“Yeah, you know what? I believed that, too. But you know what? All our ambition? It made us do goddamn stupid shit. We each picked a side. We picked sides because we came across people who we thought could help us, who could provide us with some advantage. And now, we both committed felonies tonight and are both pretty much ready to commit another one, which should be an indication to both of us that we were pretty goddamn stupid to have picked the side that we picked. Look, Anton, we’re in the same damn boat. Just two fucking writers who are trying to figure it out and maybe made some bad choices along the way. We shouldn’t be fighting. We should be friends.”
“But Billy,” Anton says. “I can’t be your friend.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a terrible writer.”
Billy sighs. He may or may not be a terrible writer, but he still doesn’t seem to have kick-ass rhetorical skills. Time for a different strategy. “Okay,” he says. “You want to fight? Let’s fight.”
“It’s hardly fair,” Anton says. “You can turn into a wolf.”
“A hell-wolf,” Billy clarifies. “You have a gun to my head, though, which I think kinda evens the odds. But let’s do this differently. Let’s do this old-school. Old-school literary fistfight. Hemingway vs. Stevens.”
Anton pauses. “Mailer vs. Vidal,” he says finally. He lowers the gun. Billy tentatively turns around, looks into Anton’s face.
“Ridgeway vs. Cirrus,” Billy says. “That’s what I’m talking about. You make me cry uncle and I leave here empty-handed. I’ll tell Lucifer that I couldn’t beat you, and you, you get a head start. But if I win—”
“You won’t win,” Anton says. He sticks the gun down into the waistband at the back of his pants and shoves Billy in the chest.
Billy takes the impact hard, stumbles back against the bookshelves. Anton’s hands come up, get a grip on Billy’s head. He presses his thumbs into Billy’s face, as though he were violently shaping a wet lump of clay. Billy snaps his teeth, hoping that flashing his canines might send a message: keep your fingers out of my orifices. But to no real avaiclass="underline" Anton carries on with his attempt to use his heavy hands to smear Billy’s features down to nothingness.
Billy shoots his arm up between Anton’s, gets a grip on Anton’s ear. He pulls, and Anton grimaces. He tightens his grip and lets himself drop down to his knees, banging one savagely on an outlet strip. Anton, not wanting to lose his ear, goes down right along with him, and the two of them thrash on the floor for a minute, each trying to get a better grip on the other.
Billy rolls over onto his back, and then realizes this was a mistake: it allows Anton to press him down, planting one hand on his sternum, the other directly on his belly — Billy groans as Anton squashes his liver, or stomach, or whatever soft organs are down there, unprotected by bones. Anton uses Billy to push himself back into an upright position, and, once risen, he begins to kick Billy with his square-toed Fluevogs. Through the pain, Billy wonders whether it hurts worse to be kicked with square-toed shoes than with the normal kind. This thought is disrupted when Anton kicks Billy in the chin, splitting it open, sending a shower of stars through his skull. One more blow like that and he’ll be unconscious.
Billy rolls onto his stomach, crawls under the nearest desk, drags himself through the maze of Bladed Hyacinth’s cable management system. Anton tries to lunge down, grab his ankles, drag him back out, but Billy’s fear has given him the advantage of speed. He comes out the far side and keeps crawling, heads under a second desk. He gets tangled in a dangling curtain of wires but he needs to keep putting distance between Anton and himself, so he continues to advance, tugging one of the big monitors off the desk. It crashes down onto the small of his back, and he gives up a yip of pain.
But. He has the space that he needs now. Just a few feet, but that buys him the time to get back to a standing position, to strike his best imitation of a fighting stance.
Anton Cirrus lumbers toward him, slowly, clumsily, all six chairs in the place somehow in his way.
Billy makes a fist. He tries to remember whether he’s supposed to put his thumb on the inside or on the outside. Which way keeps you from breaking your thumb? You put it on the inside, right, so it’s protected by the other fingers? Or is it the other fingers that crush it and pulverize it if you do it that way?
In the end, he isn’t even sure which one he opts for. The second Anton’s head bobs into punching range Billy just pops out at it as hard as he can, fueling the jab with as much animal ferocity as he can muster, with all his frustration and anger — at Anton, at Lucifer, at himself, at the extent of all he’s lost, at just the whole grand stupidity of his life now. He thinks he’s aiming for Anton’s chin but he miscalculates a little bit and gets him instead right in the throat.
Anton gurgles. His eyes bulge. He performs the arrested fish-gulp you perform when you try to take a breath and fail. He does it again and then he crumples down, grips the edge of a desk with both hands to keep himself from collapsing completely.
Billy steps back, bumps into the wall of bookshelves, and gets the bright idea that the grand finale here is to grab one of the bookshelves and topple it, burying Anton underneath. It would just look so cool. He turns, gets a pretty good grip on two shelves, and pulls, but it turns out the thing is maybe bolted to the wall or something? Or maybe the shelves in here were just built into the wall directly? He stands on his tiptoes to try to get a better look and when he comes back down, having learned nothing, Anton Cirrus jams the barrel of the gun into the back of Billy’s jawline.
Billy puts his hands up without being asked.
“Uh,” he says, breathing hard. “You’re not supposed to use the gun, remember? That was the whole point of this exercise.”
“Fuck you,” says Anton, his voice coming out all pinched and strangulated-sounding. “Walk.”
“Where are we going?” Billy asks, as Anton directs him out the door.
“What,” Anton says. “You think I’m just going to shoot you here in my office? Spray your brains into my bookshelves? No. I’m going to take you out and shoot you on the goddamn street and watch you die in the gutter.”
“Oh,” Billy says.
But at that moment he spots someone pushing into the stairwell through the broken glass of the street entrance. A cop? He’d really like to see a cop right about now.
But it’s not a cop. It’s Denver, with her video camera in its shoulder-mount, its red LED blinking blithely at him.
“Hey, fuckstick,” Denver shouts up at Anton, from the bottom of the stairwell. “Drop the gun.”
Anton Cirrus looks down at Denver. “Who the hell are you?” he croaks.
“Let me tell you,” Denver says. “I’m the one who’s getting really good high-definition footage of you committing assault with a deadly weapon.”
The pause that this gives Anton is palpable. He takes the gun away from Billy’s head and hesitates. And that’s the moment. Billy turns, and grabs Anton’s shoulders, and throws him down the stairs.
The gun discharges harmlessly into the ceiling and Billy thinks, just for a moment, of Chekhov. Anton goes down the stairs, all the way down, more or less on his face, banging his elbows and knees against the walls. Denver films his entire descent until he’s lying in a heap at her feet. The gun skitters to a halt next to her, and she pops a folding screwdriver off her belt, deftly lifts it by its trigger guard, and makes it vanish into some holsterlike compartment on her belt.
Billy gathers up the tire iron and the duffel bag, and hurries down the stairs to meet her. Cirrus is conscious, but dazed, and for one final time Billy contemplates smashing his skull open, reducing his human intelligence into insensate muck. But no. Instead he steps over Cirrus, and he and Denver hurry out onto the street.