18. Void
VOID
GHOST
The bullet went over our heads.
I heard it before I heard the gun. A flat snap through the air a foot above my hair, then the crack of the gun a beat behind it from somewhere out in the fog, and behind us the corner post of the ring rang with the hit and kept ringing.
Whoever had fired knew where a standing man's chest would be.
One second earlier I'd been standing. So had Caleb.
"We need to move!" It came out of me loud, and it came out firm, and I didn't know the voice. Wanting Caleb out from under that gun had put something in it I'd only ever heard come out of Hawk. "We're a target up here, we're lit, we're the highest thing in the room, and the others need us!"
"Where's it coming from?!" Cuervo, flat on the mat beside me, his one good eye on the fog.
"Doesn't matter." I kept my head down. "It's coming."
I looked at Caleb. He wasn't looking at me.
He was looking out through the ropes at the floor, and the floor was hell.
The dust was still coming down. It fell out of the beams in slow gray sheets through the sodium lamps.
One lamp had come half off its clamp and swung on its cable, so the light moved and the shadows moved with it.
Pieces of the ceiling kept letting go and hitting the concrete out in the gray.
Through all of it, the fighting. Men in black going backward into folding tables.
A chair coming apart over somebody's head.
Anima's inked arm flashing under a lamp as she drove her elbow into a face.
A body coming out of the fog sideways, all the way off the ground, thrown clear by a spinning kick, and landing on its shoulders and not getting up.
Smoke and dust in my nose, and under it the copper this building never washed out.
Men roaring, and under the roaring, fists landing on meat.
"Let's move." Caleb's voice came out with a rasp under it, torn up from the arm that had crushed his throat, and his head turned on me.
Fast. I'd thought he was reading the floor, the way he read everything.
He wasn't reading anything. The look in his eyes was dark all the way down, and it wanted skulls.
I'd seen him from the ropes on my way in, a flat-out run through the fog, then off the mat and turning, and a man going down without putting his hands out. That man lay across the ring right now. He hadn't moved once.
If Caleb was cracking, I was going to bring back every piece. I made myself that promise with the bullet's echo still in the corner post. For now, though, the crack might be what got us out of here, and I let it be.
Somewhere past the ropes a man screamed, high, and it didn't sound like one of ours.
Three more shots ripped the air, close together, and Caleb moved.
Low and fast along the ropes on our side, and my Glock came out of my jacket and into both hands.
The long-haired man lay in his path. Flat on his back in a spread of broken glass, blood down both sides of his face, pieces of somebody's beer glass shining in it. Caleb went past him without a look.
Then the body moved.
A groan came out of it, barely there under the noise. His upper half came up off the mat slow, an inch, then more, and his eyes found Caleb, and they were wide open.
Caleb went back a step, still low, right foot behind him, hands opening. His left hand came out toward me and the others, flat, and stayed there. Stay back. That hand told me everything about what had happened to his throat.
"You… fucking…" It came out of the man wet, through blood and broken teeth, and he was getting a hand under himself to push up. "I'm going to kill you… and your coward frien?—"
I shot him in the face.
The Glock jumped in my hands and the bullet went in under his left eye. His head whipped back on his neck and the back of it came apart, red and gray spraying across the mat behind him. His body dropped flat onto the glass again and stayed there.
Smoke drifted up off the muzzle into the falling dust. From the corner of my eye I could tell Caleb was looking at me. I didn't turn my head. The sights were still on that man's ruined face, and he wasn't getting up, and I aimed anyway.
Him. Your answer. Caleb had given me that two minutes ago in pieces, with his throat gone purple.
This was the man who'd sat on him and squeezed the air out of him until his eyes rolled.
I'd killed one man before tonight, and I'd walked around for two weeks with the weight of it.
This one weighed nothing. This one was never going to cost me an hour of sleep.
"Should've hit him harder." Norte, from behind Mateo, slow and low. I lowered the Glock.
"Let's move!" I gave it to Caleb, straight at him, and he nodded once.
Then I turned to Norte, and past him to Cuervo.
"Mateo and Trenza are down. You two stay on them.
I'm sorry—" my eyes went from Mateo's broken face to Trenza's closed eye and back "—but that's the truth, you can't fight like that, and it's getting worse out there every second.
Drop out of the ring and get low behind the platform.
He's carrying." I tipped my chin at the dead man.
Coming over the ropes I'd seen the pistol for one second, the grip of it showing inside his open jacket.
"Take what he's got. Anybody comes close who isn't a Phoenix, use it. The rest is ours."
Trenza looked at me out of her one good eye, and the look said two things at once. I know. And fuck you. "Ya vete, cabrón." Thick, through the split lip.
"Get lost already, asshole."
Mateo couldn't look at me at all. His head hung, and every time his dead arm brushed Norte's side, even a little, his whole face winced with it. Norte nodded once. Cuervo nodded once, already crouched over the body, and his hand came off the man's waistband with a pistol in it.
"We got them." His face had set hard. "Go!"
I turned my head from the two of them back to Caleb. He wasn't where he'd been. He was already at the ropes, ahead of all of us. "Caleb, wait for—" I gave it to his back, and he was already gone.
Something in him was pushing him ahead of everybody, and I ran upright to catch him, no crouch, the bullet that had gone over us be damned. I hit the top rope with both hands and went over it, and landed on my boots on the concrete a step behind him, Glock up and sweeping, Caleb on my right.
The first one came out of the fog screaming.
From the right, a man in black, and the kick he threw at Caleb's head came around high and fast off the hip.
It was Caleb's own kick, the one I'd watched him throw at a heavy bag a hundred times.
Caleb ducked it flat. In the same half second a battle cry came from my left, and a second man came in with a knife, and the knife wasn't going for my body.
It was going for my hands. For the gun in them.
I turned right, out of the line, and the knife went through air.
He came again. Knife, then a kick, then the knife on the way back from the kick, everything in combinations, and every one of them was a move I'd eaten off Blade on a training floor for years.
I wasn't where any of it landed. One step ahead, one turn early, the blade going by a hand's width from my jacket every time, and at the edge of my eye, Caleb's shape moving through the other fight.
"Stand still, you little—" It came through the knife man's teeth, and he swung it backhand. The blade came around in a reverse arc with the point aimed straight at my neck.
That was the one I'd been waiting on.
My left hand went up and slammed into the inside of his wrist and closed on it. The blade stopped six inches from my throat. My right hand came up underneath my own left arm, the Glock in it, and I put the muzzle against the middle of him and fired.
The shot went into him with a crack I felt in my elbow. Fire came out around the muzzle and lit his shirt for a second. The force of it threw him backward out of my grip, and he stumbled, three fast steps, and went down flat on his back. He didn't move after that.
I looked for Caleb.
He was in front of me now. The fights had turned everybody around, and I caught him throwing a right roundhouse into his man's left side, the shin landing flush, high on the body. Where his heart was. The man folded over onto his left and went down face-first onto the concrete.
Best case for him, his ribs were shattered. Worst case, Caleb had just kicked a man's heart still.
Caleb stood over him. His chest went in and out fast. His eyes were on the body and his hands were open at his sides, and there was no drill running behind his face, no four-count, nothing. It was gone.
"Caleb. Control it." I kept it low, and I kept it firm. His head came around to me. The look was different aimed at me. Still dark. Still burning. But listening, and careful.
Then he sprinted straight at me. "Woah woah WOAH!
" My left hand went out flat, my right hand and the Glock swinging out of the way, and he didn't slow down.
He jumped. I saw the line of the jump as it left the ground, and it was off.
It wasn't aimed at me. It was aimed a foot to my left.
I moved right and turned with it, enough to see both of his feet come down together, square in the chest of the man walking up behind me with something in his hand.
The man went back fast, off his feet, and hit the corner of the ring, his back slamming into the post with the whole platform shaking under it.
I brought the Glock up and shot him in the chest. He groaned, deep, and slid sideways off the post and over the low back edge of the ring, and dropped out of sight on the other side.
Four or five guns went off at once somewhere in the building, and Caleb and I hit the floor in a crouch at the same moment without either of us deciding to.
"It's still me." Caleb, breathing hard, his eyes on mine from a foot away. "I'm not crazy. Just…"