“Get us closer,” I tell Devon.
“What, in the name of all that is holy, do you think I’m trying to do? This is hardly how I idle down to the shops. I think going one-ten is, in fact, the polar bloody opposite of idling. Though of course if you have an alternate definition, or some spare dictionary upon you—”
“Faster!” I cut her off.
To her credit, Devon complies. I grit my teeth. I aim the speaker of the space-time disruptor. Fire flares and dies, rushing past us in whispers of searing air. Tabitha does her best to match our pace. We race down the streets, almost parallel.
We edge closer. Closer. But I still need to be closer.
From Tabitha’s car, Malcolm starts firing. Even over the tear of the wind I hear the explosive percussion of each shot. He fires slowly, methodically. Boom. Boom. Boom. He has one hand up almost covering his eyes. The gun is held out like a new-fangled lance, the police cruiser his twenty-first-century steed. Like some knight of old come to save us. Boom. Boom. Boom.
I count the flashes of light ahead of us now. Seven. I list them off in my head. Urve, Joseph, Ivan, Ekaterina, Leo, Katerina and… the woman in the van, the one who had warned Leo he was going to hurt himself while he beat seven shades of shit out of me. I wonder who she was in the file. Who we missed. I wonder if I’ll ever see her face before one or both of us die.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Malcolm ducks back into the car, reloads. I turn out of the wind, suck in a tortured breath, hold it, turn back. A Russian blinks into existence, maybe ninety yards away. We close the distance. Eighty yards. Sixty. He vanishes. Reappears, but we’re closer now, on his heels. He’s only eighty-five yards away now. We close. We close. Fifty-five yards. He disappears. Reappears. Sixty yards. Forty. Disappears. Reappears. Fifty yards. OK, it’s on.
I twist around in my seat. “Clyde, I need you.”
“How can I help you?” Clyde sounds like an ATM machine.
I lean out my open window. We’re alongside Tabitha’s car now. The barrel flare of Malcolm’s pistol is almost close enough to warm my ear. It’s like he’s trying to hit air, though, and the Russians know it. We need a broader field of damage. Something they’ll have a harder time avoiding.
“You remember the lion in Trafalgar Square?” I twist back, yell at Clyde as he leans out the window, wind tearing his lank blond hair into a streaming tail. “The one you chopped in two?”
“Sinsdale.” Clyde is barely audible above the wind.
“How big a space can you paint with that bastard?”
Clyde’s head twists. He ducks back into the car, I follow suit.
“You want me to create an area that they will teleport into?”
“Hell yes I do.”
“That will cause them to be sliced in two.”
And where does that moral dilemma fit in to Clyde’s shedding of humanity? “That’s kind of the point,” I tell him.
Clyde nods. He ducks out the window, stretches out a hand, bows his head. I can’t hear the words, but I see the edges of his jaw work. Then a bellow. He sags back into the car, panting. I spin, watch the points of light. Less than fifty yards away. They jump.
At the leading edge, one spark turns from blue to red. A detonation ahead of the bleeding line of disturbed space-time. A silhouette framed in red and yellow. A silhouette splitting. Two halves of a body peeling away. One up—an almost elegant arc—the other down, tumbling, rolling, ungainly and splayed, two sticks of meats sprayed over the ground. The spinning torso sheds strings of viscera, comes down, collides with the ground. Half of a Russian grinds along the ground. Devon swerves to avoid it.
Seven flashes of light, reduced to six.
Our first Russian down. The violence of the death keeps me from fist pumping though.
And then ahead of us, six flares are reduced to four. I scan wildly. Where did—
A blast of blue light to the right. A woman on the hood of Tabitha’s car. I wrestle for my gun.
And then, another blast of blue. Directly in front of us, filling the windscreen, eclipsing the street. I throw up a hand trying to shield my eyes. Too late. Devon flaps ineffectively at the sun shade.
And then, there, in the fading glare, balanced wildly on top of the car’s hood: the portly, tweed-encased Joseph Punin. Pummeled by wind, he crouches there, face contorted by fury. His space-glove is held way above his head. I can see fresh plates of metal roughly riveted over the old. Something that looks too much like flesh crusted around the edge. Repair work after our last encounter.
And then the time for appreciating the enemy’s armament is over. Punin slams the glove through the windscreen, turns it white with cracks. He tears the glass away in one movement, fills the car with howling wind.
And if I was looking for a fight, I just found one.