Chapter 77: One Useful Second
Chapter 77: One Useful Second
I had maybe fifty seconds and a very simple problem: two of them, coming from angles that meant I couldn’t shoot at both, and if they arrived together I was finished.
So they don’t arrive together.
I took the northern one first, because it had further to come and better ground to cross. It came out through the washed-out corner at a flat run across ninety metres of open scrub, and I lay on the roof of the tyre unit with the rifle on the parapet and let it get to sixty.
Twenty seconds is all I have and I only needed three. The first round went low and into the dirt in front of it. The second hit it in the left shoulder and turned the run into a stagger, and it came on anyway with its head down, which told me a great deal about what elite meant in a hound.
Then the southern one came round the corner of the builders’ merchant forty metres away and I had to move.
I went off the back of the merchant’s roof, onto the sloping remains of an awning and then down from its low edge. The last drop was barely a metre, but it still sent pain through the strapped leg. Feline Grace put my feet together, let my knees take it, and carried my weight forward instead of sideways. I was moving before I’d finished landing.
Into the alley.
That alley was four metres wide and eleven long between the merchant’s and a shuttered tool shop, and it was the only nearby ground I had built something in. Six days earlier I’d wedged scaffold pipe on a spring across the top, held on a trip line, for a hound I never got.
I ran through it, hit the line with my ankle deliberately, and kept going.
The pipe came down behind me at chest height and jammed across the alley mouth.
The southern elite arrived about a second and a half later and hit it. It didn’t break the pipe — it wasn’t a wall, it was three metres of scaffold on a spring — but it turned a charge into a scramble, and it had to come over, and coming over cost it about four seconds and put it in the alley alone.
Which left the wounded northern one out in the open with sixty metres to cover and one working shoulder.
I turned, went down on one knee at the far end of the alley, and shot it twice while it was still in the scrub.
The second round did it. It went over onto its side about thirty metres out and stayed there, and I had already stopped looking, because the other one was coming down the alley at me.
There was no version of that fight where I won it with strength.
It was an animal the size of a large pony, at my level cap or above it, in a corridor. I was a man with a hundred and thirty rounds’ worth of rifle training, a strapped leg, cracked ribs, and a kitchen-grade sense of my own capabilities.
What I had was eleven metres of ground I had personally cleared, and two hours in a boarded-up room with a woman correcting my footwork.
It came in committed. That was the thing — that was the whole thing. It came at my centre with everything, because everything had worked on everything it had ever done that to.
Don’t contest it. Never contest it. Move it and finish somewhere you can use.
I stepped off my left and carried my weight across instead of throwing it. Three short steps under my hips, not one long reach. Cornered through the hip — one foot planted, the other going out diagonally, two human feet doing a human thing instead of a Night-Tail’s spin — and the animal went past my right side close enough that its shoulder took the sleeve off my coat.
And I finished set. Feet under me, shoulders square, facing the direction it had gone.
That was the entire lesson. That was a flick on the forehead and eleven repetitions and you don’t finish an evasion, you finish in a place.
It had committed to eleven metres of alley and its own momentum took it four metres past me before it could turn.
I didn’t chase it. I took one step and put the knife in, up and under, into the soft place behind the point of the jaw where the throat goes into the skull — both hands, from a stable stance, with my whole weight going where I’d already decided it would go.
It went down about two metres further on, and it did not get up.
I stood in that alley for a moment with blood on both arms. What I felt was not triumph.
That worked because it was in a corridor and because it went first and because I built the trap in the daylight six days ago.
Do that in the open and I’m dead.
Then I remembered what was happening a hundred and forty metres away and I ran.
I came out at the corner of the merchant’s with the rifle up, and the situation in that yard had gone very bad in about ninety seconds.
Ilyana was in the middle of it with her shield dark. Two limping hounds were circling wide and staying out of her reach, which was intelligent of them, and they weren’t the problem.
The alpha had come out from behind the tanks.
It was standing at the far end of the yard, forty metres from her, and it was enormous — half again the size of the elites, low-slung, heavy through the chest, with a head that looked wrong in a way I still can’t articulate. And it was watching the shield. Not her. The shield, with its seams gone dark and dead.
It knows. It’s been watching her all afternoon and it’s counting, and it’s worked out that the thing which broke its pack is empty.
It came.
Forty metres, straight, flat out, with everything behind it. Not a feint, not a circle — it had waited its entire life for a target that couldn’t hit back and it was going to go through her.
Ilyana braced. She got low and planted and brought the shield up square, and it was the same thing she’d done to the crescent, and this time there was nothing stored in it and everything in the world coming at her.
I had one second and no chance of killing that animal, and I knew both of those things at the same time.
Don’t kill it. Move it.
I was at ninety metres. I put the sights on its front left shoulder while it was running — no time to settle, no twenty seconds, one breath — and fired.
I hit it. Not well. Somewhere along the shoulder or the top of the leg, and it did not slow down and it did not go over.
What it did was stumble. One stride landed wrong. Its head dropped and came off line, and the whole beautiful vertical alignment of four hundred kilos hitting one point at speed turned into four hundred kilos arriving at an angle, off-balance, with its weight over the wrong foot.
It hit the shield anyway. The noise was the worst thing I have ever heard.
Ilyana went back — a full metre, both feet dragging through the gravel — and stayed up. Her shoulder was inside the shield and her rear foot was braced against the plinth kerb and she did not go down, and every bit of that charge went into the metal in front of her.
The seams lit like something opening.
She let it stand there for a half-second with its weight wrong and its head down and its shoulder against the boss, and then she stepped in and drove the shield forward at point-blank range.
Everything the alpha had brought came back out at the alpha.
I don’t need to describe what that did. It killed it. It killed it comprehensively, at a range of about forty centimetres, and the sound the yard made afterwards was nothing at all.
And then the two limping hounds stopped circling.
I watched it happen — both of them, at the same instant, going from a coordinated flanking pattern to two frightened animals standing in a yard. One of them ran for the vehicle gate. The other turned in a full circle, twice, and then followed it.
Neither of us went after them.