Dies the Fire (5 page)

The policeman was backing up and looking around as he drew his nightstick. He was twenty years older than any of the three men walking towards him, and nobody else was left this close to the fires; the roaring of their approach was loud, and it was chokingly hot.

“Oh,
hell,
” Dennis said. “Now I gotta do something
really
stupid.”

He picked up the fire ax he'd brought from the Hopping Toad and walked out towards the policeman.

Juniper swallowed and looked around her, then at the storefront behind them. They'd broken it open for the tools they needed; she made a quick decision and dashed inside, taking the lantern with her. She hesitated at the axes and machetes and shovels . . . but she wasn't sure she could hit a human being with one, even if she had to. Instead she picked a bare ax helve out of a rack of them, giving thanks that redevelopment hadn't gotten this far yet and turned the place into a wine bar or an aromatherapy salon.

Stay here,
she signed to Eilir.
Get out the back way if you have to.

Then she turned and dashed out into the street; the firelight had gotten appreciably brighter in the few seconds it had taken. Dennis and the policeman were backed up against the pickup, and there was a turmoil of motion around them as the three street toughs feinted and lunged.

No time to waste on subtlety or warnings,
she thought.

Especially not when all her potential opponents were stronger than she was, and would probably enjoy adding rape to theft and murder.

She ran forward, her steps soundless under the bellow of the fire that was only a block away now and both hands firmly clamped on the varnished wood. Dennis gave her away simply by the way his eyes went wide as he stared over his opponent's shoulder.

The man with the tire iron was turning when she hit him; instead of the back of his head, the hardwood cracked into the side of it, over the temple. Juniper Mackenzie wasn't a large woman—five-three, and slim—but she'd split a
lot
of firewood in her thirty years, and playing guitar professionally needed strong hands. The unpleasant crunching feel of breaking bone shivered back up the ax handle into her hands, and she froze for a moment, knowing that she'd probably killed a man.

Oh, Goddess, I didn't mean it!
she thought, staring as he dropped with a boneless limpness.

Dennis had different reflexes, or perhaps he'd merely had enough adrenaline pumped into his system by the brief lethal fight. He punched the head of the ax into the gut of the giant with the baseball bat, and followed up with a roundhouse swing that would have taken an arm off at the shoulder if the big man hadn't thrown himself backward with a speed surprising in someone that size.

The blade scored his left arm instead of chopping it, and he fled clutching it and screaming curses; he sounded more angry than hurt. His smaller friend with the Balisong ran backward away from the suddenly long odds, the flickering menace of his knife discouraging thoughts of pursuit.

He halted a dozen paces away, his eyes coldly unafraid; they were an unexpected blue, slanted in a thin amber-colored face. Juniper met them for an instant, feeling a prickle down her neck and shoulders.

“Yo, bitch!” he called, shooting out his left hand with the middle finger pointing at her. “Chico there was a friend of mine. Maybe we'll meet again, get to know each other better. My name is Eddie Liu—remember that!”

Then he looked over Juniper's shoulder, shrugged, turned and followed his bigger friend in a light, bounding run.

She turned to see Eilir coming up with an ax handle of her own, and her gaze went back to her friend and the policeman.

“Either of you hurt?” she said.

Dennis leaned back against the wrecked truck, shaking his head and blowing like a walrus, his heavy face turned purple-red and running sweat beyond what the gathering heat would have accounted for. The policeman had a bleeding slash across the palm of his left hand where he'd fended off the Balisong.

Juniper tossed down her ax handle, suddenly disgusted with the feel of it, and helped him bandage his wound. Out of the corner of her eye she was conscious of Dennis recovering a little, and dragging off the body of the man she'd—

Hit. I just hit him. I had to,
she thought.
I
really
had to.

She was still thankful he moved it, and avoided looking at the damp track the bobbing head left on the pavement.

“You folks ought to get out of here,” the policeman said. “I've got to get to the station and find out what's going on. Go home if you're far enough from the fire, or head up to campus if you're not.”

He walked away, limping slightly and holding his injured left hand against his chest; the nightstick was ready in his right. Juniper pulled her daughter to her and held her, shivering. She looked into Dennis's eyes; her friend wasn't quite as purple now, but he looked worse somehow.

They started up Monroe, heading back towards the Hopping Toad in silence. Dennis stopped for an instant, picked up the revolver of the looter she'd . . . hit . . . and weighed it in one big beefy hand. Then he pointed the weapon towards a building and pulled the trigger five times.

“Remember what the fireman said?” Juniper asked quietly. “About the
dynamite
not working? And what are the odds of that many cartridges not working?”

“You know,” he said in his mild voice, “I never really liked guns. Not dead set against 'em like John, but I never liked 'em. But . . . y'know, Juney, I've got this feeling we're going to miss them. Pretty bad.”

S
he's sinking fast,
Havel thought as he scrabbled at the restraining belts that held him into the pilot's seat.

Got to get
out!
Out!

“Mom's hurt, Mom's hurt!” a voice shouted, almost screamed; Signe Larsson, he thought. “She can't move!”

The interior of the plane was dark as a coffin, groaning and tilting, popping as bits of metal gave way. The gurgling inrush of water was cold enough to feel like burning when it touched skin.

Oh, hell,
Havel thought as he reached across to the copilot's seat; Kenneth Larsson was hanging in his harness, unconscious.

A quick hand on the throat felt a pulse.
Just what we fucking needed.
Getting this limp slab of beef out in time wasn't going to be easy.

“Calm down and get the belts off her,” he said as he unhitched the elder Larsson; the flexing weight slid into his arms, catching on things in the dark, and the water was up to his waist. A little more light—more of a lighter blackness—came through the rear hatch, which Eric Larsson had apparently gotten open. The cat was screeching in its box—

A thin sound cut through it, like a rabbit squealing in a trap. Havel's teeth skinned back unseen; he'd heard that sound before, from a man badly wounded.

Signe Larsson shouted: “Oh, God, Mom's hurt inside, something's broken, I can't move her—”

“Get her out now or you'll both fucking drown!” he snapped.

The floor of the plane was tilting ever steeper; probably only the buoyancy of the wing tanks was keeping it from going straight to the bottom.

“Out, out,
out!
” he shouted. “Now!”

She must have obeyed; at least he didn't run into anyone when he scrambled into the passenger compartment himself and pulled the inert form of her father through behind him. Mary Larsson probably weighed a good bit less than her strapping tennis-and-field-hockey daughter. Kenneth Larsson's frame carried nearly a hundred pounds more than the pilot's one-seventy-five.

Contortions in the dark got Larsson's solid weight across his back, with an arm over his shoulder and clamped in his left hand to keep him from slipping back, and Havel began crawling forward with the rising water at his heels; it was more like climbing, with the plane going down by the nose.

Breath wheezed between his teeth; he'd pay for it later, but right now legs and right arm worked like pistons, pushing him up past the four seats—thank God it was a small plane.

When he got to the doorway a hand came back and felt around; he put it on Larsson's collar, and the man's son hauled away, dragging the infuriating weight off Havel's back and out into the night as Havel boosted from below. That was fortunate, because just then the inrushing water won its fight, and the Chieftain sank with its nose straight down.

“Christ Jesus!”
Havel shouted, forcing down panic as a solid door-sized jet of icy water smashed into him, nearly tearing his hand free of its grip on the hatchway; the torrent continued for an instant, and then he was submerged and weightless—floating, as the plane sank towards the bottom.

He felt the jarring thud as the nose struck the tumbled rocks at the bottom of the mountain river.

Don't get disoriented now or you
will
die,
he told himself grimly, hanging on to the hatch; he arched his head upward, and there was a small air bubble trapped in the tail space in back of the hatch—
above
the hatch, now. He coughed water out of his lungs and took three deep fast breaths in blackness so absolute it was like cold wet rubber pressed against his eyes.

He
thought
the tail was still pointing up—the current would probably flip the little ship over on her back in a second or two, though.

Get the hell out of here, gyrene,
he told himself.

It was still hard to pull his face out of the illusory safety of the bubble. He did, and then jerked himself through the hatch, pushing upward with all the wiry strength of his legs. The cold gnawed inward; water like this would kill you in ten minutes or less, and his sodden coat pulled at him. His head broke the surface with a gasp, and the moonlight was like a flare after the darkness of the sunken plane.

“Over here!” he heard; Astrid Larsson's voice, and then her sister Signe joining her. “Over here! Dad, Eric, over here!”

They were calling from the north bank about twenty feet away; he couldn't make much of it out, except a looming shadow, but he struck out in that direction, forcing limbs to move. The current was pulling at him too; he fought it doggedly. When he got close enough the girls held out sticks to him; he ignored them, clamped a hand on the trunk of a providential fallen pine, and levered himself up.

“Eric, Eric!” one of the Larsson girls called.

He turned his head; Eric Larsson was right behind him, sculling on his back with his father floating alongside on his back, held in an efficient-looking one-armed clamp. Havel turned to help him haul the dead weight out of the water, grunting through the chattering of his teeth.

“Good work, kid,” he said, as they pulled the older man up the slope and onto a ledge a little above the water, laying him down beside his wife.

Didn't think you had it in you,
he didn't add.

“Senior year swim team,” the boy stuttered. “Signe too. God, God, what's wrong with Mom?”

“Death from hypothermia, unless we get a fire started,” Havel said; his fingers had gone numb and clumsy, and it was getting hard to make them work.

The temperature wasn't all that low, a couple of degrees below freezing, but they'd all been soaked to the skin by water as cold as water could get and not turn into solid ice; and a wet body lost heat twenty-five times faster than a dry one. Plus it was going to get a lot colder before sunrise.

He had a firestarter kit in one pocket of the jacket—it was the main reason he hadn't shed it. The place they'd landed was good as anything likely to be close by, fairly dry and with a steep rise right behind it, even a bit of an overhang about twelve feet up. He gathered fir needles and leaves and twigs with hands that felt like flippers belonging to a seal a long way away, heaped them up and applied the lighter. Flames crackled, stuttered through the damp tinder, then caught solidly.

“Careful!” he said, as Signe Larsson came up with an armful of fallen branches. “One at a time. Check that they're not too damp first. Get more and stack it near the fire to dry out.”

The fire grew, ruddy and infinitely comforting; he moved the two older Larssons to lie between it and the wall, where reflected heat would help a bit. As the light grew he tried to examine them as best he could; their children crowded around. The youngsters didn't have anything but scrapes and bruises, but the parents . . .

“Your dad's had a bad knock on the head,” he said. “He'll be all right.”
I hope,
he added to himself; a concussion was no joke.

Mrs. Larsson was a different story; semiconscious, and shivering uncontrollably. He turned her head to the light. No concussion there, thank God for small mercies.