Wild Country

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Alone on the street, Quantrill felt his skin prickle. He knew nothing of the structures behind those fake storefronts. Sorel could be strolling around, gazing through those windows at his leisure in his search for a victim. But you wouldn't want me as a hostage, would you, pal? I might be too troublesome. You'd take me off the second you saw me, and go looking for somebody more tractable. Only there isn't gonna be anybody like that here. But you don't know that, so you'll be casting around to catch some other poor fish, moving along as quietly as you can, testing every footstep. You can't be far away. It took you a hell of a long time to flush those two special effects men. Drives a man nuts to proceed so slowly. I know, I know… Given one possible advantage in his freedom of movement, Quantrill took it.

Abruptly he began to sprint down the street, leaping the cable, turning the corner, then kneeling with that master key at the first door he came to. If he could get behind the facades of these buildings — really one single building a block wide, built to look like several crammed tightly together — he would at least know the terrain. The main thing was to get familiar with the territory; to take that advantage away from his opponent.

Even the false fronts of Soho, he found, were built with full walls and internal partitions. Perhaps WCS intended to bring the whole place to life one day. Meanwhile, West Texas dust storms had laid down a fine gray film in every empty room. You could move along the sturdy flooring without much noise, but you left tracks as obvious as if striding over fresh paint. Quantrill moved silently to the shadowed back wall; tried the old-fashioned doorknob very, very gently, remembering to do it right. That meant standing to one side of the door, reaching over with your free hand to grasp the knob, lining your vulnerable parts up with the two-by-fours in the doorframe, just in case. If you stood forthrightly in front of the door, you could get yourself forthrightly ventilated by a slug through that door face. Or several slugs. Hey, almost forgot; you only fired one round at that poor little guy. Low on ammo. Sorel? It should make you more cautious.

The door was not locked and opened a hand's width without a squeak. Quantrill squinted through the opening, shifting to improve his view. The door opened onto a broad hallway floored with linolamat, showing treadmarks of many small tires as well as a welter of footprints. A service hall, used often, with a nice quiet surface. Just the thing to gladden your heart, hm? He eased the door open more, cursed a complaining hinge, lifted up on the knob to silence the squeak as he persisted. Now he could slip through the doorway, but now, too, he saw that the hall had no true ceiling. Instead, a catwalk of expanded metal gratings let him see two more levels above, illuminated faintly from skylights. It was a nightmare of grid work and shadow, with tubular steel ladders spaced at intervals down the hallway, leading to higher levels through openings in the floor grate.

He was three rungs up the nearest ladder when he heard it, a single thin concussive report with a familiar ring. It seemed to have come from somewhere above. Testing our new nail gun, are we? Good careful move. But you wouldn't do it if you knew I was here. Quantrill gripped the receiver of the Chiller in his teeth, paused to gaze down the empty second-level corridor with its perforated metal floor, continued climbing to the third level. And saw a shadow obscure a skylight in someone's slow passage across the roof.

Quantrill moved as quickly as he dared, tempting faint creaks of the metal flooring as he hurried down the corridor. Three more skylights were spaced just above Quantrill, and that shadow had been moving in the same direction as he, but ahead of him. He paused, now realizing that some of those creaks were made by the man above him. You're not inside this big echo chamber, Sorel, so you can't be sure whether all these damned noises are your own.

Quantrill paused short of the next skylight, willing the heavy plastic to give him a clear view of Sorel. But dust and oxidation took their toll, and the shadow that passed above could have belonged to anybody. I'm sure it's you up there. Sorel; who else could it be? But bone deep in his training was that requirement to make utterly certain identification before he squeezed off a single round. It was faintly possible that some innocent dude was hiding out on the roof. Quantrill estimated his quarry's rate of advance and scurried forward again. He reached the turn of the upper-level corridor quickly, saw the ceiling trapdoor ahead in the dimness, and moved toward its interior ladder. If Sorel wanted to cross the street, he'd have to come down.

And Quantrill would be waiting. Unfortunately, not where he should be waiting.

He heard stealthy rustlings in the near distance, waiting for that trapdoor to open, and then felt something more than he heard it, as if a faint earth tremor had whispered through the building. He backtracked down the corridor, turned the corner, and saw Felix Sorel ten meters away, already descending a ladder to the level below. The sonofabitch had removed the skylight and dropped to the corridor floor. He'd stuffed a bulky tool, the nailgun no doubt, into his jacket front and carried his H&K sidearm in his teeth for the climb. Just like I do.

Quantrill made a lightning decision — the spaces of the perforations in that metal flooring might let a seven-millimeter slug pass, with luck — and fired a burst toward the head and shoulders of the man below. Though the Chiller's coughs were faint, the detonations of those tiny warheads were not. The series of blue-white flashes, spattering from the steel grate over Sorel's head, said that Quantrill's luck was poor. Sorel hit the second level, spun, and had the little sidearm aimed upward in less time than seemed possible. The muzzle of the H&K flashed and roared once; the heavy slug struck the grating near Quantrill's feet and shrilled away harmlessly, and then Sorel was sprinting away as Quantrill pounded after him on the level just above. It was maddening to pace a target in full view, from a commanding height, and not be able to fire. Correction: You could fire, but those slug fragments didn't care which target they found.

They had raced twenty meters when Quantrill realized that the next turn would lead them back to the vicinity of the "falling building." a big three-dimensional region that Sorel already knew. Holding his right hand splayed near his face for the pitifully small protection it afforded, Quantrill squeezed off another burst as he ran; saw several more flashes in the grate. But this time, one of those flashes erupted at the turn of the corridor just ahead of Sorel's pumping legs. Sorel grunted, slammed against the corridor wall as he rounded the corner to the left, and kept going. One of my messages get through to you, buddy?

Quantrill's next maneuver was part training, part improvisation. Instead of wheeling around the corner, he turned to face the new corridor before he reached it, bounced one-legged into the open, placed his right hand and foot against the wall, and used them to rebound backward. It gave him a fraction of a second to see ahead, and to spray a burst from the Chiller. Then he was safe behind the inside corner of the hall again.

That maneuver had saved his living bacon, for during that instant of exposure he had seen that the flooring on his level terminated with an open tubular railing, a narrow stairway leading below. Felix Sorel had been poised, his handgun extended, aiming point-blank up the stair waiting for Quantrill to appear. But that appearance had come so briefly, and with such a shower of azide-tipped lead, that Sorel had not fired once.

Did I nail you? If I did, it was sheer luck. Quantrill checked the see-through in the grip of his Chiller and saw that his magazine was nearly empty. He reached into the pocket of his right boot, the one holding a fresh magazine of explosive rounds, and made the changeover as silent and swift as possible. To cover the mechanical snicker as he slid the fresh magazine home, he spoke. "Nice try, ol' buddy."

Silence. Naturally. Maybe I'll think you're hit, or gone, and let you shoot my eye out as I peek around to see. Yeah? Well, I can hear you if you move now, and you haven't moved. "I can loosen your tongue, Sorel," he said, his voice echoing in the stillness.

For proof, he shifted the Chiller to his right hand, squatted, and poked its nose around the corner at knee height just long enough to fire several rounds in Sorel's general direction. He couldn't afford to waste a whole lot of ammo this way. but Sorel couldn't know that.

Now Felix Sorel spoke for the first time, softly-, but with its sibilant echoes down the shadowed hall: "I am hit."

"That so? Toss that little whacker of yours out to the corner. I'll be able to see it through the grating." And after you do, we'll talk about that nailgun. I'll bet it's your hole card for close quarters.

"I think not," said Sorel. "You made me underestimate your talent for this work. Perhaps you enjoy killing. I must think."

"Take your time. Bleed all you like."

A low chuckle from the shadows below. "That was an interesting move, at the stair. Now I believe my friend Coulter is truly our enemy Quantrill. You refused to play Solo yesterday. Did you know me then?"

"If I had, you'd be cold cuts now."

"One of us would," Sorel replied. "How much money do you expect to see this year?"

While you talk, my backups are on the way; surely you know that. But maybe you really do think I can be bought, or rented. Hold that thought, pal — and waste more time. Aloud he said, "More than you think. And I've got you, Sorel. That's worth a lot to me."

"Would you trade me for, say, twenty thousand dollars?"

"Toss the money out here where I can see it, and we can discuss it," Quantrill taunted. He heard a rustling, but no footfalls. I can't believe you have that much on you, and I don't really give a shit, old buddy. But take your time…

The meaning of that rustle did not become clear until a fraction of a second after Quantrill, staring down through the grating at his feet, saw the wad of currency flop scattering into view below. Of course, it drew Quantrill's attention for a wink of time.

Sorel counted on that diversion; counted on the cash to purchase time to spring five meters to the corner and empty that nailgun upward. Felix Sorel, still unhurt except for a welt across his back, knew Bonaparte's prescription for victory: audacity, always audacity. He choreographed his change of pace with wonderful precision, appearing almost beneath

Quantrill, nailgun held high, cycling its entire load of slender steel darts in the spray that lasted between one and two seconds. Quantrill reacted quickly enough to throw his forearms up before him and was leaping back as Sorel emptied the nailgun.

Those eight-penny nails were slender enough to pass easily through the grating, and five of them did. One drove itself deep into a boot heel, penetrating the tough flesh of Quantrill's right heel without doing much real damage. The second passed through Quantrill's left palm and blunted against the grip of the Chiller. The third pierced the flesh of his scalp at his hairline above the right eye, deflected by his skull, its tip emerging slightly. The fourth and fifth were clean misses.

Quantrill spun away, his Chiller clattering into the open as Sorel dived in the opposite direction. There was no reasonable possibility that he might retrieve the Chiller, because Sorel could nail him while vaulting those stairs. With one brilliant sally, Sorel had reversed the roles of hunter and quarry.

As it had done so many times before, Quantrill's body responded with that surge of noradrenaline that sent his universe into slow motion. To face Sorel at the landing was certain suicide, but the man had dived away and might need two seconds or so to reach the bottom of the stair. Quantrill was already sprinting down the hall toward the skylight Sorel had removed, ignoring the slivers of steel in his hand and forehead. He heard feet pounding up the stair and leaped for the wooden frame of the opening, catching it with both hands, unheeding of the pain in his left, hauling himself frantically upward. It was sheer luck that he kicked his legs when he did, for the nine-millimeter round, fired as Sorel paused to make an unhurried shot at twenty-five-meter range, passed between them.

Quantrill heard racing footsteps again as he levered his body over the rim of the opening and pulled his legs into a tuck, rolling to one side. He kept rolling across the graveled roof, came up in a crouch. Thank God you're getting stingy with your ammo. I wonder if you took the Chiller, pal. And I wonder if you know what'll happen if somebody whose thumb-print doesn't match mine tries to fire it. See the pretty Chiller, Sorel. Try it out. Surprise!

Having lost the initiative and his weapon. Quantrill saw the futility of further attacks. He grimaced, tugging at the nail through his palm. The damned thing was now blunt at both ends. He'd known a Chiller round might pass through that steel grating, so why hadn't he realized an eight-penny finishing nail could do it better? He scanned the roof as he pulled on that nail, swiping once at the blood trickling into his right eye, using the trick of turning his attention away from the site of his agony. He heard footsteps, quick but not loud, below. A moment later another in the line of skylight bubbles popped upward, falling back askew. It seemed unlikely that a man of Sorel's size could spring high enough to unseat a skylight with his hands, but it was happening. Wonderful, you fucking soccer jock, but why?

When a third widely spaced bubble flipped clear of its rim, Quantrill saw the point. Sorel was giving himself several well-spaced options for emerging onto the roof, and without a weapon Quantrill could not attend to them all at once. The nail in his palm was slippery now, and, running in a crouch, Quantrill chipped a tooth wrestling the thing from his flesh. It didn't hurt all that much — and then it did as he shoved the skewed skylight back into position without making himself a target. No sound came from below. That's okay, good buddy, I see about twenty people hotfooting it down the road north of here. No more hostages but me. It came to him then that if he were injured just enough, he might be a very useful hostage after all. His bloody handprint on that skylight rim must've been a great encouragement to Sorel. He called out, "Sorel! You want to discuss terms?"

No response. What would I be doing in your place? Misdirecting you. The trapdoor to the roof at the far end of the hall was fifty meters distant. Quantrill- guessed right and was running across the roof expanse away from it before Sorel popped it upward.

Ventilators and vent pipes, standing proud of the roofline, made a scattered forest of metal trunks providing some cover. Quantrill passed up an external ladder that led down the backside of the building; a man who could nail a horse at a hundred long paces could certainly pick a man off a nearby ladder, even if he tried a fireman's descent. Up ahead, the roofline dropped one story, revealing external girders and catwalks behind a false front of numbered blocks that looked like stone. It was obviously the assembled falling building, and those special effects men had left it by an internal stairwell. Sorel had to know the terrain; he'd probably watched those poor devils for ten minutes getting near enough to surprise them. The upcurled rails of a roof ladder stood just ahead, and Quantrill went over the roof by grasping one rail in his right hand, swinging around and downward to keep his profile low, catching the other rail in his bloody left hand as his feet found the side rails. Sorel's slug cut a groove through the gravel and sang away between the curled rails just over his head. Expected me to go up and over the usual way, did you? Give me some credit, pal. No, don't. Keep underestimating me…

His insteps sliding down the side rails, hands flashing down two rungs at a time, Quantrill dropped the last two meters and saw a fire door yawning open a few steps away. He fled through it, ruining a fingernail in the effort to fling it shut behind him. The damned thing was heavy, swinging shut with a lovely solid thunkk, but taking so much time in its swing that Quantrill heard the impact of Sorel's feet on the second-floor roof. You wondrous bastard, you simply went over the edge without the ladder. Keep it up and you'll break your fucking neck. But by that time Quantrill was hurtling down the dim stairwell. The way he'd been taught, only four steps at a time, gripping the banister briefly with his good hand at each bound. He dodged onto the familiar sidewalk with a flash of deja vu, glancing up as he ran, knowing Sorel was still on the roof because no sound came from the stairwell. He saw directly above, outlined against the late morning sky and at first in eldritch silence, the upper part of the building lean out and begin to topple.