Hammered (32 page)

Mitch saw the flash through closed eyelids. Reflexively, he threw an arm around Yee and pushed her down into the water. He didn’t hear the roar that followed the flash bang, deafening in the narrow tunnel. At first, he didn’t know why the water felt so warm, or what the mule-kick in the small of his back had been. Then he knew the bullet had hit his vest, knocked the air out of him, and when he tried to kick upward and get his head above water he thought he must be stunned. Dazed, he drifted, the little ronin’s lithe muscular body twisting against him. He felt her fingers in
his hair, sharp pain and then sharper, deeper, as she dragged his head above water and he opened his mouth to take a breath. Something like a knife pressed between his ribs when he did it, and he tasted bright froth and the sharp tang of blood.

“Oh, Michael, oh no,” Bobbi whispered.

What kind of a stupid-ass cop pulls out his fucking trauma plates?
Casey must have been using explosive rounds. At least he’d gotten between Bobbi and the bullet. He tried to say something, to warn Bobbi as she pressed her mouth over his, still clinging to the iron ring with her other small hand, her hair like seaweed draped over his face, the red water turning sharp as it scoured the wound in his back. She tried to breathe for him, and he would have screamed with the pain, but it hurt too much and anyway the black, black water dragged him down.

Got her
, Barb thought with satisfaction, lowering her sidearm.
Two to go.
She forced herself to breathe evenly around the stabbing pain in her chest. Cracked ribs under her bulletproof vest, probably, if not busted, and she knew she’d torn up her right knee and right shoulder coming down the hill. But she was breathing, and that was all that counted.

And she’d bet a twoonie that she’d nailed the little Chinese ronin while she was stunned by the flash grenade. Things were looking up. The big space echoing around her had to be the confluence chamber, she thought, where the north and south branches of the river ran together. She knew from schematics she’d studied—just in case—that there was an overflow pit in this room, up the slope of a long concrete beach. The water wasn’t high enough for it to be a threat yet. The need to hurry pushed at her.

Cold enough that her body had quit trying to shiver
and was locked in painful tension, Barb fell back along the north fork, where the water felt somewhat warmer.

Razorface stopped where he felt the warmer water flowing into the colder, and slowly raised his head until he got his nose above the surface—only just. He breathed deeply, as silently as he could, feeling the inside of steel teeth with the tip of his tongue. Someone moved past him in the darkness, swimming slowly and carefully; he guessed that it was Bobbi from the sound of her breathing. Something hot trickled down the side of his face: blood from his torn ear, but at least the water numbed the pain in his ankle. The storm blew across the mouth of the culvert like breath over the neck of a bottle.

Razorface closed his eyes in the darkness and listened.

Somewhere down the tunnel, a red light pulsed languidly. Flash burn still swam in front of Razorface’s vision. He squinted around it, trying to look through the edges of his eyes, and thought he saw a dark figure moving upstream farther than Bobbi could have gotten. He fumbled in his armpit for the water-slick butt of his pistol, fingers too numb to ache. He had to glance down to see what he was doing.

What does that light mean?

It seemed to flash faster, but he couldn’t be sure, and then he saw iridescence shattering off of Bobbi’s lilac-and-violet hair. She swam low in the water, and as he watched she submerged. Razorface grinned, the cold scent of concrete strong in his nostrils.

Casey was too far away for a good shot with a pistol. Kicking with his good foot, trying to brace against the recoil, Razorface leveled his waterlogged weapon just above the surface of the river anyway.
Wonder if I’ll live long enough to clean it.
Hoping the water hadn’t fouled the palm
sensor, he pulled the trigger twice; the pistol jerked in his hand like a wounded animal, its action spraying river water across his face.

He heard Casey shout in pain and curse before he dove back under the water, explosive bullets smacking into the surface where he’d been a second before. He dove deep, held his breath, and grabbed the projecting loops at the bottom of the channel, groping forward. He was worried about the flashing light.

He was more worried when he came up for air, silently, as close to the wall of the channel as possible, and heard the claxon start.

The first shot missed Barb cleanly, but the second one whacked solidly into her vest. She screamed as a stabbing ripple of flame ran across the injured side of her chest, and then swore at the top of her lungs, returning fire.
Idiot, imbecile.
She didn’t even see the little Chinese ronin lunge up out of the darkness and thrust her gun hand upward, slamming her against the side wall of the culvert, next to the narrower side tunnel she had been swimming for.
Merci à Dieu, cela endommage.
She felt something break in her chest, tasting blood as she swung the barrel of her gun at Yee’s temple, revealed in the strobing crimson light. Her scream of pain still echoed when Yee ducked under the water, came up swinging with an elbow toward Barb’s injured ribs that Barb barely twisted away from.
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
But Yee wasn’t any bigger than Nell had been at fourteen, and it hadn’t been that hard to hold her head under the water when the time came.

Barb dropped her gun and dove at the smaller woman. Yee tried to sidestep, but the water slowed her down, and Barb wrapped long wiry arms around her, feeling Yee twist and bring her knee up, shouting. A shattering noise
filled the tunnel as Barb shoved her under, and under the claxon wail, as if far away, Barb heard the big gangster shouting frantically.

“Bobbi, get out, get back here!”

Barb looked up. Something billowed toward her, red-lit in the flasher like the smoke from Hell. Yee punched her in the stomach and bobbed to the surface, turning as well to see what was bearing down on them.

The Hartford Steam Plant vents sent pressurized, superheated vapor at temperatures in excess of seven hundred degrees into the north channel of the buried Park River. Neither woman had time to feel much pain.

Even as he shouted, Razorface knew the warning came too late. He dove straight under the river, the water closing over his head warm as blood. He dropped his pistol and swam strongly with the current, kicking hard enough that even dulled with cold, white agony lanced up his leg. He swam until the breath seemed to swell in his throat, bubbling out between his teeth with a will.

Then he clung to the iron loops until black spots swam in front of his eyes, warm water rolling over his body. He half expected the bodies of the two women to strike him, but they must have floated higher in the river. At last he thought the water cooled, and he let go of the rungs and kicked toward the surface.

He coughed hard on his first lungful of air, sweet and cold and full of the scent of the storm: saltwater and strange shores.

It was midmorning by the time Razorface hobbled to the door of Jenny’s shop and keyed himself inside. He set the alarms, armed the security, and left the ruins of his clothes in a puddling pile on the floor. The storm had passed.

He stripped back the military-taut blankets on her cot, collapsed on the bed, and pulled them over himself. He only woke once, when Boris curled purring between his shoulder and his neck.

They tell you the body can absorb a surprising amount of punishment. That the brain is hardwired to forget pain. That time dulls the memories and smoothes the rough edges, that the keen edge of the blade blunts with the passage of years. But for me, the memories have stayed sharp as if honed. Nine months in a hospital bed and twelve months of physical therapy. Two hundred and seventeen hours of surgery. Fear, and overcoming it.

Some of the fear, anyway. I promised myself that I would never pass this way again. And here I lie, eyes covered, face wrapped in cool gauze, body numb and distant. Sedated, pain managed, not quite anesthetized. Pins and needles. I can’t feel the straps immobilizing my limbs, the padded blocks holding my head in place.

The left side of my face feels … funny. There’s an odd sort of pressure in the eye socket, which is why I can’t check the time on my heads-up. The nanosurgeon bots haven’t yet linked the new prosthetic to my brain, and even if they had, it’ll be some time before my visual cortex learns to process the data. Children born blind can’t ever do it. You have to learn to see, and there’s a window of time when you do that or your brain never develops the ability.

Under my skin, deep inside my central nervous system,
along the synapses of my brain, microscopic machines are implanting cultured oligodendrocytes, reversing the myelin-sheath breakdown along my neural pathways, disassembling the creaking old wetware threaded through my brain and CNS, grafting pluripotent stem cells into a collagen base to replace nerve tissue lost to injury and to scarring. Tangles of denatured myelin clogging my synapses—destroyed by electrical overload—will be consumed. Other single-minded nanosurgeons gnaw away collagen-rich scar tissue in my skin and elsewhere, providing raw materials for the reconstruction while grafting in new, fresh cells. Bone, tendon, muscle—all can be mended now.

Still more machines construct smaller and tighter nanoprocessors against the inside arch of my spine—far more protected than the old, which are to be consumed as part of the process. There will be minor additional surgery to implant linkages—sockets, essentially, where I can be wired into the virtual reality equipment.

Once remyelination commences, theoretically, I’ll be good as new.

Better, in fact.

Faster than I was, without the overload side effects. Able to move without pain. Free of the flashbacks and the dreams. Unless, of course, something goes catastrophically wrong.

There’s no more than a 30 percent chance of that.

I never wanted to know this much about neurology.

For twenty-five years, I’ve lived with disfiguring scars, out-of-date technology, clunky hardware, and inadequately managed pain. Because I couldn’t face it again. Couldn’t face
this
again.

So here I lie in darkness.

And time passes.

And as minute fingers pick through the stuff of my soul, I dream.

Some of them are even pleasant.

I dream I stand over Nell’s coffin in my brand-new dress greens: cheap coffin, copper-colored with brushed steel trim, innocent of flowers. When your younger sister dies by drowning, even the Canadian Army grants compassionate leave so you can go home for the funeral. For the first time in my life, in that dream, I know I am going to die.

Fine rocky red clay trickles between Barb’s fingers, spattering the lid. I imagine from the inside, it must sound like falling rain.

I am sixteen years old. It’s December. The sound of earth on that coffin lid scares me down to my boots. It’s worse than the sound of Chrétien cocking a gun shoved into my mouth.

Even when I tasted gun oil and cordite, I
knew
Chrétien wouldn’t kill me. He was just trying to scare me, to put the fear of him in another teenage girl. He knew how; it worked. But I never thought he would kill me.

But that’s
Nell
Barb is scattering dirt over, tears streaking her mascara down her face, black suit immaculate. Nell, my little baby doll.

Nell. Somebody else I couldn’t save. And if I couldn’t save her, I know there’s no way in hell I can ever save myself.

It’s the oldest dream and the worst one, and just like always, I know I am going to die.

“I never should have let her take her life jacket off,” Barb says at last, raising her tear-streaked face to mine. “She must have hit her head when the canoe capsized. There was nothing I could do.”

Her eyes are wide and horrified, and I swear I would believe her. Just as everybody else must. If I didn’t remember
with lenslike clarity the way she threw me out of that same damned canoe when I was five and she was twelve, I’d probably even believe her.

She reaches out to me, dirt staining the palm of her hand rusty. I knock it aside. “Je sais ce que vous avez fait,” I hiss, too low for Father Oestman to hear. “Je vous verrai dans l’enfer.”
I’ll see you in Hell.
I never called her
tu.
Not from a little girl. I never called Chrétien
tu
, either.

Make of it what you will.

“You don’t know anything,” my sister says. “You can’t prove anything at all.”

But I can prove something now.

The nurses come and go, muddy and distant through a tranquilizer haze. Their hands are cool and efficient. They change the dressings and speak in low, calm tones. I think I mumble responses, but I cannot quite be sure. Sometimes it seems like days between their visits, and sometimes they come three right in a row, as if overlapped.

I know that can’t be right.

But it’s dark in my head, and there are demons down there. Demons, and fire, and the rag-doll memories of things that used to be friends. I can hear the devil laughing at me. He calls my name—
Satan dit.

What are you going to do, Sergeant? What are you going to do?
Oh, are there a lot of demons in the dark.

I remember my rosary cold. It’s hard to keep track, so I count with the fingers of my left hand, until I remember I don’t have fingers. Or a left hand. They took the old prosthesis and they’ve pared the stump of my left arm back to the ball-and-socket joint. The new arm will settle into the rotator cuff as if it grew there. Must already be settled there, for all I can’t feel it, because the muscles are meant to graft directly to ceramic, to plastic, to vat-grown bone.

It will have the same blue-steel armor plate finish as the old one, though. I could laugh at myself. Like a little bit of home, or something.