He tried one last bite, but he was fading. Finally. Fading and then gone.
I rolled away and ran on fingers and toes away from the others, aware of searing pain in my leg. No idea how bad it was. Not in terms of structural damage but in potential. Was he one of them? A walker, someone infected with a pathogen like seif al din? If so, had he broken the skin? Had his saliva gotten into the wound? Had I survived the moment only to become a zombie myself? Was this it?
As I turned to face the other men I saw everyone on the dock and it burned itself into my brain in a series of images. Not a tableau, but a collage of moving nightmare images.
Bunny was standing twenty feet from me, his big shotgun held in his hands as he fired at one of Santoro’s men who lay sprawled on the ground. Bunny stood there and fired blast after blast with the twelve gauge, the buckshot tearing into dead flesh, ripping it apart, destroying all semblance of humanity. Over and over and over again. And in Bunny’s eyes… I saw nothing. They were empty and glazed and his face was totally slack.
Nearby, Top was firing at the people along the dock.
Not the henchmen, but at everyone.
I saw an old woman fall.
Then a skateboarder.
“Top—noooooo!”
He ignored me, or didn’t hear me. I saw a young couple running with their baby. The father went down with five or six bullets in his thighs. The woman and the baby vanished out of sight behind the utility shed. I’m pretty sure she was bleeding, too. No way to tell about the baby. The expression on Top’s face was inhuman and his muscles stood out like he was carved out of volcanic rock. He strove against the weapon in his hands as if it fought him, as if it wanted to kill and he was losing the fight to stop it. The civilians on the dock and inside the boat screamed. Some of them. A few were down, clutching at red bullet wounds. Some were running away as fast as they could. The rest stood there with empty eyes and empty faces.
Between the crowd and Top was the row of boats. Santoro was untying the lines to free the Picuda. In five seconds he would be able to push off. If he got away, then whomever he worked for would have what they needed to launch a catastrophic plague. A doomsday weapon. But there were the people on the dock. Here, now. In immediate need. I was totally torn. Closer to me, the last two of his men rushed in, punching the air even though they weren’t yet within range.
It was all so insane. The Killer in my head had not awakened. He was not in this fight at all. Hesitation was going to get me and everyone killed, and I knew it.
I tried to run around them, to get to Santoro despite Top’s wild gunfire, but my feet felt sluggish, clumsy. I tripped and nearly fell into the two henchmen. They threw themselves at me. The knife in my hand moved, maybe more from muscle memory than conscious will. The blade reached out to the hands that reached for me, and in that rapidly diminishing space it did awful work. Fingers flew into the air, chased by lines of red rubies. Pieces of their faces fell away to reveal muscle and bones. Veins opened like hoses. Then they were falling like discarded puppets, and I was running toward the Picuda as bullets buzzed like furious bees.
How I did not get killed is something I’ll never know. It wasn’t the Killer at work. You couldn’t call it luck, either, because no one on that dock was lucky. Not that day. If anything, my survival was the result of a perverse god who wanted more entertainment.
With a howl of animal rage I jumped into the Picuda, which had swung on its last remaining line and came thumping sideways into the dock. My leap was clumsy and mistimed, and my left shoe caught the edge of a locker, sending me crashing down hard enough to knock the knife from my hand. I saw it bounce off the corner of the small black briefcase. Santoro was on the forward bow untying the line from the cleat. The second I landed he dropped the rope, swarmed over the windscreen, and came at me with blinding speed. No weapons, but he didn’t need them. He should have — even off my game with the Killer gone or dead I was still a first-chair special operator. Suddenly I was backpedaling from a flurry of short, precise, vicious, and insanely fast blows. They came in at all the wrong angles and I wasn’t balanced yet for a solid response. The boat wobbled as once again I tried to hide inside a nest of forearms, elbows, and shoulders. If he’d been going for face or body hits he’d have busted his hands on my skeleton.
That’s not what happened.
He was a brilliant fighter. Not good, not great. Brilliant.
He used one- and two-knuckle snaps and corkscrew punches to the nerve clusters and connective tissue on the key points of my arms. Mashing nerves, deadening muscles, exploding white-hot pain.
I can deal with pain. I know pain. Experience has taught me that pain can be thought through and fought through in the heat of the battle, that it can even make you stronger and faster and better. The Killer who lives inside my head feeds on pain and all it ever does is make him roar; it makes him hunger for blood.
But the Killer was still asleep. And I felt like I wanted to sleep. When I tried to block, my arms moved too slowly and in the wrong ways. When I tried to hit him, I was clumsy and my blows packed no power.
Santoro laughed as he slapped my feeble punches aside.
“This is for my brother, yes?”
He had the same accent as Rafael. The same cruelty in his eyes as he set about dismantling me, attacking with a savage precision that made a joke out of my counterattacks and ignored my defenses.
This wasn’t about pain. It wasn’t even about winning.
It was about revenge. About punishment.
If you know where to hit you can dismantle an opponent, you can take away his weapons and tear down his defenses and turn a formidable enemy into the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.
That’s what he did.
No one’s ever done that to me before. Not since I was a kid. Sure, I’ve lost fights before, but no one has ever outfought me so thoroughly that I felt like a punching bag. He got inside my guard and jabbed me in the right sinus, boxed my ears, smashed the nerve clusters on both elbows, hit me in the top of the left thigh, stuck his thumb in the hollow of my throat, elbow-chopped my inner forearms, hit me over the heart with a one-two combination, and head-butted me. Then he caught me with hard knuckle shots to radial and ulnar nerves and my left arm went dead. I ducked down to try and take his next punch on my skull, hoping to break some of his hand bones with the famous Ledger hard head. But he changed a knuckle punch into a slap that felt like a donkey kick to the brain. I threw myself at him like a losing boxer would do, hugging him to stifle the flurry of hits.
Santoro pivoted as I grabbed him and he used my momentum and mass, plus the tilt of the boat, to hip throw me into the cockpit. I hit the steering wheel, the seat back, every knob and control including the little fire extinguisher tucked into the metal clamps. Hit the goddamn clamps, too.
Then he jumped on top of me, catching me in the solar plexus and floating ribs with his heels, and as I folded in half, he chop-kicked me under the chin. My whole body went limp but my consciousness hung by its fingernails on the crest of the abyss.
In the movies, fight scenes are ten minutes long. In the real world they’re over in seconds. Someone wins, somebody loses.
I lost.
He beat me to the edge of consciousness.
All the way to the edge.
But… only to the edge.
I had nothing left and it would have been nothing for him to end me with a blow to my throat. He could have stomped me to death. He had all the cards and I was a wrecked heap.