Vicious Circle (28 page)

All heads turned toward us, and I glimpsed Susan Book in among the hostages. I also saw a man lying full-length on the ground, a bloody hole where his face ought to have been. Susan was sitting right next to this poor bastard. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she opened her mouth as if to speak.

I spoke first. “Hey, guys,” I said. “Saw you on the nine o’clock news. Where do we sign up?”

We were walking forward all this time, but now the man with the rifle swung it around to cover us. “You don’t,” he snapped, coldly. “You get with those dumb fucks over there, and you shut up.”

We kept on coming. “What kind of weapon is that?” Juliet murmured to me under her breath.

“Sports rifle,” I growled back, sounding a lot more definite about it than I actually was. “Semiautomatic—which means one bullet at a time.” The truth is, I know sod all about weapons, despite having once lived for a year with a sweet girl who subscribed to
Arms and Ammo;
but this thing was all dark red wood and elegant curves. No gun that dolls itself up as pretty as that ever gets asked out to an actual battle. Plus it had a dinky little magazine about the size of a mobile phone. If it was ever set on auto, it would run out of bullets in the time it takes to scream, “Die, mother—.” On the other hand, and assuming the guy had a steady hand, that would be plenty long enough to see me and Juliet thoroughly ventilated. She’d probably survive that, unless the bullets were silver: the odds on me were a little longer.

Fortunately, these guys weren’t all singing from the same hymn book. The other three men, wielding various makeshift clubs and cudgels, chose that moment to charge us, helpfully blindsiding their friend. Juliet accelerated so that they’d reach her first, taking out two of them with strikes that I’d be happy to call surgical because most surgery leaves you unable to walk for a while and maybe a body part or so short.

The third man I managed to drop with a flying tackle, which was probably the best result he could hope for under the circumstances. We went down together, but with me on top, and though he swiped at me with the jagged metal shard he was using as a knife, my elbow in his face threw off his aim and slammed his head hard against the floor. He was still moving, though, and a lucky slash with that thing would leave me bleeding out on the floor, so I brought my knee up between his legs, introducing him to the concept of planned parenthood with immediate and devastating effect. Leaving him curled around his pain, I scrambled to my feet just as the rifle went off.

It wasn’t aimed at me, of course. These guys might be crazy, but it would be a special kind of crazy who pointed the gun somewhere else when Juliet was bearing down on him with her killing face on. The back of her jacket opened up at chest height as the bullet tore through, and a fine red spray showered my face and upper body.

The rifle was semiauto: it had to be, because the man got a second shot off even as Juliet kicked him backward through the window. He fell with a scream that sounded more enraged than afraid, and that was all he got in the way of famous last words. I heard the dull [_thump _]as he hit the street.

“Juliet!” I shouted. “For fuck’s sake, they’re possessed. There’s something riding them!”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She turned, a little bent over, her movements too slow, just as the two guys who’d been guarding the hostages charged her from the side.

One of them had a knife, and he slashed at her stomach. The other swung his baseball bat and hit her full in the face. She reeled with the blow, then stabbed out with her left hand, putting her thumb and middle finger through the second man’s eyes.

That left the knife man, and as he brought his hand back for a second thrust I finally, belatedly, forced myself to move. I went directly for his knife hand, grabbing hold of it in both of mine and twisting it up behind his back with brutal, desperate force. He dropped the knife, and Juliet, glancing over her shoulder and seeming to notice him for the first time, swept her fist up in an uppercut that almost took his head off his shoulders. He slithered to the ground between us, already unconscious.

“Are you all right?” I asked her, my chest heaving both with the effort to catch a breath and with the nausea that was beginning to hit as the adrenaline turned sour in my stomach.

“I’m fine,” she muttered, but there was a breathy gurgle behind the words that scared the shit out of me. Her shoulders were bowed: she was inspecting the bloody mess in the center of her shirt front, and her feet shifted a little as if she was having a hard time keeping her balance.

I jumped to a conclusion. A whole generation of entrepreneurs were making their first fortunes by trading on the fears that the living felt for the living dead: silver-coated ammunition was just one of the fads that had come in as a result. “Juliet, was the bullet—?”

I could only just hear her answer. “Silvered. Yes. But it only went through my lung. I think I can . . . deal . . . with the . . .”

Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t fall. All her attention was turned inward, and wherever she was right then I knew she wasn’t going to be aware of her surroundings for a while. From the street outside came shouted orders and the wail of a single siren. The police weren’t going to wait much longer before storming the place: not with bodies flying out of the windows.

I turned to look over at the hostages. Susan Book was already heading toward me, but the others were all still in a huddle against the base of the wall, some of the kids sobbing and keening, nobody daring to move. I opened my mouth to say something—probably something along the lines of “you’re safe now.” Susan’s hand lashed out, and as I reflexively parried, something red shot from her fingers to bounce off my chest and hit the floor at my feet. I didn’t even see her other hand come up: her nails raked my cheek, savagely deep, and I staggered back in numb surprise. She followed up, punching and clawing at me as she screamed obscenities into my face. The same obscenities I’d heard from the almost-hanged man outside, mostly, focusing on my sexual relationship with my parents and the cocks I’d suck in hell. It was like some kind of virus.

I fended Susan off, using my height and reach to block her wild, uncoordinated attack. I didn’t want to hurt her, though, so I was backing away across the floor, calling out her name as I gave ground in an effort to wake her out of whatever trance she was in. Then a shelf unit bumped against my back and I had to stop, which meant that she was finally able to close with me: out of options, I knocked aside her clutching hands and punched her hard on the point of the jaw. She went over backward, and there was an alarming crack as the back of her head hit the tiles.

It was followed a moment later by the crump of a detonation, and another window blew out as something hard and metallic shot through it to arc end over end through the air, trailing a plume of feathery smoke. As it landed and bounced, another and then another window burst, and the screams of the hostages drowned out all other sounds—even the hiss of the tear gas grenades releasing their indiscriminate loads.

I staggered back to where Juliet had been standing, almost slipping as my foot came down on something smooth and hard. I glanced down: it was a Victorinox Swiss army penknife, multifunctional blades extended at both ends. Susan’s weapon: I’d been within an inch of being corkscrewed to death.

Juliet was kneeling over the body of one of the fallen rioters, her hand on his chest. I thought she was checking him for a pulse, but then I realized that she was searching his pockets. I grabbed hold of her arm and her head snapped up: her dark eyes locked on mine. My eyes were starting to water as filaments of CS gas drifted across the store.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I shouted over the shrill screams. “This is to soften up the opposition. Any moment now they’re gonna storm the place.”

Juliet stood, with some difficulty. “I’ll have to lean on you,” she rasped, and she almost fell into my arms as I led her back the way we’d come. The hostages would be okay, I told myself. They’d suffer from the effects of the gas, but the cops would be all over the place within the next couple of minutes so the riot was over. There was nothing we could do for them now that the paramedics couldn’t do a whole lot better.

All the same, I felt more hollow than heroic as I staggered back down the stalled escalators, Juliet leaning heavily against my chest, the harsh gurgle of her breath in my ears. She’d been right: something
was
loose in here, and it had our number, turning victims into aggressors with a magical wave of its invisible hands, wrapped around and around us like some kind of spiritual smallpox blanket, infecting where it touched.

Skirting the debris in the ground-floor arcade was a lot harder now that I was steering for two. As we headed for the corridor where the toilets were, I heard the loud slam of the main doors off to our left and the crunch of running, booted feet on the shattered glass. I went a little faster, risking a misstep that would send us both sprawling on our faces. We got into the corridor and the echoing steps ran straight on past. I was expecting a voice from behind us to shout, “Stop where you are. Put down the succubus—slowly!” But it didn’t happen.

The loading bay was still empty. I got Juliet to the edge of the platform, set her down, then jumped to the ground myself and hauled her after me. Amazingly, exasperatingly, in spite of everything that had just happened and the sick horror that was throbbing inside my head, I was still responding physically to her closeness—still breathing hard and heavy, and feeling my prick stir inside my pants, as I inhaled her primal perfume.

She couldn’t climb the wall: she could barely walk. But there was a gate at the far end of the yard, and it was only bolted rather than locked. I slid the bolts and we limped through, both of us torn and exhausted and blood-boltered, like the last contestants in a dance marathon in hell.

I had to slow down once we got out onto the street. It was dark, so if we stayed away from the streetlights nobody would be likely to see our various wounds and blemishes, but the way we were staggering would draw attention anywhere. I pulled Juliet close to me and tried to pretend that we were lovers drunk on our own hormones—and, yeah, before you ask, that was an easy part to play. Every inch where our bodies touched was an inch I was painfully, achingly aware of.

The road we were in led back around to the street where I’d parked, bringing us out again behind the rubbernecking crowd. There was a whole lot more going on now, and nobody had time to notice us. Police were pushing the lollygaggers back while officers with riot shields and impact armor ran across the road toward the mall’s front entrance. White-shirted ambulance crews brought up the rear. The assault had begun in earnest now, and we’d gotten clear with seconds to spare.

I propped Juliet up against the car and got the passenger door open. She was starting to pull out of it now, or at least to recover some degree of control over her own movements, and she was able to lower herself into the seat without much help from me. I shut the door without slamming it, went around to the driver’s side, slid in, and started the engine.

Since the road ahead was blocked I had to make a three-point turn in the road. Fortunately there was enough street theater going on that nobody spared us a glance. We drove back toward White City Stadium, where I pulled over because my hands were shaking so much that I wasn’t really safe to drive.

Juliet’s breathing was shallow now, but even, and she was looking at me with something of her old, cold arrogance in her eyes.

That stare made a lot of possible words die in my throat. Finally I said, “I’m sorry I dragged you into that.”

“It’s all right,” she answered, her voice still a harsh rasp. “It was . . . interesting.”

“No, I mean I’m really sorry you were there. You killed a man, and probably blinded another. If I’d known you were going to let out your inner demon—”

She cut across me, remorseless. “One man was dead already. How many more do you think would have died if I hadn’t acted?”

“We can’t know that.”

“No,” she agreed, sounding almost contemptuous. “We can’t.”

“Was it worth it?” I asked, still shellshocked. “Did you get any kind of a handle on what we’re dealing with here?”

“Oh yes. Didn’t you?”

“No,” I admitted. “Although—” I fell silent. There
had
been something familiar in the way that formless evil had presented itself to my sixth sense, but it had been mixed up with a lot that was purely alien. The gestalt effect hadn’t been something I’d been able to focus my mind on for very long—like trying to join the dots when they were spinning separately in a whirlpool. I didn’t finish the sentence: there didn’t seem to be any good way of explaining what I’d felt. “Go ahead,” I said. “Give me the starting prices.”

“Soon,” said Juliet. “Not yet. And not here.” There was a long silence. Then she turned and stared at me. “Castor—” Her voice had a breathy echo to it that suggested she still hadn’t finished repairing the damage to her lung.

“What?”

“Is that how you dress for dinner?”

T
HERE’S
A
THAI
RESTAURANT
UP BY
OLD
OAK
COMMON
where I’d eaten a few times before. It’s a perfect place for snacks and cocktails after work, or after summarily executing deranged riflemen in gutted malls—and since there’s no dress code, it doesn’t even matter if you’ve been shot through the chest and a massive exit wound has spoiled the line of your jacket.

To be fair, by the time we got there Juliet was looking almost as fresh and fragrant as if she’d just stepped out of the shower—an image I had to rein in sternly before my imagination got out of hand. The blood that had saturated her shirt front had disappeared, and the line of bruising along her jaw had faded to near invisibility. I’d seen Asmodeus do something similar to Rafi’s body when it had taken some damage in one of his rampages, but this was more extreme and a whole lot quicker—I guess because Rafi’s body was still made of real flesh and blood at the end of the day, while Juliet’s was made of—something else. I never know how to ask.