Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola

Author:Mike Mignola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Twelve

Joe blinked raindrops from his eyes. He stared up at the early-evening clouds, at the blanket of storm, and felt a pang of regret that he would never see the sun again. No more blue-sky mornings. As numbness spread through him, he lolled his head to the side and coughed out the blood that filled his throat. He felt it bubble on his lips, and he wondered—perhaps as deeply as he had ever wondered anything—why he wasn’t dead yet. Surely his demise was imminent.

So he waited. With each breath, he felt things tearing inside his chest. The pain clawed at him, the numbness an external shell that did not protect him from the wreckage within. Yet still the spark of his life did not extinguish. He had seen countless impossible things in his years with Simon Church, not least of which was Church’s own mechanically and magically provided longevity, but he had been shot more than a dozen times, ruining his ordinary human mechanisms, the parts he needed to keep running. There was impossible, and then there was impossible. He could not survive these injuries.

But for the moment, he lived.

Again he blinked the rain away. He had this moment. And beyond that, he suspected he had another. He had no idea how many further moments he would be allowed, but it seemed criminal to waste them numb and bleeding and weeping raindrops in agony. One of the gas-men had reached into his pocket and taken the Penatajulum. It had been this, in fact, that had roused him from unconsciousness. The bizarre thugs had taken Molly and that most powerful of arcane artifacts, and they would bring them to Dr. Cocteau.

“Like hell,” Joe rasped, coughing another mouthful of blood into the mud.

Death would come, but as long as the Reaper was tardy, Joe refused to waste the last moments of his life. He rolled onto his side, one hand over his abdomen, covering the worst of his wounds, trying to hold in the things that wanted to seep out. Sodden with blood and rain, his clothes clung to his body, and when he moved, they tugged at bullet wounds, obliterating the numbness that had been kind to him. Still, he managed to get to his knees, and from there it was a single lurch that drove him to his feet.

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