by Tad Williams
“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 lurid 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 anything 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?”
He spat. It didn’t make it off his chin. He finally rubbed it away with his muddy arm, which left him looking like a war-painted otter. “No. Fucking thing popped out somewhere along the parade route. My gun, too. You still have that plastic piece of shit you got from Orban?”
I showed him the Five-Seven.
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said. “I got nothing but a flashlight and a headache.”
“Then we’d better start walking. Which way?”
He climbed to his knees, then cautiously lifted himself enough to look around. Other than massive power pylons looming on either side of us and the dark wires that sagged between them like scratches across the face of the moon, there were no landmarks I recognized except the faint, dark outline of Shoreline Park looming out of the bay a short distance south of us. “We’re only a couple of miles from my place,” Sam said. “We can probably get there from here without being spotted, and I’ve got a fuckin’ armory hidden under the floorboards for just this kind of evening’s entertainment.”
“Go.” I didn’t have the energy to wait any longer. I knew if I didn’t get moving soon I’d forget how it all worked. I hadn’t been hit by any bullets, but I felt like someone had taken a piece of pipe to me and shifted a few things around in my torso and head pretty good. “Liked the gaff hook, by the way.”
“I guess the Ralston does fishing charters. Darn nice hotel.”
“Yeah. Well, they won’t be doing any for a while because we just sank both their boats.”
It was a long, slow trek by moonlight over the squelching ground and watery ruts, through pickleweed and salt grass and all kinds of other stuff that naturalists love but which is pure hell to wade through when your body’s covered in bloody scrapes. As we got closer to the end of the nature preserve, I could see a few fluorescents burning in an office complex that backed onto the slough we were currently following. This tiny hint of civilization cheered me, but there was no way I wanted to go near that much light until we were almost at Sam’s front door.
He finally led us over a little bridge that crossed the slough and into a tidy little park. The moonlight picked out picnic tables and a kiddie area with a slide and some swings. “Garcia Park,” Sam said. “We’re close-we won’t even have to go near a main road. There’s a cemetery on the far side of this, then it’s only a hop and a skip across the fields to my place.”
“Do you see me hopping or skipping?” I asked, tired and sore beyond belief, but his mention of the cemetery had reminded me of one of the odder things Fatback had told me about the real Reverend Habari he’d found, and that made me quiet again.
The park was a small one, and before too long we were laboriously climbing over the iron pickets that fenced the cemetery. “I remember this place,” I said as we made our way between the monuments. The graveyard had gone more than a little to seed-it looked like the last time anyone had mowed the grass might have been last fall, and the only flowers were plastic, fake as tinsel, even by moonlight. “You used to hang out here a lot,” I said. “I even came with you a couple of times.”
Sam was silent for a few steps. “Drinking days,” he said at last. “Yeah, I killed a few bottles out here. Helps a man keep things in perspective.”
“Cemeteries or empty bottles?”
“Both.”
I didn’t point out to my buddy that he wasn’t actually a man and hadn’t been one for some time, if ever-none of us earthbound angels likes being reminded. Instead, I was trying to recall exactly what Fatback had told me-southeast corner? As best as I could tell, that seemed to be where we were headed, but it was another reason to miss my phone and all my notes. “Hey, let me have the flashlight, will you?”
Sam gave me a strange look. “What the hell do you want it for? We’re trying to keep a low profile out here.”
“Just something I was thinking about. C’mon, we haven’t heard a whisper of those guys in an hour.”
He reluctantly handed it over. It was a small light and not likely to give us away, but I kept it pointed near the ground anyway, sliding the dim beam across the headstones as we made our way over the untended lawn, much of which was more dirt than grass, a few yellowing strands still holding onto the edges of the bald patches like columns of retreating troop
s.
“Bobby, the light…you’re worrying me.”
I started to respond but something had caught my eye. I cut left and began walking toward it. Sam called that I was going in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t listening.
He trotted after me. “Bobby? What the hell?”
“Hell is not the location I’m interested in right now.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, but he didn’t sound good. “What-?”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his question because the distant noise that had been building for the last few seconds was now too loud to ignore. “Helicopter!” he said in precisely the way Captain Hook would have said, “Crocodile!” I killed the light, and we both threw ourselves to the ground, huddling face down and hoping, I suppose, that we would look like loose boulders in the middle of the churchyard. The stick-in-the-spokes noise got louder until the thing seemed to be right above our heads. A light stabbed down from it and swept one way across the cemetery grounds, then the other, but it didn’t touch us. I know because I peeked. The helicopter continued on past, and I could see the beam reaching down here and there but farther away each time.
I got up when I couldn’t hear the chopper blades any more and turned the light back on, then found what had caught my eye. After I had been standing there looking at it for long moments without saying anything, Sam clambered to his feet and limped over to stand beside me. “What’s up, Bobby?” he asked, but he sounded like he knew. He sounded like the guy who says, “How long do I have, Doc?” when he already knows the answer is “Not long.”
I let the beam play up and down the headstone. There really wasn’t any need to say anything, or at least I didn’t think so. The words were old and weatherworn but still quite legible, even by the weak beam of Sam’s flashlight.
