, tears of pain in his eyes. He blinked them away and got to his feet, grabbing the revolver he'd dropped as he stood up. Nicholai was gone. Carlos kicked his way through the debris to the corner, remembering that a window had shattered before the grenade exploded. Although it was dark and rainy outside, Carlos could see the roof of an adjacent building one floor below. Bam! Bam! Carlos jumped back as two rounds hit the outer wall, hardly a hand's width from his face. He silently berated himself for sticking his head out the window, like some half-witted baboso. He backed away from the window and turned, only to find himself staring at the burnt, bloody remains of the grenade thrower. "Gracias," Carlos said quietly. He wished he could think of something else to say, but then he decided it would only be useless symbolism; the guy was dead, he wasn't hearing shit. Carlos walked back across the room, thinking, won-dering how he was going to catch up with Nicholai. It wasn't going to be easy, but there was no other choice...... and he saw the glint of metal from the corner of his eye, and stopped. He blinked, feeling a kind of awe as he realized what he was looking at  - and then scooped it up, a giant weight lifting from his shoulders and from around his heart. He was going to be able to save Jill. The crazy pen-dejo had dropped the vaccine.

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.