"How long will this take?" Sui Ma asked with more than detached interest.
"It depends," Cunningham said. "The corpse was rather… fresh
… so that should cut down on the time it takes him to assimilate the memories."
It took a few moments, but then Deadhead finally began to groan and squirm. "Noooo!" he cried, twisting as if to avoid a fatal blow.
Cunningham leaned forward eagerly. "Who killed you?" he asked.
"Red hair," Deadhead panted in his trance. "Smiling face. The boy likes it, he does." He squirmed again and let out a long, keening cry.
"Is he alone? Is there another in the room?" Deadhead whipped his head back and forth. "Another. Too far back. Blurry. Can't see who-"
Cunningham cursed to himself. The joker who'd guarded Kien's desk had been terribly myopic. "What about Kien? Is he in the room?"
"At his desk."
"What's he doing?"
"He is afraid. He opens the box, though he doesn't want to. He is saying, `Why are you doing this to me? I don't want to. Don't make me do this.' He puts his face down in the box-"
Cunningham and Sui Ma looked at each other. "Mind control," Cunningham said, and Sui Ma nodded. "Someone-the redhead-made him inhale enough rapture to kill a whole platoon of r-heads."
"Redhead," Sui Ma said. "Mind control."
"Dr. Tachyon," they said together.
Sui Ma frowned, shaking her head. "I don't get it," she said. She looked critically at Deadhead, who was panting like a dog and tossing and jerking spasmodically on the floor, caught up in the aftereffects of brain-eating. "Why would Tachyon make Kien kill himself?"
"Maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was some other redheaded mind-control artist." Cunningham shrugged. "Deadhead can draw a picture of our man when he comes out of it." He looked at Sui Ma. "You can see, anyway, that I was telling the truth. I didn't have anything to do with your brother's death."
Sui Ma again looked into the distance. "That may be true," she admitted, "but since when did truth have anything to do with deciding upon the proper course of action?" She looked at Cunningham. "My brother is dead and I shall be the new supreme power in the Shadow Fist Society. I do not think that you'd care to work for me, Fadeout, and frankly I don't think that I would trust you."
"So I'm still dead," he said with as much flippancy as he could muster.
"Let us say that the firm is eliminating your position," Sui Ma said with a smile.
"Okay," he said. "In that case, fuck it."
He faded to total invisibility. He didn't know the layout of Sui Ma's room as well as he did Kien's, but he'd done his best to memorize it in the last few minutes. He hit the ground, rolled, and came up dodging as he heard Sui Ma shout and her guards blunder around the room. There was a short burst of gunfire, an anguished scream, and then Sui Ma shouted, "Use your swords, idiots, and guard the door!"
He moved 'toward the sound of her voice, and stumbled over what sounded like a moaning Deadhead. He landed silently, rolled, stood, and bumped into someone else. His hand slashed out and sunk into firm, muscular flesh, and he felt sudden, searing pain as a sharp blade chopped down into his upper thigh. He stifled a scream, and struck up at where he judged the sword wielder's wrist would be.
He struck flesh again, and pulled away. The blade came with him, still lodged in his thigh. He set his teeth together and yanked the sword from his leg, fading it out. Clasping both hands around the hilt, he swung in a great figure eight, feeling it slice through meat like a hot knife through butter.
Sui Ma shouted again at her guards, and that was a mistake because now he knew where she was. He started to circle toward her, holding the invisible sword out before him like a blind man might hold out his cane, and to the confusion and panic running through the room something new was suddenly added.
There were deep, hoarse shouts in new voices, and the sound of gunfire blasted deafeningly through the chamber. Cunningham risked fading in his eyes for a moment and had to stifle a cry of relief as he saw that the cavalry had arrived in the form of a Werewolf squadron led by Warlock himself.
There were more than a dozen Wolves wearing leathers and delicately featured Michael Jackson masks, and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and combat shotguns. One of them had a portable boom box, and the song "I'm Bad" was blasting through the chamber louder than the reports of their weapons.
Sui Ma was standing before her throne, more anger than fear on her face, braced by two of her guards, who were dropping their swords and fumbling for the guns holstered at their sides. Cunningham gauged the distance between them and slipped back into total invisibility. He lunged forward silently, swinging his razor-sharp blade.
He felt something warm and sticky splatter on his face and faded in his eyes, knowing that the mask of blood he was now carrying would give him away anyway.
One of the guards was down, but the other was turning toward him, gun up and ready. Cunningham tensed to dodge, but before the Asian could fire, a shotgun blast from the hands of a Werewolf cut him down. He fell forward, thudding down the steps of the dais, and Sui Ma was standing unprotected and alone before her throne.
She looked at Cunningham. "You seem to have won for now," she said, almost graciously.
He nedded. "You were right," he said. " I could never work for you. And I don't think that you could ever work for me."
He thrust the blade up and into her stomach, and she gasped, collapsing backward onto her chair. She looked at him for what seemed a long time before her eyes glazed over. Cunningham sighed and turned away. He'd killed before, but it made him feel funny to kill a woman like that. He couldn't totally console himself with the thought that she'd been prepared to do the -same for him.
In the rest of the chamber the Werewolves were wrapping up the last few of their surprised, outnumbered foes. Warlock stepped over Deadhead, cowering on the floor, and came up to join Cunningham at the top of the dais.
"Got here as soon as we could," he said, "after one of the brothers spotted you being hustled out of that laundromat. Finally figured, what the hell, bust in and-"
He stopped and stared at Cunningham. Cunningham supposed that he was quite a sight. His leg was throbbing like hell. The sword cut he'd taken on the thigh was bleeding like a goddamn river, and the blood of the guard he'd killed was splattered all over his face. Warlock was staring at his face. From the look in his eyes, peering through his Michael Jackson mask, he looked like he'd seen a ghost. The blood, Cunningham realized, must make him look like he'd taken a bad head wound.
"Don't worry"-he laughed-"I'm all right. This isn't mine." He wiped at the blood, smearing it but managing to remove some of it from his features.
Warlock seemed to catch himself. "Right," he said. "Glad you're okay. But we'd better move it before more of these damned gooks show up." He gestured at Sui Ma's corpse. "They're not going to like that."
"Okay," Cunningham said. He looked away from the corpse-littered room. Most of the bodies were Egrets, but a few Werewolves had gone down at the hands of Sui Ma's men. "It's back to the Lair. We've got to figure out where that damned head is."
But despite the death surrounding him, despite the pain he himself felt, Cunningham couldn't keep back a wide smile. It was over. The New Day had come. He was the new head of the Shadow Fists.