Vicious Circle

“I tried,” Juliet snapped. “They should have been incapable of any aggression as soon as they saw me. They should have been incapable of anything except involuntary orgasm.”

“Oh. So what went wrong?”

“Perhaps I’m losing my touch.”

It wasn’t that. Even without looking at her, I could feel her sexuality washing over me like a warm, caressing tide. And I knew from terrifying experience how strong the undertow was in those waters. But I think we both knew the answer: The demonic miasma was all around us now, and it had been ever since we got up onto this top level. These poor sods were possessed.

Without having to discuss tactics we both shut up at this point. We were walking through the shop, which was eerily silent apart from the mournful echoes of police bullhorns from the street outside. Our own footsteps were very effectively muffled by the clothes spilled from the racks and strewn on the ground. The rails and shelf units were none of them higher than about four feet off the ground, so we had a good view of the big open-plan area we’d moved into, but up ahead of us the store curved around in an L-shape, which we couldn’t see until we got to the end of the aisle. We weren’t trying for stealth, exactly—Juliet didn’t have much use for stealth—but we didn’t want the sound of our conversation to drown out any warning we might get of a possible ambush.

Rounding the corner, we found ourselves right in the thick of the party. The wall ahead of us now was the front face of the shopping center—windows from floor to ceiling, with the night pouring in through that ragged hole in the center pane that I’d seen from the other side in the news broadcast. To either side of it, maybe three or four men knelt low or flattened themselves against the wall, peering out at the cordon in the street below as if they’d never heard of police snipers. Farther away from us still there was a circular display area ringed with floor-level mirrors, which seemed to have been intended for trying on shoes. In this cramped amphitheater, two more men, one armed with a baseball bat, kept watch over a small, terrified huddle of presumably innocent shoppers. That was all—and it looked like good odds except that one of the men at the window had a rifle. Long-haired and thickly bearded, he looked, as he swung back the bolt and put the first bullet into the chamber, like someone who’d accidentally wandered off from the set of Deliverance and found himself in an episode of Eastenders.

All heads turned toward us, and I glimpsed Susan Book in among the hostages. I also saw a man lying full-length on the ground, a bloody hole where his face ought to have been. Susan was sitting right next to this poor bastard. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she opened her mouth as if to speak.

I spoke first. “Hey, guys,” I said. “Saw you on the nine o’clock news. Where do we sign up?”

We were walking forward all this time, but now the man with the rifle swung it around to cover us. “You don’t,” he snapped, coldly. “You get with those dumb fucks over there, and you shut up.”

We kept on coming. “What kind of weapon is that?” Juliet murmured to me under her breath.

“Sports rifle,” I growled back, sounding a lot more definite about it than I actually was. “Semiautomatic—which means one bullet at a time.” The truth is, I know sod all about weapons, despite having once lived for a year with a sweet girl who subscribed to Arms and Ammo; but this thing was all dark red wood and elegant curves. No gun that dolls itself up as pretty as that ever gets asked out to an actual battle. Plus it had a dinky little magazine about the size of a mobile phone. If it was ever set on auto, it would run out of bullets in the time it takes to scream, “Die, mother—.” On the other hand, and assuming the guy had a steady hand, that would be plenty long enough to see me and Juliet thoroughly ventilated. She’d probably survive that, unless the bullets were silver: the odds on me were a little longer.

Fortunately, these guys weren’t all singing from the same hymn book. The other three men, wielding various makeshift clubs and cudgels, chose that moment to charge us, helpfully blindsiding their friend. Juliet accelerated so that they’d reach her first, taking out two of them with strikes that I’d be happy to call surgical because most surgery leaves you unable to walk for a while and maybe a body part or so short.