He found himself caught between the urge to charge in and start laying about him with Lucille and the more rational response of getting the hell out of Dodge. Running back to Heath and letting him figure out what to do.
After all, Dave had proved pretty conclusively that he wasn’t Marvel material. He’d jumped in here, hadn’t he, and look at the results of that. Forty men and women dead a minute later. Hundreds more dying now as the main body of the thrall ran them down and tore them apart.
He started to back away from the creatures, mopping Everding’s tacky drying blood from his eyes, ignoring Lucille, who seemed to be humming sweetly that she thought having at the thrall would be a fine and manly course of action.
The squeal of tires caught his attention. A deep bass thrumming rolled across the killing field from Claiborne. Tupac declaring his intent to ride on the enemy. Doors popped open and slammed shut as men and women, all of them black and gunned up, emerged from behind the Pizza Hut, walking down on the Horde with an arms bazaar of weaponry: everything from comically small pistols to AK’s and one belt-fed monster that reminded Dave of the old Rambo posters.
T-Qube, Dave thought.
The first rounds cracked out, targeted on the monsters feasting before him.
Not wanting to find out if he was bulletproof now, he did the only sensible thing.
He hit the dirt.
“Light them up!”
A wall of sound rolled over the battleground. The discrete pops and bangs of single-shot pistols, the hammering crack of a full auto, and the larger, heavy pounding of what had to be the big belt-fed gun.
27
Dave looked up from the dirt with some dismay as the daemon war party turned away from the new threat and toward the crowded residential area south of the main road. The gangbangers pursued them, ignoring Dave lying prostrate on the ground but stopping to check on the marines. A few took what weapons they could scavenge from the dead. A young boy, too young for this sort of thing, Dave thought, went for a pair of dog tags, and another butt stroked him.
“Show some respect,” he said. “My brother’s in the Marine Corps. Your cousin Tyrell, too, you little asshole.”
Dave couldn’t say exactly how many people lay immediately in front of the stampede, but it had to be hundreds, perhaps even a thousand or more. Many of the blocks were dark except for candlelight or torches, and here and there a burning oil drum. Some of the residents were on the streets, attempting to flee on foot. Some just milled about, talking to one another, checking their phones, attempting to find out what was happening. Others rode in vehicles that weren’t moving much more quickly than the people on foot. But many were obviously staying put, unaware of the danger, not believing it, or simply possessed of a contrary frame of mind that was about to get them killed.
Once the gangstas were away, Dave took a couple of steps and leaped out into clear air and landed with a grunt in the car lot of a church. He was moving at normal speed now, as were the congregation spilling out onto the front steps and the residents he’d passed earlier at warp speed walking down the middle of the road. Dave accelerated again, covering the distance back toward the command van in a dark glimmer. He found the SEALs a block down from the truck, running toward the battle.
“Whoa, what the hell, man!”
Allen jumped back a step as Dave materialized in front of him with a whoosh and a soft pop of displaced air.
Dave tried to get around Allen, but the SEAL stepped in front of him. “What happened over there? One minute you’re down and the next minute you’re up?”
Captain Heath limped over. “Forty-three marines are down.”
Dave hung his head low, nodding. “I know. There’s no time to explain. If you don’t get on top of this, there’ll be a heap more folks joining them.”
He could see medics working frantically on the fallen SWAT trooper and the Navy SEAL back by the truck, but Dave could tell by looking at them that they were gone.
“I took care of that, by the way,” he said. “Sliveen scout. He’s gone now, but there’s probably a couple more around. That T-Qube guy and his crew are chasing them straight into the neighborhood. I thought I might be able to help the marines, but something went wrong. I couldn’t …”
Heath looked at him as though he were mad, although that could have been because he was covered in gore and dripping ichor. SWAT officers and SEALs moved past the group, setting up to flank the Horde. He wiped some of the Horde off the hammer’s head. Lucille, for her part, seemed satisfied with Dave. She sighed like a just-fucked prom queen.
A line of SEALs and SWAT officers opened fire from their improvised positions, enfilading the Horde, wearing down its right flank. Any other fighting force might have stopped to deal with the problem. The Horde instead sped toward the houses, leaving their fallen comrades behind.
“I need that gun run,” Heath said into his headset, ignoring Dave. “How much longer?”
Dave turned. Just as before with T-Qube’s people, the combined firepower of the SEALs and SWAT whittled away at the weaker members of the Horde. The others brushed off the nuisance and continued toward the houses. Still pursued by the gangbangers as well, the Horde continued moving toward the houses. The gunfire was having the effect of herding them in the wrong direction.
“Heath, you gotta stop shooting,” Dave said.
No one listened to him. The noise was too loud.
“STOP SHOOTING,” he shouted again. “CEASE FIRE.”
“Who the fuck are you?” a SWAT officer shouted back.
“You’re pushing them into the houses, asshole,” Dave said.
Heath ran over. “Do as he says. Cease fire.”
The firing came to a halt. The Horde slowed for a moment to ponder the brief silence before another ragged volley from the gangbangers prodded them forward again.
“Look,” Dave said, feeling as though his head might twist right off the top of his body in frustration. He wanted to be able to move as quickly as he had when attacking the Sliveen. Everyone seemed to be dragging along so slowly. Their reactions and thoughts advanced at a glacial pace. They moved like old men in winter.
“We’ve got about a minute before they break into the streets at the edge of the field just south of Claiborne,” he warned. “There’s hundreds of people over there in those two or three blocks alone. They are all going to die unless you can head off the attack.”
Allen appeared beside them. “We gotta go, Captain,” he said. “We have to move now if we’re going to get there and set up any kind of blocking force. Second Platoon is still jammed up with refugee traffic. If they get free, they can reinforce us and we can limit the damage.”
Heath glanced briefly overhead, looking for deliverance, but it was hopeless. The sky was still full of news helicopters adding to the confusion, drawing onlookers to the area, and scaring the shit out of the residents. But even if the Cobras had a clear shot at the daemons, they were about to lose that advantage when the Horde got in among the residential streets. The one free gun run Dave had witnessed had seemed heavily constrained by the proximity of all the civilians who had gathered outside the strip mall on Claiborne to watch the show. He was no soldier, but it looked to him as though the choppers had held back.
“We don’t have time,” he insisted. “We don’t have time for any of this crap. I can hold these guys. I can hold them off on my own for a few minutes, guaranteed, if you can get yourselves set up around the intersection two blocks north of here.”
“Why?” Heath asked. Allen also looked as though he’d appreciate an explanation. Dave had to shout over the uproar of orbiting helicopters, the crackle of gunfire, and the growing screams and cries of alarm to the north.
“There’s some sort of school up there,” he said. “Flood-damaged, I think. A lot of open ground out the front or maybe the back. Whatever. Two blocks north of here and then another block back east.” He pointed up the street along which he’d warped to take out the Sliveen. “If I can ge
t them in there, packed in tight, and you can keep the ground clear of civilians, does it give you enough space to use the gunships?”
Ashbury ran up, handing over the ruggedized tablet she was carrying. Heath had a quick look at the map onscreen and passed the device to Allen, who examined it and nodded.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “This isn’t contained at all, Michael.”
“I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse,” Dave answered. “Literally.”
The two navy fighters and their astro-bio babe exchanged a couple of brief, largely incomprehensible sentences in the jargon of their trade before the noncom turned on his boot heel and began barking orders at both his men and Ostermann’s. The police commander, who had been tending to the body of his slain comrade, looked worried.
“We moving?”
Heath handed him the tablet, pointing out the intersection where they needed to concentrate their forces.
“We need to get as many civilians away from the blocks around that intersection as possible,” Heath said. “Civilian noncombatants,” he added. “Your man T-Qube and his crew just saved our asses up at the McDonald’s. If they’re willing, we can always use the extra firepower.”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any question The Qube’s boys are willing,” Ostermann said. “Probably best if the request comes from one of your guys rather than mine, though.”
Dave cocked an ear to the north, where he was certain he could hear things getting worse. More gunfire. More screaming. Screeching tires and the crash of metal on metal.
“Clock’s tickin’,” he said.
“I know,” Heath snapped. “Dumb it down for me. What are you going to do? And what do you need?”
Thresh felt better in both its thinkings and its feelings as soon as they charged into the outskirts of the village. Although, it told itself, it really had to stop thinking of this place as a village. Nothing it had ever been told of Men had prepared it for the grandeur and scale of this settlement. Straight lines and hard angles ran off toward a vanishing point. It was possible that some of these streets ran true for a bow shot or more. Grand structures, some of them towering more than two or three times the height of the BattleMaster himself, loomed over them. It was almost, though not quite, like running into a canyon.
And dark, so blessedly dark when the accursed flying beasts suddenly left off the chase. Thresh searched its thinkings for some clue why, having wounded their party so grievously, the ferocious insectivores would simply disappear like that. But as its eyestalks scanned the Above, it realized that not all of the wretched creatures had departed. Some of the larger, heavier beasts still circled high above, their eyes flashing red and, it suddenly realized, with men hanging suspended from the bellies of the beasts. Under the wings or …
Around it the earth thundered with the charge of the Revengers. It was a charge, the Thresh told itself. Not an ignominious retreat and headlong flight into the relative safety of the human village. Shaking its head at the confused and contrary thinkings, Thresh gave up on trying to understand what was happening. How could this strange species of Drakon ally itself with these animals? How was it that Men rode in the belly of these Drakon chariots? Where Thresh could see them standing, waving and gesturing with the staffs and wands it now recognized as the source of their killing magicks? So many confused thinkings. So few satisfying answers. It was all so very different from how Thresh had imagined this might all turn out.
They had meant to storm into the village in the first place. To kill the elders and eat a few nestlings and spread an exemplary terror among the calflings. As the dirt and sharp stinging stones kicked up around its pounding claws and the air about its head cracked and buzzed with the magic fires of the human wizards, Thresh kept telling itself that this would all end well. It had to.
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn was vexed. As the remnants of his force stampeded toward the human village, which he now conceded appeared to be somewhat larger and more impressive than any human settlement he had ever read of in the Scrolls, the BattleMaster was uncertain whether he should be leading the charge from the fore or from somewhere in the rear ranks, driving it on as though it were a chariot so that he might best wield the whip of command and direct his thrall in such a way as to recover this situation.
Not that there was much chance of recovery, he thought bitterly. The surviving Grymm sprinted along on either side of him, bellowing orders—Orders! The hide of them!—that they storm into the village square and laager up, forming a defensive perimeter to hold off the attacks of the wizards while a messenger returned to the UnderRealms to bring back reinforcements. A full legion should be enough, they agreed.
A third Lieutenant Grymm had been adding his snarls and barks to the argument when the bizarre human lightning that flew as straight and true as a war shaft struck him at the base of his neck, causing his head to fly off. The corpse kept running for a few steps before collapsing and almost tripping a leash of Fangr coming up on the Grymm’s tail. It was heresy, but the BattleMaster sent a silent prayer of thanks to whichever human wizard had been responsible for the favor. The other two Lieutenants, however, redoubled their efforts.
If Scaroth had not been short of breath already, he would have laughed in their snouts. Bad enough that he should have come here with a Dread Company only to have it mangled by wizard men who not only refused to flee (the fools!) but who hid behind whatever cover the battlefield might provide (the cowards!) and then continued to fight from that same hiding place. With vile magicks (the fiends!). His enthralled war band was broken. His Sliveen scouts were lost somewhere beyond trumpet call. And for all these losses he had not one shred of man meat on his fangs to show in mitigation. It was a disaster. There was no chance of quitting this accursed realm unless he would be able to place before Her Majesty such tribute as would erase the shame to be forever attached to his name upon the Scrolls.
As they entered the boundaries of the village, however, Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn was faced with another conundrum. His thrall maintained something that might pass as good order and discipline while hemmed in on either side by the surprisingly large shelters and temples of the settlement. But that cohesion was already fraying as Fangr and Hunn on the flanks of the sortie scented fresh man meat and heard the screams and cries of the villagers. The defenseless villagers. With their wizard mercenaries falling behind even as the dangerous magicks continued to lash at his rear, the village lay open before them.
But just as he had been vexed by the question of whether to lead from the fore or the rear, the BattleMaster now found himself roaring over the heads of the praetorian Grymm to impose some form of discipline on his host, which was disintegrating as the bloodlust took hold of it. Finally entering the village would not be the deliverance they sought if the war party fell to pieces in an orgy of singular slaughter and mayhem. Two Fangr and one Hunn dominant fell to his slashing blade, and he was forced to race to the head of the column, cutting the legs out from under another Fangr before the great heaving, panting mass of daemonum slowed and eventually stopped.
“You will hold,” he roared. “We will reduce this village when the time for its reduction has come. But now you will hold and attend to—”
But they were not attending to him. All of them, Hunn, Fangr, thresh, and even the Lieutenants Grymm, stood staring past him, over his head. Their jaws were agape, their features mute with confusion and stupidity. Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn tightened the grip on FoeSunder and turned slowly in place, wondering what fresh hell could possibly await him.
When he saw the lights of the city—it could only be a city—his jaw dropped, too. He suddenly realized that they stood not in some small, isolated village but on the very edges of a great metropolis. A human metropolis.
A quick glance at the thresh confirmed that it, too, had come to the same conclusion and was as stunned and defanged by the revelation as he.
They were going to need more than a company, more than a legion. Som
ething terrible had happened in the Above. Man had been allowed to rise far beyond his natural station. The vast wall of light on the horizon, a towering gap-toothed edifice that soared as tall as a mountain range, was greater—heresy to say it, but it was true—in size and scale (and possibly even power, he whispered in his silent places) than all but the mightiest of Her Majesty’s strongholds.
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn let FoeSunder drop to the guard position, the point of his great blade striking the ground in a shower of sparks.
“Unholy minion shit,” he grunted just before a titanic war drum boomed a challenge not two strides from where he stood.
28
Dave Hooper flew, and the city passed beneath him. Failed husband, absent father, wastrel, and asshole, he flew through the night air holding Lucille to his chest, knees bent and eyes slitted against the wind of his passage. Beneath his boots slipped the rusted roofs of shotgun shacks and cinder block apartments, some of them slumped and all but tumbled down, others maintained with the best of intentions in the face of the crushing, relentless weight that bore down every day on those millions of people, those countless millions, who lived at the bottom of the heap. Dave Hooper flew over them all. Over stunted leafless trees, rubbish-strewn vacant lots, lovingly maintained church gardens, darkened homes, and great fires ablaze where vehicles had collided and exploded, where flames consumed houses that lay cheek by jowl, and where some idiot was having a barbecue on his back porch. He was watching the Apocalypse engulf his neighborhood on a small portable television he had carried out onto a card table and plugged into an extension cord. Dave soared over it all and saw it all. A quick turn of the head, as though he were driving his car and checking the side mirror, and he could see Heath leading his men and Ostermann’s away from the Horde. So quickly was Dave moving that they appeared as tiny, static figurines arranged by a model maker.
Dave vs. the Monsters Page 30
