Ain't Talkin'

Get-the-girl-down-and-out-of-here, Roche said with his eyes. Somehow Markus understood in that blink of a moment. When it all broke open, Markus had shouldered through the unsuspecting Corp men and was sprinting full-board down a side street, running towards the faint decay-smell of the ocean.

Roche held his wrists out as though he was going to be cuffed, and when Doctor Weaving reached out with his good hand, Roche took him and hurled him bodily over his shoulder. The doctor’s form rag-dolled through the air, his limbs all willy-nilly when he crashed into the Corp soldiers behind.

Roche hoped the throw and the fall would at least hurt the bastard a lick, even cripple or kill him. He didn’t get a chance to check, because a moment after Roche threw the doctor the way he would have thrown a bad bite of fruit, the Ethercorp soldiers opened fire.

A dozen and more automatic rifles lit a deafening wall of noise with gunshots and cordite and burning muzzle-breaks. Body armor collected shots until it could no more and twined out with lightning bolts of twisted, woven wire. His hat fell from his brow and was opened with a half dozen new holes before it hit the asphalt. Roche buckled and gyrated in a conniption fit of being shot. How many bullets ripped into the walker couldn’t be said, because a half-second later, he’d fallen backwards while clips slid to the ground with a clattering.

Flat on his back, blood pooling out from a hundred holes, Roche lay in the middle of Mission Street.

In the atmosphere around, rain continued to piddle down, the constructs moaned strange noises, gunfire continued to ring through the alleys as the walkers and the Resistance boys fought their way tooth and nail to the College to pursue their own agenda, and in the buildings that lined the streets women and other folk who lived in this walled city gasped at the sight of a man being gunned down by a dozen plus guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Had anyone opened his flak jacket they might have thought that Roche’s body resembled finely ground burger.

Eyes wide open to the sky, the walker did not stop breathing, though his lungs were tattered sailcloth. His feet planted, and invisible marionette strings drew the walker upwards by his shoulders in the most unnatural of motions.

“Yes, yes, yes it’s true! Oh, God, my God! There is a deity and he is a man!” Doctor John Weaving thrust his hips up from where he lay on the pavement, shrieking through pink-bloodied teeth at the chaotic sky, eyes wide with a madness that bore down on his mind. “There is a God and I held you for a moment!”

Roche’s eyes flip through the static of television channels and went white and black and transfixed. Soft, pulsing tendrils of there and not-there index fingers pushed outwards from the epicenter of his man. Inching along they pushed the bullets from him. Tick, tick, tick the little brass shells, all bound and rolled into amoebic balls of distorted metal fell to the concrete. The holes in his body let light through, and still the walker drew breath. Brown spittle dribbled from Roche’s chin. In the deepest point of his mind he saw the third and final man, he saw Will Dunham as an old man. He saw the myriad bullet wounds and sharp bits of glass and metal he’d driven into his fingertips and the bottoms of his feet. He saw all the wounds he’d cauterized with a welding torch. He remembered the wooden pencil he’d forced into Willie’s pee-hole while he’d struggled against the wooden chair to which he was bound. He saw and he remembered the perfect look on Will Dunham’s old face when he’d finally pulled the trigger of his Ruger and blown the brains out the side of his head. When it had all been done and he’d avenged a single death he’d realized that he’d become something more, but something darker and more terrible than any of the boys who’d raped and murdered his Mollie Groux had ever been. The holes in the walkers body filled with white, and where his feet were magnet-drawn to the concrete, the polarity suddenly reversed and Roche lifted into the air.

The soldiers of the Ethercorp would have told different stories if they’d lived through the encounter. Some men saw a great hand rise from the earth and lift Roche into the air like a child holding a doll. Some men saw a pair of pristine white wings tear from the skin of the walker’s back and lift him up on high. Some saw the tentacles of a white octopus slither wetly from the bottom of his coat and propel him muscled and wretchedly up. Whatever each man saw, Roche lifted. Someday, when she was much older, the little girl would ask her friend Alex Markus if the man in the hat and the coat had been an angel, because he’d had big, pretty wings when he died. Her friend Alex would think about it before he’d say; Yes, sweetheart. Yes, that man was an angel.

White light filled and spilled and bled from the ruins of his body, belching out in pustules and spraying from burst arteries. His eyes went bloodshot and weeping with white.

“I held you!” The Doctor intoned.

The shade of Roche turned to the doctor on the white limbs that held it up. With a wave of a destroyed hand, the doctor convulsed in pain and twisted a wrung-towel kind of twist. Blood pooled in the corners of his eyes and puddled out of his mouth and anus before he went wholly limp.

White forms of barbed wire spilled from the walker-shade’s mouth and splayed out in a bouquet, one tendril striking a viper-strike at each Corp soldier, through their hearts and temples and bellies and throats where they all burbled and shrieked and bled and collapsed to the concrete.

Glass panes shattered and the dead, ancient forms of decorative palm trees went off like firecrackers, splintering into oblivion. The walker-shade opened it’s mouth so wide that it’s jaw fell below the threshold of it’s throat. The scream broke the world all over again.

Fingers splayed opened and bent back too far and splayed too wide, the flesh of the walker-shade’s hands tore like paper, and more light and white and snaking barbed-wire spilled from the wounds. The thigh wound through-and-through was a second mouth, yawning open and crying with pristine white teeth and a lolling muscular tongue.

The asphalt of the street peeled upwards, the buildings caved in. Whether from the Resistance fulfilling their mission or from the ire of the walker-shade, the City College collapsed burning and imploding with bending shrieks of rebar and cracking concrete formations.

In a dark corner of the city, burrowed against a corner in the masonry, miraculously untouched, Alex Markus held a little girl and prayed to the endless strings of equilibrium that he and she would remain safe, and through the noise of time the shade heard, they were not touched by a speck of anything.

When the street collapsed dozens of feet in a wash of ether light and burning, burning, burning flames and oil and gasoline and barbed wire, the constructs went with it, screaming their odd noises and bleakly grasping out at reality and their own understanding for some kind of purchase. They became nothing and their bodies boiled in the heat of the world’s collapsing on a point.

All the Terra’s touched in one conduit point in New San Fran. When the smoke and the dust settled later, there was a hole in the world the size of a full city-block. There was no walker among the hundreds of dead.