“Fire never likes the sound of water,” Mani said, voice thick with a hunger as strong as the Beast’s. “Fire prefers making steam out of water.”
Max used the space she had granted him from the Beast’s appetite to read the signals he was receiving from her. She was drawn to fire. Destruction. Rithisak, and him. He understood that she was driven to replace her shaman protector with another agent of fire. With Max.
A curious pride rose in Max, as if his simple deduction were an enormous accomplishment. And then he realized that, in the face of his own and the Beast’s instincts, bothering to reason out his prey’s irrelevant behaviors was an unheard-of feat.
He wondered if this was what humans were supposed to do, and what anyone did with the results.
Before moving out, Max asked, “Do you want to see your old lover die?” He waited for another sign to rise out of the depths of her need, as interested in his reaction as he was in hers.
“I want him to leave me in peace.”
“Death is peaceful.” Max sensed a weakness. His predatory instinct leapt. He saw ways to wound and kill with words, subtle as a poisoned bite.
“Yes, I think it is,” she said, bowing her head, words drifting off.
Max tried to see where his questions had taken her. He thought of the besiac snuffling over her as a child, searching for life as she hid in death. His imagination touched on what ate at her from within, the fear beneath her hunger. Words formed in his mind, a thrust closer to her heart. Anticipating her convulsion of pain, he opened his mouth to speak.
Lee’s voice crackled over the headset. “Max?”
He looked up into the dark latticework of the fire escape where Lee had hidden himself, a spider in a web of firing lines.
“He’s here,” Mani said, then moaned, giving Max and the Beast the pain they wanted from her.
A car drove by. Survival took precedence. Max raced to the manhole, pried it open with the crowbar. The squeaking of brakes announced the car’s stopping out of sight. Max hung the bags on the rungs, climbed down, careful to pull the duster after him. Another car passed. Doors opened and slammed shut. Voices spoke: quick, sharp bursts of sound with little pitch variation, and a drop at the end of a phrase. Khmer. Someone hushed.
Something tugged at Max’s attention over the Beast’s rising cry for blood. There were far more footsteps than voices. Silent men lurking out of sight. Professionals, perhaps. Or something else. It was hard to pick up the scent with the wind blowing off the river.
Another car stopped before crossing the intersection. More silent men left the vehicle. Max climbed down the service tunnel, slid the cover back in place, dug a flex-eye out and poked it through the hole. A fourth car entered the intersection, turned into the dead end, and stopped at the corner, headlights on bright. Blinded, Max brought the flex-eye down, took out a heat scope, and squeezed the periscope through the narrow cover holes. Heat signatures showed up along the building walls on either side of the street, but the center was empty.
“Lee,” Max whispered into the headset’s mike, “anyone coming at you?”
“Nope, I’ve got the high ground. Two squads of four on the flanks, small arms. The idiots keep checking the roofline, didn’t bother sending people up. Another dozen coming up the middle. They got nothing as far as I can see, but they look weird. I feel like I’m looking at a Village People audition. Locals, not Asian. The moron in the car has them lit up like the Rockefeller Christmas tree. I hate to think we had anything to do with training these assholes.”
“Up the middle?” Max checked the scope again. “I don’t have anything there.”
“Better clean your glasses. They’re right on top of you.”
Max brought the heat-sensing scope down and listened to the footsteps tapping overhead. The Beast grumbled, uncertain, as if it had been robbed of its quarry. The taste of blood was in the air, but none had been spilled yet. “Something’s wrong.”
“Relax, Max. They’re walking right into the killing box.”
“Anything on the river?”
After a pause, Lee answered, “Are you kidding? What do you think this is, a James Bond flick? You expecting fucking hovercrafts or something?”
“Nothing in the air?”
“Outside of La Guardia takeoffs and landings, no. Would you—”
Max picked up the Uzi and carefully hung the ammo bag over his shoulder. “Lee?”
“Those assholes coming down the middle, I don’t know—”
“What’s happening with Mani?” Max knew Mani was probing the men approaching her, provoking them with her sexuality while searching for the way into their minds.
“She’s cool, just looking the guys over like she wants to give them all a blow job. But Max, check out these locals. I mean, there’s a couple of them that’s dressed like cops down there, and a Con Ed repairman with a goofy hard hat still on, and a few street kids, and some geeks in suits, Max, I mean, Long Island commuter types. And women. One of them’s pregnant. What the fuck is that?”
The Beast was cold in Max’s belly, cautious in his head.
His heart raced, not with fear but with excitement. Twice in one night, he was being threatened with the unknown. The challenge was invigorating.
Lee spoke up. “This one guy, I swear, looks like our missing runner.”
“I thought you said you found his eyes and heart in his car.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to see with the light at his back, but it doesn’t look like he has eyes. None of these guys coming down the middle of the street do, as far as I can tell. And I’m thinking that blotch is the hole somebody dug in his chest to get his heart out.”
“You didn’t take anything to wire yourself up for the fight, did you, Lee?”
“South America was a long time ago, Max, and I ain’t a kid anymore. I’m telling you this shit is crazy.”
“Now who’s having a psychotic moment,” Max grumbled.
“Pop up for a peek. They’re past your position.”
Max pushed the manhole up with his shoulder until he could see a sliver of the street. He took in the men creeping along the side walls, and the backs of the group heading down the street directly at Mani. The flankers maintained their spacing and were focused on the car and building windows. Two men from each file aimed their weapons at higher ground, but the others’ guns also pointing high betrayed their outdated training: They were not ready for street-level attack. The men avoided looking at Mani whenever her attention turned to them. The points were almost on the auto gun placements.
The group advancing along the middle ground was packed too tightly. Stumbling, staggering, bumping into one another as if drunk, distracted, or oblivious to each other’s company, they bore down on Mani as one unit. Without weapons, they did not pose even an accidental threat. Max considered the possibility they had been drugged by Rithisak and were being used to draw fire.
Except the car’s high beams illuminated the holes and slashes at the back of their clothes.
Blood tainted the air. The Beast rose to the memory of atrocities committed on the dead, hungered at the fresh possibilities.
A point flanker stared at the loading dock gun.
Mani whirled around, looked at the fire escape, and shouted, “I can’t do anything with them.” Fear cracked her voice, and Max caught a glimpse of how she must have looked after the beisac passed through her village.
Lee shot the flanker fumbling with his weapon to shoot out the auto gun’s control mechanism. The flanking files froze. A voice shouted in Khmer from the car. Lee shot the other point man as, following Mani’s gaze, he pointed at the fire escape. Rithisak’s men fired at the roofline and fire escape, sending down a spray of brick fragments and cement dust and drainpipe fragments. Lee cursed in Max’s ear. The narrow alley caught the burst of weapons fire and amplified it until it seemed a roaring, fire-sparking dragon had risen from the river in a surreal imitation of a cheap, man-in-rubber-suit monster movie.
Mani ducked into the Lincoln’s trunk and slammed the hood down.
“Max?” Lee said, voice strained. “A little fucking support here?”
Max grunted to keep himself from laughing at his comrade’s nervousness. Their enemies were shooting blind and didn’t even have the presence of mind to fire up a flare. The Beast roared in his head, deepening the gunfire’s resonance inside him. It was eager to kill, and pressured him to join the battle. But the Beast’s joyful rage did not touch Max’s heart. Detached from instincts and self by Mani’s power and his unwanted role in her life, Max watched the firefight a few moments longer. The atmosphere of unreality seeped into his thoughts. If he couldn’t fuck Mani, why should he save her or her unborn pup? Why did he have to kill for her?
A part of him wanted her to die, along with everyone else aboveground. A part of him wanted to walk out onto a field of dead bodies and disappear into a world where neither the dead nor the living could touch him. But the part that wanted this wish granted did not belong to him. It was a piece of Mani left behind in him.
He laughed at last at the absurd wish, broke through the space Mani had created between him and the Beast, and embraced his instincts. The Beast tore into his mind, filtering the world through its blood hunger. Max stepped farther down into the manhole, letting the cover slam shut over his head. The triggers for the autoguns and mines fell into his hands when he searched for them in the bags. He set off the weapons simultaneously.
The autoguns sprayed their clips of whizzing rounds in a sweeping arc that passed overhead like a horde of hornets. Popping mines punctuated screams of the dying. The Beast’s laughter rang in his ears.
Alarms blared. Sirens wailed in the distance. The stench of smoke and blood and feces spilled through the cover’s holes into the tunnel, teasing Max, the Beast. Time collapsed into a desperate ball, and Max understood that anyone caught in its final implosion had the task of explaining what had happened on the street to officials. As he had already told Mani, he did not explain himself to others. The Beast’s rage surged through him in a tide of eager destruction.
The guns and mines exhausted themselves in seconds, though the din echoed for a while longer in the alley above, the tunnels below, and in his head. Max pushed the cover up just enough to peek and survey the damage. All the men along the walls were down. Moaning and twitching bodies announced that they were not all dead. Only two from the center group had fallen, legs cut to pieces by the crossfire. They still crawled forward on broken arms. The rest had gathered around the Lincoln. Some were trying to pry open the rear hood with their bare fingers, while others beat at the Lincoln’s armor. The squeak and scrape of flesh against the car, the pounding of fists on metal added an arrhythmic baseline to the music of pain Max had composed. Dancing to the music, a head jerked as if slapped, a torso convulsed, hips and knees shattered, each marking a suppressed-muzzle hit by Lee shooting from his aerie. The Beast sent razor cuts of envy along Max’s nerves.
“They’re not going down,” Max said.
“No fucking shit,” Lee shouted, making Max wince.
A side window shattered on the Lincoln, and someone crawled into the backseat to break through to the trunk. The same Khmer voice shouted once again from the intersection.
Max threw the manhole cover away, ducked back down when small-arms fire from the headlight car kicked up tar and pinged off metal. The Beast snapped in reply, straining for action. Max grabbed a flash and a concussion grenade from one of the bags, tossed them both at the headlight car, picked two smoke grenades and threw them after the first pair. Explosions shook the ground, and smoke roiled in the night. Concussive shocks sounded through the flesh of his hands stuck over his ears. The roadbed trembled, and a fine rain of debris stung his face as he looked up at the circle of sky above him. Max’s legs and arms tingled with restless energy as the Beast gathered itself for more direct participation in the killing.
Max held the Uzi over his head, street level, and fired a burst, replaced the clip, and stood up. The Beast sang. A single high beam still gleamed like a miracle through billowing clouds of smoke. Max emptied a clip, reloaded, and emptied another. The light vanished. Someone gurgled. The Beast sighed with satisfaction. Strings of Khmer, French, and English curses laced the night.
“That was really fucking helpful, Max,” Lee screamed. “Now I can’t see shit.”
Max put his last clip in and waited, flat on the ground on his belly, for a target to separate itself from the dissipating smoke, car, smoldering fires, street corners. “Use your night scope.”
“Those assholes around your car ain’t showing up clear on it.”
Because they were cold. Because they were dead. Because Rithisak’s power filled and moved them, and like an electrical or magnetic field, warped their immediate surroundings.
Max passed the back of his hand across his forehead, wiping away sweat, figuratively pushing Mani’s memory back into the Beast’s hungry jaws.
Doors slammed shut. Rubber tires squealed. A car drove past, and someone laid down a barrage of covering fire into the smoke. Another car started and rumbled off. The ball of desperate time shrank around Max.
Max turned back to the Lincoln. Bodies seethed over the car like a blanket of grubs seeking food. He took out the .45 and the shotgun, left the rest of the equipment and weapons in the bags hanging from the manhole rungs, and charged the car. The Beast ran with him, for him, carrying him to slaughter’s feast. Max murdered through the dissipating smoke.
Lee cursed in his ear. From the heavy breathing and shadowy movement on the fire escape, Max thought he might be rappelling down to the street. Between his own and the Beast’s excitement, Max tried to clear a corner of his mind to remember Lee, so he would not kill his ally in the throes of a blood rage. Something grabbed his ankle. One of the broken bodies from the center group lay on the ground, peppered by shrapnel and bullet holes, and hung on to him with both hands. A face, pale broken bone sticking through shredded skin, tracked him with sightless eyeholes stuffed with leaves, twigs, wrappers, and can snap tops, like a dying flower seeking out the sun. Max kicked, then went down on one knee and smashed the corpse’s arms and hands with the butts of his weapons until pulped bones and flesh slid away from his ankle. Luminescent, viscous white liquid spilled from the dead man’s wounds and from the newspaper-filled hole in his chest. Cinnamon scent mingled with the stench of smoke, burnt powder, and sewer-strong filth and decay. The fluid ran like sap from a tree. Tiny seeds and dried, crushed vegetation peppered the substance. For a moment, jungle memories camouflaged the Beast in another time’s desperate firefight. Max grunted as he shrugged off another unwanted memory, un-sure if it was his own or Mani’s. He stood, sidestepped the other corpse reaching for him, broke into a sprint, and hit the car in a bellowing rage.
Shotgun blasts rocked the layer of figures piled against the hood scrabbling for a way to pry it open. No one turned around to fight him or defend himself or herself against his fire. Max brought the gun to bear against the nearest head, a businessman’s neatly styled skull, and pulled the trigger. Flesh and bone sprayed across the others and onto the rear window. The body stump of the man’s corpse continued to flail against the Lincoln’s reinforced trunk. Max fired again, blasting a hole through the man’s back and sending his tie flapping over his shoulder. And again, up his ass. The body cracked and broke apart, twitching limbs sliding to the street in streams of glowing white lava, hands grasping at bumpers and tires and shoes. Using the shotgun and the .45, Max destroyed a police officer, two street adolescents, and a woman with a small shopping bag still hooked through her arm, shattering the dead bodies in a hail of ammunition. He laughed at the human wreckage, and the Beast devoured the carnage.
But before the broken bodies touched the earth, the Beast was howling in frustration. As with Mani, it was trying again to feed on what was not. Already dead, the men and women Max tore apart with his guns did not scream in terror and agony. They did not bleed hot life. Pain, th
e Beast’s sustenance, had already drained away. The Beast’s rage slipped and slid over the mortal destruction, claws raking over its own belly, teeth closing on its tail and snapping at illusions and ghosts.
Their hearts were gone; their eyes were blind to their doom.
The wail of sirens grew louder.
Max’s weapons clicked, empty. He dropped them, drew the Ruger, but the small-caliber rounds did little damage. Failure whipped his killing frenzy. He pulled and shoved the dead aside, calling on the Beast to give him its spirit claws and fangs. He cursed himself for not bringing a machete or strapping on a Bowie.
Max found himself between the car and Rithisak’s servants. Regaining their balance, the dead threw themselves at the car once again, tearing at his duster, clothes, hair, flesh. They pushed him back with their weight, crushed him against the cold Lincoln. The com headset slipped off. Plastic and metal crackled underfoot.
The Beast shook off its disappointment, welcoming the opportunity to rend flesh. Its power flowed in a tidal flood through him, sweeping away nagging little thoughts about Lee and Mani. He punched and kicked until he had space to maneuver, then reached for his closest enemy, a utility repairman still wearing his hard hat. Hands closed around the dead man’s head, Max snapped the neck. The repairman clawed at his face, as if it were easier to get to Mani through muscle and bone rather than metal. Max drove his thumbs into the mud-and-glass-fragment-filled eye sockets. The corpse shuddered, its arms losing strength. But Max still fell back against the Lincoln from the weight of his attackers. Others closed in: A woman in a suit and trench coat slammed her backpack repeatedly against his shoulder instead of the car, while another woman, pregnant, worked at his ribs with her bare fists.
A hole in the body’s chest, stuffed up with crumpled magazine pages and rags, drew Max’s attention. Releasing the skull, Max shifted his attack and tore away the blockage, reached into the chest cavity even as the utility worker tried to bite at Max’s face. Max bobbed, ducked, dug deeper, immersing his hand in cool, thick, sticky liquid. Perforated entrails curled around his fingers; organs slithered against his skin. He squeezed his hand into a fist, crushing rotten tissue and muscle. Pulled out vines and strands of soaked newspaper and coat hanger wire. The corpse shuddered. A gasp of poisoned air escaped the dead man’s parted, blackened lips, filling Max’s mouth and nose with a cloud’s kiss of decomposing flesh and fermenting shit. Max shook the dead thing by its chest hole. Bone cracked. Skin tore. Its head lolled back and forth, its hands fell away from Max’s face, and it lay limp in his grip. Max threw the body to the side, knocking back the businesswoman with the knapsack.
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