“Why can I still hear them?” Perry mumbled, his voice bordering on suffused hysteria. “I got them all… why can I still hear them, goddamn it! ”
He lifted the scissors, taking a moment to stare at the jittering, wriggling hatchling impaled on the bloody blades. He flicked his wrist, flinging the hatchling across the room. It fell on the floor, broken, twitching, staining the carpet with purple goo.
Perry looked up and growled a primitive challenge, but the rest of the hatchlings stayed away. He moved to the door, stepping over Fatty Patty’s body. He noticed that her lower legs and hands were gone, gnawed to bloody stumps. The hatchlings popped up and down in a sickening dance, chirping, clicking, filling his head with disjointed threats.
You’re going to pay
You bastard.
You’ll get yours.
And very soon.
Perry ignored them and hopped to the entryway. He juggled his armload of goodies as he unlocked the three locks, then opened the door. He smashed his last bottle on the door frame. Rum soaked the carpet.
You’re a bad man.
We’ll be coming for you, we’re going to get you.
He looked back at the hatchlings, who stared at him with utter spite, black eyes gleaming with absolute hatred.
Perry said nothing, his mind incapable of articulating words. A thin string of drool hung from his lip, swinging in time with his uncoordinated movements. He dropped the Chicken Scissors to the floor.
In his arms he held two more things. One of the things was the lighter. He flicked his Bic.
Perry Dawsey stared at the room with eyes much older than his twenty-six years. He bent and touched the flame to the rum-soaked floor.
Flames shot up instantly, a warm blue at first, but quickly turning yellowish-orange as the carpet caught fire. He dropped the lighter. Now he held only one thing. The flames grew, crawling up the door frame, reaching for the ceiling.
Perry looked back at the hatchlings one last time. They ran around the apartment like some satanic version of the Keystone Kops, bouncing off walls, furniture and one another in a blind terror-the fire quickly spread back from the door frame into the apartment proper, and there was no place for them to avoid the flames.
“Yes you gonna burn, ” Perry said quietly.
He turned to leave, but the map caught his eye. Fire tickled the paper’s bottom corner.
Perry reached out and tore the map from the door. He left the apartment, went to his right and started hopping as the flames spread out into the hallway behind him.
83.
Dew came up the stairs just as the flames lashed out into the hallway, five feet high and growing fast. The place was going up like a dry Christmas tree. He stopped, looking for a target. On the other side of the hungry flames, he saw a huge naked man clutching something in each hand.
Through the distorted, waving heat haze, Dew saw that the man stood on one leg. The other hung limply, the foot a few inches off the floor. The man turned and hopped away, his bulk already obscured by the raging flames.
Dew started firing, emptying the seven-round magazine in less than three seconds. The lethal. 45-caliber bullets disappeared into the fire-Dew didn’t know if he’d hit Dawsey or not.
And there was only one way to find out.
He popped a fresh mag into the Colt. 45, hesitated for only a moment, then sprinted toward the raging fire.
84.
With a coordination born from complete lack of regard for safety, Perry leaped to the next landing, clearing six steps in one hop. When he landed, blood splattered from his crotch. Momentum slammed him into the wall, but he didn’t fall; instead he turned and cleared the next six steps with one powerful thrust. When he hit the second-floor landing, the towel fell off his arm, leaving him completely naked save for his socks.
Anyone watching would have thought it was impossible, that he was sure to break his neck. But he kept hopping, not knowing that Dew Phillips was only a few steps behind.
The outside door burst open, swinging wildly on its hinges, slamming so hard the handle gouged a chunk from the brick wall. Perry, wide-eyed and screaming, hopped out into the snow, the cold hitting his naked body like the fist of Old Man Winter.
He hopped fast, remembering somewhere, somehow, that he was supposed to get a car, go to Wahjamega and finish this crazy odyssey. He also wanted to get to a hospital, because some stupid motherfucker had just shot him in the left shoulder. That had almost knocked him over, but he’d been hit harder many times.
Oh, but he needed a hospital for a few other things, too, eh, Daddy-O? A hospital to stitch up an arm that gushed bright, steaming blood onto the road’s packed snow, a hospital to piece together whatever was sliced in his calf so he could walk with two legs again, a hospital to treat the huge burn blisters on his back and head and ass, a hospital to pull that bullet out of the back of his left shoulder, a hospital to suck the rotting black goo out of his shoulder and ass.
And, above all, a hospital to sew his dick back on.
85.
The front door to Building G hadn’t quite closed when Dew Phillips smashed it open again. He raced out onto the snowy pavement, trailing smoke and flames behind him. He rolled once, twice, a third time, then stood, the flames defeated, his jacket a smoldering ruin of acrid polyester.
He was in that place again, that murderous place, the spot in his mind where he sent his feelings and emotions and morals when there was killing to be done. He wasn’t Dew Phillips anymore; he was Top, the death machine that had taken more lives than he could count.
Dew dropped into a shooter’s crouch and brought up the. 45 with the stone-still grip of a brain surgeon. He saw everything: the snow-covered dead branches of the winter trees, each iced needle on the frosted pines and shrubs, every car, every hubcap, every license plate, every slushy footprint. Police dotted the lot like dark blue alligators sunning on a riverbank. A trio of gray vans raced in: one from his right, one from his left and one on the far side of the hopping, blood-streaming freak.
Dawsey hopped across the parking lot, a sprint for freedom when there was no place to run. He seemed to notice the police cars, and he slowed. Dawsey stopped, then turned. With the desperate optimism of a madman, he hopped toward Dew.
Dew sighted in on a face contorted with fury, pain, confusion and hate. The massive man raged forward,
