Divine Fire

by Melanie Jackson

  He hadn’t heard these sounds for a long while, but one never really forgot the sick thrill of being under fire, of standing at the border that separated life from extinction while some hostile person tried to hurry you over the edge at the point of a gun.

  Interesting to note—there was a clear, almost operatic echo that followed the first crack. That sound, combined with the direction of the stones, told him where his attacker was shooting from in the long gallery that encircled the library dome.

  The second bit of data was analyzed even as he rolled for deeper cover: The shooter was using a rifle. A long one. Probably a Remington. A handgun would have sounded more like a bark. The clap had been much louder. This fellow wasn’t larking about with a pellet gun or a lady’s purse pistol. But then, he’d already known that.

  A second bullet went into the floor near his foot, this time muffled. The shot came quickly, but not quickly enough to catch him. Damien looked at the bloom of copper in the carpet and thought, It looks pretty nestled in the rug. Far prettier there than lodged in my body. He knew this from past experience. He’d been shot before. Several times, in fact. Neither he nor the bullets were improved by the experience.

  The Remington was an odd choice of gun, though. Old-fashioned. Not that he wasn’t thankful the creature didn’t have an Uzi.

  Damien reflexively checked his own gun. Usually, a pistol was no match for a rifle when handled by an average marksman, but he was not an average shot. And his target was making no effort to stand behind cover. The hulking creature just stood there in the open, blazing away as if he were invulnerable.

  And maybe he was.

  A third point—and the best as far as Damien was concerned: The attacker wasn’t a good shot and had been wasting ammunition on these unsuccessful attacks. Soon he would need to reload. That would be Damien’s moment of opportunity.

  Even if the creature was a crack shot, Damien would still take him on. Because it wasn’t Damien’s day to die. He and Brice had things to do, places to see, people to find. He was going to live for a long time to come—they both were. Other people might be questioning themselves about now, wondering if Fate had caught up with them, wondering if it was time to let go and go gently into that dark night. But not Damien. Life had always been his choice, his goal—his destiny even. Let others give up, he never would. He loved almost everything about the human condition, the whole fabulous floor show that was humanity—the good, the bad, the average, the sublime.

  So, damn you all.

  Damien took a deep breath and then another, preparing for this last battle by night. He did not hurry. He did not let himself rage.

  Soon his eyes were readjusted to the dark. The prebattle pep talk was over. The creature had run out of bullets. There was no flag to salute, no stirring speech to make, no loved ones to kiss. It was time to go.

  Damien rolled from behind the desk and onto his feet, aiming and then firing in one smooth motion.

  The eyes. They were the best target.

  He looked up, aimed for the twin spots of yellowish white that peered down from the railing, and pulled the trigger.

  Dippel and the creature were finally gone. She could open the door.

  Brice forced the door open against the drifted snow and wind, then made herself step into the cold, stormy night that frightened her almost as much as Dippel.

  We’ll die out here, whimpered the part of her that feared the storm.

  We’ll die if we stay inside, answered the part that feared Dippel more.

  A sheet of loosely woven ice crystals immediately peeled off the roof and rose up like a ghost, reaching for her with cold arms. Brice flinched back, stumbling on one of the ridges of frozen water that rose like a dune every eighteen inches or so. She avoided its clutch by stepping back into the comparatively warm doorway, and was relieved when it came apart and fell back to the ground with a soft shattering sound.

  It was just snow. Nothing more.

  Hands trembling, she closed the door quietly and began searching for the fire escape—which had to be there. It was mandatory on all residential buildings, wasn’t it? She clung to the wall for balance as she threaded the strange frozen dunes that looked like ripples on a pond. Brice ducked down whenever she came to a window, crawling on her hands and knees over the brittle frost; she didn’t want her silhouette to block out the light and give her position away to anyone who might be looking up.

  She shivered violently as she moved. Lightning was lighting up the horizon, and the wind cut like an ice knife, tearing through her clothes and into her skin. It seemed Mother Nature was in league with the doctor and making a serious attempt to kill her.

  A plane passed overhead, its tiny windows alight, silhouetting a small army of heads. Brice had the mad impulse to rush out into the open, waving her arms and screaming. But she would never be seen by the plane. It wasn’t likely that anyone would notice the small block of darkness where Ruthven Tower lay, let alone a pale woman waving in the snow atop it. And even if they did, they wouldn’t understand her message or be able to reach her before the monsters did.

  It was hard to watch the plane go, though.

  Damien stepped over the toppled body and picked up the Remington. It had been a long fall, and the creature had landed on its feet. The leg bones had shattered into yellow kindling and matchsticks. The creature’s form on the way down had been imperfect, but it had really aced the landing. Damien had to give it a 9.5 for the flip dismount.

  The bloody lump moved.

  Damien stepped closer. The damned thing should be dead—its head was almost gone, along with the bottom twenty inches of its legs—but the body was still twitching, the hands trying to grasp at something.

  The rifle barrel of the Remington lying some three feet away glinted in the moonlight. He wasn’t fond of rifles. Perhaps it was his nineteenth-century sensibilities, but rifles seemed brutishly aggressive and inelegant. However, this wasn’t the sort of night when you refused Fate’s offerings. Not if you wanted to live.

  The rifle was useless without ammunition, though. Damien knelt and started searching the patchwork corpse for extra bullets. He noted, as he shoved the shirt aside to reach the pants pockets—pants from a tuxedo, unless he missed his guess—that some of the corpse’s wounds were barely fused together. It was apparently a recent creation of Dippel’s, perhaps made when the doctor realized he would need help in taking out the poet who had turned warrior.

  Damien worked quickly in his search, avoiding the creature’s grasping hands and with one ear turned toward the door. He didn’t want to be surprised a second time. He might not be as lucky in escaping the next ambush.

  Damn—he had to get to Brice. He’d seen her slip outside, a small shadow slinking around the glass dome that crowned the building like the top of a wedding cake. It was the best place for her to be, with bullets flying below, but she wouldn’t last long out in the cold. Especially not if anyone else had followed her while he was occupied with this creature.

  Brice moved slowly. She had no choice. As though aware of her presence, the storm had suddenly reawakened and shifted around to follow her. The first thin flakes of the new assault, driven by the northeast wind, were running hard and almost parallel to the rooftop. The bitter air stream and stinging snow left her nearly blind as she finished her circuit on the east side of the building. The bottom terrace had had no fire escape.

  Knowing it was probably futile, she had still climbed up the iron ladder to the next tier that ringed the dome. Staggering from the minimal shelter of iron support to iron support, she relied upon the diminishing feeling in her ungloved hands and booted feet to tell her if she was straying from the edge of the steep-pitched dome that crowned the library.

  The moonlight that came and went with the furious, rolling clouds was both a blessing and a curse. It lit her way so that she did not trip over the frozen furrows of ice. It also lit her way so that others might see and follow. Looking back frequently, Brice kept the steep-si
ded glass slope beneath her left hand and shuffled forward.

  She wondered: If she had to, could she manage to climb up the thing? Could her attackers? And was there anything up there except more of the sharp iron pickets that decorated every metal seam that joined the dome’s glass panels? Also, would it hold her weight or would she fall through, cut to ribbons before her body shattered on the marble floor some hundred feet below?

  A hundred feet?

  Yes, it was about that. Many stories, in any event. Not something she would be likely to survive.

  Brice turned the corner, escaping the worst of the wind. She was careful near the chimney stacks that disrupted the roof’s frozen floor. She counted five, all but one cold and smokeless. She wished that the one belching smoke were larger, so she could hide in its warm shadow. She also wished passionately that the roof had more than a thigh-high wall around it. The catwalk was more ornamental than functional and narrow enough to give even a surefooted feline a moment’s pause. Especially in the dark and covered with ice.

  “Just keep moving,” she whispered.

  She was more than three-quarters of the way around the building now and had found no sign of escape. She wondered if all else failed, could she burrow into the snow near the king gargoyle’s feet and perhaps have her little igloo be mistaken for a set of very large toes?

  There was noise in the elevator shaft, and yet another creature at the base of the stairs. Damien hesitated for a moment, weighing what was best to do. Gunshots would be loud, perhaps summoning others—not an advisable thing to do. Sighing, he slipped his pistol into the waistband of his pants.

  He crept up silently on the creature and then went in fast, coming up behind the patchwork man in a rush of uncoiling muscles. Just as he had been trained to do, he hit the median nerve to paralyze the arm that held the gun. Damien used a lot of force, more than he would have on a normal man. It should have caused enough pain to leave the creature vomiting, but the assassin didn’t react. At all.

  Not waiting to see if the creature eventually dropped the gun it carried, Damien brought his hands down hard, snapping both collar bones.

  Still no reaction. He had half expected this, but confronting the actual fact of a soldier who did not respond to pain like a normal human being was alarming. The very unnaturalness of it raised the small hairs at his nape.

  What the hell had Dippel created?

  Annoyed and further alarmed when the creature began to turn and lift its gun, Damien jumped back, pulling out his pistol.

  A part of him was amused to note that his subconscious was actually indignant at this creature’s reactions. Why weren’t they afraid of him? When you came at a man out of the dark, there should be something in your foe’s eyes. If not surprise, then anxiety, fear or calculation. But these creatures never reacted. Their facial muscles, even their pupils, remained fixed. Their blink reflexes didn’t work normally either.

  “Well, hell,” he said. “So we do it the hard way.”

  Not waiting for the thing to complete its turn, Damien brought his gun up and put the first round through its temple. The second and third shots went through the eyes.

  The thing was blind then and had no brain left, but it still didn’t drop its gun. Disbelieving, Damien lowered his own weapon a few inches and systematically emptied the clip into the creature’s knees and hips. Then he moved back up to the neck, attempting decapitation.

  The pistol was finally empty. Near silence and the smell of gunpowder filled the room.

  Damien noted with detached interest that neardecapitation caused total blood loss from the head in a matter of seconds, and it didn’t matter if it was done with an ax or a gun. The body bled out rather more slowly once the heart stopped, but still the creature should have stopped moving almost immediately. The shuffling feet were unnerving—like a chicken that kept running after it was dead.

  What was it trying to do without its head?

  Slightly intimidated, Damien turned and left quickly, listening for sounds of pursuit. And they were there, close by. Another wave of zombie soldiers had exited the elevator. He’d have to take another route to the roof, leading them away from his planned path, or he risked guiding them up the stairs and to Brice.

  Some legends said that zombies would die if their creator did. That would be handy. If he could kill Dippel, maybe all these walking dead would go away. He’d have to find the doctor, though, and shove the bastard into the great beyond. It was too much to hope that Dippel would suddenly succumb to guilt over what he was doing and obligingly swallow hemlock or jump off the building.

  In fact, the doctor would most likely be hiding behind his creatures, playing general and waiting to see what the shots were all about.

  Damien had to find Brice and get her out of here before Dippel got to her. She must not see the doctor. She would be repulsed, and might wonder about her lover and what he could become over time.

  Once she was safe, he would come back and deal with the others, Damien promised himself. These soldiers were strong and programmed to kill, but they weren’t particularly smart or fast. But Dippel was. Or he had once been. Very, very fast. Very, very smart. Very, very stubborn. And more than a little bit insane, even when Damien first met him. It wasn’t a happy combination in an enemy that one knew would have to be killed.

  Shots. From the staircase in the library.

  That was good and that was bad. It was good if it was Damien, or if it was the guards shooting at bad guys and killing them. It was bad if it was Damien and guards shooting at bad guys and not killing them. Or if the bad guys were shooting at Damien.

  What should she do? Go back inside and see who was winning?

  And get your head blown off? Get out of sight, stupid. Wait. And don’t leave easy tracks for the monsters to follow if they come out here.

  The only shelter large enough to hide in was provided by the gargoyles. And there was only one way to get to them and not leave prints in the snow.

  “Damn.”

  The wind was moaning an eerie obbligato that raised the small hairs on the back of Brice’s neck. It helped take her mind off the feeling of suffocation that was growing in her chest as the warm air was slowly bled from her lungs and was replaced with ice.

  Though she didn’t like it, she took her own advice about leaving obvious tracks in the snow. Brice climbed up the iron trellis and then carefully stepped from ornamental girder to ornamental girder. Finally reaching the west side of the building, she grabbed a thick iron chain that was anchored between the building and the gargoyle’s studded collar. She wrapped her legs around it and made like a human caterpillar, inching out to where more gargoyles stood guard. There would be shelter of sorts there, and she would be hidden from the windows. Maybe no one would guess she was there.

  Dangling upside-down was hard, but she could stare at the distant moon instead of the distant sidewalks below. It helped slightly with her growing vertigo.

  Her destination was the center gargoyle, a veritable leviathan of metal among the decorative monsters. She reached it easily enough and it was certainly huge, with a lot of iron protrusions to grab on to. Yet somehow the space between hip and scaly knee didn’t look large enough when one was making an eight-foot drop from a swaying chain.

  More shots. More wind. Another flash of lightning. Brice tried not to flinch.

  Neck craned downward as she checked her position one last time, and feeling especially heavy with the load of cold fear in her belly, she let go with her legs and extended her body as far as it would go. Though less than three feet stood between her and the monstrous shelter, it seemed a distance of yards—even miles.

  Hands screaming with pain and going numb, she finally let go. Brice landed with a teeth-rattling jar, missing her intended handhold on the creature’s chest plate, but managed not to scream or fall off.

  Mission accomplished.

  Sobbing once, she curled up in the gargoyle’s lap and peered under its scaly arm back at the door she
had come through—when? How long had she been outside? She was having trouble judging the passage of time.

  The wind moaned. Brice got colder.

  There hadn’t been any shots for a while. And she was cold, so very, very cold. Could she get up now?

  Her brain began a babbling litany. Where was Damien? He’d said he was coming right back. He was a crack shot. And maybe he had guards to help him. Everything was fine. Fine! But where was he?

  Hearing a stealthy rustle behind her, she whipped around in the opposite direction and peered down at the ledge.

  It was a mistake.

  The view of the street below was terrifying and, unfortunately, vertigo-inducing. One peep over the side had bile clawing up from her stomach and trying to escape her mouth. Heights didn’t usually bother her, but knowing that those tiny lights in the distance were actually automobiles served to remind her of how small and fragile, and how high up, she was. There should have been streetlights to fill out the lighting, but darkness had flooded that part of the city. She was sure Damien was right. This wasn’t something brought about by a careless power operator somewhere; Dippel had planned his attack carefully.

  Moaning softly, Brice retreated as far from the edge as she could, clinging tighter to the leering gargoyle, not minding his teeth pressed to her breast so long as he kept her safe from the ground and the eerie westering moon, which said mockingly as it peeked through the clouds that she was still on the wrong side of sunrise, in the place where evil held sway.

  The lightning also marched closer and closer, though Brice kept her eyes and ears closed to it. She didn’t want to think about having to leave the gargoyle yet. Or trying to negotiate an iron fire escape—supposing she could find one—with lightning striking around her.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please help me now.”

  “My pleasure, but stop suckling that beast and give me your hand,” Damien whispered back impatiently, as though her being on the roof wasn’t at least partly his fault and his appearance wasn’t a miracle.