He wiped them off and focused on the immediate task. "You're coming with me," he called, his voice raised but level. "That's not up for discussion." Insects have—right. Six legs. He waved off another assault; a line of pinpricks lit up the back of his neck. "The only issue is whether you come now or later."
"Later, stumpfuck! I know whose side youon!"
"We can also discuss whether I'll be taking you to a hospital or a crematorium," Lubin muttered.
A squadron targeted his face. He slapped his forehead, hard. His hand came away with three tiny carcasses flattened against the palm. Each had eight legs.
What has eight legs? Spiders? Flying spiders?
Hunting in packs?
He wiped his palm against a patch of convenient vines matting the embankment. The vines squirmed at his touch.
He pulled his hand back instinctively, shocked. What the—
Tweaked, obviously. Or some kind of accidental hybrid. The foliage clenched and relaxed in peristaltic waves.
Focus. Keep on track.
More dive-bombers. Not quite so many this time. Maybe he'd swatted most of the swarm already. He felt as if he'd swatted a hundred swarms.
A scrabbling, from beyond the barrier.
Lubin peeked around the abutment. Phong was making a break for it, scrambling along a dry strip of concrete edging the far side of the spillway. Startling graffiti decorated the wall behind him, a stylized female face with white featureless eyes and a zigzag moniker: MM.
Phong saw him, fired three wild rounds. Lubin didn't even bother to duck; his microwave was already set on wide beam, too diffuse for a quick kill but easily strong enough to reheat Phong's last meal along with most of the gastrointestinal tract that was holding it. Phong doubled over, retching, to land on the thin skin of wastewater and the frictionless slime beneath it. He slid diagonally down the spillway, out of control. Lubin put one foot on a convenient dry patch and leaned out to catch him as he passed.
The Airborne Spider Brigade chose that exact moment for its last hurrah.
Suddenly Lubin's face and neck were wrapped in stinging nettles. Overextended, he struggled for balance. Phong sailed past; one flailing leg careened against Lubin's ankle. Lubin went over like a pile of very angry bricks.
They slid off the spillway into freefall.
It wasn't a long drop, but it was a hard landing. The Merrimack was a mere shadow of its former self; they landed not in water but on a broken mosaic of shale and cracked mud, barely moistened by the outfall. Lubin got some slight satisfaction from the fact that Phong landed underneath him.
Phong threw up again on impact.
Lubin rolled away and stood, wiping vomit from his face. Shards of shale snapped and slipped beneath his feet. His face and neck and hands itched maddeningly. (At least he seemed to have finally shaken the kamikaze arthropods.) His right forearm was skinned and oozing, the supposedly-unbreachable isolation membrane ripped from palm to elbow. A knife-edged splinter of stone, the size of his thumb, lay embedded in the heel of his hand. He pulled it free. The jolt that shot up his forearm felt almost electrical. Blood welled from the gash. Mopping at the gore revealed clumped particles of fatty tissue, like clusters of ivory pinheads, deep in the breach.
The microwave pistol lay on the scree a few meters away. He retrieved it, wincing.
Phong still lay on his back, winded, bruised, his left leg twisted at an angle impossible to reconcile with the premise of an intact tibia. His skin reddened as Lubin watched, small blisters rising on his face in the wake of the microwave burst. Phong was in bad shape.
"Not bad enough," Lubin remarked, looking down at him.
Phong looked up through glazed eyes and muttered something like Wha…
You were not worth the trouble, Lubin thought. There was no excuse for me to even break a sweat over the likes of you. You're nothing. You're less than nothing. How dare you get so lucky. How dare you piss me off like this.
He kicked Phong in the ribs. One broke with a satisfying snap.
Phong yelped.
"Shhh," Lubin murmured soothingly. He brought the heel of his boot down on Phong's outstretched hand, ground it back and forth. Phong screamed.
Lubin spent a moment contemplating Phong's right leg—the intact one—but decided to leave it unbroken. There was a certain aesthetic in the asymmetry. Instead, he brought his foot down again, hard, on the broken left one.
Phong screamed and fainted, escaping into brief oblivion. It didn't matter; Lubin's hard-on had been assured with the first snapping bone.
Go on, he urged himself.
He walked unhurriedly around the broken man until he found himself next to Phong's head. Experimentally, he lifted his foot.
Go on. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares.
But he had rules. They weren't nearly so inviolable as when he'd been Guilt Tripped, but in a way that was the whole point. To make his own decisions. To follow his own algorithm. To prove he didn't have to give in, to prove he was stronger than his impulses.
Prove it to who? Who's here to care? But he already knew the answer.
It's not his fault. It's yours.
Lubin sighed. He lowered his foot, and waited.
"A man named Xander gave you a vial," he said calmly, squatting at Phong's side a half-hour later.
Phong stared wide-eyed and shook his head. He did not seem pleased to be back in the real world. "Please…don't—"
"You were told that it contained a counteragent, that it would kill off ßehemoth if it was disseminated widely enough. I thought so myself, at first. I understand that you were only trying to do the right thing." Lubin leaned in close. "Are you following me, Phong?"
Phong gulped and nodded.
Lubin stood. "We were both misinformed. The vial you were given will only make things worse. If you hadn't been so busy trying to kill me you could have saved us both a lot—" A sudden thought occurred to him. "Just out of interest, why were you trying to kill me?"
Phong looked torn.
"I'd really like to know," Lubin said, without the slightest trace of threat in his voice.
"You—they said people trying to stop the cure," Phong blurted.
"Who?"
"Just people. On the radio." Alone, helpless, half his bones broken, and still he was trying to protect his contacts. Not bad, Lubin had to admit.
"We're not," he said. "And if you had been in touch with Xander and Aaron and their friends lately, you'd know that for yourself. They're very sick."
"No." It was probably meant to be a protest, but Phong didn't seem able to put any conviction into the word.
"I need to know what you did with that vial," Lubin said.
"I…I ate it," Phong managed.
"You ate it. You mean, you drank the contents."
"Yes."
"You didn't disseminate it anywhere. You drank it all yourself."
"Yes."
"Why, may I ask?"
"They say it cure ßehemoth. I–I first stage already. They say I dead by winter, and I could not get into forts…"
Lubin didn't dare touch the man, not with his isolation skin in tatters. He studied Phong's exposed and reddened skin, at the blisters rising across it. If there had been any obvious signs of either ßehemoth or Seppuku, they were now indistinguishable under the burns. He tried to remember if Phong had presented any symptoms prior to being shot.
"When did you do this?" he asked at last.
"Two days. I felt fine until…you…you…" Phong squirmed weakly, winced at the result.
Two days. Seppuku was fast, but all the symptomatic vectors Lubin had encountered had been infected for longer than that. It was probably only a matter of hours before Phong started presenting. A day or two at most.
"— to me?" Phong was saying.
Lubin looked down at him. "What?"