Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(67)
“Point taken.”
True to his word we make a sharp left onto another avenue and sure enough there’s an open door in a boxy, five story building on the left hand side.
“Now would be a good time,” he says.
I start to duck to my left, hoping I can push through the three warriors there when searing pain rips through my chest. Instead of breaking through them, I stumble into them. Their surprise is focused on me for only a moment. And then the screaming starts.
The warriors run past me, macuahuitls raised high. I risk a glance behind me as I stagger through the door. The street has reared up in giant tentacles, paving stones rippling along the surface like snakeskin, to grab at the warriors. It twists, constricting tight around one of them. After a loud, wet crunch, the man goes limp and is tossed away like a piece of trash.
I don’t bother to see what else it’s going to do and run inside. From all the yelling the warriors have more pressing things to worry about than me. The tightness in my chest begins to subside. I take a set of stone stairs up.
The nearby buildings are shorter than this one, so unless Alex’s information is out of date I should be able to cut across the tops of the other buildings. I saw the palace not too far off. I still need to get there. I just don’t want to do it with an honor guard.
I figure out that this is an apartment building when I hit the second floor and see people poking their heads out of rough-hewn, wooden doors. Like people everywhere they want nothing to do with all the noise and hubbub and quickly run back inside.
Downstairs I can hear some of the warriors breaking off from the fight with the street and heading inside. I take the steps to the third floor two at a time, drawing the Browning once I clear the next landing.
I see one of the warriors poke his head around the corner and I take a shot, not expecting it to actually do anything to him. But the round catches him just under his left eye, blowing out the back of his skull, spraying bone and brain, but surprisingly very little blood, across the wall behind him. The others don’t seem quite so eager to follow.
The roof is through a locked wooden door, “locked” in this case meaning a hemp twine wrapped around a couple of pegs to hold the door in place. It snaps with a little force and I’m on a wide terrace overlooking the block around me.
And it’s then that I realize I’ve made a huge mistake. Sure, this building’s higher than the others but the space between them is too wide. I’ll never make that jump.
The remaining warriors, three now, pour through the doorway. I take one down with the Browning, blowing out a chunk of his skull that skitters across the roof while the other two try to flank me.
One of them steps in fast, swinging his macuahuitl. The blow glances off my left shoulder, shredding my sleeve and skidding harmlessly down the jade.
He feints, bringing his weapon up and over, catching me on my right forearm, slicing the skin down to the bone and knocking the Browning from my hand.
I grit my teeth against the pain, duck low under his backswing. I hook his legs with my left arm, tackling him to the ground. I do a graceless roll that gets me near the Browning as he pulls himself off the ground. I grab the gun, swing around and put a bullet through his guts. It makes him pause, so he doesn’t cleave my skull open, but he’s still moving. I fix that with a bullet through his head.
That leaves one more. I find out where he is when he gets his arm around my throat from behind and drags me across the roof toward the edge. I fire blindly, hoping to catch him over my shoulder, but the angle’s off. All it does is leave me deaf with hot brass bouncing off my face.
I need to end this fast. I bring my legs up and bend forward, flipping him over. It breaks his hold, but now he’s on top of me and I’ve lost the Browning. The gun skitters across the roof like a frightened spider.
This is not much of an improvement. The warrior tries to get his hold back, but we’ve rolled into a tangle of flailing limbs. I ram my knee hard into his nuts and he howls, doubling over to clutch at his crotch. You’d think the dead wouldn’t feel any pain. I slam my head into his nose and there’s a crunch of bone and more screaming.
I roll off of him and get to my feet. Blood is pouring from the gash on my right arm, dripping off my fingers. He’s not sure if he needs to hold on to his face or his crotch, so I complicate the decision and kick him in the teeth.
He screams some more so I kick him until he stops moving and his face is a pulpy mess of bloody meat. Then I get down with him and punch his face with my jade left hand until there’s nothing recognizable left.
“You have anger management issues,” says a voice behind me that I don’t recognize. I swing around, ready for another fight and freeze.
The man in front of me is tall, gaunt. Skin so tight I can see bones and organs pressing from the inside as if they’re struggling to break through. The flesh on his skull is almost superfluous, paper thin and shot through with veins of green. I can see the hinge of his jaw, teeth pressing against emaciated lips. The dozen eyeballs strung around his neck look crazily in all directions before finally focusing on me.
“Mictlantecuhtli.”
“Nice to finally meet you in the flesh, Eric,” he says. “Such as it is.”
“You’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” I say. Considering he was a rock at the time that’s not really surprising. As I become more like him he’s becoming more like me.