Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

We stopped then. The brakes squealed, and the other Kapalika in the back with us shouted angrily as he was thrown forward. Our driver shouted a curse and palmed several sharp blasts on the horn. I could hear a shouted reply from outside. There was the crack of a whip followed by the angry bellow of an ox. Our driver screamed obscenities and leaned on the horn.

A minute later I heard the front van doors open as both the driver and the other Kapalika in front jumped out to continue shouting at whatever obstacle was in our way. The curses continued. The third Kapalika squeezed forward, jumped out, and joined the unseen argument. That left only the man in khaki in the van with me.

This is my chance.

Knowing that I had to act was not enough to make me act. I knew that I should make a dash for the open doors, strike out at the squatting man next to me. Do something . But although I somehow was convinced that this would be my last chance at surprise, my last chance to escape, I could not translate my thoughts into actions. Only lying there seemed to offer the guarantee of a few more minutes without confrontation. Without new pain. Without being killed.

Suddenly the rear doors exploded open. The heavy man, shoved violently from the side, fell clumsily to the floorboards. A hand gripped my arm and roughly pulled me to a sitting position. My legs flopped outside and I blinked in pain, my right eye twitching open against a crust of blood.

"Come! Stand! Hurry." It was Krishna's voice. It was Krishna's face looming over me, hair flying, sharp teeth exposed in a gleeful, maniacal grin. It was Krishna's thin right arm that braced me upright and supported me firmly when I almost fell forward onto my face.

" Nahin !" shouted the Kapalika and vaulted out of the back of the truck. He was twice as broad as Krishna and his face was distorted with fury. " Muté !"

Krishna's left hand shot up, straight-armed, a crossing guard stopping traffic. The heel of his palm, rigid as a brick, went forward into the advancing man's face. The Kapalika's nose flattened like a pulped piece of fruit. He screamed then and arched backward, banging his head against the van's rear door, dropping to his knees, pitching forward. Still holding me upright with his right arm, Krishna brought his left leg up rapidly in a stiff arc that ended when his shin slammed into the heavy man's throat just under the hollow of the jaw.

There was a sound like thin plastic breaking, and the Kapalika's scream cut off abruptly.

"Come! Hurry!" Krishna pulled me along, tugging me upright as I teetered to one side. I shuffled as fast as I could, trying to find my balance on legs that felt as if they were full of Novocaine. I looked over my shoulder at the fallen man, at the van with all of its doors open like broken wings, and at the bullock cart beyond, blocking the intersection and the narrow street. The three Kapalikas stood frozen next to the cart. For several seconds they stared at us with stupefied expressions and then began running our way, shouting, waving their arms. One man already had what looked to be a long knife in his hand. The bullock cart creaked off into the darkness.

"Run!" shouted Krishna. My shirt ripped as he pulled me along. I almost fell then, waving my arms as I pitched forward, but he grabbed the back of my torn shirt and pulled me up.

We ran left into a pitch-black alley, left again into a courtyard bathed in lantern light. An old woman looked up in surprise as we came in through an open door. Krishna swept aside a curtain of beads and we leaped across sleeping forms on the floor of a dark room to go out a back way.

Shouts and screams rose behind us as we emerged into yet another courtyard. The three Kapalikas exploded from the dark doorway just as we ducked into another, narrower gap between buildings. Garbage was ankle-deep there, and we bounced and splashed through it. Even there were the sheeted, silent figures, squatting, huddling from the water that still dripped from eaves and filled the low spots. Krishna actually jumped over the bony knees of one squatting form that looked to be more corpse than man.

I could not keep up with Krishna, and when we had to run up two flights of wooden stairs, I finally collapsed to my knees on a dark landing, gasping for breath. The Kapalikas shouted to one another in the courtyard below.

Krishna shoved me through an open door. There were a dozen people in the room, squatting near an open fire or huddled back against cracked wallboards. Part of the ceiling had collapsed into the center of the room, and broken masonry and plaster had made a small mound upon which they had built their fire. Smoke streaked the walls and sagging ceiling.

Krishna hissed a rapid sentence in which I thought I heard the word Kali . No one looked up at us. Deadened eyes continued to watch the low flames.

There were footsteps on the stairs. A man shouted. Krishna grabbed my elbow tightly and led me into a tiny room empty except for several bronze pots and a small statue of Ganesha. An open window gave out onto a narrow alley between the buildings.

Krishna stepped to the window and jumped. I stepped to the low sill and hesitated. The alley could not have been more that five feet wide. It was at least a twenty-foot drop to nothing but darkness. I could hear a squelching sound where Krishna had jumped but nothing else. I knew I couldn't leap into that lightless pit.

Suddenly I could hear the Kapalikas shouting at the entrance to the outer room. A woman screamed. I cradled my left hand and jumped.

The garbage must have been seven or eight feet deep where I landed. I went into it up to my thighs and fell sideways into something soft and vile. Rats squealed and scurried away along the walls. I could see nothing. My legs made soft, gasping sounds as I tried to wade forward in the narrow space. I began thrashing about in panic when I continued to sink above my waist in the yielding, putrid mass.

"Shhh." Krishna grabbed my shoulders and held me still. Above us, the faint rectangle of light was obscured as a man leaned out. He disappeared back into the room.

"Quickly!" Krishna seized my arm and we began wading down the reeking trench. I pressed off from a wall and tried to swim forward through the soft refuse. Our arms flailed at each other to gain leverage, but it was like wading through waist-deep mud.

Suddenly, behind us, someone held a flaming board out the window from which we'd jumped. The man deliberately dropped the brand into the muck of the alley. It bounced once and set some greasy rags to smoldering where it came to a stop. Krishna and I froze. We could not have been more than shadows amid the heaps of garbage all around us, but one of the Kapalikas pointed our way and shouted to the other two.

I don't know whether the man with the knife jumped or was pushed, but he screamed as he fell into the alley with us. The torch was beginning to sputter out in the dampness and human waste, but it and the burning rags gave enough light to show hundreds of furry, squirming forms — some as large as cats — hunching over the heaps of waste toward us as they fled the smoke.

My skin actually rippled in revulsion. I had not known that such a reaction was physically possible. Krishna leaped back the way we had come. The Kapalika rose like a diver coming to the surface of a pool. His arms flailed and steel glinted in his right hand. The fire was all but extinguished now, and Krishna was less than a shadow as he closed with the other man. Their grunts were barely audible over the rising screech of the fleeing rats. Fat, wet bodies touched my bare arms, and I vomited then, retching helplessly into piles of foul-smelling darkness.

The two Kapalikas above us leaned and strained to see, but the alley was in almost total darkness once again. I thought that I could see Krishna and the other man pivoting in awkward jerks, two clumsy dancers in slow motion. Sparks flew as the Kapalika's knife hand was slammed repeatedly into the brick wall. Then I thought I saw Krishna behind the other, pulling back long hair, forcing him face first into the yielding pit. I squinted in the darkness and thought I saw Krishna's knee in the Kapalikas arching back, forcing him deeper, deeper . . . but then Krishna was next to me, tugging me with him, wading with me away from the window.