In the endgame—if it ever got to that—a two-round advantage could be decisive.

The chain-link fence loomed up and Pendergast raced along it to the gap and dove through; rising again, he bulled through a dense stand of brush, clambered over a heap of fallen bricks, and—after a lightning reconnaissance—leapt through an open window frame into the building. He rolled, regained his feet, and went on running, angling into the darkest shadows. Flicking on his light for but an instant, he took one turn, then another, then another; at the third bend of the hallway he halted and crouched, with a clear field of fire back down the hall he had just come. A moment later he heard faint running steps, saw the approaching glow of a flashlight from around the corner; as soon as it appeared Pendergast fired. It was a long shot and he missed, but it had the desired effect: Ozmian ducked back around the corner, taking cover. It had halted the man’s headlong pursuit and bought him a minute or two.

Pendergast pulled off his shoes and, tossing them aside, sprinted down the corridor in his socks, turned through a dogleg, and suddenly found himself in a large, open room, dimly illuminated by moonlight.

Moving swiftly to the center, he flattened himself behind a cracked cement pillar where he had a clear field of fire in all directions. There he paused, breathing in the moldy, sour air of the interior. He took a moment to reconnoiter. If Ozmian entered the room through the same archway he had, he would have a clear shot and this time would not miss; but Ozmian was not likely to take that risk. The man was no longer in hot pursuit; he was now in tracking mode.

There was enough moonlight coming in through the shattered window frames for Pendergast to see the general outlines of the room. It was a cafeteria, with tables arrayed among a disorder of chairs, the linoleum coming up in curls. Some of the tables were still set, as if awaiting a seating of the dead. The floor was strewn with cheap flatware, plastic cups and dishes. A row of shattered windows allowed in not only bars of pallid light, but also vines that had crept within and grown up the walls. The air smelled of rat urine, damp concrete, and decaying fungus.

As he continued to take in the dim surroundings, he saw that the many layers of paint that once covered the ceilings and walls had cracked and peeled off, flaking away and raining down like confetti all over the floors. The chips and curls of paint mingled with dust, debris, and trash to form a thick layer, creating an ideal tracking environment. It was like snow: one could not walk through it without leaving footprints, and there wasn’t a way to brush out or hide one’s tracks, either. On the other hand, as he scanned the floor he noted there were already tracks everywhere, crisscrossing this way and that, laid down by urban archaeologists and those people called “creepers” who made a hobby of exploring dangerous, abandoned buildings.

Pendergast made a snap decision: to gain the commanding heights by heading upstairs. Ozmian would no doubt anticipate this; he had already been outguessed once. But the key nevertheless was gaining a physical advantage—and that meant up. He had to move fast, put additional distance between him and his pursuer. At some point he could then double back, circle around, and with luck come up behind his pursuer, becoming the pursuer himself.

All these thoughts flashed through his mind in the space of no more than ten seconds.

A building like this would have multiple staircases, in the center and at the wings. Pendergast slid away from the pillar, crossed the dining hall, and, making sure it was clear, headed down a corridor deeper into the eastern section of the hospital. As he ran down the darkened hall, he could hear the paint chips crunching underfoot. At the end of the hall, a set of double doors, one detached and leaning, revealed the staircase he’d hoped to find. Pendergast ducked into the space beyond—the stairwell had no windows and was as black as a cave—and paused again to listen. He half expected to hear the footfalls of his pursuer, but even his keen ears could hear nothing. Feeling sure nevertheless that he was being tracked, and by a master, he grasped the iron rail of the staircase and ascended, two steps at a time, into the foul, cold, pitch dark.

56

OZMIAN WAITED IN the blackness at the bottom of the stairwell and listened to the faintly receding steps of his quarry as he ascended, counting each one. The man was evidently taking two steps at a time, given the slight delay between footfalls, and was no doubt heading for “high ground,” a wise if predictable decision.

For Ozmian, entering Building 93 after all these years had triggered a surprisingly deep emotional reaction. Even though the memory of those times had dimmed almost to the vanishing point, when he first entered the old cafeteria, the underlying smell of the place was still there, and it had released an unexpected rush of memories from that awful period of his life. So intense was the flood of remembrance—the sadistic aides, the raving fellow patients, the lying, smiling psychiatrists—that he staggered, the past intruding horribly into the present. But only for a moment. With a brutal application of will he shoved those recollections back into the bunker of memory and returned his focus to the stalk. The experience had given him a sudden insight. He had chosen this place as a kind of exorcism, a way to drive out the ghosts of that period once and for all.

In the dark, still listening and counting the receding steps, he ordered his thoughts. So far, he was mildly disappointed in the progress of the hunt and the lack of cleverness of his quarry. On the other hand, the way Pendergast had dropped out of the tree just as he’d fired was an impressively athletic move, even if it was unsatisfactory to find him in such a predictable place to begin with.

Ozmian sensed that the man had resources yet to be tapped, and the thought excited him. He had confidence that his quarry was good enough to give him a decent, perhaps even epic, stalk; one that would repay his effort and trouble.

The extremely faint footfalls finally vanished: the quarry had exited on a floor. Ozmian would not know which floor precisely until he had counted the steps between floors one and two and done a quick mental division.

Now he, too, began to mount the stairs, moving swiftly and silently but not too fast. Upon reaching the second floor he was able to calculate that his quarry, taking two steps at a time, had exited on the ninth floor. The top floor would have been the most obvious, but the ninth made more sense, as it still allowed his prey additional avenues of escape. As he continued climbing the stairs, he realized that he had never felt so alive to the thrill of the chase as he did now. It was an atavistic pleasure that only the true hunter could appreciate, something built into the human genome: this love of the stalk, the pursuit, and the kill.

The kill. He felt a quiver of anticipation. He recalled his first big-game kill. It was a lion, a big black-maned male that he had winged with a bad shot. It had fled, and because he had wounded it he had a responsibility to track and kill it. They followed it into elephant grass, his gun bearer becoming more and more nervous, expecting a charge at any moment. But the lion didn’t charge, and the spoor led them into even worse country, deep heavy brush. Here the bearer refused to continue and so Ozmian had taken the gun himself, advancing into a dense stand of mopane. He got that unmistakable tingling sensation and knelt, gun pointed; the lion leapt out, coming at him like an express train; he fired a single slug that went into the lion’s left eye and tore off the back of his head as he came down on top of him, all 550 pounds of muscle. He recalled that feeling of ecstasy at the kill even as he lay pinned, with a broken arm, the lion hot with stink and crawling with bugs and flies, his blood flowing over Ozmian’s own body.

But that feeling had grown harder and harder to come by—until it returned when, at last, he began hunting human beings. He only hoped the kill of this one would not come too soon.