Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

One man, standing up from the corpse of the first cop, yelled, “Someone get the police!”

Fargo kept striking with deadly accuracy, turning Gray Man’s head around to his shoulder with each blow. And Gray Man advanced, seemingly stronger for every blow that was struck.

Fargo backed up the stairs to get better leverage with his swings. Finally Gray Man bent low and caught Fargo by his legs.

And again Gray Man was trying to get his hands around Winch Fargo’s throat.

Fargo felt the closeness of blue death for the first time since he’d witnessed Philip Martel’s demise. Only now, the death approaching was his own. The snake in his brain writhed and thrashed against the inside of his skull. His hands were failing. Gray Man was beginning to breathe hard too.

Unexpectedly Winch pulled Gray Man toward him, butting the black death god with his own tortured skull. Gray Man sat up. He released Fargo and smiled. Before Winch could react, Gray Man grabbed his left arm and stood up. Placing his foot in Winch’s armpit, he wrenched and tugged.

The arm came out of the socket and ripped away from the shoulder with a sick tearing and sucking sound. Winch cried out and Gray Man laughed. People in the crowd began to run and scream.

A blur of brown fur went for Gray Man’s throat, knocking the little man down the stairs.

Nesta pulled off her denim jeans and wrapped them around Fargo’s narrow shoulders to staunch the bleeding. His blood came fast, but not as fast as a normal man’s blood. Then Nesta Vine grabbed the dismembered arm.

Gray Man had gotten the dog by his front legs, but before he could do any damage he was assailed by the meat-and-bone club.

Nesta’s image of herself was powerful and strong. She wailed at the weakened personification of death. She clubbed him while Max snarled and snapped.

Gray Man finally ran away, feeling Redwood attack him from the inside even as Nesta and Max struck from without.

The frightened mob parted before Gray Man. Max pursued him to the end of the block, then came back to Nesta, who was holding Winch Fargo in her lap.

“Am I dead?” he asked her, coming to consciousness for a moment.

“I don’t know yet,” Nesta Vine replied.

A dozen policemen were pressed into action for the disturbance that had broken out on the state building steps.

They found two dead cops, a seemingly mortally wounded Winch Fargo, a feral dog, and a blood-spattered black amazon.

It took six hours for two dozen police detectives to question the witnesses.

Miles Barber, Briggs, and Bonhomme arrived after the violence was over. When he was told of the battle with Gray Man, Barber suffered a seizure that left him unconscious and hospitalized. His coma was short compared with mine, only fifteen days. And it wasn’t really even a coma, because he remembered a dream. He was still a policeman, with two eyes. He walked out of the state building onto the scene of the murders. There he came upon a pool of blood left by Winch Fargo’s wound.

“But there was something odd,” the ex-detective said, remembering the dream. “The blood wasn’t drying. It was still wet and had blue veins all through it. I went over to inspect the blood, but it flowed away from me, down the stairs. At first I had this crazy thought that it’s ’cause of gravity that the blood is flowing downward. Can you imagine that? Havin’ a scientific reason in your dream.

“So I followed the blood down to the curb, but it keeps on going down the street. The faster I chase it, the faster it goes until I’m running after this blue-veined pool of blood that’s rushing down the street.” As it always was with Barber, he began to experience what he was telling. His breath came quickly and there was visible strain in his body and hands. “I was runnin’ so fast that I couldn’t see where I was going. I ran right into him. He stayed on his feet, but I tumbled to the ground. And when I looked up I saw that it was him; all black and big, real big. He was naked and his eyes were red. And then he bent down over me and he was whispering. Everything around me turned black like him, and all I wanted was to hear the words. I concentrated as hard as I could and then, just when the last of the light was gone, except for his red eyes, I heard him say, ‘It’s never over,’ and everything went black. And then I was coming out to see the blood again. It all happened all over again. Everything was the same except that I knew it.

“When I regained consciousness, they called Bonhomme. He told me that the court had appointed a lawyer for Claudia Zimmerman and she convinced the judge that her client’s rights had been violated. The judge let her go. Mackie Allitar was just down the hall from me, dying from drug abuse, they said. I asked Bonhomme about the black man, the killer.

“ ‘Oh, him,’ Bonhomme said. ‘They think he’s a judo expert. Add that to the fact that Fargo obviously has some kind of leprosy, and it looks pretty crazy out there. We don’t have anything to do with it anyway. We got Halston and Fargo. They let the warden go. Thanks for your help.’

“And I lay back, ready to die, Chance. I swear. I was ready. I lay in that bed for two days. Doctors and nurses came in and frowned at my charts. They stuck me with needles and put soft food on my tray, but they knew I was on my way out. But then the music came. It was like all the horns in the world all at once in a thousand tones, but they were all playing the same note. I was up and outta that bed as strong as I had ever been, stronger. That was about two in the morning. I met Allitar in the hall. We looked at each other and grinned like boys who just climbed over the school fence to check out the big world outside.”

The feral dog escaped from the dog pound the night they caught him. He had been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, but when they tried to carry him from the cell to the gas chamber, he sprang to life suddenly and made a dash for it. No one could ever remember a dog with the will and intelligence to break through a glass windowpane and dash away.

They said he was badly cut, though, and was probably dead within minutes.

Claudia Zimmerman left the Bay Area. No one knew where she went.

Winch Fargo had escaped from police custody a week after Miles Barber and Mackie Allitar, with the assistance of some unknown friend. The hospital doctors, like the dogcatchers, said that Fargo was probably dead a few hours after he escaped.

Gray Man crawled back toward his desert hole, bruised and pulsing with pain. He felt his heart thrumming as if he had been frightened, but he wasn’t actually afraid. He felt the blue coyote pup following him and wondered if he would have been strong enough to fight him off.

He finally arrived and crawled down into his hole, burying himself once again. But this time his sleep was disturbed by unnamed night terrors; this time his sleep was more alive than it was dead.

“I love you, Chance,” Alacrity said to me.

We were looking out over a vista of spiky pines and cloud-rifted blue skies. I carried her in the crook of my arm while she nestled her head against my shoulder. I carried her as if she were a small child. She was young. But Alacrity had begun to grow quickly in the woods. She was more than three years younger than Wanita, but already she was a foot and a half taller than her friend. She looked closer to twelve than three.

She and her mother, Reggie and Wanita, and I were living at the Bear Lodge Country Cabins in northern California. We stayed in California, albeit many miles from the Bay Area, because Addy and I wanted to be near at hand if the remaining Blues somehow made a stand against Gray Man. We were pretty confident that he couldn’t find us easily and that we could escape as long as we were free. Also, Reggie kept saying that he felt the safest place in the world for us was close by. He spent many days scanning the countryside for our refuge, but the direction for some reason eluded him.