Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“I saw it,” Razorface growled back, picking the kid up and spinning to get his body in front of the towers of the city. The next shot went wider. “Rasheed, Derek — get these boys off the bridge!” They didn’t need to be told twice — they were already moving for the East Hartford side.

The captured gangster yowled, grappling at Razorface’s big hand with both of his little ones, and then jerked and went slack as the third slug slammed into his back and burst out his chest, spraying Razorface with bright blood and gore. The bullet plastered itself against Razor’s armored jacket and rang on the pavement.

“Nice shooting for a fucking hurricane!” he shouted. “Killer, do something about her. You got a bead yet?”

“On it,” she answered, which is when Razorface saw a shadowy figure— Mitch —moving among potted trees back on the landing.

“She’s up on the riverbank,” Mitch said. “I think I can flush her out…”

Another bullet rang off the wrought iron. Only the gusting winds protected him as he scrambled back a few steps, still dragging the scant cover of the dead gangster. And then he grinned again and glanced around. He spotted the lick of flame this time, and knew Mitch was right about the sniper’s location. “Hell,” Razorface said into the mike. “Watch this shit.”

And dropped the corpse, took a single running step, caught the railing in both hands, and slung his body over it like a pole-vaulter.

“Razorface!” It was Bobbi’s voice in his ear, raised the way it never was, but he twisted in midair and got his feet pointed down and his arms straight up over his face. The wind from falling didn’t seem any worse than the wind from the storm whistling past him. Hope I miss the fucking sand bar.

And then the water hit him like a wall.

Mitch saw Razorface go over the railing and he didn’t bother to shout out loud, because he also saw the muzzle flash from what he assumed was Casey’s gun, and the sudden movement silhouetted in the citylit darkness as she stood up out of the bushes to snap off one final shot at Razorface as he fell. She was closer than he’d estimated in the darkness — maybe fifty, a hundred yards away, downriver.

Mitch didn’t think. He brought his captured rifle up. He squeezed the trigger.

The shadowy figure in the darkness yelped and spun, tumbling down the brush-covered bluff to the concrete walk below. “Got her, Bobbi,” Mitch said, following the descent of the body down the riverbank. “She’s not dead, dammit.” He aimed carefully as she dragged herself upright, and then he heard running footsteps and turned as Bobbi came down the riverbank stairs a hundred-odd yards to his left four at a time, clinging to the banister and half-leaping, half-sliding in the driving rain.

“I’m going in after Razorface,” she gasped as she ran. “Kill the bitch, would you?” There was a concert pavilion above the edge of the dark water, and a riverboat had once been moored alongside it. Bobbi hit the dock without breaking stride, dropped her rifle on the concrete, and went into the cold water on a flat, pushing dive that took her ten feet over the river before her powerful body slashed through the storm-shattered surface.

Mitch glanced back at the fallen gunwoman. Twice in one night, he thought, and sighted down the long muzzle of the gun. It roared in his hands, and he hissed in fury as Casey, half upright, dove and rolled forward into the black, moving water.

He knew he had missed.

He lowered the gun. A gust of wind staggered him, and he swore. Squinting through the storm, he could just make out Bobbi’s dark shape knifing through the river, the current already sweeping her downstream. There was no sign of Casey, and he couldn’t see Razorface at all. He fired a shot after Casey just for luck, knowing it was useless.

Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Mitch Kozlowski laid the rifle on the cement and walked down the stairs to the landing, unzipping his jacket and methodically yanking the trauma plates out of his vest. He dropped them on the dock, on top of the windbreaker.

Fuck me. Damned if I’m letting that bitch swim off like a 4-D villain to come back and kill my ass some other goddamned day.

He kicked off his boots and went into the water with considerably less grace than Bobbi Yee.

The water slammed shut over Razorface’s head, lancing pain rising from his right ankle. He couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the water past his ears as he brought his arms down and grabbed the bottom of his armored leather jacket in both hands. Ponderous and heavy, and he could feel it dragging him down. It wrestled him like a snake, wet leather heavy as sand, but he got it up and over his head, ripping the flesh of his ear on the zipper. He tasted blood and muddy water as he knocked the shotgun aside and kicked out of his boots, almost screaming as the right one came off.

Busted. Fuck. But he got his head out of the icy, clawing river and grabbed a breath of air so full with rain it wasn’t much dryer. Turning in the water, he saw another head break the surface downriver and nearer the bank, saw the flash from Mitch’s gun higher up and a bullet slap water so far from the target he also knew Mitch couldn’t see her. Somewhere back down the bank, over the rising howl of the wind, he heard another splash.

Razorface set out swimming toward the bank. And more important, Barbara Casey.

He lost sight of her in the chop, and he’d lost his ear clip when he tore the jacket off if not before, but he figured he knew where she was heading. There was really only one good way out of the water.

Letting the current carry him, cold swirling water numbing the shooting pain in his foot, Razorface struck out for the Park River outflow channel.

Mitch almost punched Bobbi in the face when she surfaced beside him, spewing water. “Lost my ear clip,” she said. “I can’t find him.”

“Stick with me. I’ve got a visual on Casey. I think.” He spat muddy water and stroked forward. His pistol dragged at him, but he wasn’t about to toss it away. “Down by the bank.”

She sounded as cool as ever, even up to her neck in freezing storm chop. “She’s heading for the Park River.”

The rain was warmer than the river, but it didn’t help. The undertow coiled around his limbs like pythons. He kicked hard to keep his head up. “How do you know that?”

“It’s where I’d go. Because she’s wounded. She knows we’ll catch her if she tries to drag herself up the bank, and she’d be on the wrong side of the highway. River’s too rough to swim across. She has to get out before the real hurricane gets here.”

“We all do,” he answered through chattering teeth, and kicked forward, trusting her to keep up.

The river almost swept them past the outflow, a looming rectangular black culvert barely visible through the downpour, thirty feet tall and forty-five across. The trees on the East Hartford bank were invisible through the rain now, despite the spill of light from the city, and that light glittered in trickling beams through the branches of those on the near bank.

The water from the underground river was colder, even, than the deep fast-moving Connecticut, and the turbulent confluence dragged at Mitch’s legs and feet. He kicked harder, driving upriver like a salmon struggling upstream, and the lights from the city dimmed and went dark as the tunnel sheltered them from the rain.

Somewhere, far ahead, Mitch heard a long, mechanical hiss like a restive locomotive. “The tunnel forks,” Bobbi whispered, leaning close. “How do we know which way she went?”

Mitch straggled to the edge of the culvert. Scrabbling in the near-darkness, he wrapped the fingers of one hand through an iron handhold. His reaching fingertips found the next one, three feet farther down the wall and a foot above the river. “Handholds,” he said, as loudly as he dared. “Rest.”