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“Uh-uh,” Gordo said, bringing the 9-mil up. His elephantine leg took the next plunge, and then he gulped, his hips wedged between the narrow handrails. Grimacing, he lowered his hands to pry himself free, but that only settled his weight further. He gave a cry of pain, one metal rail pinching above his hip to bite a solid two feet into his gelatinous side.
He was stuck.
Evan lunged for the ARES, gripped it in both hands, and aimed up at the looming target.
Gordo lifted his head, his glistening brow grooved with horizontal wrinkles.
Evan shot him between the eyes.
Gordo jerked violently, his bowels releasing audibly. He slumpedforward, arms drooping into thin air, blood spooling from the neat hole in his skull.
For a terrible moment, Evan thought Gordo was going to pop free and plummet on top of him, but the giant hung there, his massive torso canted out above the remaining stairs.
Before Evan could regroup, Santos had vaulted over Gordo, swinging from a handrail and jumping down to bypass the lower steps. Evan fired once, but Santos was small and swift, and he half dove, half fell atop Evan, knocking the ARES away once more.
Santos’s features were contorted, his neck straining. “I’mthe one,” he grimaced through bared teeth. “I’mthe one who can do you.”
He flurried at Evan, elbows to the jaw, twining his limbs in Evan’s, locking down his legs. Punching him was like hitting tar. He suctioned, controlled, locked joints, that crazy square cross pendant dancing around on its chain. Evan squirmed and battered at him but lost ground quickly.
Tight in, the stink of Sandman’s sweat was overpowering. The grime of the boiler room coated Evan’s skin until they were a squirming mass of slippery limbs flailing and beating at each other. They rolled and rolled once more, banging off the crumbling masonry wall and winding up with Evan on his back in the full guard position, kicking for his life.
Santos slithered through the guard, ramming his knees beneath Evan’s legs, head lowered to avoid eye gouges, chin dug into Evan’s solar plexus. Wheezing, Evan countered by going for a guillotine choke hold, curling up around Santos to embrace him tighter, clasping the small man with his legs, locking his ankles around his back. Wrapping his arm around Santos’s throat, Evan cinched the blade of his wrist and forearm across the carotid, applying pressure. He grabbed his own wrist with his opposite hand to tighten the choke and pulled up on Santos’s neck for a hanging effect.
But Evan was weak from the fall, his skin slimy with their combined sweat, and he couldn’t hold the grip against Santos’s counter. Evan was losing strength, but Santos seemed invigorated. Once the grappler got free, he would beat Evan senseless.
Sure enough, Santos burst through Evan’s hold, bucking outof the clasp. He reared up, fingers tangled in Evan’s, snatching, wrenching, clamping.
Evan spit in his eyes.
It bought a quarter of a second, Santos’s hand jerking toward his face before he halted the instinct.
But in that quarter second, Evan reached up, grabbed the dangling Order of Christ pendant, and jabbed one of the flared ends into the side of Santos’s neck.
Santos coughed out a spray of saliva.
An arterial spurt shot two feet to the side, blood tapping the concrete audibly.
Santos turned to look at the spray, swung his head back to Evan in disbelief. He dove onto Evan once more, snapping up his injured arm in a top shoulder lock, torquing his shoulder and elbow to the point of breaking.
The pain was incredible. Evan slapped at him weakly; he’d spent his strength.
Another spurt exited Santos’s neck. Releasing Evan, he rolled back up, confused, clamping his hand over the puncture. His fingers forked the spray into three spouts.
He couldn’t fight Evan and hold the blood in his body at the same time.
Releasing his neck, Santos reached for Evan’s throat, sagged a bit, reached back to cover the wound once more.
Evan’s shoulder blades ground against the floor. His head felt filled with cotton. He could barely muster the strength to lift his arm, but he gave a feeble punch to Santos’s clamped hand, knocking it off the gash. More blood spurted out, painting the left side of Evan’s face and matting his shirt at the shoulder.
Santos wobbled, his weight uneven. His eyelids drooped; his head lolled. He reached again for the side of his throat, and again Evan knocked his hand away.
Santos’s arm quivered. Hunching forward, he shoved his hand impotently against the flowing blood. With great effort Evan lifted his head and used the crown to nudge Santos’s fingers away before collapsing flat once more. For a moment they stayed like that, Santos sitting on Evan, Evan flat on his back, gasping for air.
And then Santos toppled stiffly to the side.
He lay curled in a fetal position, his legs cycling on the oil-slick concrete, the blood coming steady now, a perfectly dark, perfectly round expanding circle.
Evan rolled onto all fours and coughed until he dry-heaved. He spit out a cord of crimson-laced mucus and wiped Santos’s blood from his eye. He got up onto one foot and then the other, staggered a bit before he held his weight.
