What Time Devours by A. J. Hartley Page B

inside. His lungs were filling with blood. If he didn’t get to the phone in the next couple of minutes, he thought, he was going to die. Maybe even if he did.

CHAPTER 17
    Thomas slumped onto his side, then rolled to his knees. Carefully, biting back the agony in his shoulder, he started to crawl toward the door, still clutching the pistol. He had no idea how many bullets he had left and didn’t know how to check, but he kept it anyway. If the intruder was still out there, he wanted a fighting chance. In truth, he knew that unless the guy was already dead or gone, he wouldn’t have one. He could barely move and doubted he could raise and aim the gun at all. His right arm had no strength so he had switched the weapon to his left, but he knew that however lousy his right-handed shooting was, his left would be a good deal worse. He found himself wondering about those switch-hitting baseball players who could drive in home runs from either side of the plate . . .
    There you go, he thought . Think about the Cubs. Don’t think about the pain. Don’t think about your lungs . Imagine you’re at Wrigley . . .
    He wasn’t so much breathing now as panting, thin, rasping inhales and exhales. Each one brought a shudder of pain through his chest. They were getting worse. He reached the door and peered into the darkened hallway, pushing the futile pistol ahead of him as if it might help.
    There was no sign of his attacker.
    That was the good news. The bad news was that it was another five yards into the kitchen and at least that to the phone, which was wall mounted. He could barely crawl. There was no way he would be able to stand and lift the receiver.
    Zambrano’s on the mound, he thought. Derrek Lee is healthy and Mark DeRosa is on fire . . . There’s still hope .
    He thought of Kumi and the do-over he had started to build of their lives. After all those years apart, they might finally give it all another try, and nothing in the past decade had seemed as good as this one frail truth. He started to crawl. The pain was getting worse. He wouldn’t make it.
    He managed a yard, then another. As he reached the door, his strength gave out and he crumpled hard where the wood met the cool tile of the kitchen floor. He was starting to shiver, and the desire to stay where he was, sleep it off like some nasty hangover, was back.
    Just lie back, he thought . Unwind. A little sleep can’t do you any harm.
    He climbed back into his crawl as if he were forcing his way through a hundred push-ups. His shoulder shrieked and his arm buckled, but he forced it to stay steady. There wasn’t much light coming in from the window—the window where he had seen the dead face of Daniella Blackstone imploring him to let her in—but he was sure the skin of his hands was turning blue.
    Not good , he thought.
    And the phone was still a thousand miles away, floating beyond any possible reach. His eyes were watering, though whether that was physical or emotional, he couldn’t say. He lurched another couple of feet and then collapsed at the foot of the fridge. He rolled painfully onto his back, sucking in the air, feeling the room beginning to swim.
    Only another moment or two now, he thought.
    Unconsciousness was coming to greet him like a smothering embrace. He beat it back with his mind, as if swatting away crows, and squinted down the side of the fridge.
    There was a broom, one of those old-fashioned long-handled affairs with a head of plaited grass, just like the one his parents had had.
    He reached for it, first with his imagination, then with his left hand. He couldn’t reach, and had to shift inch by inch, hunching his back up and to the right like a dying sidewinder. He stretched out his hand again, but he was still inches short.
    Not much longer now.
    He squirmed and stretched again, and this time his splayed fingers caught the coarse bristles of the broom and brought it crashing down on top of him. The handle hit the tile like the popping of a