Thwap
Thwap
For Rick. For Malice and the others. For Bella, you shit.
Yes.
For Jasmine.
I took him apart, little by little, and no brain-surgeon was ever as precise as me in that glorious flurry of aggre Snuk
My fists stopped moving.
Cy smiled through teeth smeared with bloody spittle, gripping my hands in mid-swing as if he'd caught a pair of tennis balls, then sat up in a single continuous movement and nutted me on the bridge of my nose. Something snapped.
Fact: It's possible to kill people like this too.
I went over backwards. A fist in my eye helped me down. Warmth spattered off my lips and chin.
And I lay there panting as he dragged himself out from beneath me, and stood with no obvious aches or pains, spitting the blood away and clearing each nostril with a viscous rasp of snot and gore. He rolled his head as if he'd fallen asleep in the wrong position; jumped up and down in his spot once or twice, then gave me a great, bright smile.
'Let's go.' He said.
Fuck.
It took a long time to pick myself up. Every inch a mountain. Every movement a defeated consolation.
I couldn't win. This… this thing wasn't even human any more. With his veins clogged-up with freaky narcotic shite, nothing would work. Clever fighting. Precision and stealth. Fuck it. Fuck it all.
I've seen guys on PCP. I've seen guys go psycho on Yaba crazy medicine. Twenty bullets, major organs shredded. Doesn't matter. Takes the body longer to realise it's dead than it takes to kill whoever's killing you.
Cy was worse.
Cy soaked it up then smiled sweetly. He didn't rush. Didn't race to squish me before the wounds caught up on him. He just…
Enjoyed it.
So what happened was, my brain went away.
The conditioning shivered somewhere deep, unflexed like a great squid-thing, untangling from the murk. I'd held it down too long. Let it grow in the dark.
It took a hold of me and blurred-away all those insignificances, all those useless extremities of thought and intelligence. Sharpened me as it blunted me down.
The trainers at the SIS would have been proud.
Good little soldier. Good little killer. Good little machine.
The wolf came out from its shadows, and its eyes glowed in the gloom, and I stopped thinking. Let the instincts take over.
Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
Sir, no sir, etc etc.
And this time when he rushed me I was already hitting him, and when he scooped at the air to knock me back I was ducking into his belly with a knee, and when he snarled and spun and kicked-out I let him, and enjoyed the pain in my hips because it meant I was close, and hungry, and I lamped him so hard in the ear that the skin on my fist popped.
Chased him down to the ground.
Snapped his shin with my boot.
Took out his eye with a finger.
Caught a hold of his jaw as it flapped open and yanked down so hard something shattered and tore.
Grabbed a handful of his neck and balled my fist 'til the skin broke and the cords underneath moved in my hand.
Punches raining on my face.
Like I care.
And I locked my fingers round his throat, bloody and slick and crackling down deep, and squeezed.
His eye bulged and bled. He gurgled.
And then the gun was in my face.
The wolf loped away.
Cy's lips twitched into something like a smile.
I sighed. 'You said no guns. Not for me.'
'N't…nk… n't less… yuh… made me…'
His finger tightened on the trigger.
And from the corner of my eye a black hand reached out from nowhere, gripped the tall cock-like handle poking from Cy's head, and pulled.
It made a noise something like a champagne cork.
He rustled as he died, and a soupy sort of stuff oozed out of his skull, and Nate – shivering on the floor with the knife in his hand, foot still pulsing blood – grinned his pearly grin and said:
''nother… 'nother one you owe me.'
It was strange.
To have come this far for a maybe…
To have fought and killed and cut my way across… shit, across half the fucking world, on the strength of a feeble radio transmission and the half-a-chance idea of someone who should be dead not being dead.
To have shut myself off, to have sliced across any prat who stood in my way, because:
If John-Paul can do it, maybe Jasmine can too…
I'd come a long way. Following the voice in my head every step. Listening to its orders. It told me not to give up, and I didn't. It told me to know everything, and I had. It told me to cover the angles, and I covered them. Though it left me bloody and broken and knackered, I fucking did as I was told.
Right?
My head hurt, and the world spun around me. I giggled.
The voice, the voice. That was it. At the end, when the time came to find some things out, to finish it, the voice told me not to get distracted, to do the job, to stay focused. It told me:
Not your problem.
I wondered if I'd done the right thing, taking the syringe from Nate's bag. It made the world… different.
I giggled again.
I stood outside a room on the fifth sub-level of the South Bass Island UN Bunker complex, and shivered, trying to concentrate. Things were happening, somewhere. People running, voices raised, footsteps clattering and guns being armed. Right now, nobody was paying me much attention, which made a refreshing change. Earlier-on, as I staggered out of the detention room with my eyes watering and my head spinning, a couple of guards had got lucky and noticed the red patches soaking through my stolen robes. I'd lifted them from the Clergy aide on the floor, whose blood was currently filling my veins. It had seemed elegant, somehow. Like… regardless of whether the damp patches came from him or me, it was all the same thing.
Haha.
Should that be funny?
(The two guards who'd spotted the blood hadn't thought so. I tried to explain it as patiently as I could – not even slurring much – but they kept on telling me I was stoned, and asking me who the fuck I was, and poking me with their fingers. It got boring quickly. I like to think I left them alive – just – though to be honest I can't say I was subtle about it.)
The point was, I was free to roam. And right now I stood outside a door, on the deepest level of the complex, and stared in confusion at the sign.
COMMS
This was where it came from. The transmission. The word PANDORA. The voice. This is where she sent it. I could almost taste it. Could almost reach out and pluck her from the air, and remind myself of all the guilty
