Chapter 51 He Kept Coming #2
The car was still there, just to his side. Anca had not driven off.
The giant turned to stare at her through the windshield.
Even from this distance, even through the rain, Evan saw her recoil.
He checked his metronome.
A minute and a half left if he was lucky.
“Hey!” he shouted, his voice warped, tongue sluggish. He groped the earth around him, hands fumbling across bottles and shards, somehow managing to pull himself upright. “Come on.”
That boulder head tilted. Massive eyes locked on him, so dark they looked pupilless.
Leisurely, Goliath ambled across the road toward the beach, massive arms penduluming at his sides.
His leg buckled slightly, the only concession to the two heat-treated copper rounds he’d absorbed.
He was deliberate, his movements unwieldly, which would have been a fighting advantage for Evan were fentanyl not leaching through his central nervous system.
Goliath’s enormous shoes crunched forward, popping doll heads and bottles. Nearing, he lunged. Evan managed to jerk to the side, barely dodging the freight-train bulk and jabbing a heel to tangle up the big man’s treads.
Goliath tumbled, the ship prow of his chest harrowing the earth, shoving up ridges on either side.
With his full weight, Evan drove his knee down onto the spot between his shoulder blades, hoping to knock him windless.
When Goliath bucked, it felt like riding a rhinoceros.
He spun and Evan spun with him, nearly crushed beneath the steamroller drum of his torso.
Evan managed to skirt free. They wound up feet to head, though Evan’s span reached neither the man’s feet nor his head.
Goliath seized his ankles, jerking him along the sand, gathering him up toward his chest, sausage fingers groping.
Evan grabbed him through the crotch, trying to hold position, pounding away with a hammer fist to the gunshot wound on the hip. The Goliath grunted, losing his grip.
Evan squirmed free. Goliath clawed after him, and they scrabbled through the wasteland sludge. Goliath kept coming and Evan’s palms scraped through the muck and the trash and Goliath kept coming, he kept coming.
Fuzziness all through Evan now, his tongue pins and needles. He was barely holding off his panic, mounting with each tick of the metronome. A massive hand clamped around his foot, engulfing the entire end of his boot. It felt like getting clinched by the claw of a crane.
Yanked backward, Evan went weightless. He snatched at the sand, came up with an intact medicinal bottle with embossed lettering—Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root!
He felt himself gathered into Goliath, a fish furled toward a squid beak. Swinging around, he saw the looming head, the gritted teeth in that wool-mesh beard.
He swung the bottle as hard as he could, aiming for the paper-thin orbital rim at the side of the eye.
Yielding contact. Bone and glass shattered.
The Goliath emitted a protracted groan, a howl that never reached howling.
Releasing Evan, he clawed at his face. Evan still had the bottle by the neck, the broken bottom an oval of fangs.
His vision warbled, rot scorching the back of his tongue, the slurp of water against shore exploding kaleidoscopically in his head.
Minute and a half.
He jagged the ring of shards into the gunshot wound on Goliath’s thigh and screwed hard.
Now came a proper howl.
Evan fell back, banging his shoulders against the hull of the motorboat.
Goliath thrashed and screamed.
It would not be enough.
Evan grabbed the man’s hefty ankle, lifted the tree-trunk leg, and tugged as hard as he could. No movement. Dropping his center of gravity, he jerked, throwing his weight back in thrusts.
Bellowing, Goliath lurched, skidding across the broken bottles. When he twisted to reach Evan, his stomach bulged into view, slashed through with cuts.
Evan’s strength was fading. His sentience, too.
Another jerk across the saw-toothed ground brought the Goliath’s leg within reach of the half-buried motorboat.
Evan grabbed a muddy flex-cuff from the bunch he’d stuffed back into his pocket.
He hoisted Goliath’s massive ankle up toward one of the boat’s cleats, still bolted to the gunwale, and readied the strip of nylon.
It wouldn’t fit around the girth of the ankle and the cleat.
Goliath lurched up, swinging at him, and Evan jabbed the heel of his hand into the shattered maw of his eye. The big man slapped back onto the sand.
Hands shaking, strength fading, Evan managed to get another flex-cuff looped through the first, daisy-chaining ankle to cleat.
Goliath yowled and ripped his leg back, tearing the entire cleat free of the gunwale.
Evan half collapsed against the side of the boat, tried and failed to draw a full breath.
He said, “Damn it.”
Fifty seconds, maybe forty-five.
His head got swimmy and he slid off the hull, barely missing a pronged spade of metal thrust up from the sandy mire.
An anchor fluke.
He laughed like a crazy man.
The rain hammered him.
Digging frantically, sand rammed beneath his fingernails, unearthing a length of the shank, the bulb of the stock, and there—at last—the ring.
He sensed a barometric shift in the air. Goliath had pulled himself up, sit-up-style, arms within clamping distance. He grabbed Evan at either shoulder, crushing his rib cage inward.
Evan slammed forward in a head butt, aiming the thick curve of his frontal bone at the cheek below the vanquished eye.
A crack and a crumble.
Goliath flopped down onto his back again, gnarled hands shuddering over his ruined face.
Yanking the leg, Evan squirmed another flex-cuff through the loop around the bobbing cleat, cinched it around the anchor ring, ratcheted it tight.
Goliath heaved his leg once more, the anchor actually shifting in the sand. One flex-cuff wouldn’t be enough.
Heaviness suffused Evan, concreting his eyelids, slowing his breaths, pulling him into sleep. He fought it, hands working furiously.
Another zip tie.
Another.
Another.
Sliding and tightening, sliding and tightening until a web of high-tensile nylon 6/6 ensnared the mammoth ankle.
Evan crawled toward Goliath’s face, pinning the near arm with his knee.
“Who hired you?”
Goliath smiled through blood-matted beard. When Evan’s chest hitched, that dagger of pain stabbed his left lung.
He punched Goliath on the caved cheek. “Who sent you?”
Goliath’s head rolled back in the sand, came forward again. “You can beat me till yer tiny little fist shatters, but I ain’t telling you shit.”
Evan believed him.
The rain had slowed but the air still felt electric, violent.
He waded out of reach on his knees, found the strength to rise again, and staggered toward the road. He was breathing sounds and smelling colors and the world around him was moving drunkenly of its own accord.
Though bound at the wrists and ankles, the boy had squirmed his way over toward Evan’s gun. Evan stooped as he passed, picking it up.
Teardrop lay motionless a few feet away, face buried in mud. He was going to suffocate in full view of Anca in the car.
Evan kicked him in the ribs. Groaning, he flipped over.
Zzt. Zzt. Two more zip ties rendered him inert.
Nineteen seconds.
Evan heard a scrabbling noise.
Jimmy was bent over the side of the car, hands zombie-clawing at the passenger door. The handle had retracted, so there was nothing to grab, but Anca’s terrified face was right there on the other side of the window.
When Evan blinked, his eyes threatened to stay closed. His knees unlocked and he almost toppled. Pulling his legs forward, he neared Jimmy.
Jimmy took no notice, kept at his half-conscious efforts.
Evan made a fist around his pistol, used it as a makeshift brass knuckles, and hammered him on the side of the head.
He fell stiffly.
Evan collapsed next to him. Patted his cargo pocket.
No zip ties left.
Wait—he felt one hard edge.
Worming the zip tie from his pocket took enormous effort. Back and forth, back and forth until he fought it free.
Jimmy had fallen with his torso lopped across his hip, his right hand nearly touching his left shoe. Evan joined wrist to ankle in the unforgiving embrace of the zip tie and then jab-kicked him with both heels to roll him away from the car.
Buzzing filled his ears now, his mouth, his head, the dermis beneath his skin. The air tasted of dumpster. Warmth tugged him down, down, down.
Five seconds, maybe six.
He rolled onto his back. Utterly spent.
The sky was nothing but overlapping swirls of dreariness.
A silhouette broke it, staring down at him.
He could not muster the energy to be scared.
Shoving his elbows into the mud, he tried to push himself up, got only as far as a slight tilt of his torso.
It was done then. He was done.
He blinked against the rain. The silhouette was slender, feminine.
It crouched.
As he collapsed, Anca caught him. He looked up at her, sprawled in her lap with his head lolling à la pietà—heh, funny—but there was no time for symbolism.
It came on then, the fall of the samurai blade, slicing the curtain between him and the abyss.
No more seconds. No more planning. No more control.
Just abject terror at what was to come when he would not be there to meet it.
“Listen.” Around his torpid tongue, it came out lessun. “’M gonna go out … not safe … can’t let them … in car … just haveta…”
She gazed down. Behind her the sun glowed through the blanketing gloom, suffusing her backlit head with a nimbus glow. Her mouth seemed to move. The afterimpression of her words lingered, the last thing he had to carry with him into the waiting nothingness.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t leave you.”