A fungal bullet hit the dirt well to their right. Veins of red spread out across the ground. Seeking. Searching. Stopped next to a lizard sunning itself, oblivious to the threat.
“What’s happening, Wyte,” Finch shouted above the roar.
“I’m fucking killing them. Killing them all,” he roared.
A conventional bullet clipped the side of Wyte’s head. Left a bloody track. A runnel of flesh coming off. He roared again—this time with pain. Directed his fire to the left, toward the rebels or more Partials. The response was a fresh hail of bullets that sent even Wyte back into their shelter for a moment. Finch kept squeezing off rounds blind. Trying to aim high but not too high.
Wyte’s face shone bright. His eyes were large and dilated and he was smiling.
“The bullets don’t hurt,” he kept saying. “They don’t hurt at all.”
“They’ll hurt you eventually, dammit!” Finch got off another round.
Dapple convulsed. Blood rushed out of his mouth. His eyes stared toward the sky. Lifeless.
“Fuck.”
Finch grabbed Wyte’s shirtsleeve. Pulled him in close. Green pallor. Tongue purple. Eyes like black marbles shot through with gold worms. A bullet lodged in his left cheek. Coin-shaped. Like a curious birthmark.
“Wyte! We’ve got to get out of here. Do you understand?”
Wyte seemed to wake up. Spittle came out of his mouth as he said, “We’ll go right through the Partials.” Firing with his straight right arm as he talked. Bullets slamming into his side. Finch could hear them making impact. Being absorbed. “There’s an alley behind them. Up or down the street you’re dead. But if we’re fast, right through the Partials works.”
“How the fuck does that work?” Finch shouted at Wyte.
“I go out first, shielding you,” Wyte said impatiently. Almost with a snarl.
“With your body?” Finch said, incredulous. “That’s crazy.”
Grinned at him. One eye on the street. “It’s all fucked up. What’s one more thing? Trust me, Finch.”
“You’ll die if you do this, Wyte,” Finch said.
“No. I won’t.” Never heard Wyte so confident.
A bullet spiraled into Wyte’s left thigh. He didn’t even flinch.
Grim smile. “I love you, Wyte.” And he did, he realized.
A smile back from Wyte like it was the old days before the Rising.
* * *
Later, in memory, it would be a fractured mix of shouts and screams and bullets flying and Finch running into the back of Wyte to keep as close as possible. Tripping over the things crawling off Wyte’s legs. Wyte exploding out from their shelter, overcoat thrown aside to reveal a body become other. A garden of fungus. Arms ballooning out into sudden wings of brilliant purple-red-orange. Legs lost in shelves and plateaus and spikes of green and blue. Back broader and insanely strong and gray. Head suddenly elongated and widened. As he ran a high-pitched scream came from his mouth that frightened Finch and bloodied the ears of the Partials.
The bullets. Wyte kept taking them like gifts. They tore through his limbs, lodged in his torso. Leaving holes. Leaving daylight. That closed up. And running in the shadow of that magnificence, as Wyte’s scream became a roar again and they were assailing the ramparts of the Partials, he felt as if he were following some sort of god, his own gun like a toy as, from the shelter that was Wyte, he shot back at the chapel to keep the rebels pinned down.
Wyte’s voice came out incomprehensible and strange now. Guttural and animallike. No part of him in those moments that was human. Once he looked back at Finch to make sure he was still there. The whites of his eyes colonized. His pupils looking like something trapped. Trapped forever inside its own flesh.
For a while it was as if Wyte had lent Finch that kind of vision, because he could see the bullets coming. As if Finch were floating overhead, watching. And it was ecstasy or some kind of odd heaven. The surprise that eclipsed the Partials’ pale faces as Wyte overran their positions. Wyte trying to outrun something he couldn’t outrun. Tendrils from his chest racing out to impale them. The weeping muzzle of his gun taking them in the legs, the heads. Faces trampled under his charge. Fungal eyes still clicking and clicking as the bodies lay dead. While even the rebels’ fire had become scattershot from the shock of the new. From seeing the glory that Wyte had become. The monster.
Then it all came crashing down and Finch was in his skin again. In that one last look back he saw it all as a crazed tableau of men fallen, falling, firing, or running at an impossible speed. Almost distant enough as they made it to the warren of streets beyond to think of them as the silhouettes of broken, spasming dolls.
Realized he was roaring, too, like Wyte. As the tears ran down his face. As he kept firing behind him long after the enemy had faded into time and distance.
4
Breathless. Aching. Side hurting. Wyte trailing bits of things into the rubble behind them. Waiting for a bullet in the back of the head that never came. The acrid smell of spent ammo. A shambling halt under the shadow of the arch. The boat still tethered in the canal. The sky dark gray.
Wyte was still coming down from whatever had possessed him. Voice slick with some hidden discharge. Muttering: “Like wheat. Like paper. Just shredding them. Just running through them.”
Finch babbling back. Exhilarated. Heart still beating so hard in his chest.
Wyte’s face had regained a semblance of the normal, skin sealed over the bullets. Already now looking drawn, diminished. Finch kept seeing Wyte killing the Partials.
Wyte had rebuttoned his trench coat. The lining torn. Hung down below the hem. Mud-spattered. Blood-spattered. About a dozen bullet holes in it. Small orange mushroom caps peeked out from the holes. Others had burst through the fabric. Around the buttons, purple fungus rasped out, probing.
“Wyte, Dapple’s dead,” Finch said.
“I know, Finch. I saw. Get in the boat.”
Finch climbed in and sat down. Held himself rigid as Wyte made the difficult negotiation of casting off and jumping in without capsizing them. Wyte sat down opposite. The boat glided across the water, back the way it had come. Like magic.
“You saved my life, Wyte,” Finch said. And it was true. Monstrously true. Kept staring at Wyte with a kind of awe. Wyte’s strength had manifested in a way Finch still couldn’t quite believe.
“But not Dapple,” Wyte said. “Dapple’s dead. And I feel beaten and bruised all over.”
Had Wyte passed a point of no return? More things that had colonized him peered out from the collar of the coat. Spilled out from his pants legs. Erupted in red-and-green patterns from his boots. A stench of overwhelming sweetness. Of corruption.
“Don’t go back to the station,” Finch said. “Not today.”
“We were sent there to die, weren’t we?” Matter-of-fact.
For my sins.
“Maybe we weren’t,” Finch said, thinking about the Partial standing over Shriek’s body. Lecturing him about how Partials saw more than gray caps. “Maybe it’s all falling apart. In front of our eyes. Everything.”
Wyte made a wet clucking sound. He was trying to laugh. “Didn’t it fall apart a long time ago?”