The Last Days of New Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

walking. He sets his face back into a city sneer.
    —
    At a junction, shining in the moon’s white light, there is motion, and Thibaut slows. Two skeletons. They jerk their fleshless limbs. They walk a slow circle.
    Thibaut is still. The dead feet click.
    Alain, the best officer his cell ever voted into place, would treatsuch prim Delvaux bones, or the dens of fossils, prone Mallo skeletons shaking themselves repeatedly apart, with great respect. It had not stopped three of them jabbing him to death one humming hot June day with their own splintering matter.
    Thibaut backs away. He does not want to fight manifs.
    The organ in him, his new muscle, cramps at a sudden spasm of manif energy. It comes from somewhere
else.
He staggers. It comes again, so hard he doubles up.
    There is a rapid cracking of shots. The skeletons do not pause. The sounds are to the north. They are away from Thibaut’s route, but close, and his own insides still grip him from within, tug him, and when he runs, it is, almost to his own bewilderment, toward the firing.
    Through a boundary into the seventh. His ears pop. Another shot. Thibaut smells sap.
    The avenue de Breteuil is full of aspen trees. Their boughs stretch out to touch the houses. The complex of Les Invalides, that sprawling and once-opulent old military zone, is out of sight, has been overcome by millennial vegetation. Lampposts struggle up from roots and roofs from the canopy. The Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides is filled with bark.The Musée de l’Armée is being emptied, with slow, vegetable disorder, its weapons gripped and tugged over weeks out of their cases by curious undergrowth.
    Another shot: a flock of night things disperses. Something laughs. A woman runs out of the forest. She wears thick glasses, tweed trousers, and jacket, all smeared with woodland muck. She labors under bags and equipment, waves a pistol.
    There are growls, the snarl of breath. Beasts come rushing through the trees after her, with strange quick staggering.
    They are little tables, stiff board bodies, unbending wooden legs, thrashing tails, and ferocious canine faces. They scream and bite the air. Fanged furniture jerking across the rough ground.
    Thibaut hisses and steps past the stumbling woman into her pursuers’ path, between them and their quarry. They’ll veer from him, he thinks, as most manifs do.
    But they attack. They keep coming.
    He is almost too slow, in his shock, to bring up his gun. He fires as the first animal thing leaps, sends the growling table flying in an explosion of splinters.
    Others hurl themselves at him, and his cotton nightclothes are suddenly as tough as metal. He swings his arms. The pajamas grip Thibaut, make him an instrument, propel him fast and hard. A wood-and-taxidermy predator reaches him, biting, and Thibaut’s clothed arm comes down and snaps its spine.
    He stands between the woman and the wolf-tables, snarling as bestially as the pack. The tables inch forward. With a burst of creative chance Thibaut shoots the closest right in its snarl and sends it down in blood and sawdust.
    There’s shouting from the forest. He can see two, three figures in the trees. SS uniforms. A man in a dark coat, calling in German.
Quick! Be careful! The dogs—
    A burly officer fires right at him out of the shadows. Thibaut howls. But the shots ricochet from his chest. The soldier frowns as Thibaut brings his own rickety old rifle up and shoots and misses of course and reloads while the man still watches, stupid and slow, and Thibaut fires again, this time with
disponibilité,
and puts him down.
    Wolf-tables bite. A Nazi cracks a whip, to
rally
them, to gather them, and Thibaut snatches as the leather swings. It slaps and wraps his hand and makes it numb but he grips. By him the woman drops, pushes her fingers into the topsoil: the furniture that menaces her twitches and backs away. Thibaut yanks the whip-holder toward him byhis weapon and punches him back again, sending him