Forests of the Night

CHAPTER 24

The window was blown apart by the explosion. They fell onto the top floor of the adjoining parking garage.

Hassan's back slammed into a car below them. The fiberglass underneath them gave and Nohar felt his knee sink into Hassan's chest. Something inside it broke. The canine coughed up blood.

Hassan cocked back with the razor again. Nohar responded with a backhand slash. The fully-extended claws of his right hand hit Hassan's left arm, slicing open Hassan's wrist. The razor went tumbling into the darkness.

Nohar's teeth were still buried in the flesh of Hassan's neck and canine blood spilled into his mouth.

Hassan jerked underneath him. The canine's flesh ripped out of his mouth, and Nohar heard a collarbone snap. Hassan spilled out on the concrete drive and backed away, toward the other end of the garage.

Somewhere a pink screamed.

Debris from above began to rain down on them.

"... cat." Hassan spat a gob of bloody phlegm at the pavement. He seemed to be laboring to breathe and his voice had a breathy, bubbling quality to it. Nohar thought a rib must have punctured a lung. "Too bad, you didn't go ..."

Hassan paused to get his breath as Nohar jumped from the car and advanced, ' 'To Geauga with everyone else ... "

Nohar was barely a meter from the canine and Has-

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san actually smiled. How—no, he couldn't have. There wasn't enough time.

But where had the Zipheads been when Smith got hit at Lakeview? Where were they now?

Hassan had backed all the way to the railing. Behind him was only space. Nohar—The Beast—roared and swung his right hand. He aimed at the soft part of the skin under Has-san's lower jaw. The claws, and his fingers, dug in through the skin under Hassan's muzzle. Nohar's claws pierced the skin and crushed Hassan's tongue against the inside of the jaw. Hassan's eyes went wide with shock. Warm blood streamed out of the wound, soaking Nohar's arm.

Nohar put his whole body into the follow-through. He grabbed hold of Hassan's jaw from inside the mouth and his arm continued the swing. Hassan's weight barely slowed it. The swing carried the canine out over the edge of the roof. He was actually thrown upward before he started falling. Hassan slid off of Nohar's hand and followed a near-perfect ballistic arc to the ground.

Hassan crashed into an ambulance that was in the process of pulling out of the driveway below. The roof caved in with his weight, and the siren and flashers— for some reason—kicked in. The ambulance slowed to a stop and a pair of medics piled out to see what the hell had happened.

The Beast retreated but didn't leave. Nohar was shaking as he ran through Metro General's parking garage. No one stopped him as he made his way down, even though his arm and his face were streaked with Hassan's blood—or perhaps because of it. Good thing. Nohar was in a dangerous state of mind. Even an innocent bystander who got in his way would find himself in trouble.

Manny's van was still where they had parked it less than an hour ago. It cut diagonally across three parking spaces and was surrounded by a flock of dark-blue

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Haviers. One of the Haviers' doors hung open. The agents from it must have rounded the building to see Hassan's splat.

Manny had never bothered to hide the van's combination from Nohar. Nohar punched it in, opened the door, and got in the driver's seat. The feed ripped out as he floored the van out of the Metro lot.

He could still taste Hassan's blood and it didn't do a damn bit of good. Manny was dead, pointlessly.

"WHY?"

MLI was finished. It was all blown open. Why?

Nohar smelled Manny off the driver's seat and he wished the Indian techs had made his strain able to cry.

He was already pushing the van at one-twenty klicks an hour when he hit the 1-90 on-ramp. He was dodging slower-moving cars when he remembered this van had a siren. He found the switch and turned it on. He stopped dodging. The other cars were pulling to the side.

He maxed it out at one-fifty as he shot through the exit on to the Midtown Corridor.

Even blowing down the Corridor, going twice the speed limit, gave him time to think, time he didn't want. He didn't want to know Manny was dead. He wanted

The Beast to handle it. That's what it was for, damnit.

However, invoking his bioengineered combat-mode didn't help him a bit when it came to dealing with the death of the closest thing to a father he had ever had.

He needed to hit Mayfield, and fuck the barriers. He put on the seat belt.

He shot past the city end of Mayfield and took a right toward the Triangle parking garage. Between the bridge over Mayfield and the one over the driveway, there was a small hill that sloped toward the tracks. Nohar left the driveway and shot the van over the mostly dead lawn, up the hill, and over the dead tracks. A Dodge Electroline wasn't intended to take that kind

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of grade, but the velocity carried it over. The van started spilling over the other side of the hill, only going seventy now, headed for the side of an apartment building.

Siren still going, Nohar skidded the van to the right. The rear left corner clipped the building as he bumped on to the crumbling Moreytown section of Mayfield. The van rolled to a near stop, scattering the nocturnal population off of the street.

Nohar floored it again, feeling the uneven road in his kidneys.

After the first block, he was going eighty.

He passed the abandoned bus going a hundred.

Third block, he was going one-twenty—

Three concrete pylons blocked the road ahead of him, each three meters tall. The hulk of the dead Subaru was still wrapped around the center pillar.

He pulled the van all the way to the left, on to the sidewalk. On one side was now a concrete wall to Lakeview, and, coming up on the right, one of the pylons. Nohar hoped the gap was big enough.

The front end screeched and the van bucked forward with a crunch-He was through.

He'd made it. There was now a wobble on the front left tire, and he'd left both front fenders behind him. But now he was shooting east down Mayfield.

He was back to going one-fifty when he passed by Coventry. The cop on the riot watch only took three seconds to decide to give chase. Good for him. Nohar saw the first 322 marker when he passed the minumum-security prison. So far, the cop was the only shadow.

As long as the cop didn't try to stop him.

The vibration from the front wheel was getting worse, but he didn't slow.

Malls and suburbia shot by him, a ghostly gray blur under the streetlights.

His headlights had been taken out by his squeeze through the barrier. He drove by his night-vision and the infrequent streetlights.

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Some shithead going through an intersection didn't get out of the way. Nohar wove a tight arc around the vehicle without hitting the brakes, and raked the side of the van across the rear end of the new BMW. It spun out and hit a light pole.

Suburbia vanished in a wave of trees. The Cleveland cop was still the only shadow, and they were now three suburbs out of his jurisdiction. The streetlights vanished with the malls and the split-levels. The only light now was the van's red flashers, turning the world ahead into a surrealistic image in pulsing-red monochrome.

He hit the county line and could see the blurred lights of the motel coming up on his right. Bobby had chosen a fifty-year-old relic to stash the girls—all tarnished chrome and flickering neon. Nohar saw the lights when he was about a klick away from the hotel and cut the siren as he slowed the van.

When he passed the entrance, he spun the van into the parking lot. The van was going seventy. The first thing he saw in the parking lot was a Ziphead with a submachine gun. The rat was standing guard outside a familiar-looking remote van. Nohar aimed his vehicle at him.

The ratboy's reaction time was just too slow. He jumped to the side too late to avoid being hit. Nohar heard a burst of ineffective gunfire as the wobbly front tire bumped up over the rat.

The front end of Manny's van plowed into the side of the remote. The remote tumbled forward like it had been jerked on a cable, the sudden deceleration throwing Nohar against the seat belt.

There was the sound of shattering glass. Then more gunfire. He felt a wave of shots strafe the rear of the van. He heard more gunfire, not aimed at the van. Where the hell was his Vind?

Nohar felt the bottom fell out of his world when he realized he had lost it somewhere in the fight with Hassan.

Something inside him smelled the rat-blood under

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the van and told him it didn't matter. He was the hunter, they were prey—

And Stephie was in there.

He loosed a subliminal growl as he popped the seat belt and tumbled out the driver's side door, away from the motel. When he hit the ground he shuddered in pain. He was beginning to feel his knee again. He let the pain jack up the adrenaline.

He took cover behind the van—most of the shots were coming from the hotel. He looked at where the shots seemed to be going and saw the Cleveland cop car.

The cop was huddling down behind the front fender. The flashers were going, but a bullet had taken out the plastic covering them—the flashers were now giving off a stark white searchlight glare. The cop looked like he had taken a hit or two. Nohar recognized him. He was the pink cop who had looked so scared when he and Manny had passed him—the night all this shit started.

The whelp had better've called backup.

The ratboy who'd guarded the remote was a smear on the pavement. When he looked at the corpse, he could feel his time sense telescoping. The rest of the Zips were holed up in the motel. The Zips weren't paying attention to him yet. The cop musfve rounded into the parking lot just after he had plowed in. The wreck of the remote offered him some more cover. Nohar hunkered down and ran along the side of the wreck on all fours, right leg barely touching the ground.

The motel was simply a line of rooms facing the parking lot. The nose of the remote was only a meter in front of a door—the room next to the Zips. Nohar tackled the door, and the cheap molding splintered. He kept going, tumbling onto a twin bed. The legs on the bed snapped off and spilled Nohar onto a synthetic rug that smelled of mothballs, rug shampoo, and old cigarette smoke. The room was empty.

Nohar could hear the gunfire and the Zip's chit ten ng FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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Spanish through the thin dry wall. He stood up and looked for a weapon.

The room's comm was bolted to its own table. His shoulder protested as he lifted it. The cable connection ripped out of the wall, taking a wall plate and ripping a hole up the drywall for nearly a meter before it snapped free. Knee shaking, he lifted the comm over his head—it had to weigh thirty kilos—and listened to the Zips.

One was near the wall. It sounded like he had a nine-millimeter. Nohar aimed the comm at that one—

The comm and attached table flew in an arc that intersected the wall. It hit dead center at a fake painting—some anonymous landscape—and crashed through the drywall separating the two rooms. The mylar wallpaper tore away in sheets, following the comm through the hole.

Perfect hit on the rat—bandage on the face marked this guy as Bigboy—the side of the comm hit the rat in the face and the picture tube imploded, adding a small cloud of phosphor powder to the plaster dust.

The comm kept going, knocking away a table another rat was using for cover.

The rat—dressing on his arm marked him as the one with the chain—turned to face Nohar. That was a stupid mistake. The cop was still covering the picture window from behind the cop car.

The cop put a .38 slug through the rat's neck before the ratboy realized he had lost his cover.

The hole in the wall was a meter square.

Nohar jumped through without any hesitation. He aimed at the third rat, who was hiding behind a set of dresser drawers.

For a moment Nohar bared his entire flank to the cop, the kid had a perfect shot through the long-ago-vaporized picture window. Nohar didn't care.

Nohar landed on the third rodent, Fearless Leader. Fearless had a revolver, a forty-four. An old gun but powerful. He tried to turn it on Nohar, but Nohar

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grabbed the ratboy's wrist—it was in a cast—and slammed it into one of the open drawers of the dresser. Then he crunched the drawer shut with his entire weight. The gun went off inside the dresser, blasting chunks of particleboard over the rat the cop had shot.

Fearless was looking at Nohar with wide eyes, going into shock. Somewhere, under the growling, Nohar found his voice. "So, 'pretty kitty's' next?" The rat tried to shake his head.

Nohar slashed Fearless Leader's throat open with his claws, opened the drawer, and removed the gun from the sputtering rodent.

The gunfire had ceased.

He could smell perfume coming from the bathroom, over the cordite. Nohar could also smell blood that didn't come from a rat. He gave the cop a great shot at his back as he bolted for the bathroom door at the rear of the motel room. Somewhere, where his rational mind was hiding, he prayed to Maria's God he wasn't too late.

He kicked the door open, sending a piercing dagger of pain through his right leg, Terin turned toward him. She was picking up a nasty looking assault rifle. It looked too big for her. It was certainly too big for the small bathroom. Terin couldn't sweep it to cover the door.

There was a bloody knife sitting on the sink. Something small and blood-covered was hanging in the shower—

"I'll give you the fucking Finger of God."

The first shot hit her in the chest, slamming the rat into the white tile wall.

The second got her in the face,

The third clicked on an empty chamber.

There was a weak sound from the shower "... way to go, Kit . . ."