A short run remained between the Baron and the first pier of Welfare Island. By the power of the Cat o’ Nine lives, he was literally heating up. Whether it was chemistry, magic, or some combination of the two, it hardly mattered. Sweat was running from the hatband down into his eyes.
With the wounds on his gut, there was no more point to the fiction. He pulled off his hard hat and threw it over the railing. It tumbled out of sight, objectively over a hundred feet to the water, subjectively lost to an endless fall.
“Keep yours!” Phyllis called to the men behind her.
“Yes, ma’am!” came a chorus of cries.
“Baron!” the Zombie yelled. “Let me pass!”
The Baron slowed to a halt, grabbing onto one of the vertical suspension bars that hung from the trusses above. He leaned right, and the Zombie darted left around him, sprinting towards the pier. The entire catwalk shook from his long strides, making it hard for the Baron to let go, but he had to trust in himself, in the Zombie, and in the Cat. He had to keep moving.
d’holbach released the pole and ran. The water shimmered and wavered below him, but as long as both motion and will were clean, he would not fall.
The Zombie had made the correct tactical call. A member of the National Guard with thick glasses, a man like an athletic office worker, stepped out onto the catwalk where it circled around the right side of the pier, holding a Springfield rifle in his hands. He casually lifted the weapon and peered down its scope, aiming at the invincible man. Then he yelled something. The word was inaudible over the sounds of traffic, heavy breathing, and heavier footfalls, but they all understood what it meant. Stop.
The Zombie pulled off his hardhat and waved it towards the Guardsman, yelling at the top of his lungs, “We need help! We need help!”
“Halt!” the Guardsman repeated, finally loud enough to be understood. Another soldier stepped out onto the catwalk behind Springfield, holding a Thompson. There’d be more in the next few seconds. Given enough time, there’d be a whole platoon.
“Clear the path!” the Baron roared at the Zombie.
They needed to push the Guard out of the pier’s hallway and send Phyllis’s crew down the stairwells to Welfare Island. If those men didn’t leave the combat zone immediately, they’d become a part of this madness and almost certainly die or go to jail for a long, long time. The Baron wouldn’t let that happen. He’d failed to keep the peace. He wouldn’t fail these men again.
“Help!” the Zombie shouted in mid-sprint, waving the hardhat.
The man with the Springfield moved a few steps forward on the catwalk, taking aim around the corner of the pier. “Last chance! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
“Help me, god damn you!” The Zombie waved the hardhat with his left hand, caught a support bar at the corner with his right, and swung ninety degrees onto the stretch of catwalk that wrapped around the pier, keeping almost all of his wild momentum in front of the limestone face.
Springfield pulled the trigger, and the bullet apparently passed through the Zombie, spattering against the stretch of catwalk behind him. The Baron refused to flinch and kept running. They were about twenty feet out from the pier now. Welfare Island was rising out of the water beneath them.
A second shot, and the bullet caught in the Zombie’s eyesocket, stopping perfectly dead before rolling off like a dropped bauble.
Springfield hesitated, uncertain of what he’d seen.
The Zombie dropped his hardhat over his splayed fingers, closed the gap, and swung the hat under the rifle’s barrel, up towards Springfield’s chest. The attack should’ve shattered the Zombie’s fingers. Instead, the hardhat exploded outwards like a handgrenade. Shards punched Springfield’s rib-cage inward like a collapsing building, destroyed the rifle’s stock, and sent the victim’s body up and back with enough force to hit the rail behind him, flip foot-over-head backwards, and tumble away into thin air, already dead.
“Fucking Christ!” bellowed one of Phyllis’s men.
The Zombie caught a flying chunk of the ruined Springfield rifle, swept around the pier’s corner, and swung it sideways into the man with the Thompson. A short trigger pull was interrupted by a normal blow, striking the man’s firing arm; three bullets must’ve spattered across the Zombie’s chest, damaging his shirt. The Zombie tossed the impromptu club, grabbed the staggering man with two handfuls of dress uniform, and heaved up and out with an awkward twist of his back; the gods obliged, launching Thompson over the railing with supernatural ease. This man lived for three more seconds, screaming until he stopped.
“Keep going!” Phyllis roared.
The Baron hit the outside of the pier with his body weight, slamming hands and collapsing elbows up against the limestone. Then he pushed off, leaving a bloody smear on the white stone, and he ran for the corner, past wood splinters and bent guard rails.
Screams erupted in the hallway around the corner. The Zombie was going in.
“Give me that!” the invincible man shouted.
Then more gunshots, and the scrapes and claps of boots sprinting away.
The Baron had to trust the room was clear. He ran to the narrow gap where the cladding had been removed for catwalk access, grabbed hold of the edges, and looked inside.
The Zombie was standing beneath the old sodium lights, holding an 1911 pistol over three dead Guardsmen. A fourth man was crawling slowly up the stairs to the trolley platform. “It’s clear!” he shouted, before he turned, aimed, and killed the final living target.
“Go up, keep the room clear until the men go down!” the Baron yelled.
Phyllis caught up to him a second later, catching onto the cladding beside him. “What’s happening?” she shouted.
“I’ll run along the underside!” the Baron ordered the Zombie, informing everyone of his plans. “Once the union boys are out, go east on the bridge! Meet me at the next pier!”
The Zombie saluted with a lazy swing of the pistol barrel, then sprinted up the short stairwell and into the dim sunlight above the roadbed. Instantly, several men opened fire with automatic weapons, making the Zombie’s jacket flutter and dance like he’d emerged into a hurricane. He aimed the 1911, shouting at the top of his lungs, “I’m bulletproof!” Then he fired.
“Go!” Phyllis yelled, pulling the Baron back and waving her boys into the hallway. “Take the stairs down! Find some Guard! Report what’s happening! You’re victims, understand?”
“Yes, ma’am!” they all shouted.
“Blame Communists! Go!” she roared.
Her union workers ducked into the room and darted for the steps that ran parallel to the elevator system. No more words were exchanged. They simply fled into the spiralling stairwell like their lives depended on it, and the door slammed shut behind them.
“You too?” the Baron asked, offering to let her flee.
She waved the revolver. “Will you use it? Will you kill?”
The Baron hesitated. The answer should be yes, but he hadn’t really readied his heart, had he? He fucking hesitated.
“Then I’m with you!” she yelled. “Come on!”
They bolted around the exterior of the pier, to the next stretch of catwalk. This span of the bridge was nearly six hundred feet long, about half the previous length. It crossed most of Welfare Island before reaching the eastern pier.
At a strong run, it’d take forty seconds to a minute. That felt like too goddamn long, but the Baron willed it, and he ran.
Somewhere overhead, the shouts of men transformed to panicked screaming. The Zombie was punishing the people on the trolley platform around the entrance. A limp body fell over the road’s edge behind them, dropping past the catwalk. Small arms fire attempted to rebuke the threat, failing almost instantly as the Zombie fought eastward across the lower deck of the Queensboro Bridge. A second later, lumbering vehicles roared into life, diesel engines snarling. The bridge shuddered as heavy equipment moved overhead.
“Gods!” Phyllis yelled, keeping close behind the Baron. “What’s he doing?”
“Drawing attention!” the Baron yelled. Head down, he ignored the blood loss, and crossed two hundred feet in a solid twenty-second run. Already, his body was complaining, but he couldn’t stop now.
1400 feet of bridge remained before they could take a stairwell down to Queens. The Baron was capable of that distance while healthy, so he’d trust the Cat to maintain his strength and care for his wounds.
A thunderous boom blossomed somewhere behind them, only partially muffled by the roadbed. The sound wasn’t merely heard. Its force was felt in the back of the Baron’s brain, and an ancient memory leapt to mind, a fearful flash of a 12-pounder Napoleon cannon firing in the dark. A century ago, shots and shells flew with equal ease, obliterating earthworks before showering cowered ranks of soldiers with shrapnel. It was a nightmare, a trauma flashback. d’Holbach gritted his teeth and jerked his shoulders but didn’t stumble.
Tanks would give the National Guard momentary hope, but they wouldn’t stop the Zombie. They wouldn’t even deliver enough force to throw him over the side of the bridge, though they might knock him down.
If only they weren’t secular, they might’ve known better. The best strategy here was to drop arms and rush the Zombie as a group. Against bare hands, he was no stronger than any other man, and constrained, he couldn’t always force a divine intervention. Lives would be lost, but they could carry him to the side and throw him off the bridge.
Instead, they fired at the invincible man. They gave him the freedom to move, to build up speed and attack hardened targets with his would-be-soft body.
Even though the Zombie was his friend, the Baron regretted permitting this kind of asymmetric fight. So many people would die, and so many vehicles would be destroyed on an important bridge. Yet the fire in the Baron’s belly was stolen. It was meant for other hands. Lo, Prometheus, titan whose head was light from blood loss. This artifact was a gift of fire, peace stolen out of the hands of warmakers—
“Keep running!” Phyllis urged.
Shit. He was losing it, slowing down. He concentrated on thinking straight, and warmth rushed up the arteries in his neck. The lightness became heavy again. The Cat handled the blood loss and cleared his head. Speed returned to his limbs.
While they ran, the sounds of gunfire receded into the distance behind them. Wherever the Zombie stood untouchable, people were dying.
Another twenty seconds passed.
There was a deafening thump that threatened to pull the world out from under their feet. The closest thing the Baron could compare it to was the explosion of a gunpowder dump, a punch in every direction, throwing the catwalk down a half inch. It rose back instantly and slapped his feet, causing him to fall forward and land on his chest. A snowfall of rust and flaking paint showered over his bare, sweat-streaked scalp. The bridge swayed lightly like it was made of string and paper, but it didn’t break. It was meant to withstand the fury and might of a hurricane, and whatever had exploded had taken most of the direct damage.
“What the fuck?” Phyllis was down on her knees, clutching the revolver like a talisman against evil. She pushed to her feet, keeping the weapon at hand.
“I don’t know!” The Baron pushed to his feet and ran again. There was no other choice.
Welfare Island stretched out below like a mottled finger, a patchy mixture of empty barren lots, newly rising tenements, and derelict prison facilities. To the south, one could glimpse a 19th century city in ruins, an abandoned complex of fences and gutted buildings rotting in the sun. North was a cleared flatland, a texture rubbed out by machinery.
Directly underneath the bridge, the island population bloomed like brown mold. There was a nine-story elevator building just north of the eastern pier, known as the Elevator Storehouse. It connected vehicle and pedestrian traffic from the lower deck of the Queensboro Bridge to the island below. New buildings and facilities clustered around this terminal connection point—steepled churches, towering white hospitals, and a well-kept baseball diamond.
Welfare Island was poor, condensed, and yet somehow growing because the broader middle class couldn’t be bothered to reach it. Ferries and elevator buildings were thin roads for exploitation, and prior to World War II, developers had layered the island with asylums and institutions. Now, cheap homes and apartments filled the gaps.
They ran onwards. Gunfire petered off to a trickle. Car engines were sparse now, fleeing this span of the bridge. Violence was muted after that blast, and wouldn’t recover for some seconds. “It’s too quiet,” the Baron said, jogging doggedly onward.
“Yeah,” Phyllis muttered, recognizing the same eerie shift.
Approaching the next architectural pier, the Baron spotted something new—a set of pedestrian stairs, connecting the lower deck of the bridge to the Elevator Storage roof. The steps branched off the south edge of the bridge, ran maybe twenty feet past the pier, and sloped down to the east. They then cut left, running north through a series of dangling steel trusses that spread out below the maintenance catwalks. Finally, the steps jumped the open air to the rooftop walkway, completing a path off the bridge and onto the island below.
The only other route to the Elevator Storage building was a vehicle elevator hooked to the north side of the pier, which rose up high enough to collect cars directly off the lower deck.
“The Guard is still up there,” Phyllis noted. “Should we take those stairs?
The Baron shook his head, panting. “Only if we can’t get to Queens.”
There were only three paths to those stairs, and all of them were dangerous. They could ascend to the trolley platform above and take the intended path down, passing through the Guard directly; they could jump more than two stories from the catwalks, risking injury; or they could climb down the narrow support trusses which held up the stairs, hazarding a fall. In every case, they’d be more than a hundred feet over the streets and buildings of Welfare Island.
“Keep it in mind,” Phyllis huffed, jogging behind him. “Do you hear the Zombie?”
The Baron put out a hand. “Listen for a sec.” They slowed until their footsteps no longer rang through the metal. They tilted their ears up to the roadbed, listening keenly. Even gunshots had finally paused, leaving only the idle chatter of diesel engines.
“Nothing?” Phyllis asked.
“I don’t know what he’s doing,” the Baron whispered.
“Let’s move then.”
His heartbeat throbbed along the lines of fire, the lashings of the Cat. He resumed jogging, looking towards their destination. No threats were visible; if Guardsmen were close, they were hunkered down instead of stalking the underbelly of the bridge.
“Check the entrance?” Phyllis asked quietly, gesturing towards the connection between the catwalk and the hallway inside the next pier.
“I’ll do it.” The Baron had the Cat. It only made sense for him to risk his life first.
They reached the connection point where the walk bound itself to the exterior of the pier, and they slowed to a walk, mirroring the strange peace around them. The indifferent wind sang, diesel engines rumbled, and lightning flickered on the horizon, but nothing more.
“Did somebody wish for silence?” Phyllis asked softly
“I don’t think so.” The Baron stalked twenty feet to the corner of the pier, then put both hands against the limestone cladding and leaned around, checking with one eye. Nobody was there. “Clear,” he whispered, pulling himself around and towards the gap in the cladding.
Phyllis followed close behind, angling the revolver’s barrel towards the roadbed above. The Baron placed one hand on the edge of the cladding, exchanged nods with Phyllis to affirm readiness, and then leaned out to see if anyone was hiding in the hall.
Nobody. The stairwell up to the lower deck was bounded with sandbags, but there were no people in view. There was a hint of a parked vehicle at the top of the stairs, and the Baron could just make out the distinct shudder of an idling engine, but nothing else was noticeable.
Was someone ordering the Guard to wait strategically? Was the Zombie gone altogether, tossed over the bridge’s edge without them noticing?
The Baron simply walked past the open gap to the next corner and checked it, looking for anyone hiding against the back of the architectural pier. Clear again.
He waved Phyllis over, and she scurried forward, catching up to him.
“Suspicious,” she whispered.
“Just keep going,” he said quietly.
They left the pier behind, stalking out onto the final stretches of catwalk. As the world opened out beneath their feet again, the dizzying height was a relief. Only a hundred feet ahead, the island ended and the open waters of the eastern channel began.
Far ahead, they could already see the banks of Queens.
Somewhere to the northeast, towards those dark clouds, LaGuardia waited.
“The Zombie will catch up,” the Baron explained. “We need to get off this bridge immediately. Are you ready?”
“I’ll keep up,” Phyllis said.
d’Holbach picked up the pace, running like he was on the last mile of a marathon, breathing deep and steady. Phyllis followed closely, looking back every so often.
Somewhere distant and somehow omnipresent, diesel engines roared into life all at once. Shifting, grumbling, they moved in all directions. “Is that ahead of us?” he asked.
“Behind too,” Phyllis said.
With coordination, the National Guard was starting to move all up and down the bridge. Where was the Zombie? Was he reacting to the deployment?
The Baron and Phyllis were reaching the connection point between the island’s span and the cantilever arm sloping down towards Queens. Here, the whole roadbed vibrated sympathetically to the rumble of tracks on pavement. The Guard’s vehicles weren’t directly overhead, but the bridge was alive with the sounds of machinery.
They paused at the cusp of the curve in the slope, at the edge of the internal horizon where the bridge began to roll down towards Queens, and the Baron spotted men at the distant waterside pier. He squinted, recognizing the color. National Guardsmen were crawling out of the cladding, out onto the distant catwalks. “Uniforms,” he said. “From Queens.”
Phyllis stopped right behind him. “Jesus.”
It wasn’t much, maybe half a dozen soldiers with rifles, but without the Zombie, they were an unstoppable threat. They were almost a thousand feet away, but there was no hiding from them. Fingers were pointing. Binoculars were already raised.
“We can’t go forward,” the Baron said. He turned to look at Phyllis, ready to say we have to go back, but then he spotted something worse. Men in uniforms were exiting onto the catwalks on both sides of the Welfare Island pier—two per side so far. After they’d passed, someone must’ve signalled it, maybe from Welfare Island itself. “Behind us too.”
“I’ll jam them if they raise guns,” Phyllis said. “Let’s start back. Now.”
“If anyone shoots—” the Baron began.
He felt it before he heard it, a shot in his back from the direction of Queens, plunging inwards. He released a wet cough, then a wheeze.
“What’s wrong?” Phyllis asked, glancing back at him.
The sound caught up, a distant rifle crack, and with ill-timing, pain finally reported the damage to his right lung. One of the riflemen had struck him from all the way down at the Queens pier. The entry wound was just below the Baron’s right armpit. The entire lung was seizing, punctured, ready to collapse.
He didn’t allow himself to fall. He chose to drop flat.
Phyllis dropped with him, lying flat on the catwalk to minimize their silhouette. “Fuck!” she yelled. “We need the Zombie!”
The Baron demanded his body to breathe. There was no choice in the matter. He needed the oxygen. Even the fluid-filled lung must work, if the Cat required it. He gritted his jaw until he thought his teeth would break; then his nostrils hissed as fire gripped his lungs and pulled them open, and the Baron felt the sharp pain of the rifle wound gurgling on his flank, bringing in air. “Breathe!” he shouted into the catwalk with his new, blistering hot breath. The flavor of roasted blood spread over his tongue, thick and metallic.
Phyllis aimed her revolver towards Welfare Island, then fired once. The men at the pier darted back for cover, and she squinted at them, trying to spot their weapons. “Broken! Broken! Broken! Broken?” she wished loudly. “That’s them! Up! We have to go, or we’re fucked!”
“Yes. One… Yes.” In, out, the Baron breathed. Easier now, because the hole in his flank was sewing shut. He was dizzy, then clear, then dizzy again, as if he was hypoxic for one second, then breathing pure oxygen for the next. The world was oversaturated, colors ran full of rainbows, and the sky was glimmering like pearls.
“Bulletproof!” came the shout at Welfare Island. “Bulletproof! Bulletproof!”
The Baron tilted his head up in time to see the Zombie tackle a fifth Guardsman out of the pier hallway and into a support bar for the catwalk, smashing his victim’s face against a steel tube. One of the Guardsmen twisted towards the ruckus, pulling the trigger on a dead gun. The Zombie released his first victim to land in a heap, then darted into the second victim fingers-first, plunging them into the man’s lungs and holding him there by the ribs, gurgling.
On the far side of the pier, the last two soldiers rose out of cover, running away from the Zombie and towards the Baron and Phyllis
Phyllis aimed, then fired twice. Both men tumbled down, either dead or injured and disarmed, and the path was temporarily open for them to run back towards Welfare island.
The Zombie pulled out his knife, thumbing it open with his free hand. His captured victim unholstered a 1911 and started emptying it into the Zombie’s stomach, groin, and thighs. With devilish delight, the Zombie cut the soldier’s throat open from one side to another, then dropped him to die.
One remaining soldier was backed up to a corner of the catwalk, screaming hysterically. The Zombie took two steps forward and kicked him in the chest. He fell back over the railing, hit the sloped side of the tower no more than fifteen feet down with the back of his head, and died, painting a red streak down the stone. The body tumbled out of view, and the Zombie looked up, finally aware of his surroundings.
The Baron pushed up onto his arms and waved.
The Zombie waved back. His clothes were filled with bullet holes, and there were a couple of fist sized patches missing, but the seams were holding together. He still wore shoes.
“He’s your friend,” Phyllis murmured sadly, grieving that truth while the Zombie wiped blood across his tattered shirt.
“He is,” the Baron said.
“I already knew he was dangerous, but… you really can’t die here.”
The Baron stood up and breathed deeply. “I know.”
“Baron!” the Zombie shouted. “Come!”
“Coming!” The Baron jogged.
The Zombie heard something and turned towards the hole in the cladding. A pineapple grenade landed neatly on the catwalk. No time to throw it back, so he scooped it up and cupped his hand away from the bridge.
The explosion was directed out in a silvery-black puff of shrapnel and smoke.
Then the Zombie stepped back towards the entrance to the pier, flipping the bird while enduring a sudden rain of gunfire. Men must be standing inside the hallway, armed and ready.
The Zombie stepped back briefly, cupping his hands to his mouth. “I’ll have to clear the deck!” he shouted. Then he slipped back into the line of fire like a child diving into a sprinkler, laughed under the patter of bullets, and waded in to fight the enemy.
Phyllis was close behind the Baron. “We can’t follow him! We have to take the stairs!”
The Baron felt a sweep of dread, but Phyllis was right. There was no way out—only down to Welfare Island—and they’d have to reach the stairwell without passing through the National Guard. “We’ll climb the trusses, drop down!” he shouted.
“Alright!”
Somewhere above, shouts were mixing with the screech of jeep tires. The rumble of tanks redoubled, shifting gears to change notes in a diesel melody. Forces weren’t fleeing the Zombie; they were congealing around him like a blood clot.
Ignoring the lashings of pain up and down his ribs, the Baron sprinted for a stretch of catwalk about twenty feet from the pier on this side, suspended high over the stairs to the Elevator Storage building. Metal trusses connected the lower deck to these free-floating stairs like a spider’s web, securing them like a fly in thin air.
As they reached it, the Zombie ducked back out onto the catwalks, now slinging fresh blood from hands soaked up to the wrists, cuffs sopping wet and dark. He pointed left. “It’s a mess up there!” The sound of tanks was almost directly overhead.
“We’re climbing down!” the Baron shouted, pointing to the stairs below the catwalks.
The Zombie cast him a thumbs up. “Don’t die!”
“I won’t!”
“I’ll cover you!” The invincible man scooped up a rifle off of one of the corpses, then backed out onto the corner of the walk and aimed at the opposite side of the pier, just in case someone decided to sneak around the outside.
The Baron looked over the waist high railing. Below them, there was over a hundred feet of spring air, the shade of the bridge, two rows of tenement buildings fifty-feet tall, and a street laid across the land like a blacktop valley. If he fell, three seconds separated him from failure. The Cat wasn’t guaranteed to save him here. A high fall might count as multiple deaths.
Phyllis clapped a hand to the Baron’s shoulder. “Are you scared?”
He felt the bridge shift beneath him. Whether that was the wind, the armored units, or just a sudden surge of fear breaking its leash, he couldn’t tell. “Yeah.”
“I can go first.”
“Okay. Quick though.”
The Zombie’s aim was rock steady. When a Guardsman peeked the opposite corner, he fired, clipping a man’s brow just beneath the lip of his helmet. It wasn’t a fatal shot, but the man reeled back, screaming in terror. They’d just gained a few seconds to climb.
Phyllis stepped over the railing, spread her arms out slightly, and dropped a half a foot down onto the slope of the nearest truss. For a moment, she wavered, but there was no fear in her eyes, and she won her balance instantly. The steel trusses laced the bridge’s structure in a broad X, crossing at a node about fifteen feet over the suspended stairs. If she hung from there, she could drop down maybe nine or ten feet more and land on metal steps.
He crouched down, almost dizzy from watching her climb.
She reached the node, squatted, grabbed the edges of the beams, and lowered her body down. Here, she hesitated, looking repeatedly to make sure the stairs were underfoot. Then she dropped, slammed into the metal with a bang, and fell forward onto her hands and knees.
“Phyllis,” the Baron hissed sympathetically.
She was shaking slightly, but she pushed up onto her feet and grabbed the stair’s railings. “Come on,” she cried. “You too!”
He slid under the catwalk railing instead of going over it, trying to lower his right foot onto the truss. The steel beam seemed to wobble underfoot, but that was just the wavering strength of the leg beneath his wounds. He willed the Cat’s fire to hold him steady and set his weight on that thin strip of metal over the void. Then he followed with his left foot, keeping his arms loose but close to his body. He didn’t throw them wide, he didn’t panic, because he was already balanced. No matter what his instincts said, his rational mind insisted on what was true.
The truss was nine inches wide. If he could’ve wished his fears away, he could’ve run on it. Instead, he mechanically arranged one foot in front of the other. Round, button-shaped bolts were smooth underfoot. He ignored the fear that they’d foul his footing. They’d only foul if he overreacted. If his leg jerked away. If he reacted.
One foot. Then another.
One foot after another.
Phyllis was saying over the wind, “You’re halfway there.”
He could see the node approaching.
“You’re almost there.” She didn’t tell him to hurry. He was hurrying.
Ten steps distant. He wished he could go faster. Nine. Eight.
“Baron!” Phyllis shouted, looking past him. “Broken! Broken!” she wished desperately.
d’Holbach planted both feet on the slope of the truss and half-turned towards the enemy, looking up and out towards Queens.
At the connection between spans, the assaulting party reached the top of their hill and found him as an easy target, some hundred yards away but vulnerable. Their binoculars were in hand. Springfields with scopes were being lifted. But they were broken, weren’t they?
One Guardsman said something, tapped a rifle.
A cold jolt of fear ran through the Baron. Was that a Langley cultist, fixing guns?
He turned, ready to run down the truss. There were several sharp barks of rifle fire, and his body jerked involuntarily. Numb for a moment, he nevertheless knew he’d been shot. The world reeled; his arms spiraled. Pain lanced through his back and chest, revealing an entry wound just beneath his shoulder blade and an exit wound beside his heart.
He wanted to cry out, to express his panic to Phyllis. How absurd.
The Earth turned to spin out from under him, but he dropped down towards the beam, grabbed onto it with his hands, and held on tight, even as his entire left lung collapsed and the Cat forced it full again, a now familiar repair.
The Zombie threw the corpse of a fresh victim off the bridge, turned and sprinted at a speed that was damaging the catwalks, like sledgehammers on thin steel sheeting. “Baron!” he roared.
“Broken!” Phyllis shouted uselessly.
The Baron let go and pushed up. He ran at full speed for the node, aiming to jump to the stairs. Instead, his calf burst open, timed by the crack of another volley, and failed him.
He fell left over the truss, over open air. The screeching adrenaline seized him, and he fell out of his pain; it seemed to remain behind him, a ghost of sensation feeling fatal wounds, haunting the shadows among the trusses of the bridge.
He tumbled over, passing so close to Phyllis. The first second was the slowest. Then the world accelerated, and he was in the terrible sunlight. There were no second chances. No resurrection. “No pain—” he began to wish, but he felt the gods’ denial, for he already felt nothing. Oh, tumbling corpse to be, have you left the world already?
The bridge accelerated away, Phyllis already small.
He reached for his pocket as the Earth orbited around him in a sickening tumble. No penny. A wallet, and something else. In the corner of one eye, buildings scraped the sky.
He grabbed the object. The last cigar from Tammany Hall, still kept. Words spilled out of him quickly; adrenaline stretched out what little remained. Have time! Have time!
“This—”
Into the final shadow of buildings, no longer under the sun.
“—is—”
The valley of high-rise tenements, the passage of floors.
“—lit!”
Glimpses of windows, arches. Even doors.
Thunder. He landed in the Stygian darkness of debt, then fell out of his torpor at full speed, body seizing in one solid jerk. Up half a foot, then slamming down hard into the floor, like a dream of falling awoken with a hypnagogic jerk. He’d dodged.
A croak of pain rose out of him, but the darkness responded instantly, shushing him. Torpor was insistent. It’d only leave if he chose to be aware, and he didn’t choose the pain. He refused to feel his artery, severed alongside his still-beating heart. He refused to feel warm blood, spilling onto the carpet. He refused to feel himself die yet again.
Thoughtless sleep was better than any suffering.
This was the past, five days ago, in a sanctuary. While his body bled out and filled up with the energy of the Cat, he was also outside, earnestly rushing forward through time and space to nearly die and end up here.
The gods claimed he had a choice, but what choice was there in that? He couldn’t leave to warn himself. His debt locked the door, and it would open at the very moment that he made his wish. The cigar would be grasped for days in a clammy, still palm.
The Cat knitted him while his mind faded to hibernation.
Time was lost.
Author’s Note:
A/N goes here.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!
