Vicious Circle Read online

  As I climbed step by step up toward the top level, the crazies ran around the gallery to meet me. That was good insofar as it took them away from the man they’d been about to kill, but bad because I still couldn’t see any sign of Juliet and I honestly didn’t think they were running to get my autograph. I got to the top of the escalator just as they rounded the last corner and came running toward me in a solid wall. I tried to swallow, but found that my mouth was dry. This was the moment of truth, and I normally prefer elegant prevarications. I cast one last forlorn glance around the gallery in the hope that my curvaceous, demonic cavalry might appear in the nick of time: no such luck. With a muttered curse, I slipped my whistle back into my inside pocket, out of harm’s way, clinched my fists, and braced for impact.

  The first of the rioters to reach me was a woman, dressed for the office in a pastel-colored two-piece and sensible heels. The only thing that spoiled the ensemble effect was the claw hammer she was waving over her head. I jumped awkwardly back out of its way as it came down. Then, since she followed through with her entire body, bending from the hip to get more of her weight behind the blow, I was able to hit her on the back of the head with a roundhouse punch. She went down heavily, the hammer skidding away across the tiles. I didn’t feel particularly good about it, but this was no time for chivalry.

  In fact it was probably a time for running away, but I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of being run down from behind and trampled. As two burly men lunged for me at the same time, I ducked and crouched low to the ground, and their momentum carried one of them on past me, the other over my head in a graceless somersault.

  That was it for tactics. A great many arms were clutching at me all at once, a great many fists pummeling at my shoulders and the back of my neck. I was hauled to my feet, then knocked sprawling again as the crazies got in each other’s way in their eagerness to claim a piece of me.

  At that moment the shop window behind them, one of the few that was still intact, exploded outward in a rapidly expanding flower of glass splinters that somehow, miraculously, gave birth to Juliet. She dived through the window headfirst, but rolled in the air and landed on her feet with a barely perceptible flexing of the knees. Then, having made her entrance and her point she strode forward with perfect poise, glass splinters pouring off her like water.

  The crazies had turned at the sound, their assault on me slackening for a moment as they took in what was happening—and then for another moment, as they stared at Juliet and came to terms with her scarily perfect beauty.

  Then the nearest guy swung a metal bar at her head. It wasn’t much of a bar; it looked as though it had been torn from a clothes rail of some kind, and it was probably hollow, so the chances are that it wouldn’t have done that much harm to Juliet in any case. But we never got the chance to find out: she ducked gracefully around it, took the guy’s arm at wrist and elbow, and flung him backward over her shoulder through the window she’d just smashed. Another man did manage to land a blow, with his bare fist, on the point of her jaw. She took it without comment and kicked him in the stomach, making him fold with an unpleasantly liquescent gurgle.

  Without breaking stride she walked into the midst of the rioters, a cat among seriously unbalanced pigeons. They closed around her, hands and weapons raised, which only went to prove that they hadn’t really been watching when she came through the plate-glass window. It takes a lot to hurt Juliet, and then a lot more on top of that to slow her down. There were sounds of organic impact, truncated gasps and grunts, then the dull thunder of collapsing bodies as people fell like wheat around her.

  There was a hypnotic fascination to it that made it hard to look away. But since the heat was off me, I reckoned I’d better put my time to some productive use. Turning my back on the scene of rapidly diminishing mayhem, I sprinted along the gallery to the section of railing that had been turned into an impromptu gallows. The man they’d been looking to hang was lying on his stomach on the floor, his hands and feet tied tightly and then an additional length of rope lashed between them so that his legs were bent back, his feet sticking up into the air. I used the loup-garou’s knife to cut this last rope, but the blade was too sharp for me to risk using it close to his wrists and ankles. I rolled him over on his back and hooked the gag away from his mouth. He was pale and sweating, his dark hair lank and his eyes exopthalmically huge. The fact that he was wearing a tie struck me as a piquant little grotesquerie: who goes to a riot wearing a tie?

  “The hostages,” I said. “Where are they?”

  He spat in my face. “You fucking piece of shit,” he screamed. “Satan will ream your throat out, you degenerate bastard motherfucker! He’ll shove his fist up your—”

  A little of that kind of thing goes a long way. I stuffed the gag back in his mouth and wiped away the spittle while he glared and grunted at me. “Not on a first date, pal,” I murmured.

  Hostage, hostage, who’s got the hostage? I looked around for inspiration. The news footage had been shot from the front of the building, out in the street, and that was where I’d caught sight of Susan Book’s face peering out through the smashed window. I tried to orientate myself, remembering which way I’d come in and which way the main concourse underneath me ran. It seemed that the front ought to be over to my left, where foot-high red capitals shouted T.K.Maxx to the world.

  “Where now?” said Juliet, appearing silently and alarmingly at my elbow.

  I got to my feet and pointed. She walked across the gallery without a sound and entered the store. I shot a single glance back to the scene of the earlier engagement: bodies littered the ground, and none of them were standing.

  I ran to catch up with her. “Did you kill anyone?” I demanded.

  “No. There’s one who could die from her wounds—one of her comrades slashed her neck and shoulder with a knife, trying to get through to me. The rest will live.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said dryly. “I was thinking you’d just turn up the heat under their libidos and melt their brains into slush. This was a little more . . . direct than I expected.”

  “I tried,” Juliet snapped. “They should have been incapable of any aggression as soon as they saw me. They should have been incapable of anything except involuntary orgasm.”

  “Oh. So what went wrong?”

  “Perhaps I’m losing my touch.”

  It wasn’t that. Even without looking at her, I could feel her sexuality washing over me like a warm, caressing tide. And I knew from terrifying experience how strong the undertow was in those waters. But I think we both knew the answer: The demonic miasma was all around us now, and it had been ever since we got up onto this top level. These poor sods were possessed.

  Without having to discuss tactics we both shut up at this point. We were walking through the shop, which was eerily silent apart from the mournful echoes of police bullhorns from the street outside. Our own footsteps were very effectively muffled by the clothes spilled from the racks and strewn on the ground. The rails and shelf units were none of them higher than about four feet off the ground, so we had a good view of the big open-plan area we’d moved into, but up ahead of us the store curved around in an L-shape, which we couldn’t see until we got to the end of the aisle. We weren’t trying for stealth, exactly—Juliet didn’t have much use for stealth—but we didn’t want the sound of our conversation to drown out any warning we might get of a possible ambush.

  Rounding the corner, we found ourselves right in the thick of the party. The wall ahead of us now was the front face of the shopping center—windows from floor to ceiling, with the night pouring in through that ragged hole in the center pane that I’d seen from the other side in the news broadcast. To either side of it, maybe three or four men knelt low or flattened themselves against the wall, peering out at the cordon in the street below as if they’d never heard of police snipers. Farther away from us still there was a circular display area ringed with floor-level mirrors, which seemed to have been intended for trying on shoes. In this cramped amphitheater, two more men, one armed with
a baseball bat, kept watch over a small, terrified huddle of presumably innocent shoppers. That was all—and it looked like good odds except that one of the men at the window had a rifle. Long-haired and thickly bearded, he looked, as he swung back the bolt and put the first bullet into the chamber, like someone who’d accidentally wandered off from the set of Deliverance and found himself in an episode of Eastenders.

  All heads turned toward us, and I glimpsed Susan Book in among the hostages. I also saw a man lying full-length on the ground, a bloody hole where his face ought to have been. Susan was sitting right next to this poor bastard. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she opened her mouth as if to speak.

  I spoke first. “Hey, guys,” I said. “Saw you on the nine o’clock news. Where do we sign up?”

  We were walking forward all this time, but now the man with the rifle swung it around to cover us. “You don’t,” he snapped, coldly. “You get with those dumb fucks over there, and you shut up.”

  We kept on coming. “What kind of weapon is that?” Juliet murmured to me under her breath.

  “Sports rifle,” I growled back, sounding a lot more definite about it than I actually was. “Semiautomatic—which means one bullet at a time.” The truth is, I know sod all about weapons, despite having once lived for a year with a sweet girl who subscribed to Arms and Ammo; but this thing was all dark red wood and elegant curves. No gun that dolls itself up as pretty as that ever gets asked out to an actual battle. Plus it had a dinky little magazine about the size of a mobile phone. If it was ever set on auto, it would run out of bullets in the time it takes to scream, “Die, mother—.” On the other hand, and assuming the guy had a steady hand, that would be plenty long enough to see me and Juliet thoroughly ventilated. She’d probably survive that, unless the bullets were silver: the odds on me were a little longer.

  Fortunately, these guys weren’t all singing from the same hymn book. The other three men, wielding various makeshift clubs and cudgels, chose that moment to charge us, helpfully blindsiding their friend. Juliet accelerated so that they’d reach her first, taking out two of them with strikes that I’d be happy to call surgical because most surgery leaves you unable to walk for a while and maybe a body part or so short.

  The third man I managed to drop with a flying tackle, which was probably the best result he could hope for under the circumstances. We went down together, but with me on top, and though he swiped at me with the jagged metal shard he was using as a knife, my elbow in his face threw off his aim and slammed his head hard against the floor. He was still moving, though, and a lucky slash with that thing would leave me bleeding out on the floor, so I brought my knee up between his legs, introducing him to the concept of planned parenthood with immediate and devastating effect. Leaving him curled around his pain, I scrambled to my feet just as the rifle went off.

  It wasn’t aimed at me, of course. These guys might be crazy, but it would be a special kind of crazy who pointed the gun somewhere else when Juliet was bearing down on him with her killing face on. The back of her jacket opened up at chest height as the bullet tore through, and a fine red spray showered my face and upper body.

  The rifle was semiauto: it had to be, because the man got a second shot off even as Juliet kicked him backward through the window. He fell with a scream that sounded more enraged than afraid, and that was all he got in the way of famous last words. I heard the dull thump as he hit the street.

  “Juliet!” I shouted. “For fuck’s sake, they’re possessed. There’s something riding them!”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. She turned, a little bent over, her movements too slow, just as the two guys who’d been guarding the hostages charged her from the side.

  One of them had a knife, and he slashed at her stomach. The other swung his baseball bat and hit her full in the face. She reeled with the blow, then stabbed out with her left hand, putting her thumb and middle finger through the second man’s eyes.

  That left the knife man, and as he brought his hand back for a second thrust I finally, belatedly, forced myself to move. I went directly for his knife hand, grabbing hold of it in both of mine and twisting it up behind his back with brutal, desperate force. He dropped the knife, and Juliet, glancing over her shoulder and seeming to notice him for the first time, swept her fist up in an uppercut that almost took his head off his shoulders. He slithered to the ground between us, already unconscious.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her, my chest heaving both with the effort to catch a breath and with the nausea that was beginning to hit as the adrenaline turned sour in my stomach.

  “I’m fine,” she muttered, but there was a breathy gurgle behind the words that scared the shit out of me. Her shoulders were bowed: she was inspecting the bloody mess in the center of her shirt front, and her feet shifted a little as if she was having a hard time keeping her balance.

  I jumped to a conclusion. A whole generation of entrepreneurs were making their first fortunes by trading on the fears that the living felt for the living dead: silver-coated ammunition was just one of the fads that had come in as a result. “Juliet, was the bullet—?”

  I could only just hear her answer. “Silvered. Yes. But it only went through my lung. I think I can . . . deal . . . with the . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t fall. All her attention was turned inward, and wherever she was right then I knew she wasn’t going to be aware of her surroundings for a while. From the street outside came shouted orders and the wail of a single siren. The police weren’t going to wait much longer before storming the place: not with bodies flying out of the windows.

  I turned to look over at the hostages. Susan Book was already heading toward me, but the others were all still in a huddle against the base of the wall, some of the kids sobbing and keening, nobody daring to move. I opened my mouth to say something—probably something along the lines of “you’re safe now.” Susan’s hand lashed out, and as I reflexively parried, something red shot from her fingers to bounce off my chest and hit the floor at my feet. I didn’t even see her other hand come up: her nails raked my cheek, savagely deep, and I staggered back in numb surprise. She followed up, punching and clawing at me as she screamed obscenities into my face. The same obscenities I’d heard from the almost-hanged man outside, mostly, focusing on my sexual relationship with my parents and the cocks I’d suck in hell. It was like some kind of virus.

  I fended Susan off, using my height and reach to block her wild, uncoordinated attack. I didn’t want to hurt her, though, so I was backing away across the floor, calling out her name as I gave ground in an effort to wake her out of whatever trance she was in. Then a shelf unit bumped against my back and I had to stop, which meant that she was finally able to close with me: out of options, I knocked aside her clutching hands and punched her hard on the point of the jaw. She went over backward, and there was an alarming crack as the back of her head hit the tiles.

  It was followed a moment later by the crump of a detonation, and another window blew out as something hard and metallic shot through it to arc end over end through the air, trailing a plume of feathery smoke. As it landed and bounced, another and then another window burst, and the screams of the hostages drowned out all other sounds—even the hiss of the tear gas grenades releasing their indiscriminate loads.

  I staggered back to where Juliet had been standing, almost slipping as my foot came down on something smooth and hard. I glanced down: it was a Victorinox Swiss army penknife, multifunctional blades extended at both ends. Susan’s weapon: I’d been within an inch of being corkscrewed to death.

  Juliet was kneeling over the body of one of the fallen rioters, her hand on his chest. I thought she was checking him for a pulse, but then I realized that she was searching his pockets. I grabbed hold of her arm and her head snapped up: her dark eyes locked on mine. My eyes were starting to water as filaments of CS gas drifted across the store.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I shouted over the shrill screams. “This is to soften up the opposition. Any moment now they’re g
onna storm the place.”

  Juliet stood, with some difficulty. “I’ll have to lean on you,” she rasped, and she almost fell into my arms as I led her back the way we’d come. The hostages would be okay, I told myself. They’d suffer from the effects of the gas, but the cops would be all over the place within the next couple of minutes so the riot was over. There was nothing we could do for them now that the paramedics couldn’t do a whole lot better.

  All the same, I felt more hollow than heroic as I staggered back down the stalled escalators, Juliet leaning heavily against my chest, the harsh gurgle of her breath in my ears. She’d been right: something was loose in here, and it had our number, turning victims into aggressors with a magical wave of its invisible hands, wrapped around and around us like some kind of spiritual smallpox blanket, infecting where it touched.