by S. S. Segran
“Not to mention it’s dark out here, so trying to find one might take a while,” Tegan muttered. “Kody?”
“I’ll look.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then reopened them and searched around. After a minute, he pointed to their right, following a curve in the highway that dipped toward the main city. “There. The old Mercedes.”
They picked up the pace, weaving through dead cars and shielding themselves whenever the wind switched direction and blew smoke at them. Hopping over a railing, they cut across the road to reach the ancient, rusted truck with an open box bed at the back. Aari examined it with halfhearted distaste. “Everyone got their tetanus shot?”
Victor slipped into the driver’s seat, leaving the door open, and gave the interior a once-over. He grunted in approval. “Finally, a real car. Good old-fashioned diesel firing up cylinders.”
“You belong in a different century,” Deverell said, chagrined, as he climbed onto the box bed.
“I’m barely seven years older than you, Vaughn.”
“May as well be seventy.”
“And you might as well be seven. Kody, need your eyes up here.”
Mariah couldn’t believe they were trying to bring levity into the situation. Why weren’t they on the verge of losing their sanity? She was barely able to hold on to it herself.
As Kody pulled himself into the cab next to Victor and Chief, the others climbed into the open back and joined Deverell, sitting against the walls. It took a while to hotwire the truck. When the vehicle came to life, it sputtered and rattled hard but held steady. Mariah hated the way it jostled her from the inside out.
They stuck to the emergency lane, switching over to the curb and shoulder when the crush of abandoned cars grew too congested. The aurora overhead swayed; its diffused light sometimes illuminated their path well, but at other times was completely useless.
Mariah leaned forward, hands clasped between her knees. Tegan, sitting across from her, placed her own hands over Mariah’s.
As they rumbled through the city, taking the main road that led to the Pont du Mont-Blanc bridge, people emerged from their homes and a myriad of venues, confused and checking on each other. Some carried battery-powered flashlights while others held candles. There were awed gasps as the aurora above glowed and danced. Almost everyone had their phones in hand, testing the devices every now and then in hopes that they would turn on. Apart from a few shouts here and there, the city was eerily quiet.
“It’s like people aren’t sure what to do once the power is completely out,” Aari said softly, watching families, friends and strangers converge on streets or retreat into their homes in bafflement.
A few children ran out onto the roads, wheeling past dead cars and laughing. It was an adventure for them, an exciting happening of something they’d never witnessed before. Mariah’s stomach clenched. Ignorance was indeed bliss.
As they reached an intersection, the truck rolled to a stop. Mariah and the others peered through the sliding window into the cab. Inside, both Victor and Kody sat rigidly upright. Tegan knocked on the glass but when neither opened it, she did it herself. “What is it?”
Shrieks up ahead startled them. Mariah leapt to her feet, looking over the truck’s roof as the others in the back joined her. It was hard to make out anything in the dark, but farther down the road, she noticed flashlights dropping—at first one by one, then more at a time. Shadows sprinted past the bright beams, straight toward the group. In their wake, rivulets of red.
Horror sank in. “Marauders,” Mariah whispered.
Kody pulled himself halfway out his cab window. When he spoke, it was as if he couldn’t breathe. “No. Not Marauders. Something worse.”
The ocean of onyx monsters came within the radiance of the aurora, viridescent eyes ablaze. They raced like waves from the bridge, tearing down every human in their path. Some swerved into venues and apartments; screams echoed through the buildings as men and women threw themselves out of windows to escape the nightmares that had burst into their homes. The ones who flung themselves from higher floors hit the ground and never got up.
Mariah couldn’t cry out. All she could muster was a broken gasp before Victor stomped on the accelerator and tore toward the fiends.
Standing in the box bed, Tegan watched as the truck neared the surging monsters. Around them, people ran for their lives, but they would not stand a chance against the hellish legion that had invaded the city.
The abominations were within lunging distance of the truck when Victor made a screeching right turn and flew down a side road, plowing aside a few abandoned cars. As they passed citizens still lingering outside, Deverell barked at them to get indoors and lock themselves in the safest place possible.
Pont du Mont-Blanc was no longer an option, but there were other bridges across the Rhône River and it looked like Victor was making a break for one of them. Tegan hoped the tidal wave of beasts hadn’t flooded in from those, too. So far, they were yet to encounter more of the creatures head-on.
“Kody!” Mariah suddenly shouted. “What are you doing?”
The boy was perilously climbing out of his window and onto the bed, his ballcap safely fastened to a belt loop. “Get in, ‘Riah!” he yelled.
“Are you crazy?” she demanded, wiping the remaining tears from her cheeks.
“You can’t use your abilities right now! It’s safer for you inside! And less crowded for the rest of us!”
“Go, Mariah!” Tegan urged.
Mariah didn’t look happy but she yielded. Carefully hugging the cab of the truck, she slid one leg through the window followed by the other. The wind blew her hair to the side and she took a moment to compose herself, fear tautening her face. Deverell and Kody held her to keep her from tumbling off the side of the vehicle, and Kody didn’t let go of her hand until she was securely tucked in beside Victor and Chief.
A warning prickle on the back of Tegan’s neck made her turn. Four of the beasts had peeled away from the horde the next street over, giving chase.
“Six o’clock!” she warned the others.
“Vic!” Deverell bellowed. “Gun it!”
The truck veered left onto another main road, heading in the same direction as it had earlier, but wasn’t fast enough to outrace its pursuers. Two of the beasts started to flank the vehicle on either side while the other two stayed on their tailgate. Tegan bared her teeth at them. She didn’t know why she wasn’t more terrified but, given the situation, was grateful.
Kody appeared beside her, staff in hand. He pressed one of the buttons and the lethal ends extended with a cold shnk just as the nearer of the two beasts chasing behind leapt. As it half-landed on the tailgate, its claws hooked in. Kody stepped forward, stabbing his weapon toward the creature’s batlike face, but the beast ducked and snaked its head, avoiding the blade with frightening awareness.
Switching tactics, Kody swung the staff in an arc. The blade carved the barest of wounds from the beast’s shoulder, over its chest and toward its neck. The creature pushed on its front legs and the tailgate’s latch broke. The tailgate flopped down, putting more distance between the animal and the team.
Kody hurtled forward with a war cry. Tegan grabbed his sweater to keep him from falling off the wobbly tailgate, and Deverell held onto her other arm. With a powerful strike, Kody sank his weapon into one of the creature’s massive, flexing paws. He drove it as deep as it could go, almost sawing through, but the beast gave no indication of pain. It grinned at them, head tilting.
This close, Tegan understood what Kody meant when he said they weren’t Marauders. These were smaller and streamlined for speed, with hind legs angled backward. Long ears flattened against the sides of their heads and gaping cavities for nostrils dominated their faces. But even that barely distracted from the short-jowled muzzles that left the monstrous, serrated black teeth exposed and gleaming.
A chill coiled up Tegan’s spine as she realized what she was really looking at. It’s the cleanup crew Reyor
talked about. That’s why there are so many of them. That’s why they’re behaving like heat-seeking missiles.
With one last cry, Kody slammed his weapon deeper into the beast’s paw. The damage was enough to loosen its hold on the tailgate. It fell off, tumbling toward the fiend behind it. The second creature leapt over it without breaking stride. The first rose up, shaking itself, and hobbled after the truck, mangled foot almost completely severed. Then it noticed a boy ducking into an establishment to the side and took off after him.
Tegan yanked Kody to safety and Aari hurried forward to pull the tailgate shut. “Don’t bother!” Deverell yelled. “It’s broken!”
Aari scrambled toward the others just as the second beast sprang. It landed fully on the box bed, claws puncturing the metal to keep itself in place, and knocked Aari over. He fell onto his back with a yelp. Just as Kody made to swing his staff at the creature, Aari pulled his knees to his chest and kicked out mightily, catching the beast’s upper body. It didn’t budge.
“Work with me!” Kody shouted. “One—two—three!”
Aari kicked out again as Kody slashed his weapon at the beast’s neck. The beast tried to duck both blade and feet, but the combined attack split its attention. It reacted to Kody’s staff, writhing away from the deadly metal tip. Its angle allowed Aari to fling it back, though not before it sank its claws into his shoe, dragging it off as it rolled off the back of the vehicle. It hit the ground but got right back up, ready to take off after the truck, until a woman with a rifle on the balcony of a nearby apartment building began shooting at it. To Tegan’s horror, the beast leapt onto the lowest balcony and traveled upward to the complexes above toward its assailant.
She looked away and noted the blood dripping from Aari’s foot. Hooking her arms around his chest and dragging him backward, she leaned him against the back of the cab and crouched to inspect the injury. “Looks like your shoe took the brunt of those claws. How bad does it hurt?”
“I’ll be fine,” he answered through clenched teeth. “But that thing’s coming back.”
“I’m so angry at myself for using up the last of my explosive gels in New Zealand,” Deverell muttered.
Tegan looked over the sides of the truck. Victor had done a good job of evading the flanking beasts by swinging from one side of the street to another, trapping them against the walls of the buildings. But they were hardy monsters, and though they couldn’t make the awkward leap onto the truck as they ran, they used their compact bodies to knock the vehicle into the middle of the road and keep it there.
Kody joined Tegan, wincing at the sight. “They smell awful. The blood on them . . . it’s like raw iron. But wet. Sickly. Oh God, I might throw up.”
Tegan gripped his arm. “Disengage your senses and let’s take these—”
Kody jerked forward and retched over the side of the box bed. The beast deftly dodged, falling back just a little. Tegan held him steady. “Hey—”
“I can hear them,” he moaned, bracing himself against her. “People are crying for help everywhere. A kid screamed for his mom two seconds ago and both of them are silent now.”
It dawned on her, then, that even she could hear some of it through the lashing wind, through the beasts’ rumbling snarls and brays. As Deverell and Aari worked to keep the two remaining fiends off the truck, Tegan brought her face close to Kody so their foreheads touched, resting her hands against his temples.
“Disengage your senses,” she repeated quietly. “We’ll deal with this one step at a time.”
“People are dying. Teegs, people are dying and we’re running for the Lodge!”
Hot tears stung her eyes but she didn’t allow them to fall. “It’s only the six of us here. We can’t take these things on alone. There’s hundreds at least, maybe thousands. You saw the way they flooded in from the bridge. If we dive in now, we won’t be able to go after the person behind this whole mess.”
Kody stared at her, his gaze haunted. “I didn’t ask for this. For any of this.”
“I know. None of us did.”
“Hey!” Aari yelled on the other side of the truck. “Kody, we need you! This thing just latched on like Spider-Man!”
Tegan lightly squeezed her hands against Kody’s temples. He swallowed, knocking foreheads with her a couple of times, then darted over to join Aari and Deverell, his staff already swinging down the side of the box bed.
Shifting her attention back to the other beast, Tegan took in its thrilled smile and glittering eyes that seemed to shift from green to blue and back again. It’s getting a high out of this. I wonder if . . .
She knew the Marauders, through their design and neural wiring, were uncontrollable with mindlink. Would these new creatures be the same? They seemed even more intent on slaughter than their predecessors, which most likely meant they would be next to impossible to command.
Still . . .
Grasping the side to keep steady, she shut her eyes and propelled herself into the novasphere. In the immediate vicinity was a sea of churning blackness. Locating the creature she wanted, she shot into its consciousness. The struggle to tame the drive for carnage proved futile as she drowned in its frenzy of the hunt, choking on the beast’s suffocating bloodlust. With a curse, she tore out of its savage mind and flung herself back into the safety of her own, chest heaving. Her eyes flew open just as the beast lunged crosswise, jaws stretched open. Tegan screeched.
But the beast never landed its attack. It hung in midair, writhing body suspended a mere two feet from Tegan like a puppet on strings, black fangs gnashing angrily, front claws stretching for her. She had pressed herself against the cab, heart missing several beats. What the—
She turned. Mariah was staring out through the cab’s back window, two fingers raised, a terrible rage in her eyes that Tegan had never seen before. With a flick of her head, Mariah sent the fiend hurtling backward, over a stout building and out of sight. In the next second, she went limp against Chief. Victor lifted her chin with one hand and quickly looked her over, then laid her head securely between the wolfdog’s shoulders.
Tegan sent a silent thank you to her friend just as a roar of triumph came from the other side of the truck. Kody, Aari and Deverell all had ahold of Kody’s staff. Together, they’d leveraged it in their favor, hoisting a semi-skewered abomination above them that snarled and was attempting to free itself.
“Vic!” Deverell shouted. “Could you pretty please lend a hand?”
Victor’s arm rose from the driver’s window and a force of air followed the concussive blast that volleyed out, ripping the beast clear off the blade and sending it through a window in one of the taller structures around them.
Tegan stood up to look over the cab. “We’re almost at the next bridge!” she yelled.
They cleared the main road, but upon seeing dead vehicles crowding the bridge entrance, Victor took a right. The Rhône blurred past on the driver’s side; its depths had never looked so unwelcoming. A few beasts ripped into a couple of stragglers on the sidewalk while their other victims lay mutilated nearby. Blood painted the asphalt, glistening ever so slightly under the swaying aurora. No one at the back of the truck spoke, but anguish flashed on their ashen faces.
They raced past another bridge where a few more beasts prowled. Deverell crouched by the cab’s back window. “Vic, forget the next one too! If they’re hiding out around Tour de L’Île, it’ll be a chokepoint!”
“No!” Kody hollered. “I’ve been scanning! It looks clear! Go for it!”
Victor didn’t give any indication that he’d heard either of them, but he swung the wheel to the left. The back of the box bed listed into the turn, forcing the truck to fishtail until he got it under control halfway over the bridge. He sped straight on, forgoing the right lane that forked around the remains of a fortified castle and instead opting to stay on the tramway. Two islets with quays extended on either side of the fluvial island.
Kody did a slow, full turn with his whole body, eyes raking over
their surroundings. “None of those freaks are here, but I’m still hearing some kind of—wait! Wait! Stop the truck!”
“Not happening!” Victor snapped through the open back window.
“There are people trapped on the wharf! It’s just two of those things, we can take them! We have to help some of these people!”
The truck skidded to a hard stop. Victor jumped out, motioning everyone else to stay put and for Kody to join him. With the boy in the lead, they sprinted to the islet downstream. Tegan vaulted over the side of the box, picking up a broken metal signpost from the ground, and took off after them.
Kody’s words echoed in her mind. She’d never wanted to view the people harmed in Reyor’s path as mere collateral damage; she was just trying to make decisions that would allow the group to fulfill their part in the prophecy, even if that meant she needed to prioritize their wellbeing above others’.
But am I going too far? We want to protect everyone, but telling the team to walk past those who need help now might be crushing them from the inside. Have I made things worse?
Shaking the stab of guilt away, she rounded the establishments on the quay seconds behind Kody and Victor. An SUV stood under a lone decorative tree. Its doors had been dented in. Two sinewy creatures seemed to taunt the older couple inside; one prowled the roof of the vehicle as the second leapt onto the hood, making ready to crack the windshield with its skull.
Victor whistled, catching the beasts’ attention, and surged forward with a concussive blast that rocked the SUV. The beasts flew clear off. One landed farther down the road and the other went over the railing into the river; when it reappeared, it struggled to swim. The couple in the car spotted the newcomers and banged their hands hysterically on the glass, fighting to get the damaged doors loose. The woman sobbed, the lines on her face pulling as she screamed for help.
Tegan and Kody ran toward the SUV but within seconds the creature that had landed on the road returned, soaring over the roof of the car and taking Tegan down. The broken signpost clattered away. She cursed at it, then at the monster on top of her with its paws on either side of her head. Its hot breath bloomed on her neck, and the skin on the receding muzzle scratched her jaw.
