Following him came a gillette who'd learned to move almost silently. My first warning of his presence came when the forty-centimeter-long claws built into his right hand telescoped out with a click, then whistled as he swung them at me. His cut came waist-high and should have sliced my belly open, but I'd already begun to twist away from him before his attack began. The trio of polished steel blades shredded the right flank of my jacket and razored through the t-shirt and some flesh, but they didn't get enough to put me down.
Before he could turn his wrist around and try to backhand me with the blades, my right hand locked on his hand. I bent his hand inward toward his own chest. Anticipating my move, he retracted the claws and relaxed in preparation for using some esoteric martial art to turn my attack against me. That's why it surprised him when I jammed his fist against his own chest, then smacked the gun in my left hand against his funny bone.
The blow numbed his forearm and released the claws.
I stepped over his dying body and out onto the street again. The half-dozen gangers and razorboys racing down the sidewalk collided abruptly as their lead elements tried to stop. I stroked the Ingram's trigger twice, sending two three-shot bursts in their direction. Fortunately for them, and whoever does the workman's compensation filing for the Halloweeners, a heavy-set ork up front absorbed most of the damage. One bullet lanced sparks from a gillette's left-arm assembly and another folded an ork over as it drove his navel out through his spine, but otherwise it left the band unscathed.
Four out of at least ten down, and me with a half-empty clip and busted barrel staves in my chest. Why the hell don't these things ever happen to Kid Stealth?
I ducked back into the alley and looped the machine pistol over my shoulder by its strap. I grabbed both of the men I'd downed and dragged them to the dumpster. Lynn's eyes grew wide enough to fall out of her head, and I suddenly realized that with the silencer on the gun and the way I dealt with the first two people, she had no idea any fighting had taken place.
I dropped to one knee and brought the Ingram to hand again. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Lynn, believe me I am." I nodded toward the bodies. "I need you to go through the razorboy's pockets and get whatever he has-guns, knives, bullets, anything. I'll do the kid. It's our only chance at survival."
She reached out to touch the ragged furrows cut in my coat. "You're hurt."
"Not as bad as I will be if they get you because of trying to kill me." I started to pat the Weenie down, then liberated the spare Ingram clips in the thigh pockets of his khaki fatigues. "Charles the Red or Mr. Sampson somehow learned that Raven and the others were out of town. They decided to make a move against me. Chuckles has been planning this for some time."
"How do you know that?" Lynn said as she pulled wires and datacords from the dead man's pocket and stuffed them into her own.
I whirled around and pointed the Mk. 22's snout at the alley mouth. A short burst blasted a grunge back over a parked car. "This won't do." I stood and twisted the dumpster so it blocked the alley, then answered her question by pointing at the razorboy and his purple-spiked coiffure.
"He was one of the ones in the park when we arrived. He was jacked into one of the public tables. It's my fault: We've been too predictable-always going to the park before we go elsewhere. He just let the others know we had arrived and the gears started grinding."
Suddenly I felt the alley walls close in on me like a trap. I lunged forward and covered Lynn's body with my own. The bullets sprayed down through the space where I'd just been crouching and, somehow, missed my splayed-out legs.
As spent cartridges tinkled down in a brass rain, I rolled over onto my back and burned the rest of the Mac's clip. Bullets traced a line up the alley wall and through the street samurai who'd taken the high ground. He pitched back out of sight, his body looking like a pinata filled with cherry Jell-O, and I reloaded the gun without thinking.
Lying there on my back gave me a unique view of the world. From beneath the dumpster I saw a truck turn into the alley. Its tires squealed and smoked as it fought for traction in the garbage choking the alley mouth. As it picked up speed and the obscenities being shouted by its occupants fought over the roar of the engine, I realized the Weenies meant to use the dumpster to smear us into a thin, bloody paste.
Off to my left I saw a sewer grating lurking like a grime-smeared island in the midst of an oily patch of waste water. I leaped to it and single-handedly ripped the grating free. "Lynn, over here, now! Get down in here."
Tears streaking her face, she crossed to the hole and started her descent. The slimy, rusty rungs made the climb difficult, but she moved as quickly as she could. My enhanced olfactory senses sampled the sewer miasma with the relish of a wine connoisseur sipping Sterno. The stink gave me ample reason not to follow her, but the gangers in the truck allowed me no alternative. "Drop, just drop!" I yelled as I thrust my legs down into the hole. I let myself slip into the darkness as the truck slammed into the dumpster with a horrendous clang. My left hand grabbed the top rung and my head slipped beneath street level as the dumpster's leading edge guillotined its way above me. I felt a grinding in my shoulder and a jolt of pain as my handhold stopped the drop short, but I was too intent on other things to worry about injuries at that very moment.
I shoved the Ingram back up toward street level and tightened down on the trigger. Like a bandsaw cutting wood, the bullets ripped along the truck's midline. Just behind the cab, the slugs lanced through the gas tank. Almost instantly the acrid scent of gasoline filled my nose and I let go of the ladder's top rung.
The truck exploded before I completed the five-meter drop to the river of sewage below. I saw a tremendous flash, then felt the thunderous detonation shudder through my chest. The scream of metal twisting out of shape as the flaming truck cartwheeled through the narrow alley sounded like a banshee death-wail and was made yet more haunting by the acoustics of the subterranean sewer tunnels.
I hit water and the bottom one after the other. Fire sparked in my right flank as the water gnawed into the claw wounds. Water hissed as it touched the gun's silencer and evaporated into steam. Gathering my feet beneath me I hauled myself to the surface and stood in the waist-deep river of sludge. As quickly as possible I moved upstream. By doing that I rejoined Lynn and avoided the flaming liquid dripping down in long burning rivulets through the hole above.
I slipped my left arm around her shoulders and tried not to react as she wrapped her arms around my middle and hugged. I failed and she recoiled. Her hands came away bloody. She stared at the black stains on her palms, for the burning gasoline's light was too feeble to give the blood its true color.
She looked up at me as if her world was folding in on itself. "You're bleeding. This water… You need a doctor."
I forced a confident smile onto my lips. "You have that straight. I need Dr. Raven."
She gave me a puzzled look. "But you said he'd left Seattle for a while."
"True, but Raven keeps tabs on things through the Matrix. That's why he took Valerie Valkyrie with them." I frowned. "Unless we get to a place where we can use a deck, we're up a creek without a sewage treatment plant in sight."
For the first time since we left the park, Lynn smiled. She plucked a short datacord from her pocket and I recalled having seen her strip it off the gillette I killed. "Get me to a junction box or public telecom access jack and from there I'm in." She pulled her hair back away from her left ear and snapped the cord into the datajack implanted there. "You've got the access codes-I'm not going to have to cut any ice, am I?"