Chapter 8: A High Margin for Beginners

The man got a fistful of his collar and pulled.

Ash came up onto the balls of his feet and stayed there, the coat taking his weight across the back of the neck. From this close the corridor stopped being a corridor. The bars welded over the windows, the two doors hanging off their frames, the plaster down over the tile — all of it went flat and far away behind the man’s face. The face was white. The front of the shirt was dark from the belt up.

The hand holding his collar was a glove. Thin deerskin, one seam across the knuckles, closed on the coat and staying on the coat. The other hand was bare, and it stayed a fist.

“It’s dark in here,” the man said. “I’m standing right at your shoulder.” The hand in the collar turned him a few degrees. “And you threw a knife down the hall. What was the plan if it went into the man standing in front of it?”

Ash looked down. He worked his thumbnail along the ridge of his finger.

“I’d fail the interview,” he said. “Throwing it was a risk. If it had been a gun, I wouldn’t have hit you. Mister Whitlock.”

The smile stayed where it was on the man’s face. The fist turned in the collar and lifted, and Ash’s heels came off the tile and hung half an inch above it.

Then his eyes went down to the case on Ash’s hip.

Ash looked too. 07:55.

“Who taught you to stick something you found in your eye,” the man said. He let go of the collar, laid the flat of his glove on Ash’s chest, and pushed. “You’ve got eight minutes of strength and agility on that thing. Don’t waste them.”

Down the hall, the animal stood up.

It stood up with the knife still in it — in above the eye, at the temple, in to the handle — and it did it without hurrying. It got its legs under it and came up off the tile a piece at a time, and kept coming: upright, a goat’s head on a man’s frame, up until the head was level with the top of a doorway and the horns were dragging lines through the plaster. One arm hung down past its knee, black with hair. The knife came up with the head and stayed there, standing out of the skull.

Both eyes turned. The near one found Ash. The far one came around a second behind it, and standing still they pointed two different ways.

It put its head down and pawed the tile twice and blew two streams of steam out of its nose.

A glove reached past him, put a thumb on the case, and held it down.

The buzz came out of the grille. Three notes, hard, then three more.

The animal’s head came around to Ash the way a compass needle comes around.

“You don’t clear from back here,” the man said. “Go on. Kill it.”

Behind him the man’s boots went back over the tile toward the wall, and stopped.

Ash went forward.

He took the step, because there was nothing behind him but the wall he had been pushed against.

The step took him off the floor. His back foot took a tile with it. The ceiling came up and went an inch above his shoulders, and the hall opened out under him — dark, forty feet of it, and the thing standing at the end.

The earpiece clicked in his ear.

“Stop throwing yourself around. A foot and a half to your left there’s a heating pipe. Put your foot on it.”

He put his foot on it. It held. He crouched there with one foot forward and one back and both hands open, and the pipe knocked and ticked under him with whatever heat was still in it. On his hip the buzz went on, hard and flat, three and three.

“It’s at your one o’clock and it’s coming for your legs. Three seconds to get behind it. I’ve got eyes on it. Jump.”

He looked at the pipe instead. It was a pipe in a building with the power off, and it had been ticking under his foot since he put it there, and he was the one who was going to be standing on it.

The half second went into that. Then something came out of the dark on his left — a black arm, wide as a door — and came through the space where he stood. The pipe bent under him and rang.

He got off it. He got off it badly, shoulder into the wall, no plan at all, and his left eye had already found the animal again before he turned his face to it. The animal came around in the middle of the hall with the knife standing out of its head and both eyes running.

“Don’t panic,” the earpiece said. “I build a lot of margin into these for beginners. Now take the knife out of its head.”

He waited for the head to swing back around. Then he jumped for it, got his right hand on the hilt, put both legs out and pulled, and the knife came out. The animal took one step sideways and stayed up.

“It’s coming in on your weak side. Turn — now. Take the horn.”

He met it head-on and drove the blade into the slab of muscle over its back, hand flat behind the hilt, and hung off the handle like a climber on an ice axe. Then he walked up it, got a knee over the shoulder, got both hands on the horns, and put everything he had into the steering.

The horns were warm and slick and they were moving in his hands while he held them. The head came around a hand’s width and stopped.

Close up it was a lot of animal and none of it was soft. The one outside the monitor room had gone down in one. This one had a knife hole in its skull and another in its back and it was still walking. Maybe they got harder the longer they’d been changed. He had nothing to check that against.

It went for the wall. It put its head down into the charge and drove sideways, and the wall came up fast.

He got his head around. Down the hall the man had one boot still up off the floor and his arm folded in tight against his ribs, and he didn’t say anything. The extinguisher was already loose on the tile, sliding toward them.

Ash dragged the knife back out of the animal’s back and threw it down the hall at the canister.

It went in through the metal and the thing came apart in the air.

The powder came out of it in a sheet and took the corridor. The animal lost the hall. It lost the walls, the floor, the man, and Ash. The head came up and swung blind, the hooves went out from under it on the tile, and the noise coming out of it was still a goat’s, and at that volume it was the loudest thing left in the building.

Ash had his forearm over his mouth and the powder in his teeth anyway.

“It’s in my teeth,” he said.

Then he went up over the horns.

He got both knees in behind the skull, where it was still hard, took the left horn in both hands, jammed the right one up under his arm, and cranked the head around. All the way. Then past that.

Small things let go in there, one after another. Then something bigger let go once.

The animal went down the way a stack of pallets goes down. It hit on its shoulder and rolled half over, and the tile under the back of its head cracked out in a spiderweb.

Ash came off the neck and stood in the middle of the hall. The extinguisher was still coughing powder across the floor. He picked the long knife up off the tile and the extinguisher up by its handle, threw both through the nearest open door, and pulled the door shut behind them. The powder kept coming out under the door.

The man was on his feet.

He was off the wall and standing straight now, weight on one leg, one hand flat and pressed in over his side. The blood came out around the glove and ran down the outside of his leg onto the tile.

He didn’t say anything. He looked at Ash.

On Ash’s hip the case read 07:07.