He jabbers at me in Moon-Faced Fuck-ese, trying to use his greater bulk and strength to dislodge my grip on his wrist, which I'm using to keep him in an arm-lock. He fired the last time blindly, and either he got lucky, or I did, depending on your point of view. Given the unevenness of the fight—considering he outweighs me by roughly a metric ton of ugly-fuckness—I need to end this posthaste.
I twist his wrist and put more pressure on his elbow, which only makes him howl and thrash all the more, firing his gun blindly again. This time, he misses completely, the round going who-knows-where. I jam my knee into his ribs as hard as I can, and feel something crunch like eggshells. I drive my elbow down against his upturned elbow joint, and that snaps. He's sagging against my hold, and I let him flop to his back…
And come face-to-face with the round O of his pistol.
Time slows to glugging treacle. I see his finger tightening on the trigger. I swat at his hand, but I'm going to be too slow.
A hot, wet mess splatters all over me—a pinkish-red mist liberally sprinkled with chunks of something gloppy and awful and warm.
BOOM!
The report hits my ears a split-secondafterthe mess bathes my face.
What just happened?
I use the back of my wrist to clear my eyes of the pungent mess. Look down: Moon-Faced Fuck is nearly headless—what is left of his skull is a cratered bowl of bone splinters and gore.
Um.
"Thanks?" I say to no one.
"RUN!" It's a distant voice, a faint echoing shout. "RUNNOW!"
I can only assume the voice is the source of my all-too-timely salvation, and so I opt to listen. I bend, grab the slippery handle of the pistol, step over the oozing—and, horrifyingly, twitching—corpse, and then break into an all-out sprint in what I hope is the direction of the voice.
Another thing no one tells you is how weird and awful it smells when someone's brains go sploot. Sort of like bleu cheese, and let me say, I've never liked the stuff, but I'm going to have a Pavlovian barf response if I ever smell it again.
I hear acrackfrom behind me, and a bee buzzes around my ear. Another crack is followed by a weird snapping sound.
BOOM! This sound is farther away, the sharp cracking echo rolling over me like thunder. Unable to help myself, I crane my neck to look behind me while running: I’m just in time to see a figure topple to his knees, handgun dangling from a finger, and then dropping to the ground; the figure's head is a misshapen lump.
Jesus.
Nausea lurches up my gullet, and I trip, spewing bile to the side. Another sharpcrackechoes behind me, and that stupid bee hums past my ear again. I wave a hand to shoo the thing away, even as I keep tripping and stumbling back into a run.
Where are the bees coming from? And why now?
What did I do? I don't know what's going on. I can't identify anyone, let alone this Pooly bastard. Why does everyone want to kill me? It's really pissing me off.
And where thehellis Jakob? I haven't heard his rifle chattering in too long.
I trip over a curb, stumble across a narrow grassy verge, a sidewalk, and onto a soft green lawn. Expecting more gunshots and more of those awful buzzing bees—which I am beginning to suspect are not in fact bumblebees at all—I duck as I run, deking and juking this way and that. I stumble over a child's toy and go sprawling into grass. I roll a few times, none the worse for the trip except the fear that the next shot will see my brains painted on this very well-kept lawn. I'm in a backyard, now, open to a miniature suburban forest bordering the back of the subdivision.
I glance left as I scramble to my feet; a sliding glass door affords a glimpse into the living room of the home, and I get a rather unexpected vignette: a woman with a Karen bob on her hands and knees on the living room floor, getting plowed from behind by a burly man wearing the brown polo of a UPS driver. And now that I think of it, there’s a UPS truck parked on the curb. You'd think the driver would know better—those trucks have telemetry and their every movement is tracked, including how much time they spend at each address. So unless my guy is a two-pump-chump—and I'm watching evidence to the contrary—he's gonna get in trouble for this little stunt.
None of my business—and to be honest, you go, girl, get that porn-plot sex on. Fucking the UPS guy in your living room on a Thursday afternoon? Bold move, Cotton.
This whole aside lasts for the length of time it takes me to get to my feet.
I lurch unsteadily into the trees, spitting sour bile. Once into the shadows of the trees, I slump back, gasping raggedly, against the trunk of a towering maple. I have a straight line of sight to the safehouse from here, and my heart sinks into my stomach as I watch the garage door open, showing Jakob's slumped form being hauled between two men, feet dragging behind him. They toss him into the trunk of the Navigator like a sack of rice and then return inside to escort another figure. This one, I assume, is the Pooly bastard.
Before I know what’s happening, I’m stepping out into the light and gripping the blood-slick handle of the pistol, and it's bucking in my hands. A window shatters high above the garage, and concrete sprays from the driveway apron—clearly, I'm a terrible shot. To be fair, however, it's a pretty far distance for a pistol, and I've received zero firearms training. I've never even shot a gun before now.
A hard brown hand clamps onto my wrist with unbelievable power, easily stripping the gun out of my hands. "You risk hitting The Boss." The voice is low, silky smooth, with a lilting accent. "That is not the way we shall recover him, my dear lady."
The man beside me is clearly a wizard or a vampire or a ghost or something, because he apparated from nowhere. He is about my height but built like a firetruck, with improbably broad shoulders tapering to an improbably narrow waist. His hair is jet black and short, combed neatly to one side, not a hair out of place, with a Van Dyke goatee coming to a precisely trimmed point below his chin. I do not know how to explain his eyes—dark and black and glittering, at once hard and cold, yet when he meets my eyes, they communicate kindness, even though I can feel and sense the violence radiating from him in palpable waves.
"You must be Lash," I say. "At least, I hope so."
