Vicious Grace
Page 38

Five men came out toward us. Two wore the scrubs and lanyard ID cards of nurses, two had the cop-reminiscent uniforms of security guards, and one—a huge man with full-body tattoos, a shaved head, and easily a dozen stitches in his scalp—was in the breezy gown of a patient. Their eyes glowed cold blue-white, their clothing and hair floated. In the waiting room, the television stuttered and came on, the images a sickening montage that I’d seen before. Slaughter and brutality and the joy of the killing mob. The walls had changed. Instead of the carefully soothing paint and bright posters, they were bare concrete, stained by water and blood and time.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find you?” all five men asked at once. “Did you think you could hide? I’ve got you in my guts.”
I looked back over my shoulder. If we could run . . . Six other people—four men and two women—were behind us. Their eyes glowed too. One of the security guards drew his pistol.
“You are in one flesh, slave girl. I have come to take it from you and eat what comes out: you and her and all the others you travel with.” The voice was a chorus, but among the various voices, there was something else. Something more. The sweet, silky voice of the man from my dream with his hat and his old-fashioned suit. His voice grew out of all the others put together, and the effect made my skin crawl.
The little pocket of paper against my skin flared painfully, and I saw the others—Chogyi Jake, Ex, Aubrey, Kim—flinch at the same moment I did. The glowing-eyed mob grunted in frustration, and the guard raised his gun. Years of action flicks had trained me to expect a deep, authoritative boom, but the report was small and dry as a firecracker. I heard the bullet hiss past me, but I was already in motion, my body sprinting forward with a scream that tore the air. The other guard drew his own gun, and the three unarmed men moved toward me like blockers on a football field. Someone behind me screamed, but I couldn’t look back. Another pistol report came, and I rolled my weight, twisting my body and pushing my fist and qi together into one of the nurses’ chests. I felt his ribs give way, but the other two were on me, their weight dragging me down.
The last time, when the rider had still been trapped, the mob had been made from men and women. Rage-crazed, yes, but only normal people. Now I felt the power of the rider surging through the hands of its tools, burning cold and implacable as hate. I was on my knees, arms twisted back and locked. If I tried to rise up, my elbows would break. Behind me, Kim screamed, and Chogyi Jake moaned. The two security guards stepped close, the paired pistols aiming at my head. I pressed out my qi in a scream. I might as well have kept silent.
Something loud happened, and for half a second I thought they’d shot me. The guard standing to my left crumpled, black blood spilling down his legs, and his eyes flickering white to blue to black. The guard standing to my right whirled just as the explosion came again. He went down in a heap. A new voice rang out in the hallway, familiar and unexpected and obvious.
“I’ve got enough ammunition to take down every one you put up, y’bastard!” David Souder yelled. “I don’t want to, but push me and you know I will.” He racked another round in his shotgun and stepped forward. Resting the barrel on the shoulder of the shaved-headed patient who had my right arm in a lock.
“You let them go or I will,” he said.
The room was silent. David’s eyes were bright and glassy and brimming with a fear that I recognized. He didn’t know whether he was bluffing either. I took two deep, fast breaths, gathering my will into a ball of invisible power, and pressed it out through my right hand. I could feel the rider inside the patient’s flesh, a cold pressure pushing back at me.
“Kill them, then,” the mob said at once, and each of them smiled. David’s face went pale.
“Let go,” I said, and the man holding me shuddered. The eerie glow went out of his eyes and he dropped my hand, stumbling back.
“What the hell, man,” he said, his hands out toward David’s shotgun as if his fingers would stop the round. “What the hell?”
I felt a short rush of pleasure. I could still break the rider’s hold on these people the way I had with Kim that first time. I could take back what it had stolen. It wasn’t strong enough to keep them. Not yet.
The television screamed in frustration, then popped, scattering sparks like a firework. The pressure on my other arm faltered, and I pulled myself free. Three men lay at my feet. The two security guards; one bleeding badly from the side, the other curled up in a fetal ball in a spreading pool of blood. The nurse I’d punched was fighting hard to draw breath, a white foam at the corner of his mouth. Their eyes were human. Their pain was human. When I looked back over my shoulder, the glow had gone from the back rank of the mob too. And the walls were painted again. The rider’s influence had been withdrawn. Kim had blood on her mouth. Chogyi Jake was on his hands and knees, standing up slowly. The woman who’d been kicking him stepped forward to help him up.
“We need to get these three to the ER,” I said. “Ex, can you—”
“Jayné,” Aubrey said. “We have to go.”
I pointed to the fallen security guards.
“They’ve been shotgunned,” I yelled. “They could die!”
“They could,” Ex said, coming toward me. “But we have someplace we need to be, and the rider’s getting reinforcements.”
I looked around, a sense of powerlessness washing through me. Chogyi Jake looked stunned, Ex grim. Aubrey and Kim stood with their backs together, unconsciously preparing for another wave of attacks. I turned to the shaved-headed man, pointing a finger at his chest.
“You,” I said. “Get them help. You understand? You get them help, or I will track you down and finish the job!”
“Yeah, all right, lady,” the man said. He had a low growl of a voice, a bear that had been punched in the throat too many times. “Whatever you say.”
I turned to David.
“You just can’t follow simple directions, can you?” I said.
“Apparently not,” he said. His voice was shaky, his face pale. Chances were good he’d just killed two men. The first time I’d seen anyone killed, I couldn’t stop vomiting. He was holding together better than that, at least.
“Okay, then,” I said. “Come with us.”
I couldn’t fight the rider if every swing I took hurt someone innocent. I couldn’t stand against the Beast Rahab without becoming a little bit like it. The good guys were the ones who protected the innocent, who stood on principle, who thought that failing in a just cause was better than championing a moral compromise. And it turned out that wasn’t me.
I was the lesser evil.
TWENTY-TWO
One of the first cantrips I’d learned was how to bring my qi up to my eyes, brushing aside all illusion and sharpening my sight. My head ached from it now. The hospital around us seethed with malice. We had navigated the second subbasement without another encounter with the rider’s victims, but at the cost of moving slowly through longer, harder routes. Ex had brought us to dead ends twice now, forcing us back along our path. The frustration of being lost in the maze made me want to scream. The fear that another ambush might be around the next corner. I’d given my paper talisman to David on the theory that the wards and protections Eric had put on me would give me some cover, and I didn’t want the guy with the shotgun getting all glowy around the eyelids.
I wasn’t the only nervous one.
“But how did you find us?” Ex said.
“I don’t know,” David said. “I mean, I knew you were going back to the place. With the coffin. I just started going there too, and then . . .”
“There are choke points,” Aubrey said. “Any complex route is going to have places where the number of possible paths narrows down and places where it opens up again. The rider knew that too.”
“The rider headed us off at the pass?” Ex said.
“It could be at all the passes,” Kim said. “All of them at once. And the chances are always pretty good of running into someone when you’re going to the same place.”
Only Chogyi Jake didn’t talk. Since the fight, his face had grayed, and he kept a hand pressed to his belly. I knew he was hurt and hurting. That I couldn’t do anything about it only added to my frustration.
“But if there’s a connection,” Ex said. “If David and the rider are still in communication somehow—”
“Then every hallway between us and that coffin would be standing-room only with people trying to kill us,” I said. “They aren’t, so they aren’t. Let it go.”
It took almost an hour, scuttling like rats, darting from shadow to shadow, to reach the thick steel doors with the faded trefoil on them. Fallout Shelter. The remnant of the good old days when the Russians were going to drop nukes on us at any moment and the worst thing you could be was a commie. It wasn’t even my parents’ generation. These were my grandparents’ nightmares in fossil form, concrete and steel to keep what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima from happening here, built less than a decade after Truman had given the go-ahead to drop the bombs. The lock had been forced, and the air within smelled like burned cheese.
Inside, the shelter was like a dorm room writ large. Narrow bunk platforms on steel frames rose from the floor to the low ceiling. If there had ever been mattresses on them, they were gone now, leaving only a slightly rusted webwork behind. Eight sleepers to a bunk, eight sets of bunks in a row, fifteen rows to the end of the room. Dim lightbulbs glowed in cages hanging from the ceiling. It was submarine-tight, but almost a thousand people could have been packed in here, breathing one another’s air as the nuclear slag that had been Chicago cooled four stories above them. Men and women and children, half of them sick or dying, buried alive.
Storage rooms lurked off to the sides. I wondered whether they still had palettes of food there, waiting since before my father was born. We walked through the tomb of the Pharaoh Doris Day, avatar of the 1950s. Dread curdled at the back of my tongue. A stairway at the end of the bunks led down. It was wide enough to carry a gurney down it. A faded sign had a blue circle inscribed with a white triangle and the letters CD—Civil Defense—and a bent arrow pointing down.