فصل پنجاه و یکم

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The Bull and the Bullet

The Minotaur hit the Gunner as he rounded the corner, coming out of nowhere, hard and low, powerful as a speeding car, horns hooking evilly up and sideways.

There was a concussive thump of impact, and the noise of the air being knocked out of the Gunner mixed with the fierce grunt the Minotaur made as it bunched its massive neck muscles and tossed him up and over its back.

The horns caught in the bridle chains on the Gunner’s belt, and sent them jingling across the wet pavement.

The Gunner hit the ground and rolled and skidded to a halt against a concrete tub in a great spray of rainwater.

The Minotaur turned.

And it was only when it turned that George saw that its arms were crossed over its chest, in a grotesque parody of cradling a baby—except the thing it was cradling was no baby, but Edie.

It was no Edie that George had ever seen. She was so pale she seemed a pearl-colored ghost of herself clutched against the blackened bronze of the Bull’s chest like a rag doll. Her eyes were shut, and George had a horrid thought that she was dead—until he saw the working of her lips as they repeatedly tried to say something, like a sleep talker.

“EDIE!” he shouted.

Wherever she’d gone inside her head was a place from which she couldn’t hear him. The Minotaur stamped the ground with one of his hooves, and George felt the whole walkway shake like worlds colliding.

The Minotaur held one hand out and made a very human beckoning gesture at him.

“Stay put,” growled the Gunner, hoisting himself to his feet and stumbling in between the beast and the boy.

“What are we going to do?” said George, voice catching in a suddenly dry throat.

“I’m gonna drill the beggar.”

He pulled his revolver and pointed it at the Minotaur.

“Oi. Bully-beef. Over here.”

The Minotaur tensed when he saw the gun.

“But you haven’t got a—” began George.

“Yeah, I have,” said the Gunner without breaking eye contact with the Bull over the notch sight on the revolver.

“But you swore—”

The Bull and the Bullet “Too clever by half, the Walker. You want to fool a bloke who thinks he’s made of brains, try something simple. Kept my thumb over one chamber when I shook the rest of ‘em out. We got one shot here.” “But you broke your oath!”

The Gunner’s face tightened, all the planes flattening into a defensive mask of indifference.

“My choice. The girl didn’t sign up for this. Can’t let it happen.” “But you’ll—”

“Don’t want to hear it,” snapped the Gunner. He raised his chin at the Minotaur. “Put her down, Oxo. Nice and gentle.” The Minotaur didn’t put Edie down. He shook her out of his arms, hanging limp and ragged as a tea towel, and held her by the shoulders in front of his torso like a shield.

“Nasty blighter, aren’t you?” said the Gunner.

The Minotaur snorted.

Blam!

The revolver rocked in the Gunner’s hand. The Minotaur didn’t move. The detonation woke Edie, and her eyes struggled to make sense of where she was.

“Wha—?” was all she managed to say.

The Minotaur threw back its head and roared in a blast of rage and, George realized, triumph. The sound of the roaring echoed off the concrete buildings around them. Then it lowered its head and growled dangerously.

George couldn’t believe his eyes.

“What happened?”

The Gunner swallowed.

“I missed.”

George felt like the walls of the world were falling in on him. His chest felt tight, and breathing started to be a problem.

“What do you mean, you missed?” he asked jerkily.

“I didn’t hit it.” He looked at his gun in disbelief. “My luck must have started to turn already.” “You’re the Gunner. You don’t miss!” George hissed. “You said so!” “I also said don’t believe everything people tell you.” There was a pause as George’s brain wobbled alarmingly on its gimbals.

“No, you didn’t! You didn’t say that!”

“Oh.” The Gunner looked faintly embarrassed. “Well, I should have.” He cleared his throat and spat into a puddle. “I’m saying it now.” The Minotaur was pawing the ground. Actually, he was pawing concrete and raising nasty ridges with his hoof as easily as if the concrete had been butter.

“Shoot it again,” said George urgently. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was in full pre-panic mode. “Shoot it before it charges.” “With what?” asked the Gunner. He broke open his revolver. The spent shell casing hit the puddle at their feet in a mocking, empty tinkle and plop.

The Bull and the Bullet “I’m out of bullets. Remember?” Now it wasn’t just the walls closing in. The floor dropped out of George’s world.

“WHAT?”

The Gunner showed him the empty gun.

“Bu—Wha—Then how are you going to rescue her?” George burbled.

The Gunner shrugged with a fatalistic gesture George felt was entirely out of keeping with the seriousness of their predicament. Twenty feet away there was death, calmly plowing concrete with its hoof.

Edie just stared at them, her eyes spread wide in shock.

“Dunno, son. I mean, with another bullet maybe I can blow him into tomorrow, and we’ll be long gone; but without a round to put up the spout”—he pointed at the Minotaur—”he’ll rip me open from stem to stern. And you and all. And you know what Minotaurs do to little girls?” “No”

There was a pause. The Gunner sniffed.

“Lucky you. Best not think about it. They’re messy eaters.” George was hopping up and down in frustration.

“So what can we do?”

“Go down fighting?” said the Gunner.

George didn’t want to go down, fighting or no fighting. The Gunner’s attitude was tough and brave, but for the first time he found it—annoying. He needed to think. . . .

His hand thrust into his pocket and reflexively kneaded and shmooshed at the plasticene blob. And suddenly he knew.

“Give me the empty shell.”

“What?”

“DO IT!”

The Gunner reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the empty casings. He flicked it over his shoulder. George’s scarred hand reached out and caught it on reflex.

“I’m going to make a bullet.”

The Gunner turned one stunned eye on him.

“You what?”

George was already wodging the plasticine into the empty shell casing. The Gunner snorted.

“Out of plasticene?”

George didn’t even look up. His hands were working fast.

“If I’m this ‘maker,’if this scar is the mark of a maker, then why not? I’ll make a bullet!” “Yeah, but plasticene …”

“You’re made of bronze, but you’re soft enough to move. No reason why it shouldn’t work the other way. If I make it well enough. Like you said, it’s not just the material, it’s what you make of it,” said George. “Keep your eye on the Bull.” There was new mettle in George’s voice, and the Gunner found he was swiveling both eyes forward as he’d been told. As he’d been ordered. He whistled slowly.

“You’re the boss. But speed up a bit, because he’s about ready to steam in and try to hook us.” There was a scuff of hoof on paving stone, and a soft thud as the Minotaur dropped Edie.

“Here he comes.”

“Slow him down. Buy me time,” snapped George.

“Yes, sir,” said the Gunner through a tight smile. “Here. Cop hold of this. I’m gonna have my hands full.” He handed the revolver backward, fast, and then turned to meet the charging Minotaur head-on.

The horns went to either side of his waist, and the Gunner threw himself into a backward roll, letting the force of the impact keep them going. George had to leap sideways to avoid being steamrollered flat by the two falling statues. The bullet shape got mashed flat in his fall.

He ran across to Edie, who was sprawled over the edge of a concrete planter. He heard a crash behind him, and saw that the Gunner and the Minotaur had rolled in a complete somersault. The clash had been the Gunner’s boots hitting the ground again and bracing himself. He held the Bull’s horns like bicycle handles as the Minotaur bulldozered him across the paving toward the edge of the walkway.

Sparks flew as the hobnails on his boots were scraped back across the stone beneath.

George grabbed the sea-glass out of his pocket and closed Edie’s limp hands on it. He heard her murmur, but didn’t get what she was saying because he was busy rolling the plasticene in his hand.

“Hurry up, son!” shouted the Gunner.

George was already repairing the bullet he was trying to make.

Edie saw what he was doing. Her eyes were suddenly blazing, as if the intensity of the sea-glass were coursing through her body and beaming out of them.

“Good, George. Make it work.”

He didn’t have time to nod. He rolled and molded the plasticene.

The Gunner was backed up against the railing. A drop beckoned beyond, down into a busy street. He was fighting the immense power of the Minotaur’s bovine muscles. He clenched his teeth and pushed back.

“Thing . . . about you, Oxo, is that . . . you’d make someone a very . . . nice . . . stew. Or a rissole.” The Minotaur shook its horns. The Gunner held on and rode the spasm.

“You know what rissoles are, don’t you, Oxo?” The Minotaur snapped his head right and left. The Gunner only just held on.

“They’re sort of meatballs. Now—there’s a thought.” And his iron-shod ammunition boot swung brutally upward between the straining legs of the Minotaur like a sledgehammer. He kicked with all the pent-up force in his body, and the Bull’s feet jerked an inch off the ground as his boot clunked home.

The Minotaur bellowed in pain and fury. George felt the force of the roar hit him like a shock wave. The earlier echoing bellow was a whisper in comparison. The Bull shook loose and tried to gore the Gunner right through the chest. The Gunner twisted sideways, and the impact sent more sparks flying off the railing behind him.

“Make it, George,” said Edie urgently.

He ducked his head and concentrated on the plas-ticene and the empty casing. He worked it into a flattened cone. As he worked he tried not to hear the grunting and clashing beyond him. He thought of bullets. He thought of what they can do. He thought of what he’d seen them do. He saw them pulverizing the salamanders at the Gunner’s memorial. He saw the Raven blown to feathers, twice. He saw the gargoyle blown to powder on the cage at the Monument. He remembered the bullets in the Gunners hands as he calmly reloaded. He imagined the force that a bullet carries as it crashes through its target. As he thought of what a bullet was, of what he’d seen, of how they looked, he found his hands loosening and almost working by themselves, almost as if they knew what he was doing. And, he noticed, the pain of the scar stopped completely.

He smoothed the top of the plasticene bullet, and with the nail of his thumb, traced a delicate circle around the top of it, just as he had seen on the real bullets.

He broke the gun and stuck the bullet in it, as he’d seen the Gunner do.

There was a sudden whirlwind of flailing legs and hooves and horns as the two statues crashed past. They hit a concrete tub of plants so hard that it cracked and spilled earth onto the ground around their scrabbling, brawling bodies. George ran across and held out the gun.

“Done it!”

And the Gunner looked at him, and in that instant the Minotaur saw an opening and hooked a horn through his midriff.

It flashed and sparked like a grinding wheel as the sharp point went in low and to the side.

“Uh,” said the Gunner in shock.

George couldn’t believe the Gunner was gored.

Not after he’d come back.

Not after he’d thought he was dead.

The Minotaur jerked its head, twisting the horn in the wound with the ferocity of a terrier shaking a rat, pushing the Gunner back to the railing high above the street below. The Gunner took the railing in the small of his back as he raised his hands to club down on the Bull’s neck. His hands changed direction and scrabbled ineffectually at the rail.

George was horrified. The Gunner surely hadn’t just come back to die again? He felt the black taste in his mouth, felt it tingle spikily in his nose, and found he was running forward, cocking the gun with both thumbs and aiming right at the thick-boned crown of the Bull’s head.

“Eye,” grunted the Gunner.

George stepped around the side and adjusted his aim. Not for an instant did the blackness give him room to think that the gun would not fire. He’d made a bullet. That was all he knew. And now he was going to use it to save his friend. His friends.

The Minotaur’s eye rolled up and looked down the barrel of the gun. It was full of nothing but hate and appetite, and as it roared and pushed, George took up the slack on the trigger.

And then, before the gun fired, there was a crack, and the Minotaur and the Gunner were gone.

George’s world had narrowed into such a tightly focused cone of vision that he had to step back to make sense of what was happening. His finger loosened on the trigger as he did so.

The Minotaur had pushed the Gunner over the railing, which had buckled, sending them both into thin air over the busy street.

George swung over the void to see what had happened.

Crash!

The Gunner and the Minotaur sprawled in impact on the red roof of a double-decker bus. As they hit, the Gunner twisted, and the horn slid out of his side like a sword leaving its scabbard.

He had enough strength to boot the Bull’s face and send it over the edge of the roof. The Bull’s hand clamped onto the side as the bus pulled away, unaware of the Minotaur hanging from its offside rear and the Gunner spread-eagled on top of it.

Edie joined George at the railing.

“He’s hurt!”

“Yeah,” said George, hoping she hadn’t noticed that it was him talking to the Gunner that had caused him to take his eyes off the Minotaur for the crucial second it took for him to get gored. “We better get after him.” They ran for a staircase.

“Hide the gun,” said Edie.

He snatched a look at her.

“People don’t notice us when we’re with the spits because they can’t see them and so we don’t make sense. But two kids on the street, one carrying a cannon like that? Do the math!” He saw she was back to her old self and decided not to comment on it as they descended the spiral staircase to the street, three steps at a time.