Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (19 page)

The sad thing is, when surrounded by death, each one loses some degree of value. Don’t hate me because I say it; I’m the reporter, not the agent. Well, perhaps I am the agent, too. But I deny responsibility, whatever. Death loses value, life loses value. Each death is a bit easier to take than the last, and in this is sorrow. Death, where is thy fang? Or Feng, if you wish.

But Souci—

This I had not expected, and were I not at least a little numb by this time, I might have broken. As it was, I waited for the tears, but they failed me.

Someone, I think Rose, got me back into the kitchen while Jamie and Christian held off Justin’s friends. Tom and Libby stayed with Rose and me to watch the back door, which was still a large hole. The sounds of gunfire were harder to hear there, but they were present. I looked at Rudd and my mind reeled and spun, and it was all too clear, and too dull, and too much, and too little, and too late.

I took the knife from under my arm and held the point beneath his chin. I said, “Physician, can you heal a cut throat?”

He glared at me. “Go ahead. You’ll never find what you—”

“Shut your goddamned face.” I brought my temper under control, barely, and walked a few steps away from him.

“Souci told you who I was, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Is she dead?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill her?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

He laughed without humor. “More fool she. I won’t help, since no matter what you do, I will not tell you what you want to know. I have devoted my life to curing the human race of you diseased ones, and I will not fail now. It is just as well she died, and I thank you for that, at least.”

I closed my eyes. Visions of Souci, lying on the floor, smoke and screams fighting for control of the airwaves, came and sat in the control booth of my mind. Would I ever be free of that memory, or would it always dominate and overwhelm the memories of our shared joys, and rob me of the chance to conquer our shared pain? I didn’t know. Perhaps she would have come back to me, and I would never know that, either. But what I did know was that this—this
filth—
would not mock my pain.

I pointed my knife at his stomach, and I would have eviscerated him right then if there hadn’t come a thump and a very peculiar sound from down the hall, which stopped me just long enough for another thought to grow. I said, “You’d like me to kill you, wouldn’t you? Because you’re afraid you’ll break. Well, sweat, asshole.” To Rose and Libby I said, “Watch him. If he tries anything, shoot him in the kneecap.” I went down the hall toward the noise.

Tom was down at the end of the hall, and the noise had been the work he was doing, trying to cover over the doorway so they couldn’t come around and get us from that direction. I poked my head out before he had it covered. It was quiet and the sun was setting once more. No one attacked me, or even looked at me, except for a few barnyard animals.

“Tom,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Hold off on that.”

“What?”

I told him what I wanted him to do. He looked at me like I was nuts. “Do it,” I said.

“If you say so.” We went outside. He raised his pistol and shot the goat cleanly through the head. It fell over and flopped, twice. I felt absurdly bad about having killed it. “Now what?” said Tom.

“Help me drag it inside.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to break Rudd.”

Together we dragged it into the kitchen, while occasional gunfire from the other room provided music to drag goats by. When we arrived in the kitchen, Rose said, “What is that?”

“A dead goat,” I told her.

“That’s what I thought it was.”

“Libby, do you have your medical supplies with you?”

She turned her head to the side. “I think it’s too late to save the goat.”

“If we’d wanted him saved,” I said, “we wouldn’t have killed him.”

“Whatever you say,” said Libby. “What do you want?”

“A needle and syringe. Since the Physician here is so worried about Hags disease, I thought maybe we could inspire him by giving him a twenty-five percent case.”

He stared. I stared back. “You do know that almost a quarter of all goats carry the Hags virus, don’t you? In them, of course, it isn’t fatal, but—you didn’t know that? My, my. Where could you be from that you don’t know that? Well, never mind. Tom, hold his arm still. Libby, draw some blood from the goat. Twenty cc’s should do it.”

“You’re lying,” said the Physician.

I shrugged. “If you wish.”

Libby drew the blood and brought the needle over. Tom held the Physician’s arm tight while I held him in place with an arm around his throat. He began to struggle. Libby stopped. “What is it?” I said. “We can’t hold him here forever.”

“Just a minute.” She went back to her kit, found a cotton wad, and put some alcohol on it. She came back and rubbed this on his forearm. “Now,” she said sweetly, “this may sting a little.”

“No!”

“Tell me what I want to know.”

“All right, you bastard. It’s Proxima, the fourth—”

“Libby, give him the needle. He’s lying.”

She took her time approaching him, and I got to watch his face. At first, he had been glaring at me, now he was watching the needle as it got closer and closer, and we had to work harder and harder to keep him pinned. The point of the needle touched his arm. He screamed a scream like Poe must have imagined, which degenerated into unintelligible whimpering. I said, “Where is Sugar Bear’s home base? Tell me quickly.”

“Oh God…”

“Tell me, you sonofabitch.”

“Charity,” he croaked. “Charity around Biscane.”

I blinked, not really believing he’d answered me. “Well, son of a bitch,” I said.

Libby said, “How do you know he’s telling the truth?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“If you say so.”

I turned to the Physician. “Okay, next question: How can we stop the missiles?” He shook his head. I repeated the question. He just sobbed.

I repeated it once more and he said, “You can’t. I can’t. They’re only an hour or two away, and the transmitting equipment is on the other side of the planet.”

“Can anyone else duplicate the transmitting equipment?”

“Not without the codes.”

“Where are the codes?”

“With the equipment.”

I closed my eyes and took two deep breaths. “All right. Libby, you’re a paramedic; you know hospitals.”

“Yeah.”

“Go get Eve and meet us at Feng’s. Be careful. Take a cab. Do you have money?”

“I’ve got money. But Billy, being a paramedic doesn’t have a lot to do with getting someone out of a hospital.”

“You’ll find a way.”

She smiled a bit, then held up her automag. “I’ll use finesse,” she said. She left out the back.

I said, “I still hear shooting, Rose, you and Tom go find out what’s going on with Jamie and Christian. Don’t get your head blown off. I have to think.”

They walked out of the room. I turned away. I heard the Physician leap from the chair, and my knife was in my hand as I turned, and I stabbed him in the heart as he was reaching for my throat. I think I broke one of his ribs doing it. He grabbed me, his eyes wide and on a level with mine, his breath in my face, his fingers gripping my arms painfully.

“Thanks for doing the expected,” I told him.

I owed him that for Rich. And Fred. And Souci. I would have told him that I’d made up all that stuff about the goat, but I didn’t think of it. For his part, he didn’t say anything. I let him fall, keeping a grip on the knife so it came free in my hand. He lay on the ground, curled up holding his chest. As he rolled over onto his stomach, I stabbed him in the kidney. Then I stabbed him again, and again. I remember my arm rising and falling, and I was detached, thinking this must have been how Libby felt, shooting Claude.

Eventually I became aware of the fact that he was no longer breathing. I chose not to administer CPR.

When I could see once more, Tom and Rose were back, staring at the body. I said, “Well?”

“It’s like back at Feng’s. There are six of them and we’re sort of shooting into each other’s general vicinity, and no one is hitting anyone.”

“Why haven’t they come around the back yet?”

“They’re in that living room, completely inside the house, and they can’t get back to the entryway without giving Jamie and Christian a good shot at them, so they’re pretty well pinned down.”

“Six of them,” I said. “Let me think for a minute. Can we go around and get them from behind?”

“I’m sure they’re watching for it. We’d take some losses, but we could do it—”

“Take some losses. Shit. All right. We’ll do something else. Rose, tell Christian and Jamie to be ready to back up, carefully, when they smell smoke. Then get your ass out of here. And bring your fiddle. Tom, go around to the front, get as close as you can without letting them shoot at you, spill kerosene all over the entryway, and light it. Then go outside and shoot anyone who tries to get out the front way.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll wait here for Christian and Jamie and Rose, in case there’s any trouble.”

“Take this, then,” said Rose, and handed me her derringer. I accepted it. I still doubted I could hit anything, but now I knew I could kill.

Tom went out the back door, Rose headed toward the front. I waited, holding the pistol ready. The Physician’s body was facedown, for which I was grateful.

I think it was forever, give or take a few minutes, before Rose returned. Christian and Jamie came backing into the kitchen about thirty seconds later. The cat came dashing out past our legs at about that time.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Rose picked up her fiddle and we headed out the back hallway. I began to smell smoke. Jamie said, “What’s to keep them from following us?”

“We’ll wait just outside, and nail them as they come out.”

“Six of them? That’s a wide doorway. If they come out two at a time, shooting, they might get out.”

“So, they get out.”

“Then they kill us.”

The air was cool and smelled of freedom, just as it had the last time I’d found myself fleeing from this house. I said, “Come up with a better idea, asshole.”

“I got one,” said Jamie. He had the sawed-off shotgun in his left hand, the .357 in his right. He said, “Catch you later,” and ran back inside.

I cursed softly. “What the hell does he think he’s doing?”

“Keeping them from coming after us,” said Christian.

“By himself?”

“The hallway’s narrow. He can hold them.”

“Sure. For how long?”

“Just until the house collapses. That can’t be too much longer.”

Rose screamed Jamie’s name, and, before we could stop her, followed him into the house. By this time we could see a red glow coming from the windows, and the yard was becoming warm. I heard what I think was a shotgun blast, followed closely by another. I started to follow Rose, but Christian hit me in the back of the head and I went down. I tried to get up and he knocked me down again. I might have tried to shoot him but the derringer went spinning away.

He said, “What do you want, motherfucker? Rose and Jamie, or the mission Feng set out to accomplish?”

“Fuck Feng,” I said. “Fuck the future. Fuck humanity. Fuck you.”

“Uh-huh.”

Another pair of shotgun blasts, this time followed by others. I stayed there on my hands and knees while the house burned, and there was more shooting, until the heat forced us to back away. I heard shots for a while longer, then sirens in the distance, and I will swear as long as I live that I heard the sound of a fiddle playing an Irish reel, just before the roof collapsed, sending sparks high into the air, and leaving only a very large, glowing ember where the house had been.

I must have found Rose’s derringer, because I was holding it in my hand when we arrived at Feng’s. Carrie let us in. “What happened?” she said.

Neither Christian nor I could answer. Tom said, “Why didn’t you go to the ship?”

“I thought I’d rather stay with you,” she said.

Tom nodded and sat down, his face empty of all emotion.

Carrie said, “May I?”

Tom looked at me. I shrugged, nodded, and looked away. “Yes,” said Tom.

“What happened?” repeated Carrie.

“It doesn’t matter.”

The door opened then, and Libby came in, escorting Eve. Eve looked tired and drugged, and her eyes were very red, but there were some signs of recognition on her face when she saw us. Libby sat her down in the booth nearest the door.

“How long do we have?” said Libby.

“Maybe a few minutes,” said Tom.

Christian came and put his arms around Libby. “I’m glad you made it,” he said.

“I’m glad you did. What happened to—no, never mind.”

Christian nodded. There was no reason to talk about it. I walked over to the door and opened it. Tom said, “What are you—”

“Shut up,” I said. I looked out at the street, which was pretty empty except for a pair of kids, two boys, maybe twelve, who were walking in front of Feng’s. I remembered them from the day we’d arrived in New Quebec, parking their bicycles outside of a bakery that was now a mass of bullet holes. I glanced at it, and saw that repair work had been begun on the windows. Pitiful. I said, “Hey, come here a minute.”

The kids looked at each other. “
Pardonnez?
” said one.

I gestured toward the inside. They looked suspicious, but, for whatever reason, came inside. As they did, an air-raid siren sounded from not far away. It sounded just like the ones back on Earth, and the one in Ibrium City, and the one in Jerrysport. They hadn’t changed at all. I shut and locked the door.

The two kids looked at each other and made for the door, but it could not be opened from the inside. They stared at us fearfully, but no one had any spare energy to try to reassure them.

I walked over toward the bar to have a drink, but the missile hit just at that moment, knocking me over. It was about as hard as the place had ever been hit, and the picture of Feng fell from its place and landed on the floor next to me. The glass that covered it shattered as the room shook and spun and I went down, and somewhere I heard the whine of a generator and Carrie screaming. I saw Tom holding her. The room tilted and a table or something hit me in the back of the head.