Defenders

by Will McIntosh

  “They’re coming now!” her father shouted. “Through the sewers.”

  Her father must have gotten hold of some insane rumor. The sewers? How could they fit in sewers?

  “Dad, are you sure?”

  “I saw one,” he said, his voice low, trembling. “Is that sure enough for you?” He grabbed her upper arm and pulled her toward the door. “Move.” He was almost crying.

  They burst through the entrance, into sunlight. “Fast as you can run, Lila.”

  She ran, already breathless from fear, fed by adrenaline. She felt her father, Alfe, and Cheena right behind her. The air was filled with the sounds of battle: booming explosions that vibrated underfoot, the rattle of gunfire, and, worst of all, the sizzle of lightning.

  An image burst into Lila’s memory unbidden, of a Luyten coming out of the trees, cooking people along I-16 with its heater gun.

  The front door of Aunt Ina’s house opened when Lila drew close, then closed as soon as everyone was inside. Aunt Ina, Uncle Walter, and a few others stood at windows pointing guns, waiting, watching.

  Battle sounds were growing louder.

  “The defenders are coming,” Cheena said. “We heard it on the walkie.”

  Aunt Ina nodded from the window. “We heard the same on the TV. They’d better get here soon.”

  A dozen soldiers came around the corner of Cherry Street, covered in body armor, turning in one direction, then another. They were carrying serious weapons. Lila didn’t know how to tell one sort of weapon from another, but she’d seen enough news footage to recognize the serious ones.

  When they drew close, Lila’s dad and aunt Ina ran out to speak to them. Lila couldn’t hear what they said, but she heard the soldier who answered in a near shout.

  “Get everyone to Brandon Elementary. We’re setting up a defense there, and that’s the only facility we’re defending in the area. Most of our resources are devoted to defending the production facility.”

  “What about the defenders? Are they coming to help?” Lila shouted from the window.

  The soldier, who must have been sixty at least, held up his free hand, gesturing that he had no clue. “We have zero communication with the defenders. Zero collaboration. We just have to hope they know what they’re doing.”

  Just then, the emergency siren began to blow, startling the hell out of Lila. Just a little late to be of much help.

  The soldiers continued on their patrol as Lila and the others headed toward the school.

  They squeezed through a back door into one of the classrooms, where a hundred others were huddled, the smell of terror-sweat rife in the air. No one was speaking, save for the occasional murmur of assurance from parent to child, scattered whimpering from scared children. Lila and her people found a space near the windows, which looked out onto the playground behind the school.

  Outside, soldiers squatted behind a mix of sleek new fighting vehicles and antique tanks that were spread in a semicircle to create a perimeter. Beyond them lay a ball field, then trees on all three sides.

  Lila’s father handed her a canister of water. She took it, grateful, dehydrated from running.

  Dad studied her eyes one at a time. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, not sure if he was asking if she was scared, or still stoned from the Lace.

  An old man near the window shushed loudly. He was peering out, his mouth hanging open, jaw trembling. The voices outside had taken on shrill, urgent tones.

  Lightning surged from between the trees—three, then four bolts. Two soldiers were thrown into the air by the force of the blast. Others, farther from the impact points, vibrated violently before collapsing to the grass.

  Three Luyten surged out of the trees from the opposite direction, barreling over swings and slides, their free arms pointed forward. There was a blinding flash, the screams of burning soldiers, who’d been facing the other way, toward the lightning blasts.

  Lila squeezed her eyes shut as a half dozen more Luyten broke from the woods.

  “Where are the defenders?” someone asked as they huddled on the floor.

  Lila tried to think of something else. Anything else. Loblolly School, where she and Margot had gone to escape in that long-ago summer. Lila would keep her eyes closed and think only of Loblolly until it was over. Until she was dead. She whimpered, squeezed her eyes shut more tightly.

  Someone in the room with Lila began praying. Her voice grew louder, more tremulous, as the sound of lightning bursts outside grew louder.

  “Oh, no. No,” someone moaned.

  “We have to help them.” It was her father’s voice. “Anyone who can fight, we have to go now.”

  Lila’s eyes flew open. Her father and half a dozen others were headed toward the back door, toward the smoke and the bodies and the starfish, so close now.

  Then her father was outside, running, because the soldiers were dead and the Luyten were coming. He raced for the makeshift bunker where the dead soldiers’ weapons lay amid their toasted bodies.

  She saw a tall, balding man in a suit swing a fire ax at a charging Luyten. It cut him in two at the chest with a whip of its cilia.

  Over soon. Think of Loblolly School. All over soon. Lila felt a warm wash of pee run down her thighs. She clapped her hands over her ears. One of them was speaking to her. She’d never felt something so awful, had never heard an accent so foreign, so evil and wrong.

  Aunt Ina covered Lila’s eyes, her trembling fingers not doing a thorough enough job, because Lila saw between the slats of her fingers, saw her father raise one of the big rifles as a Luyten galloped at him.

  It gripped the arm holding the rifle and pulled it off.

  Lila howled as her father spun out of the bunker. He landed at the foot of a toppled slide.

  “Daddy!” Lila screamed.

  She pressed her face to the window, suddenly unable to see her father because something was blocking her view. It was a pillar, bone white at the bottom, black above, that hadn’t been there a second before. Just as quickly, it was gone.

  The center of one of the Luyten blew out, leaving a trail of black meat behind as it toppled to the pavement.

  Everyone was cheering. It was deafening. For a moment Lila was confused, because her father was dead and everyone was cheering. Then she saw them, impossibly tall on three knobby white legs. A defender leaped from the roof of the school above her, landed right behind one of the Luyten, and slashed it with the razor-sharp knife edges that ran down its arms and legs.

  One of the defenders threw up its hands as a Luyten turned a heater on it. It took a heartbeat longer for it to die than it took a human soldier, but as it crumpled, black and smoking, to the ground, the Luyten wielding the heater was blasted by a weapon that was built right into a defender’s forearm. The Luyten burst into half a dozen pieces.

  Three surviving Luyten fled into the trees, a handful of defenders in pursuit.

  The room went wild. Everyone was leaping in the air, kissing, hugging, laughing, crying, shouting. This was something they’d never seen before: Luyten being beaten. Being slaughtered by these giant warriors, these fearless, powerful creatures who were on their side.

  Lila understood the rush of joy and hope they felt, the relief after being so close to death, but she didn’t feel it herself. She ran outside, ignoring Aunt Ina’s calls that she come back.

  She stopped a dozen feet from her dad, who was lying awkwardly, one leg bent under him, the other splayed up high, close to his face. The bloody hole, the bone jutting where his arm used to be, made her turn away, hand over her mouth. How could he be dead? How could he die now, just when there was hope? Lila wanted him to see what had happened to the Luyten.

  It struck her that on the last day she’d ever see her father, she’d disappointed him. She’d gone off and gotten high, and he’d been forced to slap her out of her stupor. When she finally opened her eyes, he’d looked so disappointed in her.

  Lila wanted to go to him now, stro
ke his hair, tell him goodbye, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not with him like he was. Where was his arm, she wondered?

  20

  Oliver Bowen

  May 27, 2030. Washington, D.C.

  “There, in Mumbai,” Oteri said, pointing at the feed. Finally, a glimpse of a defender. He was pressed close against the buildings, his enormous body hunched. The streets were deserted; the emergency signal would have sounded by then, ordering everyone inside, away from windows. It was not simply a safety consideration—any human watching the battle became involuntary eyes and ears for the Luyten.

  The defender paused, looked left, then right. The camera sending the feed rose above building level and panned the area, revealing another defender on the adjacent street.

  “They’re nowhere near the production facility,” Ariel commented. She checked her system. “The facility is under Seshadripuram; they’re out in Rajajinagar.”

  “Maybe they figure our forces are dug in around the perimeter, so they’ll take the fight to the starfish.” Oteri smiled. “The starfish won’t be expecting that.”

  “For once those fuckers have no idea what’s coming, or from where,” Wood said. “It’s time they find out what that feels like.”

  “Starfish!” someone shouted, pointing at the Mumbai feed. There were three, their bright emerald, gold, and mustard skin fouled with sewage, galloping in a line perpendicular to the defenders’ route.

  One of the defenders spotted them. He said something into his comm and took off, parallel to the Luyten, one block to their right. Another defender took the street one block to their left. They were incredibly fast. Three legs allowed them to run upright, yet almost gallop.

  “Go!” Wood shouted, like he was watching a running back heading toward the end zone. “Go, go, go!”

  The defenders drew ahead of the Luyten, then cut inward on a crossing street. They stopped just out of sight of the approaching Luyten, pressed against buildings on either side, weapons raised.

  “Get ’em!” Wood shouted. “Yes!”

  Others in the command center joined in, shouting at the screen, as the Luyten passed the spot where the defenders had set up their ambush. The defenders stepped into the street and opened fire from behind.

  The Luyten were hurled forward by the force of the shots, black blood splattering across the pavement. Deafening cheers filled the war room. The president leaped, swung his fist in the air, again, again.

  Oliver couldn’t tell if all the Luyten were dead at that point, but it didn’t matter, because the defenders were on them in an instant, shooting each at close range before moving on.

  Now the feeds from all of the cities showed either Luyten, defenders, or both.

  “Look at that Manhattan feed,” Ariel said. She expanded it. Two defenders were standing in an alley. It almost looked like they were hiding.

  “What are they doing?” someone asked.

  A Luyten passed in the street. The defenders just watched it.

  Oteri studied the scene, frowning, hands on her hips. “Either something went very wrong in their training, or everything went right. We’ll know soon enough.”

  They spotted more defenders on the roof of Clayton Tower in Manhattan, watching Luyten movements and relaying them to troops on the ground. A few of the troops were involved in firefights, putting up some resistance, but most were actively avoiding the enemy.

  Manhattan’s production facility was beneath the tip of the island, much of it under the bay. The Luyten were converging on it. As each arrived it set up close to the outside layer of human defenses, creating a web encircling those defenses. If the soldiers holding it were overrun, they had nowhere to go but into the bay.

  More Luyten arrived by the minute. Soon there were hundreds, maybe thousands. It was a terrifying sight, to see so many in one place. Oliver’s heart was pounding; he turned his head, tugged at the collar of his shirt, which suddenly felt too tight.

  The Luyten attacked. It came simultaneously, from all sides.

  “Why are the defenders hanging back like that?” Oliver said. “Those soldiers need help, right now.”

  The Luyten wasted no time pressing in, trying to break through the perimeter. Mostly they stayed behind their cover, moving only when necessary. Oliver watched as a Luyten firing a human-made wall-buster from behind a truck suddenly bolted. Two seconds later, the truck blew to pieces.

  Suddenly all of the Luyten scattered, just before a sphere the size of a coconut sailed from a high window inside the human defense perimeter.

  “Tasmanian devil,” Oteri said.

  It exploded like a swarm of angry bees, the individual bits creating gaping wounds in wood, concrete, even the street itself, before burning out.

  As soon as things settled, the Luyten began to reappear.

  Just as suddenly, they disappeared again. Another Tasmanian devil flew from the same window.

  “They’re buying time,” Oteri said, “hoping the defenders will show. We’re in trouble if they don’t.”

  Three Luyten flying in modified Harriers appeared high over the rooftops. They hovered there as the Tasmanian devil played out, then two swooped down, fired wall-busters point-blank at the window where the Tasmanian devils originated. The side of the building erupted, spewing concrete and steel into the street. Both airborne Luyten were hammered with small-arms fire. They were cut to pieces before their aircraft had time to fall out of the air and crash, one of them taking a chunk out of a building before dropping to the sidewalk, the other tumbling and spinning down the center of a street.

  The Luyten kept coming, probing for a breach in the perimeter, firing captured human-shoulder-launched rockets that blew sections off the old buildings, their snipers waiting patiently for the soldiers to grow the least bit careless. The soldiers were using right-angle rifles with electronic sights to shoot without exposing themselves, because even before they poked a head out, the Luyten would know it was coming and blow it to chunks.

  Oliver opened his mouth to ask what the hell the defenders were waiting for, when the first few stormed into view. At that moment he realized what they were planning, and wondered if he was the last person in the room to catch on. They’d been waiting for the Luyten to pin themselves against the human defenses. They came with weapons blazing, screaming in maniacal rage. Luyten spun to engage them.

  Immediately, a Luyten fell, two of its limbs blown off. It twitched and scrabbled on the pavement as if trying to right itself, then lay still.

  “A pincer maneuver,” Oteri said, seeming to relish her role as the room’s military authority. “Perfect for this situation.”

  “The Luyten had to know it was coming,” Ariel said. “Every human in the area is a set of eyes for them.”

  “But what choice did they have?” Oliver said. “They could have hung back, chased the defenders around the city, but their best chance to destroy the production facility was to get there before—”

  Wood shushed him. Oliver shut up.

  A defender’s legs glowed red, then blackened. Writhing in agony it crashed to the ground, its head all but crushing a minivan as it landed. A second defender was firing blasts from its forearm-mounted weapon while pressing his other hand against a badly bleeding chest wound.

  The humans continued to engage the Luyten, their fire tightly contained to avoid hitting defenders.

  The Luyten were falling faster than Oliver could track; black blood was everywhere. Defenders pressed forward, spraying the Luyten with bullets, tearing them to shreds.

  Moving as one, the Luyten surged forward, storming the defenders’ position, trying to escape the trap they were in. The defenders fell back, letting them come. They waited until the Luyten were almost on top of them, then, shrieking, eyes wild, they attacked the Luyten close in, using their bladed limbs to slash Luyten open. The Luyten couldn’t match the giants in hand-to-hand combat, and had trouble firing weapons with the defenders so close; their heat guns roasted as many Luyten as def
enders as they tried to repel the onslaught.

  Within a few minutes, all of the Luyten lay dead. At least half the defenders—Oliver estimated sixty or seventy—were dead or wounded as well.

  The war room had gone silent during the final battle, but now President Wood raised his face toward the ceiling and let out an undulating whoop, part Native American war cry, part coyote howl.

  People exchanged hugs and high-fives, but only briefly, because there were eleven battles still raging, and not all were as clean and beautiful as Manhattan. London, especially, was a mess. Teams of Luyten had each defender surrounded, while other Luyten had penetrated the human defense perimeter. There were no cameras inside the facility, but it appeared the Luyten were already inside.

  “What’s happening in London?” Oliver asked.

  “They had only two platoons of defenders ready,” Ariel said. “It looks as if there were too many Luyten.”

  “If the London facility is the only one we lose, this will be a very good day,” Wood said.

  21

  Oliver Bowen

  May 29, 2030. Washington, D.C.

  Although he hadn’t slept in two days, Oliver had never felt so alive. They had a chance, a real chance, to win the war. The feeling of impending annihilation sitting on his chest like a gorilla for the past year had lifted, replaced by images of defenders swooping into cities, fighting like crazed superheroes. He couldn’t get over how fiercely they fought. They seemed to hate Luyten more than humans did. When the last of the Luyten were dead, the defenders seemed downright frustrated that there were no more to kill.

  Oliver passed Five’s holding area. He paused. Five had been mostly forgotten; he was fed and watered, and otherwise left alone. Even Oliver hadn’t spent much time thinking about Five recently.

  Oliver activated a retinal scan that allowed him access to Five’s room, and stepped inside.

  Five was curled in a ball. Oliver had never seen a Luyten in that position. He had no idea what to say. He hadn’t come to gloat. Honestly, he didn’t know why he’d come. Five probably knew.