sound twist at my palm, try to crash down against the little bones in there, clenched my fist against it and kept moving.
deDum!
The lower concrete covering of my left leg fell away. I nearly fell with it; kept going, bowing head first into the force of the roar, and
deDum!
the concrete skull cracked; I could feel it rippling down my neck, playing pins-and-needles across my shoulders
deDum!
began to shatter; not around my ears, I prayed, sound and pain, no more pain, not there, not . . .
deDum!
and our right hand was on fire, blood seeping down our wrist and we were nearly there, so close, red blood catching with blue fire, blue electric flames that spat and hissed and threw angry sparks across the floor as it writhed over our skin, electric oil burning electric flesh and we let it burn, let the fire spread throughout our body, set the cracks running through this concrete coffin ablaze, let the neon flame spread throughout and carry us that last pace as our lungs prepared to give up the ghost, fed them on fire and fury and
deDum!
and it was right there, right in front of us, we could feel it, hear it, knew it. We reached out with a hand on fire and felt our fingertips brush spiked bone as deDum!
the shock blasted away the concrete across our chest, ripped it from our neck, sent dust spilling out from around our ears and . . .
One more beat of the heart, that’s all it needed, one more beat and goodnight and goodbye and . . .
Our fingers closed around his heart. His contracted heart, waiting to pump. We could feel bright hotness, stiff, solid flesh, like a lump of uncooked steak, feel his ribs scratching at our dust-covered sleeve, feel the valves trying to move and expand in the claw of our grip. We held on tighter, fighting that strength back within his chest, pushing his heart shut within him, and it was strong but so were we, and we were on fire.
He screamed.
Big men shouldn’t scream. It’s the yowling of a baby with a soiled nappy, the wail of the kid on the landing plane whose ears have just started to pop. It’s pure and animal and ugly.
I shook the last of the concrete shield from me, tumbling it to dust all around. Glancing over my shoulder I could see the whole near wall was largely down, just a few foundation spikes and a lot of shattered slabs, and in my wake a floor of dust and broken dirt, running from the wall to where I now stood, fingers buried in the Executive Officer’s chest.
By the burning of our skin, by the bright electric fire running over our flesh, I could see his face, almost black now with the effort of death, and we hissed, “Tell us!”
His lips were the blue-black of an evening storm, his eyes were nearly all out of their sockets, the equators of the spheres starting from between his rolled-back eyelids. I relaxed the pressure on his heart a moment, let it beat a frail, constricted beat within my fingertips, then tightened my fist again. Someone, with a scalpel dipped in acid, had scrawled blessings, incantations, inscriptions and wards all over the inside of his ribs, carved them into the muscular wall of his heart. They were the only reason he wasn’t dead. They were the things that kept him almost alive.
“‘Give me back my hat’,” we said. “Tell us what it means.”
“Don’t know!” he wheezed, tongue waggling like a sick pup between his lips. “Don’t know!”
We tightened our fingers on a valve in his chest and he couldn’t even scream, there wasn’t enough blood and air. But his mouth opened, his head rolled back and every part of him spoke of agony until I relaxed our grip again. “What about the kid? Where’s Mo?”
“Took him . . . hid him . . .”
“Why?”
“Paid. Told . . . paid. He came here . . . he said to take him, hide him. The kid used to come here with his mates, he said to take the kid, kill the rest, I didn’t argue . . .”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say. Just said he wanted kid hidden, just said . . . he said . . .”
I let his heart beat a shallow beat; then we dug our fingers in deep again. “Tell us!”
“Had to keep the kid hidden. Very special kid, he said, very special, gotta have a special end, needed someone