elevator door somewhere and he and Jack were supposed to stay here on the left.
He thought. He wasn't sure. He couldn't remember. He couldn't...
"How many do you want, bwana?" Cat asked.
Crow looked up at him and his face was hard. "Get to your spot, Cherry."
Cat hesitated, looked at the screens, looked back at Crow. "It's just that... you think we can handle more than one?"
Jack eyed him a moment. "Whoever comes up with it. Get moving."
Cat hesitated again, then nodded and left, the glare of the spotlights glinting brightly off the polished shaft of his pike.
And then, from a desk on the other side of the booking counter, just visible through the huge black grille that rose from the top of the counter to the ceiling, a phone began to ring.
At first they just jumped. Then they turned and looked at it. Then they realized just which phone it was and then...
One of the downstairs screens, the one showing the guard's station just beyond the wide-open barred gate leading to the elevator, showed a wall phone. The receiver was off the hook and banging in the air and sometimes Felix could see the outlines and sometimes he could not but he knew who it was, knew it was the man.
The vampire was calling them.
"Suspicious sonuvabitch," muttered Crow but Felix didn't really hear him. Felix was staring at the other screen, the one showing the open elevator and the aquarium full of blood that appeared to be all but boiling.
"God!" he whispered almost silently.
But Crow heard it and looked and the two of them sat there in silence as the outline-image of her came and went, came and went, as she threw her open mouth at the blood, sloshing it against the glass, and even as a ghost they could see her frenzy, her hunger, her thirst.
Twice, Felix felt sure he could see the fangs.
Jack Crow leaned forward abruptly and closed the elevator door and started it up and growled, "Here we go, troops! Rock and roll."
But everyone knew, everyone heard the elevator. Everyone knew what was coming up to see them.
And the phone stopped ringing and the screens showed empty quiet cells and within seconds the shrieks of pain and anger began to echo from inside the elevator cage. The poison, the drugs, were getting to her.
"Enjoy, bitch," muttered Crow and he stood up away from the screens carrying his crossbow.
And that was it, then. That got Felix going at last, that sight of Jack Crow's muscled hand gripping that crossbow and moving into position and then Felix was moving also, alongside Crow's left flank and as he did so he noticed Cat up there, climbing atop the elevator cage holding his sack of gasoline-filled balloons and Felix remembered standing there earlier amidst the acetylene sparks when Carl had cut that hole in the top of the elevator car itself so that Cat could... could what?
And Felix's mind swirled with the remembered thought that Cat was supposed to throw his little water-gas balloons down into that bloody elevator along with a flare! to drive the vampires out into their killing area and that was insane, that was madness and Felix's thoughts screamed, I've got to get away from these people!
But all he did then was draw one of the Brownings and that's when they began to hear the reverberations from the elevator shaft, the din of pounding and screeching and banging and Felix thought, My God! She's going to tear that elevator apart!
Then suddenly, quiet. No banging. No horrible echoing screams, just the rumble of the car as it rose the last few feet and stopped.
The elevator door did not open.
And it still didn't open.
And then it tried, old circuits buzzing audibly and the metal groaning and it wouldn't open..
And Felix and Jack found themselves over in front of the screens without thinking but there was nothing on them except shattered glass and blood everywhere, on the floors and the walls and they barely glanced at each other before moving back into position, weapons held high, and Crow called out, "Careful, people. Looks like she jammed it shut!"
And then he reached down for his little remote device Joplin had fashioned for him - it was on the floor about fifteen feet from the elevator - and that's where they were. Felix and Crow standing together, when the elevators doors just blew off their moorings and crashed into them.
The door got Crow first, hitting him flat and flush on his right