Gods of Manhattan (10 page)

- the revolver in the masked man's gloved hand swung up and spat a bullet into Monk's kneecap, then another into his lung.

Monk went down like a freight train crashing, rolling over from the force of his own momentum, coming to rest next to the destroyed table. He reached, fingers trembling, a last attempt to grab hold of the masked man's coat as he scrambled upwards, but he only caught air.

Then he caught another bullet.

This time he didn't even hear the shot, just felt his head knocked sideways, saw his vision double, then triple. He felt nauseous, the pain in his ruined knee and deflated lung joined by a screaming cold iron spike right through the meat of his brain. He figured he must be dead.

He wasn't. The bullet had glanced off his thick skull, cracking it, and into the wall. The masked man fired another two - one in the gut, another in the chest about three inches from the first.

The last thing Monk saw was the masked man lifting the gun up and aiming it right between his eyes. Those eight lenses didn't have a shred of mercy in them. They didn't hold anything human at all.

Then it all went black.

In the blackness, he thought he saw a star explode, far away. A little supernova that took the shape of a thunderbolt for long moments while it faded. He felt something metallic in his hand, and realised he was awake and pointing that metallic something-or-other through a window at the night sky. There was a big circular hole in the window, which was a little strange. Had that been there before? Was it his window? He figured he should head up to bed, but then he remembered this wasn't the brownstone. It was some fancy apartment.

Whose apartment? Heinrich somebody.

Monk suddenly had a very clear sense that he'd missed something very, very important. Something obvious, something that could have changed the whole game, changed everything - if only he'd thought of it sooner.

He passed out before he could think what it was.

He didn't remember using the flare gun, but he must have, because he came round to find Doc shining a torch in his eyes. "Con cushion. Sirius." Something like that. Monk couldn't think straight.

He was alive, anyway. That red mask guy must have left him for dead, gone out the way he came in. He should tell the Doc.

He tried to speak, and went away again into blackness. He felt as if he were out for hours.

He came back around, and Doc was still shining the light in his eyes. No time had passed at all. Monk wondered if he was going to die.

Talk, ape-man. Ook ook.

"Duh. Drrr."

Doc put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't try to talk, Monk. I have to stop the bleeding and then I need to get you across town to the hospital. It's going to be bumpy."

Maya broke in. How long had she been there?

"You can't be serious."

Doc's voice was cold and terse. Deadly serious. Monk realised there was a good chance he was dead, and he tried to say something, tried to say what he'd found, but all he managed was to cough blood.

"Look at him!" Maya's voice held an edge of anger that Monk had only heard a few times in his life. She was furious, which meant she was scared. Which meant... talk, ape-man. Talk while you can.

"Look at him! He might die if you move him. If you try to - I can't even say it..." she drew in a breath, her emerald eyes flashing green fire. "If you try what you're planning, he'll die for certain."

"He'll die if I don't. By the time the paramedics get here and get him to the hospital, he'll have bled out. I've already done the math, Maya, there's no way to play this that won't probably kill him. But at least he's got a chance, if get him there myself.
If
."

Maya gripped his massive wrist, and her grip was like steel. Where there'd been fire in her eyes, there was nothing but a sea of ice.

"If you kill him, I kill you."

Doc pulled his hand away, not speaking, not looking at her, just dressing Monk's wounds with whatever he had - torn silk shirts from the wardrobe, alcohol from decanters on the sideboard. He didn't speak.

It was Monk who broke the silence. "Duh.
Doc."

"I said don't try to-"

"Important." he coughed again, and spat more blood. He didn't know how much he had left. "Donner. Not... not Untergang." He flicked his eyes around the room. "All this... exile. Ret... retirement..." He breathed in, weakly, trying to get some air into the lung he had left. Why was this so difficult? He just wanted to go to sleep.

"Monk!" Doc was yelling in his face. He forced himself to spit out some more words and prayed they made some sense.

"Guy who... did this. Red mask. Red mask."
Eight lenses. Black coat.
He tried to say it, but his brain and his tongue seemed disconnected. The blackness seemed to be closing in on him again. He had to try.
Ape-man. Talk. Say it. Eight lenses.

Talk, ape-man!

"Eyes... crazy eyes..."

That was as far as he got before his head fell away, down into a black ocean with no bottom to it.

And maybe this time he wouldn't wake up.

"Red mask. Damn it." Doc was cursing himself. He should have known. Maya's dreams didn't lie. Why hadn't he thought about it? A man in a red mask, standing over the man he killed, a man Maya cared for. Monk, of course Monk, it couldn't be anybody
but
Monk because Doc was all but invulnerable to anything except his own damned stupidity. And he'd sent him into the lion's den anyway. How had he been so damned careless with his best friend's life?

He shook his head, spitting out another curse under his breath. It was Donner. Always and forever, it was Donner. Even beyond the grave - especially beyond the grave - Donner had the power to blindside him, to get under his skin, to get him making mistakes. And now Monk had paid the price for one of those mistakes, and he might not make it through.

No wonder Maya was mad. She stood behind him, those green eyes burning into his back, as he gently cradled Monk in his arms, holding the immense dead weight of the man as if he was carrying a baby. He took a deep breath, stilling his mind and steadying his nerves.

And then he threw himself out of the window.

The important part was to get the landing right - every landing. If he fell from this height and he didn't take the whole impact on his leg muscles, he'd break Monk's neck and most of his other bones. Even so, it'd be a hell of a jar.

"Hold on, Monk." he breathed, almost whispering it. "Hold on, buddy."

The sidewalk rushed up to greet them both like an eager lover. Doc braced, and when his feet hit the pavement - hard enough to crack it - he bent his legs, softening the impact, then straightened them quickly enough to hurl himself over the rooftops. If he'd aimed right, he'd come down on Madison. After that, a leap to Third Avenue, and then one more would get him there. Hopefully that wouldn't be one too many.

Below him, citizens craned their necks, pointing, witnesses to the miracle of a man who could leap more than a thousand feet in one bound, carrying a human gorilla. None of those who saw - not the carriage-drivers whose horses bolted as Doc Thunder landed in front of them, shattering the tarmac and then taking off into the sky again like an eagle; not the secretaries working late in high-up, high-class advertising offices, who turned their heads at just the right moment to see a god sailing past their window with an injured ape-man in his arms; not the kids staying up late on the fire escapes and feeling them rattle with every shockwave - not a one of them would ever forget the sight. Some of them would carry a fear of Doc Thunder around with them the rest of their days, the arachnid response of those confronted with the alien, with a man who so plainly could not be a man. Others would close their eyes in hard moments and bring the memory back, to give them strength in a difficult time.

For Doc Thunder himself, it was three short leaps and nothing more, with the clockwork of his superlative mind crackling as he performed the calculations that would allow him to do it without killing his best friend. He felt no triumph as he landed for the last time in front of Saint Albert's, only a great wave of relief.

Monk was still alive.

"Get this man stabilised!" he yelled, kicking open the door hard enough to send it off one hinge, nurses and orderlies running to fetch stretchers and gurneys. "And get me Hamilton! Miles Hamilton! He still works here?"

A tall man with longish grey hair, haggard cheeks and eyes that had seen far too many sleepless nights stepped forward from the relative calm of one of the wards. He showed little emotion, even while his staff fought to fit their huge patient across two gurneys strapped together, his blood slicking the floor as they wheeled him down the corridor towards the operating theatre. Instead, his cold blue eyes looked up at Thunder's, accusingly. The name on his badge read Dr. Miles Hamilton.

Once upon a time, Hamilton had been Doc's closest ally, his personal physician - the one man Doc had trusted with the secrets of his strange, inhuman physiognomy. He'd been a warm, uncommonly gentle man, a man who would rather die than cause bad feeling to anybody. Then there had been that final, ugly business with Lars Lomax, the most dangerous man in the world, almost three years ago. Lomax had kidnapped Hamilton and tortured him for hours in an effort to get hold of any secret that might destroy his enemy once and for all. Perhaps it was the torture breaking his mind in a way that couldn't be fixed, or perhaps Hamilton blamed Doc for allowing it to happen in the first place, but after it was all over - after Lomax had plunged to his fiery death in the Amazon rainforest - Hamilton had never been the same. The old gentleness was gone, replaced by a cold, hard demeanor, almost cruel. He snubbed old friends in the street, and even his closest colleagues at the hospital felt uneasy around him.

Doc had tried to bring him back to himself, but Hamilton had only grown colder, a new and barely-disguised hatred for Doc Thunder bubbling under the surface of his frosty attitude. Worst of all, he now bugged Doc constantly for a sample of his blood, insisting that the recuperative qualities inherent within it could revolutionise medical science, and even if it were weaponised, well, that would only allow America to spread its military might across the entire world, which could only be a good thing. Imagine an army of soldiers with Doc's powers...

This was the kind of talk that had caused the end of their friendship. Doc had stopped calling, stopped feeling anything for his old friend but sadness at the change in him. Now, Hamilton stood, looking superciliously at Monk, like a man looking at a sideshow freak, and Doc felt again the pain and anger at how far Miles had fallen from his old self.

His voice was curt but without emotion, as if he simply didn't care. "Doc, what on Earth is the meaning of this intrusion?"

Thunder shook his head. He wasn't about to get into an argument now. "There's no time, Hamilton. Trust me, I'm not exactly relishing this encounter either, but you were the closest person I could trust. I can trust you?" Even as he asked the question, he reached down to his bicep, grabbing the skin and pinching, digging in with his thumbnail. "Get a catheter."

Hamilton looked up at him, his face still not registering the situation. "You can't mean to -"

"A catheter!" Thunder shouted the words, angrily. "You're getting what you wanted, Doctor. My blood! A full pint of it! And unless you want it on the floor, you'll get me a damn catheter!"

He was yelling now, partly from his anger at himself and at the situation he'd created, and partly from the sheer effort it took to tear a hole in his own skin. A thin rivulet of blood began to trickle down towards his elbow.

Hamilton fetched the catheter.

By the time Maya arrived, it was all over. Monk was in the theater, with a pint of Doc's blood hanging over him, being fed to him a trickle at a time along with several pints of his own blood group. Doc's blood would have a healing effect, in time, and from the sound of it Monk was critical but stable and passing further out of danger with every moment.

For a few minutes at a time - just enough to keep him from dying - Monk would have the recuperative powers of Doc Thunder himself. They were the same blood type - O Negative - or there'd have been nothing he could have done. And even among the O-Negatives, there were those who overdosed, who died instantly as their hearts inflated and burst against their ribcages, whose brains hemorrhaged, whose spines were snapped by the growth of muscle in their backs... he had to pray Monk wouldn't end up one of those. "Small doses," he'd said to Hamilton, and the old man had nodded coldly and said something about how he didn't intend to waste any. Doc had felt like punching him. Instead, he'd shaken his hand, resisting the urge to crush it.

They'd been friends once. It seemed like forever ago.

"You were right," smiled Maya as she walked back from her conversation with one of the orderlies. "Monk's alive, thanks to that little stunt. I don't know why I doubted you. Being right is what you do for a living." She leant in to kiss him, and he shook his head, placing a finger at her lips.

"If I'd been right, I'd never have sent Monk in there alone. I was a damn fool, and he paid for it." He shook his head, wincing. "It's Donner. He's haunting me. Making me sloppy."