After Death(95)
John in a watchful crouch. Nina still on her feet. A warped and loose and perhaps mold-eaten sheet of particleboard creaks as she shifts her weight from one foot to the other.
Michael says, “He’s right under us!” As he speaks, he grabs a fistful of the boy’s jacket and lifts him out of the crouch, almost off his feet, thrusting him away from the corner.
A rattle of wood on wood, a cracking sound: Foiled by loose flooring, Nina stumbles and cries out involuntarily.
Pivoting toward her, seeing her fall with the Tac Light firmly in hand, the sheet of particleboard now angled and overlapping the sheet adjacent, Michael is nowhere else but here, neither with Magog crossing a length of ranch fence nor drawn by horrified speculation as to what the next few seconds will bring, but only here, where the past matters not and there is no expectation of a future. There is never other time than the current moment; the suspension bridge beneath your feet is a fragile construct, as if fabricated from ropes and wooden slats, each slat a moment, your crossing begun at birth, the time of death at a point en route when a slat fails to support your weight and falls into the gorge, you with it. And the time of death is always. Now time doesn’t stop for Michael Mace, and neither does he step outside of time. Instead, he ceases thinking, commits himself to action by the guidance of another—he can’t say who—but it isn’t mere instinct. Afterward, he is unable to remember what he did, how he snatched Nina off the floor and into his arms as if she were weightless, how he strode twenty feet from the corner—in a seeming instant. Calaphas is so certain of his intuitive targeting that the crack of rifle fire comes four times, three more, three again. As the floor shakes, as debris is flung up but also spills from the bullet-pocked ceiling, Michael stands before the boy, whose eyes are shocked wide, though no wider than his own.
As the overlapping echoes of the barrage fade into an expectant and fearsome quiet, he sets Nina on her feet. He looks toward the fourth corner, as yet not assaulted, then at the floor under them, and he knows one place is no safer than another. He knows, as well, that it wasn’t the nanotech in his cells, not Shadow Michael, that gave him the extraordinary strength and reflexes to do what he just did. The inspiration for the action he took, the source of his power and adroitness, was as basic and human as it gets—love. He has led his life without committing to any woman, for fear the consequences will be deceit, betrayal, torment, and loss, of which he knew too much in childhood. But here he is. Here he is because of Shelby Shrewsberry, because their lifelong friendship required him to care about a stranger for whom Shelby had deep but unexpressed affection, and that caring has become a love Shelby didn’t live to experience. There is sadness in that, as well as guilt unearned but felt, yet there is also a new hope. Here he is, and Nina knows it, and he knows that what he feels for her is alike to what she feels for him. Now all they need to do is survive.
Before he opens fire, Calaphas hears a woman’s cry, the source immediately above him, in the northeast corner of the attic, a cry of surprise rather than pain, followed by something being dropped or someone falling. Whoever she might be, her exclamation thrills him, as though it’s the annunciation of his rebirth as the dark angel of Death, his sacred identity confirmed. He squeezes off four rounds at the ceiling, pauses but a second to enjoy the screams, which do not come, and fires six more times. Even if three bullets found three brains, they couldn’t all have died in the same instant. Ten rounds have raised not a shout or shriek of pain, not one plaint of horror. The only sounds are quick footfalls as they react to a new awareness of his strategy, avoiding corners, hoping that he lacks enough ammunition to keep harassing them back and forth through that high space until their luck runs out.
He is impatient to transcend. Perhaps his rage abated with the realization of his true immortal nature, but now it swells hot once more. If this game has one rule, it is that in all situations and circumstances, violence is the only winning course of action. The violent bear it away. The future belongs to the violent. They bear away those who choose not to kill. They bear away everything of which they disapprove, all art and music and writing and philosophy that they find displeasing, all thought that offends them. They bear away all traditions, institutions, and ultimately all civilization as it was once constituted. He knows this game. He is the master of this game, and he is infuriated that at this late hour, with one move left to clear the board, he is being frustrated.
He ejects the depleted magazine. Slaps in a fresh one. He has twenty additional rounds available in yet a third magazine.
Stepping into the hall, he surveys the ceiling, which is a darker shade of green than the walls. He cocks his head left and right, trying to gauge the trio’s location by the telltale sounds they’re making. He enters the next room on the right, wishing that their body heat could reveal them by translating through the attic floor and manifesting as green glowing footprints on this ceiling, an irrational desire perhaps related to the Benzedrine. He squeezes off three rounds to no effect and returns to the hallway, attention focused overhead.
A scissoring sound, blade against blade, and a series of soft clicks puzzle him. He can’t figure out what Mace and his companions are doing up there, and then he realizes the source of the noise is not in the attic. When he looks south, a daunting apparition comes off the stairs and into the hallway, an entity so bizarre that it evokes in him the closest thing to fear that he has felt since he was seven years old and purged himself of that hampering emotion. Never before have mere bennies troubled him with hallucinations. At first, in the strange light that his goggles conjure from the dark, the intruder seems spiderlike, the number of its legs difficult to discern. Then it goes erect on its two back limbs, revealing that it has only four legs, and its body appears to reconfigure in some way, with a soft whir and a softer chunk-chunk-chunk. As Calaphas begins to realize that this is neither a hallucination nor some monstrous insect, that it’s a machine, and as alarm rises in him, the intruder projects a broad beam of light—