Twig

by wildbow

  But no. I was focused, and with a challenge to dwell on and a mind to compete against, I was in my element. The trains of thought remained on their rails.

  We could slip away, and there were two things that he might do. The first would be to take care of the guns. I could imagine Sanguine very calmly dismantling the guns, scrubbing them, oiling them, and ensuring that everything was in working order, while he kept an eye out for us. Maybe one had jammed already and he’d set it aside to pick up another. He would want to take care of it.

  The other idea was that he might pick up the guns, bullets, and other supplies, and casually walk to another vantage point, moving closer to us. If he happened to have equipment to move down the sheer surface, he wouldn’t be the only sharpshooter I’d ever met who did.

  The two put together meant we couldn’t count on him stopping anytime soon, and if we found any respite at all, we had to start wondering if the bullets would start coming from another direction, from a closer point.

  “Jamie,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  A bullet struck the balcony, two inches from my right knee.

  “Where is he, specifically?”

  “Specifically? I don’t know specifically.”

  “You had a sense, right? Which direction he was shooting from?”

  “Yes.”

  Two more bullets fired, roughly one second apart. Did they have different sounds to them?

  Interesting.

  Still, I needed to work with Jamie. “Close your eyes. Recall the city as it was beneath the cliff. He’s shooting from a point on the cliffs, and you have a general sense of where? I’m going to throw a grenade, try to create some smoke cover.”

  “Three buildings with towers. They look identical, like a—”

  Bullet, wall.

  “—Fork sticking up, near the base of the cliff. If I had to guess, he’s above that point.”

  “Is there a building nearby that I can aim at? If I throw the grenade aiming for a rooftop?”

  “Given how you throw, Sy?”

  “Ha ha. I’m going to try this, catch a bullet and you’ll remember forever that the last thing you said to me was a lame joke. My throwing arm is fine.”

  “Do you know how many times the old Jamie wrote about you fucking up knife throws?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Seriously—”

  “Grenade tosses?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Point made.”

  “And the time you dropped the big glass canister of mystery plague, down in the bowels, so soon after you’d very ardently argued you should be the one to carry it?”

  “Okay.”

  Bullets pelted our general location in the moment of silence that followed.

  “I’m just making fun,” he said. “I’m nervous and bothered. You needled me with that ‘remembering forever’ thing. And I know I’m giving you ammunition by letting you know that you needled me, but—”

  “I won’t use it against you,” I said. “I have some class.”

  He snorted.

  “Don’t tempt me to change my mind,” I said.

  “Your throwing arm isn’t that bad. You do better than most. There’s a roof in that direction. Aim for the gutter. It’s a steep roof and if you hit the side of it it’ll bounce off and into the street below. There might be bystanders.”

  “Got it.”

  I pulled my hand away from the oozing wound on my arm. It still bled, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I wiped some of the blood on my pants and tested each arm. I opted to use the uninjured one, fishing for the grenade in the bag and gripping it. I shifted my stance, bringing my feet nearer to my butt, pressing my back against the post.

  The unsteady patter of bullets stopped.

  He saw me move.

  “Sy,” Jamie said.

  “Hm?”

  “Earlier, I heard two shots hit at the same time.”

  “I noticed that,” I said. “The bullets sounded different.”

  “I noticed the differences, I thought it was wind, angle, or something, but to shoot one so soon after the other and have it sound that different?”

  “Yeah. I think I know what it is.”

  “Second gunman?”

  “No,” I said. I could imagine the bullets like an ongoing discourse. I could sense the psychology behind it, the intent to keep us off balance, the coordination, the way they’d toyed with us, going for Jamie, then me, then Jamie, then Jamie again, just to drive in this overbearing sense that we weren’t safe.

  “No,” I said, as I thought, convincing myself. “There’s only one sniper. The bullets sound like he thinks. He’s sitting or laying there with a gun, and there’s a second gun close by. Shoot, drop the first gun, scoop up the second, shoot again. Just to keep us on our toes. Letting us know that even if the bullets take a while to get to us, he can shoot at a pretty fast rate. There isn’t a time window between shots to act.”

  As if to echo my thought, he did it again.

  One bullet, then another just a moment later. One hit the railing, and a larger piece of the ornate wood lattice broke free, skidding across the balcony. The other hit the wall in front of me. One-two.

  Three seconds passed. Then, just to drive up the pressure, as if he knew we were plotting something and getting ready to act, he delivered another one-two.

  I raised myself up, back sliding up the post as I straightened my legs. I tore out the pin from the grenade as I spun around, dropping to a knee so that I was still protected by the post, arm going back as my eyes took in the city.

  With the grenade live and bullets only a moment away, I had no time to find those three buildings that formed a fork. To spot the gutter. I had to decide as I started the motion of throwing and carried through, twisting my body as I saw what might have been it, adjusting the positions of my fingers as the grenade flew off the tips to tilt the course of the projectile so it veered toward the gutter.

  I threw. I didn’t wait to see the result, dropping flat.

  If any bullets flew, I couldn’t hear over the explosion and the summary crackle of wood creaking and breaking under its own weight.

  With the explosion had come fire. With fire came smoke.

  Our hand keeps getting forced. The smoke rose, and I could now hear the bullets as they were fired into the midst of it, striking in our immediate vicinity, seemingly no more or less accurate than they had been.

  I looked at Jamie, who nodded.

  As one, we hurdled the railing, until we perched on the outside. Bullets smacked into the railing just a foot to my right.

  I dropped down, gripping the same part of the ledge that my feet had just been, the grit from the bottom of my shoes now digging into my fingers as I found purchase.

  I spotted the pillar that held the balcony up above the front of the building and I swung myself over in that direction, letting go and catching it with the inside edges of my feet well before my hands were available to grip it. The swinging movement of the heavy messenger bag nearly dislodged me from the rain-slick post.

  I slid down, touching ground, then hurrying over to where Jamie was.

  “You’re a damn monkey!” he called out to me, as he crawled down to where he could grab the pillar. He barely had to check for handholds, but he wasn’t agile. I knew the old Jamie had mentioned that his altered body got stiff in places when it was cold. The scars could be problematic.

  And even if this Jamie was faster and more adventurous than the first, he wasn’t quick, a lot of the time.

  I allowed myself a moment of the deepest, blackest resentment for the fact that I had to juggle the ‘old Jamie’ with the new, that the name of my departed best friend had to be muddled so.

  Opening that door allowed for other feelings to make their attempts at rising. Mary with her leg bleeding. A crying Lillian in her nightclothes in her dorm room, face still flushed from my attention, just before I said my goodbye.

  It was like the emotions were some tentacled warbe
ast, lunging out of a container, their reaching limbs making it very hard to close them back in and away again.

  I reached up and out to catch him and help keep him upright as he dropped down from the pillar. By the time he’d turned around, I’d managed to put the feelings away. I grinned.

  “Monkey,” he said, again.

  “I heard you the first time,” I said.

  I glanced up and over at the smoke. People were staring.

  “We keep giving them cues about where we are,” Jamie said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s hurry.”

  This couldn’t go on forever.

  The net was closing, there were no exits from this city, and the number of enemies kept increasing. With each one that cropped up, it seemed I wasn’t able or willing to deal with them. Sanguine out of reach, Catcher too close a friend, the Ghost too close to Catcher.

  “Jamie,” I said, as we ran, “Get out your map.”

  “Map?”

  “In your head. For this neighborhood.”

  “Okay.”

  “What shape is it? When we account for the quarantine?”

  “It’s pear shaped, the stem of the pear touches the cliffs. The left butt touches the Marina.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Near the middle.”

  “Near the core. Okay. I want to make them think we went one way, when we went the other. That means working near the neck, where we have to travel less distance.”

  Jamie pointed. We changed direction.

  In doing so, we faced crossing a street.

  How well had Sanguine predicted us? If he was ready, weapon trained on us, then traveling in a straight line would give him time to lead us.

  If he wasn’t ready, then zig-zagging wasted time, and would give him the chance to take a shot, with a chance that shot would hit.

  I gestured. Straight.

  If there was a bullet, it traveled too far past us for me to hear. Nothing hit the road. Silence and staring people.

  One of those staring people turned their head as we ran past them. The timing of it was off, as if we were objects of interest, but they were paying attention to something else.

  We were being pursued.

  I glanced back.

  The two Brunos. Of course. One in a jacket, carrying a gun that would normally be kept mounted on a car or specially outfitted warbeast. The other was altered, with charred skin and a chemical tank at his back.

  The one with the gun fired. It wasn’t like the sniper’s shots had been. This one struck the road directly to my left, one long stride away, big enough and powerful enough that I might have messed my clothes if I’d been less hardened by past experience.

  A deliberate miss. For now, they were playing by Catcher’s rules. There weren’t any good options when it came to dealing with the man with the gun, so I didn’t try. I told myself that he wouldn’t shoot at us.

  By some small mercy, he didn’t.

  As we made our way down a long, curving street, a small crowd came into view. A cluster of people, paying almost no attention to our running approach. The front of this particular crowd kept a good fifteen-foot gap between them and their objects of focus—two men who were covered in blisters. People in the crowd were throwing bricks and bits of wood at the afflicted.

  As the most injured and most plague-afflicted of the two men raised his hand, trying to shield his face, I thought that the rocks and bricks had torn his arm ragged, that tendons or veins were hanging loose from the wound. But it wasn’t.

  Extending from one nasty, ulcerated crop of crimson blisters to the next, something very similar to an exposed vein or a branching growth of vines hung free. Near his hand, that growth had formed what looked to be flowers. Those same flowers were bright red, glistening with what might have been blood, might have been the flower’s texture itself.

  He caught a stone to the side of his face. Pulled from the cobblestone road, the stone might have been the size of my fist. He barely seemed to react.

  Another projectile flew at him, and this one caught the growth at his arm, tearing it out from the back of his hand, so it hung loose. In stark contrast to the wound to his face, this damage elicited a howl of pain, visceral and yet unearthly in how loud and alien the sound was.

  I’d heard a lot of screams of pain in my life, and this one sat uneasy with me.

  We ducked through the crowd, the Brunos two dozen paces behind us and very slowly closing that distance. Big, but not slow.

  The crowd noticed them and parted for them, where we’d had to duck and weave our way through. Inconvenient.

  We couldn’t keep this up for very long.

  I really didn’t want to use the explosives in a capacity where I’d hurt the poor bastards. It wasn’t their fault that Catcher hadn’t been able to convince them how… what was it?

  “Jamie,” I said, panting a little for breath as I uttered the word.

  “Map?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, panting. “Poster. The word—what was—”

  “Devastatingly,” Jamie said, sounding exasperated and as if he was going to laugh at the same time. “You utter bastard. Focus!”

  “I am focusing!”

  It wasn’t their fault that Catcher hadn’t been able to convince them of how devastatingly brilliant and dangerous we were. Killing them would be unkind.

  The moment the Brunos were clear of the edge of the crowd, the one with the elephant gun placed a shot directly between my running feet, making me stumble and making me worry for a moment that I had messed myself. I hadn’t, which was good. I’d done some running around at some point with blood in my ass crack, I could imagine how uncomfortable shit would be.

  Killing them would be unkind, I told myself, with less conviction.

  We neared the end of the street. Another crowd was coming up. This crowd was more spread out, focused on shouting at a group of guards at one of the quarantine points at a bridge that spanned a canal. Docks formed a row nearby.

  If we could reach the crowd, we would be able to disappear in it. But the Brunos giving chase knew that, and as the gap closed, the pressure on them increased. How badly did they want this?

  A quick glance back told me the Bruno with the elephant gun was aiming.

  I hauled Jamie’s arm, pulling him away from the direction the Bruno had been aiming.

  The aim wasn’t at us. The large caliber bullet caught the wheel of a wagon loaded with stock. Crates and barrels full of supplies tumbled, many of their contents spilling out in front of where Jamie and I had been intending to go. Something that might have been beer mixed with what might have been vegetable oil, coating cobblestones. Most of the other contents included fruit and vegetables, but even the round ones didn’t roll far enough forward to obstruct us.

  Luck, for the gunman, that the oil had been part of this particular wagonload.

  We made it about halfway across before Jamie stumbled. I put out a hand to grab his arm, but between the momentary distraction of my bullet graze and the footing, I only ended up tipping over with him. I stopped with only a crouch, hauled Jamie up and forward, and started to resume running, making our way into the crowd.

  A swiping movement of the Bruno’s hand came within a half-foot of my neck.

  “Sanguine,” Jamie said.

  This particular spot was in the sniper’s line of sight, then.

  I grit my teeth, focusing on making my way through the crowd. We were an unusual element, enough to turn heads. People looked at us, eyes moved to my gunshot wound and the blood I’d smeared on my pants. I had splinters on the shoulders and arm of my coat. I probably looked something frightful, in expression and general physical condition.

  Looking at Jamie, he wasn’t much better.

  Was Sanguine willing to put bullets into this particular crowd, in hopes of getting us, or making life more difficult for us?

  What was his move? Or was he actually moving?

  With people turning their heads, I star
ted looking for the most vocal shouters in this particular, localized group. The people who were most focused on the people on the bridge, rather than us.

  Once I’d identified them, I looked for the people who were paying the most attention to us.

  One woman in a very prim coat looked at us in an offended way, as if we’d spat on her baby or something. As we passed her, I grabbed her elbow, turning her around.

  The next two people were members of a family. Brothers, perhaps. Or cousins. Curious people, with slightly concerned looks on their faces.

  I pointed my finger, turning my head, and changing the angle of my shoulders, as if I was going to change direction. My eyes went wider.

  A bluff. They turned to see what had so captivated my attention.

  With that, I shifted course, hauling Jamie with. I moved into the densest thicket of shouters, who could barely be bothered to glance at Jamie and I.

  For the outside observers, watching the crowd rather than trying to peer through it to see a shorter-than-a-full-grown-adult Jamie and even shorter Sylvester, it would have looked like the continued focus of the crowd was on us, going another direction.

  Up until that seeming path terminated.

  If I’d done it right, judging the thickness of the crowd and the attention of the people around me right, it would seem like we’d gone off in one direction through the crowd, then disappeared entirely. If I’d done it really right, our pursuers might have convinced themselves that they even saw us go in that direction, rather than just seeing the heads turning and people turning around.

  With this little manoeuvre, I stepped things up some more with a gamble. I led Jamie off the edge of the road and over the chain railing, hopping down to the dock that sat at the edge of the canal. There wasn’t a boat to be seen, sadly. The setup looked badly disused, with leaves from autumn still lying on parts of the surface that weren’t in the public eye. Touching parts of the wood that were exposed to the elements, I found it spongy on the surface layer, only the core hard.

  In the water itself, I could see tentacles moving over tentacles, with more tentacles beneath, each of them thicker around than I was. As the tentacles disappeared, withdrawing into darkness, the water briefly bubbled.

  We stopped where we were, ducking our heads low, our back to the four feet of stone wall that bounded the edge of the canal. Together, we caught our breath.