the way they came. Nell was right behind her. Tyler grabbed hold of the barn-door handle and hauled it shut a heartbeat before the shotgun roared. The sheet-metal door bucked, and a fist-sized dent erupted like a blister.
Tyler ran to the tub of salt. He curled his hands around the far edge.
“Help me with this,” he said, and Nell and Seelie lifted from the other end. Its wooden struts squealed on the stained floor as they dragged the tub and its dead cargo across the tile, barricading the door. The edge of the tub slid up against the handle and wedged it in place.
The handle wriggled and the door jolted on its tracks, stuck tight.
The wriggling stopped. Nell slowly turned in place, one hand to her ear, focused.
“Listen,” she said.
Tyler heard it. The muffled squeal of rusted metal wheels rolling on a track.
“He’s circling around,” he said. “C’mon, we have to beat him to the stairs. We get out the way we came in, and then—”
And then what? His mind was scrabbling, clawing at the inside of his skull, trying to cope with what he’d just witnessed. If he had been alone, he’d think he was hallucinating, drugged maybe, something in the air down here. Mold? he thought, desperate for rationality. Can black mold make you see things? But Nell and Seelie had seen it too, and three people couldn’t have the same hallucination.
This was happening. This was real, as real as the shotgun in Dieter Rime’s hands, and denials would just get them killed. He’d get them all out, out to the street, back to the world Tyler knew.
He led the charge back through the warrens, following the twisting coil of power cables like string in a minotaur’s maze. Now he understood the sledgehammer holes, the makeshift barricades of bed frames and bolted-down chicken wire: Rime had transformed the bowels of the derelict spa into a killing floor. His personal lair and hunting ground. He knew this place better than they did; their only advantage was speed.
The tunnel broke open into a four-way crossroads. The cables snaked left. Before he could turn, a flash of green light blinded him.
The skinless man stepped into view from the right-hand passage. The pencil-thin beam of light erupted from a laser sight on his shotgun. Rime shouldered the weapon, wearing his wide-eyed grin.
Tyler froze.
He smelled food. Hamburger patties cooking under heat lamps. French fries roasting in a deep fryer and glistening with salt.
“French fries!” demanded a small, giggling voice.
“Tyler, talk to your daughter.”
“Oh,” he laughed. “Now she’s MY daughter.”
His head was full of wasps and his arms and legs were dead weight and he tasted orange soda in the back of his mouth. He hadn’t had an orange soda in five years. He was about to die, Nell and Seelie were about to die, and he was thinking about orange soda.
Nell grabbed his shoulders and shoved him to the floor. She landed on top of him and the shotgun’s muzzle lit the hallway like the flash of Rime’s Polaroid. A full-bore slug plowed into the wall above Tyler’s back and shredded a hole, turning rotten wood to sawdust.
Tyler couldn’t hear. The world was ringing, swimmy in the aftermath of the blast. Nell was yanking his hand, shouting something about having to leave, now, and just under the drone in his ears he made out the sound of Rime racking the shotgun pump.
Seelie took the lead, tearing for the stairs. He got himself moving. Left leg, right leg. That was all he had to do. Left leg, right leg, until he made it outside.
He braced for a second slug, but it never came. Rime was moving again, charting his own path through the maze. They pounded up the stairs, following their own footsteps in the dust. The first floor of the spa was just as dark and twisted as the basement, with all the windows boarded over and piles of debris strategically placed to channel intruders along avenues of fire. Killing funnels. Rime had another way up. Tyler’s only warning was a glimmer of green laser light playing off the moldy drywall five feet ahead.
He tried to shout. The jet-engine roar of the shotgun swallowed his voice whole and the corridor became a hurricane of splintered wood. He threw his arm over his face and veered left, down a passage in the other direction. Not the way they came in. Rime was tactical, cutting them off from the exit. They’d have to find another.
“Take