Rosemary smiled and squeezed his shoulder again. “You're a good man, Jack.”
Man. No one had ever called him that before. No one but himself.
When they opened the door, all was silent. They crept out into the hallway, Rosemary going first with her gun, and the building sat around them calm and still. They moved quickly along the corridor. It wasn't until they were closing on the fire exit door at the end that the shooting began.
Jack dropped, turning as he did so to fall across Emily. Rosemary fell against the wall and slid down to the floor, and for a terrible moment Jack thought she'd been hit. He looked for blood, but saw none, and then she turned around, looking past him back the way they had come.
She sighed. “Not this floor.”
Jack shook his head. “This floor, but not this corridor. It's coming from the other wing. We need to go.”
They moved to the end of the corridor, passing doors that might not have been opened for the past two years. Are there bodies? Jack wondered. A sad story of lonely death behind each door? The hotel smelled musty, though not unpleasant, but he had no idea whether there would still be the smells of rot and decay after so long. He felt as though he were inhabiting two times: the here and now, with people chasing and shooting at them through a deserted building in the dead Toxic City; and the past, where people spent brief periods of their busy lives in a room in one of London's many hotels.
Rosemary reached the fire escape door first. She looked back past Jack and Emily again, but did not seem to see anything that alarmed her.
“I'll go first,” she said. “After I know it's safe…” She trailed off, her eyes went wide, and she brought the gun up in two hands. It was pointing directly at Jack's stomach.
“Wait!” he said, but she was not looking at him.
This time it was Emily who pulled Jack down. He turned as he fell, looking back along the corridor at the two Choppers who had appeared at its junction with the hotel's central core. They were the same man and woman he had seen talking to Miller outside the room door.
Bullets ripped along the corridor, slicing into the plaster walls, blowing jagged splinters from door frames, filling their world with violence and noise once more.
Rosemary braced herself against the wall, then looked down at her gun, turning it this way and that.
“Safety?” Jack shouted, because he really had no idea either.
The shooting stopped. “That's them!” a voice hissed.
“Okay,” the woman said. “Just get the old bitch.” The two soldiers ran along the hallway, guns raised, and when the woman stopped and braced into a firing position, the male Chopper jerked to a halt and shot his companion in the leg.
She grunted and flopped to the carpeted floor, dropping her gun and rolling immediately onto her back.
The tall soldier seemed to be fighting with his weapon, yanking it this way and that as if someone invisibly was holding the barrel. He pointed it at the woman writhing on the floor before him, shaking his head and moaning, “No, no…”
A shape appeared behind him at the corridor junction. Puppeteer.
“No!” the soldier shouted, and he shot his friend again.
Jack turned away, but he still saw her head whip back, and blood splash across the floor and up the corridor walls.
“Come on,” Rosemary said. She nodded briefly to Puppeteer, then pushed the fire exit door open.
Jack hustled Emily through first, following her and turning around. As Rosemary let go of the door and its closer pulled it shut, he saw Puppeteer approaching the remaining Chopper, right hand held out and fingers playing the air.
The soldier screamed as his feet left the floor and his head was crushed, slowly, against the elaborately corniced ceiling.
“Jack,” Emily said, “I should have got that on film.”
“Kids,” Rosemary said. “So resilient.”
Jack barked one loud, harsh laugh, and then followed Rosemary down the stairs.
“Safety catch,” he said.