"Go ahead, Deckard!" Batty had shot a glance down to where Deckard's hands had shoved themselves against the top of the wall. A push from his braced arms would send them both toppling toward the jagged ground below. "Maybe I'll make it-" A mad spark flared in Batty's eyes. "But you won't!"
The other's grinning face wavered behind a haze of red as Deckard's throttled breath swelled to the bursting point in his lungs. He could feel his own hands pushing at the crumbling stone, the tiny stones and grit digging into his flesh. His spine scraped raw across the edge, trapped blood rushing into his skull as he dangled backward
…
Rain spattered on the roof of his mouth as the night's air suddenly rushed into his lungs. Batty's grip had loosened on his throat. The blinding haze faded; above him, the fierce intent in the other's eyes had been replaced by un comprehending wonder. Red seeped through Batty's eyebrows, spidering out from the concave ruin of his shattered forehead. From a black hole, its diameter that of a high-caliber bullet, a finger of blood reached down and gently touched Deckard between his own eyes. The echo of the gunshot was swallowed by the rumbling thunder of the clouds masking the sky overhead.
Batty fell, his body collapsing on top of Deckard, then tumbling, arms outstretched, down the freeway's wall. Deckard scrambled to grab hold of the edge of concrete, to keep from being pulled after the dead thing.
Gasping in exhaustion, Deckard crawled full-length onto the narrow horizontal space. With his chest and the side of his face flat against the concrete, fingertips dug tighter holds. Sheets of rain lashed across his back.
One of the corpse's heels had caught in an angle of rusted steel, leaving it dangling a few feet above the sideways world's rubble-strewn surface. Batty's arms flopped back in an inverted crucifix, the face gaping upward so the rain could sluice the blood from the head wound, pink rivulets thinning upon the ground beneath.
Holden lowered the gun, bullet heat seeping from the metal into his hand. The artificial heart staggered in his chest; he drew one cautious breath after another, trying to keep from passing out again. He'd barely been able to make it this far, creeping and stumbling from where he'd fallen in front of the empty apartment building. He knew he'd almost been too late; it had taken nearly all of his strength to wrap both hands around the gun and lift its crushing tonnage above his head. The rain had pounded into his face as he'd sucked in his breath, aimed, and fired.
He heard other noises now; he looked up again and saw Deckard slowly clambering down the cracked and gouged surface of the freeway.
With the gun's weight dragging his arm, he hobbled over to where the other man now stood. Looks worse than me, thought Holden. That sonuvabitch Batty had really worked him over.
"Deckard… I heard…" Holden gulped air into his wheezing bio-mechanical lungs. "I heard… what you said up there." He nodded, his own wet shirt collar rubbing against his neck. "You're right-Batty was the sixth replicant. He had to be…" It all seemed so clear to him now. "That's how he was disguising himself… trying to get away with it. As somebody else hunting down the sixth replicant…"
A cold gaze came from Deckard's wearied eyes. "Maybe." He shrugged. "But it's like Batty said. It doesn't matter." Deckard turned and started walking away.
Holden grabbed on to his arm. "But… we still don't know!" He held on desperately, both to keep from falling and so that Deckard would have to listen to him. "We don't know… who was gunning for us. Who was trying to get rid of all the blade runners…
Deckard shook him off. "You'll have to worry about all that. I've got other business to take care of."
"You don't understand-" Lungs straining for oxygen, Holden shouted after him, "We have to stick together-"
He heard something behind him, back by the wall of the tilted freeway. As did Deckard; they both turned and looked.
A figure almost human had crept out of the shadows behind the vertical stone and exposed lacework of metal reinforcement. A thing with darkened eye sockets and a tangled mat of hair, white as that of the dangling corpse. Sinews and skeletal joints poked through the gaping holes of a ragged leotard; the creature's flesh was pallid leather beneath.
Arrhythmic heartbeats passed before Holden recognized the thing. It's that other replicant, he thought, appalled. The female one. He couldn't remember what its name had been. Blood had seeped into the colorless hair, the dried-black spikes melting into red as the monsoon rains tangled sticky tendrils along the thing's neck. It was the one, he knew, that the little geek Sebastian had been in love with. that he'd been able to make move around in a bad parody of living things. Something had happened to it, a wound similar to Batty's; white bone fragments and jellied brain tissue showed through the catastrophic damage to the skull.
Dead, but still moving. Holden watched in distaste and dread as some blind instinct drew the once-living thing toward the other corpse. Its hands reached up and tremulously stroked the hollowed angles of Batty's jaw. It laid its own ravaged cheek against his, as though the gaping mouth were still capable of bestowing a kiss. Blood and rain mingled together, weeping along the faces of the dead.
Holden shuddered as he raised the gun and aimed. He couldn't stand it any longer. Before he could squeeze the trigger, another's hand stayed his, pushing the weapon aside. "Don't," said Deckard. "Just leave them alone."
He let the gun dangle at his side as he watched Deckard walk back toward the empty apartment building. The sustaining trickle of adrenaline ebbed from Holden's veins; he sank down upon the ground's wet stones. He breathed and listened to his own erratic heartbeat under the rain's slashing counterpoint.
16
The wall underfoot ran at enough of an angle that everything loose collected at one side of the safe-house apartment. A few moments of searching yielded the remote for the spinner's security devices; Deckard scooped it up and went back outside the building to the spinner.
He looked out the side of the cockpit as the spinner rose and banked over the wall of freeway, and saw the small figure of Holden, and farther away the dead Batty and Pris. Then they were lost to his sight; the spinner gained speed and altitude, its straight-line trajectory already set. The dark shapes of the sideways world fell behind as the city's bright-specked towers loomed ahead.
As the Tyrell Corporation headquarters approached, the blue-lit rectangle on top of one of the slanting towers flashed on, the landing deck's sensors responding to the spinner's coded signals. The guide beam locked on, bringing him down in the spiral of falling angels.
I should've taken the gun, he thought. Would've been easy to get it away from Holden.
Eyes closed, Deckard leaned his head back against the cold wall of the elevator. Another descent, maybe the last one. But he also knew there had been no need. That anything he had to do here, he could accomplish just as well with his bare hands. The metal doors slid open, revealing the private suite of Sarah Tyrell. The vast, columned spaces stretched out before him, shadows chased into the far corners by the ranks of flickering candles. He didn't know whether she had lit them, or if it was part of some corporate flunky's evening duties, to go around with a sacristan's taper, touching each black wick with the small flame. It didn't matter. There was no one else here now; the interlocking rooms held only her presence. He could feel it, like the shift in the night atmosphere's pressure on his skin.
Deckard stepped out of the elevator, letting the silvery doors close behind him. Stillness so complete that the motion of his breath made the flames of the candles on the nearest wrought-iron stand tremble.