The bullets had knocked Flores back. He hit a rack of miscellaneous parts and sent it crashing to the floor. Flores bounced off the rack, almost followed it to the ground, but caught his balance at the last instant. I felt a cold chill because with three bullets in his face and two in the chest, he caught his balance and stayed on his feet.
A funny sound filled the garage; it made my throat hurt and buzzed my ears. He was laughing. A cold, hard knot in my belly told me that probably someone else was going to have to deal with the shocks on the Passat.
My shoes were soft-soled and so had no trouble sticking to the top of the Passat. The gun was of no more use except as a club, but I kept it in my left hand and kept the wrench in my right.
I didn’t have much of a chance, but that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and give the thing my throat. Adam was coming, and the camera was rolling. Even assuming he killed me, the longer I held out, the more information they’d glean from the recording.
Flores’s face changed as he laughed, flowing and darkening, but beneath the darkness, visible in cracks in his skin, was a sullen red light. My changes are almost instantaneous, the werewolves take a lot longer than that with the exception of Charles. But none of us glowed.
Flores … Guayota moved his hand, still laughing, and something flew at me. I dodged, but it slid over my shirt, which caught fire, and landed on top of the Passat.
A quick brush of my hands put my shirt out, leaving me with blisters on the skin along my collarbone and a hole in my bra strap. I slid back one step to see what he’d thrown at me without having to look away from him.
It was about the size of a finger, blackened and oozing on one end. I chanced a quick glance and realized that not only was it the size of a finger, it had a fingernail. I almost nudged it with my foot to be sure, but the paint was blackening and bubbling up around it, and directly underneath it, the metal was sagging.
I’d read an account written by a Civil War commander about how he’d seen the cannonball coming toward one of his men who was wounded and down. It had been coming so slowly, and he’d just reached down to deflect it—and had lost his arm.
I didn’t touch it.
Guayota had a distance weapon, however weirdly horrible, and that meant keeping back from him was no good. Time enough later to wonder at the finger and how he’d made it so hot it could melt the roof of the car; for now I had to concentrate on survival. Nor could I follow my sensei’s first rule of fighting—he who is smart and runs away lives to fight another day. The bay doors were closed, and I had no way to run.
Out of other options, I attacked. There had been no more than a fraction of a second between when he threw the finger and when I jumped off the car. His burning finger meant that I knew better than to touch him with my skin. The wrench I’d grabbed was a giant-sized 32mm; it weighed about three pounds and gave me almost two feet of additional reach.
I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand-to-hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed.
And, finally, nothing I tried seemed to hurt him.
He continued to heat up as we fought, and before I got the next hit in, his clothes flared up in a wall of flames, then drifted to ashes. His face had melted into something with eyes and a mouth, but no other features that I could pick out in the wavy blackness of his skin.
Other than his face, his body remained in other ways humanlike, but there was nothing human about his skin. It was char black and formed into a bumpy, almost barklike surface. Fissures broke open as he moved, revealing, as I’d noticed before, something deep orange with red overtones. His outer surface reminded me of nothing so much as film I’d seen of the active lava flows in Hawaii.
He touched me, a glancing blow on my hip. I slapped my hip to put out the fire and refused to look because although my face still hurt, as did the skin across my collarbone, my hip had just gone numb.
My fifth hit landed in one of those odd fissures in his skin, this one on his left shoulder blade, or at least where a shoulder blade would have been had he been human. It knocked him forward: he wasn’t immune to the laws of physics. My arm and hand were spattered by hot chunks of liquid that burned.
Remembering the finger that sank into metal, I knocked the hot splatters off me, but the skin beneath them bubbled up into blisters that hurt. Flores reached out, a longer reach than he should have been able to manage, and grabbed hold of the end of my wrench. Where he touched, the metal glowed orange, and the glow rapidly spread toward my hand. I let go of the wrench before the glow touched my skin.
The air was smoky now—and not just with burning fabric. All sorts of flammable liquids spill on the floor of a garage; although I clean them by pouring on cat litter or HyperSorb and sweep them up, there was enough residue here and there to react as he brushed past them, so that there were several small fires burning reluctantly on the cement.
I spent an anxious and weaponless few moments just getting out of the way of his jabs and kicks before I could get close to something else I could use as a weapon. I tripped over the crowbar he’d dropped, but didn’t pick it up: it was all metal, and I’d just learned that I wanted something that didn’t transfer heat as well as metal did. But when I tripped, I knocked the big mop over on myself and grabbed it as I rolled to my feet.
The big wooden mop handle made an okay bo staff, and I used it to keep him from approaching me while occupying him seriously enough that he couldn’t rip off another finger—or other body part—to throw at me. The wood kept catching fire, but if I swung it fast enough, the air put the flames out before it could burn much away. It was getting rapidly shorter, but I was only using the very end to poke him rather than using it like a baseball bat.
I managed to lure him into leading with the top half of his body and hit him in the middle of his forehead with the end of the mop handle in a lunge that would have done a fencing master proud. The wood sank a good four inches into his forehead and stuck there. When he jerked away, he took the mop handle with him.
He wrenched it out and threw his head back and howled, a noise so high-pitched that it made my ears hurt. He bent double, and parts of his body stuck together, melting or melding. I took a chance and sprinted to one of my big toolboxes and grabbed a three-foot-long crowbar off the top. This crowbar had a big red rubber handle to protect my hands.