Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

momentary flash of light he caught a glimpse of a pale, bald scalp, luminous eyes, a darting tongue.
    As suddenly as they had attacked him, he was free of them, the displaced John the Baptist rolling impotently on the floor, snapping his jaws.
    Shadrach spun to his feet, pressed himself against the ladder, prepared to scramble back up it. But there was no need—the bipedal thugs had already leapt over the shaft's edge. As he watched in amazement, the two legless wonders galumphed over the edge, too, in what resembled some form of ritual suicide.
    He ran to the edge, stared down into the shaft. Below, he saw, like pale mushroom caps in the gloom, the parachutes of the last would-be bandits gliding gracefully out of sight. He aimed into the shaft, but at the last moment did not pull the trigger.
    Instead, he hoisted himself into the elevator, pushed B for lowest level, set it for speed return, and released the emergency stop. As it creaked into rumbling motion, he jumped back onto the platform.
    Shadrach picked up John the Baptist by the plate and sat down against the wall near the ladder. His side felt bruised, his lip was split, his right wrist partially sprained. His hand passed over something smooth as he propped himself up and he brought it in front of his face, to examine it in the dull green light.
    â€œHuh!” he said to John the Baptist. “A bomb. The little bastards were going to blow me up.”
    He looked at John the Baptist and John the Baptist looked at him.
    â€œWhy?” Shadrach asked. “Why was an assassin-model meerkat in Nicola's apartment?”
    John the Baptist tried to snap at his fingers.
    â€œWhat's the point of silence? You're not an animal. You're not a robot. You're dying.”
    John the Baptist said, “She
thought
I was an animal. I thought she was capable of genocide.”
    Shadrach jammed the cylinder deep into the meerkat's left ear. It screamed, cursed, reduced to incoherence.
    â€œI knew you were incomplete,” Shadrach said.
    Just then the elevator reached the bottom with a gut-wrenching shriek of metal, echoed by at least two screams.
    Shadrach picked up John the Baptist and said, “We'll continue this conversation later.” He stuffed the head back in his pocket. Aching, he got to his feet.
    â€œWelcome to below level,” he said, and laughed, but it was a laugh like breaking glass.
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    NOW A strange condition overcame Shadrach, in which the world existed in gasps and gaps, so that the intervals between events vanished and his actions took on a cold and deadly precision: There were only places he arrived at and places he had yet to arrive at. Once gone, he was again instantly at his next destination. He remembered vaguely, as he made his way to the fifth level, the absence and presence of light, the touch of skin against skin in the tightly packed corridors of raggle-taggle communities to whom he was like a pale ghost, fast receding from them, followed by vast, empty passages. More than once some brave local arm of the law would stop him and ask him his business among them, and he would answer them with a stare that corroded their souls.
    Only once did he come free of this fey mood, when he found himself aboard an old industrial elevator hurtling down through the darkness, lit only by red emergency lights, his fellow passengers' faces subsumed in blood, their eyes locked on the gun he held at his side. The elevator bellowed and leapt like a beast eager to plunge into the heart of Hell, and through a hole in the floor, he could see the rock to either side passing by faster than fast. He thought that the elevator must be a manifestation of his own bloodlust, the berserker love that had crashed his nerve ends, hijacked his cells.
    But such self-awareness was an anomaly: The gaps, the gasps, of time between events had been filled with memories, for he was not truly remorseless, not truly a machine rebuilt for