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Whisper of a Moment
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Part VI
Somehow, after that first bolt of revulsion, the insanity in the hallway has bled off some of my edginess and long-simmering fury. Instead of a keg I get a boxed wine cooler with a little plastic outlet valve, and Harris and I drink out of paper cups at a picnic table in the park. This is my first chance to study him as a personality, and there are things I didn’t dare try to ask him, back when just being near him made me want to break his head open. For now, I’ve put him off on the matters he wanted to discuss, insisting that I’ll have to be relaxed before there’s any possibility of psychometric reception. So we sip wine and assess each other without speaking, and finally I’m ready to start dealing again. “You’re out of high school,” I observe.
He nods. “Yep. Spreading my wings after a blowout graduation.” He grins at the memory of something he thinks I don’t know about.
“Going back after this summer?” I ask him. “To the PCP capital of North America?” I know the answer, but I’m interested in how he feels about it.
“Well, sure.” He shrugs. “Everybody I know is there.”
“The ones who are still alive, you mean.”
The grin remains steady. “Some of the dead ones can get pretty frisky, too.”
“So I saw.” I look him over, trying to project puzzlement. “How can you joke about things like that?”
“Doesn’t wear you out as much as crying,” he replies promptly. “And it keeps the brain nimble.”
“So when things go to crap, you toss off a quip and soldier on.”
“Or sometimes I lock myself in my room and OD on Tammy Wynette.” He refills his cup. “One way or another, I get through.”
I let a minute go by without comment, and then I say, “Who’s She?” He looks around for who I might mean, and I clarify. “The bravest person you know.”
“Oh. That’s Buffy.” The smile takes on a different quality: I was just laying groundwork for further inquiry, but now I know something I didn’t, and I push back the slow swell of rage. “Class Protector,” he adds, proud as if he were talking about himself.
“Girlfriend?” I do my best to make it come out casual.
“Alas, no. My love life is the stuff of tragic legend.”
“Nobody special?” That didn’t sound the way I wanted it to, so I modify it. “Ever?”
His eyes show he’s warily remembering our close encounter of half an hour ago, but he answers evenly enough. “I was lucky last year,” he says. “Or unlucky, it came down to the same thing, ’cause I had two women care about me, only at the same time, and I managed to lose them both.”
“Some people aren’t good at sharing.” I keep it light, but the barb sneaks in anyhow.
“It was stupid,” he says. “But, hey, Stupid is my middle name. Along with Danger and Lavelle.” Long swallow from the cup. “It worked out okay, no thanks to me. Wil’s back with Oz, and Cordelia … well, Cordy’s gonna be all right.”
These would be Willow Rosenberg and Cordelia Chase, both known quantities. Likewise Buffy Summers. I’m getting nowhere, and it’s making me surly, and for some reason I don’t want that right now. I allow myself one last attempt. “That’s it, then? No senior year fling, no prom night bonanza, no striking gold at the drive-in?”
He chuckles at that. “Who goes to drive-ins anymore? And my prom date left town after telling me I made her feel nauseous; slow dancing under the mirror ball is as close as we ever got, or ever will.” He leans back against the concrete slab of the table, and the casual posture and tone don’t hide the fact that he’s done with light chatter. “Why is my personal life so important to you?”
“I want to know how seriously to take you.” I toss back the contents of my cup and go for more; I’ve been drinking faster than he has, but with the two of us sharing, there’s nowhere near enough in the box to blunt my capacity. “You’re asking me to merge with some heavy traffic, and I’ve got no idea how much I can believe or trust.”
“Like I’d lie to a psychic?” He spreads his hands. “I’m not asking you to do anything, I just want to know if you can see anything that might help me make up my mind.”
Okay, it’s time to channel all this into neutral space; I’ve had my visit, I’ve learned what I could (nothing), now he wants knowledge I can’t give him. Even if he’s right about goings-on in Oxnard, whatever is happening is supposed to happen, and I’m specifically forbidden to interfere. I shift into stonewall mode, and say, “All right, tell me what you have.”
He lays it out for me, and I’m impressed. He’s picked up on a lot of the same material I have, with nowhere near my resources; either he has top-notch instincts, or experience in a mystical war zone has sharpened his perceptions, maybe some of both. Still, he’s brought nothing new to the table; I won’t have to stall him off, because I really don’t have anything to tell him. “You’re describing some fairly unusual events,” I acknowledge, “but it’s all arbitrary, unconnected. I’m not sure what you’re worried about.”
He nods as if I just made his argument instead of discounting it. “It’s got a familiar feel to it, which is what got me paying attention in the first place, but you’re right, it is all pretty random. There’s three things that make my neck hairs do the fandango, though. First is this little deal here …” He pulls a scrap of newspaper from a cargo pocket, and points to the photo and caption; it’s a reference to one of the bits of graffiti I noted down under miscellaneous vandalism. “See the writing on that window, looks like gang signs with spray paint? Some of it’s smeared, and some of the characters are wrong, but it looks like somebody used the Sumerian alphabet to write out a phrase in Latin —”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “You’re telling me you can read Latin and Sumerian?”
He looks shocked at being accused of knowledge. “No way. I mean, all the research we’ve done, you can’t help picking up a little Latin, but I break into a cold sweat whenever anybody waves a copy of Homer at me. And I don’t know Sumerian at all, but I had Giles teach me the sounds that went with the characters so I could write a limerick in Willow’s yearbook.” His smile is fond, reminiscent. “She liked that.”
“Okay, I got the idea, Latin written in a Sumerian alphabet. So?”
“So, it’s not just scribblings, somebody meant something by it, maybe meant to do something with it. There are other reports, but no pictures; thing is, they tie in with the other weirdies.”
If so, it’s news to me, maybe he was right about dialing down his imagination. “Tie in how, and what ‘other weirdies’?”
Now he seems a little embarrassed. “Okay, I’m stretching on some of this, but I’ve only been working on it a couple of days. Night before last, one of our cashiers didn’t show for work, and no one’s seen her since. She’s not the type to cut out without notice, and when I started asking around, I heard something about one of those spray-can designs being left near her apartment, only it had been painted over by the time I came around.” From the same cargo pocket he extracts a sheet of ruled paper, and unfolds it to reveal a scribbled list. “Dorrie disappeared Monday the 8th, and we have people going missing Saturday the 6th and Tuesday the 2nd. I couldn’t find anybody missing on the 4th, but I’ve tracked down incidents with spray paint or sidewalk chalk on the 2nd and 4th, besides the one at Dorrie’s. If somebody did drop out of sight Thursday the 4th, and I missed it along with missing graffiti on the 6th, then it would make a pattern: even numbered day, someone disappears and a maybe-mystical phrase gets written out; odd-numbered day, something out of Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not pops out for the next news cycle. And —” This time it’s a city map, and he lays it out on the table. “— the three disappearances were here, here, and here. If the same thing happened Thursday, only here or here, that would make four points of a five-pointed star … and if we take North as Up, that would mean the star’s upside-down, which means pentagram, which means magical, which means stock up on umbrellas ’cause it’s about to start raining demons.” He looks up to me. “Today is the 10th. If I’m right, and there’s another disappearance or kidnapping or whatever tonight, it’ll complete the pentagram. Trust me when I say this would not be a good thing.”
I stare at the list and the map. He’s filled in a lot of blanks with speculation, and what he’s constructed is the kind of makeshift polyglot you might see from a paranoid preschooler who’s seen the entire Creepshow series in one sitting, but there really is the suggestion of an outline there, and the implied picture isn’t pleasant. “You said there were three things that scared you,” I tell him, “but you’ve thrown a lot at me. Which three did you mean?”
“Well, the first was the time pattern: missing person, mystical markings, strange event, on a two-day cycle. Second was the pattern it makes on the map, and seeing that tonight would finish it out. And the third …” He frowns. “Third, on the three disappearances we know about, our old compadres from the crotch-rocket club were somewhere close on two of them.”
That one shakes me; I tracked the activities of the Pig Posse, but had it sidelined as a personal matter so I could avoid them. While I’m still trying to sort it into some kind of sense, he says, “Anyway, that’s what I have. So, can you get any kind of reading from this?” and pushes the newspaper clipping at me, the one with the photo.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I say, sliding easily into plausible evasion and reaching out to shove back the photo. “It has to be something with personal meaning —” I stop.
He’s right on it. “What?”
I look at the photo, at the streaks and curls of spray paint showing fuzzily on the window of some storefront. “You said this was, what, Latin rendered into Sumerian?”
“No,” he says, “more like if you sound out the characters phonetically — what I think the characters are supposed to be — and say it aloud, it makes what could be a Latin phrase. Something about ‘god in the door’, or it might be ‘way to the gods’.”
Yeah. Or “god of doors”.
I’m on my feet, and he likewise scrambles upright, eyes widening in alarm at whatever my expression must be. I’m thinking, thinking hard and counting back. I got here twelve days ago; little over a day and a half to get clothes, money, ID, a place to live, and then I began to contact my various consultants. Didn’t start meeting them until three days ago, but if one had already been somewhere near when I sent out the invitation — e-mail addresses say nothing about the geographic location of the recipient, best information put him close to Baton Rouge about then but there was a plus-or-minus built into that — he could have arrived here that same day to get an advance view of the territory. And if he found players in place, already trying to manipulate a minor demon with an interesting probability hiccup …
I still can’t figure any way to fit the pale woman into the picture, and we definitely have unfinished business, but for now she’s low on the list. “I have to make a phone call,” I tell him, and start for the bank of pay phones I can see by the bus stop a hundred feet away. He moves as if to come along, and I freeze him with a jabbing finger. “Stay.”
At the phones I follow basic precautions — keep the housing box between us, and my face toward him as I push the leads into the base of my skull — but I suspect we’re past the point where it would matter that much. I slide the card key into the credit card slot, and in seconds I’m into the phone company’s net, and from there anywhere I want. The first five seconds I spend confirming and delving further into everything he’s told me; some of it isn’t there, he may have gotten it word-of-mouth, but he’s not specifically wrong about anything. Then I reach out for deeper intel on the Pig Posse: their actual name is Los Malsuertos, I’m not sharp on my Spanish but it sounds like an attempt to call themselves the Bad Luck Boys or some such. Turns out that unlike most outlaw biker gangs they steer away from drug merchandising or transport; their specialty is the theft and underground wholesaling of high-performance automobiles, and they make it a habit to party at the casinos in Nevada at least four times a year.
People showing a preoccupation with luck, of one kind or another, and auto theft has gone down the last few weeks, so they’ve been busy with something else. Over into police records, tracking sightings and movements, and a patrol observation gets me doing a quick sideline scan elsewhere, and YES. Auto repair center, suspected of doing occasional chop shop work, and Posse members spotted in the vicinity … and an online map check shows its location to be in the precise center of the pentagram Harris sketched.
I pull out and disconnect and look to him, waiting at the picnic table and never taking his eyes from me, and I have a decision to make.
Not whether I should do something, that’s already been established; the strictures against my interfering in the normal flow of events don’t apply here, I’ve created this interference and I have to fix it, and fast. No, the question is whether I should ditch the geek before I get started.
My handlers will be horrified when they learn about this, but to hell with that, they use me because I get results and part of that is picking a course without hesitation and carrying it through quick enough to matter. Where I’m going I’ll be facing who-knows-what, and despite my feelings about him, Harris has a track record in hairy situations. I don’t have time to prepare the way I’d like, and I need a little extra edge just in case, and he’s it.
I beckon him toward me with a hard gesture, and he starts trotting my way, pausing only to grab the wine box. (Good priorities, though misplaced just now.) I’m already in the Hyundai by then, and I pull it around next to the sidewalk so he can hop in. “Better lock your harness,” I warn him, and smoke rubber out into the street while he scrambles to comply.
Right now is when I need the lightning capacity of cyberlinked thought, but I’ll just have to struggle along. The timing of recent events makes me suspect that there’s no time to waste, which means hit like a thunderbolt and use whatever comes to hand. Harris showed disturbingly good judgment in finding and arranging the facts we have, so I ask him, “Someone vanishes every other night, with occult markings to commemorate it, and timed so as to draw out a pentagram. What do you think that means for the people who were taken?”
“Could be a lot of things,” he gulps, grabbing at the door frame to steady himself as I pull a particularly tight turn. “But to me it says sacrifice, that’s why I came looking for you —”
I was on the same ground, so I cut in. “What I want to know is, what are the odds that any of the four — if they don’t have the fifth one already — are still alive?”
He shakes his head. “The day-after looney toons don’t really ring the gong on the strange-o-meter, it’s more like the stage is being set for something else. I think we’d have seen worse, or at least different, if there’d already been four sacrifices, so something tells me they’re being saved for a big show-stoppin’ lollapalooza.”
That would be good; death is one thing, but four deaths that I caused, even unintentionally, would carry some stiff karma. “Okay. Don’t ask me how I know, because I don’t have time to explain, but here’s how it is. We’re on our way to where all this is supposed to go down, and it may have started already. The people who were abducted should be there, if they’re still alive; if so, we have to get them out. There’ll also be a demon, not a really big horrendous one but he’s being amped up for some serious fireworks, and him we’ll probably have to kill.” Harry Doyle definitely wouldn’t approve, but hey, the shortest distance between two points is a head shot. “On top of that, there are the cycle-jerks themselves, maybe forty in all; plus, I have a feeling they’ve brought in outside talent to help them with their little project.”
He’s taking it well; with no warning I’ve switched from doubtful consultant to full-barrel squad leader, but he reacts as if this were a matter of routine. “Right,” he says. “Forty antisocial bruisers with definite sadomasochistic tendencies, one about-to-get-oh-so-much-worse demon, and one or a dozen mercenary wizards.” He rubs at his jaw. “Somehow I’m thinking ‘distraction’, unless you can trump me with ‘machine gun’.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with,” I tell him. “On the distraction, that is. Look, we go in, you do as you’re told, no questions; but if we have to split up, I’m leaving it to you to get the civilians out. You got that? We’ll run it together, if I can swing it, but if the situation starts a deep dive, you grab the victims and go.”
“My accustomed role,” he says, nodding. Then he looks to me with sudden concern. “Except, I’m used to working with superheroes. I can do dazed survivors, but are you up for this?”
I laugh. “Cocked, locked, and ready to rock,” I assure him; then, “What?”
He’s staring at me, eyebrows knit, and he gives his head another hard shake. “Whoa, for a second there you sounded just like … You said you’re from Philadelphia?”
What’s he on about now —? Oh, right, last time we were together I made some throwaway comment about Philly, just chatter to point him in the wrong direction. “Among other places. Okay, here we are.”
I’ve pulled up half a block from the target; if I had a larger vehicle at hand — a tow truck, maybe, or an eighteen-wheeler — I’d drive it straight through the front and let that be our distraction. Lacking one, low profile seems like the better approach. We shell out together, me ordering, “When we get inside, stay close, stay quiet, and do what I say.”
There’s a sign at the front, CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. I bet. Again in keeping with the initial indirect approach, I take us around to a side door, check through the inset window for observers, and then tap in a code at the keypad. The mag-lock releases, and I pull the door open, sliding inside. Harris is right with me, and in a hoarse whisper he asks, “How did you know the code?”
“Got the aura off the keys,” I answer automatically. Actually I added my own code back when I was jacked in, and ran over the building schematics while I was at it. There have probably been modifications since the plans were filed — maybe major ones, this place does have an illegal sideline, which means they’ll want to keep some secrets — but I know the basic layout and structure. We’re in the section where automotive parts and supplies are delivered and stored; next out will be the main bay where cars are hoisted on hydraulic lifts, that’s the largest area and the one where the main activity is likely to be taking place. Out front is the customer section, counters and registers and chairs, through the front windows I could see that it’s partitioned off from the work area. There are offices on the other side, three of them in the schematics but they may have been subdivided or opened out; and in back are toilet facilities, lockers, and a shower stall for the mechanics.
I crack the adjoining door and peek through, then pull it shut again. I was right, the Posse is in full attendance, and it looks like they brought all their bikes inside, too. Competing music blares from slam boxes posted here and there throughout the throng, and I see at least two card games in progress and one with dice, cans and bottles of beer featuring heavily in the proceedings. They’ve all been called together, necessitating the closing of the shop during normal business hours, so clearly something is getting ready to happen; but they’re all lounging and relaxing right now, so just as clearly the big show hasn’t started yet.
More to the point, I didn’t see any sign of distressed kidnap victims, so if they’re still alive they must be posted in areas we can’t reach without crossing the main bay. And that isn’t a place where you can flit from shadow to shadow, it’s one big open space stuffed with unwashed sociopaths bored enough to welcome some vicious action. It’s either go out and hijack an eighteen-wheeler, or …
I survey the space where we’re standing, shelves and bins of different components. Enough of them are electrical or electronic that I could throw together some interesting combinations in quick order, but sometimes low-tech does the job just as well. On a shelf at eye-level, layered with dust, someone has left a pack of cigarettes, with a cheap book of paper matches tabbed into the cellophane. I snag them, then pull over the rolling stepladder that grants access to the higher shelves. Harris watches as I climb to the top of the ladder, stick a cigarette between my lips, and light it; good, the matches haven’t gone mushy with the humidity. I fold the book of matches around the cigarette, leaving the lit end and two inches of unburned tobacco protruding from the side, and look back to Harris. “I forgot, I’ll need something to secure it in place.” He nods, looks around, steps away, and is back in seconds, tossing me a roll of electrical tape. Good, I snap off a strip and use it to tape the improvised fuse next to the heat sensor in the ceiling-mounted sprinkler system.
“We’ve been watching the same movies,” he says approvingly as I descend the ladder. “Cigarette burns down, all the matches flame up at once, sprinklers come on: instant distraction.”
“Better yet, distraction on a time delay.” (It doesn’t work that way, actually, the movies are wrong, you don’t activate every sprinkler in a building just by setting one off. This building is miswired, though, I spotted that during my online recon, so this one time it should go according to Hollywood cliché.) I cross back to the door. “Now, let’s see how far we can get before the water show starts.”
I ease the door open a fraction at a time, and when there’s enough of a gap we go out on our hands and knees, staying low and avoiding any of the sudden movement that people catch from the corners of their eyes. Within a few feet we’re behind a diagnostic machine of some kind, and can rise to a crouch; from there we move behind a tall red wheeled toolbox, and further on is a set of gas cylinders for an acetylene torch, and then more toolboxes … We get nearly halfway across without detection, the noise and beer and lowbrow amusements holding the gang’s attention, but we’re almost out of things to creep behind —
Water bursts from the ceiling, and the biker bozos erupt into motion and clamor, shouting and swearing and expressing their startlement and displeasure with loud, coarse vigor. No clanging alarm, too bad — anything adding to the confusion would be a plus — but the fire department will be responding sometime soon, and I yank Harris by the elbow, pulling him after me in a dash around the periphery to the door on the far wall, and somehow we’re inside before the motley bunch in the main bay can spot us through the spray and their own surprise.
It’s a narrow interior hallway, a single wall screening the three offices — yes, three of them — from the outer work area, and another door down at the end that has to lead to the toilet/
locker/ shower section. “Go check there,” I order Harris, pointing, and I’m inside the first office without looking to see if he obeyed. Whang! and a wastebasket caroms off the wall by my head, I dive left and roll, come up again as seven feet of squash-yellow humanoid smashes the glass over a fire extinguisher case, bleating, “Warned me, he warned me about the black suits, three fourteen you won’t take me you won’t you won’t you won’t —!” With an outward wrench of his elbows he simultaneously squeezes and warps the handle on the extinguisher, locking the valve open, and throws the canister at me. I dodge it but it starts spinning as it hits the floor, the CO2 jet whirling it around and throwing up clouds of vapor, and as I cough and blink the Skira’ad is on me through a swirl of mist, clubbing at me with a fist the size of a summer ham.
Block and counterstrike are automatic, but he’s at least twice as strong as I am and moving like a cyclone, strobing in and out of the clouds thrown up by his improvised fog machine, striking and vanishing and whirling out to strike again, all the while yammering his terror and resolve. Preternaturally intelligent and violently paranoiac, that’s what Wesley said, somehow he’s been kept awake (stimulant drugs, probably) as part of the process of keeping him under control. Even under ideal circumstances my chances wouldn’t be good, and with bedlam busting out around me and the odds so obscenely lopsided, it’s time for extreme measures.
I yank up the front of my shirt, tense my belly muscles in exactly the right way, stick my index finger into my navel, and push.
The enzymes hit my system with a neurochemical slam as the implanted capsule is punctured, and time slows; no, speeds up, but I’m moving and thinking even faster and my muscles swell with the surge of energized blood, my ribs creak from the huge draught of air I pull in, and with a shout of challenge and exhilaration I’m on the Skira’ad, chopping and smashing with paranormal power and quickness. The enhanced X that I described to the pale woman? I’ve got it, too, from both parents, and only the absence of a call from the magic lottery kept me from being a Slayer myself; but my people found a way to access that heritage, activate and call it forth, for a little while and to a lesser extent and at a considerable cost. I’m a tiger, I’m a tornado, I’m an unstoppable fury, hammering the warty demon without effort or hesitation or pity.
I feel like I could keep it up forever (though I know better), but then it’s over, the Skira’ad catches a solid punishing roundhouse swing at the jawline far back of his snout, and just like that he wilts and teeters and blinks out of existence before he can begin to fall. Score another for the quality of Wesley’s research: the biphasic gremlin pops back home as soon as he stops choosing to remain. It’s time to find Harris, and instead I spin and slash outward, and the man behind me yelps and drops the crowbar as my bladed hand chops into the meat of his forearm.
Ethan Rayne, just as I expected: devotee of Janus, the Roman god of chaos, the new year … and doors. “Hey, Ethan,” I call cheerfully, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and slamming him back against the wall. “I think I’ll be killing you now.”
A crack runs up the plasterboard wall with the impact; his knees are wobbly and his eyes don’t focus too well, but he still manages to pull up a smile. “Just like her,” he mumbles. “I knew it, same kind of lifeline …”
“Stow it.” He’s talking about the Slayer, the Thriceborn, and that has nothing to do with me. I give him a belt across the mouth for punctuation, and say, “Make it quick, I’m pressed for time. It was you priming the Skira’ad, right? These leather jockeys think you’re working with them, but you’ve been following your own agenda.”
“Marvelous creature,” he slurs in dazed agreement; I must have really rocked his noggin against that wall. “Would you believe, they were trying to harness his potential to aid them in gambling? Magnificent untapped natural resource, and all they can think …” Then his mouth goes slack and his eyes roll up, and I let him fall, I really am on a tight schedule.
As I step back into the little hallway, Harris is coming back down it, herding a knot of people ahead of him: five, so Ethan was getting ready for the ceremony that would have somehow sealed the Skira’ad into a permanent agent of calamity. I ignore them after the first glance, telling Harris, “You got ’em, good work. And I got our demon, so now out is all that’s left for us.”
He looks to the door we entered through, and all his comic bravado can’t hide the real unease. “Back that way? ’Cause I’m thinking we’ve lost some momentum here …”
We have, but there’s no helping it, there are three ways out but all of them require that we go back into the main bay. “Head for the far wall,” I tell him, “the one with the sliding doors where they bring in cars. You bunch!” I raise my voice, and they blink at me in fear and confusion and hope. “Stick with him, he’ll get you out okay. Let’s move!”
Out and moving fast, there’s no time for delay or planning, I blast straight through three of the Posse within the first few steps, and the rest start for us with a mass roar. I leap to meet them, I have to cover a wide front and only the speed whirling through me now will make that possible. No subtlety, no fancy technique, just smash and move and smash into the next one, throw off all the dampers and pour it on.
I plow through eight of them in three seconds, bodies flying and falling, and then there’s a moment’s space and I turn to yell at Harris, “Get them to the doors!” He’s staring at me with horror, his mouth forms the word Buffy (of course, he just saw me cut loose with Slayer speed and strength, except a Slayer is called only when her predecessor dies) … and then his expression changes to something else, something I can’t read, and his lips shape a different name and
whu
nnnnn
.........
I’M BACK! There’s a huge blank at the back of my head, someone must have landed a really solid hit while I was looking away, booted feet hammer past me and a few pause to leave kicks for souvenirs and it doesn’t matter, I’m down and Harris is on his own and I have to get to him —!
I find sight of him as I make it up onto hands and knees, and the breath catches in my throat. I am seeing the legend in motion.
How many times before this assignment did I go through the records on him, searching for illumination, savage with bafflement and frustration because the records told dick-all? Everywhere I looked it was the same: no training, no preparation, no special abilities or skills, no reason he should still be breathing after his first contact with Sunnydale’s night world. I was serious when I told the pale woman that his XXY status, even with the double protoSlayer-X, wasn’t enough to explain how he could face off against monsters and not only survive but, often as not, win: every eyewitness account (including my own, once I saw him) confirmed the historical consensus that the guy was a doofus, a clown, a goldfish among barracuda.
I’m seeing something else now. Even half-concussed, my synapses are firing triple-speed, the go-juice still rocketing through my system, momentarily melding with my cyberorganic status to pump my awareness to hyperacute levels. Surface appearance has gone transparent, and the truth sears through like a plasma torch.
There are three of him, fighting for dominance in his body, leapfrogging over one another to take turns in tenth-of-a-second spurts of control. One is dark, animal, primal, all instinct and savagery. One is balanced, disciplined, striking out with focused force and deceptively clean technique. The last must be the core essence of the man, something pure and solid and unflinching, the other two work through it but never overrule it, it sits between forces that should tear it apart and forges them into a synergy that can’t exist.
He leaps and staggers and lashes out wildly at the leather-and-denim forest around him, and it’s laughable and pathetic except he’s still on his feet at ten to one odds. His movements are so unpredictable that none of them can really center on him … and it’s no wonder they never know what he’ll do next, he doesn’t know himself, and his disjointed body language scrambles all the cues. He picks up on cues, though, the soldier-mind anticipating every attack and his beast-self twitching him away at the last instant, so that he takes plenty of hits but none of them ever connect quite right; and when he swings back he’s no stronger than any human (less so than most of these characters), but he does it with absolute commitment, every last ounce of what he is thrown totally into the moment.
This is how he dropped a vampire with one punch (okay, it was probably a fledgeling, but still, one punch!) when his other arm was already broken; and, within twenty-four hours, felled another with a blow from the new cast. This is how he went up against William the Bloody twice, barehanded, and lived to whimper about his bruises. This is how a kid with no combat background, no mystical capacity, no unusual attributes that anyone was ever able to chart, could save the world three times that we know of.
He’s a freak. He’s a brother of Slayers. He’s a hero, damn him to everlasting hell, and with all the advantages I’ve bought and bartered and cheated to acquire, I’m still not in his class.
I’m up again and plowing toward him in a sustained burst of bone-breaking fury, and his face goes slack with relief as the bikers turn away from him to react to my renewed assault. I’m blowing past all the margins, I’m redlining and I don’t care, all that matters is I don’t fail where he can see it. “The door!” I yell to him. “Get the switch on the door!”
He has his back to one of the doors, two civilians are down and the others are behind him, he must have swung around to fight a rear guard action. As I boil through the last of the throng separating us, he twists to stab a finger at the green UP button, at the same time shouting at the uninjured ones to grab the fallen ones and drag them.
Behind me I hear a motorcycle kick-start up, and then two more, and oh crap.
I’m with him now and I punch STOP and DOWN, he’s squeezed himself and most of the others through the up-trundling door and I catch up the last one by collar and ankle and heave her through after them as it lurches to a halt and starts down again. “Keep going,” I call through the dwindling gap, and toss him my keys, underhand. “Get them out of here, get them away, I’ve got your back!” Then the door touches down and stops, and I swivel to face the men who remain.
There are now four of them sitting astride their precious machines, revving engines that remain useless as long as the doors stay down. Another seven are still on their feet, murder and uneasiness in their eyes as they look to where I stand. They’ve just watched me go through dozens of their comrades like a threshing machine, they know they’re no match for me … but these are tough, proud, desperate men, any one on his own might back down but under the eyes of their buddies it’s just not possible for them. I’m blocking them from the escaping prisoners, and even as I watch they begin to gather themselves for what they think is a hopeless charge, the sprinklers still hissing spray onto the bleeding, moaning, broken men that litter the concrete between us.
I laugh. I can feel my arms trembling, see the grayness beginning to edge my vision; the enzymes are nearly exhausted, I only have seconds of activity left in me, and then I’ll be done. I’m about to die, and some creepy crazy part of me has never been happier. They flinch at the sound of that laugh, but they keep edging forward, nerving themselves for the final rush.
A wolf’s grin stretches my lips, and a voice I don’t know croons, “C’mon, lickwicks. Show me what you got.”
And they do.
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