A Perfect Machine(53)

“She’s… gone, William,” Henry said. “She has moved on. She will not be returning.”

“I know – I guess I’ve always known – it’s just that I…” Krebosche stared at the floor. He was beginning to come apart. Felt his insides burning up, like someone had touched a hot flame to them. Like his guts were being stirred with a hot poker.

Henry saw the hurt in Krebosche’s eyes, and understood it. He also understood that he had a knife or a gun – something – pointing at Palermo’s head.

“Palermo said that… that you’d know where she was. And I thought maybe if I could just see her again, let her know that… See, I just want her to know how much…” Krebosche felt his mind unravelling like a spool. His face had gone pale. He staggered back farther.



* * *



Palermo just stood for a moment, uncertain what to do.

At precisely the same time, Henry was suddenly gripped with ferocious pain. It ripped up one side of his body and down the other. He doubled over in agony, went down to his knees, clutching his stomach with one hand, his head with the other. He let out a roar that not only woke the neighbors, but probably everyone on every floor of the building.

Palermo reeled back against the hallway wall, open-mouthed.

Krebosche pointed the gun at Henry. He knew it would be next to useless against him, but on some instinctual level he still ridiculously believed in its stopping power. When Henry had doubled over, he’d revealed Faye standing behind him. Krebosche saw her, trained his weapon on her instead, said in a sleepy voice, as though waking from a dream, “Hey, who’s that?”

Henry roared again. Krebosche panicked and fired.

Faye went down.

People started poking their heads out of their apartments. Once they saw Krebosche with his gun out, however, they vanished again just as quickly. Doors slammed, deadbolts locked.

Milo rushed forward and tried to knock the gun from Krebosche’s hand, but he was holding on to it too tightly. Krebosche felt something brush by him, nearly knock the gun from his hand. He frowned in the direction of the attack, didn’t understand where it had come from, but understood that someone was after his weapon, and that was enough to focus him – it was the only thing standing between death and this roaring monster in front of him.

He held on to the gun even tighter, held it lower, down at his side, to protect it.

That’s when Palermo finally got up the nerve to make a break for it. He took off down the hall as fast as his legs would carry him. Which, given his injury, wasn’t that fast.

Krebosche watched him go for a second, then shot at him. The bullet hit him in the back of the thigh. Palermo staggered forward once, crumpled to the floor. Got back up, kept running, now with a limp. Burst through the door to the stairwell. Gone.

Krebosche then emptied the rest of his gun’s clip into Kyllo, who felt not a single one of the bullets – even those that happened to hit what he’d thought might be his Achilles heels.

All he felt was fire as he found his feet once more.

The fire burned along his synapses, rippled up his spine, crawled over his scalp, tore at his insides.

The only clear thought he had before he started growing – visibly expanding – in height and width was: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THIS?

And then there were no more clear thoughts for quite a while.

Like a snake shedding its skin, big chunks of metal began dropping off, clunking to the floor, tendrils of smoke rising from them as though they were meteors falling to the earth. He staggered, nearly fell, crashed against a wall, righted himself, roared again. It was just blind luck that none of his pieces crushed Faye to death where she lay unconscious. The bullet had hit her upper chest, close to the armpit, and just below the collar bone. Not immediately life-threatening, but she was losing blood.

More pieces of Henry came loose and fell off. His body beneath was smoother, sleeker than the previous incarnation. Every inch looked like brushed metal, much more uniform than before. If he were able to stand upright, he would have been close to ten feet tall, and would have measured about four feet wide across the chest. He had to go down on all fours to keep from crashing through the ceiling; hunching and ducking would no longer cut it.

In the hallway, Krebosche just stood there for a moment longer, staring. Then he dropped his empty gun and walked toward Henry. Tears glistened on his eyelids. His mouth hung open. All pretense of attack or defense was gone.

This new Henry breathed heavily and with difficulty, his esophagus pushing air along pathways still being forged. But his eyes worked well. They saw Krebosche approaching, narrowed, then Henry determined the threat – if any one man could be seen as any kind of threat to him now. He sprung forward on legs like pistons, forearms stacked on top of one another, thrust out ahead of him: two massive columns of steel that crashed through both sides of the doorframe.

Right before Henry’s arms connected with Krebosche’s upper half, Krebosche’s eyes went even wider than before, and he said, “Adelina?” Whether he could actually see her, or whether he just said her name because it was the last thing he wanted to come out of his mouth before his death, Adelina would never know.

She put a hand over her mouth as Henry slammed into Krebosche with his doublestacked arms, against the wall where he’d stood to shoot Palermo as he ran away. Krebosche’s legs were lifted and dragged under him, his legs nearly horizontal with the speed of the attack. There was a sickening crunch when his top half hit the wall. His torso crumpled under the pressure. Blood splashed upward in a gout, covering his neck and most of his face.