might pull the trigger by mistake.
After a moment, I let it drop. Only three of our attackers were still alive and above ground. As I watched, Kelis kicked one of them in the knee, snapping the joint with a wet crack I could hear from fifteen feet away. When he was down she reached round and snapped his neck. The other two didn't last much longer, and as suddenly as it had begun, it was all over.
Only then did I notice the uniform our attackers had been wearing, sashes draped round their shoulders in the old revolutionary Tricoleur. Old tribalism revived, I thought. And old instincts coming back, even in the most civilised of us. The cold ability to kill or be killed.
I thought I might be sick but in the end I wasn't. Because they hadn't even spoken to us before they'd opened fire and I wasn't in any way sorry they were gone.
'Hey, you OK?' Kelis asked, crouching down beside me and staring at me in unexpected concern, as if her own body wasn't leaking blood onto the cobbled pavement.
'I'm fine,' I said. 'Bullet grazed me, that's all. But let me take a look at that.'
She frowned for a moment, whether unsure if I really was all right or just not keen to let me treat her, I couldn't tell. But then, the heat of battle wearing off, her pain must have begun to register and she slid down the wall beside me and nodded.
The wound wasn't as bad as I'd thought, though she hissed in pain as I probed it with my fingers. 'I think one rib's cracked,' I told her, 'but the bullet's gone clean through and it hasn't nicked any major vessels.'
She looked down for a moment longer, as if mesmerised by the sight of my white fingers moving along her brown skin. I realised that I was closer to her than I'd ever been, and for the first time really registered her as another person, with thoughts and feelings inside her head which I couldn't know.
Then she swatted my hand away impatiently and nodded over to the other side of the street. 'Go see to Michaels. He took one in the leg and he doesn't look so good. I can bandage this up myself.'
It took me half an hour to patch us all together. Michaels needed something more major than the field surgery I could offer him, but he was safer with us than alone so I improvised a splint for his leg and shot him so full of opiates that he wouldn't care if it dropped off on the journey. For a moment, just a moment, I felt a fierce desire to turn the needle round and plunge it into my own arm, feed the hunger which would never quite die. I didn't though. Not this time.
The constant, never-ending war of the addict. Not this time. Not the next. The one after that? Yeah, that one you're never quite sure about.
I realised that one of our attackers was still alive. She was groaning quietly, body slumped half in, half out of the sewer. She looked to be middle aged and bald from some skin condition which left her looking like a medieval leper. The woman had taken a bullet to the gut but I probably could have saved her. Curtis spared me the effort though, not even wasting a bullet on her, just smashing the butt of his rifle hard against her head, driving it down into the pavement until the skull shattered.
'Stupid fuckers,' he said. 'Try to get us every fucking time. Never fucking learn.'
We walked off east, one man light and even more cautious. But I guess news of the fight travelled because no one else challenged us and the pressure of unseen eyes against my back eased.
The streets soon broadened again, into the grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Paris. I started to recognise the buildings we were passing from a romantic holiday he had taken me on. Palais de l'Elysee. La Madeleine. Our route led straight through La Place de la Concorde and I wondered again just where we were going. Who we were looking for.
No one had taken the gun from me after the fight, and it hung limp and useless from my hand as we walked. I guessed it was a sign of trust, but I didn't feel particularly flattered.
Kelis saw me looking down at it and gently pried it from my fingers. 'Might want to reload that,' she said, doing it for me. When she handed it back I tried to hold it in a firmer grip but it still felt alien in my hand.
He'd taught me to shoot, back when we first met, said it was something everyone should know how to do – almost as if he'd seen all this coming. But I'd never learned to love guns the way he did. I didn't like the potential for death I could always feel curled up in their barrels.
When we stopped at the huge glass pyramid, I thought for an insane moment that we'd come sightseeing, that this was what it had all been about. But the tense set of Kelis' shoulders and the sudden tight wariness around Soren's eyes, told me different. This, for whatever reason, was our target.
'So we're what?' I said to Kelis. 'Stealing artwork? Desperate to get our hands on the Mona Lisa? Unable to go another minute without looking at the Venus de Milo?'
She flicked a quick, hard smile at me. 'Long gone. We're here for something much more valuable.'
'Is it going to require the use of my gun?'
'That's not the plan, but…' Kelis shrugged.
Right, because when did anything ever go according to plan? My hand tightened on the trigger, so hard that I almost let loose a volley when the lone figure emerged from the glass pyramid. But he was unarmed. Hands held high.
Curtis wasn't taking any chances. He waited until the figure walked right up to him and then grabbed him round the neck, pulling him into the shelter of an old magazine stand.
The man didn't resist when Curtis frisked him, and he proved not to be armed. He was thin-faced, deep smile lines etched at the sides of a wide mouth, hair so brown it was almost black. When Curtis finally released him, the smile lines deepened as he grinned at us, as if he wasn't staring down the barrels of enough heavy ordinance to take on a small army.
'My name is Jules,' the man said, his French accent only faint. 'Welcome to Paris.'
'Yeah, it's been real welcoming so far,' Curtis said. 'I'll be giving it a five star write-up in my travel guide.'
The man frowned. 'Ah. I think perhaps you have met with the Revolutionary Guard. They see it as their duty to protect this great city against incursions from elsewhere.'
'No kidding,' Kelis said. 'And what about you? You planning to live up to the Parisian reputation for warm hospitality?'
He turned to face her, hands lifted in a conciliatory gesture. 'We are always keen to welcome newcomers.' And then, for just a moment, the smile slipped from his face. 'We also have twice as many armed men as your numbers, and not all of them are inside the pyramid. But this does not matter, I think, because you are not here to make war.'
Curtis' mouth pulled into a thin line. 'No. That's not what we're here for at all.'
It surprised me how readily Curtis allowed his men to surrender their weapons, leaving half his force behind to guard them while the disarmed contingent – myself included – was led into the pyramid by Jules.
Kelis hadn't been kidding. Everything of value was long gone, horded by some unknown collector for some unknown purpose. The bare walls of the gallery looked like an accusation, or a metaphor. The stripping away from this new life of everything that wasn't purely functional.
Still, there was no denying it made a great base. There were fifty-six of them here, camped out in the shell of the museum, sitting on a stockpile of weapons and ammo they'd scavenged from who knew where. They weren't soldiers – there were families, children as young as two and a silver-haired old woman well past eighty – but they knew how to fight. Or they'd learnt, in those last five brutal years.
They had food too, fresh food. After we'd toured the empty, dismal galleries of the museum and seen the homes they'd carved out for themselves in the shell, they took us to their farm. I smiled when I saw it. The Twilleries, the formal gardens long dug up, rows of lettuce, beets, potatoes, planted in place of the roses and neatly mowed lawns.
'How can you defend all this?' Kelis asked.
Jules shrugged. 'We have guards.'
But she shook her head. 'Not enough. Not for this.'
He looked at her narrowly, assessing. Then he nodded. 'No, not for this. But without us it would not grow so well, nor the hydroponics underground. We have scientists among our number, agronomists, and biochemists. We make medicines too. They, the Revolutionary Guard, and others like them, let us make the things they need. They take what we give and we make sure that the price for taking it all would be too high.'
Curtis looked impressed. Or maybe he was just pissed off – he had the kind of face which made it hard to tell.
