The Fae Wars: Onslaught

by J. F. Holmes

  Damn, I liked this woman. Competent, no shit, to the point smart ass. Reminded me a lot of Hollis, and then I wondered where she and Clark were. Hopefully at the safe house in Queens.

  “Major, can you watch our back until we get to the main tunnel?” she asked. I don’t think she was too sure of me just yet.

  “No problem. It’s your town,” I affirmed. “But once we get to the main line, I’d like to take point. That’s probably where we’ll run into trouble, a main north - south transit corridor.”

  She flashed a pretty smile through the grime and said, “If we ain’t dead before we get there, sure!”

  Chapter 12

  Darkness enveloped us, something deeper than anything you would see outside at night. We felt our way down the stairs, one step at a time, and my hand ran along the wall, keeping me on the right side and following the twists. We would risk a light when we got to the access tunnel, but not without listening first.

  It was quiet down there, quiet as a tomb. Ordinarily when you’re in the NY subway system there was always sound. Thousands of people going about their day, the rush of air as it was pushed through the tunnels by trains, the trains themselves, street musicians, announcements over the PA system. Now, though, the silence was literally deafening. My ears are pretty shot after more than a decade of combat, but it even felt quiet. Nothing through the soles of my boots. O'Neill risked a light, shining it down one direction, then the other. Everything was clear and the tunnel looked clean and well used. I knew there were many corridors that went parallel to train tunnels for maintenance and access, but we needed to get into the main tunnels. It would be easy as hell to get lost down here and come back up under Central Park. That would be great for gathering intel, shitty for staying alive. We went about a hundred meters when the corridor turned to the left and down again. Another flight of stairs, deeper into the earth. “There’s gonna be an access door coming up,” said one of the guys. “I’ve been down here before, chasing a drunk. Not fun.”

  “Hey buddy, how you doing?” I asked the guy who was wearing a bandage.

  He grunted and cursed. “Been shot twice, once in Iraq and once in Brooklyn. Never thought I’d get hit by a frigging arrow. Hurts like a son of a bitch.” His voice was kinda slurred and I knew he must have been in an incredible amount of pain, but he was tough. I clicked on my light and checked his bandage; it was soaked with fresh blood and the stub of the arrow stuck out of his chest, just below his shoulder.

  “You’ll be OK but try not to move it much. Think of the pension!” I was trying to do some morale building stuff, but he just grinned and said, “No shit.”

  “If you two are done holding hands, can we get on with it?” hissed O'Neill. Yeah, she was joking around, but underneath was a nerve-racking tension that we were all suffering from. Plus I suspected that I had had more sleep than any of them in the last twenty four hours.

  “OK, this door leads to the main tunnel. I got no idea what’s waiting for us, so major, maybe you can do some of your sneaky peaky shit,” said the cop who had chased the drunk down here.

  I nodded and said, “Lights off, and I’m going to wait sixty seconds for my vision to adapt. Keep them off, I don’t want to be silhouetted going through the door. And I’d like to borrow that shotgun if I could.” I held out one of the Glocks in exchange.

  “Only got three rounds, and it ain’t gonna work against the pointies,” said O'Neill.

  I grinned, took the shotgun, checked that there was a shell in the chamber and said, “I’m not worried about them, this is for the rats. Three knocks means come out. A shit load of knocks means let me the fuck back in.”

  The minute passed in darkness and silence, and although I knew my eyes were adjusting, I still couldn’t see anything. I leaned against the push bar of the door and felt it give slightly with a groan that seemed like booming thunder. A little further and I waited, seeing if there was any reaction from outside. With a start, I realized that I actually COULD see; there was a faint light coming from the tunnel. Maybe the tracks were still electrified and there was some subway train way down throwing some illumination. Leading with the barrel of the shotty I slowly shoved the door open, seeing nothing off to the right, south in the direction that we wanted to go in. The illumination was a bluish green light coming from what looked like splatters of paint on the walls, nothing man made. I pushed the door open further and slipped out, letting it close softly behind me.

  In front of me, slightly off to my left, was a subway train, stretching back down northward. It was filled with people, hundreds of them packed in like sardines. All of them turned bone white, like marble statues. The refugees must have been fleeing southward sometime during the night and the Elves had caught up with them. They stood and stared at me, almost seeming to move in the tricky shadows of the magic light. Faces gaped in horror and silent screams, arms raised, pleading, tearing at each other to get away from approaching death. It was more horrible than any pile of bodies that I had seen.

  There was nothing else around, so I turned back to the door and knocked three times, softly. One by one the cops slipped out and I gave the shotgun back to O'Neill. We stepped slowly down the tunnel, keeping to the side of the wall as it made a slow curve, all of us avoiding looking at the horror on the train. Every ten meters or so I held up my hand to signal stop and we listened. I heard it the third time we stopped, a soft clinking, tapping sound from far up ahead. Could be anything, but then I heard … singing.

  It could have been Germanic, harsh and guttural, long words strung together in a mindless tune. There were several voices, actually harmonizing. “What the hell is that?” whispered O'Neill in my ear, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. All of my attention had been focused forward to where I could barely make out the next station.

  “I dunno, but let’s go check it out. On the way anyway. Stay tight and be ready to run like hell back the way we came.” Hell no I didn’t want a fight in this tunnel.

  We moved steadily forward and the songs grew louder, accompanied by tools clinking and hammering. Nothing powered, just hand tools. I motioned for the rest of the guys to stay back, and O'Neill and I crept slowly forward to the edge of the platform. I took out my phone and started the camera, making sure to minimize the light as much as possible, and held it up over the edge, repeatedly pressing the shutter button. Then I brought it back down and we squeezed as close as we could under the ledge while we looked at the pictures. They were grainy, but they showed a half dozen squat, bearded figures working on sealing up the stairway to the street. Two were hammering bricks from the station wall, two more were passing them along in a chain, the rest were laying brick at an incredible pace. Half a row between one picture and the next. Then the final picture showed one of them stopping and approaching the platform edge. Crap.

  I looked up just as a stream of dwarf piss arched over the edge and splattered in front of us, splashing us with little drops. O'Neill started to get up and I slapped my hand across her mouth before she yelled, forcing the barrel of the shotgun down with my other hand. The piss stopped and we waited breathlessly. Then a voice above us said, “We heard ye comin a league away, but we have no conflict with ye, humans. Be on your way and the gods be with ye.” It was a deep basso rumbling and it faded slightly as the speaker backed away from the edge.

  “Holy shit, they speak English!” I whispered.

  “The fuck they do!”” shot back O'Neill. There was anger in her voice, and fear. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He said he had no problem with us and to be on our way. Didn’t you hear that?” I asked. It had been plain as day.

  “No!” she said, exasperated.

  “Go back to the guys and give me five minutes. If I don’t come back, I’m dead and you're on your own.”

  “I’ll kill you myself, crazy bastard,” she said, but started back up the tunnel.

  I waited until she was gone and then slowly raised my head above the platform edge, expecting
an arrow through the eye. Instead I saw all six of them standing by where they had been laying bricks, still as statues as they watched me. “I want to talk,” I said simply, and one of them, I assumed their leader, nodded and strode forward.

  “Speak your piece, human. We have no war with ye,” he rumbled. “I am unarmed.”

  I had a thousand questions, but the first one that came out was, “You speak English?’ Duh, obviously he did.

  He made a gesture, pointing at my left hand. “If an Elf catches ye wearing that ring, he will cut your hand off and then your wee head. I’m not speaking English. I have not much time, so ask your questions.”

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I said bluntly.

  “Closing up yer bolt holes. Fine brick you have here, but we love stone more. We are … once we were a free people. Now, like you all will eventually be, we are but slaves to our masters.” He said it with a bitterness that had an untold age of servitude behind it.

  I made an instant decision and said, “Come with us. Humanity hasn’t even started to fight yet.”

  “Ah, humans. I’ve heard the legends, but even ye failed in the end in the old world. This one will be the same. Go now while you can and leave a dying people in peace.” And he turned his back on me, returning to laying brick. Before he did, though, he said over his shoulder, “Be careful the further you go down the tunnels.”

  Chapter 13

  I came back and told the guys what had just happened and they shook their heads in collective disbelief.

  “So this alien was speaking English? Yeah freaking right!” said one.

  “I think it has to do with this,” I said, holding up my left hand. The ring was small for me, so it was on my pinky, which felt kind of weird. “I took it off an Elf I killed. The dwarf flat out told me he wasn’t speaking English. Then told me they had no beef with us. I could have smoked all of them while I was standing there talking to them.”

  They had no answer to that; the cops were scared and tired, probably hungry too. “Listen up, before we continue, I’ve got some water and food. Can’t give you any sleep, but share out and then let’s get this done.”

  You gotta hand it to the cops. They were tough, used to policing a city which had gotten rougher and rougher over the years. Gangs, guns, drugs, they battled it all, and although there was a lot of weirdness going on, they really didn’t bat an eye. Maybe tomorrow they would think about it, but right now was right now. It was the only way soldiers could deal with it and they were soldiers in a war now, like it or not.

  I stepped carefully past the platform, and one of the dwarves, a younger one, eyed us as we walked past. Then he raised his right arm in what I recognized as some sort of salute, hand curled in a fist, and I returned it. “LIVE FREE OR DIE!” I shouted. He nodded and then returned back to breaking bricks out of the wall.

  As we moved south, the tunnel angled a bit downward, then levelled out. We had a few more stations to pass before we turned left and the tunnel went down to go under the East River. Each one we passed was completely deserted, though at one point we heard echoes of a gunfight going on overhead, the heavy thumps of a Ma Deuce or a chain gun. Good, the National Guard was getting into the fight. I wanted to charge up the stairs and actually thought about it, but the gunfire abruptly stopped and a wash of heat rolled down the stairs from up above. Then there were screams, sporadic shots, and the roar of something gigantic. Those guys were getting murdered. I started to pull myself up on the platform, and a hand grabbed my arm. “Don’t,” said O'Neill, a pleading look on her face. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “To hell with that, if I come up out of the station I can catch them from the side or behind,” I shot back. Those were soldiers dying up there, my people.

  “There’s nothing you can do, major, this fight is lost. We gotta get out of here and regroup. You ain’t stupid, you know this. The intel we can bring back ...” It was a solid classic Irish face, dirt smeared and bloody with intense green eyes, and she was right. Hearing the roar of battle, I had, for an instant, thrown away the discipline that had carried me through many tight situations.

  “You’re right. Sorry,” I said simply. And she was. No matter how highly trained I was, I wouldn’t make a difference up there.

  She squeezed my arm, and said, “Come on, we got a long way to go, and I’m tired as hell.”

  “OK. Everything is just getting weirder and weirder.” And it was. Dragons, dwarves, orcs, Elves.

  She smiled and said, “It ain’t weird, it’s the City!” And she made an ‘after you’ gesture.

  Just before we were to start the long turn to go east, the glowing lights seemed to disappear into nothingness. Not go out, just fade, and we all tensed up. “Weird shit,” said O'Neill, and I agreed with her. Then the last man screamed like a hot poker had been shoved up his ass. I turned to see him lifted off the floor, run through by a nightmare. It was a cross between a spider and a scorpion, with long ass legs, bulbous eyes, and stinger that had arched over its back and stabbed him right through his vest. Bigger than a subway car, almost filling the tunnel, all legs, teeth and stinger. The tail lifted him up and drew him, still screaming, to a pincered mouth and popped off his head. The sound cut off short and the thing tossed the body aside, lashing the tail out and spearing another man through the throat.

  O'Neill’s shotgun boomed the same time my pistol fired. I went for the eyes, three rounds in each, and I was rewarded with a splash of blood and a scream that tore at my eardrums. The rest of the magazine went into the torso, then I dove aside as the tail whipped towards me. Drawing sparks off the metal, the stinger hit the rail next to me. And then I saw the bravest thing I’ve ever seen in all my years of combat. O'Neill was swatted aside by a leg, hitting her head on the edge of the platform, and then the remaining cop grabbed the damn tail in his arms and wrapped his body around it, holding on for dear life.

  I dropped the QZ and drew the Glock in one motion, emptying that magazine, trying to be careful of the cop bouncing up and down in front of me. It was a heroic thing he did, but it only bought us a little time. In his struggle he got too close to the thing’s mouth, blocking my shots, and it ripped his spine out. Frigging brave bastard dropped to the floor, and the monster turned to where O'Neill was crawling away, trying to talk into her radio. Yeah, head injury. The spider thing was hurting, one eye dead and lifeless, and blood coming out of its mouth. The rest of it, though, must have been armored like a tank, because there were long scores where my bullets had skipped off, though I saw a few bloody holes from the armor piercing rounds. One leg dangled, that must have been the shotgun.

  Screw it, time for something else. Hopeless, I drew the long knife out of my belt, and held it in a high guard, point downward, the tail came stabbing forward towards O'Neill, ignoring me; I think I was on its blind side, and I stepped into it, whipping the knife across and down, stabbing through the flesh. The elven knife went into it like a hot knife into butter, and the screech this time was louder than before, blanking my ears out like the howl of a subway car braking. The spider / scorpion thing swatted at me wildly, the knife was torn from my hands and I was knocked on my ass. I scrambled frantically for the remaining Glock, but it was in my backpack, up on my shoulders, a few inches and a trillion miles away. The blood splattered face descended towards me, and I saw a cruel intelligence in those eyes, well the one that was still working. Then the features twisted and reformed into a hideously beautiful blue and pointed ear visage, and low laughter bubbled out from misshapen lips. “Surrender, human, and I will make it quick!” it hissed, whatever the hell it was.

  “Kiss my ass!” I shouted back, but inside I was terrified. My hand scrambled for a rock or something to hit it with, but the ground was only smooth packed earth. A long, scaly tongue slipped out and caressed my face, licking at the dirt and dried blood. Then a meaty THUD, and a heavy pickaxe appeared, buried to the handle in the remaining eye socket. The creature screamed and hissed, rolling aroun
d like a spider that has been swatted, but not hard enough. A pair of rough, powerful hands grabbed me and dragged me out of the reach of the flailing limbs. Ignoring my new ally, I dug out Glock and ran up to the spider thing, ducked under the blindly flailing limbs and placed the barrel in the hideous face and pulled the trigger, letting the sight drop after each shot. By the last round there was nothing left of the head and the body twitched in slight spasms that slowly died away.

  I turned to my rescuer and held out my hand, breathing heavily and the young dwarf took it in an enormously powerful grasp. “What ye said to us, ‘live free or die’, do ye truly mean it? If ye do, I be coming with you.”

  “It’s kind of a thing here in America, this country you’re in, so yes, I meant it. Glad to have you aboard.”

  Chapter 14

  O'Neill was hurt, bad. The back of her head was bloody and as we came up to her she kept squeezing the shoulder mounted microphone for her radio. “Ten Thirteen Zulu, Sierra Uniform!” over and over. “Plainclothes officer needs assistance, Special Unit.” Her eyes were closed as I gently took the mic away from her. A quick look with the flashlight showed one pupil full on dilated and unresponsive and the back of her head where the wound was felt soft, like the bones had been crushed. Even as I checked her out her words turned to babble and a thin stream of blood started out of her nose.

  “Yer soldier is in a bad way,” said the dwarf, crouching next to me, a look of concern on his rough features.

  “No shit, Gimli,” I said sharply, and laid her gently back down on the packed dirt. Then I walked over to the still twitching monster and found the elven knife embedded in the tail. Being careful to avoid the foot long stinger, still dripping some kind of clear fluid, I pulled it out, wiped it off and then washed it with a little bit of water from my container. Even with what I was going to do, I didn’t want that filth on it.