Zero Sight (15 page)

“
Silly, magus,” Rei replied. I raised an eyebrow. Her voice was so cold—its normally melodic ring had been replaced by something horrid. She tilted her head up and stared the tall man down, her tongue slipping over each and every syllable. “I already told you, magus. It’s right here in my pocket. Why don’t you come over here and get it?”

Christ, Rei was reading straight out of a Spaghetti Western. How could she be taking this so lightly? Yet the glint in her eye…it made me uneasy.

A grating laugh erupted from thug in the red sweatsuit. I guess he thought that line was as ridiculous as I did. He leaned forward and grabbed his belly.

It was the last mistake he ever made.

Rei’s whole body quivered. I didn’t so much see her move as see where she wasn’t. There was just enough time for me to gasp before she closed the distance and flicked a slight little blade straight into his carotid. Spinning around his enormous body, Rei wrapped onto his back, thrusting the small blade again and again through the tuft of his neck. I watched blood shoot ten feet into the air. A red mist rained down as the tall man stumbled backwards issuing gurgled curses.

“
Stars above…” I whispered.

The thug in blue didn’t delay. He rushed into the fray instantly, and considering his size, his speed was impressive. I wasn’t the only one surprised. Before Rei could react, the big man closed and delivered a sickening blow to her temple. I had no idea a human being could strike with such power. The punch knocked Rei off the red thug’s back. She landed on the blood-drenched concrete with a heavy thwap. Free of her, the red thug dropped to his knees and struggled to stem the flow of blood from his neck. A series of red bubbles issued from his mouth.

I forced down the rising vomit.

Not finished, the blue thug lumbered after Rei, who—incredibly—was struggling to stand back up. I couldn’t understand how she was still conscious. I had heard the crunch of her skull from where I stood. The punch had caved her cheekbone. The entire right side of her face was nothing less than tenderized meat. Yet she stood firm, eyes blazing. I looked at her bloody left hand. She was still clutching that tiny blade. I shook my head in disbelief. A box-cutter. It was a box-cutter. She had opened up a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man with a freakin’ boxcutter.

Rei answered the blue thug’s advance with a wolfish grin. There was something off about that smile, something inhuman. Her teeth were too bright, her incisors, too long. And I could sense killing intent now. It projected out of her like the rattle of a snake. Her world was small now, made up only of her enemies. Everything else had ceased to exist. She was feeling neither pain nor fear. Those silly feelings no longer compelled her. She yearned to open him up. She wanted to work her way through his insides. She wanted to be there for his last rattles as he turned from man to corpse. Those crazed eyes, that gleeful smile…Rei had totally lost it. She was battle-mad.

As the thug dashed forward roaring his reply, I only wished I could pause time long enough to figure out what the hell was going on. Was I still on planet Earth? I wondered. On Earth, people didn’t move that fast. People didn’t hit that hard. People didn’t stand back up after taking that much damage. How could any of this be possible? And better still,
what the hell was I still doing here
?

A new scent distracted my focus. It smelled like…ozone. The hair on the back of my neck shot up, and my Sight forced my attention back to the tall man. He had backed away as the other three fought. Now he was clutching an object dangling from his neck with his right palm stretched out facing Rei.

I shook my head. My Sight was telling me that the tall man was about to do something impossible. I knew what was about to happen, but I found it absolutely absurd. I was a scientist at heart. I knew thermodynamics. I knew physics. Energy had rules. Those rules were absolute. I told myself that make believe never actually intruded on reality, but then I remembered the photos Ms. Curray had shown me. The three men in DEA windbreakers…

Rei’s intensity faltered. She must have sensed it too. Her eyes shifted desperately.

“
Fulgurus!” The tall man roared.

Rei made a dash to the right. A bolt of electricity erupted from tall man’s palm. The room flashed white.

If Rei hadn’t moved that instant, the bolt would have struck her in the chest and stopped her heart. The main bolt swept past her instead, but it wasn’t a focused blast. Tendrils of electricity crackled into her torso anyway. They shocked her body rigid. A yelp made it halfway out her mouth before it was pinched off. She landed stiffly on her side. I watched helplessly as the spasms induced by the electrical charge pulsed through her body.

Exploiting the opening, the remaining thug delivered a kick to her chest. I heard her ribs break from fifty-yards away. She suppressed a whimper as a second kick crunched into her side. A steady wheeze left Rei’s lips. Her eyes bulged. She couldn’t breath. A rib must have punctured a lung.

I felt at my own chest reflexively as the tall man started to laugh. I’d heard that laugh before, that glee, and my body started to tremble. Again. It was happening
again
. Thinking stopped. Reasoning stopped. I abandoned any semblance of stealth, stood, and broke into a dead sprint. I shifted the pipe for a broad, two-handed strike. I didn’t hesitate. I aimed straight for the bastard’s spine. The blue thug yelled a warning, but it was two late for the tall sack-of-shit. I landed the blow clean below his shoulders and waited for the satisfying crunch…

An explosion of sparks shot me fifty feet in the opposite direction.

Stunned, I found myself on my back, the smell of fried bacon in my nose. I let loose a few coughs. It felt like someone had wrapped both of my hands in cotton. I looked down at them. My hands were burnt charcoal black. They looked like two slabs of overcooked meat. And as disturbing as that sight was, it wasn’t my biggest concern. There was a sharp pain rising in my chest, and I had a pretty good idea why.

The realization hit me like the bag of bricks. I had been careless. I hadn’t thought it through. The tall man had been one big ball of static charge, and my pipe had been a metal one. I’d electrocuted myself, and now both my palms were burnt. That meant the charge had passed
through
my chest. That wasn’t good. The pain growing just above my sternum had to be my heart. Right now it was probably fluttering at about 300 beats-per-minute. At that speed, it didn’t even have time to fill with blood, and if a heart can’t fill, it can’t pump. If it can’t pump, blood can’t flow. And if blood can’t flow…

I knew the math: 2 minutes of consciousness left; 3 minutes more before I went brain dead; and 1 more till I started to cool. And the only cure was those paddles they had in ERs. They gave the heart a chance to get back in rhythm. Nothing else worked. I wondered if the management at Sketchy Warehouses, Inc. kept one of those automatic defibrillators lying around. Better yet, I wondered if any of the nice folks around me would be kind enough to give me CPR till the paramedics arrived.

I turned to my head to my left. The tall man was cursing as he limped towards me. That perked me up a bit. At least I’d done some sort of damage with my strike. I turned my head right. Rei lay in an expanding pool issuing from the red thug’s neck. The blue thug stood over her, his face twisted in rage. The pain from the broken ribs was etched on Rei’s face. Pink foam coated her mouth. She definitely had a punctured a lung. Rei flinched, and I heard more cracks come from her insides. Her eyes were an empty grey. Not a hint of blue remained.

The tall man screamed something to the remaining thug.

The big man nodded and shuffled off.

The tall man was hunched over, guarding his back, but he still managed to deliver a savage kick to my side. The blow blinded my vision, but I could hardly feel the pain. I knew what that meant; my body was failing.

I looked back over to Rei. She was on her hands and knees spitting up pink foam. Dark blood coated her face, and her hair was a grubby mess. She spit out the last of foam and took a deep breath. I decided I was getting loopy. You don’t start breathing after you burst a lung.

My Sight burned as a blanket of icy needles danced over my flesh. The tall man wasn’t done with me. He struck my side again.

Rei continued her coughing. I stretched out my hand to reach her, but it only slumped in her direction. The muscle was useless. It sucked, really. All I could do was lay still and wait till my body ran out of oxygen.

Rei’s rally faltered. She collapsed into the thick puddle of blood.

I couldn’t do anything as she choked on it. She must have reached her limit. Her hand still grasping the tiny box-cutter, but she looked ghastly. Her cheek was dented in. She could hardly see. But as her eyes met mine, all I saw was defiance. I held onto those pale grey orbs, and for some reason they sent me back to my grandmother’s house.

+

My grandma used to insist on taking me to services every Sunday. Even in Las Vegas, the Church had a big presence. (Nothing like fear and despair to drum up new converts.) Our local church was huge. Before the service, I would stomp up and down the aisles listening to the echoes bouncing off the walls. I hated how you had to sit on those hard wooden seats, but I did like the parts when everyone sang. I didn’t quite get the reason for it all—they kept saying God was everywhere, but if that was the case, why did we have to go to a special house to visit him?

After the services, grandma would take me back to her house for the whole afternoon. It was fun there. Everything was old and strange and ripe for exploring. Better still, no one ever yelled at me. Grandma had hundreds of porcelain dolls decorating her house. I didn’t like the dolls, but I dug the general idea. I decided that when I grew up, I would decorate my entire house with GI Joes. Decorations aside, the best part about Grandma’s house was the cookies. She baked them fresh every weekend. The sugar cookies with the jam in the center were my favorites. I would eat the outside first, and then chomp down on the jammy centers. Cookies gone, we would sit at the kitchen table and talk. Grandma was the only person I knew that would actually listen to what I had to say, so I tended to blather on endlessly about my week. The way she would just sit and listen…that was better than the cookies.

On the walls of my grandmother’s kitchen were some old Briton Rivière prints. Two of them featured lots of dogs. Since dogs were awesome, paintings of dogs were totally awesome. There was this one of a guy named Daniel. He was playing with lions. (I figured he must have been Siegfried and Roy’s dad or something.) And then there was my favorite. It was one of a knight next to a dead dragon. The knight’s horse was dead too, crushed under the monster’s giant, scaly hide. It was frightening to see how the horse’s huge body had snapped like a twig. How could something as strong as a horse be broken like that? The knight looked almost as bad as his horse. He was lying on the ground staring up into the sky. He looked totally exhausted…except for one thing: His right hand still gripped his sword. His horse had been shattered, but the knight’s grip had held firm.

One day, as I dusted off another half dozen of Grandma’s finest, I asked her if the knight had a name.

Grandma looked up to at the old print and smiled.

“
That’s Saint George, Dieter,” she said.

“
Saint George,” I repeated.
“
He looks really tired.”

“
Hmm…he does, doesn’t he,” she said. “And tired he should be…do you want to hear his story?”

I slid my milk to the side and nodded eagerly.

“
Long ago, there were dragons, many dragons. Dragons were terrible monsters, bigger than a city bus, stronger than a herd of elephants, craftier than a council of scholars. They dined on people—and they terrorized the lands of man. In one kingdom lived an especially evil dragon. He could breathe poison. Any man who caught a whiff of his foul stench writhed and died on the ground. The beast demanded from the king of the lands children to eat lest it weave its poison among them all. The people became angry. They loved their children. They didn’t want them to die. But all of the king’s brave knights had dropped to the ground like flies.

“
His army defeated, the king gave in to the giant lizard’s demands. Every week the people held a lottery. To lose was a pitiable thing. It meant sending one of your children into the dragon’s jaws.”

I clutched my glass of milk tightly. Grandma didn’t seem to be joking.

“
Years passed, Dieter. The dragon ate many children, and the people despaired. The king hung his head in shame. But what could he do? How could he fight that which could not be killed?

“
Then, late one evening, a knight arrived at the gates of the capital. This knight came from far away. A place he called Cappadocia. The name of this knight was George, and after hearing the peoples’ sorry tale, the knight’s eyes grew dark with fury. He told the people of the capital, ‘I shall go forth and slay the beast. Who will come with me?’ But the people looked upon him in silence. Many men had tested their mettle against the fearsome dragon. All had fallen. There was none brave enough left among them to stand with this strange knight named George.”

I balled my little hands. What cowards these people were. “What did George decide to do, Grandma?”

“
The hard thing, Dieter. He decided to face the dragon alone.