The Pure Cold Light (30 page)

He charged his tall assailant, grabbed fistfuls of loose, striped robes, and hurled.

Lobly/Lyell tripped up the steps and caught herself against a narrow opening in the wall near the top; then, with a quick turn, shot up the steps and tried to escape into the melee.

Mingo leaped forward and managed to snare the robe’s ragged tail. He yanked her back and himself up the final step. One driving punch snapped the dark, mustachioed head around like a top. A follow-up to the midsection doubled the body over, and a third uppercut lifted Aswad Lobly off the ground and straight back through the opening in the wall. The turban unwound, ejecting a bright blue fillet, which lingered momentarily in the air after Lobly dropped from view. The mustache, like a black butterfly, twirled in undetected spirals to the ground. Mingo faced about.

He bounded the distance to the edge of the mob and began hammering at the nearest exposed necks, prying stunned figures, flinging them from his path, down the steps. They bowled others over, starting a second ruckus at the bottom. “Not again, damn you, Rueda,” he cursed. “This time I have you.” Rhythmically, he assaulted each impediment, a fist thrust on each beat.

Somewhere nearby, someone tuned in a music broadcast, and an electronic orchestra erupted with a crazy Latino beat.

He punched a large, incommodious shape, but when he pulled the man around, a hand the size of a packing crate responded, slamming into his temple twice—
ba-boom!
—in quick succession. He stumbled across the bricks, barely avoided plunging off the top step, and caught his balance against a rickety table where a scabious little man was selling purloined canned goods. Under his weight the table crashed, and the tinned wares bounced and rolled into the crowd. The owner shrieked, pouncing upon Mingo, spitting in his face, digging at him with filthy nails. Mingo dazedly weathered the assault for a moment; his head rang with whistles and bells. Then the man inadvertently clawed into the deep cut in his cheek, and the pain jolted him like current from a whirring dynamo.

Mingo grabbed the man’s hair, hooked fingers under the stubbly jaw, twisted quickly and snapped his neck. A can of tuna spilled from the folds of the Boxer’s clothing, rolling across the bricks and down the steps. In the general unfolding chaos of bodies and debris, no one noticed the heap of another victim against the wall, where Mingo tossed him aside.

Mingo put all of his weight on his wounded leg in order to kick the table out of his way, and a hot bolt of agony shot through his thigh. He nearly fell but steadied himself before the leg collapsed.

Unable to manipulate the raging mob before him, he dragged himself up on a stone bench for a better view over them. He searched for the gleaming lines of the
crab
, but he couldn’t see it anywhere in their midst. They must have pummeled Rueda to the ground, smashed him underfoot. He could hope.

The turmoil seemed to be spreading like a contagion beyond the flagpoles. Mingo eased down off the bench and limped toward the center of conflict. He drew his gun, checking the grip, where a tiny panel displayed the number of rounds it held. The clip was full—he had filled it while trapped for hours in “security.” Nevertheless, it paid to be careful, to double-check. There weren’t going to be any more mistakes.

He next calculated the size of the crowd. It was conceivable that he might have to spray them all in order to confirm Rueda’s death. Whatever it took. That he might not kill Rueda was unthinkable, unacceptable even as a remote possibility. Suicide was preferable. He
had
to see this pursuit through to the end. The grinding pain in his thigh would keep him alert to his purpose.

Once again he tried to thread himself into the midst of the melee. The steroidal gorilla who had cuffed him had wandered off. Nevertheless, the outer ranks closed tighter before he reached them, as if resentful of his attempted intrusion. He scowled and contemplated shooting the nearest Boxers. Nothing was more demeaning than being ineffectual.

Before he could make up his mind, a wonderful and miraculous thing occurred—the crowd began to disperse of its own accord.

The tight knot of people unraveled slowly, drawing away from the core. Mingo held the Ingram tight by his side, ready for the instant when he spotted his adversary. Nearer and nearer he edged toward the epicenter. More and more people pulled away, like shrapnel thrown off by an explosion. The fight had gone out of them; they didn’t know what to do or where to go next. In fact some of them seemed to be fleeing. Whatever the cause, he brushed past them with no trouble. The frenetic dance tune cut off in mid-note.

There was fresh blood on the white marble. The dawn’s light flashed in it. His heart hammered. His spirit soared. Surely, they had killed Rueda—that was why they were dispersing. There was no reason to continue, they’d torn him apart. But where was the corpse, where the bits and pieces? The last half dozen of them turned aside, disconcerted, their instincts guiding them away from Mingo as well.

Now he could see straight down to the dried-up fountain, to the Liberty Bell enclosure, all the way to the cupola of Independence Hall glowing pink in the light of dawn.

Impossibly yet incontrovertibly, Angel Rueda had disappeared. Vanished into space.

Some cog broke loose and jammed the perfect mechanism inside Mingo. He stood, feet planted, unable to sort it out. For a brief moment he considered putting the gun to his own throbbing, wounded head and pulling the trigger.
Suicide is preferable.
Eyes wide, struck apoplectic, he gaped at the white marble flooring and willed body parts to manifest themselves before him. He wanted severed limbs, crushed bones, heart and kidneys and spine; but most of all he wanted that damned elusive cybernetic head. Wanted to see it hoisted on a pole like an executioner’s trophy.

“
Rueda
!” he bellowed, sustaining the last syllable operatically, a raging Alberich upon the stage, flinging his curse so powerful it could snap tree trunks and split mountains: “
Verflucht sei dieser Ring, Rueda
!”

The whole of Box City stilled and a thousand heads turned to look at the murderous black figure on the top step of the quadrangle, lighted orange in the fires of the dawn.

***

Angel heard his name and looked up, too.

A ghost had rescued him.

The hydra mob of a hundred limbs that he had plunged into had dragged him down to the marble tiles. He had expected to be killed and he hoped it would be swift.

He’d skidded onto his wounded shoulder and cried out at the fresh pain, pinned his elbows against his head and curled instinctively into a ball. Feet and fists struck at him, but the crush of so many bodies enfeebled their actions. A few short jabs stung him, a snapped kick at his ribs barely scraped his side.

One of the attackers directly over him fell prey to phobia, turned on his fellows, and began scrabbling madly to get out, bleating with foam-flecked lips, the sound drowned in the roar of the crowd. When the Boxer started peeing himself, the clutch quickly disgorged him. Music began to play.

Somebody grabbed onto the bypass unit to wrench it free. Angel thought his neck would pull apart, and he tore the hands loose, then rolled to the side. A knee collided with his face, shooting bright sparks under his eyelids. Blood flowed warmly over his lip. Something struck him on the back, shoving him forward. His head dangled over the top step.

Then a woman’s voice close beside his ear said, “Quick, get up.” Two hands slid beneath his arms and managed to turn him so that he could haul himself up by clinging to various bodies, ignoring the rain of blows as some of them tried to beat him away. Miraculously, the mob had spread out a little, allowing him room to maneuver. He absorbed a few more punches, but most of the people were now trying to shove him aside. They seemed to have become afraid of him.

The woman who had spoken steadied him. Her head passed easily beneath his armpit. She stared up at him with heavy-lidded eyes beneath thick brows. She had broad round cheeks, black hair. He didn’t think he had ever seen her before. She explained, “I know a lot of these bastards, see. They all think I died and they did it, so I told them I’m my own ghost, come to haunt them to their graves for killing me.” She glanced around. “Word spread pretty fast, hasn’t it?”

He understood: it wasn’t he they were getting away from, it was
she
.

He wiped at the blood on his face. She tugged him free of the crowd, which, as if in a dream, released its hold and let him go. The battle waged on but the cause was lost. He stumbled down the broad steps of the quadrangle. The collapsing mass of people above still walled him off from his would-be assassin, trapping Mingo on the far side.

When he reached the middle plateau—the narrow channel at the bottom of the steps—the woman tried to drag him to the left, behind a sidewall, but he resisted. He had to look back, to search for Lyell. The woman insisted, “You have to come. I’m taking you to your friends.”

“Friends?” The word tugged at him.
Who could she possibly mean?

“The others like you,” she said. “You have to come.” She dragged him behind the wall.

Then, from over the quadrangle, his name roared like a jet of flame, like a flare across the sky. It echoed out of the arcades and over the camp, and he stared back in amazement.

“Like somebody screamin’ their way out of Hell,” his savior observed, and with more urgency tugged him around behind the eastern arcade, down two more sets of steps to the ground.

They headed toward a ramp beneath the quadrangle.

“I think it was,” he replied. “Tell me who you are, why you helped me.”

“My name’s Amerind Shikker. Glimet sent me after you. He described what you’d be like, right down to that thing on your head. He thought you’d be here in Box City—don’t ask me how he knew it, but he did. He sure did. I guess he must a seen you on TV, huh? Like maybe an earlier broadcast. I saw that one.”

“Glimet?”

“That’s how
I
know him, not the way you do. When I found him, he only had one arm left and part of his head. Now he’s all back together again, only he ain’t him no more. I mean, who he is didn’t used to be Glimet, he was somebody else real different.” She shook her head. “You better not have me tell it, unless you want to get it wrong from the start. I know it in my head but I can’t speak it right. Just come on and he’ll tell ya.”

She led him down the curving, broken concrete ramp into darkness.

***

Directly above them, hanging over the wall in back of the arcade, Mad Bucca helplessly watched his catch disappear into the underground parking garage. Bucca knew the garage as well as anyone. There was just one place where the black-haired woman could be going, which supported Bucca’s assumption that she was one of Mr. Mingo’s aliens. He was glad he’d thought to use his magic coin when he had.

Getting down from the rail, he shoved his way through the open arches past an enraged fire tender who swung a chair leg at his skull. When he reached the inner plaza of the quadrangle, he found that the crowd had gone back to its general milling about, except for one group that stood clustered around what appeared to be a body over to the right. Where Mr. Mingo had bellowed his defiance, the light of the rising sun shone brilliantly, making the marble glitter. The metal tackle of the flagpole cables clanged overhead like morning bells against the tall aluminum poles. The man in black had disappeared.

Bucca pulled idly at his lower lip. Events were requiring enormous efforts at reasoning, which happened to be an atrophied faculty in Bucca. Complexity and decision-making were at the top of the list of things from which Boxers in general had escaped, and Bucca was no exception. The simplest divergence posed a conundrum that could tie him up for several hours or even days.

He was still standing indecisively at the same spot at the top of the quadrangle when the first of a dozen fires broke out below.

Chapter Twenty-One: Toward an Explanation

They wedged their way through a split in the wall of the parking garage, and entered another world.

To Angel the woman named Shikker became a lifeline, and the journey she forced upon him took the form of an endless descent into a sunken realm where sound was the guiding sense. Had she let go of him at any point, he had no doubt that he would have meandered in darkness for an eternity and died in black confusion. What magic guided her in a realm so totally lightless that there was no discernible difference between open and closed eyes? What kept at bay the things scrabbling along to the sides, the things fluttering above him? It was as though the two of them walked a magical path through enchantment, through hell, and so long as they held to their course, the million lurking demons could not touch them. He hadn’t known till then that he had an imagination. He was sure he hadn’t possessed one the day before.

Once they had climbed through the hole, Shikker did not speak. Angel listened to the crunch of gravel underfoot, the skitter of broken things, the splash of unexpected puddles. Smells of all sorts wafted in and around them on various breezes. There was the obvious odor of urine, the organic stench of mildew, even the smell of smoke from God knew where. None of these offered him anything substantial by which to locate himself, and in fact only caused him to lose track of where he was while he pondered them. He stumbled from time to time, but Shikker did not. Nor did her grip ever relax. It was forged, welded, seamless.

Eventually, they leveled off. She tugged him over an ankle-high barrier; he nearly fell on his face. The strength in her arm kept him up. Then he started tripping over raised objects set at regular intervals in the floor of the impenetrable tunnel. He developed a sense of the spacing of these and began striding from strip to strip. Every so often the spacing changed, and he stumbled again before re-gauging his stride. At one point he sprawled forward onto his knees, and she lifted him back up as if he weighed nothing and they continued on—all without a word passing between them.

He stuck his free hand in his jacket pocket and felt something small and hard there. He thought at first he had found another cube, but it was round, thin. It was a coin, and he didn’t remember having it when he had searched through his pockets earlier in front of the umbrella woman, but he closed his fist around it, pressing it into his palm.