Nice one, Jack, I thought: tactical mastery as usual.
A second to make a decision. I needed the guy alive—I wanted to talk to him. But if he got to Suej, everything was over anyway.
I shot him, carefully.
The bullet caught him in the neck and spun him round, but he was a big fucker and kept on going. I parked another in his back and launched myself off the bar, flying raggedly over rows of heads and smashing down onto him. We crashed to the floor, a space suddenly clear around us; I tried to turn the fall into a roll but he was quicker than me and kicked me back down again as he pulled out his gun. I twisted immediately and took some splinters in the face as the patch of floor where my head had been exploded.
I decided I was tired of being shot at in bars and that I didn’t need to talk to him that much.
My gun was half empty before he staggered; I pushed myself to my feet with one hand, still firing with the other. The problem with guns is that they don’t kill people as quickly as you might think. Shooting people doesn’t send them flying backward in a graceful arc. It just tends to really annoy them. I lunged forward and grabbed his neck, my hand slipping in the biology spilling out of the hole there. I got him on his back and knelt over him, hand still on his throat and a knee on each arm, gun firmly pointed at his forehead. His face was thin and not very clean, eyes deep set and dark. Under his coat it looked like he was wearing army fatigues which hadn’t been troubled by water in a while.
I knew I didn’t have long before the cops arrived, so I made it simple for him. “Tell me who you are and where you’re from or I’m going to spread your brains all over the next floor down,” I panted, feeling warmth spilling out of his neck onto my fingers.
He bucked and nearly threw me off so I put another bullet through his collarbone at close range.
“You know where I’m from,” he said, through a mouthful of blood. He seemed to be grinning.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “And it’s pissing me off. Are you SafetyNet, or what?”
The man laughed, sending another gout of mess up through the remains of his lungs. “Ain’t no safety net there, Randall. You know that.”
From behind, I heard someone whisper “They’re coming,” and knew that time had run out. I stood up and left him lying there, knowing he wasn’t going to tell me anything. Then as an afterthought I shot him in the head. Not very polite of me, I know, but then he didn’t want the best for me either.
“Jesus—what is it with you and public places?” Nearly shouted. “Were you, like, mistreated in a bar as a kid?” I’d obviously slipped back in her estimation to big violent dude with a drug problem, maybe even further than that. “Wherever you go it’s the same fucking movie. Don’t you-get tired of it?”
“One, he could have been the guy killing women,” I said, pushing her and Suej quickly along the street. “Two, he could have killed Mai. Three, either he or his friend cut Nanune’s fucking head off, and four, I don’t want to discuss it.”
We ran out into Road 2, the smaller of 67’s main drags. I could hear sirens in the distance, cops on platforms surfing toward us from the station on the other side of the floor. The platforms are simply that, four-inch slabs with Hovers underneath; one cop drives using the lectern at the front, the others do what the hell they like. I kept us moving away from the bar for as long as possible, and then, when I saw a flashing light turn the corner into our road, yanked the girls into a sidestreet. The platform rocketed past like a very low-flying bird with parasites on its back, and I hoped the bar wasn’t about to experience an “incident.” The cop piloting was bombed out of his mind and the others were waving their guns around like cowboys on a runaway riverboat.
When the platform was safely past, we ran back out onto the street and sprinted across it, into another side road and then through to the waste ground behind. Once it had been a botanical garden. Now it was just a mess, some descendants of the original plants still struggling for life, most dead and gone. Yellow streetlights were strung along the edges of the grounds, but the interior was dark and abandoned.
“Where are we going?” Nearly panted. “And are you going to shoot anyone when we get there? if so, I think I may pass and take in a movie instead.”
There was an elevator on the other side. I pointed to it.
“Down to your apartment,” I said as we ran into the gloom. “There’s stuff I left there. Then Suej and I are disappearing. Probably for good.”
“Well hey, it’s been nice knowing you,” Nearly said angrily. “And when I say ‘nice,’ I don’t mean it.”
I was about to try to say something conciliatory when Suej suddenly ground to a halt in front of me. I almost collided with her and instead skidded to a stop, a growl ready on my lips.
It never made it out.
We were in the middle of the waste ground by then, two hundred yards from anything in any direction. The sirens still blared in the distance, but apart from that it was quiet and still. Suej was staring into space with her mouth open. There was nothing there.
“Suej?” I said. “What—?”
Then something morphed out of the shadows. A flicker at first, a shimmer like shadows changing places to music I couldn’t hear. At the threshold of audibility a sound, like many hands clapping but speeded up and far away.
Then a shiver went through the ground and the space between us fractured into noise and light.
Suej shrieked as the birds exploded into being, a hundred mad, happy orange sets of wings and ear-splitting cries crashing into fluttering life, Living flames shot up into the air, but went nowhere; movement and noise contained into stillness, as if everything in the world was trying to be in the same place at once. It was impossible to discern the beginning of one scream and the start of the next, or one bird and another.
I found Suej’s hand in mine. She was pulling me toward the elevator. Her face was white with shock and surprise, and she ducked and twisted against things that weren’t even there. Nearly just stared at us, following, as we stumbled toward the elevator. Behind her the birds slithered and ran into invisible tracks in the air, tearing passage back the way they’d come.
We fell into the elevator and stared out into darkness as the doors closed and sealed us in.
“What the hell’s wrong with you guys?” Nearly shouted, stamping her feet. I ignored her and put my arms round Suej’s shoulders, as much for my own comfort as hers. She was trembling like an animal caught in headlights, rooted to the spot. I thought she’d been struck mute but suddenly she looked up, blue eyes staring straight into mine.
“You know what that was.” Her voice spiraled into accusation and terror. “You know”
“You saw the forest in the elevator before, didn’t you?” I asked. She nodded feverishly.
“What are they?” she wailed. “Where are they from?”
“Hello? Calling planet Jack…” Nearly shouted, as the doors opened onto 66. She was beside herself with anger and fear. “What are you guys talking about?”
“You didn’t see them?” Suej asked her incredulously, and Nearly just stared as if finally realizing that she’d spent the day with two people who should have been weaving baskets and knocking back Thorazine. I stepped quickly out of the elevator, my arm still round Suej. I was trying to work out what was happening, but it was all coming at me too fast. Some final penny had been thrown in my lap, some huge great hundred-dollar special edition coin out of the sky. I’d have done anything to be able to hurl it back before I worked out what it meant.
“See who?” Nearly demanded, hurrying along beside us.