The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [227]
“Where the hell is Ian?” McVey started back into the room. “Ian! Ian!”
“McVey.” Remmer was using the wall to help him stand. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
“IAN!” McVey cried out again into thick smoke and roaring inferno inside the room.
Then Remmer had McVey by the arm and was tugging him down the hallway. “Come one, McVey. Jesus Christ! Leave him! He would!”
McVey’s eyes locked on Remmer’s. He was right. The dead were dead and the hell with them. Then there was a sound at their feet and Noble crawled through the doorway. His hair was on fire, so were his clothes.
Two shots from a Steyr-Mannlicher telescopic rifle, fired from a rooftop across the alley, had taken down Kellermann and Seidenberg. And now Viktor Shevchenko, having discarded the Steyr-Mannlicher for a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, was rushing up the stairs to the lobby to help Natalia and Anna take care of any unfinished business. The trouble was there was one person he hadn’t counted on, and neither had Anna—Osborn, who’d come running at the sound of the explosion, Bernhard Oven’s Cz in his hand.
His first encounter had been with an old man who had I been right outside the car just as he’d opened the door. The startled moment between them had given Osborn the split second he needed to see the automatic in the old man’s hand and to shove the Cz into his stomach and fire. Then he’d run the half block to the hotel and raced into the lobby at full speed at the moment Anna put a just-to-I make-sure shot into Holt. Seeing him, Anna swung the gun, firing in a fan pattern toward him. With no other choice, Osborn had simply stood his ground and squeezed I the trigger His first shot hit her in the throat. His second grazed her skull, spinning her around and throwing her face-first onto the chair above Holt’s body.
Ears still ringing from the blast of the gunshots, Osborn had the sense he’d better turn around. As he did, Viktor I came through the door swinging the Kalashnikov from his I waist. He saw Osborn but wasn’t quick enough, and Osborn pumped three shots into his chest before he crossed the threshold. For a second Viktor just stood there, totally surprised that it was Osborn who had shot him, and that anything at all could happen that fast. Then the look faded to disbelief and he stumbled backward, tried to catch himself on the handrail, then fell headfirst down the stairs.
With the acrid smell of gunsmoke still hanging in the air, Osborn looked down at Viktor, then stepped back in side and looked around. Everything seemed strangely off-angle, as if he’d walked into the middle of a bizarre and bloody sculpture. Holt lay on his side near the fireplace where he had fallen. Anna, his killer, was facedown, half kneeling on the chair next to him. Her skirt, obscenely hiked up over her rump, exposed a tight-fitting half stocking, and above it, a white fleshy thigh. A soft breeze washing in through the front door worked at cleansing everything, but couldn’t. In the space of no time, Osborn had killed three people, one of them a woman. He tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. Finally, in the distance, he “ heard sirens.
Then, real time lurched back.
A grinding sound to his right was followed by a heavy thud. Swinging around, he saw the elevator door start to open. Heart racing, he stepped back, wondering in the same instant if he had any ammunition left. Abruptly a figure started out.
“HALT!” he yelled, trying desperately to think of the ‘German, his finger closing on the trigger, the ugly snout of the Cz coming up to fire.
“OSBORN! JESUS CHRIST, DON’T SHOOT!” McVey’s voice rang out at him. They staggered forward out of the elevator, retching and coughing, trying to suck in fresh air. McVey and Remmer, bloody, tattered and reeking of smoke, with Noble, painfully burned and semiconscious, somehow propped