-- DAN
CHAPTER 20
Matt’s thoughts spun in his head as he drove back to the LaCroix. He’d originally intended to go to the basement before he did anything else, but he realized that, if his story were to hold any water at all, he’d at least have to put the car back where Diedra would expect to find it. He wasn’t sure how well his actions meshed—first rushing off to face the attacker, then freaking out and leaving—but he felt sure he could think up some explanation to cover the weirdness.
Hard empty eyes, fingers white and jointless and twisting.
Matt screeched to a halt in the LaCroix’s private parking lot. He jumped out, slammed the door, looked around briefly, and sprinted for the unbroken shadow behind the building’s dumpster. He fell into it and flickered away.
Matt rolled to his feet in the basement. The Vylar suit hung there, just as he’d left it after he’d washed it in the shower and put it back here, on its rack. He practically tore off his outer clothing, pushed his shoes off his feet without untying them.
Three minutes later he was dressed and buckling the spike harness to his left forearm. The Glock hung at his thigh. His heart hadn’t stopped pounding since he’d first heard the girl’s scream in the park. He took a deep breath and calmed himself. Focused and centered.
Matt concentrated again and vanished in a breath of icy air.
# # #
Thousands, millions of lights everywhere sparkled and glittered, but reached only so far; darkness surrounded each one, and he flickered there, an icy presence wherever the light fell short.
Only a few people felt his passing, and then only as a sudden intense chill. A uniformed policeman, sitting in his patrol car in an alley between a convenience store and a one-hour photo shop, froze with his steaming coffee halfway to his lips, abruptly certain that someone was watching him. He turned, scanned the alleyway and saw nothing, but gooseflesh crawled over him—and his windshield abruptly fogged. When he lifted a slightly shaky hand to take a sip of the coffee he discovered it was only lukewarm.
A prostitute lounging against a burned-out street lamp gasped as a breath of Arctic air brushed her. The metal of the lamp turned icy against her partially bare back so quickly she thought she’d been burned, and she jerked away from it with a startled yelp. As she cast about for someone she could ask to look at her back, she saw something move around the corner of a nearby building and vanish into an alley. She thought it might have been a man...but for a second, just a second, she thought she could see through it.
The cold from her back twined itself with fear, flashed into her stomach and out along her bones, and she turned and ran.
# # #
Matt had never covered as much ground as he covered tonight. From shadow to shadow, darkness to darkness, he flickered in, took in his surroundings, then flickered away again. Twice he broke up muggings and left the assailants stretched out on the concrete. The first of the would-be victims began to offer shaky thanks before Matt left. The other bolted away without a word.
More and more prostitutes and drug dealers haunted the streets the farther into the city he traveled. Matt tried to remember each of them, each of their faces, each of the locations, but their numbers overwhelmed him. He hadn’t been at this long enough. He felt pulled in every direction, and wanted to come down hard on every one of the pimps and the pushers, but he knew he couldn’t, not tonight. Tonight he had to find Simon.
“I’m sorry, about...I didn’t...” It was like a plea. The young man had sounded so pitiful.
And frightened. “I’m sorry...”
Matt had just stepped out of the shadows beside a dilapidated frame house in one of the metropolitan area’s worse residential districts when he heard the distinct sound of flesh striking flesh, followed by a howl of pain. He reached into the dark, back to the basement, and brought his quarterstaff to him, and the grass crisped and died under his feet.
The house was a two-story, built onto the side of a hill and separated from the next one by a fifteen-foot alley that sloped sharply down toward the backs of the structures. Lights visible through thin curtains burned in all the windows of both houses, but if he stayed quiet, there was no reason anyone should see him. Not until he wanted them to.
Matt crept forward and raised his head to the window closest to the front of the house where he’d heard the noise. The dingy, faded beige curtains had spots of mildew on them. Hung incorrectly, they left a half-inch gap below the right panel, which let him see into the house’s front room.
His hand tightened around the quarterstaff.
A huge Latino teenager stood unsteadily in the middle of the room. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and a net bound his hair to his head. He wore black jeans and a white T-shirt with red bandannas tied around one arm, and he clutched a young, shapely Hispanic girl by one wrist, and even as he weaved on his feet he drew back a block-like fist and smashed it across her face.
The teenager’s words through the glass were both slurred and in Spanish, and the only one Matt could pick out—drawing on the precious little Spanish he remembered from high school—was puta. Whore. The girl screamed. Her face ran purple and red in a mass of bruises and contusions, and one split lip bled openly. He thought he heard her call the young man “Cesar.”
Matt’s teeth ground together as he left the window.
Cesar dropped the girl and spun around as the front door exploded off its hinges. It slammed to the floor and kicked up a huge cloud of dust as the glass in its one small window shattered. Matt came through the doorway, quarterstaff held ready, and Cesar grunted and pulled a knife.
The girl backed into a corner, forgotten, her one good eye widening. She whispered “Redeemer,” then jumped up and fled into a back room.
Matt watched Cesar carefully. The kid was flying high, that much was clear, but Matt couldn’t tell from what. He spun the staff and waited for Cesar to make the first move.
Obligingly, Cesar raised the weapon, a bone-handled sheath knife with a five-inch blade, and swung at Matt. Matt stepped aside, brought the quarterstaff down on Cesar’s elbow, and kicked his feet out from under him. Surprisingly, Cesar held onto the knife, so Matt knelt beside him as he landed face-down and pinned Cesar’s arm to the floor. Allowing him just enough slack to raise his elbow, Matt forced Cesar’s hand into an acute angle with his forearm, the back of his hand flat against the floor. The tendons obligingly spasmed open and Matt took the knife out of the boy’s unresisting fingers.
Pinned to the dirty floorboards and helpless, Cesar began screaming obscenities at Matt in Spanish. Matt relaxed for a second, trying to decide what to do with him, when he heard a feminine voice somewhere else in the house shouting, “Redeemer! Redeemer!” This was followed by multiple footsteps pounding up what sounded like a wooden staircase. He had just enough time to realize he might have made a serious mistake when a door burst open and five Latino teenagers boiled out of it, every one of them armed and dressed in red.
Matt rolled out of the way as the first spray of bullets kicked at the floor and wall. He thought a couple of the rounds might have hit Cesar, who didn’t try to rise from where Matt had pinned him. Throwing spikes whickered and flashed in the air and sank deep into the gun hands of two of the youths.
The other three fired madly, randomly, screaming at him and each other in Spanish. The room filled with the roar of gunfire, and Matt heard bullets buzzing past him like super-sonic hornets. Dust and bits of plaster clouded around him as the gunshots tore huge chunks out of the floor, walls, and ceiling, and for an instant Matt grew disoriented.
A large-caliber round took him in the side, kicked him off his feet and forced the air from his lungs in a whoosh. Gasping, he rolled again, the Glock now in his hands. Aiming low, he put bullets into the right legs of two more of the youths, but the rest of his shots went wide. The pain of the impact began to reach him, and he doubled over, clutched his ribs, but didn’t lose his balance. He knew the Vylar padding had dispersed a substantial portion of the force of impact, and probably kept his ribs from shattering.
Matt straightened, willing his eyes to focus, and raised the Glock again just as the one unhurt youth fired his Uzi. Seven bullets stitched their way across Matt’s chest, knocked him backward through the front window, and a shower of broken glass followed him down into the shadows.
# # #
Julio, the teenager with the Uzi, ran to the window and thrust the weapon outside and sprayed the ground below him before he risked looking out.
Dust and dirt floated in the air, blasted up by the impact of the bullets.
There was no one there.
Julio’s hands began trembling violently, whether from adrenaline or simple fear he couldn’t tell. Diego joined him, staring numbly at the four-inch length of steel protruding from his right hand, wedged in tight between the bones of his second and third fingers.
“I can’t pull it out,” Diego said quietly, in Spanish. “It won’t come out.”
One of the youths who’d been shot was silent, either unconscious or in shock.
The other one began to cry and clutched his shattered knee. The third sat with his head against a wall, gripping his torn hand tightly as the blood seeped between his fingers. For some reason he held the metal throwing spike between his teeth.
Julio pulled a cell phone out of his back pocket and, staring at the empty space below the shattered window, dialed 911—then he heard the sirens, already on their way. He folded the phone back up with shaking hands, ran down the front steps, slid behind the wheel of his car and got away from the house as fast as he could.
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
Those of you paying close attention will notice that I'm about an hour late with this post. I got hit with some unexpected revisions on a freelance project tonight that I needed to turn around in a hurry, and I lost track of...well, everything else, I guess.
I'll try and come up with something cogent to say about this chapter after I've had some sleep.
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