“Fuck you—” Batty scrabbled toward the gun a few feet away.
In an instant he’d estimated his chances of reaching the gun before the other man or getting it away from him. Deckard turned and dived for the apartment’s entranceway, yanking open the door and tumbling out into the unlit hallway just as a bullet ripped out a section of plaster above him. He got to his feet and ran.
“Shit—” Outside the building, he discovered that the pocket of his long coat had been ripped loose in the struggle with Batty. The remote for the spinner’s security devices was gone, probably somewhere back inside the safe-house apartment. He slammed his fist against the curved glass of the cockpit, but nothing happened.
Noises came from the front of the building. He glanced behind himself and saw that both Holden and Batty had emerged. Some kind of scuffle had broken out between the two of them; Deckard could hear them shouting, faces close to each other. As he moved around to the other side of the spinner, he saw Holden grab for the gun in Batty’s hand; they wrestled briefly, before a shot snapped through the night air. Holden fell against the side of the building, clutching at the bright smear of blood that had erupted through the torn shoulder of his jacket.
“Deckard! Stop!” He heard Batty shouting as he pushed himself away from the locked spinner, turned, and ran. Another shot kicked up a spray of concrete chips and dust at his feet.
“Come back here!”
Your ass. He kept running, picking his way as quickly as possible across the jagged terrain. Fragments of starlight penetrated the clouds overhead, turning the low jumble of broken shapes to tarnished silver.
Perhaps he was dying. It was hard to tell. Right now, his head felt as though it were about to explode, not with pain, but with the rush of energy that had welled inside him, from the moment he’d stood back up in the safe-house apartment. That bastard knocked something loose, thought Holden as he lay against the wall of the deserted apartment building, one hand clutched to his bleeding shoulder. Some governor mechanism for the clattering heart in his chest had gone awry; his pulse seemed to be racing twice as fast as it ever had before.
The wound was more of an annoyance than anything else; Holden managed to get to his feet, swaying a little. But it would serve his ex-partner right if the blow from the table leg and its consequences were what enabled him to catch up and nab Deckard, beat his head a few times against the stony ground before deciding what to do with him next. If his own heart didn’t swell up and burst before then, like an overheated engine flying to pieces with its internal violence. Deckard had taken advantage of him during a temporary moment of weakness, when the biomechanical heart and lungs had been chugging through a low point in their cycles; now the sonuvabitch would have to deal with the old Dave Holden. Better than old, he thought grimly.
Bracing himself against the wall for balance, he spotted something on the ground before him; his artificial heart surged when he saw what it was. The gun-he’d gotten it away from Batty, but the other man had twisted it around and squeezed off the single round that had dropped him. Then the sonuvabitch must have been in too much of a hurry, chasing after Deckard, to stop and search around here for it.
Holden bent down to pick up the gun. And realized his mistake immediately. When his head went below the level of his heart, the amped-up wave of blood dizzied him. To blackout: he fell, fist grasping tight around the gun’s handle.
On the spinning earth, he could feel the gun sweating against his palm. He managed to lift his head for a moment; the edges of his gaze turned red as he scanned the limits of the angular landscape.
Motion against stillness. He’d sighted Deckard; even better, he saw that there was no place farther to which the replicant and ex-blade runner could get to. Deckard had traversed enough of the rubble-strewn ground to hit smack against the abandoned freeway, turned onto its side by the long-ago earthquakes. A blank wall trisected by lane divider dashes reared up against the night sky, with a humanlike figure small against its base.
Another figure appeared, running, quickly eating up the distance between Deckard and itself. The shock of white hair was enough to identify Batty.
“Don’t bother, Deckard-you’re not going anywhere!” Batty’s gloating call cut through the night air.
As Holden watched, vision wavering, the figure in the long coat started climbing, hands clawing at cracks in the freeway’s vertical surface, boots scrabbling at crumbling projections of cement or ends of metal reinforcement rods. Deckard had already worked himself up to the center lane by the time Batty sprinted across the last few yards.
“Don’t . . . kill him . . .” Holden’s voice came out as an agonized whisper. “You’ve got to keep him . . . alive . . .” Gun in hand, he pushed himself up from the ground, to his knees.
That was his last effort. Holden sprawled forward, seeing nothing. Feeling only the cold weight of the gun under his fingertips and the razor-edged stones pressing against his face.
Into his eyes fell dust and grit, knocked loose from above by Deckard’s progress toward the freeway’s upper edge. Batty reached for the next hold and pulled himself up, threads of blood trickling from his abraded fingertips to the tautened cords of his wrists.
Against the clouds that had shrouded the night sky, he’d momentarily lost track of Deckard; only when he got his hands onto the top edge, scrabbling one knee and then the other up onto the horizontal surface, did he catch sight of him again. As Batty crouched, he spotted Deckard running along the narrow ribbon. The freeway’s understructure had broken away during the original quake, leaving a sheer drop into darkness on either side of a meter-wide span.
Batty saw a dark space open up before the figure in the long coat. A section of the freeway wall had previously disintegrated, leaving an abrupt cliff front on either side of the gap.
Deckard halted, nearly toppling from the crumbling brink; he glanced over his shoulder at Batty, then drew back for a running leap.
That hesitation was enough; Batty dived, one outstretched hand grappling Deckard’s foot just as it lifted from the edge’s flat surface. They fell together, Batty’s shoulder hitting the concrete as he crooked his gun arm around Deckard’s knee. Rolling onto his back, Deckard shoved the butt of his hand against Batty’s forehead, pushing him back and toward the edge’s limit.
From beneath them came snapping and grinding noises. The impact of their bodies was more than the freeway section could withstand; the network of cracks along the vertical surface suddenly widened, boulders of cement crumbling away from the mesh of rusted metal beneath. Batty felt the gulf open beneath, the dark air made tangible with the grey dust filling his mouth and nostrils. The collapse of the freeway section yanked Deckard’s ankle from his grasp; he rolled onto his shoulder, his arm desperately reaching, hand locking on to an angled stub of rebar sticking out from the ragged precipice above him. Twisting his neck, he saw the concrete and interwoven metal tumbling to the ground below with a crescendoing, bass-heavy roar.
Batty held on, his other hand reaching up and grasping the freeway’s narrow edge. He pulled himself onto it, chest scraping across the rough surface. The collapse of the middle section had peeled with it another layer of the remaining vertical wall, leaving a tightropelike span only a few inches wide.
Kneeling, with one hand gripping the edge for balance, he looked across the now wider gap as the dust sifted out of the moon’s thin radiance.