Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,34
recall a series of images, like photographs or flashcards.
I’ll use present tense here. Seems more appropriate somehow:
I see the city, from up there, and I realize up there is the High Line, that odd park on the Lower West Side that used to be a section of the New York Central Railroad. In the wolves’ greenish night vision, I see leaves, gravel, rusted tracks. Sirens are screaming.
Jump cut.
There’s a rent-a-cop motherfucker with a gun aimed at me, at the loup. He looks scared shitless. The streetlights glint off the barrel of the revolver. His hands are shaking. He’s pissed himself.
Jump cut.
A figure steps out of the bushes, someone dressed up like the Unabomber, big, baggy hoody, face hidden in shadows. They’re holding a crossbow in leather-gloved hands. My crossbow. It’s aimed at the security guard’s head. I’m thinking, Don’t you fucking do it. Maybe that’s meant for the loup. Maybe for the guard or the person holding the crossbow, or maybe it’s meant for all three at once.
Jump cut.
The Unabomber shifts just so, and I can see it’s Selwyn. She’s so goddamn calm, as if she’s done this a hundred times before. The rent-a-cop obviously doesn’t see her. He’s whispering “What the fuck?” over and over and over again as if it’s a litany against death by werewolf. Or whatever he believes he’s seeing looming up before him. The loup roars, and the gun goes off. I’d almost believe that bullet did a time-travel trick and hit me, us, the loup, before the man squeezed the trigger. There’s fire in our left shoulder. All this is happening so incredibly fast. Selwyn fires a carbon-composite bolt, puts it through the guard’s skull, temple to temple.
Jump cut.
I can’t remember seeing the man fall. But now he’s on his back, his body twitching, legs and arms doing a death-throe tarantella, right? I smell blood. The sirens are very close. My shoulder is burning alive.
Jump.
I’m staring up at Selwyn, her face still half obscured by the hoody. I know the loup is gone, and I’m alone now. And sweet Jesus on rubber crutches, I have never felt so alone as I do right now. Selwyn touches my face, and she whispers something I don’t understand. I’m wondering where the hell she got those clothes, wondering how long she was on the streets in her birthday suit before she scored them.
Jump cut.
We’re in a taxi, and I realize the blood I smell is my own. “Don’t move,” Selwyn says. “It’s not much farther.” I can’t hear the sirens anymore. The driver smells like sweat and patchouli. I smell fake evergreen from the pine-tree-shaped cardboard swinging from the rearview mirror. I’m wrapped in a blue wool blanket. My shoulder throbs. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot, and the pain’s familiar. I want to tell her I’ll be fine by dawn, but I don’t. I’m dizzy, but it’s not from the pain. I’m dizzy from the sheer weight of color werewolf us couldn’t see. My vamp eyes are flooded with color.
Okay, I’m gonna stop with the damn “jump cut” device and the present tense. You get the point.
The taxi ride seemed to go on forever. The longest taxi ride of my life, though it couldn’t have lasted more than twenty minutes. My face was propped against the window. On the other side of the glass, the world was a slow blur of nothing I recognized.
“Where’d you get the clothes?” I asked Selwyn.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied.
“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t about to come looking for you stark naked, Quinn.”
I laughed, and my shoulder ached worse.
“That’s not what I meant, you pinhead. You don’t throw down on a cop.”
“He wasn’t a real cop. And don’t call me names, okay? I just saved your ass from a metric fuck-ton of real cops with much bigger fucking guns.”
A few moments before, Selwyn had sounded concerned. Now she just sounded angry. I wasn’t sure if we were talking quietly enough the driver couldn’t hear. I also didn’t care. Actually, I was considering having her drive to some deserted spot and having a snack to help my shoulder heal.
“You don’t want me to call you a pinhead,” I told her, “don’t go around acting like one. Did you at least not leave the bolt back there?”
She didn’t answer, which meant, of course, that she had left the bolt sticking out of the man’s head.