City of Night

three shots without taking time to aim, before pulling back onto the stairs.
     
    Three pistol shots, all wild, but one of them close enough to sing like a wasp past Carson, suggested the wisdom of a change in plans.
    Even from the brief glimpse she had of him, Carson recognized the man on the stairs. He was the guy in the Mountaineer, the one who had smiled and waved.
    Figure there were two of them on the stairs, the woman behind him. Figure they were both New Race, and both armed with pistols.
    To drop Randal, she and Michael had had to scramble his internal organs, shred both his hearts, and shatter his spine with three point-blank slugs from the Urban Snipers.
    These two golems on the stairs would be at least as difficult to kill as he had been. And unlike Randal, they were armed and seemed to have some paramilitary framing or at least experience.
    Without Arnie to consider, Carson might have relied on the power of their weaponry, might have stormed the stairs, but with the boy to worry about, she couldn’t roll the dice.
    “Vicky’s room,” she told Michael, grabbed Arnie by the arm, and retreated toward the end of the hall.
    Michael backed away from the head of the stairs, laying down two spaced rounds of suppressing fire to discourage another fusillade from the pistol.
     
    The juncture of hall and stairwell walls took such a beating from the shotgun that the metal corner beading under the Sheetrock was exposed, snapped, sprung like a clock spring, and shards of it peppered Benny and embedded in his face.
    For a moment he thought they were recklessly charging the stairs. Then he heard a door slam, and no more gunfire followed.
    He scrambled up, off the stairs, and found the upper hallway deserted.
    “Those’re the guns they were trying out in the woods,” Cindi said as she joined him.
    Plucking the metal splinters out of his face, Benny said, “Yeah, I figured.”
    “You want to back off, come at them someplace later when their guard’s down?”
    “No. They have a kid with them. That complicates things, limits their options. Let’s whack them now.”
    “Kid? They’ve got a kid?”
    “Not a baby. Like twelve, thirteen.”
    “Oh. Too old. You can kill him, too,” she said.
    Unfortunately, now that the situation had blown up, Benny didn’t expect to be able to take either O’Connor or Maddison alive. This job wouldn’t give him the opportunity for any of the careful carving that he enjoyed and for which he had such a talent.
    Three rooms opened off the hall. A door was ajar. Benny kicked it open. A bathroom. Nobody in there.
    On the floor of the second room, a body lay in blood.
    In that room also stood a humungous model of a castle, about as big as an SUV. Weird. You never knew what strange stuff you’d find in Old Race houses.
    So the door Benny had heard slam must have been the last one in the hall.
     
    As Carson hurriedly replenished the expended shells in his shotgun, Michael shoved the dresser in front of the locked door, further bracing it.
    When he turned and took the weapon from her, she said, “We can go out the window, onto the porch roof and down.”
    “What about Vicky?”
    Although it hurt to put the thought in words, Carson said, “She either ran when she saw them or they got her.”
    As Carson took Arnie by the hand and led him toward the open window, one of the golems in the hallway threw itself against the door. She heard wood crack, and a hinge or lock plate buckled with a twang .
    “Carson!” Michael warned. “It’s not gonna hold ten seconds.”
    “Onto the roof,” she told Arnie, pushing him to the window.
    She turned as the door took another hit. It shuddered violently, and a hinge tore out of the casing.
    No ordinary man could come through a door this easily. This was like a rhino charge.
    They raised both shotguns.
    The door was solid oak. As the golems broke through, they would use it as a shield. The shotgun slugs would penetrate, but do less damage than an unobstructed shot.
    On the third hit, the second hinge tore loose and the lock bolt snapped.
    “ Here they come! ”
     
     
     

Chapter 65
     
    After sitting for a few minutes with the body of the replicant Pastor Laffite, Deucalion walked out of the parsonage kitchen and into the kitchen of Carson O’Connor’s house, where Vicky Chou lay unconscious on the floor, in the reek of chloroform.
    A tremendous crash from upstairs indicated worse trouble, and he walked out of the kitchen into the