Thicker Than Water

At the far end of the walkway I scooted down a second, identical set of steps. Then I just ducked to the side, behind a narrow parapet wall maybe three inches taller than my head, and waited. Now I could hear him coming, because he was out on the bridge and there was no way to cross those echoing boards both quickly and quietly: and by the same token I was hoping that, because the noise he was making drowned out the noise I wasn’t, he didn’t know that I’d stopped.

I tensed, getting ready to jump him. He hadn’t looked too hefty, but it was probably still better to hit hard and ask questions afterwards. I had plenty of questions I wanted to ask.

But the sound of footsteps died away above me, just as they reached the top of the stairs. Had I blown my cover somehow? I glanced up, saw nothing between the slats.

The moment stretched, way past the point where it could have been explained by the guy tying a shoelace or pausing to catch his breath. From where he was, he presumably had a good view both up and down the street: maybe he’d waited up there to see s this which way I went: in which case he had to have twigged by now that I hadn’t come back into view, so unless he was a peerless moron my pathetic ambush stood revealed. I was just about ready to jump out of hiding, sprint back up the steps and see if I could catch the guy before he bolted. But before I could, the sound of footsteps resumed. Someone was coming down the steps towards me: coming down slowly, with long pauses for thought or reconnaissance.

Reverting to Plan A, I got myself into a tackling crouch. The steps at my head height creaked one by one, in descending sequence - an arpeggio of protesting wood.

But maybe on some level I’d already registered that there was something wrong with the footsteps. At any rate, when the old man came out at the foot of the steps, sighing audibly as he paused to get his breath back, I was able to check my forward lunge in time and I didn’t actually punch him in the head. He walked on down the road, weighed down by two bulging bags in Sainsbury’s livery: he hadn’t seen me at all, which might have seemed odd if he hadn’t been wearing glasses as thick as the portholes on a bathysphere.

Stifling an obscene oath, I went back up the steps at a run, but I was locking the stable door when the horse was already at the airport with a false passport. The walkway was empty: my tail must have waited for the next pedestrian to come along, lingered just long enough to watch me from above as I stepped out of cover, and then - having verified beyond any doubt that I’d made him - done a quick fade back the other way. The old gent’s footsteps coming down the stairs would have covered his heading back the way he’d come.

I was chagrined - and frustrated. I’m too constitutionally lazy for real detective work, and I’d found the prospect of leaning on someone else for information very attractive.

But there was nothing doing, clearly. Next time, I promised myself, I’d move a little faster and give the slick bastard the benefit of one less doubt.

I was still thinking that when I caught a sudden movement off to my left. Honed reflexes made me turn right into it, and something hard and heavy smacked against the side of my head. The zombie had been clinging to the outside of the suicide netting, having crawled through one of the many gaps in its mesh. He knew damn well that his biggest handicap in a fair fight was speed - dead nerves and dead muscles taking their own sweet time to answer the call to arms - so he’d made damn sure the fight wasn’t fair, turning my own ambush back on me.

The first blow made me see stars and tweeting birds. I staggered and fell against one of the steel beams supporting the suicide nets. That put me beyond the reach of my assailant’s hands, but he got around that by kicking me in the face. The back of my head slammed into the beam: I caught hold of his foot at the same time, hauling him down on top of me. We sprawled and wrestled in an undignified heap, until he got his hand free and it came up again. I saw what was in it this time: a builder’s hammer, with one flat and one clawed end. Like I said, an enthusiastic amateur.

The hammer came down, clawed end first, and buried itself in the wood of the planking as I twisted my head aside. I would have been doing okay except that the first whack to the head had left me sad f t dazed, my movements logey and slow. Since the hammer didn’t serve his turn, the zombie butted me hard in the bridge of the nose, then locked both hands around my throat. I brought my knee up into his groin, but with no noticeable effect: a half-rotted nervous system has its upside.