Oh, man, Dave thought. You are going to need all of them and more before this is over. Small scouting parties lead to war bands, which lead to Cohorts, which form Talons and …
Eichel took a deep breath. “We’re on our own, then.”
“For now,” Heath said. “But we’ve got your back. It won’t be like Katrina, I promise you.”
Allen came back from the street. “Sir, it is pure chaos out there. We could take the vehicles, but it’d probably be quicker to move up on foot.”
“Fair enough,” Heath said, scrutinizing the map again. “Emma, what do you have on your feeds?”
Professor Ashbury set her tablet down on the hood of the car. A green-lit video stream from an airborne source highlighted a small party of creatures moving across an open lot. She brought the image out wide to show the surrounding roads.
“Louisiana Avenue is jammed with refugee traffic. But Toledano looks passable on foot,” she said.
“Let’s move north quickly and in force,” Heath said, wrapping up the map. “When we make contact, we’ll try to fix them in place. Any questions?”
Dave found Heath at his side, a hand on his elbow.
“I need you to stick close to me, Dave. Don’t go getting any ideas about charging off. I need you to tell me, as best you can, what’s happening.”
“I got no fucking idea what’s happening,” he said, trying to throw off the gathering depression that wanted to envelop him. He could feel every pound of Lucille on his shoulders now. They began to ache with the effort needed to carry her.
“But, er … Captain, if this is a scouting party, it’ll just be like an advance group. You get that, right?” he said
“Yeah. Come on,” Heath said. “I’m sure as soon as we make contact with the enemy, everything will become crystal clear. Let’s go.”
Now, that was a joke, Dave knew.
They cleared the hospital with its scenes of Dark Ages horror and misery, emerging into a cool night in which the SEALs awaited them, arrayed in a large semicircle, weapons out. Two armored personnel carriers, big eight-wheeled numbers in the white livery that made them look like ice cream trucks of the Apocalypse, stood growling and coughing diesel fumes around a crowd of police cruisers and civilian vehicles. Some of the SWAT officers worked with the regular cops to maintain some order of control.
Allen nodded toward the traffic jam. “See what I mean?”
If anything, the scene outside the hospital was worse than it had been inside. The crowd was thousands strong out there. Some streamed into the hospital grounds. Many were passing through and moving on. Still others looked to have set up camp with whatever they’d carried from home or possibly looted along the way. Music pounded from dozens of cars’ sound systems. A couple of flares burned bright pink and green. Dave counted at least four separate brawls. He heard more gunfire, much closer this time, but it had no effect on the crowds.
The rear hatch of the nearest armored car swung open, and a man in black coveralls hopped down to run over to them. He sought out Heath, introducing himself as Lieutenant Ostermann, NOPD SWAT.
“Sorry, sir,” Ostermann said. “Road net is jammed up. Might be best to go on foot. It is a mile and a half from here.”
“Fine,” Heath said. “We’re good to go. Can you get your men disengaged?”
Ostermann nodded. “Definitely; we’re with you.”
Dave chewed on another energy bar and sucked a mouthful of Gatorade out of his CamelBak, trying to sift some useful advice from the trove of race memory and lore stored within his head. It was still hard to know what to look for when you didn’t know what to look for. And it didn’t help that Ashbury and Compton were deeply invested in their own distracting argument.
“They will need us,” she insisted.
“They’ll have him,” Compton shot back, jerking a thumb in Dave’s direction. “You know the rules. We establish a reference point as far forward as possible but not in the combat operating post. We stay in contact—” He tapped a finger against his headset. “—but we don’t make contact. We …”
She looked ready to slap him when Dave intervened.
“He’s right, Prof. You don’t want to be getting snuggly with these things.”
“I followed your advice,” she said defiantly, quickly drawing a pistol from a concealed carry holster at the small of her back. “See?”
“What I see,” said Dave, “is someone who is gonna get bitten in two. Listen to Professor Compton, would you? He’s a professor and he has a neck beard. You don’t so he wins this round. Establish whatever it is you’re establishing as far back from the Hunn as you can. And be ready to get the hell out of there, too.”
“Dave. These men haven’t had a chance to study this problem at all. Five minutes. That’s all the time we had to brief them back on the rig. And what you said on the flight in. Shoot here, here, and here,” she said, summarizing the advice and pointing at her face, neck, and lower abdomen.
“I’ll go with them,” Dave said. “Whatever they need to know, I probably know already. But you don’t. Unless one of these things wants to explain the role of plumbing in the social hierarchies of the Grande Horde,” he said, winking at Compton.
Heath cut the argument short by returning from his conference with Ostermann.
“Got a contact report from the local PD that’s been verified by our Cobras,” Heath said. “We’re moving north to Magnolia Street.”
Heath looked to Dave then.
“Problems?”
The oil rigger shook his head.
“I dunno, Heath. You know your own business. Your plan sounded all plausible and shit before. But you don’t have a lot of guys, even with the marines and the SWAT dudes. You gonna be able to deal?”
“What will the Hunn do when they find out they’re surrounded?” Heath asked.
He knew the answer to that without even having to reach for it.
“They attack. Everywhere. All at once,” he said, leaning against Lucille as if she were a gentleman’s walking stick. “They don’t like being hemmed in. Drives them nuts.”
Heath thought it over.
“Actually, that is sort of what we would do; not so different from us, then. But we’d probe for a weakness and then concentrate. Let’s at least go measure their strength,” he said. “If it’s a company of sword-wielding orcs, no problem. A battalion or more, well, I got some air support en route or on station.”
“Those choppers you had,” said Dave. “Those big fucking Gatling guns could be handy. Leather armor ain’t gonna help when those things open up.”
“They’re refueling,” Heath said. “They’ll be back. But I have Cobras and more assets inbound.”
He turned to the professors.
“If the two of you would set up here at Touro, I think that would be best,” he said. “Any insights you can glean from the video feeds would be welcome. You can come up when NOPD has the resources to get you closer. Requisition a command truck or one of those armored units if you have to. But get everything shipshape here first, because we’ll fall back in this direction if we have to. If we don’t have an engagement first.”
Neither of the academics looked happy, but for different reasons, Dave thought.
More gunfire erupted nearby, this time eliciting screams and drawing the attention of a couple of SEALs. Ostermann joined them after briefing his own people.
“We need to get going,” he said. “T-Qube Suarez’s crew just rolled on Magnolia.”
“Who? What?”
“T-Qube. Local notable. That’s his turf down that way,” Ostermann explained. “Patrol says they’re rolling in force.”
“Gangsters?” Heath asked.
“New Orleans’s finest.”
“Great,” said the navy officer. “That won’t complicate things at all.”
He keyed his throat mike and sent orders out to both SEALs and marines on the command net.
Ashbury looked fit to be tied. He reached out to her
, but she turned and stomped away, refusing to talk to anyone. The oilman shrugged it off.
“Sure you don’t want to come with us, Prof?” he asked Compton. “You might get lucky. Catch one of these things taking a dump.”
23
A vanguard of Sliveen insisted on the honor of the First, as ever. Pathfinders always, they had forged past the thresh, confident about what they would find on the surface: prey. A pair of Hunn with their leashes of Fangr followed to provide support should the unexpected magicks of the prey prove difficult.
Thinkings and feelings, a slithering knotted mess of them, fought for thresh’s attention as it led the main body of the Revengers party through the honeycombed maze of tunnels and warrens back to the point where the barrier between the realms had come apart. It felt pride that the Queen should have entrusted it to lead the warriors Above. Well, not that it was leading, of course.
The BattleMaster Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn would lead the Dread Company with the thresh to guide him. But one could not take from thresh the fact that it took the field at the head of the Queen’s Vengeance. So yes, pride was appropriate. And some fear, surrounded and carried along by those very same warriors, any one of which could cleave it in two with a single slash of talon or blade. Fear, too, that the passage Above might have collapsed, leaving it to look foolish as it scratched and skittered about in an increasingly desperate search for the breach. The warriors almost certainly would strike it down if it had misled them.
Two full Talon of Hunn and their attendant Fangr escorted thresh, with the Queen’s Choice of Grymm to represent her personal will. Thresh tried to think just how many they might number in total, but the thinking of a number increased by another number and then another was beyond it. As the Company huffed and grunted along at a half trot, thresh examined one of its foreclaws. With a great effort of thinking it could be almost certain that talons it had in the number of three at the end of that limb. But of limbs and talons thought of as a whole … well, the thinking of that number was beyond it, too.
Not that it mattered much. Thresh could see, which is to say that it was almost certain, that there were many more warriors hurrying toward the breach than it possessed talons. A formidable force indeed. Not a legion of course. Or a Regiment. But neither were they as few as a simple Cohort. And with the Royal Warrant to search out and fall upon the men of this village to exact Her Majesty’s Vengeance for the killing of a nest mate, they had, thresh was sure, a sufficiency of talon and tooth and blade.
The warriors hunched over as the tunnel roof dipped lower, but thresh, being considerably smaller, was able to remain erect while Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn was all but doubled over. Thresh could see the subtle trail left by the scouting party of Sliveen and Hunn.
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn held up one clawed fist.
“Hold and prepare. We await the clawhold. We have not long to wait.”
Thresh tested the breach in the barrier and found it to still be there. It could sense the passage of the Sliveen and the Hunn through the opening. They were too distant for it to sense their thinkings, but they had found the breach with no trouble at all.
Just before they had reached the small, dank alcove where he earlier had followed the minion through the rent in the barrier, a difficult and worrying thinking did arise in the small mind of the creature. So much seemed different from what little it knew about Men even as it retained some dim recall of Her Majesty’s far greater knowledge and memories of them. The Queen knew of Men as feedstock. None had ever slain a daemon of the UnderRealms in open combat.
But thresh had seen its companion destroyed before its very eyes. And the realms had been separated for so long. Was it possible that Men had been gifted by their gods with new and powerful magicks? After all, the same gods had chosen to interfere with the natural order of things when they banished thresh and all the other clans and Sects to the UnderRealms. Was the outrage done to its nest mate beyond even the thinking of She of the Horde … Thresh banished the thinking before it formed. That way lay the blood pot.
Still, it was worrying indeed that thresh felt a great strain inside its skull when it tried to think of such things. Time passed without notice to thresh as it struggled to control its dangerous ponderings.
It was all taking too long.
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn grew impatient. Glory was within reach Above, and surely his scouts would not linger beyond the time necessary to bring back a simple report of what lay ahead. The warriors gripped their spears and blades tightly, snarling and grunting as they waited for orders. They had been waiting for quite some time, in fact.
“Bring me the thresh.”
Hunn dominants and attendant Fangr stood aside as one of the Queen’s own Lieutenants Grymm motioned the creature forward. Thresh cowered at the side of Scaroth, sensing a great intemperance of black mood falling across his mind, the great taloned fists cracking and flexing with frustration.
“We wait no longer. You will lead, little one.”
The lieutenant pointed at the scummy, sulfurous pond. Or really, more of a puddle. The thresh bared its fang traps, and without a grunt of warning it pitched forward.
Praise be to the Sky Lords, it seemed even darker than it had been the last time they had emerged in this realm. Thresh was aware when it had passed through the breach by the way the temperature of the sucking ooze that surrounded it suddenly fell away. The Above was unpleasantly cold. It passed through the barrier and came up into the chilly flooded tunnel as before.
With traces of the bloodwine still coursing through its veins, the lesser daemon had no trouble staying submerged in the frigid waters while it waited for the warriors to follow it through. One of Her Majesty’s Lieutenants Grymm appeared first, shaking its snout vigorously as it pushed up through the mud. Thresh could not be certain, but it suspected that the Grymm was more than a little disoriented at the transition. It snarled, and thresh hurried to abase its thoughts before the superior daemon.
The rent in the barrier was not large, and it took about as long for all of the members of the Queen’s Vengeance to pass through as it might to pluck the spines from an urmin. As more of the host passed through, however, the tear appeared to grow wider so that the last revengers were able to pass through as a group rather than singly. That bore thinking about, thresh decided. But later.
Thinking was hard.
The tunnels under the village were not large, and all the Hunn were forced to stoop over. The shorter, thicker Lieutenants Grymm, too. Only thresh and the Fangr could stand upright.
As the last of the warriors fought their way up through the mud, BattleMaster Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn gave a single order to the thresh.
“Lead on.”
Following the scent of the minion it had tracked on its last visit, thresh pointed a talon up at the ceiling above, which was dripping with mud and wet where the sky above it could be seen through a crack. A great hammering noise could be heard along with the wails of the creatureless chariots. The scent of slain calflings reached them all.
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn took a whiff of the air from the Above, rage boiling from his thinkings. A light played over the hole to the Above that caused some of the host to scatter.
—deprived of the first kill. There will be a reckoning.
Not caring, Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn roared.
“Forward!”
24
The police got no respect in New Orleans. They often had to brandish their weapons at the very people they were trying to help. As Dave kept an easy pace with the trotting SEALs, he could hear the choppers whirling overhead. Not just police and military, either. There were at least three news channels up there, shining powerful searchlights down over Central City, as if to light their way. Heath and Ostermann cursed them.
“That’s supposed to be a no-fly zone,” the SWAT leader complained.
Heath talked into his radio from time to time, giving brief instructions while keeping up the fast trot, his own rifle now at hand.
Allen’s four men were to the right of Toledano, and Igor the Giant’s men were to the left. SWAT, for better or worse, had to stop and deal with one problem after another, then run to catch up with the SEALs.
“Captain?” Dave asked the naval officer.
“Yes?”
“You watch horror movies?”
“No,” Heath said with a visible effort to control his impatience. “If you’ve got a point, Dave, I’d appreciate your getting to it.”
“Just seems to me that splitting up like this is a bad idea,” Dave said. “In the movies it always goes badly.”
“This isn’t a horror movie,” Heath said.
“Says you,” Dave scoffed.
“Look,” Heath explained. “I’m not dividing my forces without reason. We have reserves. I can deploy them when I know where they’ll do the most good. I have air assets I can call down if we get surrounded, cut off. Believe me, we’ve been doing this shit for years. And I need to leave some forces back at that hospital because if the Hunn roll over us anyway, they’ll head straight there, won’t they?”
“The all-you-can-eat buffet?” Dave said. “For sure.”
“So we need some assets there to maintain a semblance of order and to rear guard the next evacuation if necessary.”
The crowds were thinning now, pushed south by police cruisers flashing their lights and using bullhorns to hurry everyone along as quickly as possible. This was a poor district. The SEALs and SWAT team jogged down long stretches of narrow one- and two-story homes broken up by a surprising number of churches. Many of them, Dave was disturbed to see, were full of parishioners. Lights burned brightly, and hymns drifted out on the autumnal air. A good number of the homes, too, were alive and alight. A few even seemed to be hosting impromptu parties. Ostermann peeled off to remonstrate with a couple of patrolmen who had demonstrably failed to convince the locals of the imminent danger they faced.
Another news chopper hammered low overhead.
“Flying to the X,” Allen called back over his shoulder.
Dave vs. the Monsters Page 25
