Game Of Cages (2010) (36 page)

And there was no way it would let them trap it here, no matter how much they loved it.

I shouted: "Get out of the way!" Steve looked at me in surprise, but it was too late.

The sapphire dog leaped up as if it was jumping into his arms. Its head struck Steve low on his torso and then sank into him. Its legs, body, and tail pulled back into a thin column behind that oversized head, like the tentacles of a jellyfish, and it slowly, excruciatingly, passed through Steve's body and the wall behind him.

It couldn't have taken longer than five or six seconds, but it seemed much longer. As it happened, Steve's mouth fell open and a sorrowful expression came over his face. He looked as though he realized he'd done a terrible wrong to someone he cared about.

Then the predator was through and gone. Steve's face went slack and he fell onto the floor in a sloppy mess.

I laid my forehead onto the freezing concrete floor and let out a long string of curses. The predator had not recognized me, or it would have had me shot out in the field. It had seen the ghost knife as soon as I touched it, though, and it had fled. Steve was dead because of me. The sapphire dog had not even bothered to feed on him.

I had failed.

Hondo and his pal still held on to me. I struggled, but they were using all of their weight. I was sure the next thing I was going to feel was a bullet punching through my skull.

"Move aside," someone said. The speaker's voice was low and gravelly and heavily accented. "You will move aside! I have only come to talk." He pronounced will as "vill" and have as "haf" like a cartoon villain.

They moved aside and Zahn limped in, the right side of his head scorched black and his right arm withered to the bone. His clothes were in tatters, and his left leg was a mess of raw meat. Annalise had hit him hard, and I was glad she'd gotten her licks in. Still, just seeing him walk in here instead of her filled me with an empty, grieving rage.

Zahn didn't act like a man with critical injuries, though. He didn't even walk like a scrawny old man. "Is it not here?" he shouted, his voice raw. "I will speak to it immediately!"

The sapphire dog's pets stared at him with the same inscrutable gaze the predator had given me.

"Very well," Zahn said. "I will speak to underlings." He walked up to a young woman in a long red coat, seemingly chosen at random. "I have sealed this town off from the rest of the world. Unless I lift this seal, no one will ever come here again, and no one but me will ever leave. You will be trapped--and starving--on a world teeming with food. Again."

From somewhere behind me, Pastor Dolan said: "What do you want?"

Zahn turned toward Dolan. "I will take you from this place," he said. "As my captive."

Everyone who had a gun raised it in unison and began shooting at Zahn. The old man's skull split open as a shotgun blast tore through it. He staggered, and bits of blood and flesh splashed off his body under the barrage. God, the sound was deafening.

Bullets ricocheted around us. One skipped off the floor near my hand, and Hondo collapsed heavily across my neck and shoulders.

The firing stopped after a few seconds. I glanced around the room. Six people lay dead or dying on the floor, and eight others were pressing their hands against bloody wounds. The nearest corpse had her face toward me. It was Karlene.

I had a sudden vision of her dog Chuckles, sitting on a blue tarp in the back of her truck. Was he still alive? If so, I hoped he'd find someone to care for him.

Someone behind me threw an empty nine-mil on the concrete floor. Preston's shotgun and a pair of rifles were discarded, too. Obviously, they hadn't brought enough spare ammunition.

The old man had fallen on his back into the corner. He raised his left arm and made a horrible choking sound. The woman in the long red coat lay on the floor beside him, a bright spray of arterial blood pulsing out of her thigh onto the wall. I shrugged Hondo's body off me and got to my knees. Zahn was still making that hrk hrk hrk noise.

Then I realized he was laughing.

He sat up. Most of his head and face were gone, and his body was riddled with bloody exit and entrance wounds. His only good eye rolled in his head as he looked around the room.

He saw the bleeding woman beside him and lunged at her wound, ruined mouth gaping.

I shut my eyes. My stomach felt sour, and my skin crawled. I wanted to run for the door, but I could hear a couple of the pets nearby reloading. The sounds the old man was making were revolting. They weren't the wet slurping noises you hear in a horror movie. They were the moans a connoisseur makes during a fine meal.

I couldn't help myself. I looked at him again.

As he gulped down the blood, his wounds were healing, even the ones Annalise had given him. Raw and fresh, I wanted to say again, but the thought made my stomach twist. Annalise used that same spell to heal herself, but at least she limited herself to meat bought at the supermarket.

The woman died before Zahn finished healing, so he started eating the meat.

"I don't understand," Pastor Dolan said, his voice flat and toneless. "Why didn't you die?"

"Of course you don't understand," the old man said between bites. "This world is full of things you and your food do not understand. Chief among them is me. You can't kill me with those guns, but they do hurt. If you hurt me again, I will leave you here to starve."

"I don't want to be captured again," Dolan said. I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to see the expression on his face. I also didn't want to turn my back on Zahn.

"The people who held you captive before didn't understand what you are. They would have fed you if they knew how, but they didn't. I know more about you, and I can guarantee that you--and your new selves--will never starve again."

New selves? That didn't sound good.

"I don't want to be captured again. I nearly starved to death the last time." Pastor Dolan's singsong voice sounded a little closer to me.

"You have been captured already," Zahn said. "You and your food."

"I know this. I tried to escape many times."

"If you come away with me, I will see that you are fed. I don't want to destroy you, like this one does." He pointed at me. "I want to grow in power with you. Or you can starve here. The choice is yours."

"I don't really have a choice," Pastor Dolan said. "Isn't that right?"

The sapphire dog poked its head though the hole in the cinder block. Zahn looked at it and smiled. "It is right," he said as he tore a long muscle out of the runner's thigh. "You have belonged to me all along." He stuffed the meat into his mouth, opening his jaws unnaturally wide to make it fit.

The sapphire dog stepped through the opening in the wall and curled up on the floor. Four of the uninjured townspeople moved in front of it, blocking my view. Damn. I was probably too far to use my ghost knife anyway.

Then Zahn turned his bloody face to me. He smiled in a way I didn't like. "And now for you."

Without Hondo, the man holding me couldn't keep me on the floor. He was strong, but I thrashed desperately. I knocked him down and moved away from the old man.

Unfortunately, the sapphire dog's pets had clustered in front of the exit, blocking it with their bodies. If I ran that way, they could simply grab me and hold me for Zahn.

So I moved away from him in a direct line. I only managed a few steps before three or four others took hold of me. I struggled but couldn't break free. My legs were kicked out from under me, and I fell to my knees again.

Someone stepped on my calf, pinning it to the stone floor. The pain in my kneecap was intense. I tried to glance back to see who it was, but I didn't have that much freedom of motion.

Zahn stood, took a linen napkin from his pocket, and delicately wiped the blood off his face. He began to resemble the little old man I'd seen on the Wilburs' back lawn.

"Damn," I said, trying to keep tremors of fear out of my voice. "You carry a napkin around? I guess cannibals never know when they'll need to freshen up."

"That word holds no revulsion for me. I have done many, many things that you would consider a horror, but to me they are the price of power and extended life. I do not even think of this"--he held up the bloody cloth--"as distasteful anymore, unless they soil themselves in fear.

"But you find many things to be a horror, yes?" He began walking toward me. I tried to move my pinned leg, but I didn't have the leverage. "I enjoy killing your people, Mr. Twenty Palace Society. I enjoy seeing your numbers dwindle. You were so close to winning, not so many decades ago, yes? Or maybe you don't know that. You were very close to making yourselves kings of the world."

He stopped in place and held his arms out as though a crowd was cheering for him. "But there were always some, like me, who refused to play by your rules. Individualists. Rebels. And how many palaces do you have left now? Eleven? Ten? Six, perhaps? And you have no more dreamers, yes? Soon your kind will be gone from the world, and free men will be free."

He started toward me again, taking his time. I didn't like seeing him so confident and relaxed. I wanted to shake him up. "Free to bring predators here to feed on other people ..." Maybe he no longer thought of himself as human, but I pressed on. "And feeding on them yourself, too. The world would be better off without you."

Zahn smiled. He should have packed some floss along with his linen napkin. "What would the world be without magic?"

Then, finally, he stepped on the slot I'd cut in the floor.

I said: "What would this town be without magic?" I closed my eyes and called my ghost knife.

It cut through Zahn's foot and flew into my open hand. The old man gasped as a jet of black steam shot out of the top of his black leather shoe. I ducked low, letting it blast over me.

The people holding me cried out in shock and pain as the steam struck them, and I broke free. I kicked the leg of whoever was standing on me, knocking him into a pile, then dropped to the floor and rolled away from the scalding blast. With a twist of my wrist, I slid the ghost knife through the handcuff chain.

I scrambled to my feet as Zahn fell to one knee. He clasped his hands over the energy blasting out of his foot. I charged at him, grabbed him by his scrawny neck, and scraped the ghost knife down his spine.

Another, larger blast of black steam roared out of him. I gripped my spell in my teeth, grabbed Zahn's leather belt, and lifted his tiny, withered body off the ground.

I held him in front of me and ran at the human shield around the sapphire dog. The steam made the pets fall back, covering their faces and shrieking. They didn't break and run, but they did fall.

I spun Zahn behind me, dropping him to the floor in case more pets came at me from behind. He caught hold of the lapel of my jacket as I let him go, and I wasted precious seconds slipping out of it. Then the sapphire dog was right in front of me. I grabbed the ghost knife out of my teeth.

The predator split into three and vanished.

I wanted to roar in frustration, but I didn't have the time. The pets were all around me. I dropped to the floor next to Steve's legs. My hand fell on a gun lying against the wall, and I grabbed it, then scrambled through the hole the sapphire dog had made.

I heard shouting and commotion behind me. A hand grabbed at my pant leg, but I fought free. The second hole to the outside was just a couple of feet away. I scrambled through.

Then I was outside. I ran, holding the found gun by the barrel.

I heard two quick gunshots, but I had no idea if the shooter was aiming at me. I ran through the tents to make myself a more difficult target. I felt faster without my jacket, but that wasn't going to last. I was cold, wet, and hungry. The only real weapon I had was my ghost knife, which was useless against the pets. If the old man summoned another floating storm, I was dead.

I stole a cinnamon bun out of a booth and, still running, took a bite. It was sweet and sticky and exactly the fuel I needed.

There was movement ahead. A teenage boy stepped out from behind a plastic tent. He raised an old revolver, but I was too fast for him. I hit him hard and ripped the gun out of his hand as he fell.

I passed the last of the stalls and hit open ground. There were no more pets in front of me, but there were plenty behind. I could hear them yelling instructions to one another. I would have guessed that, with the predator in their heads, they wouldn't need to talk to one another, but that wasn't the way it worked, apparently.

I had five options: the two feeder roads across the open field; the parking-lot exit; the horse trail that connected the fairgrounds with the stables; and finally the pastor's church and ruined house. The feeder roads and parking lot pretty much guaranteed I'd be shot. The horse trail was the safest in the short term, but the locals knew the landscape and would run me to ground eventually.

The last choice had something the others didn't--Annalise. Even if she couldn't help me--and I hoped she was still alive and dangerous, even if only barely--I couldn't leave her behind. Besides, I hoped she would have something I needed.

So I ran toward the rubble of the pastor's house, swerving erratically in case someone took another shot.

At the edge of the field, I scrambled up the small hill bordering the church property. A bullet smacked into the dirt beside me, and goose bumps ran down my back.

When I made it to the top of the hill, I looked back. The people of Washaway, teen to senior citizen, ran toward me in a straggling mob, weaving between the stalls. A few carried guns, but most had other weapons.

I turned back toward the church. Waterproof Cowboy and his crew lay scattered across the grass. All of their guns were slag, and all of their heads were missing.

I ran toward the rubble of the pastor's collapsed house. I remembered the way parts of the building seemed to vanish and hoped Annalise hadn't vanished with it.

There. Annalise lay motionless beneath a pile of scorched wood. I stuffed both guns into the back of my waistband and hauled her out by the wrist. She was even smaller than Zahn, but the wood was heavy and the nails snagged on her clothes. It took three tries to heave her into my arms. She wasn't missing any limbs and I couldn't see any blood, but she looked like just another corpse.