“You will all die,” the Kurian squealed. “Those creatures out there will not leave so much as an earlobe uneaten. I’ve called for them. You will die if you don’t release me.”
“I will die,” she said. “I’m mortal. You’re not, but I’m prepared to put the issue to a vote. All in favor of turning you into octopus salad? Sorry, fucker, the vote’s unanimous.”
The image blurred and she was left holding a writhing octopus shape. Tentacles lashed at her face, leaving painful welts that brought tears to her eyes.
She ran for the window. The Kurian managed to get a limb around her neck and it tightened. In turn she clenched her neck, bending her jaw forward to put space around her voice box.
A black curtain rose across her vision and the lights began to twinkle behind the curtain.
The snake around her neck gave one final yank and then released, taking some hair on the back of her neck and leaving a raw burn.
Rolf, bellowing in Norwegian, held the Kurian aloft above her, reminding her for a fleeting moment of a picture she’d seen in an old book of an ancient warrior with the head of Medusa. For a moment she thought he was going to make a Kurian kebab, but instead he burst out of the scrum and made for the lobby. She followed, knocking over a Lifeweaver who’d appeared out of nowhere blabbing something about diplomatic immunity.
Rolf went to the lobby windows and stabbed his chair-leg spear into a vast pane, breaking the glass out of the second-floor overlook on the courtyard. The Big Mouths, so tightly packed that their backs resembled a writhing, rock-covered beach, turned their toothy faces up at the noise. He tried to throw the Kurian, but it clung to his arm, chest, and face with a whipping mass of tentacles. Blood ran from the gory pulp of one of Rolf’s eyes. He yelled something in Norwegian and threw himself through the glass.
The Kurian let out a gassy hoot as they fell together.
Rolf flailed back and forth with the chair leg, breaking jaws and turning great-fish eyes to pulp with his blows. He fended the Big Mouths off with the Kurian wrapped about his arm. It flailed in all directions with its tentacles, now fewer in number, some having been bitten off by the snapping jaws all around.
A fitting end for the Last Bear of Trondheim.
Still, the Big Mouths crashed through the feeble barriers and the glass of the lower level.
The Finns worked in layers. Teams of men with shotguns gave short-range cover to soldiers with big support machine guns in slings. The crackle of gunfire was so intense it sounded like surf.
The machine gunners took Big Mouths down in rows. Then the shotgun men blew basketball-sized holes in the wounded with their open-choke riot models until they gave only an occasional twitch.
Rifle fire from the handlers was returned by snipers on the roof of the conference center. The Finns were as methodical and efficient with their weapons as they were with street cleaners, and once a couple were shot down the rest fled.
The Big Mouths, caught in a feeding frenzy, either died gorging themselves or followed their handlers back to the waterfront. Duvalier had no way of knowing it, but fast-moving “cavalry” on bicycles had already stormed the wharf—they were retreating to a slaughter-yard.
“Glad that’s over with,” she rasped. The words came out like they had been dragged across sandpaper. She extracted a hook from her neck, a claw the Kurian had left there when he was ripped from her grasp by Rolf. It was blackish and translucent at the edges. She’d never been one to take souvenirs of the dead—explaining why you had a chain of Reaper teeth could cause difficulties for a Cat—but she decided she’d keep this one, at least through the voyage home.
Looking in the bathroom mirror back at what was left of the hotel, she saw that she had so many marks on her neck from the Kurian’s suckers that it looked as though she’d been trying to win a hickey scavenger hunt.
What chance did humanity have, without the Lifeweavers? No Lifeweavers meant no Hunters, and no Hunters meant the Reapers had nothing to fear.
She’d known Christians who’d had a crisis of faith. Sometimes it was the little things that sent them into despair, a single death from disease rather than a trench full of corpses. The Lifeweavers, to her, always explained the inexplicable. They took the long view, saw temporary losses as just that. They never panicke
d at bad news or rejoiced in a victory.
If they had given up on Earth, what hope had anyone?
Maybe the delegates should have taken the deal.
Her stomach was killing her. She should never have had that roast. She should have kept her diet light, a little rice and soup would have done nicely.
A hot bath would relax her.
Her hair needed a little trim. The part where the Kurian had ripped out even her quite short hair had made everything uneven. Using her sharp skinning knife, she did her best to even things up a little. She accidentally cut her thumb in the process. It was a slice running perhaps a quarter inch deep at its deepest, and it bled profusely.
Sucking at the cut, she decided the pain wasn’t so bad.
God, she was closer to forty than thirty. How had she lived so long? Sooner or later the odds would catch up with her; they always did.
She should have investigated Von Krebs more carefully, gone to that house on the gulf better prepared. Were it not for fortune, the whole population of Kokkola might be working its way through those damn Big Mouth digestive tracts right now.
It was the easiest thing in the world to make a long cut in her arm, running parallel to the bones. She was used to creating wounds without the hesitation stabs of a novice. She admired the work, the brilliant red line as straight as a sure-handed surgeon would make.