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Then, abruptly, she stopped. A voice of reason began to penetrate her red haze of fury. This was stupid — very stupid. She had allowed her anger to cloud her judgment.
She stopped to listen again. A scrape, a flitting shadow, more swaying sheets. She spun toward it. Then she paused, licking lips that had suddenly gone dry. In the dim light, surrounded by countless hulking, shrouded skeletons, she asked herself a question: who was hunting… and who was the hunted? Her anger dissipated abruptly, replaced by mounting anxiety as she realized what had happened. Fearing had been unable to get into her locked lab. Instead, he had drawn her out. And now she'd allowed herself to be lured into this maze.
Suddenly, a knife slashed through a nearby plastic curtain, creating a huge rend. A figure began coming through the gap. Nora whirled toward it, slashed at it with the jagged end of the cylinder, made glancing contact. But the figure struck her makeshift weapon away with his knife, sending the glass tube crashing to the floor.
She backed up, staring at him.
Fearing's clothes were tattered, stinking, stiff with old blood. One livid eye stared at her; the other was whitish, dead looking. The mouth yawned open, exposing a mouth packed with black, carious teeth. His hair was full of dirt and leaves. His skin was sallow and smelled of the grave. With a wet snoring sound, he took a step forward and slashed at her, the knife — a knife she recognized too well — moving in a glittering arc.
Nora twisted aside as the weapon swept past, losing her balance and falling to the ground. The figure advanced as she took up a large piece of broken glass and scrambled backward.
The mouth yawned wide, making a horrible, gurgling sound.
"Get away from me!" she screamed, brandishing the shard of glass and rising to her feet.
The figure shambled forward, slashing clumsily at her. Nora backed up, then turned and ran, thrashing through the curtains of plastic as she tried to fight her way to the rear of the room. Surely she would find a back door. Behind her, she could hear the figure cutting through the plastic, the knife almost shrieking as it nicked hanging bones.
Shhchrrooogggg
The figure made horrible sounds as it drew in ragged breaths through a wet windpipe. She cried out in fear and dismay, her voice echoing crazily in the cavernous gloom.
She was disoriented now, unsure she was going in the right direction. She fought against the plastic, struggling for breath, getting entangled again, finally throwing herself to the ground and crawling frantically under the rustling, swinging shrouds. She had become completely lost.
Sssshrroooggg
In desperation, she stood up underneath the plastic drape of a low — hanging skeleton, reached up and seized a whale's rib bone, then swung herself up, crawling into the rib cage as if it were some monstrous piece of playground equipment. She climbed frantically, the desiccated bones swaying and clacking together, until she had reached the top of the rib cage. Here a slot between two ribs was big enough to squeeze through. She slashed a hole in the covering plastic with the piece of glass, then hauled herself between the bones and through the plastic, clambering onto the back of the skeleton. For a moment, despite everything, she paused, frozen by the bizarre sight: a sea of whale skeletons, large and small, hanging in all directions beneath her, arranged so close together they were touching.
The skeleton beneath her feet began to sway again. She looked down. Fearing was below her, climbing up into the jungle gym of bones.
With a groan of fear, she ran as quickly as she dared along the top of the skeleton, crouched, then jumped to the next, grabbing on tight as it swayed crazily beneath her. She ran along the second backbone, jumping to a third skeleton. From here, she could just make out a door at the far end of the hall.
Please let it be unlocked.
The hideous figure appeared on top of a skeleton, rearing out of the rend in the plastic. It scuttled forward, leaping from one skeleton to the next, and Nora realized that despite its shambling movements it was more agile than she had realized. All she had accomplished by climbing atop the skeletons was to give it an advantage.
Slashing another hole in the plastic beneath her, she climbed back down, then dropped to the floor, crawling as fast as she could toward the rear of the vault. Behind, she could hear Fearing thrashing his way after her, the horrifying sucking sounds growing louder.
Suddenly she broke free of the mass of bones. There, no more than ten feet ahead of her, was the door: heavy and old — fashioned, without a security keypad. She ran for it, grasped the handle.
Locked.
With a sob of dismay she turned, setting her back against the door and clutching the sliver of glass, ready to make a last stand.
The skeletons swayed and creaked on their chains, the agitated curtains of plastic restlessly scraping the ground. She waited, preparing herself as best she could for the final struggle.
A minute went by, then another. Fearing did not appear. Gradually, the rustling and swaying of the skeletons settled down. Silence returned to the storage room.
She took one shuddering breath after another. Had he broken off the chase? Had he gone?
From the far side of the storage room, she heard the creak of a door, shuffling footsteps, and then silence.
No, no. He hadn't gone.
"Who's in here?" a voice rang out, quavering slightly with ill — suppressed anxiety. "Show yourself!"
It was a night guard. Nora almost sobbed with relief. Fearing must have heard approaching footsteps and been frightened off. But she held her breath. She couldn't reveal herself now; not while her DNA analysis was in process.
"Anybody here?" the guard called out, clearly reluctant to advance into that forest of whale skeletons. The feeble beam of a light played about the dimly lit room.
"Last call, I'm locking the door."
Nora didn't care. As a curator, she had the security code to the front door.
"All right, you asked for it." A shuffling, the lights went out, and then the slamming of a door.
Slowly, Nora got her breathing under control. She dropped to her knees and peered forward in the dim light trickling in from the small window set into the door.
Was he, like her, still in the room? Was he waiting, ready to ambush? What did he want — to finish the job he'd failed to finish in the apartment?
Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled under the now — still plastic, moving slowly, as quietly as possible, heading for the front door. Every few minutes, she stopped to peer around and listen. But there were no sounds, no shadows — just the great hanging whale bones in their shrouds.
As she reached the middle of the skeletons, she paused in her journey. She could see the faint glimmer of a scattering of broken glass. The rest of her makeshift weapon, broken to pieces. In the gloom, she made out a faint dark streak along the glistening edge of one large shard. So shehad struck Fearing with the glass — and cut him. That was blood…his blood.
She drew in a breath, then another, trying to think as clearly as possible. Then, with shaking fingers, she withdrew one of the spare reaction tubes she'd shoved into her pocket. Carefully breaking the sterile seal, she picked up the glass, dipped it into the liquid, and resealed the tube. Pendergast had already given her DNA samples from Fearing's mother, and mother — son mitochondrial DNA were always identical. Now she could test his DNA and compare it directly with the unknown DNA recovered from the crime scene.
She slipped the tube back in her pocket and made her way — quietly and carefully — to the door. It responded to the code and opened. She closed and locked it quickly behind her, then walked on shaky legs down the corridor and back to the PCR lab. There was no sign of Fearing. Entering the code into the keypad, she slipped into the lab, shut the door behind her, and turned off the overhead light. She'd finish her work by the glow of the instrumentation.