Finally managing to bat the errant cancer-stick well away from his crotch, the partner turned to face me, gun up. I put my hand to the grill, just over its muzzle, and smiled. Handcuffs sliding down my gauntlets like sweaty mercury, already going liquid. Beside him, the driver, radio in hand: “Sir, yeah, I think we have a situation here—”
Starting to go for the burn.
The gun smoked and softened, and the cop shrieked, dropping it. The driver turned white. The radio kept right on chattering: “Disengage and pull over, repeat, pull over. Do nothing to perforate Vosloo’s protective shell. Patrolman. Patrolman. Red one. Red two, do you copy?”
“Ever wonder what it would’ve been like to make a drop from the Enola Gay, right at the moment of impact?” I asked the guy on the right, conversationally.
“I have kids,” he managed, holding tight to what was left of his fingers.
“That’s nice. Boys or girls?”
From the corner of my eye I saw the driver had finally got his gun free—so I punched right through the fiery hot spot in the grill, spraying his incredulous, half-turned face with glowing metal. The partner, making a remarkable mid-cringe recovery, lunged for the wheel, and I hit him across the face as I pulled my hand back through the grill. He fell sideways, gasping as his nose bled.
The car lurched over some kind of curb, jouncing badly, skidding across a divider and up onto an exit ramp. I glanced back into the rear-view mirror, and saw the Impala swerve to follow. The radio had already cut off, abruptly, in mid-blare.
That’s right. No more time for talking, not now.
I sighed, letting my head loll back, right hand already at my throat, little finger snagged in the key of my zipper. With that flush boiling up through me like incipient fever, flesh hot as gangrene;
veins like wires, laid bare and sparkling.
The Impala sped up, squad car jolting as they tried to run it off the road. Then metal screeched and dragged as the bumpers locked. We hurtled forward while the road curved out from under us, well away from the yawning chasm—
Just me, or is it getting hot in here?
The doctor leaned on the horn. The soldier unholstered his gun.
And I . . .
. . . let it rip.
* * *
I broke through the roof as it peeled away and hit the cliffside with far more force than I’d expected, missing a rock-borne head injury by a mere hair’s breadth. By the sound of that grinding snap my left arm made on impact, I assumed it was probably broken; I also seemed to have either developed a permanent stitch in my side, or cracked several of the same side’s ribs. The whole sole of my boot had ripped away, exposing scalded skin to the hissing rain: No tape, no coverage, about sixty seconds left until the next combustive blast. And . . . I had lost my goggles.
I lay limp for a moment, letting the mud seep around me, and felt my bones slowly begin to defuse. Because it was so nice there beneath the overhang, down amongst the trees’ bare roots, where erosion had made everything soft and loose and cool and dark—soft enough to cradle, cool enough to soothe. Dark enough, almost, to actually put me out.
But the lit seed in my stomach told me otherwise, every time I took another blood-laced swallow of rain.
I pushed myself up by my good arm, stumbled, then stood—wavering a little—to watch the lovely orange storm below, Impala and squad car melting from the inside out, caught in the act like some pyrolangist’s ultimate wet-dream. A chance updraft hit me full in the face, gusting my eyes shut, and I revelled in its reviving heat: Sparks singing my clotted hair, soot blackening my face. And still I stood fast, quite transfixed, drinking in the wave in all its complex, terrible, all-consuming glory.
But not afraid, no. Because, after all, the wave could never hurt me.
I know it far too well—too intimately—for that.
* * *
So now, I wait. I know that Charlie assumes I died in the crash—a scenario which Battaglia, yapping at his heels as usual, was no doubt all too eager to suggest. The sun is up and it hurts my eyes, naked without the protection of my goggles—just a pair of dark glasses and a triple layer of fresh electrician’s tape, up here where I roost amongst the pigeons, above Charlie’s penthouse balcony.
It took me an hour and a half to get back to Mr. Pang’s, and my supplies. An hour and a half of cold rain in my eyes, abraded skin on wet asphalt and sizzling sparks inside that wouldn’t ever quite go out, always poised and waiting for the rain to let up just a little, even while I wended my way through Chinatown.
Soon enough, however, noon will come and Charlie will wake, pulling his incongruously gaudy velvet curtains aside to face the day. He’ll step out onto the balcony in that checkered bathrobe of his, yawning and stretching—maybe praying, even. Who knows.
Which is when I’ll slip down on him, silent and swift: The wave made shaky, igneous flesh. Ground Zero crashing in at last, consuming him, as it must us all.
And when only his bones are left, long after those bones are nothing but a fine, grey, rendered ash like that of a slow-burning cigarette, then I’ll go home. And go to sleep.
Thinking: All in all, a good night’s work.