by James Axler
Gyatso swung his short sword in a fast, glittering arc, wheeling on the balls of his feet. The blade slashed through scaled throats, plunged into bellies, withdrew to chop at arms and hands. A keening cry issued from his lips.
Using the wall at his back as a brace, Kane kicked out, sending a scalie sprawling into one of its comrades. Taking advantage of the momentary respite, he shoved the Sin Eater back into its holster and reached down for the combat knife in its boot scabbard. His fingers pressed the quick-release button, and he whipped up the long blade just in time to parry a spear thrusting for his face. His knife whirled down to strike the shoulder of his attacker, gashing the chest and driving the hissing monster back.
The same strategy occurred to Grant when he found himself backed to the wall. He leathered his Sin Eater, drew his knife and leaped to the attack even as a dagger point raked along his ribs. He was no defensive fighter. Even in the teeth of overwhelming odds, Grant always carried the battle to the enemy.
His blade chopped out and dropped a scalie, severing a shoulder, while a whistling backhand stroke sank into the skull of another. The scalies crowded him fiercely, raining blows blindly but hampered by their own numbers and lack of strategy.
Domi was reluctant to holster her Combat Master, but she drew her long serrated knife, the one with which she had cut Guana Teague's throat. She sank the point into an arm. She used the blaster barrel to block blows whistling her way. Metal clashed loudly against metal, blue sparks briefly lighting up the darkness. She moved in a blur of speed, dodging, ducking and sidestepping. She slashed the blade in a flat arc, the point tearing through the tough flesh of a scalie's forehead. It uttered a croak of horror as blood rivered into its eyes. As it lifted its hands to staunch the flow, she drove the knife halfway to the hilt into the side of its throat.
Brigid drew her own blade, a Sykes-Fairbairn commando dagger, but it was slapped down by a thrust from a poleax. The blunt end of the shaft rammed into her stomach, and the air shot from her lungs and tears sprang to her eyes. She allowed herself to fall forward against her assailant, smelling the musty reek of its muscular, scale-covered body. As she fell, she stabbed savagely with the dagger, feeling the point meet a second of resistance before sinking deep into yielding flesh. The howl of surprised pain bursting from the scalie's throat nearly deafened her. Hissing and snapping, her foe fell atop her, bearing her to the floor.
Shu lashed out with the key-shaped cudgel, the heavy iron crashing against a skull and shattering it. The scalie yelped, hands clasped to the bleeding split in its scalp and bone, then fell to the floor and rolled in agony.
He struck another stickie with his iron key, smashing it into the mutie's temple. The creature's blood and brains spattered in its face.
Trai wielded the AK like a quarter-staff, blocking knife thrusts on the wooden stock and driving the butt full into faces, breaking noses and teeth, fighting as savagely as the muties.
Only Grigori Zakat did not resort to a weapon other than his firearm. He squeezed off shot after shot, always striking a scaled target. Kane caught fragmented glimpses of him moving swiftly and skillfully, weaving and dodging all blows that came his way.
A crude knife blade flicked out of the shadows, caught the gun and knocked it from the Russian's hand. Zakat skipped to one side, avoiding the sharp point, and his arms whipped out, trapping a scalie's head between them, one at the neck, the other at the rear of the skull. Zakat performed an odd twisting and sliding dance step. The mushy snapping of bone was easily audible even over the cacophony of grunts and growls. When Zakat's hands relaxed their grip, the scalie sprawled motionless to the floor.
Kane's knife ripped open a belly but he took a hammer blow across his shoulders, which nearly drove him to his knees. A spearhead jammed hard into his solar plexus. He latched on to a scaled wrist and kicked the mutie's kneecap loose with the metal-reinforced toe of his boot.
Screaming and plucking at its leg, the scalie fell into the path of two muties. All three went down in a tangle of thrashing limbs. As one of them tried to get up, Kane kicked it in the head as hard as he could. A hand clapped onto the back of his neck, and he whirled, his razor-edge blade slashing in a flat arc.
The shock of impact jarred up his right arm into the shoulder, and a scalie reeled away, hands at its deeply gashed throat, blood bubbles bursting on its lips and squirting from between its fingers. Crimson droplets splashed over Kane's visor, obscuring his vision.
Back and forth, the battle rolled, blades slashing and chopping, scarlet streams spurting, fanged mouths screaming, feet stamping the fallen underfoot.
Finally, the scalies engaged in a reluctant, stubborn retreat, snarling and spitting in rage. The wounded backed away, whining. Many mutie bodies lay on the floor in widening pools of blood. Blood splattered the walls, smeared the floor and almost everybody in the corridor. Only Zakat seemed untouched. With Grant's help, Brigid heaved the heavy body of the dead scalie away and sprang to her feet.
Now that there were fewer muties to crowd around and impede each other, the danger for the humans was greater. There was room for the scalies to throw knives and their crude spears.
One of the withdrawing scalies drew its arm back, but the red kill dot projected from the laser autotargeter of Grant's Copperhead bloomed on his chest. A ripping triburst stitched holes in its torso, slapping the mutie backward, the knife clanging to the floor.
"Let's go," Kane husked out, starting a shambling run down the corridor. He unlimbered the Copperhead from his belt and stroked the trigger, directing a prolonged burst into the murk ahead of him, not certain if any of the 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds found targets. Ricochets whined and buzzed like angry insects.
Guttural voices bellowed behind them, and he heard the others begin sprinting after him, following his lead. Ahead of them glimmered a faint wedge of light, briefly limning the scuttling figures of the fleeing scalies.
Kane palmed away the blood spatters on his visor and increased his speed, not wanting to give the muties time to stage another ambush. He heard a smacking thud behind him and he risked a quick over-the-shoulder glance. Shu stumbled forward, clawing at the three-foot-long rod of rusty metal sprouting between his shoulder blades. He hit the floor heavily on his face, making no attempt to break his fall.
The girl, Trai, slowed her pace a trifle, but Zakat's clipped voice blurted a string of syllables and she began running again, ignoring the impaled Shu.
The wedge of dim light was another archway, and when Kane sprinted under it, he saw four scalies dashing pell-mell for the stairwell that led to the upper level. The corridor branch he had chosen evidently angled around the below-ground floor, ending on the opposite side of the exhibit hall.
Zakat caught up to him. He had taken the AK from Trai and cradled its knife-nicked stock in his arms. "We must not allow the misbegotten lizards to gain the high ground," he panted.
Kane wheezed, "My thoughts exactly."
Zakat triggered the AK as he ran, shifting the barrel in short left-to-right sweeps. Flinders of stone exploded from the stairwell's balustrade, and bullets punched a series of dark holes in the back of one of the scalies. Flinging up its arms, it staggered for a few feet before falling facedown at the foot of the stairway.
Bleating in fear, the other three muties bounded over the body and took the stairs two at a time. Zakat and Kane reached the base just as the scalies struggled to squeeze past the massive head of the blue whale, forced to climb the steps in single file.
The two men opened up at the same time, the drumming roar of the AK-47 drowning out the silenced reports of the Copperhead. There was nothing silent about the reactions of the scalies as the double hailstorm of lead battered them.
They screamed, jerked, flailed and spasmed. Blood and brain matter sprayed the sleek surface of the whale, and its pale blue surface acquired several punctures from wild bullets.
The trio of muties slammed down on the stone risers and, after a few twitches, made no fu
rther movement.
Gusting out a sigh, then inhaling, Kane coughed from the acrid cordite fumes. He turned to face the panting Grant, Brigid, Domi, Trai and Gyatso. All were daubed with liquid crimson, but it was impossible to differentiate scalie blood from their own.
He asked, "Is everyone all right?"
All but Gyatso and Trai responded with affirmatives. The girl eased past them to stand beside Zakat, looking up at him in adoration.
Grant hooked a thumb over his shoulder. "I don't think we're being followed, but they can always circle back around through the hall of minerals and come up behind us again."
Before Kane could respond, Zakat announced, "In that case, I suggest our truce continue until we reach the gateway installation. There may be a mob of the monsters waiting to waylay us on the streets."
Kane nodded tersely. "Only until then."
Zakat started up the steps, but Kane restrained him. "I'll walk point."
The Russian smiled thinly. "As you wish, Comrade."
Kane went first, followed by Zakat and his party. Grant brought up the rear, continually checking their backtrack out of habit. There were no signs or sounds of muties who may have regained their courage.
To get past the whale, Kane had to step on the bullet-riddled corpses of the scalies, and blood squished loudly beneath his feet. Zakat's shoulders heaved in an exaggerated, theatrical shudder as he crossed them, murmuring, "Filthy, wretched things."
At the top of the stairwell, they waited for the others to join them. As Brigid struggled over the bodies, one hand on the whale and the other on the balustrade, Kane said to Zakat, "Since you didn't know what happened to Sverdlovosk, I'm assuming the Mongols weren't answering any of Russia's questions."
"You assume correctly," Zakat replied smoothly.
Then, in an eye-blurring burst of speed and coordination, he whipped up the stock of the AK autorifle, crashing it into the side of Kane's jaw.
18
The brain-jarring impact of the unexpected blow caused Kane's surroundings to wink out for an instant.
When they returned, he became aware of two things more or less simultaneously: a sickening pain in his head and the realization he was falling down the stairs, his back bumping violently against the risers. The cut on the tender lining of his cheek filled his mouth with blood.
He heard Brigid cry out a nanosecond before he caromed into her. She clawed out for the balustrade and managed to keep her footing, but Domi wasn't so fortunate. He clipped her ankles with his head and sent her tumbling over the corpses of the scalies. She uttered a piercing shriek of anger and fear as she fell.
Kane heard the staccato stuttering of the AK-47 and he frantically tried to bring his Copperhead to bear. No bullets came near him, however. He heard semimusical twangs, as of giant guitar strings being plucked, then a pair of whiplike cracks.
He had a fragmented glimpse of Zakat, Trai and Gyatso at the head of the stairwell, right before the vast body of the blue whale began a roaring tobogganing slide down the granite steps.
The Russian had shot away the leviathan's few remaining support cables, and it cannonaded down the stairwell like a runaway locomotive. Kane pressed his body tightly against the stone pedestals of the balustrade, and a giant fin missed his head by a finger's width.
The whale rocked slightly from side to side, its pale underbelly bouncing off each riser with nerve-racking screeches. It rumbled past Kane and Brigid, then its snout smashed into the floor below with a hollow thunderclap.
Kane elbowed himself to his feet, glanced toward Brigid to make sure she was all right, then looked down the stairwell. Over the rolling echoes of the crash, he faintly heard a voice lifted in mocking laughter and Zakat calling out, "Dasvidanya, idiotisch!"
The passage of the gigantic whale body and its impact had raised flat planes of dust, and Kane didn't see either Domi or Grant. Torn between running up the stairs after Zakat or running down to check on his team, he spit out blood then called, "Grant! Domi!"
For a long moment, he heard nothing. Then, in a voice tight with strain, high and wild with fear, Domi cried, "Help him!"
Spitting out more blood and a curse, Kane lunged down the steps, Brigid on his heels. He followed the streamlined contours of the blue whale and cautiously approached the massive head. Domi, a white wraith in the murk, lifted a tear-wet face and repeated in a forlorn whimper, "Help him."
Icy fingers of fear seized Kane's heart. Domi knelt beside Grant, trying to cradle his head in her lap, which was all that was visible of him beneath the sweeping, furrowed curve of the whale's underjaw.
Grant was in a great deal of pain and as angry as Kane had ever seen him, which probably kept him conscious.
"Do you fucking believe this?" he raged through mashed and bloody lips. "I'm probably the first bastard in three hundred years to be crushed by a whale!"
"You're not crushed," Kane told him, kneeling down, although he had no way of knowing. "Maybe a little compressed."
The preserved carcass of the animal had caught Grant broadside, steamrollering him down the stairs. The weight of the whale had to be gauged in tons and if Grant hadn't been wearing his armor, he most definitely would have been crushed. Only his left arm and his head were free. Domi, on the verge of hysterics, tried to hold him up. Neither Brigid nor Kane had ever witnessed such an emotional reaction in her, not even when she learned the grisly fate of her people in Hell's Canyon some months back.
Out of the corner of his eye, Kane saw Brigid kneading her midsection and grimacing. "You sure you're all right?"
She nodded. "More or less. You?"
Kane gingerly probed the laceration on the inside of his cheek with his tongue. The bleeding seemed to be tapering off, but his facial muscles throbbed fiercely. "More or less."
To Grant, he said, "Don't go anywhere."
He and Brigid hunted through the lower levels for anything they could improvise as a fulcrum. After what seemed like a maddeningly long time, they came across a storage room holding the remains of some long-ago and forgotten construction project: disassembled scaffolding, concrete blocks, sturdy planks and timbers.
They had to make two trips, staggering under the weight of a square timber and several concrete blocks, alert for any sign of scalies who might have lingered.
Balancing the wooden beam on a concrete block, Kane jammed and worked and nudged one end beneath the whales jaw, as close to Grant as he could manage. Brigid combined her strength and weight with Kane's on the timber. After a long moment of grunting exertion, they were able to lever up the whale's head just far enough for Domi to shove in a concrete block to act as support. Grant swore, wrestled, strained and managed to free his right arm.
"Can you feel your legs?" Brigid asked him, green eyes bright with worry.
"Yeah," he rasped. "They hurt like hell."
"That's a good sign," said Kane.
"I know," Grant snarled. "That's why I'm so goddamn happy at the moment."
Kane stated, "Domi, Baptiste, I'll need you to work the timber while I try to pull him out. Neither one of you are strong enough for that."
They acknowledged his instructions with grim nods. Domi took Kane's place at the fulcrum as he stooped over Grant, securing firm grips on his forearms. Grant clasped him about the wrists.
"I'm going to pull hard," Kane warned. "If it starts to hurt too much, sing out."
He knew Grant wouldn't, even if he experienced the agony of the damned, but he figured he'd give the man the option.
Kane counted backward from three, bracing his legs, planting his feet solidly. At his shouted "One!" Domi and Brigid hurled their bodies against and over the timber. With a creak of wood and grate of stone, the whale's jaw shifted upward.
Kane catapulted backward. For an eternal moment, he strained against Grant, muscles quivering with tension. Adrenaline surged through him, and with a scraping, slithery sound Grant slid free. Kane saw he used his left leg to kick himself out from under the pinioning weigh
t, so he wasn't paralyzed.
Breath coming in harsh, labored gasps, Grant hiked himself up to a sitting position and took off his helmet. Perspiration sparkled against his dark skin. His lips were swollen and lacerated, but only a cut at the corner of his mouth looked deep enough to require stitches.
Brigid examined his legs as best she could through the polycarbonate sheathing. She guessed the right ankle was broken and suggested removing his boot.
Grant took a sip from the water bottle Domi handed to him and shook his head. "Big neg on that. You'd have to have cut it off. With the metal bracings in it, it's the next best thing to a splint."
He washed down a painkiller, coughed and winced. "Pain in my chest. Hurts when I breathe too deep or swallow."
"Cracked ribs maybe," Kane said. "You got off lucky, though."
"Why is it," Grant asked between clenched teeth, "that whenever I get hurt, you always tell me that?"
Kane tried to grin, despite the pain in his jaw. "I just don't want you to feel sorry for yourself."
Domi dabbed at the blood streaking Grant's chin with a square of gauze taken from the equipment case. "Got to get out of here before sundown. Muties may come back with reinforcements."
Brigid cast an anxious glance up the stairwell. "It won't be easy getting out of here."
"Hell," Kane snapped, "what is?"
She ignored the observation. "One or two of us could make it back to the gateway. Go back to Cerberus and return with DeFore and a stretcher."
"That could take hours," Grant said. "By then, we could be contending with an army of scalies. Let's just go."
With Domi's and Brigid's help, Grant rose to his feet. He draped an arm over Kane's shoulders, leaning into him, balancing on his left foot.
"Just like old times," Kane grunted as Grant sagged into him. "Except you've put on weight since then. I hope I'm in shape for this."
Grant understood the reference to the time a dozen years ago when he had been wounded in the Great Sand Dunes hellzone and Kane had lugged him for days through appallingly rugged terrain.
