The mouth also had teeth, a grate of metal bars set a meter back from the opening. They kept Phong from escaping underground, and had forced him to fall back on his one high card: an antique firearm that shot bullets of indeterminate caliber. Lubin trumped him twice over on that score; he carried a Schubert active-denial microwave pistol that could heat flesh to 60°C, and a Heckler & Koch rapid-fire PDW that was currently loaded with mitigated conotoxins. Unfortunately there was way too much earth and concrete for the microwaves to penetrate from Lubin’s present position, and getting a clear shot with the H&K would involve exposing himself on the slimy slope of the spillway.
It shouldn’t have mattered. Under normal circumstances it would still be the furthest thing from an even match, even granting Lubin’s rusty marksmanship after five years. Even though Phong’s refuge was in shadow, and the sun stabbed directly into Lubin’s eyes whenever he peeked around the corner. Those all made the shot trickier, no question. Still. Lubin was a professional.
No, what really skewed the odds was the fact that Phong seemed to have a thousand bodyguards, and they were all attacking Lubin at once.
He’d scarcely noticed them on approach: a cloud of midges hovering over a patch of resistant greenery on the embankment. They’d always been completely harmless in Lubin’s experience. He’d dispersed them with a wave of his hand as he passed through, his attention on the concrete barrier that cut the riverbank just ahead...and in the next instant they’d attacked, a swarm of mosquito-sized insects with piranha-sized attitudes.
They bit, and they distracted, and they broke both his concentration and his stealth. Phong, stealing a drink from the sewer, had seen him coming and squeezed off a near miss before ducking back under cover. He’d almost escaped entirely, but Lubin had plunged through the insectile onslaught to the edge of the drainage apron, just in time to trap his quarry back against the tunnel.
“I’m here to get you to a hospital!” he called. “You’ve been exposed to—”
“Fuck you!” Phong shouted back.
A squad of dive-bombing insects attacked Lubin’s hand, almost in formation; the little bastards had followed him. He slapped down hard. He missed his attackers but welcomed the sting of the impact. He unrolled the gloves from the wrists of his isolation skin and slipped them on, juggling the Schubert, then reached over his shoulder for the hood.
The velcro tab on the back of his collar was empty. His hood was probably hanging off some low-lying branch in the woods behind him.
And he was going up against someone who’d been exposed to Seppuku for two full days. Lubin allowed himself a muttered, “Shit.”
“I don’t want to hurt you!” he tried again. Which wasn’t exactly true, and getting less so. The desire to kill something was certainly circling around his self-control. More insects attacked; he crushed them between hand and forearm, and reached to wipe the smashed body parts off against the river bank. He paused, briefly distracted: it was hard to be certain, but those crushed bodies seemed to have too many legs.
He wiped them off and focused on the immediate task. “You’re coming with me,” he called, his voice raised but level. “That’s not up for discussion.” Insects have—right. Six legs. He waved off another assault; a line of pinpricks lit up the back of his neck. “The only issue is whether you come now or later.”
“Later, stumpfuck! I know whose side you on!”
“We can also discuss whether I’ll be taking you to a hospital or a crematorium,” Lubin muttered.
A squadron targeted his face. He slapped his forehead, hard. His hand came away with three tiny carcasses flattened against the palm. Each had eight legs.
What has eight legs? Spiders? Flying spiders?
Hunting in packs?
He wiped his palm against a patch of convenient vines matting the embankment. The vines squirmed at his touch.
He pulled his hand back instinctively, shocked. What the—
Tweaked, obviously. Or some kind of accidental hybrid. The foliage clenched and relaxed in peristaltic waves.
Focus. Keep on track.
More dive-bombers. Not quite so many this time. Maybe he’d swatted most of the swarm already. He felt as if he’d swatted a hundred swarms.
A scrabbling, from beyond the barrier.
Lubin peeked around the abutment. Phong was making a break for it, scrambling along a dry strip of concrete edging the far side of the spillway. Startling graffiti decorated the wall behind him, a stylized female face with white featureless eyes and a zigzag moniker: MM.
Phong saw him, fired three wild rounds. Lubin didn’t even bother to duck; his microwave was already set on wide beam, too diffuse for a quick kill but easily strong enough to reheat Phong’s last meal along with most of the gastrointestinal tract that was holding it. Phong doubled over, retching, to land on the thin skin of wastewater and the frictionless slime beneath it. He slid diagonally down the spillway, out of control. Lubin put one foot on a convenient dry patch and leaned out to catch him as he passed.
The Airborne Spider Brigade chose that exact moment for its last hurrah.
Suddenly Lubin’s face and neck were wrapped in stinging nettles. Overextended, he struggled for balance. Phong sailed past; one flailing leg careened against Lubin’s ankle. Lubin went over like a pile of very angry bricks.
They slid off the spillway into freefall.
It wasn’t a long drop, but it was a hard landing. The Merrimack was a mere shadow of its former self; they landed not in water but on a broken mosaic of shale and cracked mud, barely moistened by the outfall. Lubin got some slight satisfaction from the fact that Phong landed underneath him.
Phong threw up again on impact.
Lubin rolled away and stood, wiping vomit from his face. Shards of shale snapped and slipped beneath his feet. His face and neck and hands itched maddeningly. (At least he seemed to have finally shaken the kamikaze arthropods.) His right forearm was skinned and oozing, the supposedly-unbreachable isolation membrane ripped from palm to elbow. A knife-edged splinter of stone, the size of his thumb, lay embedded in the heel of his hand. He pulled it free. The jolt that shot up his forearm felt almost electrical. Blood welled from the gash. Mopping at the gore revealed clumped particles of fatty tissue, like clusters of ivory pinheads, deep in the breach.
The microwave pistol lay on the scree a few meters away. He retrieved it, wincing.
Phong still lay on his back, winded, bruised, his left leg twisted at an angle impossible to reconcile with the premise of an intact tibia. His skin reddened as Lubin watched, small blisters rising on his face in the wake of the microwave burst. Phong was in bad shape.
“Not bad enough,” Lubin remarked, looking down at him.
Phong looked up through glazed eyes and muttered something like Wha...
You were not worth the trouble, Lubin thought. There was no excuse for me to even break a sweat over the likes of you. You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. How dare you get so lucky. How dare you piss me off like this.