Palermo lowered his voice, said, “Now put her down, Adelina. Please, put her down.”
Adelina removed one hand from around Beiko’s torso, but kept the other one tight. She moved the fist holding Beiko’s limp body against the closest wall, pressed her knuckles flush to it, then slowly, slowly pushed the heel of the palm of her free hand against Beiko’s head.
Her skull cracked, crumpled in on itself entirely. Adelina smeared the resulting mess of blood and bone along the wall in an arc, like a shooting star.
Adelina dropped the body and reached out for Kendul, something monstrous burning in her eyes.
Palermo backed out into the hallway as quickly as his feet would take him. Kendul drew his gun, started firing at her. The bullets ricocheted off her solid steel frame, bounced around the room, thwipping into drywall. One bullet nearly drove into Palermo’s leg, but he moved in time to avoid it. He yelled for Kendul to stop and, after one of the bullets whizzed by Kendul’s ear, he was shocked enough at his brush with death to stop firing.
Kendul assumed that Palermo had screamed at him to stop firing because this was still, in some way, his daughter, but that was untrue; Palermo knew that his daughter – if she was still in there at all – was not the one who’d killed Sandra, was not the one trying to kill Kendul and himself now. He’d simply told him to cease fire for practical reasons – the bullets were bouncing off. They needed to try something else to stop her.
“It’s not working, Kendul! You’ll kill us both!” Palermo said. Kendul moved out of the room into the hallway, opened his mouth to speak, since it appeared that Adelina was backing off.
That’s when she lunged again.
An enormous metal hand burst out of the room, into the hallway where both men stood, cracking through the bedroom doorframe, splinters flying. Adelina roared once, and it was like no sound either man had ever heard in his life. Entirely inhuman.
With no time to think – and Adelina’s other hand moving to join the first, fingers almost the width of fence posts, her head dropped down to try to see them – both men opened fire. They backed away as far as they could and just emptied their weapons.
Nearly every shot bounced off, but on two occasions Palermo’s scrambling, terrified mind subconsciously picked up that two or three of their shots seemed to drive home. But where? At what point on her body?
Then it came to him. As their guns clicked empty, Palermo muttered, “Joints.” He turned his head toward Kendul. “Aim for the joints. They must not be fully formed or something.”
Kendul nodded. “Ammo?”
“Downstairs, follow me.”
Since Adelina was now blocking most of the upstairs landing, both men vaulted over the banister, dropped onto the staircase, ran to the basement.
“Shotguns will do more damage. Got a few down here,” Palermo said. He moved quickly to the gun cabinet while Kendul kept watch on the stairs – not that Adelina could fit down the staircase, obviously, but she could come tumbling down it, he supposed, and just roll over them like the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“Come on, man, come on,” Kendul said.
Palermo smashed the glass with the butt of his gun, dropped the gun on the floor, reached inside, grabbed two shotguns, scrambled around for ammo, chucked a shotgun and some shells in Kendul’s general direction, then started loading his own weapon.
There was a deep moan from upstairs, thumping, then an otherworldly scream that filled their ears, drove deep into their brains.
“Christ!” Palermo said, shaking his head from side to side, as if the noise were a tangible thing and he was trying to dislodge it from his head.
A loud crash, wood splintering. It sounded like she’d fallen through – or consciously driven herself through – the second-floor ceiling.
“Load up, man. She’s coming,” Kendul said. “She’s fucking coming.”
More thumping – metal on wood, metal on tile – as she clomped around the main floor, probably searching room to room, her body busting through the walls, shredding the house, gutting it like a demolition ball.
She stopped at the top of the stairs, moved her head down to see.
Palermo’s base instinct was to hide. His primary thought being if she can’t see us, she can’t hurt us. But he knew they needed to try to stop her, couldn’t let her just go rampaging around, destroying the street, the whole fucking city.
They had to try to be seen.
Going against every natural instinct in his body – every fiber of his being shouting at him to get the fuck away! – Palermo moved to the bottom of the stairs where he and Adelina locked eyes. Her head was enormous, eyes big metal balls set into a face composed of shards of what looked like jagged rock and steel.