The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams

Author:Tad Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Urban, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101597576
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2012-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

twenty

wards and wheels

ONCE AGAIN I was stuck in a dark room with guns booming all around me. At least this time I wasn’t the one being shot at.

Chico rested his front grip on the top of the bar and hosed down the hulking shadow that had come through the window, his gun on deafening full auto, strobing the darkness with muzzle flare. Beside me Sam fired the Mossberg slowly and methodically, trying to put as much of each load into the target as possible. I could hear Teddy Nebraska and Annie and Monica and Jimmy yelling, but the guns made too much noise for me to understand what they were saying. I’m guessing it was something on the order of “Oh, shit, what is that?”

The ghallu didn’t like Chico’s silver nitrate at all, which was probably all that was keeping us alive. Like rock salt from a farmer’s old bird gun it clearly stung more than it wounded, but from the howling and thrashing of the ghallu it stung a lot. How much it disliked the silver salt became clear a second later when it leaped right past me and bashed a smoking hole in the middle of The Compasses’ ancient mahogany bar in an attempt to get Chico. I didn’t see what happened to the bartender after he dove to the side but for at least the moment his weapon had been silenced.

“Annie, follow me!” Monica shouted as the ghallu dug through the wreckage of the bar like some monster badger trying to claw its prey out of the earth. I didn’t know what Monica was up to—running for her life, I hoped—but I needed to cover her, so I stepped forward with my revolver leveled, and as the thing turned its nasty, inhuman mask of a face toward the running women I started firing. The fetch swatted at the flashes and reared back from what I presume was the annoying pitter-patter of my little silver bullets on its skin. I hit an empty chamber and dove to one side to avoid being skewered by a spike of shattered bartop the size of a surfboard that the ghallu flung at me. I was seriously rethinking my little five-shot Smith & Wesson, which emptied in seconds. I hadn’t been forced into this kind of military rate of fire in a very long while, but right now I wished I had something with a more generous magazine. Like maybe a silver-throwing antiaircraft gun.

Sam had dug his way backward into the mound of chairs and desks we had stacked, which were now blocking our only exit, and from this improvised defensive position was laying down fire as fast as he could pump the Mossberg. I knew Chico had only tossed him a couple of boxes of shells, so he was going to run out soon. On the other side of the bar, and true to his name, Jimmy had turned over a table and he and Nebraska and Kool were barricaded behind it in one of the booths.

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