by Tad Williams
The first floor wasn’t damaged at this end, but the smoke and dust were even thicker, and the far end at the front of the hotel was clearly on fire, flames gleaming through the gray haze. I could hear screams now, and not just the agitated voices of rescue crews, but honest to God screams of pain and terror. I did my best to pretend that it wasn’t my fault—all this destruction and carnage just so Eligor could catch me.
But had Eligor really set off a bomb just so he could catch me off guard? Surely there were easier ways he could have done it—waited until tomorrow then thrown a cordon around the hotel being one obvious way. Why blow up the place?
Because he wants the conference stopped, I realized as we hurried toward the escalator. Bobby Dollar was only part of what was bugging the Grand Duke. The whole discussion was getting too close to things he didn’t want discovered—especially if he had made a deal with someone in the heavenly hierarchy. His fellow demon lords would forgive any kind of murder or treachery but they would never forgive a deal with the enemy.
“Shit,” said Sam, staring down at the long, unmoving escalator. “Of course. Power’s off.”
“Then we do it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “Don’t trip.”
When we were halfway down the bad guys came out of the smoke and dust behind us like armed ghosts. They were shouting for us to stop, but they weren’t pretending to be police any more, and if they didn’t really want to kill me they were doing a good job of acting like they did. A stream of automatic fire took the rubber handrail off just behind Sam, so that it flew through the air like a dying mamba. The next burst laid a trail of holes down the aluminum escalator wall in front of me. Another pak-pak-pak blew the crystal chandelier hanging over our heads into glittering splinters, raining sharp fragments down on us.
We ran with our heads down as the floor-to-ceiling glass windows exploded into shards behind us. We ducked out through one of the automatic doors our pursuers had just conveniently blown into powder and then sprinted along the edge of the pool, both bent over like Quasimodo searching desperately for a bathroom. Out in the comparatively clean, cold bay air I realized for the first time how much smoke and particulate I’d been breathing and silently thanked my bosses for lending me a good, sturdy body in which to run for my life.
“We need to buy some time,” I gasped.
When the men in combat gear burst out of the hotel after us, Sam and I both turned and began firing. They dropped back into the cover of the doorway and returned a few volleys, but they were shooting wildly.
I had squeezed the trigger several times before I realized that I’d only had twenty shots to start, and unless I found the time somewhere to hand-load the shells jingling in my pocket, fifteen or sixteen shots was all I was going to have for a while. I would need to be careful.
We fired as we ran, just like Butch and Sundance, and because Sam was a better shot than me, and because he wasn’t wasting silver, I let him do most of the shooting. We skirted the pool, ran down a tanbark-covered embankment (ripping the hell out of a bunch of inoffensive plants some hotel gardener had probably spent several days placing just so) and then hurried along the jetty beside the boats with their furled sails. The bigger ships had their own part of the marina, but I doubted that was where we’d find what I was looking for.
“It’ll be over here,” I told Sam. “By the harbor master’s office.”
“And ‘it’ is what, exactly?”
“Excursion boat,” I said. “The hotel does their own fishing tours. Cabin cruiser.” Fatback’s hotel maps and information were going to keep us alive, I was almost certain. “I know you can pilot one, but can you hotwire one?”
Fire engines were screaming up to the hotel behind us, and the sky was beginning to turn scarlet, which made us better targets. The bullets started to chop along the dock behind us, and I reflected that even if Eligor had other, better reasons for derailing the conference, his men still seemed very willing to shoot lots of bullets into his friends’ expensive boats to try to keep me from leaving it.
We found the hotel’s twenty-five foot cruiser whose stern proclaimed it the John P. Gaynor, whoever that was. To my very cursory inspection it looked like a reasonable little craft. I turned and ducked behind the gunwale and made an old word literal by sheltering behind it as I fired several rounds at our pursuers, forcing them to take cover behind a shed. Sam was already in the cabin, on his back, fumbling in the dark. I found a flashlight clamped to the wall and tossed it down to him, then went back and fired off a shot every time I saw something move behind the shed. I think I hit one of them; I certainly heard the sound of someone made profoundly unhappy by something. Whether it was the same guy, enraged by his wound, or some buddy of his making a heroic play, one of the guards then charged out from behind the shed and right toward us, automatic rattling, the flashes on the masts between us throwing long, quick shadows. He was wearing a black riot helmet, and it was hard to see him clearly with the fire and smoke billowing out of the building behind him, but I remembered Leo telling us that shooting last was often more important than shooting first. I hunkered back down behind the gunwale until only my eyes and the top of my head were sticking up—parts of me that I would have hated to lose but which I would need to make the shot. I let him get to within twenty yards, his bullets stitching their way along the cabin behind me, shattering glass and smashing expensive wood, before I pulled the trigger. His plexiglas mask spiderwebbed, and he tumbled forward and slid a couple of feet then lay still, but his helmet came off and kept rolling, its progress as uneven as a fumbled football. I hoped I’d just shot a demon, not some poor bastard of a security guard, but I didn’t have time for a forensic exam. Behind me the boat’s engine coughed and then caught, and Sam yelled, “Get your ass in here!”
Sam steered us out of the berth while I was still trying to find my footing to get down to the cabin. A few more shots hissed past, and one cracked against the wall behind me, but already the muzzle flashes were dim as birthday candles. The shooting stopped as I leaned into the cabin, feeling for the first time as if I really might survive this fiasco.
“Where?” Sam shouted.
“I don’t know! What do I look like, Mr. Bay Cruise Expert? The hell away from here.”
“There’s a landing not too far from my place,” he said. “We can make it in ten minutes.”
I hadn’t thought of heading down toward Southport, but it made sense. I crouched beside Sam as he piloted the cabin cruiser out of the estuary and into the dark waters of the slough. The boat began to pitch as we got out into the bay proper, and the wind kicked up. My stomach protested, but I was just glad not to be shot at and not to be in that hotel, which now looked like something out of Gone With The Wind, hungry flames leaping on both the first and second floors as fire engines, ambulances, and police cruisers screamed toward it from several directions.
“You want to tell me what any of this is about?” Sam asked, squinting through the cracked windshield.
I weighed how much truthiness would feel comfortable. I still didn’t want to put Sam in a bad position, and just because we had got away didn’t mean this was the end. Eligor had a long reach, and for all I knew they’d reconvene the conference next week and start asking questions again. “I seem to have pissed off the hotel owner,” was all I admitted. “Guess I left too many wet towels on the floor.”
Sam gave me a look and went back to squinting at the dark water. I was glad he was being careful. The public wetlands start just south of Sand Point, and there aren’t many lights out here, because what do sandpipers and curlews need with streetlights, anyway? More than a few ancient piers and even some abandoned boats lay half-buried in silt up and down the shore, and most of them could punch a pretty good hole in anything smaller than a tanker.
I clambered back up the cabin steps, so I could hunker down in the clean, nippy bay air and try to get my bearings. I had about nineteen seconds to think about what I was going to do next, which I wasted on several lur
id fantasies of me single-handledly yanking the head off one of Hell’s most prominent nobles. Then something buzzed past me and smashed into the gunwale, showering me with chips of mahogany. The actual crack of the gun followed an instant later.
“Sam! Those fuckers are still after us!” I slid toward the rail on my belly, then cautiously lifted my head. They were at least a couple of hundred yards back, but their craft looked wider and faster than ours, and its full complement of running lights made it burn like a star. “And they have a better ride than we do!” I cursed myself for relaxing too soon: I should have realized Eligor would have more boats. I steadied the Five-Seven on the railing and squeezed off a shot, just to let them know there was a downside to all that light they were showing, but I don’t think I hit anything. I was now down to about half a dozen rounds in the mag and the loose ones rattling in my pocket, depending on how many had fallen out. “Sam! Fucking do something!”
“Do you really think there’s anything more useful I can do than keep the throttle all the way open and try to avoid running into anything?”
“Point taken.” I inched toward the stern railing, feeling very strongly that I didn’t want to get my head blown off. “Cabin cruisers don’t have torpedoes or anything, do they?” I called.
“Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me. There’s a Polaris missile down here under the cooler.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic just because I don’t know shit about boats.” A few more shots, or at least their hissing ghosts, snapped past. I chanced a quick look. “They’re gaining on us!”
“Fuck me.” Sam went silent for a moment, long enough to worry me, then said, “Keep your head down. There’s a nearer place I can land, but it’s probably going to be rough.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t ask.”
I popped up and squeezed another shot into the center of the constellation of lights. Their boat was higher than ours, and I couldn’t see anyone on it, so I aimed for the cabin windows but again didn’t seem to hit anything. You try shooting a pistol at a pitching boat from another pitching boat two hundred yards away, then you can criticize.
Our cabin cruiser’s engine was whining like a wood-chipper with a stump caught in it, and I began to wonder if we were even going to make shore. We took a sharp, deck-swamping turn toward the nearest bank and began slaloming through an inlet where reeds grew high on either side, hiding us for the moment. I crawled to the cabin stairs. “They can’t see us.”
“Stay the hell down,” my friend suggested. “You’re not that much fun, but I still don’t want to lose you.” As if to prove the opposite he suddenly swung the wheel wildly to one side, sending me tumbling. “Old dock,” he called as I picked my bruised body up from where I’d slammed against the outside of the cabin wall. “Now, shut up.”
I wanted to point out that he’d been doing most of the talking, but I was too busy clinging to the slippery deck with my fingernails. Try it some time, it’s fun! A moment later I saw a searchlight beam sweeping the reeds just to one side. Eligor’s men were much closer. The narrow, shallow estuary didn’t seem to be slowing them down much at all.
In fact, it slowed them down so little that a moment later the light fell directly on us and made the cabin glow like a Nativity scene in the town square as shots began to ring out again. This time they were definitely hitting things. Bits of wood and aluminum and fiberglass, and whatever else held the cabin cruiser together, were flying everywhere like razor-sharp pinwheels. One splinter about the size of my hand stuck into the cabin wall near my head and quivered as each new bullet slapped the boat. I scrambled on my belly until I could slide headfirst down the steps into the cabin. “Where’s this landing?”
“What are you doing down here?” Sam asked, risking a look back at me. “Get the hell up there and shoot something!”
Turning around in that narrow space wasn’t easy. I had just reached the top again when somebody or something squared up our cabin cruiser like a hanging curveball, bringing us to a surprisingly immediate, noisy, violent halt. I pitched backward, managing to keep my feet on the steps but smashing the base of my head against the low doorway. My gun flew away, bouncing then sliding along the darkness of the deck. I tried to crawl after it, but my body abruptly decided that my muscles should stop working for a few moments, and I collapsed onto the wet boards.
Even as I lay with a skull full of sparks, trying to remember which of me was the top part and which the bottom and how to make either of those work, everything around me, gunwales, bullet holes, shattered cabin windows, suddenly leaped into brilliance as a cruelly bright light set it all ablaze. A moment later I heard another loud crunch, this one farther away, and angry voices shouting, but I was still trying to find the correct sequence that would make my rubbery body function again so I could get up onto my hands and knees and look for my gun. I heard nothing but ominous silence from the cabin where Sam was.
I had just begun to crawl when shadows started clambering over the railing of our boat, dark, shouting shapes. I tried to stand but it didn’t work. Something cold and hard pressed against the back of my neck.
“Got you, you little shit,” said Howlingfell. “Fucked up the boss’s boat, but it was worth it.”
The pressure increased, the barrel of the gun pushing brutally hard against the base of my skull until I gave in and let him force me onto my belly. He slid the gun down to rest against the highest knob of my backbone.
“You think you’ll get lucky and make me kill you, Dollar.” He was breathing hard, but not that hard—it sounded more like hunger than pain. “But I’ll just put one in your spine. We can do everything we need to do with just the nerves of your head working—eyeballs, teeth…oh, there’s plenty to work with. You’ll scream out everything you know, Dollar, but it still won’t end. Not for days. I promise.”
thirty-six
departed this earth
SO THERE I was doing what comes naturally, dripping wet on my hands and knees with a gun against my neck, surrounded by the lights of Howlingfell’s nearby boat and the worried shouts of his men, who seemed to be dealing with a fairly large hull breach of their own. Even though my head had slammed into the wall thingy above the steps leading down to the cabin, and now felt like a beachball full of sand and broken glass, I still couldn’t help noticing a weird noise close behind me. Howlingfell noticed it too, and though he still held the gun against the knob of my spine, I felt the pressure ease just a little as he turned to look behind him. I know I should have heroically leaped to my feet and punched his lights out in his moment of distraction, but to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure where my feet were. But I did crane my neck so I could look, too.
A big shape came trudging up the steps from the cabin below, and for a brief, happy moment I thought it was Sam. It wasn’t—it was one of Howlingfell’s men, but he was making a strange gargling sound that didn’t quite form words. As he rose into the light I could see he was struggling with something; one more wobbly step, and I saw the gaff hook through his throat, the long handle banging against his chest as he struggled to pull the barbed metal out of his neck.
“Shit!” was the only comment Howlingfell had time for, then Sam came up the steps behind the gaffed guard and shoved him out onto the deck where he fell beside me and lay twitching, still trying to get that hook out of his neck. It would all have been great, except Sam’s hands were up, and they were both empty of firearms.
Howlingfell swung the gun away from me and pointed it at Sam. Eligor’s men may have wanted me alive, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t true for my buddy, so I did the only thing I could manage while down on my hands and knees—I slammed my thick, useless head right into Howlingfell’s gut. He stumbled back against the rail and the gun flew up as he squeezed the trigger, the bang so close to my face that for a second I thought he’d blown my head off, but the shot hadn’t hit anything. Sam took a step over the dying guy and, because he couldn’t get close enough to do anythin
g else, gave Howlingfell a hard shove in the chest that sent him over the rail and into the estuary.
Sam dragged me to my feet. I spotted my gun and lunged for it just before my buddy climbed over the rail and jumped into the dark water. I could hear Howlingfell thrashing nearby but couldn’t see him. I squeezed a shot off in his direction anyway, and then, just for good measure, shot one of the nearest moving shapes on the brightly lit boat, sending it spinning down to the deck.
“Tell the boss we need back-up!” I heard Howlingfell screech past a mouthful of dirty water and weeds, then I followed Sam over the side toward the shore. How many shots did I have left? Probably two or three, and that was going to be it. My pockets were empty, the loose shells gone now, just so many expensive, shiny pebbles sinking to the estuary mud or rolling across the deck of the ruined cabin cruiser. I hoped that at least one of Howly’s men might step on one and slip and break his neck.
The water was cold and muddy and just disgusting, but in that moment of unexpected freedom it felt like the finest spa treatment ever as we swam and sloshed and splashed toward the bank and its thicket of reeds. We had slipped beyond the glare of their lights, and I could hear the shouts behind us turning to panicky rage as the guards realized their leader was in the water and we were gone. The footing was terrible, slippery mud and tangles of roots, but we pushed and shoved and dug our way forward through the close-packed reeds like we were still swimming. A couple of shots snapped past us, and I realized we were probably creating a visible trail of thrashing stems, so I grabbed at Sam’s collar and whispered for him to slow down. A few more shots cracked the night but none of them came close enough to make me nervous. We hunkered down until only our heads were above the water and kept going.
Something close to half an hour later we abandoned the reeds at last and collapsed in exhaustion on a bare, muddy lump of exposed ground. The moon looked down with its usual magnificent unconcern as we coughed and spat out water and only the Highest knew what other muck, then spent several more minutes just trying to get air back into our lungs. At last I sat up and made a quick inventory. Wet shoes, wet pants, wet jacket. One gun with three bullets in the pipe and a few more that had stuck in my pockets. The rest had fallen out into the ooze during our escape. It took me long moments to make my cold, slippery fingers work well enough to hand-load these extras, but I now had half a dozen fifteen-dollar silver rounds in my gun (it would have been cheaper to throw bottles of Chivas Regal at them) no other weapons and no cellphone—mine had tumbled out of my pocket with the extra bullets. I turned to Sam. “Do you still have your phone?”