Michael backed away from the head of the stairs, laying down two spaced rounds of suppressing fire to discourage another fusillade from the pistol.
The juncture of hall and stairwell walls took such a beating from the shotgun that the metal corner beading under the Sheetrock was exposed, snapped, sprung like a clock spring, and shards of it peppered Benny and embedded in his face.
For a moment he thought they were recklessly charging the stairs. Then he heard a door slam, and no more gunfire followed.
He scrambled up, off the stairs, and found the upper hallway deserted.
“Those’re the guns they were trying out in the woods,” Cindi said as she joined him.
Plucking the metal splinters out of his face, Benny said, “Yeah, I figured.”
“You want to back off, come at them someplace later when their guard’s down?”
“No. They have a kid with them. That complicates things, limits their options. Let’s whack them now.”
“Kid? They’ve got a kid?”
“Not a baby. Like twelve, thirteen.”
“Oh. Too old. You can kill him, too,” she said.
Unfortunately, now that the situation had blown up, Benny didn’t expect to be able to take either O’Connor or Maddison alive. This job wouldn’t give him the opportunity for any of the careful carving that he enjoyed and for which he had such a talent.
Three rooms opened off the hall. A door was ajar. Benny kicked it open. A bathroom. Nobody in there.
On the floor of the second room, a body lay in blood.
In that room also stood a humungous model of a castle, about as big as an SUV. Weird. You never knew what strange stuff you’d find in Old Race houses.
So the door Benny had heard slam must have been the last one in the hall.
As Carson hurriedly replenished the expended shells in his shotgun, Michael shoved the dresser in front of the locked door, further bracing it.
When he turned and took the weapon from her, she said, “We can go out the window, onto the porch roof and down.”
“What about Vicky?”
Although it hurt to put the thought in words, Carson said, “She either ran when she saw them or they got her.”
As Carson took Arnie by the hand and led him toward the open window, one of the golems in the hallway threw itself against the door. She heard wood crack, and a hinge or lock plate buckled with a
“Carson!” Michael warned. “It’s not gonna hold ten seconds.”
“Onto the roof,” she told Arnie, pushing him to the window.
She turned as the door took another hit. It shuddered violently, and a hinge tore out of the casing.
No ordinary man could come through a door this easily. This was like a rhino charge.
They raised both shotguns.
The door was solid oak. As the golems broke through, they would use it as a shield. The shotgun slugs would penetrate, but do less damage than an unobstructed shot.
On the third hit, the second hinge tore loose and the lock bolt snapped.
“
Chapter 65
After sitting for a few minutes with the body of the replicant Pastor Laffite, Deucalion walked out of the parsonage kitchen and into the kitchen of Carson O’Connor’s house, where Vicky Chou lay unconscious on the floor, in the reek of chloroform.
A tremendous crash from upstairs indicated worse trouble, and he walked out of the kitchen into the second- floor hall in time to see some guy slam his shoulder into a bedroom door as a woman stood to one side, watching.
He surprised the woman, tore the pistol out of her hand, threw it aside even as he lifted her and pitched her farther than the gun.
As the guy hit the door again and it appeared to break off its last pins, Deucalion grabbed him by the nape of the neck and the seat of the pants. He lifted him, turned him, and slammed him into the wall across the hall from the room that he’d been trying to enter.
The force of impact was so tremendous that the guy’s face broke through the Sheetrock and hammered a wall stud hard enough to crack it. Deucalion kept shoving, and the stud relented, as did the rest of the wall structure, until the killer’s head was in Arnie’s room even as his body remained in the hall.
The woman was crawling toward her gun, so Deucalion left the guy with his neck in the wall as if in the lunette of a guillotine, and went after her.
She picked up the pistol, rolled onto her side, and fired at him. She hit him, but it was only a 9mm slug, and he took it in the breastbone without serious damage.
He kicked the gun out of her hand, probably breaking her wrist, and kicked her in the ribs, and kicked her again, sure that even New Race ribs could be broken.
By then, the guy had pulled his head out of the wall. Deucalion sensed him coming and turned to see an angry gypsum-whitened face, a bloody broken nose, and one eye bristling with wood splinters.
The killer was still game, and fast, but Deucalion didn’t merely sidestep him. In the same way that he had traveled from the parsonage kitchen to the O’Connor kitchen in a single step, he went twenty feet backward, leaving his assailant to stumble forward, grappling only with air.
In retreat, having abandoned her pistol, the woman had scrambled toward the stairs. Deucalion seized her and assisted her by pitching her down the first flight to the landing.
In spite of being the future of the planet and the doom of mere humanity, the New Race superman with the plaster-powdered face and the toothpick holder for a left eye had had enough. He fled the hall for Arnie’s room.
Deucalion went after the guy just in time to see him plunge through a window into the backyard.
Standing in Vicky’s room, listening to the ruckus in the hall, Michael said, “What — are they fighting with each other?”
Carson said, “Somebody’s kicking ass.”
“Vicky?”
They didn’t lower their shotguns, but they moved closer to the barricading dresser, against which the loose door was now merely propped.
When sudden quiet followed the uproar, Carson cocked her head, listened, then said, “What now?”
“Apocalypse,” Deucalion said behind them.
Carson turned with a jump and saw the giant standing beside Arnie. She didn’t think he had come in through the open window.
The boy was shaking as if with palsy. He had covered his face with his hands. Too much noise, too much new and strange.
“It’s all coming apart,” Deucalion said. “That’s why I was brought to this place, at this time. Victor’s empire is blowing up in his face. By morning, nowhere in the city will be safe. I must move Arnie.”
“Move him where?” Carson worried. “He needs quiet, peace. He needs—”
“There’s a monastery in Tibet,” said Deucalion, effortlessly lifting Arnie and holding him in his arms.
“
“The monastery is like a fortress, not unlike his castle, and quiet. I have friends there who’ll know how to calm him.”
Alarmed, Carson said, “
