15

KUNG F.U.

I tried to fire some rounds into the chiang-shih, but my finger wouldn’t pull the trigger. It was my fucking geas. The chiang-shih hadn’t done anything to endanger the Pax Arcana, hadn’t directly threatened me or anyone I cared about. I stood there and strained mentally and physically, but my index finger wasn’t budging on the trigger. I was going to have to wait for the chiang-shih to attack me.

At least I didn’t have to wait for long.

It was one thing to read about the way chiang-shih jump about, another to see the ungainly stiff-legged leap that pushed off with one foot and propelled the chiang-shih toward me. It landed in front of me in a spray of wood chunks, the floor sagging beneath us and throwing me off-balance. The big plastic water bottle on top of the blue stand tipped over and water seeped into the depression around our feet.

The chiang-shih gave a scream that sounded something like a bat, lurching and whirling in jerky, robotic motions that were swift despite their limited range. I tried to discharge my gun into its empty eye socket then, but the tilting floor kept me off kilter, and the chiang-shih knocked the gun out of my hand with a forearm block that only moved from the elbow. The bullet hit the chiang-shih high on its right temple and lodged there, steam hissing around its edges.

I ducked under a jerky backfist and came up fast, slamming my palms over the chiang-shih’s ears and forcefully compressing the air inside its ear canals. The chiang-shih screamed as its eardrums ruptured with a muffled but audible pop. You have to understand, the inner tissues of the chiang-shih’s ear canal were far softer than its outer skin—maybe even more vulnerable than a normal human’s because the ears had to channel vibrations to function, and chiang-shihs have ultra-sensitive hearing.

I hadn’t just deafened the chiang-shih… I’d as good as blinded it.

There was no time to celebrate, though. The chiang-shih hit me while the hitting was good with a short, straight-armed blow with the heel of its left hand. The damned thing was using its freakish strength to skip a lot of the movements that build momentum and center the body behind a blow, and its herky-jerky fighting style was hard to anticipate. If I hadn’t been wearing a Kevlar vest, I think that blow would have caved my chest in. As it was, I went flying backward and skidded over the floor, cutting the wooden legs out from under an easel with a painting on it while I did so.

What was Jerry Kichida waiting for?

The skidding saved my life. The chiang-shih focused on the direction it had sent me and made another stiff-legged hop to cover the increasing distance between us. Its trajectory was a little short though, and the chiang-shih was coming down towards my ankle when I curled my back, rolled on to my shoulders, and straightened so that I could shoot my feet straight into its midriff. I knew how heavy it was now, knew it in my muscle memory, and I launched its top-heavy form backward. The floor that had risen when the chiang-shih went airborne sagged alarmingly again when the undead thing landed on its shoulders. Water from the overturned cooler flowed back into the new depression. That and the chiang-shih’s own density and inflexibility had it struggling like a turtle on its back for a few precious seconds.

I was lighter on my feet than it was, even with a chest that felt like a metal plate. I didn’t exactly bounce, but I got up and grabbed a four-foot-long standing floor lamp that was teetering back and forth. I had about ten feet of cord to play with, and I smashed the lamp tip against the floor, shattering glass and brass fittings. The broken fiberglass tip and the exposed wires made contact with the puddle of water the chiang-shih was trying to rise up in. Something sizzled and all the lights in the room went out while the chiang-shih jerked.

Chiang-shihs are vulnerable to electricity. Maybe because electricity travels faster through tightly packed molecules, or the disruption of covalent bonds is more serious in denser organisms. I’m not a physicist. What I do know is that lightning is one of the few things that kill chiang-shih quickly in the old stories.

The chiang-shih swayed back on its heels, and I swung the lamp around again and smashed the base alongside its jaw while it was momentarily stunned. The base flew off, the cord snapped, and I stabbed the exposed jagged rod into the chiang-shih’s empty eye socket on the backswing. Whatever neural bypass the chiang-shih’s fast-healing body had come up with to get it moving again, the synaptic connections inside its skull were still fragile, and the chiang-shih dropped to the floor.

So did I.

Jerry Kichida had just shot me through my left temple.