Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

He wondered where he was and what he was going to do about getting home. He ran.

By the time he reached the cliff edge they were close enough to stop and fire a few rounds every five or six steps. Bullets whizzed over him, and then something caught him full in the back and he was airborne. He flew, for the second time that night, end over end. Above him he could see the harvest moon, and he thought probably this was what had hit him. He could see how it might have happened: the huge globe spinning out of its orbit and barging into him, smacking him into the air. He tried to breathe, and found vacuum. Yes. This was space. He would die in space. His corpse would go round and round the world amid the junk and clutter of Sputniks and the rest. Somewhere out here there was a dog, too, an early Russian experiment. Laika. He had always felt sorry for her: surely she had been the most alone creature ever, when she died. Now he would join her. Perhaps their ghosts would go for walks. He would throw sticks for her, or moonrocks, and she would bring them back. He wondered if a Soviet dog would associate with him, a filthy capitalist. He hoped so. Dogs were largely apolitical. Had Madame Duclos’s dog had opinions about what was happening to its home? He owed her an explanation, he realised, for its death. Owed her answers.

The moon hit him again, this time from in front. It clanged. Should the moon do that? Or, no. Not the moon. Something metal, something artificial. And not space. He could smell pines and dust and burning. This was still Mancreu, and the Iron Bridge across its gorge, and he was hurtling past it towards the river far, far below.

Lester Ferris, in a home-made demon suit with a magic tiger on his back and chest, spread his arms and fell.

HE HIT THE water hard, but it felt like lying on a feather bed. Or he imagined it felt like that — he didn’t think he’d ever actually been on a feather bed. On consideration they probably weren’t all that comfortable: not enough back support. But he wasn’t running any more. He had been running for hours. His limbs felt light and tired. He breathed in, and felt the mask suck against his cheeks. Water squirted from the kazoo and splashed his face.

Self-knowledge returned, and fear, gut-wrenching and panicked. He could die here. He would die here. In seconds. The Ukrainians were still firing: he heard shots snip past him; the strange, strangled yelp of bullets in water. White lines, phosphorescent, told him which direction was up. He tried to swim and realised he couldn’t. Too much weight. More bullets yipped past. They were inexperienced with shooting into water, he thought, were not accounting for the deflection. His vision was brown at the edges, brownish-red. He knew in a moment it would turn grey, and that would be the end.

His boot scraped riverbottom. His chest — his lungs, presumably — felt appalling. The belt on his costume was tight, and he reached down to shed it. His gauntleted hand batted vaguely at half a dozen items, couldn’t find the clasp. Knife. Bandages. Sharkpunch. Pitons. Hammer. Siren.

You’re kidding me , he thought. The boy’s magpie instinct, covering the uniform with ridiculous things. Siren. It was a nonsense — almost no one ran towards the sound of a siren, not any more, not with car alarms going off every ten minutes and a very well-publicised chance that any good Samaritan would get stabbed for his trouble — and these days there were electronic ones which were smaller and louder. This one was the old kind. If you were desperate, you might use it to blow out a candle.

Or if you were very desperate you might breathe it.

He jammed the nozzle under the chin of the mask and thumbed the release, felt the rubber stretch around him like a balloon and gasped stale air. Thank God, it was proper air, not butane or anything else. The noise was probably very loud but he’d just blown himself up (again) and been shot at in a confined space and it was less bad than either of those things. He let go of the trigger and the sound stopped. The bullets had moved downstream — they were assuming he’d float, which was daft but he’d made the same mistake. How much air was there in the siren? It had to be three minutes, surely? He shook it, felt liquid sloshing around. Half full, maybe, but he’d been profligate in that first, desperate heave. Now he could make it last.

Tentatively, he tried walking against the current. Not possible. He could hold his own, just about, but it was hard work and it hurt. His back was marked, he knew, with a sharp square of bruises where the armour plate had been driven against it. How many shots? Three? Four? How far out into the stream had he fallen?

The water pushed him hard against something massive. A boulder. No, of course: a concrete slab, one of the bridge supports. It must be the first span, he couldn’t have gone further than that. He tried to remember if there was anywhere to get out on this side. Two more breaths from the siren — he was worried now that the noise would give him away, but he dared not remove the screamer because it seemed to be part of the trigger mechanism — and he used the concrete to push himself along with his hands. He was moving uphill. He could see the surface about five feet above him. Eddies swirled around his head. He couldn’t see or hear the bullets any more, so he dared to ignite the fisherman’s glowstick, cupped it in his hand to direct the light down and forward. The siren was almost empty now, but he wasn’t going to die. Something new was in him, familiar and predictable but not the less powerful. He had been shot at and chased, and both of these things made you enormously angry. It was just a fact; human nature, human chemistry. When someone tries to kill you, when they hunt you, you hate them. So now he hated, and with that came a confidence. He was getting out of this river. He was a few steps away from breaking the surface, he could see the rocks, the path up to dry land. He took his last breath from the canister and released it, let it wash away. Perhaps they would see it and think it evidence of his death, like a destroyer hunting a submarine.

He felt the crown of his head break the surface, and lifted his chin so that in the next step his eyes were just above the water. There was no one on the bank. Three steps more and he could breathe again, and then he was staggering through the shallows and up and out, and the river was behind him.

A soldier would take this opportunity to retreat. A soldier would call for reinforcements and retrench. But now, out of the water and with air in his lungs again, the ragged, tooth-spitting fury of a brawler was boiling in him, demanding release. Fucking shoot at me? And there was the picture of Shola in his pocket, the picture which said they might have had something to do with that, too. Oh, you fucking think so? Is that right, you Chicken Kiev wankers? DO YOU FUCKING THINK SO? He rolled his shoulders and felt the pain in his back, and that made him even angrier. He snarled. Water spewed from his mask like steam, and the sound which went with it was like the sound of hopeless triage.

He smiled tightly behind the mask, and took a few experimental steps. Nothing wrong with his legs, no shrapnel, no fractures. Ribs might be a problem. Limited mobility in his arms, but they’d loosen. Time to go and put these lads straight. Oh, yes. Time, and more than time. After a moment, he sliced open the glowstick and poured it over his head, glowing green slime. No doubt it was toxic. If he didn’t die tonight, he’d probably have an itchy scalp. He laughed, and the mask made it into something very wrong.

He set off at a run, water falling from his clothes.

He knew where they were because he could hear them shooting at rocks and tree trunks in the water, hear them arguing about it. He circled to put them against the lights of Beauville, and waited until the wind was blowing off the river, carrying his footsteps back behind him into the trees. Then he charged.