Dr. Albert Nash was lost----and not just in the physical sense. He had no idea where he was, he had no idea what to do, and he had no idea what was going to happen next. All he knew was that he'd been crawling around up here in the dark for what seemed like hours, and it was only a matter of time until he did something wrong and died because of it.
He was not cut out for this. Not at all.
And making it even worse---he kind of needed to pee.
He didn't allow himself to think about that. As long as he didn't acknowledge the need, maybe it wouldn't become urgent.
He stopped and drew in a deep breath. As he did, dust settled in his nose and throat and tickled maddeningly. He wanted to cough, but he stifled that urge. One of the terrorists might be right below him, and if he coughed, the killer would hear him, realize that someone was in the crawl space, and open fire. Those flimsy ceiling tiles wouldn't stop any bullets. The thick plank on which Nash was lying might shield him, but he didn't want to risk that. So it was best to be as quiet as possible while he continued his question to find a way out of here.
He must have covered the whole area up here more than once, he told himself. If there was any kind of ladder or hatch that led out of the crawl space, he hadn't found it. If there was such a thing, it might just lead him into more trouble. HIs choices were limited, though. He could go on exploring or he could just give up, lie here, and wait to see what happened.
Chances were, he would die no matter what he did.
With that bleak thought in his mind, he started crawling forth along the plank again. He hadn't gone more than a few feet when, without warning, he sneezed.
The dust he'd inhaled a few minutes earlier had caused that reaction, he knew, but knowing the cause didn't make things any better. His nose, which was on the prominent side, made sure that the noise it made was loud and resonant.
A man's shout from below dashed his hope that the sneeze hadn't been heard.
Nash began crawling faster as another man responded with a shout of his own. Even though he was hurrying, he still tried to be as quiet as he could, so maybe they wouldn't be able to track him by the sounds of his flight.
Whether they could hear him or not, they started shooting through the ceiling, just as he feared they might. The gunfire was thunderous and made him cry out involuntarily. The wild thought crossed his mind that maybe he should shoot back at them---he had a gun, true---but he couldn't even see where he was going, let alone being able to aim at the men trying to kill him.
Something punched through a ceiling tile near him and thudded into a board, chewing splinters from the wood that stung Nash's face. That bullet had almost hit him. He gasped in shock and crawled even faster.
Suddenly the plank wasn't beneath him anymore. It'd come to an abrupt end. The air duct and the path alongside it must have turned, probably at a right angle. Thrown off balance with nothing to support him, Nash sprawled forward. His outstretched hands struck one of the ceiling tiles.
The tiles and the metal latticework that held them up weren't meant to support any kind of weight. The tile broke under Nash and fell out of its frame. He yelled as he plunged headfirst through the opening that hadn't been there a second earlier.
Nash had always been clumsy and unathletic. It was pure luck that he didn't break his neck when he hit the floor. He had dropped the gun when he fell, but he was able to catch himself with both hands and roll over to take away some of the impact. Despite that, he landed hard enough on his back to take away his breath, rattle his teeth, and shake himself to his core.
Someone yelled, "What the hell?" The shout reminded Nash that he was still in terrible danger. His brain screamed at his muscles to move, but they weren't quick to react.
He moved a lot faster when a shot blasted and a bullet whined off the tile less than a foot from his head. He jackknifed halfway up and tried to get to his feet as his instincts told him to run.
But run where? He glanced to his left and to his horror saw two men pointing pistols at him. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Then he heard something from the other direction and a voice bellowed, "Doctor, get down!"
Nash did what he was told. He dived, landing flat on his belly this time, and as he did, he lifted his head enough to look up and see Calhoun Weaver standing just outside the door to the stairs, with a gun clasped in both hands and thrust out in front of him.
That gun spat flame as four shots erupted from it, the reports rolling through the air so fast they sounded almost like one long roar. A tiny wisp of smoke curled from the muzzle as Weaver stopped shooting.
No more shots came from the other men, either. Nash jerked his head around, twisting his neck so that he could see them lying on the floor a few yards away. One man was motionless, but the other still writhed and spasmed as a little fountain of blood arched up from his ruined throat where a bullet from Weaver's gun had torn through it.
Then with a hideous gurgle, that man slumped down, too, and didn't move again. Nash's brain was stunned, but enough of it still worked for him to realize that Weaver had killed those two men in not much more than the blink of an eye.
Now Weaver stalked toward him with the gun still held ready. Nash covered his head with his arms. Surely Weaver hadn't saved him only to kill him, but the young man hated his guts, of that Nash was sure. There was no telling what a bloodthirsty barbarian like Weaver might do.
Something thumped against Nash's side and made him jump. Weaver said, "Grab the gun, Doc, and get back on your feet. There might be more of them around here."
That was the pistol he'd dropped when he fell through the ceiling, Nash realized. Weaver must've slid it over to him with a foot. He wasn't going to kill him after all!
Weaver strode past the professor to check the two terrorists and make sure they were dead. While he was doing that, Nash pushed himself into a sitting position and gingerly wrapped his hand around the butt of the pistol lying beside him. Weaver glanced over his shoulder, smiled faintly, and said, "You know how to use that, Doc?"
"I---I killed one of them a little while ago," Nash said. His voice sounded hoarse and strange in his ears.
Weaver cocked an eyebrow in shock and said, "Good for you. You'll probably get to do it again before the day's out."374Please respect copyright.PENANAJGTXrhWZBi
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Calhoun hadn't known what to expect when he stepped through the door, but the sight of Dr. Nash lying on the floor while two of Barlow's men tried to kill him wasn't it. He was pretty sure of that.
Actually, now that the two guys were down and out of the fight and Calhoun was leading the way up a corridor toward the middle of the library's 3rd floor, he hoped these two actually had been part of Barlow's bunch. He didn't see how they could have been anything else, since they'd been trying to kill the professor, but you came right down to it, he didn't know any of Barlow's followers by sight except the few he'd already encountered.
But Nash had a gun, Calhoun reminded himself. In fact, the professor had the weapon in his hand again, but just because Calhoun had prodded him to pick it up.
He paused and said quietly over his shoulder. "Do you know how many of them are on this floor?"
"N-no. All I know is that I shot one of them, while the others were trying to get all the prisoners together in the central part of the floor."
"How many prisoners are we talking about?"
"I've got no idea," Nash replied with a shake of his head. "I was the only one in the section where I was. Maybe a few people in each of the other sections, two staff members...." He shrugged. "A dozen in all, perhaps."
"If that's all, Barlow's guys might have left just one person guarding them."
"Barlow?" Nash repeated, frowning in obvious confusion.
"Lark Barlow, or that's what he says his name is. He's the idiot behind this nightmare."
"I've never heard of him."
"Well, not many people did before today," Calhoun said. "Sometimes when guys pull big stunts like this, it's as much for the sake of their ego as for the money they hope to collect."
"I still don't know what you're talking about. I'm afraid I have no idea what's going on?"
Quickly, Calhoun sketched in what he knew about the takeover of the campus. Nash, already pale, blanched even more when Calhoun told him about the bombs.
"That lunatic's going to blow us all to kingdom come," the professor said.
"Or so he wants us to believe," Calhoun said. "That might not really be the case, even though one explosion went off. That doesn't mean there actually are more bombs."
"But surely the authorities won't risk it...."
Calhoun held up a hand to stop Nash as he heard someone moving up ahead of them. This corridor didn't have any windows in it, so the light was dim here. The windows on the library's upper floors weren't as big and numerous as the ones on the ground floor, either, so not as much light filtered in from them.
Calhoun spotted a door ahead of them on the left. A quick step brought him to it. He grasped the knob, turned it, and opened the door to a supply closet.
"In here," he whispered to Nash.
They crowded into the closet. Calhoun pulled the door in but didn't quite close it all the way. With Nash behind him, he wanted to see what was going to happen.
Slow, careful footsteps approached along the hall. Calhoun didn't breathe, and as he heard Nash's nervous exhalations behind him, he moved his right elbow back until it prodded the professor's midsection. Nash seemed to get the idea. Calhoun couldn't hear him breathing anymore.
He was still a little flabbergasted by finding Nash the way he had. He knew from the broken ceiling tile that Nash had gotten up there into the crawl space somehow, and he claimed to have taken one man's gun away from him and killed him. That seemed even more farfetched to Calhoun than any book he'd ever read about dragons or wizards or alien invaders. He would almost be more inclined to believe in those things than to accept the idea of Nash performing with heroics.
But Nash had the gun, so Calhoun supposed he had to believe him. He had his doubts, though, that the professor would be that lucky in any future gunfights.
Calhoun's eye was close to the narrow gap he had left between the door and the jamb. He saw a man's shape move past in the shadowy corridor. The guy had a gun, and he wasn't wearing any kind of uniform, which meant the odds were he was one of Barlow's men. Calhoun wasn't going to shoot him from behind in cold blood without knowing for sure, though.
Instead, as the man eased along the corridor past the supply closet, Calhoun opened the door quietly and stepped out behind him. The Glock rose and fell and came down hard on the back of the man's head. He grunted, pitched forward onto his knees, and dropped his own gun. Calhoun hit him again and drove him facedown on the floor.
He checked for a pulse and found one. The guy was just out cold, not dead. Calhoun knew he'd risked killing him by hitting him like that, but it was a chance he'd had to take.
Nash whispered, "Is----is he......"
"He's alive," Calhoun said. "Come on out of there so I can drag him in."
He tore strips off the man's shirt and used them to bind his wrists and ankles, then crammed another piece of shirt into the guy's mouth and bound it in place. They left him in the closet. The cops could get him out later, assuming they hadn't all been blown sky-high.
One moment later, they reached the end of the corridor and the reception area for the Special Collections floor. Several desks sat behind a counter. On the floor around those desks were seven women and four men, lying facedown on the carpet.
For a bad 2 seconds, Calhoun figured they were all dead, executed by the gunmen. But then he realized that he didn't see any blood. In fact, one of the older women, with graying brown hair, lifted her head enough to look around, and when she spotted Calhoun and Nash, she cried out, "Oh, God! Don't kill us! We stayed right here where you...."
She stopped short, stared, and then exclaimed, "Doctor Nash?"
The professor hurried past Calhoun and said, "Mrs. Slocum, are you all right?"
Some of the other people had lifted their heads and were looking around now. Calhoun told them, "You can get up now. Those guys who threatened you won't hurt anybody ever again." He added quickly, "Did they leave just one man to guard you?"
"That's right," one of the women said. She was young enough to be a student or many one of the library staff. All of them except the older woman fit that description. As she climbed to her feet, she went on, "When the other two didn't come back, and then there was all that shooting, he told us to lie down and not look up, or someone would kill us. Then I guess he went to look for the others."
Calhoun didn't take the time to explain that the last guard was now tied up in the supply closet. Instead, he asked, "Anybody hurt?"
He got head shakes all around.
"Just scared to death," one of the young men said. "What's going on?"
"Doctor Nash can tell you. Right now, is there any place you can hole up, a fairly small room with just one entrance?"
"The rare book room," the older woman said.
Calhoun nodded. It would have been good if he could have gotten these people completely out of the building. The cops probably had a perimeter set up outside. The hostages could have hurried behind that line to safety. But there was no way to reach the ground from the third floor without jumping, and that would likely result in some broken arms and legs, or worse.
Of course, that was better than getting blown up, but Calhoun still didn't believe the situation had gotten that desperate yet.
The gun Nash held was also a 9mm. Calhoun took one of the loaded magazines from his pocket and extended it to the professor.
"Hang on to that," he said. "You might need it."
Nash looked a little like Calhoun was trying to hand him a scorpion. But he took the magazine and asked, "Are you going to leave us here?"
"Trying to get out of the building right now would be way too risky. Better to get someplace you can defend if you have to." Calhoun looked at the others. "Does anybody else have any experience with firearms?"
Of course, they all just looked at him like he'd asked if they could flap their arms and fly to the moon. The typical Stonewall College student not only had never fired a gun, the very idea would be abhorrent to them....at least until their lives were in danger.
"Looks like you're the only gunfighter around here, Doc," Calhoun said to Nash.
That made the professor's eyes widen in horror. He started to stammer something, but Calhoun cut him off.
"I'm counting on you to keep these folks safe."
Nash opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, swallowed hard, rubbed his free hand over his face, and said, "I---I'll do my best, Mr. Weaver."
Calhoun nodded, clapped a hand on the man's shoulder, and said, "I knew I could depend on you."
He didn't know that at all, but he didn't figure it would cost anything to say something positive to Nash.
"What're you going to do?" the professor asked.
Calhoun smiled grimly.
"Still some rats to exterminate in this building," he said.
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