Hayes guessed it would happen in seven seconds. He wasn’t sure how but he was already picking up their positions, unconsciously aware of their exact placement around him. It never happened so fast, usually it took minutes, even hours.
“Samantha?” he said softly.
“Yes?” she said.
“Listen.”
“What?”
“Listen, you-” But the soft-chinned one was already pulling a strip of iron from his pants pocket. Hayes heard the man behind them spinning around and sprinting back at them, moving for the backstab.
Hayes shoved Samantha to the ground hard and the little knife popped out of his sleeve and into his palm. He stabbed it down and felt it sink into the thigh of the man behind him before he could make contact. The shock of the impact shook Hayes’s wrist. Their attacker cried out and stumbled, and instead of tackling Hayes he crashed into him. The flick knife stayed deep, grinding through gristle and tendons, and as the man tumbled to the ground the blade was ripped from Hayes’s hands. He collapsed beside the wounded man and saw the leader and the one on the right rushing forward.
Samantha reacted much faster than Hayes ever would have imagined. She got up and drew close to him, clutching her briefcase before her and backing away from them. Then she knelt and ripped the knife from the wounded man’s leg. He screamed and a flash of blood marked her shoulder, and then she stood and held the knife out before her. She licked her lips and shouted to stay back, stay away. Hayes dimly felt like applauding her. The remaining attackers faltered, uncertain as to exactly how many knives their prey had hidden on them. Then without any warning the one on the right froze, looked across the intersection of the street, and gaped at something before screaming wildly and running away.
Hayes, Samantha, and the remaining two assailants all watched him go, each of them confused. Then they stupidly turned to look at what he had seen.
When Hayes saw it he was not sure what it was. At first it looked like no more than a blur, like some error of the light hovering on the sidewalk. But it was not, as the fluttering thing began to move toward them.
He realized it looked something like a person, pale and ghostly like a dying light. Hayes saw arms and fingers and legs and a mouth somewhere in the blur, just flashes of each as if they were there for a fragment of a second before dissolving into nothing. It staggered forward toward them, and then there was a sound like all the metal and steel in the world squalling and screeching under enormous stress, high-pitched and furious. Hayes and Samantha and their attackers all clutched their ears and cried out. They could barely hear themselves. Hayes’s eyes watered and he struggled to look through the tears, but he swore he could see a face somewhere in the advancing blur, wild and crazed.
Then it hit him. Hit him like a meteor, like an artillery shell. A sense of such powerful grief and madness that it overwhelmed him. It boiled in his heart and ate his throat from the inside out and he suddenly saw the world as a cruel, vicious place where no act was just and all that lived in it deserved to die, and to die horribly, to die screaming.
He screamed with it. The noise was like a needle in his mind and he doubled up and the world faded around him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hayes awoke to the sting of alcohol in his nostrils. Everything around him was a muted roar, throbbing and pulsing. There was a cold ache where his sinuses met his throat. Then he moaned and he heard his voice faintly as though it were coming from the next room and he opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed, surrounded by white curtains. Clean white daylight fell in rays upon the bedsheets in his lap. Through the cracks in the curtains he could see people darting past, wearing white. He guessed he was in the Hamilton, the big, well-trafficked hospital on the edge of the Shanties. It was a hospital of fairly low repute, as it saw more than its fair share of questionable wounds and the staff could be paid to keep quiet about them. It was also rumored they ran a small drug trade, though Hayes had once been personally frustrated to learn those rumors were not true.
He held his hand up in front of his face and snapped his fingers. He could hear it, very faintly. Then he checked his joints, his hands, his elbows, his knees and ankles. They seemed to be working. He checked his face and couldn’t feel any lacerations, but the linen bandages around his ears were troubling. Then he surreptitiously eased a hand down toward his crotch, found that everything familiar was still there, and lay back.
The curtain twitched. A nurse stuck her head through and said something to him but he couldn’t catch much of it. Then she checked his bandages. She nodded and leaned close and said, “You probably can’t hear well right now. One of your eardrums burst, you’ll have diminished hearing for a while but it should come back eventually.”
Hayes let loose a long string of swears. They must have been louder than he intended because the nurse recoiled slightly. Then she asked, “Is there anything you need?”
“A fucking cigarette,” he told her. She made a soundless sigh and walked away.
He lay in bed for a few more minutes before the curtain opened again and Garvey sidled in. He looked at Hayes’s head and grimaced.
“Your bedside manners are terrible,” said Hayes.
“Not so loud,” said Garvey. “Can you hear me?”
“Somewhat. Where am I? The Hamilton?”
“Yeah. You’ve been here nearly a day. You should get good treatment, they know me here. They’ll be surprised I’m not here to see some weasel or a denner with five rounds in his legs.”
“Cigarette?” asked Hayes hopefully.
Garvey reached in his pocket and took two out of his tin. First he lit Hayes’s, then his own.
“What’s going on?” Hayes asked, exhaling. “Where’s Samantha? Is she all right?”
Garvey was silent a while, thinking. Then he said, “She’s fine. That’s what they told me, at least. I missed her. They let her out before you, about a day ago.” He coughed. “You had some sort of… I don’t know. It looked like you were in a coma. It wasn’t the ear thing. You were attacked, you know, but Samantha didn’t see you catch any blows to the head. Did you fall and hit it on something?”
“I fell. Didn’t hit it on anything. I think…”
“Think what?”
That it was almost like an attack, thought Hayes, but he waved the question away. “Never mind. What was that thing? That thing we saw?”
Garvey pulled up a chair. He sat down beside Hayes and pulled his tie loose and took off his hat. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
Hayes described it, word for word. From Peggy in the jewelry shop to when they saw the twitching thing walking toward them in the street. He even described the attack he’d had, the sense of grief and sadness and fury that brought him to his knees. Garvey nodded along, his face growing wearier and wearier as he listened. At the end he said, “You shouldn’t have gone there. Once you had the name and address you should have come straight to me.”
“I should have,” Hayes said. “Probably. Yes.”
“You should have given me everything you had on Skiller the second you knew anything.”
“I was trying to help.”
“Damn it, Hayes,” he said angrily. “We could have jumped on this. I could have jumped on this. Time matters in these things, damn you.”
Hayes frowned as he looked Garvey over. The skin under his eyes was dark, like little smears of coal. His hair was oily and unbrushed and his collar was a faint yellow.
“What’s going on?” Hayes asked. “What’s wrong?”
Garvey sighed again and rubbed his face. Then he stood and took off his coat, moving slowly and unsteadily. He sat back down and stared into the linens on the bed and said, “It’s surfaced.”