Afterwards, as dusk settled on a very different Van Ryman mansion, they sat in the sauna next to the master bedroom, drinking iced tea. A full pitcher rested on one of the floorboards, water beading down its sides from the heat and steam.
“I think I’m going to purchase a Servant, maybe two,” Vincent suggested. “That way we can have more time with each other.”
She closed her eyes and nodded wearily. “Mmmm.” She ran the cold, wet surface of her iced tea glass along her chin and jaw, relishing the coolness. Julia looked completely content.
He felt satisfied himself. He had been afraid that challenging the neo-Satanists would be much more difficult, with far greater repercussions. But it had been so easy. And it was all over now.
21
Enforcer Jones ran blindly through the streets, waving his hands in front of him though the crowd had long since thinned out. He breathed heavily; the damp, unfiltered air whistled through his nostrils.
The Enforcer wore only his armored boots and his black skin-pants; everything else was gone. He had discarded the rest of his armor in scattered pieces during his dazed flight. The suit radio had gone with it, smashed under someone’s feet. His skin crawled with the memory of hundreds of hands grasping, groping, tearing, trying to kill him by sheer force of numbers.
His ears roared, but Jones kept himself from screaming, from releasing the pressure still building within him. What had he done? How had he deserved this? The Enforcer continued to run, trying to flee farther, hide deeper into anonymity.
Enforcers weren’t supposed to run. But right now his Guild status didn’t concern him. Most of all he wanted to forget the nightmarish memories, sharpened by his own fear….
As the rebel Servant had vanished down the streets, moving faster than seemed humanly possible, Jones found himself trapped by the murderous mob. He had killed someone. Maybe more than one. The people surrounded him like the tentacles of a voracious squid. Chaotic anger filled the air, making it difficult to breathe with the sweat and shouts and liquid hatred. Hands, bodies, people pushed at him.
Some of the pedestrians began to throw things. Jones felt his armor battered and pummeled—and he struck back. He fired his weapons, hoping to awe and frighten the mob, to drive them away, to give him some breathing room.
He was an Enforcer. His friend Fitzgerald Helms had died for Jones to get into the Guild. He wasn’t after the pedestrians—he wanted the Servant. He had to stop the Servant, because he didn’t want to think where the Guild would demote him if he screwed up one more time. Jones had no more amnesty units left to his name.
But the runaway Servant had escaped—wounded but gone, and the mob remained. The mob wanted only blood anyway, and they hated Enforcers almost as much as they hated Servants.
A suicidal old man managed to snatch one of Jones’s weapons and cradled it gleefully in his gnarled hands, but the Enforcer shot him. The weapon spun away into the crowd, and moments later someone else picked it up and began shooting indiscriminately. Jones realized with horror that several people in the crowd were laughing.
Two more people reached for the remaining weapons that bristled from his armor. Training and blind reflexes took over now; panic smothered all thoughts from the rational part of his brain. Moving jerkily, Jones shot in all directions until the pocket bazooka was empty.
But still the people didn’t fall back.
Someone yanked the heater-knife from its socket at his side, and the seal broke with a thin pop. The hot blade glanced off the Enforcer’s white armor. Grasping hands tore the other two projectile weapons from their sockets, and Jones knew that even the dura-plated armor couldn’t withstand such an attack.
The people continued to press forward. Frantic, unable to escape, Jones fled deep inside himself, letting the body fend for itself. Uninhibited, his hands chose the last alternative open to him.
Someone was trying to break his arm, but the Enforcer managed to wrench it free, blessing the slickness of the polished armor. His finger found a depression in his chest plate and pushed a release button.
Dense clouds of stinging black smoke poured from the joints of his armor, pushing the mob back with its foul smell. Hidden by the smokescreen, Jones pulled off his helmet and threw it far into the unseen crowd. He held his breath and ran through the blinded and choking people, trying to remain unobtrusive, shedding pieces of armor and hoping to become invisible, normal, just another face on the street. The armor was his protection, a part of him insisted; it made him an Enforcer, someone to be feared and respected, and he shed it with a growing horror at himself. But he had to get rid of the armor, had to get away from the clutching, murderous crowd….
Still moving mechanically, dazed, Jones came to an enclosure between two tall blank-faced buildings. A chain-link fence surrounded the enclosure, topped with glistening barbed wire. Inside the fence a mushroom forest of satellite dishes stood skewed at various angles, a haphazard array pointing toward invisible targets in high orbit. Some of the dishes were solid, some made of wire mesh.
The shadows of the struts and the dishes beckoned him, and some irrational impulse told him he had to get inside. Jones glanced along the ground, found a crumpled aluminum can, and tossed it at the chain-link fence, watching carefully for sparks.
The Enforcer felt a rush of adrenaline again as he visualized the hands reaching toward him… his own weapons stolen, playfully turned against him… the mob’s anger pouring down like boiling oil, knowing that in an instant he would be torn limb from limb….
Jones grabbed the chain-link and scrambled up. He paused at the barbed wires, wondering if they might be coated with some deadly substance or paralytic drug. Even though he had no armor protecting him this time, his Enforcer training had taught him how to avoid barbed wire. He swung his slim dark body over and let himself drop to the ground. The armored boots absorbed much of the impact, and he crouched, looking around, then sought the safety of the tangled shadows.
His chest heaved as he lowered himself under one of the deepest shadows, sheltered from sight. Jones let the last adrenaline course through his bloodstream, making lap after lap of his circulatory system. And then he drowned in a numbing grayness of exhausted sleep.
He awoke long after nightfall. Cool darkness around him made the satellite dishes seem like alien sentinels. He could look through the wire mesh of one dish to see scattered stars far above, most of them washed out by the ambient glow of the Metroplex.
Jones sat up with a jolt and looked at his wrist chronometer. After midnight—past curfew. And he was an Enforcer, out of uniform, with no ID.
He shuddered. He had left his armor behind. Was he even an Enforcer anymore? He had deserted his duty. He had let another rebel Servant escape. He had killed pedestrians. He had been the cause of a bloody riot.
How would the Guild look at it? Would they punish him, demote him to some even worse job? Would they dismiss him, make it impossible for him to find other work—force him to become one of the jobless blues? Or would they quietly kill him, an embarrassment best forgotten?
Jones crouched, unmoving, debating with himself whether he should try to avoid the Enforcer curfew patrols, try to make it back to his own dwelling without being caught. Or should he just stay put where he was, shivering in the wet coldness of the night, and hope nobody found him before morning?