Read Sanctuary for Free Online Page A

don’t recognize, wheeling a patient. They’ve got our boy!”
    “Where??” I demanded. Walter and Carla. The Chemist’s most trusted bullies. Those two were trouble. They nearly killed me in Compton.
    “Ah jeez, I don’t know. Which security camera am I looking at?”
    “Puck, figure it out!” Samantha ordered, jogging back to me. She had a pistol in her fist, her face a mixture of excitement and rage. I recognized that visage. The madness was beginning to blaze in both of us.
    “Got it! Opposite end of the hospital.”
    Samantha and I bolted in that direction. We’d cover the distance in seconds, bursting through security doors.
    “They’re moving slowly. Heading towards the western bank of elevators.”
    “How’d they get out of Compton?” I wondered. “And get here so quickly?” I had heavy steel in my hand, ready to remove someone’s head if necessary.
    The same virus burning in Samantha and me also burned in Walter and Carla, and presumably the other two with them. The virus interacted with our specific body compositions and affected us all differently. Samantha and Walter were both blessed (or cursed) with snap reflexes, crazy-good mental focus, and heightened hand-eye coordination, making them natural gunners. My body had grown quick and strong, even more so than Samantha's, but I’d be useless with a gun. I didn’t know anything about Carla’s abilities. Or the other two.
    “Heads-up!” Puck called. His voice hurt my ears. “Ambush!”
    Walter rose up behind a chest-high nurses’ desk at an intersection and opened fire, aiming at me. The cluttered hallway erupted into a riot of shrapnel as the oncoming storm of bullets flung hospital equipment. I couldn’t see the rounds, but some inner preternatural instinct knew how to dodge them. I was a blur, slipping through the storm, but Walter was lightning quick too, and POW! One lucky bullet caught me in the shoulder. I rolled behind a meal cart that shuddered with impacts.
    Samantha returned fire. She emptied the clips of her two pistols so fast it sounded like a violent peal of thunder. Walter fell back as the Nurses’ desk disintegrated.
    Puck asked, “You okay?”
    “ So great!” I shouted, examining the smashed bullet-proof plate in my vest that saved me serious injury.
    “Children!” Samantha screamed down the hall in delirious, sick joy. “You’re just children !” She reloaded faster than my eyes could follow and aimed another volley at Carla, coming around the corner with a shotgun.
    “Outlaw Outlaw Outlaw!” Puck repeated in my ear, barely audible over Samantha’s gunshots.
    “ What ?!”
    “They’re stalling! Some jerk is pushing our patient down the hallway!”
    “Okay,” I said, sneaking a peek. A kid (I’d never seen him before) was almost to the elevators with the bed. “I see him. I got him.”
    I gathered a fistful of metal and sent a heavy barrage after him. The steel ballbearings hummed like angry hornets and ripped through the rolling bed’s legs. The patient spilled onto the floor.
    “Nice shot!”
    Carla came again, and this time she took us by surprise. She had an illegal eight-gauge semi-automatic shotgun whose concussive blasts shook the floor and rattled picture frames off their mountings. Samantha and I bailed into rooms on either side of the hallway as death whistled past, gouging the walls.
    “Any ideas, Puck?”
    “You’re the Outlaw! Not me!”
    “Then I’m going out the window.”
    Both Samantha and Puck said, “You’re what?? ” but I had already broken through the third-story window. A billion slivers of glass went slicing off into the air. I snatched a hold on the outside wall before I fell. I put my fingers straight into the pink stucco-like material. It was quiet out here. I hadn’t realized people inside were screaming in terror until I no longer heard them. I was above the parking lot, over a vacant ambulance. A nearby palm tree was almost touching me.
    I glared across the sheer