Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith
up the tunnel a couple of yards, until I was safe, and then sat down heavily, chest heaving. Things, I realised, had gone from crap to really, traumatically crap. There was no further sound of gunfire, but the guard outside would surely be radioing to the ones inside that an intrusion through the pipe was in progress.
I’m pretty tough, actually, by most people’s standards, but I’m not Snedd: if they knew I was coming, then three machine-gun-toting guards were going to be more than I could handle. Unfortunately, there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t go back, because the guard would be standing there, sight steady on the entrance to the pipe. Even if I sped down he’d be able to get me as soon as I hit the water, and I didn’t want to die by being shot full of holes in a lake of turd soup. It struck me as undignified.
There was no point in rushing up the tunnel firing my gun: a blanket fire of energy would cut me in half and quarters and eighths before I got anywhere near them. There was a bend in the pipe about five yards ahead, and that seemed to be my only potential hope. If I waited, and they eventually crept down to do me in, there was a tiny, minimal, infinitesimal chance that I might be able to get one or more of them first. My position would still be absolutely terrible, but I wouldn’t be dead. Soon afterwards, perhaps, but when all you have is a few minutes, each one of them seems fairly precious, each couple of seconds worth having. I crouched down and waited, gun ready.
On impulse I fumbled the portable vidiphone out of my jacket and called my apartment. I told the fridge to make sure that Spangle was fed regularly, and to alert the store if it ran out of cat food. I think it sensed I was in a serious jam, and it dispensed with the usual backchat and wished me luck. There was still no sound from the pipe up ahead, so I quickly called Zenda’s office and got Royn on the screen.
‘Oh hi, Stark. Hey, you’re in a tunnel.’
‘Yeah. Is Zenda available?’
‘Christ, no way, Stark, I’m afraid. She’s in meetings for the next seventy-two hours solid. Any message?’
I thought for a moment. Nothing came, nothing big enough.
‘Just say I called. No, say this: say I said to remember the waterfall.’
‘Sure thing. Remember the waterfall. You got it.’
‘Thanks, Royn.’
I heard a sound up ahead and cut the transmission, hugging the wall as tight as I could. Each shot was going to be critical, and so I braced my arm and held my torso as steady as I could, waiting, I knew, for death.
After everything I’d done, everything I’d seen, the distance I’d travelled, it was going to end in being gunned down in an ancient sewage pipe on an unimportant job. And I found I cared, strangely. A few years ago I wouldn’t have done. Something had been changing in me recently, stirring and flexing beneath the surface. I’d started to feel worse, but to care more. Something was happening, but I didn’t know what. Now it looked like I’d never find out.
Then the sound came again, and my arm wavered slightly. It was very faint, but I thought I recognised the kind of sound it was. I opened my mouth slightly to let the noise get to my eardrums through the Eustachian tubes as well as my ears, and strained every nerve to hear. It happened again, and my mouth dropped open wider of its own accord.
It was laughter. The sound was definitely laughter.
I’ve had a lot of experience of macho people. In the last nine years I’ve worked for, with and against a wide spectrum of soldiers, policemen, lunatics, hit men and gang members, and I’ve met a lot of ‘if-it-moves-shoot-it, -and-if-it-doesn’t-shoot-it-until-it-does’ kind of guys. When that kind of person is on the hunt, when he’s got a quarry in his sights and he’s moving in to blow it to little bloody pieces, some of them will laugh. A few laugh with nervousness, with a last-minute realisation of the enormity of what they’re about to do. Some will laugh heartily, desperately proud and strong, and some will laugh the thin giggle of the completely and utterly deranged as the twisted devil inside them peeks out to do its work.
None of them, however, have ever laughed with the guttural, lewd good humour of the sound I could hear echoing down the tunnel. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, but it was a genuine one.
The conclusion was obvious, but so unexpected that I took a while to look at it from every side. Men who are on their way to kill someone do not laugh like that. At least one of the guards was laughing like that. Therefore they weren’t coming to get me. They didn’t know I was here.
That may sound like thin reasoning to you, but it’s the kind that has kept me alive over the years, and I’ve learnt to trust it. I realised I was still in with a chance, in the short term at least. The guy who’d been shooting at me wasn’t a guard. He couldn’t be, because otherwise he’d have contacted the others and they wouldn’t be laughing like that. So who was he?
He had to be a member of the gang which had stolen Alkland. There was no reason for anyone else to try to kill an intruder. The clever bastards had posted someone outside on the off-chance.
This was both good and bad news, of course. It meant I was on the right track, which was good. It also meant the gang were even more together than I’d thought, which was not so good. But as it meant I wasn’t necessarily going to die in the next two minutes, I decided that on balance it qualified as good news, absolutely top quality news, news out of the top fucking drawer.
I dissuaded myself with difficulty from throwing a street party, and settled for re-evaluating my position. It was, I realised, just as if everything was going according to plan. That wasn’t as good as all that, but it was okay. The gang was a problem I was going to have to deal with anyway when the time came. What I had to do now was just carry on as I’d intended. I knew my intrusion plan was only so good, but I felt so relieved that anything seemed possible, and I started to creep quietly up the pipe. I carefully made my way round the first bend, and saw that there was at least one more to go. A faint glow was coming down the widening tunnel, and the sound of more laughter. I reached the final bend and flowed round it like an oiled shadow or something similarly quiet.
About twenty yards ahead of me was a desk, bulky and bigboned in dark wood. A guard was sitting at it, with his back to me, and another was lolling on a chair on the other side.
There were only two guards. Not only that, but they were paying no attention to the outward end of the tunnel, but drinking out of plastic cups and swapping tales of unlikely sexual prowess.
These were not crack troops, wired up and itching for action. They were just a couple of cops, bored but content with their lot, sipping coffee and cheerfully telling each other fibs which both knew the other wouldn’t believe. The guns on the desk weren’t machine guns, but just a pair of old-fashioned revolvers. Maybe Snedd had been the last outsider to make an intrusion, and after eight years security had become a little lax.
What I couldn’t do was risk the chance of the sound of shots echoing up the tunnel, and so I had something else in mind. I crept forward inch by inch until I was little more than ten yards away, and then stopped. The tunnel was becoming too light, and I didn’t dare go any further forward. I felt in my jacket pocket for the device, steeled myself, and then snapped forward at a sprint.
I got to within a couple of yards before either noticed me, and that was far enough. By the time they were rising to their feet I was vaulting onto the desk, judging my landing so that one foot kicked the guns off onto the floor. I spun round and kicked the lamp very firmly into the wall. It smashed, plunging the tunnel into utter darkness. Then I leapt off the desk and after a few yards hurled the device back in their general direction. It hit the desk and detonated with a barely audible crump, and the two guards immediately started sneezing, coughing and sniffing.
Then I ran like hell. As I sprinted soundlessly up the tunnel I kept a listen out for sounds of pursuit, but they soon faded into the distance. A hacking cough reached me every now and then, but that was all.
The device I threw was a Flu Bomb. Anyone within a two-yard range when it detonates instantaneously goes down with a really dismal dose of flu. Runny nose, headache, chesty cough, aching muscles, the whole works.