The short one staggered out the door. His hands were deep in his pockets. He drew forth double pistols.
“Fire!”
The blasts from Leland’s Colt were drowned out by the roar of other weapons emptying their magazines into the man. His head was gone in the first heartbeat, only a dark cloud above his shoulders. His body jiggled as entry wounds sprouted all across his abdomen. He seemed yet alive, his gun-toting hands clearing the pockets.
Except there were no guns – and no hands. His wrists ended in grisly stumps, like those of the other victims. Other victims?“Cease fire!” Leland shouted into the mike as the bullet-riddled body went down, a heap of meat.
The reports crackled to silence. Leland paused a breath, slid a new set of bullets into her Colt, drew her flashlight, and stood up behind the crate. She leveled the smoking barrel of her gun toward the wedge of darkness and held her flashlight far out to one side to keep from getting shot. The light shone into the storage closet.
Color suddenly came to the black space. Blood, mostly. A body -
“Mother of God, no, don’t let it be Azra,” Leland gasped out beneath her breath. She staggered forward. But it wasn’t he. The body was wrapped in a bulky coat. It lay, headless and handless, across the threshold. If that isn’t Azra, then where -?
A pair of hunched shoulders moved in the shadows beyond.
“Stop what you’re doing, raise your hands above your head, and come out!”
The man did not respond. He continued whatever work he was doing.
Slow and nervous, Leland advanced to the door. Her flashlight caught patches of the man’s shirt, blood draining from at least two bullet wounds. He was oblivious. He seemed to be churning something. Leland knew those shoulders. She knew this man…
Twelve years ago, she had walked to a different door, but the cell beyond it had already been emptied. There hadn’t been even a body swinging from the lamp grate. Kerry had already been pulled down, already lay in the sanitarium morgue, cold on steel. She had been too late twelve years ago.
Perhaps she was too late now.
Between gritted teeth, Leland growled, “Come out, Azra. You’re surrounded.”
There was still movement, but no sound. Leland strode steadily toward the space, finger curled around the hot trigger.
Keith’s hands will end up on the bottom of this bin. By the time they sort through all the others – Keith’s hand collection – his will be stale, too.
She’s almost to the door. I’d better stop before she sees motion in the crate.
“Sergeant Michaels, is that you?”
What? How can she see me?
I straighten. My body is casting a shadow against the shelves of maggoty skulls.
She can see me? What’s gone wrong?
This is a cardinal sin – to fall in love with a human. I raise my bloody hands over my head and turn around. Just before her gasp, I hear the click, click, click of photographs being taken.
“Down on your face. You have the right to remain silent…”
My power had been waning ever since that night in January, but now my descent was complete. My shadow told the story. I was unable to dissolve away into nothing, to slough off the body of Sergeant Michaels.
“I said, lie down on your face, hands above your head,” Detective Leland shouted.
I dropped, incredulously, to the cold concrete and felt the warm wicking of blood into my pant legs and the keen, hot jab of a spent bullet under my right knee. It was only then that I knew I had become completely mortal – flesh and bone, descendant of the mudman. The union of angels and humans brings only abomination.
“Down! All the way!” barked Detective Leland. She kicked away shell casings as she approached. The little brass cylinders made a tinkling bell sound on the cement. The camera answered with cricket calls. I lay down, across the blond man’s legs. His corpse shifted. A sputtering moan came up through the sawed neck. Keith’s body lay face down nearby, except that he no longer had a face. One of Donna’s boots dropped smoothly between McFarland and me, and I lay there, hands laced behind my head.
Her other boot descended beside the first. With it, I heard shouts from behind her to watch for a trick.
“Azra, what the hell is this…?”
“You shouldn’t be able to see me,” I said, trying to explain. “This was supposed to fix everything.”
“Mother of God, don’t say it. Don’t say it,” she whispered. “But how could it be anything else? How could I be so stupid?”
She was beside me, now, gun trained on me. I held still. Some impulse of my new flesh knew to do that much. Hold still, and live.
The boot beside me shifted. I felt her knee pressing into the small of my back. She pulled one of my bloody hands down, behind my back, and then the other, and clamped the handcuffs so tight that my fingers began to swell.
My body was suddenly heir to all the pangs, twinges, and mortal frailties of any flesh. I trembled. She shifted, her knee still on my back, and pulled one of my feet up toward her. Through the thin knit of my dress sock, I felt the broad band of the ankle cuff snap into place. With a jangle of chain, both my legs were bound.
There were other boots around hers, now, and the long shadows of sniper rifles fell in bars across me.
“This is Squad Four, Detective Leland. We’ve got our suspect. Bring in the ambulance crews, Phil – he’s got gunshot wounds.”
Only then did I feel the injuries – two slugs in my back, just below my right shoulder blade. The ache was dull and ragged. It hurt less than the place where Donna had knelt. How strange that these human bodies are at once so fragile and so insensate. It would have been easy enough to die without ever feeling it or knowing it.
“…yeah. We’re all breathing a sigh of relief about that. Still, he got two others. Yeah, notify the coroner. There’ll be a set of death investigations. No, no officers down, but two civilians, and a bunch of remains, in various states of-” She stopped talking, staggered away, and was sick over a set of crates.
I could only lie there and breathe. If I had been an angel still, I would have risen and enwrapped her in my arms. But all I could do was lie there and breathe and know she was more sickened by me than by all those skulls.
“Sorry, Phil. Yeah, I’ll be okay. Yeah, it’s just a bad sight down here. Yeah. Leland out.”
Someone else approached, knelt beside me, and set a metal kit next to my head. “Sir, I’m going to be looking at your back. You’ve been shot. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
He shifted and cut my shirt away. After a pause, he flipped open the kit and brought out a small bottle, some cotton swabs, a roll of gauze, a roll of tape, and a small pair of scissors.
As the man set to work sealing the outer wounds for the ride to the hospital, Donna stared down bleakly.
“So, Azra, explain this.” Her voice quivered. She was pleading. “Mother of God, Azra. Explain this.”
I breathed raggedly. “I cannot.”
Her voice rose in intensity. “You know what it looks like, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
The man who was gently dressing my wounds said,
“You do have the right to remain silent.”
And then, I was not just still, but silent.
BOOK II
TEN
The warehouse doors barked open, and the EMTs charged out, rolling the gurney that bore Azra Michaels. Detective Donna Leland rushed alongside, followed by a crowd of small-town cops. At the curb ahead, civilians clustered around an ambulance. Its flashing lights and the flashing Nikon of Blake Gaines painted the scene in carnival colors.
There should be a barker, Leland thought. She could almost hear him: “Come one, come all! See Azra, the Incredible Killing Machine! He can chop off heads! He can chop off hands! He can kill in Wisconsin and Illinois and Indiana! For one lucky fan, he’ll kill again, tonight!”