Relentless

fiction.
    As tall as she already was, Zazu straightened her shoulders and lifted her head, and became noticeably taller. “What have you done? You idiot, you disgusting lump, what have you done?”
    “That was my only chance,” said the son of Shearman. “He’s never been helpless before. He’d never be helpless again. That was my only chance, and I took it, I took it, I took it.”
    The death of her son, Shearman, obviously enraged Zazu, but it seemed to be more of an intellectual than an emotional issue. “You cretin. He was a pioneer in the post-humanity movement. The way you were engineered from his sperm cells, you were destined to be the first of a super-race.”
    The weeping hunchback regarded her with bafflement. “But I’m not, Zazu.”
    “That wasn’t Shearman’s fault.”
    “But it wasn’t my fault, Zazu.”
    “At least Shearman made the effort.”
    Zazu was so slim and her suit so well tailored that I would not have thought she could have been carrying a concealed weapon. Magically, it appeared in her hand. She shot the hunchback in the head and then shot me in the chest.
    As I fell, I saw Penny shoot Zazu.

   Lying on my right side on the black-granite floor, I could see Zazu’s crumpled form, which seemed to be all sticks and baling wire tangled in haute couture. Her blood looked as black as the granite on which she had fallen.
    My vision rapidly faded, and when in seconds full blindness settled upon me, I heard Penny speaking my name. I was not able to reply, not able to
say I love you
or
good-bye
. I heard from Milo a terrible cry, and I tried to reach out to him, but I had no strength.
    As my vision left me, in the same way so did my hearing, diminishing until the silence of a perfect vacuum took me one step farther from the world of sensual delights. I wanted one more time to hear their voices, her laughter and his giggle, but a veil had fallen between me and them, a veil more imposing than a stone wall.
    The last smell I remember was the odor of my blood, which at first seemed repellent but then in some way became so sweet that it moved me to tears.
    About then the strange thing began to happen. My sense of smell swiftly returned to me, as did my hearing, and then my vision. I saw Zazu’s black blood spurt
into
her through her wounds, and she rose off the floor to a regal height once more. Her dropped gun flew back into her hand.
    As I had fallen, so I rose to my feet again. The bullets that had torn through me now retreated from my flesh and raveled backward through the air to the muzzle of Zazu’s pistol.
    The hunchback, too, had been reborn, standing with the dripping butcher knife displayed as if it were a precious talisman. He spoke his announcement of murder backward, and reversed out of the room.
    And then time flowed forward once more.
    “Not madmen,” Zazu said.
“Intellectuals
. They form the opinions of the elite…”
    From the way that Penny and Milo looked at me, I knew that we three were the only people in the room who were conscious of what had happened. Even Lassie was clueless.
    Because we were carrying the saltshakers that were no longer salt-shakers
.
    “—carry the message of their superiors to the masses. Which you have not done, Mr. Greenwich.”
    Because Zazu went on in this vein for another minute, we had the power to guide events as they best served us.
    I had been to the razor’s edge of death, balanced between this world and the next, and now Penny and Milo looked more precious to me than ever before. My heart labored, and I had to struggle against a great tide of sentiment that would have disabled me.
    We let Zazu babble until, as before, Milo said, “Don’t put down my dad. He’s the best dad in the world.” This time, instead of adding “and
soooo
patient,” the boy said, “and nobody’s gonna kill him on my watch.”
    Ignoring Milo, Zazu Waxx said to me, “With your books, you arepushing the pendulum in the wrong direction, which is why you must be broken, made to renounce your heresy, and purged.”
    Gasping, weeping, the hunchback returned to the room with the dripping knife to announce the murder of Shearman Waxx.
    Zazu straightened her shoulders, lifted her head. “What have you done? You idiot, you disgusting lump, what have you done?”
    “That was my only chance,” said the hunchback. “He’s never been helpless before. He’d never be helpless again. That was my only chance, and I took it, I took it, I took