The Night Market (7 page)

Most of the men around her had been caught by the cloud
and were variously stumbling about, doubled over coughing or laying in their
own vomit. The men who had struggled with the lock on her bag, also of Visitor
design and therefore as invulnerable, had also collapsed in misery. One hacked
out his lungs with eyes screwed shut while the other moaned and thrashed on the
ground.

Yael sprinted through them, grabbed the handle of her bag,
then sprinted off down the street, following her original path as fast as she
could move. Her lungs were raw and her eyes watered from her minimal exposure
to the gas. The best she could manage was a sort of half-jog, half-run, so that
had to be fast enough.

She made it no more than a few blocks amongst the
fractured roots of the dead city before she heard footsteps and angry voices
from nearby. Yael realized that she hadn’t incapacitated all of the men with
her gas canister. Whomever was left among her attackers would quickly run her
down in her reduced state.

Yael turned at the next corner and went to work
crouched behind the rubble, freeing a chunk from the crumbling remains of the
wall. She managed to break off two pieces roughly the size of her fist before
the first man came around the corner, hair standing up from a lesion-covered
head, face flushed with anger and exertion. Yael’s aim was good, honed by years
of driving off the graveling-sparrows that roosted on the walls of her parent’s
estate. The chunk of concrete bounced off his forehead. Yael saw the first
blossom of red on his skin, eyes rolling back in his head before he fell. The
man behind him caught the second rock with his nose and fell to his knees,
howling with rage while Yael backed further into the ruins, praying that she
hadn’t picked a dead-end.

She had. The wall that rose up in front of her was
fairly intact, two stories high and far too smooth for her to attempt climbing
it. Yael turned around, her back pressed to the wall and fumbled in her waist
pouch.

Four men advanced on her, three new ones plus the one
who had blood streaming from his nose. They had seen enough to be cautious in
their advance, but they clearly had not been dissuaded. Yael found what she was
looking for and pulled it from her waist pouch, clutching another titanium
spike in her right hand. Her pursuers slowed their approach and wrapped
bandanas and rags across their mouths, but they didn’t back off. Yael’s mind
raced, looking for a solution, a way out, a way through. Realistically, Yael
knew she could stop only one of the men if they rushed her, which they almost
certainly would.

Yael was so frightened that she didn’t notice that the
men had come to a halt midway down the dead-end, ugly laughter dying on their
lips. She only became aware of their trepidation when they turned around one by
one to face a figure in a red-hooded sweatshirt and cut-off camouflage pants,
flanked by a dog that looked more like a wolf than anything else.

“Huh. What do we have here?”

It was a thin woman, her features hidden by her hood,
her voice amused and her hands in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. The dog
kept pace beside her as she walked down the shattered alley, the men backing
nervously toward Yael.

“This many of you boys in the same place, I guess you
found something you want real bad, huh?

The men vacillated between Yael’s spike and the woman
in red’s cheerfully relentless advance. They muttered amongst themselves briefly,
then one of them, a golden-skinned man with numerous ear piercings, finally
spoke up.

“This ain’t your concern. Our business is finished. We
gave you free passage through our territory. You ought to take it.”

“Gave me free passage? Did I hear that right asshole? ’Cause
the way I remember it, you bastards wanted to rape me and eat my dog.”

“We came to an understanding,” the golden man
insisted.

“I killed everyone who got close enough,” the woman
said, shrugging with disdain. “Then you hid and yelled shit from behind the
rocks and I got bored. I was on my way out of here when I saw that girl in the
mask give you a hard time. That was interesting.”

“What do you want?”

“I wanna talk to her. Without company.”

The men looked at each other uneasily and Yael
wondered what the woman could have done to make them so afraid. They seemed to
want to leave, but with the woman blocking the only exit, they didn’t know what
to do.

“If we let her go, will you let us leave?” The short,
dark man who asked the question looked very concerned underneath layers of face
paint. “Without a fight?”

“Well, I might,” the woman offered happily, standing
as if she had the whole day allotted for that task. “Fenrir doesn’t take talk
of eating him very well, though. He’s pretty hungry, too. I can’t promise you
anything.”

The golden-skinned man spun on his heel, stabbing one
blunt finger in the direction of Yael so violently that she almost mistook it
for an attack and grabbed for her backup spray can. Smaller than the first, and
lacking the remote detonator, it would still probably stop him before he could
get to her.

“We will leave. For now. But you are lucky that your
friend showed up when she did...”

Yael never heard the rest of the sentence because that
was when she sprayed him, the vapor surrounding him like a cloud. He cried out,
a sound that died down as his throat closed, and clawed at his useless eyes. On
either side of him, men stared at each other in uncertain horror while the
woman behind them cackled.

Yael wondered if she had done the wrong thing, if she
should have let the men leave after making their threats, because she thought
they might rush her en masse, trampling their fallen spokesman. Then they
seemed to realize there was no outlet in her direction, and turned and ran, one
after the other, for the mouth of the alley.

The woman in red stood and waited, standing between
them and the exit. Just behind her, her dog whined with eagerness.

The first had a length of pipe that he swung with
tattooed, heavily-muscled arms, while the short man behind him held kitchen knives
of different lengths in either hand, the blades chipped and jagged. The woman
ducked the pipe swinging for her head without even taking her hands out of her
pockets, though it came close enough to knock her hood from her head. This revealed
a blond ponytail and a much younger girl than Yael had been expecting, with a
grin like a broken glass bottle. Stepping sideways, she watched the pipe
ricochet off the ground with amusement, hardly seeming to put any force behind
it at all when she stepped on top of the pipe. Her weight tore it from his
hands, then she kicked him in the side of the knee so that it snapped and
buckled beneath him. The tattooed man’s screams were muffled by the bulk of
Fenrir, who leapt on him with a particularly ferocious growl and started
tearing the shrieking man to pieces.

The dark-skinned man attempted to stab the woman in
red with both knives simultaneously, in an act of desperation or madness. The
woman jumped backwards at the last moment and the man slashed at nothing but
air, yelling incoherently in frustration. The woman finally took her hands from
her pockets, jabbing the man in the neck with something Yael couldn’t quite
see. His whole body went rigid for an agonizing moment, then he fell over,
crashing to the ground in a twitching mass.

It was obvious to Yael that the final man had no
intention of fighting. He ran for the mouth of the alley, sprinting with the
form and single-minded drive of an athlete, ignoring his comrades scattered
across the ground. The woman in red seemed disappointed as she let him pass. Instead,
she collected one of the dark-skinned man’s knives and sat on his broad chest,
holding the point so it hovered directly above his left eye.

“Granted, it’s hard to find a place to take a bath
around here, but I swear that you bastards go out of your way to stink. Let’s
make this quick. Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll shove this knife straight
through your eyeball and leave it there. Then my dog will eat you. Understand?”

The man twitched and shuddered, pinned to the ground
as if the chipped point of the knife exerted its own terrible gravity. He was
actually moving slightly from side to side, as if he intended to worm his way
into the ground to avoid the knife.

“Good. Where do you guys keep your stuff?”

“What?”

“You rob people, right, asshole?”

For some reason, the man had to open his mouth several
times for each word that he managed to spit out. Yael crept closer, making sure
to stay out of reach of the man she had sprayed, who was still writhing
blindly, whining and rubbing dirt in his face.

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to find...”

“You know what else is hard? Seeing things with only
one eye. You gettin’ the general idea, son?”

Apparently he got the idea. The directions he babbled
made no sense at all to Yael, who had no clue where she was, but the woman
seemed satisfied enough with them, because she buried the knife in the man’s
head with such abrupt and casual violence that Yael let out a little shriek. The
man’s body performed one tremendous spasm, then went limp, the hilt of the
kitchen knife protruding forlornly from his eye socket. The woman looked over at
her with a jagged grin and her dog paused his meal to do the same. Saliva and
blood dripped from Fenrir’s stained muzzle, his black eyes sparkling with
malice and curiosity.

“Well, hello,” the woman said brightly, standing up
and wiping the blood thoughtlessly from her hands onto her tattered sweatshirt.
“What in the hell are you doing out here?”

Nostalgia creeping across a humid expanse of skin,
languid as any seduction. Echoes of footsteps and urgent breathing, found
objects of a sidewalk vendor arranged in a subtle and vaguely disturbing
pattern across a plaid blanket. The topography of a subjective and unknown
territory, the metallic taste of fear.

Yael had to hurry to
keep up, though the blonde girl was hardly taller than she was. The manic pace
she set was matched by the questions she rattled off at Yael, rapid-fire, often
without listening to the answers.

“What’s your name?”

“Yael Kaufman. May I ask your name, Miss?”

The woman cackled, adding another piece of gum to the
wad she chewed incessantly.

“Aren’t you a polite little brat? And it’s Jenny. You
might wanna drop the honorifics, by the way. This isn’t a place for nice people.”

“Polite isn’t the same as nice,” Yael pointed out, practically
jogging to keep up with Jenny on the narrow trail that wandered between
blackened tree trunks and alkaline banks of soil. “It never hurts to be polite,
Miss Frost.”

“Suit yourself. What the hell are you doing out here?”

“I’m going to the Night Market in the Nameless City –
which is really a name in and of itself, if you ask me,” Yael said directly,
seeing no point in making a secret of her destination. That earned her a
backwards glance from Jenny. Fenrir, trotting behind her, looked as if he was
laughing with his tongue lolling out. “I have business there.”

“Where did you hear about the Night Market?”

“A cat named Tobi told me.”

“Oh. Okay. That makes sense, at least.”

“I am glad that you think so. In my experience, cats haven’t
generally been talkative. I thought it a bit odd.”

“Not really,” Jenny said, shrugging. “Cats talk. People
usually just don’t listen.”

“I – I am not certain what you mean.”

“You do seem pretty new at this. Why are you wearing a
mask?”

“The air isn’t safe. I have a read-out,” Yael said,
tapping one of the lenses inset in the mask. “Not all of the bio-war compounds here
are inert. You are at risk, Miss Frost...”

“I don’t care about that shit.”

“You don’t – you aren’t worried about lung cancer? Or
blister gas and neurotoxins?”

“Not particularly.” Jenny climbed the ridge in front
of them with the same relentless pace she used on the flat, paved road, leaving
Yael to pant along behind her. “What do you care? Why would you give a fu – ”

“Please don’t swear,” Yael said sternly. “I don’t care
for that sort of language.”

Jenny paused in climbing the ridge, glancing back over
her shoulder at Yael, who glared stubbornly in return, hiding her trembling
hands behind her back so Jenny wouldn’t see them. Yael was worried about Jenny
Frost’s potential reaction, but at the same time, principles were important,
and she didn’t back down once she took a stand.

Even if she sort of wanted to, this one time.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You are kidding, right?”

Jenny turned around slowly, her hands buried in her
pockets, her expression bemused but alarmingly fluid. Yael noticed for the
first time the wanton cruelty that lurked in her eyes, the utter lack of
empathy and naked disregard. Yael noticed Fenrir moving behind her, cutting off
any chance of retreat down the path.