Hammered

by Elizabeth Bear

  There was a cold, falling feeling in the bottom of his gut. “Are you sick?”

  She shook her head. “No. Hell. Yes. Antidepressants. Serotonin levelers, to be precise. Like half the damned country.”

  “Ah,” he said, and lifted the covers so she could slide back under them. “I was a walking pharmacy after my wife died, and after Genie was diagnosed. I couldn’t cope, you know? And I had to cope.”

  “Nobody to take care of the girls for you?”

  “Nobody to take care of anything. No, that’s not fair. Jenny was there for me. She slept on the sofa for a month.” He closed his eyes. “You know.”

  “Yes,” she said, and snapped off the light. “I know.”

  12:15 A.M., Sunday 17 September, 2062

  One American Place

  Hartford, Connecticut

  They had outrun the storm on the way back to Hartford, but barely. On the west bank of the Connecticut River, the structure locals called the “Boat Building” rested in the middle of a raised concrete plaza. A small tower of glass, green in daylight as the river below it, the skyscraper had only two sides, bowed and meeting in a point on either end. Now, clouds swirled around the upper stories, strawberry colored in the reflected downtown light. Rising wind blew Razorface’s heavy armored jacket against his shoulders. The storm would be an advantage: hard to snipe in high winds and rain.

  Razorface leaned back in the shadow of the building’s eastern tip, smoking a cigarette, as a light rain began to fall.

  From here, he could see the automobile and foot bridges across to East Hartford, and the head of the steep stairs that led down the bluff to the riverfront proper. South, beyond the convention center and hotel, white mist from the Hartford Steam Plant curled against the storm-promising sky. He couldn’t see Mitch or Bobbi Yee, which was as it should be.

  Razorface dropped his cigarette on wet concrete and crushed it under a booted foot, rubbing his jaw as it hissed and died. Voices—raucous, strident—drifted up to him from the area of State House Square, a few hundred feet off and a flight of stairs down at street level. Checking the hang of his shotgun under his jacket, he stepped back farther into darkness.

  He had a good view as five skinny young men mounted the stairs and strode toward him, out of step, their shadows stretching long on the pavement. “Mitch, you got ’em?”

  “They look like Hammerheads to me. I don’t know anything else. Oh, wait. I recognize the one in the middle.”

  “Rasheed. Good kid.”

  “Yeah. I busted him once. He was really polite.”

  Razorface choked on a laugh. “Going out to meet them. Bobbi, you got me?”

  “As soon as you come out into the light, Razorface. Between Michael and I, we have most of the vantage points covered. Move your boys out over the river, and we should be able to cover you pretty well. I am assuming Casey knows by now she didn’t get us in Bridgeport.”

  “I’m assuming she knows about this meet, too,” Mitch put in. “Anything you told your boys, she’s probably heard about.”

  “Gotcha.” Razorface squared his shoulders and strode out into the light of the streetlamps, cold against his neck despite the storm-warmth of the air, as if he could feel the pressure of a sniper scope. He knew he wouldn’t hear or feel a thing, if Casey was there, if she did get a clear angle of fire on him before Bobbi or Mitch spotted her.

  He went anyway, and knocked fists with Rasheed, Derek, and the other three kids before gesturing them to follow him across the broad expanse of pale cement out toward the footbridge. The boys were silent now, following Razorface’s swinging strides three abreast and then two. He stopped at the midpoint of the bridge and stepped into the half-circle lookout platform over the river. Razorface leaned forward against antique wrought-iron panels picturing a twisted, lightning-blasted tree—the Charter Oak, symbol of the state. Downriver, he could dimly make out the dark maw of the Park River outflow channel through the rain, and beyond it, a glimpse of star-spangled azure light reflecting from the onion dome of the former Colt firearms factory, reinvented a dozen times and more in its long history and now—since the days of the Christian Fascist regime—a national monument.

  He’d been there on a school tour, many years before.

  Windblown rain stung his eyes as he turned to face his boys. He grinned hard, meeting and holding the gaze of each one. Two of the boys glanced away from the gleam of his teeth. Damn, he thought, my city really is fucked—and reached out to grab one by the throat as the first bullet stung sparks from the railing he had just moved away from.

  “Razor!” The cop’s voice, in his ear. Ex-cop.

  “I saw it,” Razorface growled back, picking the kid up and spinning to get his body in front of the towers of the city. The next shot went wider. “Rasheed, Derek—get these boys off the bridge!” They didn’t need to be told twice—they were already moving for the East Hartford side.

  The captured gangster yowled, grappling at Razorface’s big hand with both of his little ones, and then jerked and went slack as the third slug slammed into his back and burst out his chest, spraying Razorface with bright blood and gore. The bullet plastered itself against Razor’s armored jacket and rang on the pavement.

  “Nice shooting for a fucking hurricane!” he shouted. “Killer, do something about her. You got a bead yet?”

  “On it,” she answered, which is when Razorface saw a shadowy figure—Mitch—moving among potted trees back on the landing.

  “She’s up on the riverbank,” Mitch said. “I think I can flush her out …”

  Another bullet rang off the wrought iron. Only the gusting winds protected him as he scrambled back a few steps, still dragging the scant cover of the dead gangster. And then he grinned again and glanced around. He spotted the lick of flame this time, and knew Mitch was right about the sniper’s location. “Hell,” Razorface said into the mike. “Watch this shit.”

  And dropped the corpse, took a single running step, caught the railing in both hands, and slung his body over it like a pole-vaulter.

  “Razorface!” It was Bobbi’s voice in his ear, raised the way it never was, but he twisted in midair and got his feet pointed down and his arms straight up over his face. The wind from falling didn’t seem any worse than the wind from the storm whistling past him. Hope I miss the fucking sand bar.

  And then the water hit him like a wall.

  Mitch saw Razorface go over the railing and he didn’t bother to shout out loud, because he also saw the muzzle flash from what he assumed was Casey’s gun, and the sudden movement silhouetted in the citylit darkness as she stood up out of the bushes to snap off one final shot at Razorface as he fell. She was closer than he’d estimated in the darkness—maybe fifty, a hundred yards away, downriver.

  Mitch didn’t think. He brought his captured rifle up. He squeezed the trigger.

  The shadowy figure in the darkness yelped and spun, tumbling down the brush-covered bluff to the concrete walk below. “Got her, Bobbi,” Mitch said, following the descent of the body down the riverbank. “She’s not dead, dammit.” He aimed carefully as she dragged herself upright, and then he heard running footsteps and turned as Bobbi came down the riverbank stairs a hundred-odd yards to his left four at a time, clinging to the banister and half-leaping, half-sliding in the driving rain.

  “I’m going in after Razorface,” she gasped as she ran. “Kill the bitch, would you?” There was a concert pavilion above the edge of the dark water, and a riverboat had once been moored alongside it. Bobbi hit the dock without breaking stride, dropped her rifle on the concrete, and went into the cold water on a flat, pushing dive that took her ten feet over the river before her powerful body slashed through the storm-shattered surface.

  Mitch glanced back at the fallen gunwoman. Twice in one night, he thought, and sighted down the long muzzle of the gun. It roared in his hands, and he hissed in fury as Casey, half upright, dove and rolled forward into the black, moving water.

  He knew he had misse
d.

  He lowered the gun. A gust of wind staggered him, and he swore. Squinting through the storm, he could just make out Bobbi’s dark shape knifing through the river, the current already sweeping her downstream. There was no sign of Casey, and he couldn’t see Razorface at all. He fired a shot after Casey just for luck, knowing it was useless.

  Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Mitch Kozlowski laid the rifle on the cement and walked down the stairs to the landing, unzipping his jacket and methodically yanking the trauma plates out of his vest. He dropped them on the dock, on top of the windbreaker.

  Fuck me. Damned if I’m letting that bitch swim off like a 4-D villain to come back and kill my ass some other goddamned day.

  He kicked off his boots and went into the water with considerably less grace than Bobbi Yee.

  The water slammed shut over Razorface’s head, lancing pain rising from his right ankle. He couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the water past his ears as he brought his arms down and grabbed the bottom of his armored leather jacket in both hands. Ponderous and heavy, and he could feel it dragging him down. It wrestled him like a snake, wet leather heavy as sand, but he got it up and over his head, ripping the flesh of his ear on the zipper. He tasted blood and muddy water as he knocked the shotgun aside and kicked out of his boots, almost screaming as the right one came off.

  Busted. Fuck. But he got his head out of the icy, clawing river and grabbed a breath of air so full with rain it wasn’t much dryer. Turning in the water, he saw another head break the surface downriver and nearer the bank, saw the flash from Mitch’s gun higher up and a bullet slap water so far from the target he also knew Mitch couldn’t see her. Somewhere back down the bank, over the rising howl of the wind, he heard another splash.

  Razorface set out swimming toward the bank. And more important, Barbara Casey.

  He lost sight of her in the chop, and he’d lost his ear clip when he tore the jacket off if not before, but he figured he knew where she was heading. There was really only one good way out of the water.

  Letting the current carry him, cold swirling water numbing the shooting pain in his foot, Razorface struck out for the Park River outflow channel.

  Mitch almost punched Bobbi in the face when she surfaced beside him, spewing water. “Lost my ear clip,” she said. “I can’t find him.”

  “Stick with me. I’ve got a visual on Casey. I think.” He spat muddy water and stroked forward. His pistol dragged at him, but he wasn’t about to toss it away. “Down by the bank.”

  She sounded as cool as ever, even up to her neck in freezing storm chop. “She’s heading for the Park River.”

  The rain was warmer than the river, but it didn’t help. The undertow coiled around his limbs like pythons. He kicked hard to keep his head up. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s where I’d go. Because she’s wounded. She knows we’ll catch her if she tries to drag herself up the bank, and she’d be on the wrong side of the highway. River’s too rough to swim across. She has to get out before the real hurricane gets here.”

  “We all do,” he answered through chattering teeth, and kicked forward, trusting her to keep up.

  The river almost swept them past the outflow, a looming rectangular black culvert barely visible through the downpour, thirty feet tall and forty-five across. The trees on the East Hartford bank were invisible through the rain now, despite the spill of light from the city, and that light glittered in trickling beams through the branches of those on the near bank.

  The water from the underground river was colder, even, than the deep fast-moving Connecticut, and the turbulent confluence dragged at Mitch’s legs and feet. He kicked harder, driving upriver like a salmon struggling upstream, and the lights from the city dimmed and went dark as the tunnel sheltered them from the rain.

  Somewhere, far ahead, Mitch heard a long, mechanical hiss like a restive locomotive. “The tunnel forks,” Bobbi whispered, leaning close. “How do we know which way she went?”

  Mitch straggled to the edge of the culvert. Scrabbling in the near-darkness, he wrapped the fingers of one hand through an iron handhold. His reaching fingertips found the next one, three feet farther down the wall and a foot above the river. “Handholds,” he said, as loudly as he dared. “Rest.”

  In the shadows not far away, a wet coughing was followed by Razorface’s voice. “She came in here,” he said. “I was twenty feet behind her. Hush up and move.” Soft splashing told Mitch that Razor was suiting action to words.

  Just like a deadly serious game of Marco Polo. But he tapped Bobbi on the arm as she swam up next to him, and moved slowly upstream.

  After the struggle through the tossing Connecticut, the sheltered Park River, frigid as it was, seemed almost restful. Mitch clenched his teeth to keep the chattering from giving him away. Somewhere close by, he heard the quiet spattering of Razorface moving through the inky blackness, and the big man’s ragged, carefully silenced breathing. The smallest noise echoed and reverberated.

  Mitch thought the water was warmer, suddenly, and then the sensation of heat passed. You’re probably getting hypothermia, Mitchy, he thought. Even without the trauma plates, wearing his waterlogged Kevlar was like swimming holding a bag of cement. He could barely hold the handgrips in his rust-slashed hands, and his head spun with cold and exhaustion. Somewhere ahead, a single splash echoed.

  He closed his useless eyes for a moment, leaning his forehead against the cold cement of the culvert wall. Bobbi bumped into him in the darkness and slithered an arm around him quietly, giving him a quick squeeze before she passed by. He turned toward her.

  It saved Bobbi Yee’s life.

  “Motherfucker!” Razorface threw himself backward, shouting in pain as he kicked away from the wall with his shattered ankle. Incandescent, searing white, loud as apocalypse in the echoing culvert, whatever happened next seemed to take the top of his skull off. He ducked under the water, which burned like cold fire as it clogged his nose. Flash grenade, he thought.

  And then he remembered the two grenades he was carrying on his own belt. And underwater, blinded, he smiled.

  He dove deep, breathlessness aching in his chest already, struggling against the current as he felt along the bottom of the culvert for what he hoped would be there.

  Handholds. And they were.

  Slowly, sparks swimming before his eyes, deathly as the shark he resembled, Razorface dragged himself along the bottom of the culvert.

  Mitch saw the flash through closed eyelids. Reflexively, he threw an arm around Yee and pushed her down into the water. He didn’t hear the roar that followed the flash bang, deafening in the narrow tunnel. At first, he didn’t know why the water felt so warm, or what the mule-kick in the small of his back had been. Then he knew the bullet had hit his vest, knocked the air out of him, and when he tried to kick upward and get his head above water he thought he must be stunned. Dazed, he drifted, the little ronin’s lithe muscular body twisting against him. He felt her fingers in his hair, sharp pain and then sharper, deeper, as she dragged his head above water and he opened his mouth to take a breath. Something like a knife pressed between his ribs when he did it, and he tasted bright froth and the sharp tang of blood.

  “Oh, Michael, oh no,” Bobbi whispered.

  What kind of a stupid-ass cop pulls out his fucking trauma plates? Casey must have been using explosive rounds. At least he’d gotten between Bobbi and the bullet. He tried to say something, to warn Bobbi as she pressed her mouth over his, still clinging to the iron ring with her other small hand, her hair like seaweed draped over his face, the red water turning sharp as it scoured the wound in his back. She tried to breathe for him, and he would have screamed with the pain, but it hurt too much and anyway the black, black water dragged him down.

  Got her, Barb thought with satisfaction, lowering her sidearm. Two to go. She forced herself to breathe evenly around the stabbing pain in her chest. Cracked ribs under her bulletproof vest, probably, if not busted, and she knew she�
��d torn up her right knee and right shoulder coming down the hill. But she was breathing, and that was all that counted.

  And she’d bet a twoonie that she’d nailed the little Chinese ronin while she was stunned by the flash grenade. Things were looking up. The big space echoing around her had to be the confluence chamber, she thought, where the north and south branches of the river ran together. She knew from schematics she’d studied—just in case—that there was an overflow pit in this room, up the slope of a long concrete beach. The water wasn’t high enough for it to be a threat yet. The need to hurry pushed at her.

  Cold enough that her body had quit trying to shiver and was locked in painful tension, Barb fell back along the north fork, where the water felt somewhat warmer.

  Razorface stopped where he felt the warmer water flowing into the colder, and slowly raised his head until he got his nose above the surface—only just. He breathed deeply, as silently as he could, feeling the inside of steel teeth with the tip of his tongue. Someone moved past him in the darkness, swimming slowly and carefully; he guessed that it was Bobbi from the sound of her breathing. Something hot trickled down the side of his face: blood from his torn ear, but at least the water numbed the pain in his ankle. The storm blew across the mouth of the culvert like breath over the neck of a bottle.

  Razorface closed his eyes in the darkness and listened.

  Somewhere down the tunnel, a red light pulsed languidly. Flash burn still swam in front of Razorface’s vision. He squinted around it, trying to look through the edges of his eyes, and thought he saw a dark figure moving upstream farther than Bobbi could have gotten. He fumbled in his armpit for the water-slick butt of his pistol, fingers too numb to ache. He had to glance down to see what he was doing.

  What does that light mean?

  It seemed to flash faster, but he couldn’t be sure, and then he saw iridescence shattering off of Bobbi’s lilac-and-violet hair. She swam low in the water, and as he watched she submerged. Razorface grinned, the cold scent of concrete strong in his nostrils.