He went back into the room, gathered his clothes up, and put them under one arm. Then he went out, closed the door behind him, and started down the hall. His hand was sweating against the grip of Elder's gun. When he reached the gurney he looked behind him, unnerved by the silence and the emptiness. The cougher had stopped. Stu kept expecting to see Elder - creeping or crawling after him, intent on carrying out his final directive. He found himself longing for the closed and known dimensions of his room.
The groaning began again, louder this time. At the elevators another corridor ran at right angles to this one, and leaning against the wall was a man Stu recognized as one of his nurses. His face was swelled and blackened, his chest rising and falling in quick spurts. As Stu looked at him, he began to groan again. Behind him, curled in a fetal position, was a dead man. Farther down the hall there were another three bodies, one of them female. The male nurse - Vic, Stu remembered, his name is Vic - began to cough again.
"Jesus," Vic said. "Jesus, what are you doing out? You're not supposed to be out."
"Elder came to take care of me and I took care of him instead," Stu said. "I was lucky he was sick."
"Sweet bleeding Jesus, you better believe you was lucky," Vic said, and another coughing fit, this one weaker, tore loose from his chest. "That hurts, man, you wouldn't believe how that hurts. What a f**kup this turned out to be. Bleeding Christ."
"Listen, can I do anything for you?" Stu asked awkwardly.
"If you're serious, you can put that gun in my ear and pull the trigger. I'm ripping myself to pieces inside." He began to cough again, and then to groan helplessly.
But Stu couldn't do that, and as Vic's hollow groans continued, Stu's nerve broke. He ran for the elevators, away from the blackish face like the moon in partial eclipse, half expecting Vic to call after him in that strident and helplessly righteous voice that the sick always seem to use when they need something from the well. But Vic only went on groaning and that was somehow worse.
The elevator door had shut and the car was already moving downward when it occurred to Stu that it might be booby-trapped. That would be just their speed. Poison gas, maybe, or a cutout circuit that would disengage the cables and send the elevator careering down the shaft to crash at the bottom. He stepped into the middle of the car and looked around nervously for hidden vents or loopholes. Claustrophobia caressed him with a rubber hand and suddenly the elevator seemed no more than telephone-booth-size, then coffin-size. Premature burial, anyone?
He reached out a finger to push the STOP button, and then wondered what good that would do if he was between floors. Before he could answer the question, the elevator slid to a smooth, normal stop.
What if there are men with guns out there?
But the only sentinel when the door slid back was a dead woman in a nurse's uniform. She was curled up in a fetal position by a door marked LADIES.
Stu stared at her so long that the door began to slide shut again. He put his arm out and the door bounced obediently back. He stepped out. The hallway led down to a T-junction and he walked toward it, giving the dead nurse a wide berth.
There was a noise behind him and he whirled, bringing the gun up, but it was only the elevator door sliding shut for the second time. He looked at it for a moment, swallowed hard, then walked on. The rubber hand was back, playing tunes on the base of his spine, telling him to hell with this walk-don't-run bit, let's get out quick before someone... something ... can get us. The echoes of his footfalls in this semidark corridor of the administration wing were too much like macabre company - Coming to play, Stuart? Very good. Doors with frosted glass panels marched past him, each with its own tale to tell: DR. SLOANE. RECORDS AND TRANSCRIPTS. MR. BALLINGER. MICROFILM. COPYFILE. MRS. WIGGS. Perhaps of the cabbage patch, Stu thought.
There was a drinking fountain at the T-junction, but the warm, chlorinated taste of the water made his stomach turn. There was no exit to his left; a sign on the tile wall with an orange arrow beneath read LIBRARY WING. The corridor seemed to stretch away for miles that way. Some fifty yards down was the body of a man in a white-suit, like some strange animal cast up on a sterile beach.
His control was getting bad. This place was much, much bigger than he had first assumed. Not that he'd had a right to assume much of anything from what he'd seen when he was admitted - which had been two halls, one elevator, and one room. Now he guessed it to be the size of a largish metropolitan hospital. He could stumble around in here for hours, his footfalls echoing and rebounding, coming across a corpse every now and then. They were strewn about like prizes in some ghastly treasure hunt. He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot. The words written on each arrow said: YOU ARE HERE. They put those up so people wouldn't get lost. Like he was now. Lost. Oh baby, this was bad. This was so bad.