Prophet Margin (31 page)

"Ha! Eloquently put and perfectly accurate," Grinn waggled a finger. "But for one little detail. It's a ship, Alpha."

"What?"

"This villa."

Johnny scowled, suspicion creeping over him. The metal bulkheads showing through thin plaster walls, the service access ladder, the great trumpetlike chimneys that, now he came to think of it, looked more than a little like engine exhausts...

Grinn chuckled and edged sideways, tapping at a control. An image appeared on a wallscreen: the view from a camera outside. The streets thronged with celebrating pillocks, staring in rapture at the sky, presumably waiting for the meteor's arrival. Amongst the frivolity and drunken decadence, remarkably few people noticed when the villa began to change, shedding its whitewashed exterior in a sequence of prearranged collapses like a snake sneaking out of its skin. What was revealed underneath looked, to Johnny, depressingly sleek and shiny.

"You're standing on the bridge of my starship," Grinn giggled. "We - or rather, I - shall be lifting off in a little under ten minutes. Cutting it a little fine, I'll grant you, but this is a fast rig. You didn't think I was going to hang around for the fireworks, did you?"

Somewhere far below their feet, in response to Grinn's fleeting taps at the controls, the unmistakable rumble of a starship engine shuddered to life. On the screen one or two of the drunken cultists had noticed the villa's transformation and were waving their arms about excitedly - presumably discussing whether they were witnessing a miracle or a demonic trick.

"So you see," Grinn said, preening himself, "I really
have
won. Over you, over those morons out there, over the law. Everyone. I'm out of here, Alpha, and with nothing but a cloud of greasy atomic debris and the stink of money behind me, I don't imagine anyone will be following. Certainly no one I can't pay off, at any rate."

"Didn't try it with me."

"Aha. No. You, I had to beat. I think you'll agree I've done a rather good job."

Johnny found himself overcome by a surge of contempt, a violence so strong that he rocked forwards in his spot, fingers crooked into claws. "I'll kill you!" he snarled, the executioner in his genes frothing like a maniac. Grinn thumbed back the hammer on the blaster, shaking his head.

"I don't think so," he said, sighting along the barrel with one last derisive, almost pitying smile. "You mutants really are animals, aren't you?"

Clack.

Johnny jolted in his spot, expecting at best the heavy thump of a blaster impact, at worst the sudden blackout of the long
zzzz
. The more he thought about it, the more it occurred to him that
clack
wasn't a noise he'd normally associate with a blaster discharge. In fact, it sounded to him an awful lot like a rifle being armed.

After a second or two of tentative existential query - double checking that he really wasn't dead - he opened his eyes to find Roolán holding the rifle aimed carefully at Grinn's heart.

"Shoot him!" he shouted, forgetting the fear of death, red mist coming down over his eyes. The killer rampaged out of his head and into his voice. "He killed your parents! Make it personal! Make it personal!"

Roolán was shaking, twitching at every angry syllable.

"I think not," Grinn drawled, still holding the blaster aimed at Johnny's head, seemingly unconcerned by the threat. "He shoots me, I shoot you. It's a simple thing."

"Roolán! He'll kill me anyway! Finish it!"

Sweat poured from the youth's forehead, arms trembling like some personalised earthquake. Grinn giggled.

Johnny almost roared. "Shoot him!"

"Look at him, Alpha, standing there in a puddle of brains." Grinn flicked a contemptuous glance at the bloody floor. "Already had a taste of killing, hasn't he? And... hah... didn't like it, did he? Can't do it again, I bet."

"Roolán! Don't listen to-"

"'Roolán', is it? Pretty name. Such a pretty little thing, he is." He smiled at the youth, eyes narrowed. "Aren't you? Too pretty for guns."

Roolán stifled a sob.

"I should give up, pretty little thing. You won't do it. We both know you won't. Some people don't have what it takes. Not the second time."

"Kill him!"

A tear flounced its way across Roolán's cheek, fighting with beads of sweat all the way down. Johnny watched him with adrenaline hotwiring his mind, quivering through all his senses. He could almost taste the victory, smell the blood in the air and imagine Grinn's smirking face blown apart.

And then the boy glanced across at him, eyes so full of shame and horror that he felt himself overcome; stepping back as if punched. In his mind the universe crystallised, like amber trapping him at its centre. Everything slid out of proportion and back again, washing his senses clear. Roolán's shame - his young eyes full of regret and fear and doubt - filled the world.

Johnny realised with a jolt that he was encouraging a boy - a snecking child - to murder someone on his behalf. The killer in his mind was sucked back into the shadows with a pitiful squeak.

"I'm... I'm sorry," he whispered to the boy, stunned. "It's okay."

Roolán dropped the gun with the relief of someone surfacing from underwater, gasping for breath. A spark of something ignited in his eyes. Johnny couldn't be sure, but he guessed it was maybe humanity.

Grinn shot away the rifle with a couple of disinterested blasts, tilted the handcannon upwards towards Roolán, and smirked.

"No," Johnny whispered.

Grinn pulled the trigger. The youth went down without a sound, hand clutching at the air, and lay still.

Johnny found himself on his knees, mind paralysed. Guilt and horror struggled for dominance in his brain, leaving everything washed out and surreal.

The gun tilted towards him.

"Well," Grinn smiled. "Gotcha. Again."

He would, of course, never admit it, but Wulf was beginning to question the sense in choosing to handle the hypershark alone.

The severity of his need to settle the score couldn't be doubted. In his ancient past a severed beard was insult enough to incur the very wrath of the gods, although admittedly back then one would never have to enact their revenge whilst under imminent threat of, well, consumption. He was beginning to understand how it felt to be small, squishy and edible.

He was bleeding from more gashes than he cared to count, he'd been swatted by so many hyperfins that his arms were basically prehensile bruises, he'd skinned all his knuckles and broken at least one toe in unsuccessful attempts to grapple with the beast. And to top it all the son-of-a-frost-giant Loki-cursed sneck of a helmet on his head continued to zap him at every opportunity.

He was not a happy bunny.

Vowing to himself that dying whilst wearing such ignoble headgear would be the ultimate embarrassment, Wulf had - until now - ignored the pain, attempting to fight back with fists and feet. But watching the wretched thing's wounds heal, its gashes seal together and its vulnerable little eyes reappear over and over with bright pops of light, was beginning to take its toll on his morale. He felt like he was swordfighting with a cloud.

The shark lunged for what seemed like the hundredth time, drawing his carefully-gauged punch to the left then vanishing abruptly, leaving him overbalanced and exposed. It was a trick the monster had pulled already - playing with Wulf's balance like a cat with a captive mouse, growing steadily sneakier with every moment. This time, however, Wulf was ready for it; ignoring the first feint and turning to the side, protecting his exposed legs and preparing to drive a vengeful knee into the path of the reappearing creature, thumbs ready to hook into its eye sockets as soon as the monster materialised beside him.

Which it totally failed to do.

Razor jaws locked around his head like continental plates crashing together. It was directly above him. The sweaty expanses beneath the immovable helmet became significantly more unbearable, strange lights oscillating across its surface as the metal buckled. It felt as though someone was trying to unscrew his head. Spitting and cursing, lifted off the ground by the contracting jaws, he shut his eyes to prevent them popping out and tried to reach up to grab at the monster's flanks, questing fingers shaken clear every time. Someone appeared to have switched off all the colour in the room, and instead of noise there was a new tinkly oxygen-starved soundtrack. This, Wulf reflected, was not a good sign.

And then the helmet, its confused little electrodes responding to some random prompt, discharged with a fizzle. Wulf, who had all but grown used to the constant electrifying abuse, barely grunted.

The shark, however, did not.

It screamed like a banshee stuck in a jet turbine, rippled a violent red, flexed through several dimensions and vanished with a howl. Wulf thumped to the floor smoking and bleeding, head throbbing like a JunglistBeet
^TM
, strangely reinvigorated. He ran a hand over the familiar curves of the helmet, formerly an object of disgust, and grinned.

"Cool," he snarled, "as der cucumber."

From that point the match became a far more cautious affair, each protagonist aware of their opponent's ability to inflict damage. The shark, blossoming with ugly red lesions, circled Wulf in supernatural silence, mouth gaping. Wulf stood his ground, turning in his spot to face whatever strange vector the creature chose to occupy. A plan was forming.

The attack, when it came, was devastatingly swift. After long minutes of languid circling and turning, eyes locking, the shark came to a ponderous halt, rolled onto one side to flash its luminous underbelly at its opponent, and-

"Sneck!"

And was abruptly so close beside Wulf that he could feel the weird energies fluctuating across it, mouth wide and ready, eyes boiling with light. It seemed to Wulf like someone had teleported a dark tunnel into his path, complete with rippling walls and peristaltic fronds of digestive ganglia, squirting and frothing in anticipation.

There was no finesse here, no amusing game of cat-and-mouse, no cunning feints or sneaky tricks. The creature, still on one side, had apparated so close that it simply needed to close its mouth: a jawspan large enough to divest Wulf's body of everything between his neck and his groin. In a horrified moment, the Viking realised this would leave his head - still attached to the helmet - as a humiliating souvenir of his death.

Without applying any further consideration to the matter, in the instants before the jaws slammed closed across his collar, he ducked down into the maw and pushed himself forwards as hard as he could.

The shark was therefore surprised to find itself swallowing its prey whole, teeth clashing closed somewhere behind the morsel's booted feet. For Wulf, the world became a dark and caustic place - utterly airless and completely revolting. Silently hoping that he hadn't just made the biggest mistake of his life, he shook his head until each horn lodged itself into the spongy viscera around him.

Responding to whatever crackling energies danced throughout the creature's bulk, the helmet's diodes began to buzz like a swarm of hornets, overheating.

Wulf held his breath and waited.

And waited.

And started to panic.

And waited.

And began to run out of air.

And finally, gloriously, like a reward from Odin himself, the helmet fired. A great burst of punitive energy flared in the darkness and everything went white.

Even a dimensionally dislocated creature, able to slip between reality and subreality on a whim, can't escape from its own innards.

With electrical charges playing havoc with its own strange energies, the shark detonated like a psychedelic nuke, semi-corporeal gore alternately splattering and passing through the walls, great gouts of glowlight earthing like some localised lighting-storm.

An exhausted Viking dropped from its guts with a wet thud, shimmering with bioluminescent mucus.

Wulf stared around himself in astonishment. The creature's death appeared to have ripped away the majority of the stone walls, punching a molten crater in the gunmetal bulkheads that the brickwork had revealed. Strange traces of whatever subreal energy had sustained the monster crackled and discharged in the cavity, arcs of lightning chasing each other upwards, playing havoc with illuminators and automatic doorways that were now exposed. Wulf breathed a heavy sigh of relieved victory.

And then he made a discovery that blew his levels of self congratulation to such dizzy heights that he almost fainted with joy.

The helmet was gone.

TWENTY-SIX

The blast rocked the entire building. Spaceship. Whatever.

Blue gauss lightning crackled up from the central stairwell, coruscating across the command consoles, gobbing sparks and smoke. Something that sounded important detonated somewhere far below, further shaking the structure. The rumble of the generators died with a drawn-out whine.

Johnny compressed all the guilt and horror at Roolán's abrupt departure, all the fear over Wulf's unknown fate in the explosion below, all the residual shame over his treatment of Kid Knee and - most of all - all his hatred for the bastard with the dragonlike sneer before him, and he pounced.

Thrown off balance by the blast and glancing around in bewilderment as his hopes of escape perished with the whine of dying engines, Grinn was less than prepared for one hundred and eighty pounds of angry, resentful mutant barrelling into him, swatting away the blaster with casual ease and driving a vengeful fist hard into his guts.

For Johnny, this was living. This was what he'd been born for.

Grinn heaved on air and scrabbled for a weapon, producing from the folds of his robe the same remote control he'd used to summon the hypershark. Manic with desperation, throwing sidelong glances at the countdown timer, he hurled it at Johnny's head and turned to flee - not anticipating the bounty hunter catching the slender device and barely slowing in his advance. He spun like a dancer, bashing the remote across Grinn's nose and bringing up a knee to catch the man's head as it dipped, shattering a fan of teeth with a greasy crunch.