Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [129]
The job had taken hours, nights.
But now—
Keys in her hand.
A key could turn a screw.
Nearby, a steel door clanged. Cray was at least halfway down the hall.
She stepped onto the commode bowl’s lidless rim, reaching blindly for the vent cover in the ceiling. Her fingers touched the grille, velvety with dust. Four screws secured the cover to the ceiling. She found the first of them and struggled to insert a key into the notch in the screw head.
The key was too big. Wouldn’t fit.
Another door clanged, closer.
She tried another key, thinner than the last.
It fit. She wrenched her wrist counterclockwise, and the screw turned, loosening.
From the hall, a wild baying and another slam of steel.
The screw unwound another few turns and dropped into the dark.
Three left.
Not enough time.
She found the second screw and worked it free.
Glanced back.
Red glow in the mesh window of the cell door.
His flashlight, very near.
Another door swung open and crashed shut. She felt the vibrations through the stone wall as she fumbled for the third screw.
He was perhaps two doors away. Coming fast, too fast.
The third screw was caked in dust, hard to discover by feel alone, but she found it and jammed the key into the notch.
It wouldn’t yield. It was implanted too tightly in the frame.
The door directly across from this room creaked open.
Cray would look in here next.
She gave up on the third screw, found the fourth.
It was loosely set in its hole, easily dislodged with a few turns of the key. She let it fall.
The door across the corridor banged shut.
She threw away the keys, and with both hands she reached overhead and grabbed hold of the grillwork, tugging with her full strength, and the vent cover, fastened by just one screw, shuddered and pulled free of the ceiling.
It clattered on the floor.
Red light in the room.
Cray, beaming his flash through the mesh window.
She didn’t look back, not even when she heard the thunk of a pneumatic bolt retracting and knew the door had opened.
Into the vent, scrabbling, clawing for purchase on the dusty metal, her legs swinging as she hoisted herself up and bellied in—grunt of exertion and blind panic—she was in the duct, prone in the horizontal shaft, but her legs still hung out the opening, and she squirmed forward, grabbing at the smooth metal sides of the passageway, pulling herself all the way in, and there was pain, pain in her leg, like biting teeth—knife—Cray’s knife slashing her, too late, because with a final effort she hauled herself completely into the shaft and then she was plunging ahead.
She’d made it.
But not for long.
The duct trembled, groaning with new weight.
Cray, lifting himself into the hole.
Following.
Red glare behind her. The flashlight.
She shouldn’t look back, shouldn’t look back, but she did, and there he was, scrambling in pursuit, the flashlight in one hand, knife in the other.
She heard his fast, hysterical breathing, or maybe it was her own.
Forward. Go.
There was nothing for her then but a smeared impression of her elbows and knees in furious motion. Speed and panic and pure darkness ahead, red death behind.
She’d done this before—crawled like this, through this ventilation duct—crawled when she escaped from Hawk Ridge. Only then no monster had been chasing her, and she had crawled slowly, silently, afraid of being heard. Crawled to the midpoint of the ward, the bend in the L, where a vertical shaft intercepted this duct and rose a few feet to an opening in the roof.
Ahead she saw a faint fall of starlight, the roof exit, her one way out, her last chance.
Yards away.
Too far.
Cray was closing fast, and she wouldn’t get there.
She kept going, terror drumming in her chest. She was all fear now, nothing but fear, as Cray was nothing but hunger.
He grabbed her ankle.
With a gasp of panic she shook loose. Drove herself forward, pawing at the shaft, her hands gummy with old dust, the light from the rooftop opening still too far away.
Behind her, Cray sped up.
He had her scent in his nostrils now, the flavor of a fresh kill tingling