Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (15 page)

After that most of her hunger deserted her. She picked at
everything and then asked for it to be bagged up. ‘We can take it back for Sassy. If she’s still there.’

‘Yeah,’ Zal said, although now his voice was quite different. Wondering anger marked it so strongly it made her look up with
a jolt. ‘If we make it out of here alive.’

Lila followed his gaze. He was looking across the diner and out of the misted, greasy windows into the parking lot where a
cluster of semis screened off most of the highway. She didn’t see the trouble until a few seconds later, which was still earlier
than most.

A large group of cars and trucks had pulled up on the outer edge of the lot and now the passengers were getting out. They
shared a slow, deliberate style of action, which confirmed in Lila’s mind and heart that they were bad news. They were wearing
shirts and armbands with the same logo, a skull and crossbones in red. She counted thirty, until a group of bikers rode up
bearing the same sign on their jackets – hastily applied in most cases, over older colours. Her data lookup was working perfectly.
She heard Bentley replying in her mind’s ear before she was even aware of asking the question,

‘That’s Deadkill. They’re one of the vigilante groups I told you about. They kill Returners and anyone who tries to stop them.
Very organised. They will wait until they find undead before they start shooting, but after that I’d say all bets are off.’

Lila replied silently, digitally. ‘There are demons with them, I see two. And maybe a kind of fae.’ Guns had begun to appear,
methodically pulled from vehicles and handed out. Ammunition was loaded, checked. It hadn’t occurred to her before that the
Returners were as killable as any other human being, but it must be so. She didn’t see any special weapons.

‘Yes. The demons are part of a set that hunt around looking for violent crime most likely. There are a few in the City area.
And Deadkill have Hunter Children as members according to the last seized records but they organise by blip at the last minute
and keep their plans off the networks. This must have been cued in the last twenty minutes – yeah, uh huh, I see the phone
nets passed out a list bleep forty-two minutes ago so that will be the signal, not that you can tell what it is until it breaks.
Just unlucky you’re there. Or lucky. Depending.’

Lila took a bigger scan of the area and the net. ‘I don’t see any cops.’

Bentley hummed. ‘Ah, the emergency call record . . . they’ve been
scammed. All the ones in your area have been pulled on fake calls, at least, I bet they’re fakes. Just far enough to be away.’

‘Can you get backup?’

‘Not sooner than fifteen minutes. On their way but . . .’

Now the other people in the diner had noticed what was going on outside. Disbelief and uncertainty meant they were still seated
for the most part and except from a few raised voices there was still nothing amiss inside.

Lila turned to Zal. ‘Demons, one fae, lots of guns. Fifty. At least. Maybe more on the way.’ She turned back, alert, systems
running, lifting, speeding. Her blood seemed to freeze though it was accelerating. ‘Gasoline cans. Flame throwers. Shock prods.’
And there were other things in the arsenals that didn’t fit with the story of simple killing either; ropes and shackles, and
chains.

The waitress came to their table, her attention on the windows. She dumped a large brown paper sack full of food containers
in front of them and said, mostly to herself, ‘Now what the heck is that? Some kinda convention?’

Lila stood up and pushed out beside her – no easy feat in the mass of the robes. The woman looked at Lila’s hands on her arms
and opened her pink-lipsticked mouth to object.

‘Exit,’ Lila said, firmly but quietly. ‘Is there a back way out?’ She had no faith that the lynch mob wouldn’t have thought
of this first but she had to know.

‘Through the kitchen but—’

‘Do you have a cold store?’

‘Yeah but—’

‘You need to get everyone and move inside it, lock yourselves in. Right now.’ Cold stores had at least some reinforcements
in their structures, mostly, she thought. Better than being in the open anyway. Anything would be better than that.

She ran her eyes over the customers. They were moving now, standing, grabbing their stuff, dropping their cutlery . . . There
were kids, teenagers, all kinds of people. She couldn’t tell just by looking at them if any of them were Returners but there
were certainly fae there in their ‘slob’ glamour forms, disguised as ordinary people, so un-special your eye would slide over
them twice without noticing. And Zal. And her.

The outside mob showed no signs of hurrying their marshalling. They were forming up facing the door and windows, weapons hefted
openly. They didn’t shout too much. Another bad sign, she thought, pushing at the waitress’s slack response. ‘Move! For your
life! Get into the store room!’ People heard her now, reacted to the voice of authority she’d pulled from her repertoire,
but they were still slow and then the sluggish, dumb air and its steady flub of old country music was pierced by a howling
scream from the dim corner where the sign for the ladies’ blinked in broken neon.

Then everyone ran as Lila stood still, knowing what it meant, momentarily paralysed by the horror she felt, the surge of dry,
deathly fear. The girls on the fire-exit steps had taken too long over their last smoke. They were caught.

She felt Zal push past her as he jumped over the table, from there over the heads of the panicking customers, onto another
counter, onto the bar, over to the windows. Shadow flooded out from him, a cloud of unnatural, impenetrable darkness. His
speed and the recognition that he could buy them a few seconds by hiding them and confusing the enemy galvanised her.

A staccato burst of fire from a machine gun broke through the screams that filled the room now, driving the panic. She registered
its meaning – it came from the back – as if it were old news. The dead girls were dead again.

Now she had to struggle to fight through the bodies rushing past her. She heard glass break at the front and registered the
presence of petrol in the air. Too heavy to properly ignite it coated a table in weak yellow flame. Fury and loathing filled
her. She reached the door, crossing the zone of black that Zal had trailed. Beside her she felt his presence, stronger, brighter,
and realised he ate the light – he ate the light – it was so important in its impossibility, but it wasn’t important now,
there was no time for it. Instead her hand was opening the door and her foot was kicking it aside on its pathetic hinges that
gave just like the calculations told her they would so the whole thing burst free and went flying, low and whirling, a missile,
into the front lines of the band standing below the steps. They scattered like bowling pins.

She held up the palm of her hand, displaying the lit Agency emblem and amplified her voice, almost to the point of pain.

‘Your gathering and assault is illegal and you will disperse or be arrested. Lay down your arms. Surrender the shooters. They
are under arrest. Any obstruction to my authority will be considered an act of assault.’ Which covered her, not that she expected
it to work.

The faces looking at her were a real picture with their comic
mixture of disbelief, bloodthirst, hate and incredulity. They really weren’t in any shape for thinking straight. She longed
to kill them.

Around her the robes shifted, tightening, drawing in, threads moving of their own accord, making new designs, new words. Across
her chest a red cross appeared, tangled in a spiral of red like a spider’s web, a white flower at its apex as the faery declared
its colours.

And is this what it had come to at last, she thought as she surveyed the crowd, wondering which one was going to shoot first,
or if they’d shout first and gather their nerves, wait for the ones at the back to signal they were in position. For surely
they didn’t look uncertain, no, they had decided there would be no prisoners, no innocents here. Lila against the humans,
not human any more, a monster worthy of hate? She despised her own drama even as she felt it catch and flame inside. But she
stood and stared at them, judging their willing greed for blood and suffering, their righteous, ugly determination. She saw
the promise of being crushed in the narrow vices of their eyes, she heard once more the burst of the machine guns in her mind
and heard the silence of the despairing undead who had got what they wanted here on this luckless, lucky day, and she hated
them more still.

Then a slow drawl interrupted her moment. ‘Well now, who the fuck are you dressed as?’

Their leader, a worked-out man, handsome, in construction-worker overalls and holding a shotgun, gestured at her with the
double finger of the barrels. It was a contemptuous, lingering kind of move, the sort that men make in sleazy nightclubs when
they’re sizing up the girls on the poles. It gave the crowd confidence and their stunned moment of immobility departed in
a ripple of sneers and laughter. They moved forward until his languid arm movement stopped them. The fact that she’d kicked
an entire door into their front line seemed to have slipped their notice as they slid together into a pack.

Lila’s attention sharpened to a point. She heard the group around the back talking, saying something about sending news round
to the front, there was a brief argument, then a messenger came running around the side. The people in front of her stopped
for a gawk when they saw the situation, then trotted forward to whisper in the leader’s ear. Meanwhile Lila could see Zal
inside the diner, clear on infrared despite his cloak of shadow. He was shepherding people into the kitchen area. They were
almost all inside. She waited until the messenger had delivered his news, a whisper she heard clearly, and then said, ‘You’re
all under arrest. Put down your weapons.’

In reply the construction guy primed his shotgun with the flashy one-arm style of a movie star and pointed the business end
at her. ‘People who get in our way get killed. We came for the undead abominations. Stand aside.’

‘What’s the petrol for then?’ Lila asked, making her final calculations as she mapped the location of all the people and weapons.

‘Tainted ground,’ he said, grinning. ‘Has to be cleansed. And places like this that harbour the filth, have to be razed.’

‘There are innocent people and kids in there,’ Lila said, stalling, though she sensed a fresh urgency as some of the mob checked
the time and realised they were going to run into police trouble soon. She read them the full records, her conviction absolute.
‘And I don’t take assurances from people who already made three similar raids in the last month all over the southern-states
area. Fifty-six casualties. Twenty-one dead. Fifteen of them ordinary human citizens, four teenagers, one child of seven.
You are under arrest for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to cause civil disturbance, riot, incitement
to hate, incitement to riot, causing a disturbance of the peace, destruction of property, arson, illegal possession of weapons,
membership of an illegal organisation, resisting arrest and obstructing the path of justice.’

Her litany had the desired mesmerising effect on the front rows even as some members were cautiously peeling themselves off
the back of the crowd and sidling away. She wasn’t done with the last word before she was already moving.

She saw the leader’s finger on the trigger pulling steadily, but she was on him before they’d moved more than a few millimetres.
Even his blink of surprise was a slow, clumsy piece of shutterwork to her as she took the gun away from him, popped out the
shells and manacled his wrists together with the twisted barrels. It was a tight fit. She broke a bone in his wrist doing
it and then she broke a few more as she pressed the figure eight all the way closed. They snapped like twigs and she felt
every pop as a bubble of cold glee. As she stepped back, moving into human time, the plastic shell cases fell at her feet.
Most of the bystanders were too surprised by her speed to do anything but stand and stare but some, the hardcore who had come
wired and been frothing during the conversation period, were liberated by the burst of action. Their minds weren’t on realism
and whatever odd danger Lila represented, they were focused on violence.

Their liberation was hers too. She picked up the closest agitator,
crushing his hand around the grip of his stun gun where it was trying to shock her into jelly, and lifted him off his feet.
With a short spin and a burst of energy robbed from the gun that was meant to incapacitate her, she flung him across ten heads
into the chest of a middle-aged grizzler brandishing a minigun. The stun gun, clamped by broken fingers, was still fizzing
at maximum battery power. It connected with the other man as they both went down onto the tarmac, scattering several others
and pushing their part of the crowd back. As they jolted around together Lila was already airborne in a leap that took her
in the other direction to where a woman was lighting up the pilot on her flamethrower – a homemade but serious object that
reeked of leaking kerosene and was almost as much danger to the holder as anyone else.

With her fingers edging into blades, Lila cut the tank off its old rucksack-strap moorings on the woman’s denimed shoulders
and swung it around hard. The woman, still holding the gun end firmly, was yanked off balance as the hoses dragged on her
arms, then she let go in surprise and got a spray of paraffin into her eyes as the loose end of the hose whipped around, sprinkling
everyone in range. Tatterdemalion took her share, Lila could smell it, but she wasn’t bothered by such small irritations as
fire. She twisted and crushed the crude metal kerosene tank and flung it in a low arc across the thin strip of ground between
the diner and the crowd, then directed her own burst of intense narrow-band microwave heat from the palm of her hand at the
flying metal.

Liquid sprayed wildly out through the splits in the tank as it expanded, dousing the ground. The steel tank itself sparked
violently, contorting as it tumbled to a halt. Mobmen scattered instinctively around it, most backing off. The pilot light,
dying but still going, finally landed near enough to ignite the vapour and with a burst of hot yellow and a wave of fresh
heat the entire left side of the building had been cut off from the assault by a low wall of flame. It wouldn’t deter maniacs
but it was bad enough that anyone with doubts wasn’t going that way.