Instead of a multitude of screams, as there had been when she’d folded in midfall to the roof, only one rose from below. Looking down, she saw a woman in a pink suit attempting to alert the other guests to the danger – ‘Up there, up there!’ – pointing not at Jilly, but some distance past her.
Realizing that she faced the back of the nave, not the altar, Jilly turned and saw the third killer, twenty feet away, tethered to the wall, balancing on the edge of the platform, peering down at the crowd. He held the rifle with the muzzle up, aimed at the vaulted ceiling – but he began to react to the woman in pink.
Jilly ran. Twenty-four hours ago, she would have run away from a man with a gun, but now she ran toward him.
Even with her heart lodged in her throat and pounding as loud as a circus drum, with fear twisting like a snake through the entire length of her entrails, she possessed sufficient presence of mind to wonder if she had found a fine new courage in herself or instead had lost her sanity. Maybe a little of both.
She sensed also that her compulsion to go after the gunman might be related to the fact that the nanogadgets busily at work in her brain were making profound changes in her, changes more fundamental and even more important than the granting of supernatural powers. This was not a good thought.
The twenty feet between her and the would-be bride killer were as long as a marathon. The plywood seemed to move under her, foiling her advance, as if it were a treadmill. Nonetheless, she preferred to sprint rather than to trust once more in her as yet unpolished talent for folding.
The hard boom-boom-boom of running feet on the platform and the vibrations shuddering through the scaffolding distracted the gunman from the wedding guests. As he turned his head toward Jilly, she slammed into him, rocking him sideways, grabbing the rifle.
On impact, she tried to wrench the gun away from the killer. His hands remained locked to it, but she held tight, as well, even when she lost her footing and fell off the scaffold.
Her grip on the weapon spared her from another plunge. The garlic-reeking gunman’s tether prevented him from being dragged immediately off the platform with her.
Dangling in space, looking up into the bigot’s eyes – such black pools of festering hatred – Jilly found in herself an intensity of anger that she had never known before. Anger became a rage stoked by the thought of all the sons of Cain crawling the hills and cities of this world, all like this man, motivated by innumerable social causes and visions of Utopia, but also by personal fevers, forever craving violence, thirsting for blood and mad with dreams of power.
With Jilly’s entire weight suspended from the rifle, the killer didn’t have the strength to shake the weapon out of her hands. He began instead to twist it left and right, back and forth, thereby torquing her body and putting stress on her wrists. As the torsion built, twist by twist, the laws of physics required rotation, which would tear her hands off the gun as her body obeyed the law.
The pain in her tortured wrist joints and tendons rapidly became intolerable, worse than the still tender spot in her hand where the splinter had punctured her. If she let go, she could fold to safety during her fall, but then she would be leaving him with the rifle. And before she could return, he’d pump hundreds of rounds into the crowd, which was so transfixed by the contest above it that no one had yet thought to flee the church.
Her rage flared into fury, fueled by a fierce sense of injustice and by pity for the innocent who were always the targets of men like this, for the mothers and babies blown to pieces by suicide bombers, for the ordinary citizens who often found themselves between street-gang thugs and their rivals in drive-by shootings, for the merchants murdered for the few dollars in their tills – for one young bride and a loving groom and a flower girl who might be shredded by hollow-point bullets on what should have been a day of joy.