I ducked. He fired. The drywall lost. When he racked another cartridge in I managed to find another door and even though I fully expected him to be behind this one as well I tugged it open and slammed it shut behind me.

The room was pitch black, and I was breathing like a locomotive, but I swear I heard feminine giggling.

"Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Hee hee! Ow!" I said, as the ladies clawed and bit into my arms, legs, torso, and an extremely ticklish spot under my right knee.

"Zesty, tangy blood..."

You wouldn"t expect chained-up elderly women to be so freakin" strong. For the first few moments I wasn"t fighting back as hard as I could, simply because it still felt like I was engaged in combat with my grandma, but once the biting and clawing started to really hurt I punched and kicked with no regard to brittle bones or fragile dentures.

I couldn"t get away. I kept straining to get out of chain-range so I could at least cower in a corner, but there was simply no escape from these women. They"d been slurping steroid-laden blood or something.

They were in no hurry to kill me. Though I tried to protect my throat, it was unnecessary-they obviously planned to eat me alive, one tiny bite at a time.

I was definitely bleeding in several different places.

"Foamy, frothy blood..."

Was my blood really foamy and frothy? Or had they just run out of good adjectives?

I couldn"t believe that I was going to die from being slowly eaten alive by chained-up elderly ladies who thought they were vampires. I"d always kind of figured that I would go peacefully in my sleep, after my wife dropped an anvil on my head.

One of the ladies bit my arm hard. This one actually took some flesh with it. I screamed. (Not that I hadn"t been screaming before, but I screamed a little louder at that one.) They both stopped biting me at the sound of the shotgun.

The three of us listened.

Chaos outside.

Hopefully it was good chaos. Maybe the cops had burst in to save the day. They"d blow away Vlad and his goons, and-oops, sorry, we bad-accidentally shoot down McGlade in the crossfire. He"d lay on the floor, blood seeping from the hundred and seventy-eight bullet holes in his chest, wondering why he"d been such a loathsome p.r.i.c.k.

I could imagine his eulogy: "f.u.c.ker"s dead. Throw some dirt on him. Let"s go play some poker."

More shotgun blasts. More chaos.

It occurred to me that I should be trying to use the distraction as a tool for escape, rather than fantasizing about Harry McGlade"s tragic demise.

I fantasized about it a little bit more, just because it was so pleasant, and then sprung to my feet.

Since my legs were all bitten-up, I promptly dropped back down to the floor. Falling on my legs hurt about as much as getting them bit in the first place.

One of the ladies dove at me. I threw an instinctive punch. It was not a mighty punch, but the momentum of her face moving toward my fist, combined with the momentum of my fist moving toward her face, combined with the fact that I got her right in the middle of the nose, made for one splattery smack. I couldn"t quite see the results, but I could feel them on my knuckles.

She let out a howl and began to flail around on the floor. Positive descriptions of my blood"s flavor and consistency were replaced by barely coherent, profanity-laden cries of rage and pain.

I couldn"t quite tell what the other woman was doing, but I hoped that her partner"s wails were keeping her attention. I scurried away from there, yelping as a clawed hand grab my ankle. I slammed my other foot into the hand. The crack sounded like it hurt.

I scrambled to the other end of the room, hoping I was out of chain-range. In theory, if the Vlad"s administrative a.s.sistants had thrown me into the "Pit" with the intention of letting these women devour me, it wouldn"t make a h.e.l.l of a lot of sense for their chains not to give them total access to anywhere in the room.

After pausing to pluck part of a fingernail out of my ankle, I stood up and pressed myself into the corner. Okay, there had to be a way out of this little pickle. If I ran across the room at top speed (ably avoiding the women with my astounding dexterity) and bashed into the door, I"d either break open the door or the left half of my body. Or maybe both, in which case I could at least drag my mangled frame to safety.

I kind of wished that the woman would stop wailing. It was distracting me from figuring out whether the potential mangling was worth it.

The woman stopped wailing.

Much better.

Then she started giggling, which was less noisy but a lot more unnerving. The other woman giggled with her. I, myself, did not giggle.

I decided that the risk of shattering eighty-three bones was probably worth it.

Another shotgun blast. Much closer than the others.

The door flew open and I got a refreshing glimpse of light as Harry burst into the Pit. He slammed the door behind him, casting us back into darkness.

"Okay, who"s doing the giggling?" he asked.

"Harry, I"m in here with you," I said.

"That you, Maypole?"

I was in the mood to be around pretty much any human being in the world but Harry McGlade at this point. "Are you trying to be funny when you screw up my name, or are you just an idiot?"

"Oh, I was talking to some other guy named Maypole. I guess he"s not here anymore."

"Idiot."

"Are we in the pit?"

"Yeah."

"Pretty shallow pit."

"I know. How bad are things out there?"

"Oh, things suck out there. Suck bad."

"They suck in here, too."

"Figures. At least we-c.r.a.p, something"s got my leg!"

I could hear a struggle, and then a nice loud thump that sounded an awful lot like an incompetent private investigator being pulled to the floor by a chained-up carnivorous old lady.

"Get off me, you toothy b.i.t.c.h!"

I rushed forward to help him. If Harry "Obnoxious p.r.i.c.k" McGlade was going to die, I at least wanted it to be in a room with enough light that I could watch.

The door opened again, and Vlad stepped inside, holding a shotgun. The ladies immediately released Harry and ran to opposite sides of the room, hiding their faces and cowering.

It"s easy to be intimidated by a very large man with a shotgun. It"s a bit harder when the large man is naked and possesses male equipment that, immature as it may be, can only be described as a wee-wee.

Harry stood up. "You can kill me if you want," he told Vlad, "but then I"ll take the secret combination with me."

Vlad"s face went from crazily angry to crazily confused. "What secret combination?"

"If you kill me, you"ll never know. I"ll take it to my grave. I"ll tell you this much, though: The first number is 14. The first digit of the second number is 8, but that"s all you"re going to get out of me for now. Interested?"

"No."

"What if I told you that diamonds were involved?"

"I"d say that you were a bad liar, and to be perfectly honest I"d be rather offended that you insulted my intelligence in such a manner."

"What if they were big diamonds? The size of honey baked hams?"

I raised my hand as if I were in a cla.s.sroom. "Can I say something here?"

"Go ahead," said Vlad.

"We"re in a residential area, and you"ve been shooting this place up for the past few minutes. Instead of worrying about us, shouldn"t you be fleeing the scene before the cops arrive?"

"Why would I want to do that?"

"Ummmm...you know...getting arrested...going to jail...dropping the soap..."

Vlad laughed. "Don"t worry. We have the situation well under control. And now, Harry McGlade, I"m afraid your time has come."

Harry stared at the barrel of the shotgun. "Go ahead and kill me. But I beg you-let Andrew Mormon go. He"s innocent."

"No one is innocent."

"You"re right. Kill him first."

"Hey!" I started to say, but my protest was drowned out by the much louder cry of "Stop! Don"t kill him!"

A girl pushed past Vlad and stepped between the shotgun and Harry. She looked about sixteen, was dressed entirely in black, and had enough metal in her face to be part cyborg.

Harry and Vlad both spoke at the same time: "Tanya...?"

If life were indeed like a box of chocolates, this evening had been one c.r.a.ptastic bitter orange jelly after another. You know the one-it looks deceptively like a chocolate cream or a truffle, but when you bite into it tastes like someone wiped an orange peel in an ashtray and then loogied on it and encased it in rubber. Those candies suck a.s.s. Why even make those nasty things in the first place? Is anyone even listening to me?

Where was I? Oh yeah. Staring death in the face, again.

I was about to take the shotgun away from Vlad and introduce it into his unhappy place when Tanya exploded into the room and threw herself at me.

"We can"t kill him! He"s the One!" she yelled. Or something like that. I was still thinking about chocolates.

"He isn"t the One!" Vlad hissed.

"He has the Mark!" Tanya screamed.

"The Mark of the One? Where?"

"There! On his arm!"

We all looked at my arm, at a red blotch of psoriasis I"d been meaning to see a doctor about.

"It"s the Mark of the One!" Tanya said. "The Pentagram of Ba"al!"

"Looks like psoriasis," said Andrew.

While I"m quick at many things, most of them horizontal, coming up with ingenious schemes on the spot to get myself out of deadly situations isn"t one of them. So I surprised myself where I raised up my hands in a grandiose way and bellowed: "All bow before the One!"

Everyone in the room bowed, except for my sauce buddy. We locked eyes for an instant, then ran like h.e.l.l.

Andrew beat me out the door, and he moved like his feet were spring loaded. I huffed and puffed behind him, my own labored breathing drowning out the yells of confusion and chaos all around us. We went left, down a hall, right, down another hall, through the black light room with those two Bill and Ted Pires still stoned on the couch, and wound up right back where we started, facing Vlad and his shotgun.

Andrew back-pedaled, b.u.mping into me, and we took off shoulder-to-shoulder in the direction we came from.

"Who the h.e.l.l designed this house? M.C. Escher?" he asked.

"Is he still with the Wu Tang Clan?" I asked.

Down another dark hall, left, and right into a Pire with an aluminum baseball bat.

"I"m the One!" I intoned. "Bow before the Mark of b.a.l.l.s!"

He didn"t bow. He swung the bat. I tried to duck behind Mayberry, but at the same time he tried to duck behind me, and when our heads. .h.i.t they actually did make a coconut sound.

The bat buried itself in the drywall, and while the Pire tugged at it, Andrew and I crawled around him and b.u.mped into a door I hadn"t seen before. I reached for it, turned the k.n.o.b, pushed it open, and then Andrew screamed in a most feminine way and pushed me forward.

We fell.

It"s disconcerting falling into darkness, and all I had time to do was let out a small yelp and clench my bladder closed before we hit the first stair. After taking three steps to the chin, instinct took over and I reached out for a soft pillow to hug to my chest and break my fall. It worked, and landing was a relatively painless process.

The pillow wasn"t amused.

"I think you broke some ribs," he moaned.

I checked. "Nope. I"m fine."

I climbed off Andrew and squinted at the darkness around me. It smelled like a root cellar, earthy and moldy, with and underlying hint of something.

"Now this," my airbag said, "this is a pit."

"Nice observation, bright boy. Now see if you can find a door to the outside."

"Andrew?"

The voice came from the darkness, somewhere ahead of us. A creepy, crackly, moany kind of voice.