Out of the Black (43 page)

The hospital workers seemed to all guess that it was time to bolt. They moved quickly past the armed women.

"Witches?" Miranda was skeptical.

"Corpses." Elena said, face darkening.

After a quick exchange of uncertain glances, Elena and Miranda resumed their ascent. Halfway up the final flight of stairs, Miranda asked, "What's a flebotomist?"

"Down!" someone shouted from behind the door to the fifth floor. An explosion cut off the shout; then it deepened into an earthquake.

Elena's vision blurred as an ephemeral cloud seemed to flit through the stairwell. The floor shuddered. The building creaked. Dust fell from cracking sheet rock.

Miranda almost lost her footing as the building seemed to swim around her. She grabbed the handrail with both hands, saving herself from a fall down the stairs. Her eyes were pressed shut against intense vertigo. She felt as if she were tumbling through the air like Dorothy on her way to Oz. When she could finally open her eyes, she found Elena on all fours, resting her head on the stairs. Her gun had fallen on the stairs beneath her.

"Wha?" Miranda stammered, blinking dust from her eyes.

Still swaying, Elena grabbed her assault gun and wobbled up the last few stairs. "Come on!"

***

Of course, the big woman with the all-blood makeover moved first, but Alex wasn't far behind.

He was already in the Loom strengthening his Obscuring, so he had a speed advantage over Ping and Rae. When the doors opened into the elevator whose last stop had obviously been the more fiery pits of hell, he'd quickly picked up the Cast he'd last used on the Savant in the OR. Its pattern was still constituted, so it was just a matter of redirecting power from the Obscuring to activate it.

Ping was in mid shout. He was either yelling 'down', or perhaps 'doubt' or 'dowry'. It would be a bit more time before Alex could be sure. The big lady was already moving toward the elevator, hostile intentions out for all to see. Ping's pistols were halfway out already... man, he was fast! Rae's hands had left the gurney she'd been pushing and were in the process of finding their proper places on her fletcher. She was entering a crouch and moving to the right to get a better shot around Ping.

With a shock, Alex realized that the demons were also in mid-draw. Each had a pistol; most looked like Rae's work pistol, but a couple had more expensive looking weapons. They were fast too... faster than Ping and Rae, but not faster than Dek- not faster than the woman who now wielded his power. No matter though... in a few hundred milliseconds they'd all be grinning demonic barbeque.

The Cast was in place. The energy focused, leapt out toward the targets packed into the elevator. But then something went very wrong.

Even before the energy touched the demons, the power grew unruly and the weave began to strain, then fray at the edges. Alex tried to compensate, but his weapon dissolved when it touched the first target. The Underworld seemed to contort and the air filled with light and explosive fury.

Alex was surprised he was still conscious. He did his best to defend himself from the backlash that came next. The explosion tore his weave apart, tore his Obscuring away; crashed over him like a tsunami. He was in the air, stretched tight on the swell of power with only the simplest shield sputtering around him. It took all his focus to cling to the Loom, to keep his hastily-erected shield working.

Then he had an idea. It was a rather desperate and foolish idea, but as he flew through the air with Rae and the others about to be exposed to a lot of hot demon lead, he felt both desperate and foolish.

He embellished the patterns in the interior folds of his shield extending them into a replica of his first extemporaneous Cast. He packed the Warping close around him inside his faltering shield.

Then he dropped the shield, or more accurately, he let the storm around him rip it away. His Warping burned brilliant in the avalanche of power, then exploded outward. Then it was gone and Alex was defenseless before the onslaught. The speed of the Loom was gone. He struck the wall on the other side of the hall about a meter up. The sound of crushing destruction filled his ears. A blinding light stole his vision.

***

"Down!" Ping shouted. He was done with his draw before the word was out.

Then his guns exploded, or he thought they did. What he initially attributed to near-fatal misfire was actually something else- less fatal, but weirder. The world seemed to end for an instant, leaving him off-balance, but tranquil in a bright and pleasant place. Into this peace, flashes of some disturbing thing that could perhaps be called 'reality' intruded. There were flashes of rushing bodies, a quickly approaching floor, falling dust, flickering light. This all seemed familiar.

Yeah, reality.

He hit the floor with a sobering shock. His twice-healed noggin took the brunt of the impact... this was just not his head's week. Perhaps because of some inherited cephalic fortitude, he didn't black out. Ol' Grandpa Sean O'Bannon was still legendary at the family school for his hard head. One time he'd taken a full-power hit on the forehead with a wooden fighting pole during a ranking test and had still gone on to win the match. According to the legend, he' even taken a cast iron crock pot in the head from Grandma Yao during a bit of premarital sparring, though he hadn't won that match. Or maybe he had- they'd gotten married less than a month later.

Long line of hardheads... Ping's dad had been so happy when Ping finally "woke up and joined the force". When he started with family counseling, dad had been so "secretly" disappointed that his little Tian Fu had "squandered his gift" and moved into a profession so "obviously full of crap". Dad was subtle in disappointment.

Ping was smiling as he came off the floor; dizzy, but determined. The guns in his hands were so warped that they looked like cartoon caricatures of pistols. The hole in the barrel of one was deformed into an oval and bent about ten degrees off center. Alex had saved his bacon again. He'd known the demons had the drop on him as soon as he saw them... they were too ready, too fast.

As he rose to his feet, he saw Alex sprawled out about a meter below another body-sized imprint in the wall. Ouch. He wondered fleetingly if this was their lot in life- Ping taking the head trauma, Alex trying to make it through wall after wall. He hoped not, though that was a significantly brighter future than the most likely one right now. Right now any future where he didn't end up with an apple in his mouth on the demon smorgasbord seemed rosy.

On his feet, though not entirely stable, he turned to the elevator. The demons were struggling to their feet, some of their clothes seemed to be smoldering. There was a step down of perhaps five centimeters where the elevator had fallen down slightly before wedging into place. Cracks covered walls of the hallway at regular intervals where the metallic supports behind the sheetrock had deformed.

Anne was already up. She spared him a quick glance then bolted toward the warped elevator doors. Two demons had made it into the hallway, but now they were dealing with the phlebotomist... true to form, she'd already drawn blood. One of them was already on the floor and looking even more dead than it did when it stepped off the elevator. She was really pouring on the destruction, moving faster at times than he could follow. Wow.

His smile broadened. His blade came out.

***

"Freeze!" Miranda yelled as they burst into the hallway.

Though she was pretty sure they'd done it correctly, nobody listened. They'd displayed their weapons prominently and aggressively. She'd used an authoritative voice and the 'on the edge of shooting' face. She willed them to comply... but the fight raged on.

To call it a pitched battle would convey intensity, but not form. It was complete chaos. Maybe ten of the things that killed Derry were brawling with a uniformed cop using a fletcher like a club, some guy with a sword who looked and acted not unlike Jet Li, and a large red-skinned alien from fast-forward planet.

They glanced at each other. Elena shrugged.

As they stood there indecisively, the guy with the sword bisected one of the demons from shoulder to opposite hip. Elena winced.

The big red alien took a very painful looking blow from one of the demons- pistol to the back of the head. Perhaps its alien physiology had a different home for the brain because the blow didn't slow it down much.

The alien whirled around, looking somewhat miffed. With two or possibly three blurring-fast moves,t trapped the arm that held the pistol. The arm broke at the elbow and the gun flew from the demon's hand. The alien drove its elbow into the demon's head with a sound that was more shattering than breaking. The demon's pistol ricocheted off the ceiling and landed about two meters in front of Miranda as the demon who'd held it landed in a heap at the alien's feet.

"You think that's a flebotomist?" Miranda asked, clearly amazed.

"Don't whack it on the head." Elena replied.

The cop took a kick to the gut, then a fist to the face as she doubled over. To Elena's surprise, the cop didn't go down. Hands on the barrel of her weapon, she swung it into the demon's right knee, then slid one hand to near the pistol grip as she stepped forward, bringing the weapon up, connecting with the thing's chin. As the thing stumbled backward, she swept its arms aside with the barrel end of the gun then twisted the gun so that the barrel controlled the thing's arms while she broke the folding stock on its face. Without stopping, she gripped the barrel with both hands again and struck another demon in the face with the pistol grip. She turned back to the fallen demon. The high tech club raised and fell three times as she insured the thing wouldn't get back up.

Elena wondered why with so many firearms in the fray they were all being used as clubs. It was like watching a second-rate action film, only with no slow motion or hokey spinning head kicks.

The guy with the sword swept a demon's arm off, and the big alien leapt a full meter into the air, spun through about 270 degrees, and kicked the demon in the head so hard that its feet flew over its head before it hit the ground.

Well, no slow motion anyway.

"Did you see that?!" Miranda shouted, eyes wide.

"Don't shoot the humans or the flebotomist." Elena said, aiming at a demon rushing toward the guy with the sword. She pulled the trigger. There was a click, but nothing else. "Jammed!" she yelled.

"Me too." Miranda said. They both examined their weapons. The electronic diagnostics were offline, but it was obvious there was a mechanical jam.

"Check this out." Miranda held up her gun so Elena could see the length of the barrel. It was warped slightly. Elena examined her own weapon. She noticed similar deformities in the metal. With a little more inspection, they discovered that their pistols hadn't been spared either.

"Great." Elena shook her head.

It was then that she noticed Kyle. He was swaddled on a gurney near the center of the fight, looking like a new resident of the maternity ward. With this realization, her eyes went to the other gurney. She saw blonde hair, dark suit cut to allow surgical access, she saw blood, saw Hawthorne.

She flipped her weapon over, grabbed the barrel with both hands and rushed forward. "Come on!"

***

"All fighting breaks down to resolve and geometry, Tian Fu." His Dad used to say, usually right after compromising Ping's geometry and giving him a friendly fist in the face.

Good ol' Leung O'Bannon, now Leung Bannon (Americanized), was known internationally as a great teacher, but that's just because most folks didn't know how good a father he was. Sometimes you become well known for things other than what you're best at. Ping was familiar with this phenomenon.

Ping spent his childhood in "Gun Fu", the Hong Kong Wing Chun Kwoon Granpa Sean and Grandma Yao opened when his dad was little. He spent his adolescence in the Chicago extension Dad opened. To add to the all-important Asian mystique such establishments require outside Asia, they'd called the Chicago branch "Chong Fu"- "Gun Fu" in Chinese.

When dad found out the name of the school had to sound mysteriously Chinese, he'd initially come up with "Bu Xue Wu Shu Dao", or "The Way of the Gomer". Good humor and hard heads- it might as well be the O'Bannon family credo.

Life was simple growing up in the Kwoon. He'd been happy, surrounded by stimulating activity, plenty of exercise, and family. His Dad was the biggest influence in his life. He'd taught him to think, taught him to meditate, to explore. He'd taught him to fight.

Ping had broken with two generations of tradition on his father's side and eight generations of tradition on his mother's side to pursue a career outside the Kwoon. It's not that he didn't like his world, but he loved to listen to the students talk about their work. The students that Ping respected most were cops. When Ping had gone to college, he started out in Criminal Psychology. Of course, he didn't expend a lot of energy advertising his law-enforcement intentions to his parents.

His parents never had any problems with his educational choices. "Life is education." Mom said twice daily. Their concern had started when he had switched to the Marriage and Family Counseling program in his second year of school and started talking about taking it up as a career. Ping had to admit now that they were right to be concerned. He'd been happy at first, but the stakes for counseling were just too high. Ping preferred the simple things now, problems you could touch- evil you didn't have to talk out into the open.

He just wasn't tough enough for the high stakes game of family counseling, he had to admit it and move on. Now, he preferred to deal with problems he could solve with resolve and geometry.

"Resolve is the commitment to victory. Geometry is the path to it." Ol' Leung was fond of saying. Ping's father had taught him to drink from the deepest well of resolve. Most people fight out of rage, which is the puddle from which all bullies lap. Others fight for hate, which is the baby-pool in which the vengeful splash. But Leung had taught him to fight for the same thing as all good cops: the commitment to serve and protect. "To fight for others is to always win, boyo."