Down These Strange Streets

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  Eleven of them—no: twelve, of us—gathered at the door. I lifted the gun, and whispered, “There’s stairs up and then a hallway. Go down it to the left about thirty feet, and the outside door’s at the end. Keep to one side in the hallway so I have a clear line of sight. If you head out the door at the angle of two o’clock you’ll be in the trees quickest. Up the hill and down, my car’s on the road with a key in a lockbox near the driver’s tire. If we’re discovered, I’ll keep these bastards in place and you move as fast as you can. Don’t worry about me, just go.

  “And when you get closer to town, take my laptop out of the trunk and turn it on. The last e-mail it sends will give you a safe contact in the police department. Tell him to get someone here, fast. Now, ready?”

  At least six of them started talking, with questions or protests, but Harry interrupted them. “There’s no time for this. We’ll do as he says.”

  And they did. My gun leading the way, I crept up the steps, wincing at all the creaks and groans the crew behind me made. At the top, I had them all stand very still and got the door open, again sticking the gun out first, then my nose.

  No one there.

  I went into the hallway, and they came after me, limping and stumbling. I kept to the right, trying to look both ways at once, my heart in my throat. I mean, I’ve been in tight places before, even been shot at, but with eleven innocents on my back? That was a whole different ball game.

  The damned door creaked as I opened it. Why, I don’t know, it hadn’t on my way in, but maybe I was a little more impatient this time. Anyway, it creaked, and then they were pouring past me into the darkness, little cries of disbelief and pleasure, surprise that it was dark, shuddering gasps of clean, night-scented air.

  And then the lights went on.

  “Go!” I said. Harry was last, with the woman on his back, and he hesitated. “Go, get her out of here!” I shoved him into the night, and then reached forward to slam the door shut, closing him out. Closing me in.

  I jumped for the nearest side door, which was closed but not locked. An office of some kind, windowless of course, nice and dark. I left the door open a crack, pressing my ear to it, and about three seconds later I heard voices.

  “—like the outside door.” A man, his voice high, by nature or with tension.

  “I’ll check it.” This man sounded big, his voice deeper and slower; younger, maybe. I heard footsteps approaching; they sounded heavy; my hand got ready on the gun.

  “Not the door,” snapped the first one. “Downstairs first, so we know if any of them are loose.”

  The footsteps paused; a door opened and I heard a pair of feet descending the metal stairs. The older man stayed at the top, but the voice that rang up from below was perfectly clear:

  “They’re gone! All of them!”

  The older man’s curses retreated down the corridor until they were drowned out by the racket his partner made, pounding up the steel stairs. When he reached the top, he shouted, “You want me to go after them?”

  “Get a shotgun, and wake up Andrew and Mannie. Christ,” he said in a lower voice, “I knew we should have a dog.”

  I was glad about the dog, not so happy about the shotgun. I shifted to put my eye to the crack, and eased it slightly wider until I could see a large back going away from me. My legs twitched with wanting to dive for the door, but I stayed put.

  If I was on the outside, I couldn’t know how many of them there were. Outside, I could keep them from coming out that one door, but there were two others, and in no time at all, they’d circle around me. Outside, I’d be safer, but the others wouldn’t.

  Oh hell, admit it: I’d shut the door to force Harry and the rest to run.

  I’d shut the door because I wanted to climb down the throats of these animals and tear them apart from within.

  In fact, although I hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly when I made my choice, it wasn’t altogether idiotic. There was a good chance these guys would all make a dash for the door at once, allowing me to pick them off, or at least pin them down. I’d brought enough bullets to keep things hot for a while.

  And for a minute, it looked like it would be okay. A clot of men appeared at the far end of the corridor, milling around and shouting at each other. Then they started in my direction.

  I waited, counting heads: four. It was hard to tell exactly where they were in relation to the building’s front door, but I could see enough to know when they passed the door to the prison stairs. I gave it a few seconds, then opened the door wide enough to fit my gun arm through.

  I’d hoped the older voice, the guy in charge, would be first, but I figured he was probably the man I’d seen drive up in the red Jeep, and sure enough, the head of white hair was barely visible past various shoulders. The big guy whose back I’d seen was at the front, carrying a shotgun. The two other guys, both with that rumpled look of being dragged out of bed, seemed like people who spent their days in a lab torturing mice, more at home with scalpels and microscopes than with the weapons they carried.

  Didn’t matter: They were all targets.

  I opened fire. The big guy saw me a split second before my finger went down and dove through a doorway—I thought I winged him, but it was one of the scientists behind him who fell. The white-haired guy and the skinny assistant on the left vanished into other doorways.

  A shotgun went off, spattering the hallway but not making it through my wooden door. There was a lot of shouting and cursing, and finally a sharp order from that first voice I’d heard. Silence. Then: “Who is there?”

  “Guess,” I called.

  “Which one of you is that?”

  “Oh, I’m a whole new nightmare for you.”

  Silence again.

  “I don’t know what you want, young man, but—”

  “What do I want? I want you to die, in a whole lot of pain.”

  Silence, longer this time.

  “Well,” he said at last. “You can probably understand that we don’t wish to oblige you.”

  “Tough.”

  “Apart from our deaths, why did you come?”

  “Because you’re a monster, and monsters need to be slain.” I don’t know why I said that. Probably because it didn’t matter what I said: The longer he talked, the farther his lab rats could scurry.

  “And you are our modern-day hero, rescuing the creatures?”

  “They’re people. Unlike you.”

  “They’re valuable resources, whose unique heritage could save countless lives. Think of all the soldiers whose limbs might be regrown, the blind who might see, the—”

  “Yeah, and because Hitler’s doctors and dentists learned things in the concentration camps, that justifies Dachau and Buchenwald? What say we put you in a lab and pull you apart, see if we can find a cure for evil?”

  Jesus, I thought; stay here any longer and I’d start singing “Kumbaya.”

  He answered, his voice all sad and patronizing. “I can see your mind is made up. Although I’m sorry your little friends have abandoned you here.”

  “My choice.”

  “And now you’re trapped.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Oh, very well. Andrew, you get ready to shoot our visitor when he puts his head around that doorway. Jonah, you’re on his blind side of the hallway: when I give the word—”

  My gun went off, six times. The first tore up the floor next to the nose of Andrew’s gun and made it jerk back; the rest of them took out the four lights overhead, leaving a couple down at the far end.

  I slapped in another clip and risked putting my eye to the crack, but nobody was moving.

  “There,” I said. “Now it’s nice and dark, like creatures prefer.”

  “Um, boss?” Andrew said. “What do we do now?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the boss man. He sounded annoyed, more than anything, which made me nervous. I strained to hear, but I couldn’t tell what he was up to—until his voice came again, tal
king. On a phone.

  “Manny? Dr. Curtis here. We have an intruder, with a gun. He’s in the office just inside the west door, the first room to the left. If you open the door, you and Jack can stand back in the darkness and blaze away, you can’t possibly miss him. But make sure you take care, we’re right down the hallway. How long? Okay. Yes, we’re not going anywhere, but then, neither is our intruder.”

  That put a whole different picture on the situation.

  I sighed, and reached for the knapsack.

  When I was ready, I watched Andrew’s doorway. I didn’t figure him for a patient man, and indeed, after a minute the end of his shotgun eased around the frame. I let it come four inches, and then fired, at his door and at the other two for good measure. And once they had all ducked back in their holes, I stepped into the hallway, and threw.

  Andrew’s curses almost hid the first sound of breaking glass. But my second bottle, aimed ten feet farther down the hallway, made an unmistakable noise, and the third one as well.

  Dr. Curtis figured out what it meant first. I could feel him staring at the dim hallway, looking at the liquid and smashed glass, and then he must have smelled it.

  He waited just long enough to see that the bottles had all landed on the far side of his door, long enough to figure out what I had in mind, long enough to make his choice between a chancy bullet and a sure burning to death. The old guy came out of his doorway so fast I almost wasn’t ready.

  Almost.

  The lighter in my hand snapped into life, the rag in the top of my last bottle flared, and I backhanded it into the corridor. Before the bottle hit the wall, the corridor exploded into a wall of flame.

  The doc screamed as he ran, and he might have gotten the door open if I hadn’t managed to get off a couple of shots in that direction. A slightly more solid shape among the flames went down, and although I had to slam my own door shut then, I could hear him screaming for a while before he went still. A few minutes later, the others stopped, too.

  And some time later, so did I.

  EXCEPT . . .

  If I died, who is telling this story?

  Interesting fact—a last one: Some of the myths about salamanders are more or less true.

  The room burned around me, my hair and clothing crinkled and burned, the beams overhead groaned and burned. The fire department got there, snaked their hoses into the inferno, and found five dead people. Or so they thought.

  Then one of them moved.

  Myth has it that a salamander can extinguish fire with the cold dampness of its body. Aristotle believed it, and some of the other old Greeks. Nonsense, of course, as even Pliny pointed out—but strangely enough, not entirely.

  I lost my fingers, three toes, my voice, and most of my skin. A normal man would have died. They kept me in a coma for weeks. My looks disturbed hardened nurses for months.

  But that was a year ago.

  By the time I was in any shape to be questioned, there were really no questions left. They sent Frank to do the interview, even though he’d had nothing to do with the case other than passing on what I sent him. I don’t know, maybe I made them nervous.

  Anyway, Frank told me a lot more than he asked me.

  I knew about the scandals and the headlines, of course—when you’re in the hospital, they leave the television on a lot. So I’d sort of vaguely heard about the police raids and the government shake-ups; I’d heard the outraged speeches and the wild rumors and the dueling news stations. Even wrapped in my blanket of pain and drugs, I was aware of the shift of public opinion that made every SalaMan into a hero.

  WeWeb closed down, after nine out of ten users canceled their pages, even though WeWeb did nothing but sell the ads.

  A bill went in front of Congress to ban targeted ads, although no one thought it would pass.

  What was expected to pass was a slew of bills reforming how science was done. Labs across the country were shut down or raided because of the links Dr. Curtis had formed with organized crime—nothing glues people to headlines like a modern-day Mengele: high-ranking scientist hires thugs to kidnap the raw material for his experiments; thugs go on to search the victims’ houses for more raw material; thugs set fires to discourage snoops.

  And there’s nothing that makes the lawyers drool like a case linking universities and government agencies and organized crime and weird, mostly beautiful people like the SalaMen. It’s going to make the Nuremberg Trials look like squirrel food.

  And you want to know the thing that astonishes me most, in all this? That Uncle Sam had in fact done exactly what it said it would: lock the door on the SalaMan files and make sure no one knew who we were. Which would’ve been a good and fair thing, except it meant that when we started disappearing, the FBI didn’t notice, since there was no reason to tie the disappearances together. The police didn’t notice, because the victims were so spread out. The media didn’t catch it, because even if they’d heard, who would believe it? Nobody noticed but Harry Savoy, and Harry was too paranoid to trust the FBI, the police, or the media.

  Me? I kept out of everything. I had to shut my office, although I could’ve been busy a thousand hours a week if I’d been in any shape to work. I’m thinking that when I open again, I may actually call myself SalaMan Investigations. I might even try just working for my own people for a while.

  But when might that be? Well, last night, while Lizzie and I were . . . well, as we were occupied with things that married people do, she said “Ow!” and sat up, rubbing her ribs. When she pulled her hand away, we both saw the red welt, up the side of her pale skin. I held the stubs of my fingers under the light, and studied them.

  Sure enough, there among the scar tissue was a tiny rough protuberance. It looked for all the world like a baby’s fingernail.

  SHADOW THIEVES

  A Garrett, P.I., Story

  by Glen Cook

  Glen Cook is the bestselling author of more than forty books. He’s perhaps best known for the Black Company books, which include The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose, The Silver Spike, Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel, Bleak Seasons, She Is the Darkness, Water Sleeps, and Soldiers Live, detailing the adventures of a band of hard-bitten mercenaries in a gritty fantasy world, but he is also the author of the long-running Garrett, P.I., series, including Sweet Silver Blues, Bitter Gold Hearts, Cold Copper Tears, and ten others, a mixed fantasy/mystery series relating the strange cases of a private investigator who works mean streets on both sides of the divide between our world and the supernatural world. The prolific Cook is also the author of the science fiction Starfishers series, as well as the eight-volume Dread Empire series, the three-volume Darkwar series, and the recent Instrumentalities of the Night series, as well as nine stand-alone novels such as The Heirs of Babylon and The Dragon Never Sleeps. His most recent books are Passage at Arms, a new Starfishers novel; A Fortress in Shadow, a new Dread Empire novel; Surrender to the Will of the Night, a new Instrumentalities of the Night novel; and two new Garrett, P.I., novels, Cruel Zinc Melodies and Gilded Latten Bones. Cook lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

  In the action-packed tale that follows, Garrett learns that when trouble comes knocking at your door, sometimes it’s better not to answer.

  I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN THE BROOM CLOSET I CALL AN OFFICE. SOMEBODY hammered on the front door. Odd that they should. I wasn’t home much anymore.

  This time I was hiding out from the craziness that comes down on the newly engaged. My future in-laws dished me make-crazy stuff relentlessly.

  I began disentangling myself from my desk and chair.

  Old Dean, my cook and housekeeper, trundled past my doorway. He was long, lean, slightly bent, gray, and almost eighty, but spry. “I’ll get it, Mr. Garrett. I’m expecting a delivery.”

  That was one impatient deliveryman. He was yelling. He was pounding. I couldn’t understand a word. That door was fortress grade.

  Dean did not use the peephole. He assumed the noise came from whoever he was expecting. He
opened up.

  All kinds of tumult rolled on in. Dean shrieked. A deeper, distressed voice bellowed something about getting the frickin’ frackin’ hell out of the way!

  I started moving, snagging an oak nightstick as I went. That gem had two pounds of lead in its kissing end.

  More demanding voices joined the confused mix.

  I hit the hall fast but my ratgirl assistant, Pular Singe, was out of her office faster. At five feet Singe was tall for her tribe. Her fine brown fur gleamed. She slumped a bit more than usual. Her tail lashed like an angry cat’s but she emptied a one-hand crossbow as calm as sniping at the practice range. Her bolt hit the forehead of a thing whose ancestors all married ugly. It was a repugnant shade of olive green, wide like a troll, and wore an ogre’s charming face. It smelled worse than it looked. It filled half the hallway. Its forehead looked troll solid but Singe’s quarrel was unimpressed.

  What kind of toy had she found herself now?

  She stepped out of my way, whiskers dancing.

  Big Ugly finished collapsing. Two of his friends clamored right behind him. One tried to get hold of a very large, equally ugly human being who was down and squashing Dean because Singe’s victim had fallen forward onto him. The guy was still breathing but wouldn’t stick with it long. He had several serious leaks.

  I laid into the hands trying to drag him. Bones crunched. Somewhere beneath it all Dean groaned piteously. I gave the final villain a solid bop between snakish yellow eyes. He took a knee after gifting me with a straight jab that flung me two-thirds of the way back toward the door to Dean’s kitchen kingdom. From her office Singe called, “I was counting on you to last a little longer.”

  Females.

  I glanced in as I headed back for more. Singe was cranking a device that would span her little crossbow, which apparently had the pull to drive steel quarrels through brick walls.