As he recovered from the first two blows, he stayed doubled over and hung onto Fury’s handshake, feinting a lunge towards him. As Fury resisted the advance, he reversed his direction and hauled him backwards before letting go. Fury, totally off balance, careened across the room and slammed, half falling, into the wall between the two windows of the apartment’s main room.
Johnson stood to face him, watching as Fury withdrew a polythene razor strip from the seam in his leather trousers. The strip was so thin it was almost transparent but in the hands of an expert it could open fatal cuts to the neck or blind its victim. Something about the woman made him ignore her presence to concentrate on Fury, but he’d gone against both instinct and training to do so.
He was bewildered when he felt the plastic garrote bite into his neck and only managed to get the fingers of one hand between the sharp thread and the meat of his throat. Why had he trusted the woman? Meanwhile, Fury approached, lifting and dropping his razor strip, snapping it in the unhealthy air of the room. With each act of violence the vines surrounding them shuddered and contracted as if they too had been struck or seized.
Johnson felt the garrote cutting through the skin of his fingers. With Fury almost in striking distance he made to pull away from Elina and then used her moment of resistance to push her backwards towards the wall. She fell for the move just as Fury had and couldn’t fight the motion. The impact against the wall was strong, knocking the wind from her lungs as if she’d fallen a similar distance. Her grip loosened and Johnson, with his back still to her, used his elbows to hammer into her ribs and abdomen. Elina went down.
A second later he felt the sting of Fury’s razor strip across his bare left shoulder. The attack had missed his face but the cut parted his skin as if it were silk, slicing half an inch deep. As Fury raised the strip for the next cut, Johnson noticed the vines reaching away from the walls towards him. He felt a touch on his back and thought at first it was Elina. Glancing back, he saw a thick finger of creeper trying to gain a purchase on him.
Cupping his right hand under the wound in his shoulder, he sidestepped around the walls, just out of reach of the waving vines and with his eye on Fury. As soon as he had enough blood in his hand he threw it in Fury’s face. Fury blinked and tried to wipe the gore from his eyes.
“You crazy fucker. You trying to give me a disease or something?”
Johnson didn’t answer. Instead he lunged for Fury. The secret of defending against the razor strip was to stay so close the wielder couldn’t whip it at you. Johnson couldn’t reach his gun but he had a small bodkin hidden in the back of the boots he’d slept in. As he clung to his assailant’s midriff, he withdrew the spike and plunged it into the man’s thigh.
Fury screamed and tried to disengage but Johnson held him, withdrawing and stabbing again into the other leg below the knee. Fury was frantic to withdraw now, almost running backwards and carrying Johnson along. Johnson’s next thrust buried the tip of the bodkin deeply beside Fury’s hipbone. The movement of the next step Fury took snapped the needle-like blade off inside the capsule of the joint. Fury screamed again, blood now flowing liberally from his wounds.
Johnson stood back and watched his attacker fall against the wall near Elina. He tried to pull the broken end of the spike from his hip, cursing and moaning each time his hand slipped off the smooth shaft of steel. Johnson didn’t move in to finish it; he could see the way the creepers were detaching from the wall and reaching towards Fury. They snaked under his arms and around his chest before the man could stagger away from them.
Beating and pulling at the tightening tendrils, Fury tried to haul himself from the wall but the vines held him and more were stretching his way. They curled around his knees and ankles, pulsing with vital muscularity. Within seconds they had him pinned against the wall and only his fingers and head could still move. He tried to reach a vine near his shoulder with his teeth and managed to bite through it. A milky green fluid leaked from the torn binding but another two tendrils took its place.
As Johnson watched, he saw the tips of three tiny shoots disappear into each of the puncture wounds he’d made on his attacker’s legs. Fury stiffened, his eyes widening and his whimpers of defeat became screams of protest. He began to beg Johnson to help him, said they’d never set out to hurt him, it had all been a stupid mistake. Serpent shoots coiled around his head. They soon found their way into his cranial openings. Green probes wormed into his ears and up each nostril. A fat green tentacle pushed between Fury’s lips, forced his teeth apart. His screaming and begging ceased, though his body shook against its invaders for a very long time.
Johnson saw that Elina was trying to stand up in an attempt to evade the vines. They were attracted to her but less so because she wasn’t bleeding. Her movements were weak though and he wondered if he had broken some of her ribs.
Johnson thought it would be safe to leave her for a moment. His shoulder wound was bleeding and many tendrils of vine were waving in his direction.
In the bathroom he washed and bandaged the cut on his shoulder before returning to deal with Elina. She was up now, an arm wrapped protectively around her middle. She had the door to the security chamber open and was trying to retrieve a pistol from the safe. The problem was that the safe wouldn’t open until the door into the flat was shut tight. There was so much vine around the frame that the door wouldn’t close.
Eventually, she managed to pull the door closed behind her but it seemed to be at great cost to herself. Johnson could see on the monitor, now half obscured by a thick rope of greenery, that there was blood coming from her mouth. In closing the door she’d severed many major limbs of the vine and inside the security chamber there was a flurry of movement. The chamber seemed to hold a particularly dense collection of vine limbs; possibly where the roots of this particular vine had taken hold. Cut tendrils and healthy ones slapped at her and began to take hold.
She managed to wrench the safe open and pull out her gun and a blade. It was the start of a battle. Even through the solidity of the reinforced door, Johnson could hear the muffled reports of each shot she fired. On the monitor the image turned white each time she pulled the trigger. Human and plant limbs flailed together. In her hand she swung a switchblade in every direction, hacking and stabbing at the vine. When the larger limbs tried to take hold of her she fired into them, splitting them. Fluid began to spatter the camera; he couldn’t tell if it was blood or sap. For every vine she cut or destroyed with a bullet, more seemed to grow from the walls and ceiling, one even unfurled from the safe.
There was no way she was going to make it and no way he was going to open the door to her even though, for some inexplicable reason, Johnson felt he owed it to her.
He sat down in the centre of the room away from the walls, on his couch. No more shots came from the security chamber. From this distance he could only see vague movements on the screen.
“Phone JHD.” He said.
He heard the connection and a ringing tone.
“This is the Justice and Harmony Department of Tier Two. How may we assist you today?”
“Put me through to Beckeridge, please. This is urgent, it’s Officer Johnson.”
It was a long wait. On the tiny screen by the door all movement had ceased.
“What the hell do you want, Johnson? You’ve got some nerve calling me.”
“I need you to pull me out, sir. I’ve got two dead lowlifes in here and the place is crawling with weed.”
“You’re wasting police time. That’s an offence, or had you forgotten already?”
“Sir, I need evac and reassignment immediately. I’ve been identified.”
“What are you talking about Johnson? We fired you months ago.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been off the force for three months. You never made it past day one on the outside. You couldn’t cope with the adjustment from the psych endurance test. Weaver tried to persuade you to come in but she said you got violent, tried to rape her. We canned you right there.”
“But sir, I’ve been working my contacts hard and now they’ve figured it out. These two came here to kill me. They know I’ve been turning Sooth dealers in to you.”
“You didn’t make a single bust, Johnson.” Beckeridge was laughing. “All you did was get high. For all I know you’re high right now, hallucinating this whole thing. You certainly hallucinated your involvement in JHD business.”
The weight of Beckeridge’s words sank onto Johnson’s shoulders like wet concrete. He covered his face with one hand.
“Johnson, you still there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I liked you. You almost made a good drug squad officer but almost isn’t enough. Don’t be calling here
