The cell had no furniture. The only amenities were a hummock of loose straw in one corner, a galvanized steel bucket in the corner opposite. Wyungare shook his head. Obviously Bloat wasn’t expecting many guests.
But the environment didn’t matter. It was time to work.
He would make the formal acquaintance of his fellow prisoner later. Then he stopped. He heard the woman weeping softly and his heart went out to her. It didn’t take supernormal powers to pick up her feelings. The dark terrified her. So did the loss of power that came with imprisonment. Wyungare took a deep breath and let his soul range out.
The black cat yowled low in his throat just a short distance away. He had followed Wyungare and Kafka first up, then down to the cell block. Wyungare pushed just a little, made a suggestion.
The cat purred and ambled up to the barred door of the woman’s cell. He flowed between the bars almost as fluidly as quicksilver.
There was silence for a few seconds. Then, “Kitty?” said the woman. Wyungare felt the sense of arms wrapping tightly around the cat, hot tears spotting his warm fur. Wyungare offered thanks to the mirragen’s spirit.
Then he sat cross-legged on the stone, conscious of the fissures of the irregular surface imprinting in his flesh. He took a deep breath, another, began deliberately to control his respiration. Wyungare let the rhythm of his breathing fall into synch with the cycles of his body. One breath, four beats of his heart, then six beats. He slapped the stone with the heels of his hands. If he had no drum, he could make one.
And he descended into the lower world.
Wyungare found himself in something that looked like swampland. Good, that was what he had hoped for.
In the distance, he heard the mournful cries of a harmonica. He walked toward the sounds.
He had to circle the huge complex trunks of cypress. Most of the sun was shut out by the foliage canopy. The water now lay on either side of him, brackish and green with moss.
Finally, as the music grew louder — it was a French ballad, he finally decided — Wyungare rounded a clump of scrub oak and found a young boy, perhaps eight or ten, sitting on a fallen log and playing his juice harp.
The boy stopped when he saw Wyungare.
“You can keep on if you like,” said the Aborigine.
“I don’t mean to bother you, sir,” said the boy shyly. His hair and eyes both were the black of starless nights.
“It’s no bother,” said Wyungare. “Hello, Jack.”
“Do I know you, sir?”
Wyungare nodded. “We’ll take a walk, young man. We need to talk. I have a favor to ask of you.”
Jack looked at him curiously, but got up from the log.
By the time he neared the Brooklyn Bridge, Tom knew what he had to do. Hartmann was curled up on top of the shell, his bloody hand pressed to his chest, moaning. “Hospital… my hand…”
“I can’t,” Tom said. “They’d be on you in no time. The Hunt’s only five blocks behind me. I’ve been doubling back, dodging through alleys and over rooftops, trying to lose them, but they’ve got the scent, I can’t shake them.”
Thunder pealed behind them. The storm went before the Huntsman, it seemed.
“… hurts… “ Hartmann whispered.
“I’m sorry. Hang on a little longer.”
There was no reply. Tom glanced up at his overhead screen. The senator’s eyes had closed. He started to slide down the curve of the shell. Tom caught him with his teke, shoved him back up top. Hartmann whimpered in pain.
The great stone arches of Brooklyn Bridge loomed ahead of him. Tom slowed, hovered, looked around. There wasn’t much to work with, except…
“This is going to make me real fucking popular with the natives,” Tom muttered. But he didn’t see that he had a whole lot of choice. He summoned all his concentration.
A half-dozen cars parked along the bridge approach floated into the air, yanked upward by his teke. One slipped from his mind’s grasp. The windshield shattered as it hit the ground. “Fuck,” Tom said. The sound of the Huntsman’s horn came echoing through the night, and he heard the baying of hounds. There was no time.
He thought of a net.
He held it high in the air, above the street lamps, and began scooping parked cars into it, fast as he could. Three, five, ten, twelve, he grabbed them with his teke, shoveled them up into the net, where they slammed together. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty…
A dozen hounds came howling around a corner, a block away.
Tom fled, dragging his net behind the shell. Metal screeched, glass broke, and sparks shot off concrete as the jumble of cars bounced along in his wake.
The Hunt came howling after him.
He pushed harder. The shell picked up speed. He started gaining on his pursuers. The baying grew more frantic.
At the approach to the bridge, the Turtle stopped, hovered, and began to slam the shattered cars into place.
By the time the hounds reached him, the wall was there: a solid barrier of twisted metal, not as high as the one in his junkyard, but high enough to shut off the roadway.
A yellow cab, coming on too fast and braking too late, fishtailed and sideswiped the barrier. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE,” Tom roared down at him. The cabbie must have seen the hellhounds in his rearview mirror. He smoked his tires backing up, then lit out of there. One of the hounds bounded right over the taxi, staving in the hood as it bounced off.
Tom flew back over his barrier, onto the bridge.
More traffic was coming from Manhattan. “TURN AROUND,” the Turtle told them. “YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HERE.” A big limo saw the wall, slowed, stopped. “MOVE IT,” Tom thundered down. A taxi swerved around in a sudden U-turn. The limo began to back up. It got rear-ended by a Mercedes. “OUT OF HERE!”
If the drivers had any doubts, the sight of the first hound coming over the cars made up their minds.
The wall of wrecks barely slowed them. They were climbing it in the blink of an eye, leaping down the far side, baying up at the shell. The Mercedes reversed, backed, fled. The limo followed. Other traffic was turning back halfway over the span.
More hounds were bounding onto the bridge now. Behind came the Hunt. The Huntsman sounded his horn again, and took the barrier in full gallop. The great black stallion leapt clean over it, with a good five feet to spare. The other riders followed.
“OKAY, YOU CAN JUMP,” Tom said. “BIG FUCKING DEAL.”
He pushed higher, taunting them, way up in the air out of their reach, watching his cameras until the mob came into view.
Tom zoomed in on the faces. Cops, streetwalkers, bums, bikers, old women who’d taken their poodles out for a walk and gotten caught up in the blood lust as the hunt went by. People, that’s all. They had no part in this.
He thought of a portcullis. Made it a gate. Wide, solid, heavy, strong as iron. He pictured it in his mind’s eye. Then he brought it down. The metal barrier jumped with the impact. Cars crunched. A biker tried to ride his Harley over the wrecked cars, hit the invisible wall, and went flying. The mob found they could go no farther. They groped at nothingness, hit it, clawed at it.
“NO WAY PAST,” he told them. Nobody listened. This bunch wasn’t going to give up and go home. Lightning fingered the cables of the bridge like a demon harpist. Close, too close. Thunder swept over the shell. Beyond the wall, the mob was howling louder than the hellhounds.
He had to keep the wall in place, Tom thought wildly. He moved the shell out over the span. “The wall,” he muttered to himself, a frantic mantra. “The wall, wall.” The microphone caught his plea, sent it booming out into the storm. He held the wall firmly in his mind even as he left it behind.