He descended into a valley formed by two buildings rising on either side of a walkway, which was itself composed of the rooftops of buildings below it. At the end was an arch, beyond which was a wide terrace running perpendicular to the walkway.
Right or left? he thought as he hurried toward the T. North or south?
The maracas rattle of Tyler’s utility case started as suddenly as a flipped switch. Close, but the walls around him tossed the sound around, and he couldn’t be sure how close or even from which direction it came. He stopped, held his breath.
On the terrace, Tyler flashed past the arched opening.
“Tyler!” Jagger dashed to the terrace and swung right just as his son’s bobbing head disappeared down the stairs at the terrace’s north end. “Ty—”
Footsteps rushed toward him from behind. He spun to see a man dressed from toes to neck in a gray skintight suit. He had short-cropped hair, wild eyes, and the maniacal grin of a butcher who loved his job. Most disturbing was the handgun he clutched in a bloody, gloveless hand. He was pumping his arms in an all-out sprint.
All this Jagger registered in a glance. The guy was nearly on top of him. Jagger’s sudden appearance had not given Tyler’s pursuer time to slow; the man’s eyes were just now growing wide in acknowledgment of his presence.
That this nightmare was chasing his son sent a flood of rage through Jagger’s body. He stiffened his muscles and narrowed his focus on one thought: this guy was going down.
[ 46 ]
Faced with a charging madman, most people would freeze or jump out of the way. Jagger attacked. He took two quick steps toward the man, crouched, and threw his shoulder into the guy’s midsection. He rose, flipping the attacker over his head, sending a backpack tumbling across the terrace. Before the body landed, Jagger had pulled his baton, snapped it into full extension, and swung it into the hand holding the gun.
The man howled, but kept his grip on the weapon. Jagger raised the baton, taking aim at the man’s head, which lay between Jagger’s feet where it had landed. In a move out of Cirque du Soleil, the attacker executed a backward flip, raising his legs over his head and planting a foot squarely into Jagger’s crotch. Jagger dropped the baton and doubled over . . . then sprang forward, tackling the man as he tried to stand. There was no time for pain; two seconds of incapacitation meant death.
Jagger fell on top of him. He clambered up his back and pushed down on the man’s head with his prosthetic forearm, grinding his face into the terrace. He gripped the gun hand, lifted it, slammed it down, over and over.
The man drove his head back into Jagger’s chin. He slipped his body out from under Jagger’s and began kneeing him in the hip. He twisted and shoved his foot into Jagger’s ribs, thrusting Jagger off him. The man rose up on one elbow and crossed the gun under his body to fire it.
Jagger completed the roll he’d started when the man shoved him, winding up on his back. This put RoboHand inches from the gun. As the hammer fell, he flicked his hook, knocking the barrel away. The gun roared, and the bullet could have parted Jagger’s hair, it came so close. He pushed RoboHand under the man’s chest and clamped it over the hand and fingers that gripped the gun.
The man tried to jerk his hand away, but it might as well have been bolted to Jagger’s hook. He tugged and tugged, casting a stunned expression at Jagger. Jagger flexed his biceps, deltoids, trapeziuses, and the rest of his upper-body muscles—all of them contributing to the power of his grip. In the second it took the man to draw breath, Jagger heard his fingers break—like eggshells and Fritos under a booted heel—then his scream obscured all other sounds.
Jagger released RoboHand’s tension, slid the prehensor off the fingers, clamped the gun barrel, and pulled it away. He swung it around to his real hand, which found the trigger and grip wet and sticky with blood.
A locomotive drove into his cheekbone. As his head snapped back, he realized the man had elbowed him: a bony joint, powered by a muscular arm and backed by the weight of the man’s upper body. Considering the excruciating pain his attacker must have been in, it was impossible for the man to have risen so quickly and launched such a precise counterstrike, but the exploding nerves in Jagger’s face screamed otherwise. The man spasmed upward like a bucking bronc and came back down on him. His left knee pinned Jagger’s gun arm; his right foot slammed down on the prosthetic.
Jagger rocked back and forth, twisted and pulled his arms. He kicked his legs up, but the man leaned forward, out of reach. His mangled hand was tucked to this chest, and he was grinning. He reached to his side and produced a sword. Its blade was about two and a half feet long, three inches wide, and marbled with blood.
Jagger squirmed, rocked, pulled, tugged, kicked.
“First you,” the man said. His tongue slid over his lower lip. “Then the boy. What’s his name?” He looked around and called, “Tyler! Tyler!”
“No!” Jagger said. He rocked left and twisted his fake arm. It popped free of the man’s boot. He shot it up to the man’s neck and squeezed. The hooks slid over a hard surface, ripping away the scaly material and exposing a metal collar.
“Pretty cool, huh?” the man said and laughed. He swung the sword down at Jagger’s face. Jagger caught it with RoboHand, kicking up sparks and stopping the blade six inches in front of his face.
Through gritted teeth Jagger said, “Not as cool as mine.”
He twisted his arm and wrist, but with his back and other arm pinned, he couldn’t generate enough strength to wrest away the blade. The best he could do was not let go, and he wasn’t sure that was enough. The man was strong, and knew the kind of fighting moves that made him dangerous beyond his strength and weaponry. Jagger could think of a dozen ways the guy could push the sword into his face or weaken him enough to maneuver it free.
The man leaned over and rested his forehead on the back of the blade, which quivered under the pressure of converse forces.
“You know,” the man said, “we were going to leave you alone. But you got in our way—you and the kid—and that gives us permission. Not just that, an obligation.” He straightened, looked around again. “Tyyyyler! Here, boy!”
Under the man’s knee, Jagger’s right arm was out of action, but not his wrist. He tucked it in as far as it would bend, gave it every bit of concentration not already allocated to keeping the blade out of his flesh, and pulled the handgun’s trigger.
A red blossom bloomed on the man’s cheek, instantly followed by another, larger one on the other side, higher up. He spat blood. It ran over his lip and down his chin, along with a white chunk of tooth. He released his grip on the sword and toppled.
Jagger flicked the sword away and reached for the man’s wrist, thinking he was going for the gun. RoboHand snagged his sleeve, ripping it along a seam. The man thudded down over Jagger’s gun arm. The man’s own arm extended overhead onto the terrace, as if reaching for something. The tear in the sleeve revealed a glittering gold tattoo on the inside of his forearm—a comet or fireball, as far as Jagger could tell.
He held the torn-off swath of scaly material over his face, watching it shake as his muscles tried to process the flood of adrenaline coursing through them. He closed his eyes.
The man remained conscious, but not fully there. He squirmed and gurgled out unintelligible words. With the man’s chest over the gun, Jagger thought about how easy it would be to twist the weapon again and put another slug into him.
He heard footsteps and opened his eyes. Rising onto an elbow, he scanned the terrace. It was empty. The fight had taken him away from the arch, so he couldn’t see the walkway on the other side of it.
“Tyler?”
He reached for his baton. It moved away from him, scraping on the stone tiles, then it lifted off the ground. His mouth dropped open as he watched it dance in midair. It rose high, and that’s when he saw the eyes, only eyes. They blinked, and the baton sailed down at his head.
[ 47 ]
The blow didn’t knock him out, but it mig
ht as well have. A spike of pain pierced his brain, kicking up incongruous thoughts like disturbed bats:
—Tyler, get to bed—
—technically speaking, the brain itself does not possess the sensory nerve endings to feel pain—
—ha ha ha ha ha—
—I did not come to bring peace, but a sword—
—the children! not the children too—
—the monastery was founded by the Roman Empress Helena in 330 AD—
—you’re here at the pleasure of Gheronda—
—and that gives us permission—
—you and the kid—
—you and the kid—
Jagger groaned, touched the new wound, and pulled his fingers away to visually confirm the blood he felt. It took his eyes a few seconds to focus.
Fast breathing drew his attention toward the man lying on his arm. His back rose and fell far more slowly than the quick breaths Jagger heard. He noticed the eyes: they were hovering near the man’s head, which teetered one way then the other unnaturally.
A woman’s voice whispered, “Phin . . . Phin!”
The eyes moved higher and stared at him. White sclera formed twin almond shapes, irises that appeared black in the dim light. They shifted down, and the man’s body began to roll over. Jagger tugged his arm out and pulled it close, tucking the handgun under his leg.
The eyes rose straight up and disappeared. Footsteps pattered around him. The backpack the man had dropped floated off the terrace, its strap forming a triangle above it. It swooped around, and the strap became an upside-down teardrop over what must have been someone’s shoulder. He was looking at the part of the pack that ordinarily pressed against a wearer’s back.
Jagger caught a glimpse of the eyes and said, “Who are you?”
The pack bounced in the air until it hovered over the man’s feet. One of his legs rose, the pack rotated, and the man slid away, trailing a slick of blood over the terrace. His unelevated leg cantered out, bent at the knee. The man gurgled, shook his head, lifted it.
“Ev-ah,” he said through blood and shattered teeth.
Jagger wondered if his tongue was intact.
He shook his head again and said, “No, no, wait”—or so Jagger interpreted from the “oh, oh, aith” the man gurgled out.
His leg came down. The pack moved around to his head and lowered, stopping a foot off the ground. His head rose—too steadily and too high to be his own doing. Jagger imagined the hand that must be holding it, the invisible woman crouching beside it. There was whispering, gurgling. The man’s head turned, and he spat. More whispering. The head lowered and the pack rose. The eyes stared at Jagger.
“Where’s the boy?” came the woman’s voice.
Jagger felt ice crystals form in his blood. He regretted not finishing the job, not pulling the trigger one last time. He sat up, bending his legs to keep the gun hidden.
“He has something of ours,” she said.
“Leave your address,” Jagger said. “I’ll mail it to you.”
Silence. Then: “We’ll find him.”
Jagger closed his eyes, then slowly opened them. “Just . . . leave. Please.”
“Not without what’s ours.” A beat. “Is he yours, the boy?”
“What does that matter?” Jagger said, but his words felt like denying Tyler. “Yes, he is.”
“All we want is what we came for. If he . . .”
Jagger stopped hearing her words. Tyler had appeared behind her, rising up from the stairs. He smiled when he saw Jagger but recognized that something was wrong—not the least of which, Jagger thought, was the backpack floating between them. His boy froze, except for his lips, the corners of which drooped.
Go back, Ty, Jagger thought, hoping beyond hope that somehow, some way his son would hear him, would understand. Back up, Tyler . . . go . . . away.
Jagger forced his attention back to the floating eyes, but it was too late. She’d caught something in his expression or in the flick of his gaze. The eyes disappeared, and the backpack rotated around.
“Tyler, run!” Jagger yelled. “Go! Go now!”
The pack began bouncing in midair, heading toward his son.
Tyler spun and descended the steps.
Jagger lifted the revolver and pointed it at the backpack. “Stop!” he yelled, then added the word that had become, in the culture of cops-and-robbers entertainment, weighted with a specific consequence: “Freeze!”
The pack stopped and shifted sideways; it rotated back and continued toward the stairs. Jagger wondered if she had forgotten about the backpack, that it betrayed her location.
He nudged his aim a few inches to the right of the pack and fired.
When faced with something not only new but contrary to everything one has ever learned about the world, some humans are prone to suspect the supernatural or otherworldly—that hovering saucer must be from outer space because planes need wings and helicopters need rotors; those flickering lights, dropping temperatures, and self-opening cabinets are, of course, evidence of poltergeist activity. Upon first encountering the invisible being, Jagger’s mind had flashed through the possibilities—angel . . . demon . . . alien . . . ghost . . . But then he’d seen human eyes and heard a human voice, and he’d put it together: ordinary bad guys with extraordinary technology. What happened when his bullet struck the invisible thing sent his mind spinning back into the Twilight Zone.
A small explosion sprayed fire and smoke from the point of impact, as though the weapon had been loaded with exploding ammo, followed by an eruption of sparks—not the empty Bic lighter sparks the blade had kicked up when it struck RoboHand, but big, Fourth-of-July sparks. A body appeared, sleek and charcoal-colored, with blue electrical currents flashing lightning-like around every contour, every limb.
At that moment it seemed to Jagger more of a probability than a possibility that the thing was some sort of space-aged robot, a real-life Terminator who’d come from the future not for John Connor but for Tyler Baird.
The creature—definitely female, or at least constructed to resemble one—reached back with both arms to claw at the sparking point of impact. She spun around like a dog chasing its tail, like a man on fire. She pulled off the backpack and slung it aside. She slapped at her arms, stomach, head, trying, it seemed, to catch the quick squiggles of electricity coursing over her. But her hands always landed after the current had passed. In desperation, she gripped the scaly flesh of her shoulder and tore at it, spinning away from him as she did.
After ten or fifteen seconds, the sparks sputtered and stopped. The blue streaks of current diminished to a few random bursts, except in one area: they congregated around her neck, concentrating into a pulsating color of bright blue threads that flew like shooting stars over her shoulders, up around her head.
The figure turned back toward him. Both hands grabbed her neck, and in a quick upward motion she peeled off her face, revealing—Jagger realized with some relief—her true identity: very human and very beautiful, an observation coming more from the part of Jagger’s mind that told him marauding psychopaths who attacked monasteries and kids should not look like this than from the part that appreciated pretty things.
She had already torn away the material over her shoulder, arm, and chest, revealing a black athletic halter top. At first he thought her bare skin was dappled with shadows, but they were too crisp and formed images: thorny vines, a grinning skull, crosses in a variety of styles. Black, gray, blue tattoos. Among them one stood out: on her forearm, the same gold fireball he’d seen on the man.
She clutched at her neck again and pulled down, ripping the material from clavicle to armpit. A flap fell over her chest, exposing a metal collar identical to the man’s. She fumbled with something in the back—a latch, he realized, when she pulled the collar off and hurled it to the ground.
Grimacing, she rubbed her throat, then her face. Her right hand slid around to the back of her neck, and she released a curtain of black hair. She scratched at
her bare arm, then at the other through the material, then her legs. She placed her hands on her knees and stayed that way, catching her breath. Slowly she raised her face and gazed at him through strands of hair.
“That hurt,” she said. More heavy breaths, then: “Well, what are you waiting for? Shoot.”
[ 48 ]
Jagger’s finger tightened on the trigger, then he relaxed it. “It doesn’t have to end this way,” he said. “Just—”
From their tall tower near the basilica, the monastery’s carillon bells began chiming, loud in the still air. Nine bells of different sizes—a gift from the czars of Russia in 1871, Gheronda had proudly told them—peeled out a rhythmic tune that to Jagger’s ears recalled the grating horror of the shower scene in Psycho. He focused more intently on the woman, thinking she’d use the distraction to get the upper hand.
The 13th Tribe Page 18
