Vicious Circle

I shook my head. I’d have dearly loved to get my own clothes back, but I had no idea where Basquiat would have stashed them. I was just going to have to get by.

Po loomed over me, and Zucker flicked him an appraising glance. “You know that Olympic event where people walk really fast?” he asked me.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Well that’s what you’ve got to do. If you run, my friend here is apt to knock you down, step on your head and rip your guts out. It’s his way. But we are in a hurry. So—as fast as you can without running.”

He turned and led the way out of the room. I followed, and Po brought up the rear like a walking wall. Except that walls mostly have graffiti rather than spines, fangs, and slavering jaws.

The other cop was slumped out in the corridor, the scattered pages of a pink racing paper bearing silent witness against him. Not that he’d have had a much better chance if he’d seen the loup-garous coming: I had a suspicion that you’d need something on the scale of a howitzer even to slow Po down.

The alarms were still screaming, filling the air to the exclusion of everything else. I was sort of assuming that they were a default distress signal, but I realized as we reached the short flight of steps at the end of the corridor that the building was actually on fire. At least, the level below us was full of smoke that hung heavily in the air in visible layers, and there was an acrid, chemical smell that took a lot of the fun out of breathing.

We came down into an open space lined with chairs—a waiting area of some kind for one of the Whittington’s specialist units. Zucker hesitated, then pointed to the far side of the room and headed off in that direction. I followed, at a constrained jog-trot. I didn’t want Po trampling me under from behind, and I wanted still less for him to get a mental image of me as a rubber bone.

There were three sets of lift doors in a row. Zucker pressed the down buttons on all three, and the middle one slid open immediately. Po pushed me forward and I staggered in. Zucker glanced off to the left and right, then backed in himself and hit the ground floor button.

“If the power goes, we’ll fry in here,” I told him, the thought genuinely making my stomach turn over slightly. I’ve got just a touch of claustrophobia that surfaces every now and again when I’m in enclosed spaces with semihuman monsters that smell like old, damp carpets.

“Not a problem,” Zucker said tersely. “Trust me.”

The doors slid open again and we came out fast into a wide corridor, Zucker still taking point. The ground floor was like some kind of vision of hell. The smoke was thicker here, shutting my line of sight down to my own arm’s length, and the chemical stench was worse. There were a whole lot of other sounds now beneath the wail of the alarm: screams, shouted orders, the scrape and thud of booted feet. No footsteps from behind me, though. I looked round, and saw that Po’s feet were as bare as mine. The last vestiges of his clothes had sloughed away now, and with them whatever laughably slim chance there’d been of him passing for human. Even if he got his errant flesh under control, he’d be stark bollock naked.

I collided with a wheelchair that was just sitting in the corridor, almost went over on my face. Po snarled warningly: he clearly took my breaking stride as a provocative act. “How are we getting out of here?” I called out to Zucker, who was a good few yards ahead of us on account of not having to worry about losing major limbs and organs.

“Trust in God,” he suggested. I looked at him curiously, but he was forging on down the broad corridor without looking behind, so that all I could see was the back of his head. There was no trace of irony in his tone.

“Not usually an option for me.”

“But now you’re in His hands.”

A pair of large doors were in front of us. Zucker kicked them open and went on through, into an atrium of some kind. The higher ceiling made the fumes dance in hypnotic convection currents like curdled milk in coffee. My head was spinning, my stomach heaving. Neither of the loup-garous seemed to be affected at all.

I lost sight of Zucker almost at once, but he hadn’t gone far. When I stepped through after him his hand shot out of the fug and gripped my wrist. His voice sounded close to my ear.

“Stay close to me,” he muttered. “If we have to leave you behind, we’ve been told it’s okay to kill you. Po is hoping it pans out that way, but I prefer to stick to the script as far as possible.”

It occurred to me to wonder what Zucker looked like when he made the change into his animal form. He obviously had a lot more self-control than his partner. I decided that I didn’t want to be around when that self-control snapped.

He hauled me after him into the thunder-gray semidark. I presumed that Po was still with us, but I couldn’t see him anymore. I couldn’t see anything. It seemed like the whole place was ablaze, although I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen any flames, felt any heat.