She tried to look, tried to get her bearings. Eddi’s right eye was functionless. Wouldn’t open.
She hoped that was the deal: Her eye’d caught some wood and refused to uncover itself. The alternative was the eye was punctured. Or gone altogether. Either way at the minute it was useless. Staying alive meant working with the one good eye she had left.
Eddi was twisting, bringing Soledad’s piece around. Taking aim . . .
Across the room: gray sweat-suited, hood up. Carlin. Carlin was bear-hugging Raddatz. Raddatz, without a weapon, was trying to fight, trying to fight back. Fighting back amounted to good-for-nothing flailing. Weak slapping with his hook and hand. Carlin’s grip would not yield. Beneath the drape of his sweats, Carlin’s Power-
Assist suit. The hiss of air pumps. His grip constricted. The pain inflicted feebled further Raddatz’s slaps. Then from Carlin, for good measure, an electric shock settled Raddatz the fuck down.
And Raddatz was right where Eddi didn’t want him to be: in the line of fire.
“Raddatz!”
Raddatz turned. His face, beaten—power-punched—busted, was like a bloody rag.
Carlin turned. His face, darkened by the hood, wore a smile Eddi’s blinded eye could not see but could real well sense.
Carlin torqued and Raddatz twisted. A scream. Raddatz’s snapping spine. Impossible to tell if one preceded the other.
Raddatz oozed from Carlin. Puddled on the floor. His body was like that now. Hardly better than liquid. Hardly more sturdy than gelatin.
Eddi: “Fucker!”
Gone.
Before Eddi could pull the trigger of Soledad’s gun Carlin jumped himself up through the roof of the house.
Up through the roof.
A rain of wood and shingles. The crumble of brick.
He was as much freak as he was normal. More.
Quiet.
Quiet.
Especially from Raddatz’s body. Twisted up. No sound, motion. No breathing Eddi could hear.
Eddi looked up, looked at the hole in the roof. Light filling the darkness constricted her pupils. Her pupil. She held a hand against the sun. Saw nothing. Listened.
Just the quiet.
Nothing above her. No footsteps, not the creak and moan of motion.
Eddi eased for Raddatz. Newly acquired 2-D vision made her put effort into calculating proximity.
“Raddatz,” she whispered, hand stretched for him. “Raddatz!”
No response.
Pointless. She’d seen what Carlin had done to him. Carlin could kill freaks. Carlin had taken out an invulnerable. Snapping Raddatz, burning Raddatz amounted to clipping a nail.
“Raddatz!”
Eddi kept up a constant sweep of the place with her inherited gun. The muzzle hole a surrogate eye that was doing duty where Eddi needed the slack picked up. Part of her wanted to do some tough-talking. Wanted to go MTac macho. Faux testosterone wanted to taunt the unseen: C’mon, motherfucker! I’m right here!
But the hard-guy part of Eddi usually had a trio of MTacs backing her up. Something like a game plan to go with them. Now she was fifty percent blind. All alone.
Up the block she could hear someone praying in Spanish. She could whiff mother’s milk being suckled by a newborn. And every beat of a hummingbird’s wings was clear to her.
A hypersense of the world. She’d read about that in Soledad’s journal. She called it a sense of death. Simpler just to call it fear.
Queer.
It was weird to Eddi. First time in a long time she could recall feeling fear and it was hunting a normal instead of a full-blown freak.
Hissing. Eddi heard hissing. Carlin’s freak-faking suit? Ruptured pipes? A gas leak? Figure it out later, get out of the house befo—”
Not gas. A breath. Raddatz was breathing. Poorly, slowly. Shallow, but he was . . .
“Radda—”
The chaos this time delivered a hail of glass, brick and wood. Carlin busting back into the house through a wall, the frame of the structure screaming as it took the wound.
Eddi brought her gun around. Tried to. Carlin was already on her, had her. Threw her. Just a flick of his wrist. Didn’t feel like hardly more than that. Geared up, it was all that was needed to manipulate Eddi’s 128 pounds. Eddi took air, punched through the glass of a window. The transit pass a three-inch gash slashed into Eddi’s thigh. The ground outside no more benign to her fall than the floor had been. It caught her without kindness, with hard dirt, rocks slugging at her back and shoulders. Eddi rolled, still half blind. Now weaponless.
The earth shook. Carlin taking a leap from the house for Eddi.
Eddi clawed frantic.
The gun!
Her hand ripped at the ground, got ripped by the junk that booby-trapped the yard.
The gun!
Eddi’s leg got grabbed. Shin snapped. Busted tibia tore through her flesh.
She screamed. Her own body getting turned against her.
Carlin was reeling her in. She could feel the pleasure in the measure of his motions. He was going to get her. He was going to hug her. He was going to break her. He was going to kill her.
The gun . . .
Reality. She wouldn’t find it before death was delivered.
Carlin’s grip was tightening.
Jasmine. Laughter. Tears.
Death was coming.
A stay of execution came leaping at Carlin. His dog. Whippings, beatings, burnings. Electrocutions for the sake of shocking something. The beast was looking for payback. The beast was serving it up with snapping jaws and tearing canines. Carlin wasn’t its master anymore. There was a slave revolt. It was Juneteenth. The tortured was giving it to its tormentor.
The snarling was nearly hideous. The animal sounds . . . which was the dog, which was Carlin?
Eddi pulled herself, pulled her busted ankle along the ground.
The gun . . .
The crack of electricity. The stink of burned meat. A pathetic yelp.
Carlin tossed the animal away. A toy grown tiresome to a belligerent child.
Carlin had another toy to fill his interest. Eddi. His curiosity: how to break her.
His hands on her. Back on her, digging into her. Hardly a beat skipped after killing the dog and Carlin returned to pulling Eddi for him.
Eddi wildly padding down the ground.
The gun . . .
Her hands—her left, fractured, but still doing work—whipping around frantic for the gun.
Technology to fight technology. If she had any chance at all of living, Eddi had to resurrect Soledad and put a bullet . . .
The gun?
Not the gun. Anything but the gun. She was suiciding herself by even trying for it.
Eddi’s hand felt metal. A pipe. It held warmth from the sun of the day. Hot to Eddi’s touch. Heavy in her hand. It was just enough to do damage. Eddi swung it with purpose. She twisted in Carlin’s grip. Her ankle gave her another injection of pain. She batted, batted at his midsection. Slugged at his ribs. Pointless. Carlin had sanctuary under his exoskeleton and Kevlar.
Eddi kept pounding. Two, three times. A fourth. The force of the hit running hand to shoulder. A major leaguer on GHB, Eddi was swinging for the fences.
Carlin’s head took the strikes, recoiled. He slowed none. Under his hood, a helmet? He wasn’t wearing the hood for nothing. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to go after freaks naked upstairs.
He couldn’t all be armored. Achilles had his heel. Carlin had some weak spot.
A blow to the shoulder, the chest, the gut, the neck, the—
A grunt from Carlin. He staggered.
The hum of batteries. He was charging up to juice Eddi.
Now. Eddi told herself: Now’s the time to get macho.
“Let’s go, motherfucker! C’mon, bitch! Do me like you did Soledad! Try and fucking ki-aaaah!”
Eddi’s right wrist caught, then snapped twig-style. The pipe tumbled to the ground. Her brain had the natural reaction to
the hurt, wanted to shut down.
Carlin pulling her close. An augmented hand on her neck. The squeeze was slow and steady. The flow of blood to Eddi’s brain was dammed. For a moment she floated. Started to. Then her head throbbed like her brain was beating against the sides of the skull that was, second by second, becoming its casket.
. . . this is what I wanted . . .
Her thoughts going gray. Gray to black.
I wanted . . . I wanted him to kill me? I wanted . . .
Gray to black. Black. Just black.
I wa . . . wanted him to pull me close. I wanted . . .
A flop, a flop of her hand. A grab with her left hand. Wrist fractured, the grab would be weak. Decrepit. It had better be good ’cause it was the only one Eddi would get.
Hand to her belt. Hilt in her hand.
Deep in the black, one word slipped past her lips: “Daddy.”
She brought the knife, the Hibben Bowie, out of its sheath. Drew it, thrust it in an upward arch taking aim as best her one eye, her fading vision would allow for Carlin’s vulnerable throat. She felt the blade catch, jam against bone. Eddi let her body fall forward, drive her arm upward. It was all about the follow-through. Like a golf swing. Like a tennis backhand. Like a deathblow. She pushed. Eddi pushed. The blade doing battle with Carlin’s cervical vertebra. The knife lost the fight. Snapped off. Remained lodged. Then again, looking at it that way, having a piece of metal in his throat: Really, it was Carlin who was the loser.
He lost the battle.
He was losing his life.
He was losing it in a mist of blood that hissed from his carotid artery in a seemingly ceaseless spray.
Tangled together, Eddi and Carlin did a little tango to the ground.
Eddi lay among the junk, the oxidizing metal. She lay with a dead dog. The dying Carlin. Blood still geysering. Less, less. The spray subsided.
Was gone.
The end of fear.
No sirens.
All the ruckus done and no one in LA, at least in this part of LA, cared enough to call a first responder.
Eddi wouldn’t be making the call.
She was broken up and she was bleeding out, and her abilities were at the moment limited to lying right where she was.
She could hear a child just pulled from its mother’s womb take its first breath.
Eddi could hear the lips of two lovers meeting.
Eddi could feel the air generated by the flap of a butterfly’s wing in China. Guiyang, to be precise.
Eddi had a sense of the world.
Loss of blood made her very relaxed. But she was also very sad. She did not wish to die. Obvious. Does anybody really want to die? Like cloudy skies on the day of a parade, it’s just one of those things that happen. One of those things you can do nothing about.
One thing she could do.
She put on that grin of hers.
So how did you know?
What’s that?
How did you know, Eddi?
I just . . . in the moment, I knew.
In the moment, while a guy is trying to snap your head clean from your body, you just—
When Raddatz took the cadre after Carlin their radios just happened to go down? Anytime Carlin was anywhere near a surveillance camera they just happened not to work? Cars just stalled? Technology vs. technology. Carlin . . . I figured he must have had a low-level electromagnetic pulse coming off his suit. Just enough to mess with electronics, digital cameras . . . Enough to mess with Soledad’s gun. That’s why it misfired. Even if I’d found it, if I’d tried to use it, it would have done the same. I quit trying. I went for my knife.
Ah, bullshit.
Look, I’m not a techie. I don’t know how all that electronic stuff works. But I took a chance, and it—
That’s not what I’m talking about. You figured all that out in one split second while somebody was working on separating your head from your body? Nah. What I think: When it came down to it, you wanted out of you know who’s shadow. Wasn’t going to happen dropping Carlin with that gun.
Wait . . .
So you went for your knife. Carlin could’ve killed you, but you went for it.
Wait, am I . . . I’m not having this conversation. I’m not . . . I’m talking, but I’m not . . . I’m dead. In Carlin’s yard with the junk and the dog. I’m—
You had a better place of dying. Although, guess there’s no perfect place.
I don’t want to—
Glad you could make it, Eddi . . .
I don’t want to die.
Even for just a minute. I’m proud of you.
The average human can survive about eight minutes without heartbeat before the brain, starved of oxygen-rich blood, begins to suffer permanent damage.
Eddi’s heart stopped beating for nine and three-quarters minutes on the operating table of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. It would have remained still eternally except she’d lucked out, gotten an ER doc who was only in his second year. Jaded by the sight of people dropping off the face of the earth, he worked that extra minute and three-quarters to bring her back to this side.
No brain damage.
None that the docs could find with their MRIs and CAT scans. None that the psychologists could find testing her mind.
Except . . .
There was a conversation had that was absolutely indisputable in Eddi’s mind. The words and tenor were vivid to her. The only thing she wasn’t sure of: who she’d spoken with.
She told this to no one. Told no one about her conversation. She didn’t need anyone thinking her head was messed up, her gray matter was fractured. Despite her snapped wrist, her snapped ankle, a left eye that’s usability would be diminished by at least thirty-five percent, a face that would forever carry a lightning scar from left brow to right jaw . . . and possible but clandestine brain damage, Eddi still had designs on being a cop. Back in MTac if doable. DMI if she had to. She wasn’t ready to quit the fight. The fight was just starting. And it was nothing like what Eddi thought it would be when she’d first suited up.
The question, the questions now as she rested, rehabbed, got ready to get back into things:
What is she going to do?
Who’s she really fighting?
Who does she trust?
Who could Eddi even talk to about the new knowledge of the struggle? Not to Vin. Not that she couldn’t trust his council, not that she couldn’t trust him with the truth. Or the version of it she was carrying this week. Vin was beyond caring about anything that didn’t pour from a bottle. Much like the city of Las Vegas, what happened with Vin would stay with Vin. But Eddi had no idea how to begin a deep meaningful politically dicey conversation with him. In her heart she didn’t want one. Her feelings about him, for him were confused. Confusion was a thread not to be trifled with for fear of unraveling. So all the days Vin sat with Eddi, endured her recuperation with her, she said nothing to Vin of the incident.
That’s the way it was talked about within the department. What other euphemism is there for cops going after an ex-cop who’d souped himself up so he could kill freaks? Wasn’t one. Wasn’t a good one. So it got called “the incident,” and a lot of brass spent sweaty nights hoping no one at the LA Times got wind of the truth.
They didn’t
It was Oscar season in Hollywood and the Times flooded the zone on that.
There were conversations to be had.
With Raddatz. That conversation was difficult. Carlin had done a job on him, had come up shy of killing him. Busted Raddatz’s back, his spine at T9. His body was dead from the abdomen down. He was bed-bound. For a while. He had to wear diapers because he had absolutely no control over his bladder and bowels.
Other than all that . . .
Actually, other than that, Raddatz was still a prideful fighter. In private moments he would tell Eddi that what they had done together was perhaps the single most significant act in the real struggle between normals and metanormals since San Francisco.
Eddi worked really hard at cheering him up, cheering him on. The world at large didn’t know the truth. The world at large still hated freaks as much as they did the day before Raddatz’s body got busted.
There was a conversation to be had with Helena, Raddatz’s wife. It wasn’t quite the “he was a good man” chat Eddi was afraid she was going to have to have. It was an ugly cousin to it. He is a good man. You should be proud of him for what he did, even though we can’t tell you what it was.
And Helena was all right with that. Not with . . . there was no part of her that wanted her husband to be a paraplegic. No part of her. But what she had wanted for so long, two things: That her husband should live to see their boys grow. That he would no longer be a cop.
Not like she’d hoped, but finally, she’d have both.
There was the talk Eddi had to have with Bo, the one where she came around and told him that all was good with Soledad’s weapon. Bo, being MTac and not DMI, didn’t know all the specifics of “the incident” beyond the rumors that bounced around inside the blue wall. Eddi gave no clarifications other than to say that with modifications Soledad’s piece should be able to eliminate its only fault. Excel was a weapon. As dismissive as she’d previously been, Eddi was now effusive in praise for the gun. For Soledad.
For all that Bo didn’t know of the reality of things, Eddi’s contriteness was not lost on him.
As she began her hobble from his office, Bo said to her: “Why don’t you do it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Work on Soledad’s piece. Modify it.”
“I don’t have the background for it.”
“You got all her work as a starting point. You could do it in conjunction with A Platoon or HIT. And I can’t believe you couldn’t finish something Soledad started.”
Bo tossed that line like bait. Not to antagonize. To encourage. Albeit encourage with a taunt. Bo believed the department—normals, period—needed cops like Eddi. The Eddi he thought he knew. And if he had to play her ego to keep her around, keep her in the fight, he was ready to play.
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