Dragon Tears

Armageddon. His awesome power. His relentless-ness. His hard, gleeful, merciless brutality.

Greasy nausea slithered in her guts, and she was afraid she might throw up.

Beside her, the softest hiss of apprehension escaped Harry, and Connie opened her eyes. She was determined to meet her death face to face with all the resistance she could muster, useless as resistance might be.

On the floor of the warehouse below, the golem-vagrant reached the foot of the same set of stairs up which she and Harry had climbed to the loft. He hesitated there, as if considering whether to turn and walk away, search elsewhere.

Connie dared to hope that their continued silence, in spite of every provocation to cry out, had encouraged Ticktock to believe that they could not possibly be hiding anywhere in the rave.

Then he spoke in that rough demonic voice. “Fee, fie, fo, fum,” he said, starting up the stairs, “I smell the blood of hero cops.”

His laugh was as cold and inhuman as any sound that might issue from a crocodile — yet contained an eerily recognizable quality of childlike delight.

Arrested development.

A psychotic child.

She remembered Harry telling her that the burning vagrant, in the process of destroying the condominium, had said, You people are so much fun to play with. This was his private game, played by his rules, or without rules at all if he wished, and she and Harry were nothing but his toys. She had been foolish to hope that he would keep his promise.

The crash of each of his heavy footsteps reverberated across the wood treads and up through the entire structure. The floor of the loft shook from his ascent. He was climbing fast: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

Harry grabbed her by the arm. “Quick, the other stairs!”

They turned away from the railing and toward the opposite end of the loft from where the golem was ascending.

At the head of the second set of stairs stood a second golem identical to the first. Huge. Mane of tangled hair. Wild beard. Raincoat like a black cape. He was grinning broadly. Blue flames flickering brightly in deep sockets.

Now they knew one more thing about the extent of Ticktock’s power. He could create and control at least two artificial bodies at the same time.

The first golem reached the top of the stairs to their right. He started toward them, ruthlessly kicking a path through the tangled lovers on the floor.

To their left, the second golem approached with no greater respect for the Paused people in his way When the world started up again, cries of injury and outrage would arise from end to end of the wide loft.

Still gripping Connie’s arm, pulling her back against the railing, Harry whispered, “Jump!”

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the thud of the twin golems’ footsteps shook the loft, and BOOM- BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the pounding of her heart shook Connie, and the two sounds became indistinguishable from one another.

Following Harry’s example, she put her hands behind her on the railing, pushed up to sit on the handrail.

The golems kicked more viciously at the human obstacles between them and their prey, closing in faster from both sides.

She lifted her legs and swung around to face the warehouse. At least a twenty-foot drop to the floor. Far enough to break a leg, crack open her skull? Probably.

Each of the golems was less than twenty feet away, coming toward her with all the irresistible force of freight trains, gas-flame eyes burning as hot as any fires in Hell, reaching for her with massive hands.

Harry jumped.

With a cry of resignation, Connie pushed with her feet against the balusters and her hands against the handrail, launching herself into the void—

— and fell only six or seven feet before coasting to a full stop in midair, beside Harry. She was facing straight down, legs and arms spread in an unconscious imitation of the classic skydiving position, and below her were the frozen dancers, all of them as oblivious of her as they were of everything else beyond the instant when they had been spellbound.

The deepening chill in her bones and the rapid depletion of her energy as they fled through Laguna Beach had indicated that she was not making her way through the Paused world as easily as it seemed, certainly not as easily as she moved through the normal world. The fact that they did not create their own wind when they ran, which Harry also noticed, seemed to support the idea that resistance to their motion was present even if they were not conscious of it, and now the arrested fall proved it. As long as they exerted themselves, they could keep moving, but they could not rely on momentum or even the pull of gravity to carry them far when exertion ceased.

Looking over her shoulder, Connie saw that she had managed to launch herself outward only five feet from the loft railing, though she had shoved away from it with all her might. However, combined with a five- or six-foot vertical drop, she had gone far enough to be beyond the reach of the golems.

They stood at the loft railing, leaning out, reaching down, grasping for her but coming up only with handsful of empty air.

Harry shouted at her: “You can move if you try!”

She saw that he was using his arms and legs somewhat in the manner of a swimmer doing a breaststroke, angled toward the floor, pulling himself downward by agonizing inches, as if the air wasn’t air at all but some curious form of extremely dense water.

She quickly realized she was unfortunately not weightless like an astronaut in orbit aboard the space shuttle, and enjoyed none of the motive advantages of a gravity-free environment. A brief experiment proved she couldn’t propel herself with an astronaut’s ease or change direction on a whim.

When she imitated Harry, however, Connie found that she could pull herself down through the gluey air if she was methodical and determined. For a moment it seemed even better than skydiving because the period of the dive when you had the illusion of flying like a bird was at comparatively high altitudes; and with features on the ground rapidly enlarging, the illusion was never fully convincing. Here, on the other hand, she was right over the heads of other people and airborne within a building, which even under the circumstances gave her an exhilarating sense of power and buoyancy, rather like one of those blissful dreams of flying that too seldom informed her sleep.

Connie actually might have enjoyed the bizarre experience if Ticktock had not been present in the form of the two golems and if she had not been fleeing for her life. She heard the BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of their heavy hurried footsteps on the wooden loft, and when she looked back over her shoulder and up, she saw they were headed for opposite sets of stairs.

She was still ten or eleven feet from the warehouse floor and “swimming” downward at an infuriatingly slow speed, inch by grinding inch through the colorful fixed beams of the spotlights and party lasers. Gasping for breath from the exertion. Getting rapidly colder now, colder.

If there had been something solid for her to push against, such as a nearby wall or roof-supporting column, she’d have been able to achieve greater propulsion. But there was nothing besides the air itself off which to launch — almost like trying to lift herself entirely by her own bootstraps.

To her left, Harry was about a foot ahead of her but making no better time than she was. He was farther along only because he had started sooner.

Kick. Pull the arms. Struggle.

Her sense of freedom and buoyancy swiftly gave way to a feeling of being trapped.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the footfalls of their pursuers echoed flatly through the huge chamber.

She was perhaps nine feet off the floor, moving toward a clear space among the dancers. Kick. Pull. Kick and pull. Keep moving, moving. So cold.

She glanced over her shoulder again, even though she was afraid that the act of doing so would slow her