Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (41 page)

She breathed deeply and waited for the hordes of enemies to break upon them.

Nothing happened.

First Pete, then Fifi slipped past the obstruction, while she waited a little while as a hedge against any stalkers who might have been drawn by the noise.

Nothing.

She wanted to relax and believe this was going to be a milk run, but the absence of any trouble so far just made her more anxious. When she was sure they were indeed alone and unsought by scavengers or Biters or ne'er-do-wells of any kind, she followed her crewmates up the steps. They were headed for the sixth floor this time and she calculated it would take them at least another ten minutes before they were done if they moved as cautiously as they had back at the watchmaker's. She tarried behind Fifi and Pete, watching their rear, pausing on each landing, waiting a full minute, moving slowly to the next floor and . . .

“Got it.”

“What?” She almost jumped out of her skin.

“We're good,” said Pete, tucking a sheaf of documents into Fifi's backpack. “Easy as a drunken nun. Lets go.”

“Bugger me,” said Jules, struggling to still her rapidly beating heart. “You sure you got the right one?”

“Checked it against the Warrant. Come on. This place is giving me the creeps.”

“There was dead people upstairs,” said Fifi. “Heaps of them.”

“How? When?” asked Jules, suppressing the note of panic in her voice.

“Don't sweat it,” Pete said. “Looked like a suicide pact back in the day. Whole bunch of them got together in some meeting hall one floor up and necked enough pills to do the job.”

“Nasty,” said Fifi. “Little kids and everything.”

“Ugh, I hate these places,” said Jules. “Let's just go.”

They hurried through the detritus, pausing for a moment to surveil the street and, finding it clear, plunged back out into the surprising chill of a morning that had turned gray and overcast in front of a southerly change. That would mean tacking down the harbor against a prevailing wind, but still, they were on the home run now. Only needing to retrace their steps, return to the boat, haul anchor, and haul arse. All for fortune and glory.

Everything turned to shit one minute later.

Fifi took point, as always. Pete brought up the rear. Jules had swapped kukri blades for her slingshot again. They moved a little faster now they had secured the salvage. They shouldn't have. Each of them knew enough to take the business of getting out without being seen or heard as seriously as they had taken sneaking into the city. But it was hard. It was always hard when you felt yourself this close to getting away with it. This close to stepping back on the boat, and laying on sail for the open waves. Out there, they knew they could outrun pretty much anybody. The heart always beat a little faster when you knew you were getting clean away. Your breath came a little shallow, and your steps quickened. You . . .

“That'll be far enough, Pete. The redneck and the fuckin' Thloane Ranger can hold up there too.”

The voice was rough and loud and vaguely familiar, and as soon as she heard it Julianne didn't think or pause or hunt around for the source. She dived for cover, and while she was diving she swept the crossroads of the intersection they had been moving through, looking for any sign of movement.

She saw it as she flew horizontally through the air. Two figures darting between an overturned postal van and the charred metal skeleton of a taxi. Already airborne, diving for her own spot sheltered in the lee of a sun-faded station wagon, she still had time to draw her sling back a little farther and loose three heavy steel balls in the direction of the attackers. She heard glass shatter, and steel punch through steel with a dull clang. Two shots had missed then.

But the third struck home with a satisfying, meaty thud that was lost in the gargling scream that followed. It was enough to take some of the sting out of landing heavily on the concrete.

“Smoke!” yelled Fifi, somewhere ahead of her, lighting and throwing both of her smoke pots from somewhere within the traffic pile up.

The crude grenades wouldn't explode, of course. But they did an admirable job of filling the intersection with thick, gray chemical clouds. Julianne pulled the bandanna around her neck up to cover her mouth and throat. Fifi's smoke bombs always tasted like shit.

“OH PETE! COME ON, NOW, MATE! THITH ITH UNNETHETHARY! DAN THAID YOU'D BE REATHONABLE ABOUT THINGTH!”

Jules cursed to herself.

Fucking.

Shoeless.

Dan.

That treacherous cunt. Was there a world somewhere in which he didn't fuck them every fucking time?

She recognized the voice now, too. The harsh, rasping lisp of Dan's one-time first mate, Jake “The Cobra” McTiernan. The Cobra liked to put it about that he got his nickname by virtue of his being so fast and deadly in a fight, but everyone knew it was because Dan had slit his tongue in two during a drunken disagreement over a salvage rights split six or seven years ago. Jake the Snake, as Jules preferred to think of him, had drifted from salvage into scavenging, but it seemed the rumors he'd patched it up with Shoeless Dan, at least in private, were no longer rumors.

“Fucking Shoeless Dan,” hissed Pete, warning her of his approach as he slid out of the acrid smoke to crouch beside her. “Treacherous motherfucker.”

Jules had already swapped out her slingshot for the twinned daggers. They'd be of much more use in this fight now. Pete's club and sharpened tonfa, she saw, were already slicked with blood.

“Where's Fifi?” she asked.

“Fucked if I know. She was moving fast when she popped smoke, should be headed for the rendezvous point by now, but . . .”

They heard a scream.

A scream with a noticeable lisp.

Then, “I am not a redneck, you ignorant cocksucker.”

“Bugger,” said Jules, at almost exactly the same moment as Pete, causing an odd, echo effect.

*   *   *

There were at least nine of them.

At least. Maybe ten. That was the rough number Fifi thought she counted in the sight-picture she took in the mad chaotic second after she sprang the ambush and Snake McTiernan's little worms had all come wriggling out to play. That could mean there were only nine of them, but more likely meant they were facing a dozen or more.

Pete and Jules would head for the first rendezvous point as soon as the smoke gave them a chance to get gone. And she would too. She would totally do as she was supposed to do.

But by her best reckoning, that forked-tongue spudfucker McTiernan was standing between her and the quickest path to the first ERP, and that meant she was totally entitled to a reckoning with him for getting in her goddamned way.

She didn't pause for sake of caution, or falter out of timidity. Sword and sai raised she moved into the thickest of the smoke, toward the voice that was now yelling in fury and exasperation to “Kill them, kill them all and get their thtuff.”

Fucking scavengers.

She hated these guys.

A face came at her out of the gray chemical soup, a leering fright mask of facial tattoos, nose bones, lip rings, and long, oiled hair. The eyes went wide as he saw her, first in triumph, then in horror as her hand licked out, driving the trident sword deep into his throat. The thrust destroyed his voice box, opened up the trachea, and he died trying to scream, but failing as Fifi ripped the sai out of his neck and spun on her heel, cleaving a trail through the smoky air with the razor-edged metal blade of her ninjaken sword. The sweeping blade failed to connect with the other scavenger who'd come up behind her, but the flash of lethal steel unmanned him completely. He stumbled over his own feet, trying to back up even as his earlier momentum and intent served to carry him forward.

She lashed out with a front kick, missing his groin but connecting with the inside of his upper thigh. Her heavy, steel-capped boot dug into the soft flesh around the femoral artery and he collapsed with a howl that she cut short by opening his throat with the chisel point of her longer weapon.

“Kill them all!” cried McTiernan, and he was very close now. Fifi homed in on his cries.

“Hey! Thnakey,” she called out as his rotund profile emerged from the smoke. “Behind you.”

The leader of the scavenger band whipped around, raising his machete to guard against the flurry of blows he expected to face. But Fifi had already stowed her sai, replacing it with a seven-pointed shuriken that she flicked into his face with practiced speed. Over the years since the Blackout, she had made tens of thousands of practice throws into a series of scarred wooden tree stumps on the deck of the
Diamantina
, gradually reducing the fat, hardwood logs, one after the other, into kindling and wood chips.

Over the same period of years, the Snake had enriched himself, in a meager fashion, by sneaking up on travelers in their bedrolls and bashing out their brains, by raiding isolated farmsteads in low and vicious company, and by ambushing small parties of legitimate salvagers with genuine Royal Warrants to be about their business. None of this prepared him for close combat with an experienced and committed foe and one who, in the person of Fifi Lamont, was authentically bugshit on the topic of scavengers.

McTiernan made a ham-fisted attempt to knock the throwing star off its course, but badly mistimed the fend and screamed in pain and violation as the missile bit deeply into one of his eyes and the hairy curve of his cheek. His hands flew up involuntarily, pawing at the wound, and Fifi leapt forward in a fluid blur, slicing down across the front of his poorly protected belly, hacking through the ties of his boiled leather-scale vest with her first strike, then biting deep into his unprotected flank with a return technique that caused her sword to describe a glistening figure eight in the smoke, before gutting Jake “The Thnake” McTiernan at the intersection of Castlereagh and Market Streets.

For his dying declaration he chose “Thupid redneck thlut,” which gave Fifi reason to cry out in protest.

“I am not a redneck, you ignorant bigot,” just before she kicked him in the face, driving the shuriken in so deeply there was no sense in trying to retrieve it.

“That's her,” said Pete. “Come on.”

“Behind you!” Jules cried out, and Pete spun as he came up, already raising and sweeping the tonfa in a defensive arc.

A scavenger was leaping at him from the bonnet of a car. Pete poured even more torque into his turn, whipping his hip and shoulders around in a tight circle that perfectly recalled the old graphical representation of yin and yang. The real-world effects were not so pretty. The move took him off the line of attack and the long arm of the tonfa smashed into the man's unprotected elbow, doing little structural damage but probably stunning the arm. He was already too close for Pete to get a good swing in with his club, so he lashed out with an elbow, connecting lightly with some part of the guy's head as he flew past. Graceful technique fell apart in a tangle of arms and legs as ballet gave way to messy kinetics. The city blocks swirled around him in a sick miasma of washed-out colors and he drew in a deep breath ready to raise the club and bring it down on the neck or spine or anywhere soft. The attacker flew past and crashed into the car against which they had been sheltering. Pete readied himself for the kill, but then . . .

No point.

Julianne was already there, Gurkha blades flashing out in short, efficient strokes that neatly removed his head. Blood jetted from the body in extravagant fountains of hot, red horror.

“How many of them?” he asked, feeling stupid and numb.

“Same as before,” answered Jules, flicking gore from her blades. “Fucked if I know.”

With McTiernan no longer shouting orders, there was no sense of a coordinated assault, but that hardly made their position any less perilous.

“This way,” said Pete, leading Jules in the direction from which they'd heard Fifi shouting at the scavenger chief.

Club in one hand, tonfa in the other, ready to block or stab, he felt his way through the smoke and chaos, expecting at every moment to fall into a desperate close quarter fight for his life. He could sense Julianne just a few steps behind him, her long, bloodied daggers ready to spin up like an old-fashioned threshing machine at the first provocation.

A gust of wind thinned out the smoke for half a second, revealing two bodies just ahead of him, one of them was the sprawled out corpse of the so-called Cobra, one hand clutching at a sharp and decidedly foreign object lodged in his face, while the other had tried to hold in a butcher's bag of gizzards that had come spilling out of his once generous paunch. He was dead, but there was no sign of Fifi.

No sign of the Cobra's crew either though, and that shouldn't be. As cowardly and vicious as they were, by Pete's best guess the scavengers still had them outnumbered two or three to one. He hefted the club, and gave the tonfa an experimental twirl, burning off nervous energy.

“Where are they? Where'd they go?”

“What part of fucked-if-I-know are you having trouble understanding, Pete?” said Jules in her clipped, pissed-off voice.

The wind freshened as they found the edge of the smoke and stared up the gentle slope of Market Street toward Hyde Park.

“Bugger,” said Julianne in a flat voice.

It took a heartbeat, maybe two, for Pete to understand. At first he thought the southerly front was simply whipping through the dense forest and undergrowth that had taken dominion over the park lands. His body seemed to understand before his brain kicked in. He felt his balls trying to crawl up inside him before he had processed what he was seeing.

What looked like hundreds of Biters emerging from the foliage. They were camouflaged not so much by design and cunning, as by caked-on filth and long reversion to brute nature. They had one of McTiernan's men, who'd foolishly run toward them, or rather away from the sudden danger presented by the small salvage crew he'd meant to murder and rob.