But the sound of footsteps died away above me, just as they reached the top of the stairs. Had I blown my cover somehow? I glanced up, saw nothing between the slats.
The moment stretched, way past the point where it could have been explained by the guy tying a shoelace or pausing to catch his breath. From where he was, he presumably had a good view both up and down the street: maybe he’d waited up there to see which way I went: in which case he had to have twigged by now that I hadn’t come back into view, so unless he was a peerless moron my pathetic ambush stood revealed. I was just about ready to jump out of hiding, sprint back up the steps and see if I could catch the guy before he bolted. But before I could, the sound of footsteps resumed. Someone was coming down the steps towards me: coming down slowly, with long pauses for thought or reconnaissance.
Reverting to Plan A, I got myself into a tackling crouch. The steps at my head height creaked one by one, in descending sequence — an arpeggio of protesting wood.
But maybe on some level I’d already registered that there was something wrong with the footsteps. At any rate, when the old man came out at the foot of the steps, sighing audibly as he paused to get his breath back, I was able to check my forward lunge in time and I didn’t actually punch him in the head. He walked on down the road, weighed down by two bulging bags in Sainsbury’s livery: he hadn’t seen me at all, which might have seemed odd if he hadn’t been wearing glasses as thick as the portholes on a bathysphere.
Stifling an obscene oath, I went back up the steps at a run, but I was locking the stable door when the horse was already at the airport with a false passport. The walkway was empty: my tail must have waited for the next pedestrian to come along, lingered just long enough to watch me from above as I stepped out of cover, and then — having verified beyond any doubt that I’d made him — done a quick fade back the other way. The old gent’s footsteps coming down the stairs would have covered his heading back the way he’d come.
I was chagrined — and frustrated. I’m too constitutionally lazy for real detective work, and I’d found the prospect of leaning on someone else for information very attractive.
But there was nothing doing, clearly. Next time, I promised myself, I’d move a little faster and give the slick bastard the benefit of one less doubt.
I was still thinking that when I caught a sudden movement off to my left. Honed reflexes made me turn right into it, and something hard and heavy smacked against the side of my head. The zombie had been clinging to the outside of the suicide netting, having crawled through one of the many gaps in its mesh. He knew damn well that his biggest handicap in a fair fight was speed — dead nerves and dead muscles taking their own sweet time to answer the call to arms — so he’d made damn sure the fight wasn’t fair, turning my own ambush back on me.
The first blow made me see stars and tweeting birds. I staggered and fell against one of the steel beams supporting the suicide nets. That put me beyond the reach of my assailant’s hands, but he got around that by kicking me in the face. The back of my head slammed into the beam: I caught hold of his foot at the same time, hauling him down on top of me. We sprawled and wrestled in an undignified heap, until he got his hand free and it came up again. I saw what was in it this time: a builder’s hammer, with one flat and one clawed end. Like I said, an enthusiastic amateur.
The hammer came down, clawed end first, and buried itself in the wood of the planking as I twisted my head aside. I would have been doing okay except that the first whack to the head had left me dazed, my movements logey and slow. Since the hammer didn’t serve his turn, the zombie butted me hard in the bridge of the nose, then locked both hands around my throat. I brought my knee up into his groin, but with no noticeable effect: a half-rotted nervous system has its upside.
With a frown of effort, the dead man leaned hard into the business of throttling me. His grip tightened, and all strength went out of me in a black, liquid tide. I shouldn’t have bothered with the knee to the groin, I should have been trying to break his grip. I scrambled for his hands now, but I couldn’t make my own hands move in synch or take a tight hold of anything. I was sinking into a swamp sown with broken glass. I was broken myself, and every ragged edge of me was shrilling in atonal discord like the factory sirens of Hell. My eyes were still open, but the seat of my consciousness seemed to drop from its usual position right behind them, plummeting into stippled darkness.
Time to fight dirty — assuming you count a knee to the balls as fighting clean. I went for the dead man’s eyes, hooking my thumbs into the sockets and squeezing with as much force as I could bring to bear.
The zombie rolled off me with a spluttered curse, one hand raised to his face, the other groping blindly at the planking. I rolled away in the opposite direction, struggling to get my knees back under me. That was the wrong move, because the dead man wasn’t groping blindly at all, he was reaching for the hammer. It swung around in a tight arc and staved in my third rib.
I screamed in agony, further tearing my already badly mangled throat. The dead man went two for one, smashing me in the chin with the blunt end of the hammer as he brought it up for another blow. I jackknifed, kicking out with both feet because it was the only thing I could do. Luck was with me, and my right foot met the guy’s arm as he brought the hammer down again. It went spinning out of his hand end over end, ricocheting off the suicide nets and fetching up ten yards from us.
But that was all I had in me. I slumped back onto the boards, my vision filling with black, granular static.
I think I actually blacked out for a moment or two. The next thing I was aware of was movement: the movement of my own body. Someone was lifting me, strong arms hooked around my lower chest. The pain was indescribable, because the pressure was right against the rib that had been damaged by the hammer.
‘It’s all right,’ said a voice. It was a woman’s voice, soft and low and very gentle — a stark contrast to the strong grip around my middle. ‘It’s all right, Fix.’
It wasn’t all right. My head was still swimming and the gorge was rising in my stomach. I was terrified of what would happen if I threw up: involuntary muscular spasms would tear through my tortured throat and bounce me off the diving board of agony in a spastic triple salto. I tried to pull away from my rescuer’s grip, but she wasn’t having any. As I sank she raised me up again, whether I liked it or not.
I was too close to the rail and my balance was off. I was still rising, and my Good Samaritan was leaning against me from behind now, pressing me hard against the rail.
‘Hey–’ I choked out.
She shifted her grip, clamping one hand on the back of my neck to push me forwards through a gap in the suicide nets. Then she got hold of my leg with the other hand and lifted my feet off the ground.
‘I can’t let you do it,’ she said, her voice strained and breaking. ‘God forgive me, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
There was the distant honk of a train’s klaxon, and the rails below me gave a tinny death rattle.
My eyesight cleared for a moment, at the worst possible point in the proceedings. I was staring down at the tracks far below, and even though there was a slight red shift to the scene I knew exactly what it meant.
I was about to impact on those rails at a modest but effective nine point eight metres per second — head first. And then the train was going to roll over me.
I got a good grip on one of the steel uprights and squirmed in the woman’s arms, leaning my weight backwards to mess up her leverage. That brought my head around to the point where I was staring straight into her face.
His face. Paler than pale, and with a steel ring punctuating his right eyebrow.