But again, the old reflexes saved me.
As the elf barreled into me, I bent my knees and sidestepped slightly, reaching up and grabbing his arm as he tried to get an arm-bar on my throat. One good twist of my body and his momentum sent him up and over my shoulder.
Wish I could have seen his face when he got his first look at the ghoul he was sailing right into.
Both of them went down, tumbling on the stairs in a ball of legs and teeth.
I didn't hang around to see which one was going to win the wrestling match, though I think the elf probably had the most motivation. It was highly unlikely he was going to try to eat the ghoul if he won, which was not at all true of the ghoul if it won instead.
Unfortunately, I am not a twenty-something anymore and the kid's weight put me off-center enough that I went down on one knee.
Hard.
The only good thing about pain is that the worse it is, the faster the body's endorphins kick in. At least long enough for me to fumble an autoinjector out of my pocket and jab it into the fleshy part of my leg.
The pain went from flashy sparkles of color in my vision to mere agony in seconds.
I'd only bought myself maybe ten minutes, though, before that knee was going to swell and lock up on me.
At the top of the first flight, the extra twenty kilos of kid strapped to my chest combined with fifty years of muscle atrophy to make my tired old heart hammer in my chest. The painkillers probably helped with that.
I never wanted to be a courier. I wanted to be a fighter. I had the knack and I trained, when I was young, in the martial arts. When the Awakening happened, I was one of the first kids in my school tested for magic. I spent my college money learning the adept magic.
But I fell in with the wrong bunch, signed the wrong contract, and by the time I got myself out of that, my head was full of silicon.
There wasn't much left of my magic.
I was on the third floor, I was sweating like a pig, and the damned kid was beating my poor knees to pulp.
Donna loved this kid. No way she could be a child of mine. A child of mine would have drowned this spawn the first chance she'd got.
Weak or not, I needed the old spells.
Never learned to do the spells without moving my lips, muttering the guiding instructions my old teacher gave me. Then again, I never had that much need for them, so I never really learned to do it the right way. Kept telling myself I would do the work, practice, and get better. I still do. Hope springs eternal.
I felt new strength running into my legs, into my chest. My heart rate slowed a bit but I was still puffing like a bellows as I made my way up the last four flights and onto the roof.
The way to make an op work is to have a plan. That plan should include a backup plan, in case things go to hell.
If there was any justice, there would appear to be three air conditioning units on the roof. The building plans would only show two but if my people had done their jobs, there would be three. I wanted the one closest to the alley.
I also wanted my heart to either to stop hammering so hard or to just give up, have the heart attack, and let me die. The spells had helped some. I had made it to the roof, even if I felt death breathing on the back of my neck.
Did I mention that the kid was howling at the top of his lungs the whole time?
Cargo pants are a good thing. I had scooped up the gag the elves had used as I scooted out of that apartment and had stuffed it into a pocket. Before I broke the handle off the roof door, I slapped the gag over the kid's mouth.
Good gear is worth every dime. I still have that gag, by the way.
That's the second error I made in my plan. Maybe I was still caught up in that John Wayne thing, but gag, hobbles, binders: those should have been in my kit. I'd been lucky that the elves were more experienced with kids than I was.
When I eased the door open, the roof was empty. One big flat expanse, covered with crushed limestone over a tar base.
And three AC units.
The only thing better than good gear is good contacts.
The kid was still drumming his heels on my poor knees and I knew that, if I lived through this, I'd be limping for weeks, as much from the kid as that jammed knee I took on the stairs. I just needed to limp another ten meters.
This last box looked just like an AC unit, felt like one. In the old days, we'd used these boxes to hide all sorts of stuff. Good place to stash extra gear, cache extra ammo, or hide stuff you'd stolen while you beat feet for freedom. No one looked twice at an AC box.
The kid kept bracing his feet against the edge of the unit and pushing off, which pissed me off until I turned around and backed into the unit, feeling around under the edge for the release.
I found the button and pushed it. As I stepped forward, to get out of the way, the kid threw himself to one side so hard I almost fell on my face.
Believe it or not, I actually panicked for a moment, afraid I was going to fall on the kid and hurt him.
Fortunately, I caught myself, though I twisted my ankle, and my foot folded underneath. I hopped a couple of times to catch my balance again, without putting any pressure on my foot, but it felt like I'd broken every bone in my foot and torn every tendon in my leg.
I hate getting old.
Behind me, the rustle of heavy fabric and a rush of air told me the balloon was inflating. Turning, I watched it pop free and rise above it, a dozen cables holding it to the box.
They make pretty fine plastics for all purposes these days, but cloth doesn't reflect radar and, filled with helium rather than hot air, it wouldn't show a heat signature either.
The kid jerked again and I caught myself on the already-damaged ankle.
'Goddamnit, kid,' I growled, my eyes tearing up from the pain. 'You act like you never want to see your mother again.'
He stopped struggling, just like that.
Who'da thought it'd be that easy? Kids.
Once all the lines were clear and the balloon loomed over the box, I stepped over the edge and settled down inside it. What with the helium tanks, there wasn't much room for me and the kid. The frost on the tanks warned me not to touch them. Fire-burn, freezer-burn: burn is burn and it hurts. Avoid hurt.
In the middle of the floor of the box was a handle. One twist and the box came free of the roof and off we went, rising silently into the air.
I almost dared to breathe.
Until I heard the helicopters.
Maybe they were friendly, maybe not. Probably not.
Riding a balloon is deathly quiet. Since you move with the wind, there is no sound from that. You are far enough up that you don't hear much of anything from the ground.
I sat up enough to peer over the edge of the box and saw the lights of the city creeping by below us. All I could hope for was that without radar or IR to find us, the helicopters would fly right by.
Still, I reached over and eased open the valve on the nearest cannister. Helium hissed and I could feel the minutest rise of the balloon. The choppers will be low, looking for us, so the higher we went, the less likely they would find us.
Not to mention that having a helicopter blade slash the gasbag would change the ending of the story.
I settled back for the ride. I felt the kid shiver against my chest, and I looked down to see he had wrapped his arms around himself.
The bottom-most pocket on my right leg contained my first aid kit. Kind of silly to carry it, since most times you either got away clean or were leaving body parts behind, but I had a mylar survival blanket in the kit.
