I looked and saw only dark tunnels of towering crates, a chain fence and a padlocked gate. Janus lay just out in the open, head rolled towards me, mouth working, blood and foam on his lips, trying to speak. I eased closer, back still pressed against the containers, until I was a foot and a half from him.
“Ca… ca… ca…”
The beginning of a sound that might have been a name.
Janus’ left hand was outstretched to me, right hand limp as his life ran away, the breath bubbling up through the shattered remnants of his ribcage. I could almost reach his hand without exposing myself, grab it from cover. The blood trickled against the toe of my shoe.
I reached out, caught Janus’ arm by the wrist, pulling with all my might, dragging his body through the blood, little waves of it shifting beneath him as the body began to turn.
A gun fired and Janus’ body jerked. I saw his eyes go wide, a sharp punching-out of breath, felt the blood splatter against my face as the bullet slammed into his chest and
Janus jumped.
Into the only body that was available.
I screamed and so did Janus, the two of us in one falling back against the crate, shrieking as I pressed my hands against my head and Janus pulled my knees to our chin and we screamed to drown out the shrieking in my ears and screamed to silence the bursting in our brain and screamed because all the little blood vessels behind our eyes were peeling away from the optic nerve and our tear ducts were filling with iron and our nose was flooding with hot blood and our body was kicking and tearing against itself and I tried to shriek,
“Janus!”
but the body by my side was dead and someone else was howling with my tongue, the breath ripping my chest in two.
“Can’t… get the… / Help! / Can’t stop / can’t breathe!”
With all the strength I had, I pushed myself from the wall, flopping on to hands and knees, and Janus tried to pick me up, one knee buckling and another dragging up, and I screamed, “Gunman! Crane / gotta move / body! Get body!” as Janus hauled us to our feet. Blood was running down my face, spilling from my nose as vessels ruptured. Pain lanced through my side as some internal piece of machinery tried, and failed, to maintain its usual function, but the brain wasn’t having any of it, every part, every neuron, fit to bursting as Janus took a step, took another and I shrieked,
“Can’t… breathe! / then… breathe!”
We tumbled again as I tried to stop our legs, focus only on getting air into my lungs, on that single conscious act of inhalation, and I managed to drag down a lungful before Janus, giddy with terror, pushed us back on to our feet and, falling, running, staggering, pulled us away from his already chilling corpse.
Janus ran, and I breathed, and tried not to use my eyes, filled with blood, or my ears, singing where the drums were beginning to rupture. Away from the crane, we saw a strip of metal fence and Janus ran towards it, but I managed to gasp, “No!” and drop us to the ground.
“Got to run / sniper on the crane / got to get / need a body! / run / sniper!”
I rolled on to my side, clasping my knees to my chest in an effort to hold Janus down. “Speak / now! / listen! / now! / listen to me! Listen! There’s… sniper… gotta be / dying / I know / body dying! / listen! / gotta get out / listen! We’re not getting over fence, saw… sheds back / back? / way we came few hundred yards / dying! / few hundred, get to shed, call cops / cops? / flesh with guns! / run!”
Janus hauled me to my feet and I let him, dedicated every thought I had through the red haze of pain to breathing, just breathing, let him manage the rest, arms, feet, even the direction as we stumbled through the dark. The customs sheds lay, grey blots on a grey land, visible between the crates, and as we neared them I felt something hot and sharp down my side, and we screamed but kept running as another part, muscle, organ, nerve, didn’t matter, gave up trying.
“Run,” I whispered as we paused on the edge of the crates. Ten yards between us and the shed, ten open yards and a sniper at our back. “Run!”
Janus ran and so did I, our legs flying as we tore across the ground and something bit the concrete by my back, smacked into the wall ahead of us, but the first was wide to the left, the second wide to the right, and we ran and Janus slammed our shoulder into the door of the cabin, which cracked and collapsed beneath our weight, tipping us shoulder first into the musty gloom within.
For a moment I lay as the blood seeped into my mouth and Janus shrieked and buzzed around my mind and tongue. I managed to open my eyes long enough to see a beige phone hanging on the wall, and hand over hand crawled towards it, each limb dressed in lead, each movement a kick against a wall, until Janus too seemed to see my intention and with a sudden surge forward propelled us to the phone.
911.
The ringing in my shattered eardrums sent bubbles through my face, I could feel them burst and pop inside my cheeks, along the line of my jaw, and as the operator came on to the line another surge of pain kicked through us and I nearly dropped the phone from my bloody hand.
“Help me / dying! / port / help me! / gun / help!”
A bullet smashed through the window above our head and with a shriek Janus dropped the phone and I dropped us, landing curled up on the floor, head in my hands. I pressed against my skull in case it burst even without the help of lead, and as the phone hung swinging by its cable I screamed, “Get me a fucking body!”
Another bullet slammed into the table behind me, and it occurred to me suddenly that these shots weren’t muffled, weren’t the silent wasp of a sniper’s rifle, but were a revolver, high calibre, and getting closer.
“Coming,” I hissed. “He’s coming / oh god / got to move / where? / away / coming? / on foot / jesus jesus jesus / listen / oh god oh jesus jesus / listen we have to…”
Too late. Janus uncurled and crawled up on to our feet. “No, wait,” I gasped, but he was already staggering out through the broken door, and for a second I saw a shape move by the containers, dark beneath the dull street light, then a forklift truck, disguised as a nine-millimetre bullet, slammed into my left leg, spun me against the door frame and dropped me back down on to the cabin floor from whence I came.
Janus screamed, and screamed, and kept on screaming, even as I scrambled back into the shelter of the cabin, pressing my hand against the growing shock, the growing cold, the growing mess that had been my thigh, and breathed in
until Janus screamed again
and breathed out, which he seemed to find easier, and it occurred to me that this was it, dead in a cabin in the Port of Miami, gunned down by a stranger in a stranger’s body, and that all things considered, give or take a variation of geography and time, this was probably how it was always going to have been. How it always had to end.
Then the door opened at the other end of the cabin.
A flashlight swung into my face. Janus’ jolt as he tried to flee sent puke into my mouth. The flashlight came towards us, and behind the light was a security guard, from his peaked black hat to the revolver on his hip, his face open in an expression of shock and concern, and as he knelt down beside me he said, “What the hell…”
Janus moved
faster than me. He caught the guard by the wrist
and was gone.
The security guard fell back on to his buttocks, a toddler learning to walk. Then full control kicked in: his eyes went from me to the door directly in front of us, and at once he fumbled at his side for his revolver, drawing it and locking it in place with a two-handed grip, the barrel fixed on the rectangle of light through which our assailant should walk. I lay beneath him, gasping for breath, the shock of my shattered limb beginning now to assert itself in strong, clean waves of physical pain, even as the blood slowed in my brain and I blinked scarlet tears from my eyes.
We waited, eyes on the door, Janus on one knee, torch beam and barrel pointing towards the exit.