Reapers (33 page)

A woman kicked at her umbrella. Lucy yanked it away, her ribs spiking with pain. Warm spit struck her face. Something hit her in the side.

"Get her!" Ludrow shouted. "Take away her face!"

A fist cracked her in the nose and blood popped down her lips. She had thought herself too tired to fight, but she swung her umbrella like a bat, raking its end across Ludrow's leering face. He shrieked and clutched the blood gleaming in the furrow in his cheek.

Someone hit her in the back of the head and she reeled forward. A woman danced up and socked her in the jaw. Lucy's knees gave out. She fell to her hands, umbrella skidding, fingers splayed in the harsh snow. A boot stomped toward her right hand. Dimly, she had the presence of mind to pull it back. The boot crashed into the snow, spattering her face with slush. A toe banged into her ribs, rocking her and sending white heat shooting up her spine. Blood dribbled down her stomach. She closed her eyes.

"You fucking idiots." A high and pretty voice knifed across the grunts and babble. "How about you let me hear the crazy idea that brought her back here?
Then
you finish beating her to death."

Ash glared his way through the circle of assailants. He was trim and short and the bones of his face were as pleasant as Tilly's, but his expression could have eaten holes in a battleship. He crouched next to Lucy and lifted her chin. He smelled like his red leather coat and the musk of aftershave.

"What brings you uptown, you cuckoo clock?"

"The hospitality." Lucy tasted blood. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Her nose was swollen and possibly broken. "So hey, as long as I'm here, want to know how to destroy Distro?"

"I was thinking about shooting them. Got a better idea?"

"I know where their trade comes from. Cut that and you bleed them to death."

"Where, the sea? I'm not the East India Company. I don't have a fleet."

Lucy swung her head side to side. "A few armed men should do it."

Ash squatted back, snow glimmering on his long hair. He rested his wrists on his knees. "My attention? It's yours."

"Nuh uh. You don't get any more. Not until you patch me up. Once I'm good enough to travel, I'll take you there."

"That's a convenient bargain! And when you're well enough to walk around, what's to stop you from running out?"

She lifted her head and met her eyes. "Nerve's the man who put the bullet in me. I aim to return it."

"He's an asshole like that, isn't he?" Ash rubbed his smooth jaw. "So what do I get if you don't make it?"

"My death."

"Sold." He stood and snapped his fingers three times. "Get her to surgery. And somebody go wake Doc."

"He's drunk," Brian said.

"He was about nine sheets to the wind when he took my tooth out. I lived. You know who won't if he doesn't get that bullet out of her? This girl."

Ash rolled his eyes and strolled inside. Hands reached for Lucy, but this time, they helped her to her feet. The world shrank to a dime, then a pinhole, then decided to go away altogether.

When she woke, she was lying on a table. A masked man leaned over her with a blade.

"Shit." He straightened and tugged down his mask; an uncombed beard seemed to burst from his face. "Nurse! My whiskey!"

"I think you've had enough," Brian said from behind Lucy.

"For my
patient
."

"What?" Lucy slurred.

The bearded man sat next to her on the table and put his hand on her shoulder. Which was bare.

"I'm a doctor," he said. "You've been shot."

"Oh."

"Things are all Civil War around here. I can't put you under, but I need you to stay very still. To help you be brave, I'm about to get you extremely drunk. Can you do that for me, Lucy?"

She tried to sit up for a look at her chest but her whole body cried out the moment she moved. "Please."

He smiled and patted her shoulder. "There's my girl."

Brian returned, donned in scrubs and a blue surgical mask, and handed the doctor a tumbler of brown-yellow liquor. Brian helped her sit up. The doc brought the glass to her lips. It smelled like oak beams and old forests and it burned her throat so bad she choked, snorting it out her nose. The doctor smiled patiently and dabbed it away.

"Tell me once the medicine's kicked in," he said.

She nodded. She was already breathing easier. Five minutes later, she told him she was ready.

"Excellent." He twisted around, then held a narrow, leather-wrapped tube above her mouth. "You might want to bite down on Mr. Stick. Don't worry, he's used to it."

She clenched it between her teeth. Her breath whistled from her nose. A line of fire sliced across her chest. Her body went stiff and she bit down on Mr. Stick until it creaked.

"I know you can be brave!" Doc said. "Know how I know? This bullet's in your chest, not your back."

She tried for him, but she was done. She went black and she stayed there.

Lucy woke to daylight and a bed. The apartment was narrow and the curtains were so musty she could smell them from where she lay. A scrabble at the door had woken her; the doctor entered and walked to the side of her bed. He set down a black satchel and peeled the bandage from her wound.

She sucked air through her teeth until the hurt quieted down enough to let her talk. "How do I look, Doc?"

Doc wore the aggrieved patience of a man with stones in his bladder. "Like something I scraped off my shoe with a stick. I can't believe you walked all that way. I've got a special bandage on you that should prevent more air from getting into your chest cavity, but if you feel any pressure, additional pain, or shortness of breath, you have to let me know."

"Am I gonna make it?"

"Every word you speak decreases your chances."

She slitted her eyes. "I question the soundness of your medical opinion."

He poked her chest, flooding her with pain. "I'm sorry, does that hurt?"

She gasped at the ceiling. "You son of a bitch."

"How do you feel?"

"Like I got to pee."

"Good news is your room has plumbing," he said. "Bad news is that when you stand up, you're going to wish you could pass out."

She eased up on her elbows. "You got running water?"

"The Feds charge a president's ransom for it. We're in the wrong racket."

"Which racket's that, extorting protection money from farmers?"

"Question the ethics as you please. All I know is I've had to treat a lot fewer clubbed, stabbed, and shot farmers since the Kono brought order to the park." His brows pushed together. "You need a hand? Or were you planning to wet the bed?"

With his help and a lot of sweating and pain, she made it to the bathroom, then tottered back to bed, legs quivering. "What now?"

"Think of it like a hospital. Where you're under house arrest." He tapped her shoulder with his fist. "Cocktail hour."

"Are you sure you're a doctor?"

"That's what my degree says. That reminds me." He dug into his pocket and held up a coin-sized lump of gnarled metal. Its base was largely intact, cylindrical and copperish, but its tip was mushroomed and leaden. "I imagine you're the type of girl who'd like to keep this."

He deposited it in her palm, walked out, and locked the door from the outside. She slept again. When she woke, a sandwich and a glass of water waited on the nightstand. She ate ravenously.

She didn't see another person until the day after that, when Ash swept open the door. "Lucy, I'm home!"

She eyed him. "Like I ain't heard that a hundred times."

"Doc said you're recovering like a champ." He clicked across the room and scootched his rear into the windowsill. "Our deal stands, right?"

"Sure."

"How about a hint?"

She laughed. It hurt. "Not until I feel good enough to fight back."

He sighed and flicked at a cobweb on the curtains. "I don't like this deal anymore."

He'd no sooner left than Brian entered with scrambled eggs and toast that even bore a faint smear of butter.

"They got you as my nursemaid?" Lucy wriggled upright. "How you feel about that?"

He set down the plate. "I haven't had much of a role at all since you shot Duke."

"I'd say I was sorry, but he tried to turn me out."

"I know."

He walked out. Her room didn't have electricity, so when he came back with lunch, she asked him for some books.

"What kind?"

"I don't know," she said. "Got anything with pirates? Or dinosaurs?"

"They don't write many books about dinosaurs."

"Then what good are they?"

He left again. That night, all he brought was dinner. Onions, potatoes, and bread (all of which she would eat a lot of in the next couple weeks). She figured he'd forgotten about the books, or didn't give a shit, but the following morning, he walked in with a cardboard box of paperbacks and set it on the foot of her bed.

"Enjoy." He wiped the dust on his hands and locked the door behind him.

She spread them out. He'd found a few with pirates—though most of them were the kind with bare chests, curly locks, and a woman draped over their arm in a posture so traumatic to the human spine you could almost hear the vertebrae cracking—but one of the books had the silhouette of a T. rex skeleton on the cover. While snow fluttered past the window, she read it from front to back. It was the first book she could remember finishing.

A couple days later, Brian walked in with a chess set. "Do you play?"

She shook her head. The light in his expression went out. She rolled onto an elbow. "Got checkers?"

He did. She could tell he found the game mechanical and predictable, but he seemed to enjoy himself anyway. Lucy chatted him up about life outside the apartment, but between the snow and the Kono saving their juice for the intel Lucy was sitting on, hostilities between them and Distro had simmered down to mutually nonviolent disdain.

The Doc came for her stitches. With her special bandage affixed to her chest this whole while, it was the first time she'd gotten a good look at them. She was horrified. The black threading looked like a mummy's mouth.

Doc offered to let her keep those, too. She declined.

She rolled the bullet around her palm and watched the snowy streets. This part of town showed much more life than down around the piers. At the bar, people came and went, glad for the chance to grab a meal they didn't have to cook themselves. Every morning, a horse-drawn wagon clopped west toward New Jersey, returning in the afternoon full of split wood. The woman who drove it dickered with one of the Kono over the woods' price every single time. Initially, Lucy resented the yammery back-and-forth—Christ on a cracker, choose a rate and stick with it—but the daily bargaining session soon became just another thread in the weave of uptown life.

Between her injury and the bed rest, Lucy had lost a lot of strength. Once the stitches were out, she paced around the room. Pushups were out of the question, but she discovered that so long as she was careful, she could get away with sit-ups, lunges, and jogging in place. When she wore out, which was much too damn fast, she read the other books in the box, but none were half as good as
Jurassic Park
.

Three weeks after she'd walked up to their front door, Doc came in with a stethoscope and some rubber tubes and pumps Lucy didn't like the look of at all.

"You get that out of a museum?" she said.

"Some of it." He listened to her pulse and her breathing and had a look at her incision, which had closed right up without redness or much in the way of discharge. "You heal like the devil."

"Am I ready to once more face the world?"

"I wonder if it's ready to face you." He frowned distractedly at her boob, which under any other context would have been disconcerting and might well have earned him two black eyes. "I'm a little concerned about the lung. It sounds good, but these things can take a couple months to heal. Go easy on it." He looked up at her; if he'd been wearing glasses, he'd be gazing over the top of them. "If you're capable of such a thing."

He left, locking the door as always. Hours later, Ash walked in for the first time since his initial visit where he'd asked her for a hint.

"Doc says you're cleared for active duty," he said. "Time to pay your bill."

Lucy walked to the window. The first snow had melted a few days after she'd been shot. More had replaced it the week after that, but there hadn't been a fresh fall in days and the slush in the streets was grimy and black.

"You got a boat?"

Ash arched one brow. "You said I wouldn't need one."

"I said you wouldn't need a fleet. We can walk there if you like, but two days from now, when your shoes are soaked, your ears are numb, and you're tramping around in the pine barrens wearing fifty pounds of guns, ammo, tents, and—"

"I have a boat," Ash cut her off. "I've got shitloads of boats. If you need a submarine, I'll get you a submarine. Just get me to their source."

Lucy primly laced her fingers together. "Anything with a sail should do fine."

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the door. "Real battle plans are drawn up over beer."

She got her shoes and the hoodie Brian had brought her when she'd mentioned the room had a draft. After three weeks in the musty apartment, she stepped into the dingy hall with the zeal of a conqueror. Downstairs in Sicily, Ash grabbed them a booth and the two of them drank beer from bottles that had lost their labels long ago. Men and women glanced over each time Ash gestured or raised his piercing, androgynous voice, which was often. Lucy got the idea he was something of a live wire. His unpredictability could throw a wrench into her plans, but it was easy to stir such people up and unleash them in the general direction of whatever you wanted destroyed.

The plan didn't take long to hash out. She didn't tell him where they were going or what they'd see. Just that it would require a boat and some troopers and that it might devolve into a shootout.

"You are
intransigent
," he said over his bottle. "If you're withholding details because you're lying about the whole enterprise, I'm going to send you to sleep with the fishes. Starting with your toes. I will personally slice you into chunks and put your chunks in a bucket and chum you across the Upper Bay."