10. Rapids
HE HIT THE water hard, but it felt like lying on a feather bed. Or he imagined it felt like that – he didn’t think he’d ever actually been on a feather bed. On consideration they probably weren’t all that comfortable: not enough back support. But he wasn’t running any more. He had been running for hours. His limbs felt light and tired. He breathed in, and felt the mask suck against his cheeks. Water squirted from the kazoo and splashed his face.
Self-knowledge returned, and fear, gut-wrenching and panicked. He could die here. He would die here. In seconds. The Ukrainians were still firing: he heard shots snip past him; the strange, strangled yelp of bullets in water. White lines, phosphorescent, told him which direction was up. He tried to swim and realised he couldn’t. Too much weight. More bullets yipped past. They were inexperienced with shooting into water, he thought, were not accounting for the deflection. His vision was brown at the edges, brownish-red. He knew in a moment it would turn grey, and that would be the end.
His boot scraped riverbottom. His chest – his lungs, presumably – felt appalling. The belt on his costume was tight, and he reached down to shed it. His gauntleted hand batted vaguely at half a dozen items, couldn’t find the clasp. Knife. Bandages. Sharkpunch. Pitons. Hammer. Siren.
You’re kidding me, he thought. The boy’s magpie instinct, covering the uniform with ridiculous things. Siren. It was a nonsense – almost no one ran towards the sound of a siren, not any more, not with car alarms going off every ten minutes and a very well-publicised chance that any good Samaritan would get stabbed for his trouble – and these days there were electronic ones which were smaller and louder. This one was the old kind. If you were desperate, you might use it to blow out a candle.
Or if you were very desperate you might breathe it.
He jammed the nozzle under the chin of the mask and thumbed the release, felt the rubber stretch around him like a balloon and gasped stale air. Thank God, it was proper air, not butane or anything else. The noise was probably very loud but he’d just blown himself up (again) and been shot at in a confined space and it was less bad than either of those things. He let go of the trigger and the sound stopped. The bullets had moved downstream – they were assuming he’d float, which was daft but he’d made the same mistake. How much air was there in the siren? It had to be three minutes, surely? He shook it, felt liquid sloshing around. Half full, maybe, but he’d been profligate in that first, desperate heave. Now he could make it last.
Tentatively, he tried walking against the current. Not possible. He could hold his own, just about, but it was hard work and it hurt. His back was marked, he knew, with a sharp square of bruises where the armour plate had been driven against it. How many shots? Three? Four? How far out into the stream had he fallen?
The water pushed him hard against something massive. A boulder. No, of course: a concrete slab, one of the bridge supports. It must be the first span, he couldn’t have gone further than that. He tried to remember if there was anywhere to get out on this side. Two more breaths from the siren – he was worried now that the noise would give him away, but he dared not remove the screamer because it seemed to be part of the trigger mechanism – and he used the concrete to push himself along with his hands. He was moving uphill. He could see the surface about five feet above him. Eddies swirled around his head. He couldn’t see or hear the bullets any more, so he dared to ignite the fisherman’s glowstick, cupped it in his hand to direct the light down and forward. The siren was almost empty now, but he wasn’t going to die. Something new was in him, familiar and predictable but not the less powerful. He had been shot at and chased, and both of these things made you enormously angry. It was just a fact; human nature, human chemistry. When someone tries to kill you, when they hunt you, you hate them. So now he hated, and with that came a confidence. He was getting out of this river. He was a few steps away from breaking the surface, he could see the rocks, the path up to dry land. He took his last breath from the canister and released it, let it wash away. Perhaps they would see it and think it evidence of his death, like a destroyer hunting a submarine.
He felt the crown of his head break the surface, and lifted his chin so that in the next step his eyes were just above the water. There was no one on the bank. Three steps more and he could breathe again, and then he was staggering through the shallows and up and out, and the river was behind him.
A soldier would take this opportunity to retreat. A soldier would call for reinforcements and retrench. But now, out of the water and with air in his lungs again, the ragged, tooth-spitting fury of a brawler was boiling in him, demanding release. Fucking shoot at me? And there was the picture of Shola in his pocket, the picture which said they might have had something to do with that, too. Oh, you fucking think so? Is that right, you Chicken Kiev wankers? DO YOU FUCKING THINK SO? He rolled his shoulders and felt the pain in his back, and that made him even angrier. He snarled. Water spewed from his mask like steam, and the sound which went with it was like the sound of hopeless triage.
He smiled tightly behind the mask, and took a few experimental steps. Nothing wrong with his legs, no shrapnel, no fractures. Ribs might be a problem. Limited mobility in his arms, but they’d loosen. Time to go and put these lads straight. Oh, yes. Time, and more than time. After a moment, he sliced open the glowstick and poured it over his head, glowing green slime. No doubt it was toxic. If he didn’t die tonight, he’d probably have an itchy scalp. He laughed, and the mask made it into something very wrong.
He set off at a run, water falling from his clothes.
He knew where they were because he could hear them shooting at rocks and tree trunks in the water, hear them arguing about it. He circled to put them against the lights of Beauville, and waited until the wind was blowing off the river, carrying his footsteps back behind him into the trees. Then he charged.
Two of them were standing side by side a few steps from the others, and he slammed their heads sharply together, heard gristle and that sickening sound like the ball in an aerosol can which meant concussion. The bruises on his back screamed and he screamed back. A third man turned in shock and looked about to scream too, and then his face disappeared under a crushing elbow. He dropped.
A step further away, Pechorin held an expensive gun. It was an American thing with all sorts of clever engineering and a bottle-opener on the back: very light, very strong. He should have used it already but he hadn’t, seemed to have forgotten about it, or perhaps he just couldn’t believe this was happening. Now he brought it round and the Sergeant whipped the sharkpunch up and forward in a fencer’s lunge. The tip touched the gun and the charge fired. Pechorin went flying back, fragments of next-gen rifle embedded in his face.
The Sergeant dropped and rolled, putting the fallen between himself and the remaining men. As he came up, he saw his nearest enemy sighting along the barrel, looking for a clear shot. He ducked left, then reared back the other way and threw one of the climbing pitons as hard as he could.
It was supposed to be a distraction, or at best a knockout blow. Instead, the steel pin went directly into the man’s open mouth and lodged in the soft part of his throat. He made an appalled sound and sank to his knees, hands outstretched in appeal.
Everything was still.
The remaining soldiers stared in abject horror at the choking man. Blood was coming out of his mouth, not arterial spray but a venous welling which would kill him eventually if not treated, although it seemed he might suffocate before that became an issue. The other casualties were regaining consciousness. Pechorin looked as if he might lose part of his nose.