Ryan grunted and fell backward. He lay gasping on the floor, eyes half-closed. Bill found that he had the walking stick in his own hand. He dropped it beside Ryan, then knelt and took Ryan’s pulse. Ryan was stunned, unconscious, but his pulse was strong. Bill knew, somehow, that Ryan would survive intact.
Bill squeezed Ryan’s hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ryan. I didn’t know what else to do. I can’t kill you. Best of luck, guv…”
He stood, pistol in hand, and started for the door, walking mechanically, feeling all lumbering and heavy like a Big Daddy. He stuck the pistol in his pocket and found his way out past the double line of dead men on stakes, out past the swiveling camera.
He stepped into the hallway, trying not to look like he was in a hurry. He and Elaine and Sophie would have to take a circuitous route. It was a long trek yet to get where they were going. He didn’t have much time. Karlosky would find Ryan, and there would be an alert… security bots, Ryan’s thugs…
He had to hurry or lose everything. They were waiting for him in the cemetery, a separate little park off Arcadia…
Burials at sea were cheap. But some preferred Rapture’s charming little cemetery.
Bill had liked visiting the place, and it was usually deserted, so he’d arranged to meet Elaine and Sophie here. Old-fashioned, rustic in style, the cemetery near Arcadia reminded him of the churchyard where his grandfather was buried.
But when he stepped through the archway, he found it had lost its charm.
Five paces away, a naked man, painted blue, was hunched threateningly over Elaine and Sophie, who were cowered in front of a tombstone. The man was a Saturnine, one of the “pagan” cults who’d sprung up in the vacuum of religion in Rapture, sneaking about starkers to paint their cryptic graffiti, getting high on ADAM and coloring themselves blue. “Harness the flame, harness the mist!” the man chanted in a grating voice. The blue- painted savage gripped a large kitchen knife in his right hand. Its blade was brown with dried blood.
The man’s bare foot was pressing Elaine’s purse to the ground, as if crushing a small animal.
“I will give you to the flame,” the Saturnine muttered. “I offer you to the mist!”
The Saturnine raised his knife high, to slash down at Elaine—
“Here’s some flame, you bastard; harness this!” Bill shouted, to make him turn his way.
The Saturnine whirled to confront Bill, his face a caricature of ADAM-warped savagery, teeth bared, red foam coming from his nostrils. He threw the knife as Bill dodged to the left—the knife slashed at his right shoulder, just a razor-thin cut, and Bill shot the pagan point-blank in the chest.
The Saturnine swayed, went to his knees, and flopped facedown.
Sophie was sobbing, her hands covering her eyes. Elaine jerked her purse from under the dead man’s foot, pulled out the pistol, slung the purse over her shoulder, and, with a look of steely determination in her eyes that Bill admired, pulled Sophie to her feet. “Come on, baby,” Elaine told her. “We’re getting the hell out of this place.”
“I’m scared, Mama,” Sophie said.
“I know the feeling, love,” Bill said, giving the child a quick hug. “But you’ll like the surface world. Don’t believe what you’ve heard about it. Come on!”
They were surprisingly close. Bill, Elaine, and Sophie were hurrying up to the open bathysphere that would take them up the shaft of the lighthouse, to where Wallace should be waiting.
A rogue splicer slid down the cable, jumping off the bathysphere’s top and tumbling through the air like an acrobat. He landed on his feet in front of Bill. The splicer wore a small harlequin-style New Year’s Eve mask, splashed with the blood of the body he’d taken it from; he had long, dirty brown hair, a streaked red-brown beard, and glittering blue eyes. His yellow teeth were bared in a rictuslike grin. “Hee, that’s me, and ooh, that’s you!” he cackled. Leaping from right to left, back again, blur-fast, an elusive target. “Look at the little girly-girl! I can sell her to Ryan or keep her for play and maybe a quick bite!” He had a razor-sharp curved fish-gutting blade in each hand…
Sophie whimpered in fear and ducked behind her mother—Elaine and Bill fired their pistols at the splicer almost simultaneously… and they both missed. He’d leapt in the air, flipping over them and coming down behind: SportBoost, and lots of it.
The rogue splicer was spinning to slash at them—but Bill was turning at the same time, firing. The bullet cracked into one of the curved blades, knocking it away. The splicer slashed out with the other blade, which cut the air an inch from Sophie’s nose.
Enraged, Bill forgot his gun and rushed at the splicer, shouting, “Bastard!” He just managed to duck under the swishing blade, to tackle the splicer around the middle, knocking him onto his back. It was like tackling a live wire—there was not a gram of fat on the splicer; he was all muscle and bone and tension—and Bill felt himself overbalanced and quickly flung off.
The splicer leapt up, stood grinning down at Bill—throwing the hooked blade before Bill could fire his pistol. Bill twisted aside, felt the curved knife shear a piece of skin from his ribs—and then there were three quick gunshots, each one making the splicer take a jerking step back. The third one went through the splicer’s right eye, and the splicer went limp, falling on his back, feet twitching.
Bill turned, panting, to see his wife with the gun in her hand, a wild look in her eyes. Sophie was clinging to her mother’s leg, face buried in her hip.
“You’re a bloody fine shot, love,” he told Elaine, “and thank God for that.”
“I had a good teacher,” she said numbly, staring at the splicer’s body.
“Come on—into the lift…” Elaine nodded and took Sophie into the bathysphere. Bill climbed in after them, found the release hidden under the control panel, and activated it.
They took the bathyspheric lift up the shaft, out of the undersea—the three of them riding up into the lighthouse. Bill had cut power on the security bots and turrets guarding the way out through the lighthouse this morning, but he was afraid they’d be back on, somehow, to greet his family with a spray of bullets as soon as they stepped out of the bathysphere.
But only quiet greeted them, at first, when they stepped out. And the echo of their footsteps in the dome…
Sophie looked around in awe, stunned by the naked daylight coming through the entrance to the lighthouse, the unfamiliar sound of breakers outside—then, eyes wide in fear, she stared up at the enormous electroplated bust of Andrew Ryan, glaring back down at them. Ryan seemed to be holding up a banner, yellow lettering on a red field, reading:
“It’s Mr. Ryan!” Sophie gulped, stepping back. “He’s watching us!”
“It’s just a statue,” Elaine said.
“Oh, but she’s right,” said Head Constable Cavendish, coming around from the other side of the bathysphere. Bill spun, raising his gun, but then he saw that Karlosky was there too, and Redgrave; they all had tommy guns at the ready in their hands. Redgrave was pushing a despondent Roland Wallace, who had his hands bound behind him. If Bill fired, the constables would return fire, and Elaine would likely be hit. And Sophie. He couldn’t get them all.
Bill lowered his pistol—and then let it slip from limp fingers to the floor.
“Drop it, lady,” said Cavendish, pointing the tommy gun at her.
With a sob, she dropped her gun, and clutched Sophie to her. “Oh God, Bill, we were so close…”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, love. I should have found a better way…”
Karlosky looked grim; Cavendish was grinning wolfishly—but Redgrave looked stricken, uncertain. Deeply sad.
