9.
 The man in the wheelchair rolled himself closer. The gun rested on his lap. He groaned with the effort of turning the wheels by hand. "So, Kanon, you came for it as we expected. Not long escaped, out of prison, and here you are. I've been waiting for you, wanting to do this to you. You son of a bitch. Leaving me crippled by my own gun. Trying to lie your way out of the fact that it was you who attacked and killed my son who was the messenger. Are you suffering? Don't worry, I won't let you get to Hammerkill. I'm going to finish you right now." He lifted the gun.
A silver thread slipped through the air and pierced Vodak's throat. He made a face as if he'd bitten a very sour lemon, then silently slumped to one side, sliding out of the wheelchair to lie crumpled and motionless on the broken glass.
"Help me," Kanon whispered as Rin's lithe body rounded the wheelchair.
"We're a lot smarter now," Rin said.
"I can't move."
"We took over many years ago," she said. "The Authority is us."
"I'm—having trouble breathing." He tried to reach out to her, not understanding, but his arms would not work. He was beginning to feel faint from loss of blood.
"I was going to tell you, and now is the time. Why the Authority is so powerful. Why nothing can be done for you." She unraveled her coat and threw it down. "I will wait until night to escape." Her head elongated into a pearly melon, and her little face grew hard and hungry. Foam bubbled at the edges of her mouth and it was becoming difficult for her to speak in that human voice. Her thighs and buttocks ballooned into grotesque sexual hypnotics, and fangs appeared along the sides of her feet. "Now I have the sphere and I will rule my people." She belched as her organs changed inside and gases rearranged themselves. She leaned over him. As she slit his clothing open from neck to groin she murmured: "I saved you for last."
Last? Rin. He remembered the meal she'd brought—in a membrane soaked with purple meat—and gagged.
As he felt the unmen female's cool corpse-breath on his naked body, Kanon summoned the last ounce of his energy. Grasping for a triangle of broken glass at his side—the creature's beady eyes were intent on the next blow, in which she was about to rip his body open from neck to groin—he slashed through the air with it.
He had one shot. If he failed, she would rip his limbs off before proceeding with her deadly lunch plans.
The glass sliced through her neck. As the air filled with twirling greenish-brown liquid, she backed away holding her neck. Her maw opened and closed, but no words came out. Her eyes registered a faint disappointment, almost a carnal sadness. Then she keeled over.
Kanon and the monstress lay bleeding to death. Her claws struggled across the floor toward him, trying to finish him off even during her own death agonies.
Kanon pushed himself away from this horror that Rin had become, or had been all along.
He felt his own growing numbness, and knew that death wasn't far away in this world of savage betrayal and bloody killings.
Then he saw the dead man with the arrow on his neck. Vodak lay on his back. Vodak's face was turned away. Vodak's eyes were open as if staring into the distance, and his hand lay on the floor in the direction of his stare.
Kanon raised himself a few inches, as much as he was capable of doing. What was Vodak looking at?
Kanon almost laughed as he saw it: the omni-drip that would have saved Vodak if only he could have reached it.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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