ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Chapter 22

I yanked open the door and jumped in just as Carl sent us surging forward before the door was even shut. The Jeep plunged out into traffic amidst a cloud of vaporized rubber. We ducked around the slower cars, veering into the oncoming lane and dodging back before we collided with anybody. I caught myself pushing on the dashboard, willing the Jeep to go faster. Just after we left the Jiffy-Go Mart parking lot a police car shot by going at least sixty, siren blasting out it's warbling "flying saucer" wail, lighting up the night with blue and red flashes. Behind us we saw other flashing lights pulling into the Jiffy-Go Mart.

We raced along the crowded avenue with a lunatic disregard for personal consequences. Law-abiding motorists blasted us with their horns as we zigzagged in and out of traffic, searching desperately for any sign of the white car with a fragmented windshield and a murderer behind the wheel. The kaleidoscope of taillights ahead of us made the task seem impossible. Our prey had been swallowed up by the maze of crowded roads he might have taken in his desperate efforts to escape. Another police car soared past, reminding us that the killer had plenty of good reasons not to stay on this road.

Carl was diligently breaking the law by plowing through traffic at a high speed. I began to weigh the risk of causing a serious accident against the decreasing possibility that we’d spot the murderer and somehow stop him from escaping. I hated the idea of giving up the chase, but —

“There he is!” shouted Doug, lunging forward to point over the front seat at the road ahead. The white Chrysler was immersed in a pack of cars at a large multilane intersection while they waited for the light to turn green. The impossibly tall tail fins made the Chrysler stand out from the newer cars. Apparently it was a long traffic light, because the Chrysler had only managed to get two miles from the Jiffy-Go Mart before being caught in the clump of cars. It was blocked on all sides until the light finally turned green and the traffic started moving. As soon as the spaces between the moving cars began to open up, the Chrysler started swinging around the slower vehicles, weaving back and forth between the lanes, leapfrogging it's way past the cars ahead of it. But the driver grew impatient and suddenly swerved over into the oncoming lanes. Headlights veered to prevent a head-on collision, and horns blared in a strange harmony.

A wisp of steam trailed out of the white car as it swerved back into the right lanes. Carl floored the Jeep, and we surged forward, but we were barely keeping up. The driver of the white car was maneuvering with a suicidal disregard for either his own safety or the people around him. We could hear the white car’s horn blaring angrily at the people who blocked its way while it wove in and out of traffic.

Carl gripped the wheel with white-knuckled hands, yanking it back and forth as we desperately tried to overtake the homicidal lunatic. The trailing plume of steam thickened behind the vehicle.

Stan leaned over the back of the seat again and peered out the windshield. “He must have caught a slug in his radiator.”

Doug said, “I'll bet it was that fourth shot Swan got off just as he was hit in the shoulder.”

Carl smiled as he stared at the road ahead and continued to wrestle with the steering wheel. “If he keeps driving like that, his engine will seize up. All we have to do is keep him in sight.”

A freeway overpass loomed ahead of us, the entrance and exit ramps for I-75. The last thing we expected our quarry to do was get on the freeway with a car that was already overheating. And even if he did, he'd be foolish to head south back toward the center of Atlanta.

All four of us just sat there dumbfounded as the man in the white car veered onto the entrance ramp of the southbound freeway. This guy was making some really bad personal choices.

“Damn, he's got to know that his engine is overheating," said Carl. "The steam from the broken radiator must be coming right into the car through that broken windshield."

When the white car got to the end of the entrance ramp and swerved out onto I-75, we expected him to take off at ninety miles per hour and make it hard for us to keep up. But he must have realized the comet tail of white steam that trailed his damaged vehicle was getting thicker every second. He kept his speed down to sixty-five miles per hour, even though he was cutting around the slower cars with a frenzied recklessness, tolerating no delays.

Suddenly he sped up, and we realized he knew another car was following him. By this time his vapor trail was so thick we could barely see the car. It wouldn’t be long before his engine locked up and left our prey on foot.

He swerved across three lanes and barely made the exit ramp that curved slowly to the right and merged with Courtland Avenue. The lunatic driver was heading straight into the downtown area, even though the police had issued an APB and every cop in the city was on the lookout for a white Chrysler with a busted windshield and fins big enough for a rocket ship.

Carl did a masterful job of not killing anybody as he nearly rolled the Jeep over in his determined efforts to make the Courtland Avenue exit ramp. The rest of us were turning our heads in all directions, searching for a police car that would notice all this insane driving and put a stop to it by arresting both the tall man in the white Chrysler and the crazy teenagers in the blue Jeep. But there wasn’t a police car in sight, and the four of us shared a grim determination to make sure the tall man was not allowed to escape.

Carl's lunatic weaving and dodging through the traffic on Courtland must have erased any lingering doubts the man might have had about whether or not we were chasing him. The fact that we weren’t a police car must have puzzled him, but he was still determined to shake us off his tail. He shot through a red light at the intersection of Courtland and Baker Street, passing miraculously through a gap between two cars. Carl was forced to stomp the brake and send the Jeep sliding along on howling tires that left long black streaks in the road as we ground to a halt at the pedestrian crossing of the intersection. A line of cars moved sedately through the intersection and blocked us from moving one inch forward. The four of us went quietly insane as we watched our quarry speed away.

The Chrysler continue down the street, the cloud of steam nearly hiding it from view. It looked like a metal comet with a hood ornament. It was producing its own smoke screen, but the abused car’s engine was not long for this world. I tried to tell myself that even if we lost him in the maze of city streets, he would soon find himself on foot in the middle of Atlanta with every policeman on the force eagerly searching for the man who mistakenly thought he could shoot a policeman and get away with it.

The only problem with this optimistic notion was that the only people who knew what the man looked like was a dazed pimple-faced teenager, a critically injured police officer . . . and the Bowmen. And we were the only ones who could stay on his trail and make sure he didn’t slide off into the night.

"Oh no," Stan mumbled. "I know why he came into the downtown area. Officer Swan was right. He's going to highjack a car!"

After a moment of stunned silence from everybody present, Carl swore bitterly. "Damn! That must be it."

"Right," said Stan. "He's planning to ditch the Chrysler and then jump into a car at an intersection. He'll point that gun at some poor driver and they'll take him anywhere he wants."

"It's the perfect way to hide from the police," I said.

"Not if we see him do it and stay on his tail," said Carl.

The traffic light finally turned green, and Carl gave us all whiplash with a screaming takeoff that removed the last of the tread from the Jeep’s tires. We passed through the remnants of the steam cloud that still hung in the air along Courtland Avenue, but as we approached the intersection at Harris Street, we saw that the air beyond the intersection was clear — and the air to the right was hazy.

Carl made the right-hand turn onto Harris Street, the Jeep’s rear end fishtailing when he twisted the steering wheel. Harris Street took us up a moderate incline toward the intersection of Peachtree Center Avenue, with the world famous Peachtree Street just one block further up the hill.



But the steam cloud that marked our quarry’s path trailed off to the left at Peachtree Center Avenue, and Carl dogged the vaporous cloud like a heat-seeking missile. The traffic light ahead of us was sympathetic, and it remained green as we careened around the corner. We traveled fifty feet down the street, gaining speed — and suddenly found ourselves in clear air.

Carl slammed his foot down onto the brake and brought us to a noisy stop in the middle of the road. Horns blasted us from behind, and a pair of headlights nearly mated with our rear bumper. The driver of the car behind us continued to lean on his horn while the four of us looked over at the public parking lot on our left and saw steam rising from somewhere near the back row.

We had him.

Carl twisted the steering wheel hard to the left and stomped the gas. We turned into the parking lot and narrowly missed the rear ends of a dozen parked cars. We rolled thirty feet down the lane between the parked cars, and suddenly the fugitive sprinted right passed us, headed for the street entrance. The big white Chrysler was sitting diagonally across two parking spaces in the empty row at the back of the parking lot, the door standing wide open while steam poured from under the hood and rapidly enveloped the vehicle.

The Jeep stopped so fast we all rocked forward and nearly dove through the windshield. Carl snatched the keys from the ignition and lunged through the door like a bull bolting from a rodeo stall. The rest of us followed quickly, and we converged on the rear of the Jeep as Carl yanked open the tailgate, grabbed his bow from the back, and turned to sprint off after the lanky giant without waiting for anybody else. We three did an unintentional comedy routine by diving for our bows at the same time. Stan hit Doug soundly on the nose when he snatched up his bow from the pile, but Doug and I didn’t say a word as we grabbed our own bows and hurried after Carl and Stan.

Carl was forty feet head of us, running toward the nearby intersection of Harris and Courtland. Across the intersection, we saw the fugitive heading up the hill on the right-hand sidewalk bordering Harris. We ran diagonally across the intersection like four suicidal joggers, headlights blinding us as cars swerved and horns blared. The noise and commotion attracted the attention of the fugitive, and he glanced over his shoulder. He saw us just as he came to a small side entrance to the big building on his right. He pulled the glass door open and disappeared from sight.

The four of us miraculously reached the sidewalk without getting plastered to the grills of the cars on Harris Street. We ran toward the building’s side entrance through which the man had gone. I looked up and realized it was the Regency Hyatt House — the same hotel Ann and I had recently visited. I realized the fugitive would attempt to lose himself in the crowd of people in the spacious, futuristic lobby. If he succeeded in evading us, he could leave through any of several exits and slink off in to the night. Or he could highjack a car at a stop light within a few blocks of the hotel.



After passing through the doorway, we found ourselves racing up a short flight of stairs that brought us to a long hallway leading to the hotel lobby. The plush carpet muffled the sound of our running feet as we sprinted down the hallway past the entrance to an expensive restaurant on our left with a dimly-lit interior and puzzled diners who watched us run past. Carl was still in the lead, and I saw him quickly pluck an arrow from his clip and fit it to his bow. Stan and Doug followed his example and armed themselves, their movements fluid, their hands steady. I pulled my arrow free and tried to fit it to the bow without looking down, but it was difficult to do while running, and when I glanced down to line the arrow up with the string, I nearly collided with the others when they suddenly stopped. We had plunged out into one corner of the huge hotel lobby.

It was like coming out of a dark tunnel into to a sunny valley. The ceiling was twenty-two stories above our heads, a frosted plexiglass expanse, lit from above to simulate sunlight.



The balcony-like levels at each floor were festooned with hanging ivy that draped down from each floor.



The four of us started scanning the wide lobby floor, looking for our gunman. Several people nearby spotted us and stopped dead in their tracks, staring at the four masked individuals who stood motionless holding loaded bows at a low angle. Somebody shouted, and I saw a man pull his two children back into the gift shop. A few people in the cafe on far side of the lobby stood up in alarm.

Nobody was laughing.

We stood there for a moment that lasted forever — scanning, turning, looking for an animal that was masquerading as a man. There were dozens of places he could be hiding. The lobby was adorned with several larger concrete planters containing small trees.



Near the center of the lobby was a series of escalators leading down to lower levels. Several sofas and chairs were arranged into conversational groups just beyond a spectacular centerpiece which adorned the lobby, a tall column of clustered copper tubes with water flowing down the sides. The column rose from a square hole in the floor and towered forty feet above the lobby.



The hotel’s main entrance was on the opposite side of the lobby, and the man we were looking for might be making his way cautiously around the perimeter of the lobby, ducking into the shops that bordered it, moving closer and closer to the bank of doors that led out onto Peachtree Street.

If we didn’t find him soon, the murderer would slip away and leave the four of us to deal with the hotel’s security people who would soon arrive to hold us for the police.

On our left was the massive concrete pillar that ran from floor to ceiling along the lobby’s wall. Five glass elevators with rows of tiny lights running top to bottom were attached to the pillar. The elevators glided up and down the pillar with majestic grace, carrying their precious cargo of smiling guests from floor to floor. A brightly-lit waiting area was visible where the elevators opened inside of the pillar on the lobby floor. It was crowded with people, none of whom had noticed us yet.



But they had noticed the tall, poorly-dressed man who stood in their midst, desperately trying to hide himself among the affluent and fashion-conscious crowd around him. His ragged jeans and dirty t-shirt made him stand out like a skunk at a pedigree dog show. The four of us spotted him when the people in the waiting area deliberately backed away, casting nervous glances in his direction and leaving the man alone and unprotected under the bright lights.

Suddenly a man near the fugitive started shouting. "He's got a gun! This man has a gun!"

The fugitive had tucked the pistol under his belt in back, but the t-shirt had ridden up over it, exposing the weapon to the people around him. The four of us started sprinting towards the elevator waiting area while the fugitive looked around at the frightened crowd.

Panic reigned. People scrambled out of the elevator waiting area in all directions, pushing and shoving in their haste to escape. The elevator waiting area cleared out in seconds.

Just before we raced into the waiting area, an elevator door opened. The tall man reached into the elevator and started yanking people out. Shouts and screams filled the waiting area. The tall man leaped into the elevator and stabbed his fingers at the low end of the control panel. The doors closed just we arrived. The waiting area was now empty, but we could see people in the lobby staring at us with the same fear and confusion the fugitive had caused — four strange figures in comic book masks, as out of place in this sane world of high fashion and cutting-edge architecture as he was.

The doors of the elevator next to the one the fugitive had taken slid open. The people inside the elevator looked alarmed at the sight of four masked men armed with bows standing there amidst the sounds of the screaming people in the lobby.

“Out!” I shouted. “Come on, folks. Get out now, please!"

The frightened people were more than willing to vacate the elevator, and they rushed past us with wide eyes and pale faces. We boarded the elevator and let the doors close in the faces of the astonished crowd.

"Press the button for the parking garage," Doug told Carl. "He's trying to get down there so he can force the attendant to give him a car."

"Hold on, Carl!" Stan was pressing his face close to the elevator’s curved Plexiglas and looking up. “That's probably what he planned do. But he’s not going down.”

Carl pressed the button for the twenty-second floor.



The lobby floor dropped away below us with dizzying speed, like the surface of the earth falling beneath a rocket as it headed for high orbit. The ivy-laden balconies of the hotel atrium rushed past us as we soared higher and higher, speeding toward the lobby’s distant ceiling.



“He went all the way to the twenty-second floor,” reported Stan, still pressing his cheek against the plexiglass and looking upward. "Why would the idiot go up?"

Doug had a dazed look in his eyes and a clever theory in mind. "Maybe the button on the top floor had already been pressed by somebody up there before he got into the elevator," said Doug. "If that's what happened, he'll have to come back down to the lobby after the elevators stops on twenty-two."

Carl was smiling because he was one step ahead of everybody. "Right! But I'm bettin' he can't do that now. I think the maintenance guys have shut down the elevators to keep him there until the police arrive. He's trapped!"

Everybody was grinning about this until I dropped my verbal bomb. "Good point," I said quietly. "But in that case . . . so are we." This revelation wiped away everybody's grins.

The elevator slowed as it approached the twenty-second floor, seconds away from pulling up next to the one the fugitive had ridden in.



“Uh-oh!" Stan suddenly blurted out. "Wait a minute. We screwed up. He’ll wait for the elevator doors to open and shoot us like clay pigeons!”

The thought chilled us, one and all. I stood there mesmerized by the horrible mental images of all four of us being gunned down the moment the elevator doors opened. We had to be ready for him.

I had an idea.

“Okay . . . Stan, you and I will kneel in front of the door, ready to shoot. Carl and Doug, you guys stand behind us so you can shoot over our heads.”

Without another word, we took up our positions.

The elevator reached the twenty-second floor and stopped next to one the fugitive had used. Because both elevators were plexiglass bullets, we could see that the other elevator was empty. And even though we could see most of the balcony that ran around the huge open space above the lobby, we saw nothing of the lanky killer — which meant he had to be in the elevator waiting area.

After a maddening pause, the doors of our elevator slid open. Before they moved an inch, our arrows were drawn.

The waiting area on the twenty-second floor was empty. I leaned out cautiously to peek around the corner. The area was clear. No killer was waiting to blow holes in us.

We dashed out into the twenty-second floor waiting area, spreading out as we did. We moved like combat veterans, Marines in an old John Wayne movie, darting from cover to cover, flattening ourselves against the walls. I heard air hissing in and out of my nostrils. The silence was like a long sustained note in an inaudible key.

He was here . . . somewhere. In my mind’s eye, I saw the face of the old man at the Jiffy-Go Mart, his lips moving just before the side of his head had been blown outward toward me with sickening violence.

"Help me."

Once we left the elevator waiting area, there was almost no place to hide — either for us or the fugitive. Just a one-sided hallway with rooms on jone side, a guardrail on the other, and a twenty-two-story drop down the middle of artrum. The black guardrail alternated with concrete sections, each twenty feet long. Between the railing and the concrete sections were decorative plants and plush benches for guests to sit on and enjoy the view of the distant lobby floor, way down there on planet Earth.



As we moved out of the elevator area and into the hallway/balcony, we played leap frog — each of us advancing a little and then crouching down to signal the guy behind to move forward and become the new point man, taking cover behind the benches or planters. We constantly twisted our heads back and forth, looking for the gunman we knew must be hiding somewhere on this floor.

Four sides to choose from, lots of places for him to conceal himself and wait for us to walk right up and get shot real, real dead. Our adversary could be under the benches . . . or behind the concrete sections of the guardrail around the corner . . . or waiting to pop up and turn us into cooling meat just like the old man at the Jiffy-Go Mart.

Carl, Stan, and Doug had advanced ahead of me, all crouching low and looking very nervous. It was my turn to move up. Just as I was about to do so, I had a strange thought.

What if the fugitive had gone into one of the rooms to our right? Say, for instance . . . the one we had just passed.

I stood up and whirled around just in time to take a glancing blow off my forehead instead of a crashing blow on the top of my skull. But the impact jellied my knees and fogged my vision as I staggered back and fell to the floor, looking up at a nightmare scene.

The tall man stood ten feet away with his gun leveled directly at my chest. I saw his finger tense on the trigger. My gut turned to stone as I waited for that cold piece of gray lead to tear into me.

Like a bolt of lightning, a slugger was fired from behind me, and it collided with the man's bony jaw just as the gun fired.

I felt a quick tug on the right side of my shirt, just above the belt. Doug leaped over me as the man shook his head, stunned by the slugger. Doug dropped his bow so he could grab the man’s thick wrist in both hands and push it to the side with enough force to cause the second shot to miss Carl and Stan when they rushed in to help Doug.

The man brought his knee up quickly, and Stan was lifted six inches off the floor. Stan slumped away from the struggling group, doubled over with an aching groin. The gun which the killer held was waving over everyone’s head, wrapped in his own fist and two other pairs of hands.

With so many hands gripping the pistol, somebody was bound to pull the trigger. The thunderous boom of the gun sounded deafening as it reverberated from the wall and ceiling overhead. It echoed back up from the lobby floor, twenty-two stories below. The slug plowed into the stippled ceiling above us and filled the air with chalky dust. Chunks of plaster fell down onto the wrestling group.

I struggled to my feet and stood there like a hopeless drunk, barely able to stand as I yanked a slugger from the clip, backed up to give myself room, and pulled on the bow string until the arrow's feathers brushed my right cheek. But I couldn’t get a clear shot at the man’s face as the struggling mass of bodies surged back and forth. The man saw me aiming an arrow at him and started forcing the gun slowly down towards me.

Carl’s finger was wedged into the trigger guard on top of the tall man’s finger, and when Carl realized that the gun was being aimed at me, he started yanking hard on the trigger while the man’s arm was still angled upward.

Bam! Bam! Bam! — click, click.

The last three shells went off as Carl jerked the trigger while the giant forced his arm steadily downward, determined to put a bullet into my face before I put a slugger into his. The third bullet must have passed three inches over my head..

Once the gun was empty, the man surprised Carl and Doug by yanking his arm upward and wrenching the gun free. He hammered the side of Doug’s head with it and sent him stumbling back towards the wall to my left. Then the man put one large, meaty paw against Carl’s throat and shoved him toward me like a rag doll.

I fired the slugger just before Carl crashed into me. It missed Carl’s left ear by the length of his last haircut and punched the big man solidly in the right eye. Carl and I fell to the floor and started pushing at each other to get untangled.

The killer staggered back, his hand covering his injured eye. Stan had recovered enough to crawl over to the bows lying on the floor. He grabbed one, yanked a slugger from the clip, put it in place, and hauled back on the string. He put the slugger squarely into the pit of the big man’s stomach. All the air was ejected from his lungs, and he shuffled backward, hugging his belly and leaning forward like a drunk about to leave his lunch on the floor in front of him.

He was staring at me, his eyes growing larger as he watched me crawl up onto my knees and fit another slugger into place. I pulled the bowstring back, but before I could fire he turned and stumbled toward the elevator waiting area twenty feet away. The slugger sailed over his head and landed on the carpet near the far corner of the hallway as the man ducked into the elevator area.

Doug hurried over to help Stan, while Carl and I rose from the floor. Stan’s face was a white portrait of pain. We were all in bad shape — certainly in no condition to immediately pursue the fugitive.

Doug pulled Stan slowly to his feet like a devoted son helping his invalid mother out of bed. He looked around at the benches positioned along the balcony outside the doors of the hotel rooms. Then he spotted the open door of the room the gunman had emerged from, just a few feet away. Doug draped Stan’s arm over his shoulder and hauled him toward the doorway.

Carl and I followed them into the room, our bows loaded and ready and aimed at the entrance to the elevator area twenty feet away, where we knew the gunman was hiding. I noticed that the two elevators were still on the twenty-second floor, empty and with their doors closed. Carl had been right about the maintenance crew shutting down the elevators to hold the gunman on this floor. His only means of escape would be to go down twenty-two floors using the staircase — and the police would be waiting for him at the bottom.

The lights were on in the room we entered, but the room was empty. I stood at the doorway, peeking out to see if the gunman would stay put in the elevator waiting area. Doug helped Stan sit down on the edge of the nearest of the two beds. Carl gave his wounded friend a sympathetic look as Stan sat there with his arms in his lap, hunched forward, wishing that all men didn’t have such a vulnerable spot right where any jackass with a knee could deal such a painful blow.

Carl noticed the blood that coated the side of Doug’s head. “Hey, I better get you a wet washcloth for that.” Carl turned to the nearby bathroom door, which was closed. When he tried to open it, he discovered it was locked. A timid voice spoke from the bathroom.

“Please . . . don’t hurt us. We haven’t tried to come out.”

The four of us looked at each other in confusion for a moment, then Carl said, “It’s okay. He’s gone. Uh . . . are you hurt?”

There was a long pause, then a frightened voice said, “No. We’re okay.” Another pause, then the voice asked a tricky question. “Who are you?”

Carl looked over at me, and I knew he was wondering what he should say. He wanted to reassure the people in the bathroom, not confuse and scare them. But there was only one answer he could give, so he gave it.

“Ummm. . . . We’re the Bowmen.”

That got no response at all, so Carl came over to me while Stan sat on the bed and tried to stop groaning out loud. Doug stood next to him, acting motherly.

“Is he still there?” said Carl. I hadn’t looked in the last twenty seconds, but when I glanced out the door I saw that the hallway was empty.

“I guess. He's either there or somewhere else on this floor, hiding somewhere. The elevators are shut down, just like you said.”

Doug came up to join Carl and me as we peered around the corner of the door, surveying the hallway outside.

“Still there?” Doug asked.

“Maybe,” I replied. “We can’t be sure.”

“At least he’s out of bullets,” said Doug. “Surely he’s not carrying enough to reload a third time.”

“Hey, you’re bleeding,” said Carl, pointing to my forehead. I reached up and felt a spot of warm wetness at my hairline. My scalp had been split by the glancing blow.

“Hey Brad, look here!” said Doug. He was pointing at my right side, just above the belt. I pulled up my blood-soaked shirt and found a raw groove that had been cut by the bullet that had grazed my side. Two holes in the T-shirt marked the borders of the bloody wet spot.

Stan came shuffling up, walking funny as he pushed Doug and Carl aside. He bent down to peer closely at the wound. After a moment, he straightened up and gave the three of us his diagnosis.

“Ah, big deal. It’s already starting to clot. Come on, guys.”

Doug was more sympathetic. “Hold on, he’s lost some blood. We need to get him to a doctor.”

Carl seemed to be siding with Doug, and I knew it was up to me to make the call. I stood up as straight as I could and said, “Oh hell, I’m okay. Let’s finish the job. What about you, Sta — ” I caught myself when I remembered the people in the bathroom. “What about you, Cowboy?”

Stan drew a deep breath and blew it out noisily as he copied my forced posture, standing tall in the face of our injuries.

“Never better,” he said. He looked over at Doug and Carl.

“Right,” I said firmly. “Then I say we should rush him. Come on.”

Before they could protest, I bolted from cover and sprinted toward the elevator alcove, pulling out my billy club as I ran. Carl and Doug followed close behind. Stan shuffled after us as best he could. We rushed into the alcove with our billy clubs in hand, ready to beat the murderer to a bloody pulp!

However . . . he wasn't in the waiting area.

We all stood there looking around with dumbfounded expressions. Finally Doug said, “He's either hiding somewhere else here on the twenty-second floor, or he's gone down one of the stairways.”

“The stairways won't do him any good,” called out Stan. He was standing out by the guardrail, looking down at the lobby. “Wow, look at all those cops.”



We joined him at the guardrail outside the elevator area. The lobby was crawling with tiny figures in blue uniforms, running around and looking up at us.

“The other elevators are all down at the lobby. He's definitely still up here somewhere,” said Stan. "When they shut the elevators down, the doors to the ones on this floor wouldn't open again."

Doug was nodding in agreement. "Besides, he wouldn't have gotten on an elevator with all those policemen down there."

"What about the maintenance elevators?" said Carl.

"Those will be shut down, too," said Stan. We had become experts on how to get trapped on the top floor of the Regency when the police are after you. Too bad it came one day late.

I looked around at the others for a moment. “When they get ready to make their move, we'll see several elevators full of policemen coming up. I guess they don't really need us any more. Shall we just leave this to the pros?”

After a long moment of silence, Carl said, “Maybe we should, but . . . I’d sure like to have that guy all wrapped up and ready when they get here.”

Everybody looked at everybody else — and everybody seemed to feel the same way.

“Right,” I said in a quiet voice. “Then let’s get to work.”

Stan grabbed my arm and pointed across the open space to the opposite side of the atrium. I saw the tall man peeking over a concrete portion of the guardrail. He had obviously left the elevator waiting area during the brief period when I hadn’t been watching it.

"What's he doing?" said Carl.

Stan looked down at the lobby, then back up at the fugitive. "He's watching to see how many elevators will come up, and which floors they'll stop on. Then he'll run to the stairs and go down a few floors so he can hide in a room again."

I was desperately hoping the fugitive wasn't as smart as Stan, because the plan he'd just described might actually work. We had assumed the fugitive was stupid when he drove his damaged car straight into the city. But now we knew he was a crafty animal, staying one step ahead of both us and the police.

"The stairways are on the two opposite corners," said Doug, pointing at the red exit signs above the stairway doors on our own floor. "If we move just right, we might be able to cut him off from the fire exits."

Doug was making sense. “Hey, that's a good idea. Stan and Doug, go that way. Carl, you go this way with me.”

We separated and headed around the twenty-second floor balcony in opposite directions, closing in on the gunman. His head ducked down as soon as we started toward him. Stan and Doug paced themselves to stay even with us on their side of the atrium. We loaded our bows as we moved along.

On the balconies below we saw people on various floors looking down at the commotion in the lobby and staring up at us. The sounds of gunfire a few minutes earlier had convinced the wiser guests to stay in their rooms, but it had lured the foolish ones out onto the balconies which surround the atrium. If the fugitive made it down to any of the lower floors he would have no trouble finding rooms to hide in, despite the fact that dozens of people would witness his forced entry and inform the police.

If anyone had come out of their rooms here on the twenty-second floor, they must have done so right after the gunman shot me. They probably saw the struggle and heard the other shots being fired, which convinced them to go back inside their rooms and hide in their bathtubs.

As we made our way around the atrium, we saw the doors to several rooms on our level open a few inches as the frightened guests peeked out. The doors never stayed open long. The sight of masked men armed with hunting bows sent them scurrying back inside. I wondered what the switchboard downstairs was telling the hotel guests who called to find out what was going on.

Please stay in your room, sir. Crazy people are running around on the twenty-second floor, trying to kill each other. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

The four of us arrived simultaneously at the two corners of the atrium that brought us in line with the gunman. We saw him kneeling behind a big concrete planter, hidden from Stan and Doug, his back toward Carl and me.

I saw an elevator stop on the floor below us. A dozen policemen split up and ran around the atrium toward the stairways at the corners of the building. They weren’t going to come up to this floor in a plexiglass elevator.

Smart. We should have thought of that.

When I moved around the corner of the balcony and started toward the fugitive, Stan nodded and moved with Doug to close in on him from their side. The nearest stairway door was on the corner of the atrium right behind me. The other stairway was diagonally across the atrium. The deactivated freight elevators occupied the remaining two corners, also diagonally across the atrium. We had succeeded it placing ourselves between the fugitive and both stairway doors.

I crept forward on feet made silent by the thick carpet. I held my bow ready, the arrow fitted in place, my left arm straight in front of me, my other arm ready to draw back the string. Carl followed a few paces behind and to my left.

I had taken a dozen steps when suddenly the man stood up. Stan shouted, “Watch it!” as he and Doug ducked behind a planter. I heard the click as the gunman closed the cylinder.

The man turned and fired the reloaded revolver at the center of my face, all in one motion. Stan’s warning gave me just enough time to yank my head six inches to the right. My bow exploded in my hand as the bullet went though it, just above the grip. All the bow’s stored-up energy released itself at the ragged break, and the layers of wood and fiberglass shattered into a hundred flying shards. I felt slivers lance into my face, arms, and chest like shrapnel from a grenade. Reflexively I hurled the ruined weapon away from me and pitched myself sideways to avoid the second and third shots, colliding with the wall on my right and falling to the floor. The shattered bow sailed over the guardrail and dropped twenty-two stories to land somewhere in the lobby far below.

I heard the man run by me, and I twisted my head around to see Carl pop up from behind a large planter, kneeling on the carpet as he fired a slugger at the gunman's back just as he pushed open the fire exit door. The slugger passed over the man’s shoulder, sailed through the open door, and rattled around audibly in the stairway beyond. The door closed behind the fugitive, and seconds later we heard gunshots thundering inside the concrete enclosure.

Carl came running up to where I lay on the carpet. He grimaced behind his mask when he saw the condition of my face. He knelt down in front of me as Stan and Doug came up.

“Holy crap,” whispered Stan, staring at me as he helped me sit up.

Carl reached out and carefully extracted a two-inch needle of fiberglass from my left cheek. His teeth clenched in sympathy. After pulling it free, he said, “Did that hurt very much?”

Strangely, it hadn’t. So I said, “No.”

“Good. Then hold on. There are five more.”

One by one, Carl cleared my pincushion face of the sharp slivers. Stan pulled two from my right arm and three from my chest. My dark blue Bowmen shirt had tiny bloodstains that my mother would know how to wash out — if I was ever foolish enough to tell her how they got there.

A voice, shouting from the level below, caught our attention. We saw a policeman on the opposite side of the atrium, looking up.



“Were any of you guys shot?” he called out.

“No,” I shouted back. Then I remembered why my side was hurting. “Well, yes — but not too badly. Did you guys get him in the stairway?”

The answer was disappointing. “No, we didn’t. He wounded an officer and then went up the stairs. He might be on the roof. We’re waiting for spotters to get into position on a nearby building.”

Carl called out a question. “How many times did he fire?”

“In the stairway?” said the officer. “Three or four times. Why?”

“Oh . . . just curious,” said Carl. The policeman started talking on his radio, and then he hurried around the atrium toward the stairway entrance on his level. Carl turned back to us.

“He shot three times at Brad. I think he’s out of bullets again.”

“That’s what we thought the last time,” I said in a humble voice.

“Are you really that sure?” Doug said, looking at Carl.

“How many bullets could he have in the pockets of those jeans?” said Carl. “He fired six rounds at the store where he killed the old man. He reloaded before he got here and fired six more.”

I was nodding in agreement. “Carl is right. He fired three at me and three more at the policemen in the stairway. This guy’s gotta be out of ammo by now.”

Stan gave me a kindly smile, the sort of smile parents give their children when they finally admit there’s really no Santa Claus. “Come on, Jones. You want to risk our lives on that logic?”

I smiled back, even though I was hurting practically everywhere. “Hey . . . guys . . . I got us this far, didn’t I?”

That produced a grin from absolutely everybody. Stan looked around, surveying our less-than-enviable situation. With a wry smile, he said, “Yes, you certainly did, Captain. And by the way . . . have we thanked you for that lately?”

Carl, always the voice of reason, dropped his reality bomb into the discussion. “Guys, let’s face it. No matter what happens, we’re leaving here tonight in the back of a squad car. And those cops are going up to the roof in a few minutes to get that sick bastard — after we did all the work to run him down.” Carl looked each of us in the face for a second, then he said, “Does that really seem right to you guys?”

I sat there on the carpet with messy holes in my shirt and little streams of blood trickling down from tiny holes in my face. I felt dizzy because of all the important fluids I was leaking out. I had no weapon, other than my billy club.

Doug had been silent throughout the discussion, a rare thing for him. Into the silence he spoke in a soft and undeniably caring voice.

“Captain? I hate to say it, but you look terrible.”

I felt terrible. But being called Captain by Doug at that particular moment did something to me. I struggled to my feet with much help from my friends. They gazed at me intently and wondered what I would say. After a long pause, I said it.

“Come on, guys. Let’s finish this job.”

I headed for the stairway door and wondered if they would follow. Oddly enough, they did.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)