Blood Men

chapter thirty-two

I drop down, the shotgun exploding, and I’m back at the bank all over again, the air-conditioning replaced by real air, the houseplants replaced by bushes and trees, the six men replaced by two men in a car. A hole appears in the garage door about the same time my knees crash into the concrete.

The car door starts to open. I have nowhere to run, I have no idea what to do. But then I realize I’m not alone, I have my monster with me and he knows what to do. We’re already in action. I get up and run forward, the monster leading the way, the monster in full control and now I’m the one along for the ride. We get closer to the car. To me this seems the wrong way to be going, but I’m in no position to argue. A leg comes out of the car and touches the sidewalk: jeans and a black steel-capped boot. I drop down and ram the entire weight of my body into the door, leading with my shoulder, slamming it hard on the leg. The guy inside yells out and the shotgun drops somewhere inside the car, buying me a couple of seconds. I don’t wait around. I run up the street, crossing behind the car, making it difficult for them to fire on me.

The car hits reverse. The transmission whines loudly as the gap closes. Words of anger spill out the window as the two men swear at each other, a miscommunication passing between them. Maybe the passenger wanted to get out and take another shot, or the driver wanted to hit me with the car in the beginning. I weave across to the opposite sidewalk. The car screeches to a halt. It fishtails so the front turns toward me. The doors fly open and the two men jump out, but the driver has forgotten he’s still wearing his seat belt and he’s pulled back in, his eyes wide in confusion.

The passenger runs around the side of the car and lines up another shot as I dive forward, getting behind a parked car and bang, metal is ripped out of the bodywork as I hit the ground. I get up and run, weaving between silver birch trees lining the street, waiting for the next shot, but there isn’t one, only footsteps as they pound the ground behind me.

The houses in the street are all similar, around ten years old, in great condition but a little tired, none of them-thankfully-with any front fences. I race over the front yard and down the side of a house, hitting the side gate with my shoulder, busting the latch holding it closed. I get through and the gate swings back and the top section explodes in a cloud of splinters from the next gunshot. I go left, cutting across the backyard, over the deck and past the french doors and a small sandpit that has bright yellow toy trucks in it. I reach the corner of the house and go left again, back toward the road. This time there’s a fence across, but no gate. I duck into the alcove by the back door. It’s a glass laundry door that I ram my fist through, the bandage around my hand protecting me from any cuts. The glass shatters into a thousand tiny pieces. I reach inside and unlock the door and spill into the house, my feet slipping on the glass. I go left into a hallway as the men come into the house behind me. Nobody’s home. I turn into a bedroom and shut the door behind me. I tip a chest of drawers across the doorway and a moment later it rattles as the men push against the door. The door wobbles in its frame as it’s kicked. I try opening the windows, but they have security latches and only open far enough to fit my arm through. I grab the nearest thing, which is a clock radio, and yank it from the power socket and thrash it against the window. It cracks on the third hit, then smashes on the fourth. A shot roars from the hallway and a large hole appears in the door, then the entire thing folds in on itself with one more kick. I don’t wait around to see the rest. I take a running jump where the window was and do my best to clear the glass, but end up dragging my right thigh along a shark tooth of glass jutting out from the frame.

I get straight to my feet and run toward the road, my shoe filling with blood. I hear tinkling glass as the man behind me breaks more of the glass out of the framework with the gun to make his jump easier. The front door of the house opens as I pass, and the man without the gun comes out, running hard at me. I put my head down and pump my arms and go as hard as I can, my feet pounding into the sidewalk, my foot splashing inside the shoe, creating a suction effect that squelches blood over the edge onto the ground. The only advantage I have is that these guys are wearing big heavy shoes and I’m not, and I figure my desire to survive is stronger than their desire to gun me down-though on that last part I’m not so sure. My legs are burning, my chest even more, every breath is like swallowing smoke.

I reach their car. Both doors are still open, the keys in the ignition, the motor running. I jump in and jam my foot on the clutch and accelerator and pop it into gear at the same time as he reaches me, pulling at my shoulder. I peel rubber, and as the car lurches forward the door slams hard on his fingers. He yelps, and as the car powers ahead, he falls forward too, dragged along beside the car. The window is still up but I can hear him screaming, can hear his knees scraping along the asphalt, his feet bouncing and kicking at it. I swerve left and right to shake him loose, the bones in his fingers breaking like gunfire. I take the car up to fifty. Then sixty. Still swerving, still trying to shake him loose.

No you’re not. If you wanted him gone you’d pop the door open and watch him fall away. You’re the one in control now.

I jam my foot hard on the brake and the car swerves. My passenger slingshots forward at the speed the car was doing two seconds before I jumped on the brakes. His hand bends all the way back on itself, the tops of his fingers against the back of his hand, then-schrip-a wet sound as the fingers come free-only they’re not free at all, they’re still in the door. Flesh tears from the base of his fingers and runs halfway up his forearm like an apple being peeled, muscle and tendons exposed, and then he’s free, flying and then rolling past the car out on the street, his hand reduced to a piece of meat with only a pinkie and a thumb. He hits the ground hard, rolls a few times, and comes to a stop with his bloody hand cradled against his chest. He doesn’t get up, just lies there, trying to figure out how things have gone so badly and why he’s in so much pain.

The car comes to a complete stop sideways on the road. The guy with the shotgun is running toward me, getting bigger in the view from the passenger window. He’s about two hundred meters away and could probably cover the distance in about nineteen seconds if he were an Olympic athlete and wearing running shoes, but he isn’t, he’s wearing jeans and heavy boots and carrying a shotgun and he’s built big, and none of that is helping him right now. I figure I have thirty seconds until he reaches me, but he doesn’t need to cover all that distance to put me back into range.

I gun the engine and the wheels spin up as I turn toward him, but I lose control; the car keeps turning and I end up facing away from him again. The engine stalls. The back windscreen explodes, a hailstorm of glass peppering the back of my seat and the dashboard as I hunker down. My hand finds the key and I twist it. A follow-up gunshot hits the rear wheel as the car comes back to life. I take off and the back of the car drops down as the tire shreds away. The ground vibrates through the rim and the chassis as I drive, pumping the blood out harder from my torn leg. There’s a high-pitched squeal from the back of the car, making me wince. The steering wheel fights with me, but I keep forward and then the car jumps up-boom dud-and the front wheel goes over the legs of the guy with the missing fingers, and then-schlock-as the rim with no tire goes over him.

I can hear his screams over the sound of the car. In the mirror, I see him roll to one side, but his left leg doesn’t move at all, it’s still on the ground, severed. His right leg goes with him, blood jutting toward the sky like a fountain. He drags himself, and gets about half a meter between him and his severed leg before giving up.

His partner runs right past him and takes another shot, but it doesn’t do any damage as I gun the engine, turn the wheel, and in a flurry of sparks, round the corner and leave them behind. I take the car up to sixty, race through a couple of intersections, take a hard right, and pull over.

I try calling Nat’s cell phone again. I’ve got blood on my hands somehow and it smears the buttons on the phone. I keep hitting the wrong ones and have to lean back and take a couple of deep breaths before trying again. My hands are shaking so badly I have to hold the phone in both of them to get it to work. There’s still no answer. Surely they’re okay. If something happened to them it would have happened at the house, not in public.

Jodie was killed in public.

So where does that leave me?

It leaves you and anybody close to you in danger.

The media coverage was extensive, so the men who killed Jodie certainly know all about me and think I’m coming after them. These people, they know I killed their friend. They know my dad gave me a name, and they suspect he gave me more than one.

I pull away from the curb. I find myself heading toward home, then decide it’s not the best place to go if I don’t want to be found. Could be the guy with the shotgun has made one phone call and another pair of men are descending on my house right now.

I change direction. The way the car is handling, with the wheel rim squealing on the road and my forearms burning from trying to control it, I probably wouldn’t have made it there anyway. Other cars slow down and people stare at me.

I pull over. I’ve put about two minutes between me and the shooter. When I open the door the three fingers that were jammed there are dislodged, all three connected by the back of the guy’s hand and a long piece of skin resembling torn wallpaper. They hit the ground, the middle finger tapping louder than the other two because of a silver ring on it. The ring has been flattened and has a skull on it; maybe that’s what kept his fingers from slipping out of the door. I climb out. My leg is covered in blood, my shoe so full of it now that it’s leaking through the material. I feel woozy and grab on to the side of the car to stay balanced. I try calling Nat again but there’s still no answer.

I get back into the car. There are dance-step footprints made up of blood on the ground where I was just standing. I start to feel dizzy, and then tired. I open the glove box and rummage through it. Tissues, a road map, a woman’s sunglasses. There’s a gym bag in the backseat covered in broken glass. It’s open, and I can see a woman’s clothes in there. Whoever this car belongs to, it sure as hell isn’t either of the men who showed up in it.

I rest my head back. Even with my eyes closed the world keeps swaying. I hold my hands on my leg and the blood is warm, the world fades and it takes me with it.