"Naskeag Falls Department of Roads and Bridges," the sign on the dump gate said, "Your tax dollars at work."
The man following her ignored the truck, and the slush seemed to ignore him. Hairs prickled along the back of Maureen's neck. Without speeding up or even looking at her, he'd halved the distance between them. The paranoia kicked in, elbowing her anger aside and substituting cold calculation. She needed some defenses.
"Enough of this crap," she muttered, or maybe it was her voices. The next alley offered places where a small woman could hide, places where muscles wouldn't help him. If he came in after her, he was history. She thumped the pocket of her wet ski jacket and felt the reassuring weight of metal.
She ducked around the corner. Dumpsters lurked in the shadows, two of them, jammed right up against brick walls and close enough together to just leave space for a single person between. She ducked into the bunker they formed and waited, remembering her lessons.
Smith and Wesson Chief's Special, she heard the instructor lecture, thirty-eight caliber. Five shots, short barrel, not very accurate--don't ever shoot at anything beyond ten yards. Light, compact, reliable--perfect weapon for close-range self-defense.
If you ever really need your gun, don't give warning. Don't wave it around. Don't make threats. Just shoot as soon as you show the weapon. Shoot twice. Shoot to kill. He's trying to kill you!
Her gloves jammed in the trigger guard. She slipped them off and stuffed them into her pants pockets. The wood and metal of the pistol grip actually felt warm compared to the sleet.
The squat shadow turned the corner, outlined against orange streetlights. "You stupid ass," she whispered, "you just voted for the death penalty."
She crouched between the dumpsters, took the two-handed stance she'd learned in the firearms course, and centered on the shadow's torso. Her senses switched into overdrive and the world slowed down. Kill or be killed, just like the instructor said.
She wimped out. "Stop, or I'll shoot!"
The man kept coming. He didn't speed up, or slow down, or flinch, or anything. Was the sonuvabitch deaf? She aimed at the bricks across the alley and snapped the trigger as a warning shot.
Click.
Her belly froze. She hadn't checked the cylinder before tucking the gun in her pocket. Had Jo been frigging around with the gun, dry-firing in their apartment?
Her hands trembled as she flipped the cylinder open and saw the glint of cartridges. It was a goddamn dud. She'd never had a misfire before. She snapped the gun shut.
Click. Click.
Two more duds, centered on his chest. She ran the whole cylinder around again.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Clear in spite of the shadows, the man smiled in slow motion. He inhaled deeply through his nose, as if he had been tracking her by smell. His mouth opened and spouted gibberish.
"Na gav aygul orsht. Ha an dorus foskulche."
That's what her ears pulled out of the air. God only knew what he'd actually said. Maureen started to scream and found she couldn't. She started to throw the useless gun in his face and found she couldn't. The alley was nowhere near as dark as it had been a few seconds earlier.
The slow-motion unreality continued. The man had a face now, not just a shadow, and his eyes were fire under heavy brows and a mop of coarse black hair. What she had thought was the drape of an overcoat was his square body, short but muscled like a Bulgarian weight-lifter. He radiated power and compulsion.
Maureen flashed back to childhood Sundays in church, and she grabbed the crucifix she wore as jewelry rather than a statement of faith. She started to mumble the "Our Father," offering it as a prayer against witchcraft.
The alley seemed as light as day, and the sleet had vanished from the air. Somebody must have dumped flowers in the trash because Maureen could smell them, lilacs or something sweet like that. The brick walls looked more like fieldstone masonry now, like the peasant cottages in Grandfather O'Brian's yellowed photographs of County Wicklow.
Something flashed in the end of the alley, and Maureen saw another man striding easily through the molasses-slow air. Steel mail rippled across his shoulders and swung heavily as he struck the dark man from behind. Gold crowned the second man's head over honey-blonde hair.
She'd stepped into a tale of knights and mages. Swords. Sorcery.
Bullshit!
Maureen gasped at the renewed sting of the sleet. The metal of her pistol burned cold. Shadows swirled in the darkness and resolved into one man standing and another stretched out at his feet. Her scream finally escaped into the storm, sounding more like the squeak of a mouse.
Steel flashed again, hacking at the fallen mugger. The light-haired man swung some kind of heavy bent knife, almost a short machete. Sour bile clawed at Maureen's throat, and her bladder burned like she was going to soak her pants.
A severed hand scuttled through the snow, sideways like a crab, searching for its wrist. Blood flowed black in the shadows. The meat-cleaver chunking seemed to go on forever. Her rescuer kicked something into the heaped snow across the alley, and Maureen gagged when she recognized it as a head. It hissed at her and clacked its teeth.
The light-haired man dropped his knife and pulled a can from his jacket, sprinkling something over the corpse. It writhed across the filthy snow and seemed to spit steam.
He looked up at her and nodded as if she’d asked a question.
"Lye," he said. "Drain-cleaner. It prevents healing, blocks the tissues from connecting back together." His voice was bright and cheerful, with a faint accent she couldn't place. He sounded like a TV chef assembling lasagna.
The whole scene was insane. His teeth flashed a savage grin from the shadows, as if killing a man was a public service like emptying the rat-traps in the basement laundry room
