Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Rounding the corner, we found ourselves right in the thick of the party. The wall ahead of us now was the front face of the shopping centre – windows from floor to ceiling, with the night pouring in through that ragged hole in the centre pane that I’d seen from the other side in the news broadcast. To either side of it, maybe three or four men knelt low or flattened themselves against the wall, peering out at the cordon in the street below as if they’d never heard of police snipers. Further away from us still there was a circular display area ringed with floor-level mirrors, which seemed to have been intended for trying on shoes: in this cramped amphitheatre, two more men, one armed with a baseball bat, kept watch over a small, terrified huddle of presumably innocent shoppers. That was all – and it looked like good odds except that one of the men at the window had a rifle. Long-haired and thickly bearded, he looked as he swung back the bolt and put the first bullet into the chamber like someone who’d accidentally wandered off from the set of Deliverance and found himself in an episode of EastEnders .

All heads turned towards us, and I glimpsed Susan Book in among the hostages. I also saw a man lying full-length on the ground, a bloody hole where his face ought to have been. Susan was sitting right next to this poor bastard: her eyes widened when she saw me, and she opened her mouth as if to speak.

I spoke first. ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Saw you on the nine o’clock news. Where do we sign up?’

We were walking forward all this time, but now the man with the rifle swung it around to cover us. ‘You don’t,’ he snapped coldly. ‘You get with those dumb fucks over there, and you shut up.’

We kept on coming. ‘What kind of weapon is that?’ Juliet murmured to me under her breath.

‘Sports rifle,’ I growled back, sounding a lot more definite about it than I actually was. ‘Semi-automatic – which means one bullet at a time.’ The truth is, I know sod all about weapons despite having once lived for a year with a sweet girl who subscribed to Arms and Ammo ; but this thing was all dark red wood and elegant curves. No gun that dolls itself up as pretty as that ever gets asked out to an actual battle. Plus it had a dinky little magazine about the size of a mobile phone. If it was ever set on auto, it would run out of bullets in the time it takes to scream ‘Die, mother—.’ On the other hand, and assuming the guy had a steady hand, that would be plenty long enough to see me and Juliet thoroughly ventilated. She’d probably survive that, unless the bullets were silver: the odds on me were a little longer.

Fortunately, these guys weren’t all singing from the same hymn book: the other three men, wielding various makeshift clubs and cudgels, chose that moment to charge us, helpfully blind-siding their friend. Juliet accelerated so that they’d reach her first, taking out two of them with strikes that I’d be happy to call surgical because most surgery leaves you unable to walk for a while and maybe a body part or so short.

The third man I managed to drop with a flying tackle, which was probably the best result he could hope for under the circumstances. We went down together, but with me on top, and though he swiped at me with the jagged metal shard he was using as a knife, my elbow in his face threw off his aim and slammed his head hard against the floor. He was still moving, though, and a lucky slash with that thing would leave me bleeding out on the floor, so I brought my knee up between his legs, introducing him to the concept of planned parenthood with immediate and devastating effect. Leaving him curled around his pain, I scrambled to my feet just as the rifle went off.

It wasn’t aimed at me, of course. These guys might be crazy, but it would be a special kind of crazy who pointed the gun somewhere else when Juliet was bearing down on him with her killing face on. The back of her jacket opened up at chest height as the bullet tore through, and a fine red spray showered my face and upper body.

The rifle was semi-auto: it had to be, because the man got a second shot off even as Juliet kicked him backwards through the window. He fell with a scream that sounded more enraged than afraid, and that was all he got in the way of famous last words: I heard the dull thump as he hit the street.

‘Juliet!’ I shouted. ‘For fuck’s sake, they’re possessed. There’s something riding them!’

She didn’t seem to hear me. She turned, a little bent over, her movements too slow, just as the two guys who’d been guarding the hostages charged her from the side.

One of them had a knife, and he slashed at her stomach. The other swung his baseball bat and hit her full in the face. She reeled with the blow, then stabbed out with her left hand, putting her thumb and middle finger through the second man’s eyes.

That left the knife-man, and as he brought his hand back for a second thrust I finally, belatedly, forced myself to move. I went directly for his knife hand, grabbing hold of it in both of mine and twisting it up behind his back with brutal, desperate force. He dropped the knife, and Juliet, glancing over her shoulder and seeming to notice him for the first time, swept her fist up in an uppercut that almost took his head off his shoulders. He slithered to the ground between us, already unconscious.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked Juliet, my chest heaving both with the effort to catch a breath and with the nausea that was beginning to hit as the adrenalin turned sour in my stomach.

‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, but there was a breathy gurgle behind the words that scared the shit out of me. Her shoulders were bowed: she was inspecting the bloody mess in the centre of her shirt front, and her feet shifted a little as if she was having a hard time keeping her balance.

I jumped to a conclusion. A whole generation of entrepreneurs were making their first fortunes by trading on the fears that the living felt for the living dead: silver-coated ammunition was just one of the fads that had come in as a result. ‘Juliet, was the bullet—?’

I could only just hear her answer. ‘Silvered. Yes. But it only went through my lung. I think I can . . . deal . . . with the . . .’

Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t fall. All her attention was turned inward, and wherever she was right then I knew she wasn’t going to be aware of her surroundings for a while. From the street outside came shouted orders and the wail of a single siren. The police weren’t going to wait much longer before storming the place: not with bodies flying out of the windows.

I turned to look over at the hostages. Susan Book was already heading towards me, but the others were all still in a huddle against the base of the wall, some of the kids sobbing and keening, nobody daring to move. I opened my mouth to say something – probably something along the lines of ‘You’re safe now.’ Susan’s hand lashed out, and as I reflexively parried something red shot from her fingers to bounce off my chest and hit the floor at my feet. I didn’t even see her other hand come up: her nails raked my cheek, savagely deep, and I staggered back in numb surprise. She followed up, punching and clawing at me as she screamed obscenities into my face. The same obscenities I’d heard from the almost-hanged man outside, mostly, focusing on my sexual relationship with my parents and the cocks I’d suck in Hell: it was like some kind of virus.

I fended Susan off, using my height and reach to block her wild, uncoordinated attack. I didn’t want to hurt her, though, so I was backing away across the floor, calling out her name as I gave ground in an effort to wake her out of whatever trance she was in. Then a shelf unit bumped against my back and I had to stop, which meant that she was finally able to close with me: out of options, I knocked aside her clutching hands and punched her hard on the point of the jaw. She went over backwards, and there was an alarming crack as the back of her head hit the tiles.