The hunger pangs dialed back a little as he chewed and swallowed.
A disagreement flared into an argument among what he took to be the leadership group of the raiding party: Scaroth, the Grymm, a couple of Hunn Dominants, and a smaller critter.
A baby Threshrend, he thought idly. Thinky little fuckers.
The minor daemon tried to offer its two cents’ worth, but a Hunn kicked it away. It yelped and slunk back to the rear ranks of the company. The daemons, he was glad to see, were tightly bunched now, many of them jockeying for a clear view of the challenge.
Dave took the opportunity to uncap an energy gel.
He drained that one as casually as could be, trying to look bored, all the while looking around, checking on progress. They played a lot of poker on the rig. Not everyone could get on the Xbox at the same time, after all. And though he wasn’t the coolest hand at the card table, he liked to think he had more game than these ass biters.
“So,” he said, deciding to push things along, “what happened to you guys? You used to be cool. And now a dude throws down a challenge and you gotta get into a full circle jerk to figure out who’s gonna get their asses kicked by him. Scaroth, man. That’s lame.”
“Enough,” Scaroth snarled, sheathing FoeSunder. With a flick of his wrists, he motioned forward two of the largest Hunn. They grinned hungrily at Dave, moving left and right, dagger- and shieldwise, to outflank him. The Grymm meanwhile drew their own blades and began to advance on him as the daemon war band took up their own chant.
“Hunn ur Horde. Hunn ur Horde. HUNN UR HOR—”
Dave Hooper didn’t let them finish. He tossed aside the gel pack and hopped down from the rear tray of the totaled pickup. As soon as his boots touched the ground, he stomped on the accelerator.
Again he was thrown by expecting the world to become a blur, when of course he was the blur within it. The Horde, the anxious human onlookers, the long swaying stalks of grass in the wasteland across the street, the outlines of the helicopters circling above them—all these things grew not just clearer to him but more vital, as though they somehow pressed themselves into the fabric of reality with much greater force.
He didn’t bother with theatrics for the Hunn, jagging shield- and daggerwise, using the ax head of the maul for the first time to decapitate the two dominants before turning on the Lieutenants Grymm in the blink of an eye. He swung Marty’s heavy-hitting sledge down low, breaking the knees of his first target, sweeping the slow moving feet out from beneath it. The momentum of the swing carried him across to the other unholy warrior, whose skull he split with the ax head before spinning in place to finish off the first lieutenant, which was busy crashing to the ground.
He had time to eat another chocolate bar before the carcass thudded down on the tarmac, but as soon as it did, Dave brought the hammer down on its head with such force that the explosion of bone shards, broken teeth, and brain flecks painted everyone within three strides.
He decelerated back toward the truck as the first wracking gut cramp hit him.
He was hungry. He’d burned through all of his stored energy, and now his white-hot metabolism was eating him from within. Taking a pull from the CamelBak Chief Allen had rigged up flooded Dave’s system with Gatorade. The cramps subsided again while he threw in a couple of CLIF bars, chocolate chip cookie dough–flavored, to power the internal turbine that was throttled up to full capacity.
“Damn if kickin’ so much ass don’t give a man a powerful appetite.”
He kept a cheesy grin plastered on his face, but it was hard. Sweat began to bead his forehead.
“So, worthy enough for you?” he asked the BattleMaster, who stood with jaws agape and dawning horror filling its black sharklike eyes.
“We can just leave it at that if you want,” Dave said, all but grimacing with the need to bend himself double around the terrible pains shooting through his guts. “Dead Grymm won’t tell no tales. How about we call it done and you just fuck off back where you came from?”
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn let go with an animal roar of enraged hatred just as Dave got his second wind. The BattleMaster strode toward him, each foot tread punching a two-inch depression into the road surface. With slow, casual relish, Scaroth unsheathed FoeSunder from his silver-trimmed scabbard, twirling the great blade. Glints of dark iron flickered in the night, giving Dave a glimpse of the railroad spike that extended from the pommel. It was all too easy to imagine that nasty fucking thing driving through the top of his skull.
“Trifle with the Horde?” Scaroth growled. “Think that treacherous Urgon has taught you everything? You have the strength of a score of your kind because you took all that Urgon had.”
Dave could see flashes of Urgon’s life. Long hours of training, rites of initiation, battles and campaigns fought with rival clans. The sacrifice and ritual required before each battle to sustain one’s strength. He could sense how Urgon might deal with Scaroth if he relaxed and let the knowledge flow to him.
“Hear that, Urgon? You Dave’s bitch now.” Dave shifted his grip on Lucille. Tried not to hold her too stiffly. “Make me a sandwich for ol’ Scaroth here.”
He could have sworn the splitting maul purred in his hands.
“Just as you stole all that Brother Urgon had,” Scaroth said, “I will take all that you have. But I will take it with honor. By killing you here.”
Scaroth brought FoeSunder up and flowed into a killing stance. The point of the blade glinted high above Dave’s head before rushing down with terrible speed.
Dave dropped down to his right knee with Lucille above his head, blocking the first blow, half expecting Scaroth’s blade to slice straight through the wooden handle. But the enchanted hardwood held, the blow landing with a giant clang. Holding the Hunn’s blade, he pushed up with his right hand, using the maul’s head to drive the blade off to his left. Coiled tightly, Dave’s legs launched him into Scaroth’s midsection, knocking the BattleMaster off his feet. He rolled over the snapping fangs and hot froth to land on his feet a couple of yards away.
They circled each other one step at a time, shieldwise. Helicopters, hammering overhead, focused their searchlights on the action, driving the remnants of the Horde away from the two combatants.
“I will feast on you this day,” Scaroth said, lunging toward Dave. “The little champion’s blood will make a fine aperitif before I feed on your nestlings.”
“They have aperitifs in Monsterland? Man, you guys have changed. It used to be all about the skulls full of bloodwine.”
Dave parried down with Lucille, a great clash of sparks bursting where the two weapons made contact. He whipped back and swung in an upward arc from the parry for Scaroth’s wrists, but the BattleMaster merely caught the splitting maul and with a twist of his wrists sent it flying through the air.
Shit, Dave thought, scrabbling across the ground.
“A charmed weapon?” Scaroth asked. “Is that all you have, champion? Pathetic.”
Scaroth kicked Dave, launching him skidding across the street. When he stood up, Scaroth was already there with a backhand that knocked him down. The BattleMaster raised his foot to crush Dave’s skull.
Hooper rolled over across broken glass, avoiding the foot stomp that punched up a cloud of pulverized asphalt. His lungs burned, and his mouth was full of cotton-thick spit that made it hard to breathe. Every muscle ached from the exertion of defending himself. With his last reserves, Dave backed up to the shattered truck, where the tailgate hung by a single hinge. He grabbed the F-150’s tailgate and tore it off.
Scaroth kicked the improvised shield dead center as Dave brought it down to protect himself. It folded like tinfoil around the Hunn’s foot, launching Dave across the street and through the front porch of a vacated home. He heard old dry wooden slats crack and explode, tasted dust, and felt broken bones knitting back together. His strength ebbed away ever more rapidly, and he wondered if he could even get back on his feet, when Chief Allen emerged from cover to kneel
beside him. Scaroth approached slowly and surely, carrying his great war cleaver as though it weighed nothing.
“Dave, let Igor take the shot,” Allen said. “You are getting murdered out there, buddy.”
Dave rolled to his feet, sucking down most of the Gatorade in one long draw. “Zach, I gotta do this.”
“Why?”
“Reasons.”
They made eye contact not as civilian and soldier but as men, allies in a common cause. Chief Petty Officer Zach Allen drew his Gerber Mark II fighting knife. He handed it to Dave.
“Take this at least.”
“Thanks. A Snickers would have been better, but … no matter what happens,” Dave said, taking the knife, “if I kill Scaroth, you have to let the rest go. It’s a deal. They’ll honor it. That’s why I have to kill him, not Igor.”
“I’ll let Heath know,” Allen said. “And Dave?”
“Yeah?”
Allen extended his hand. “Good luck, man. Fight dirty.”
Dave took the blade. “It’s all I got. And beers later. Lots of beers.”
Scaroth casually swung FoeSunder through the picket fence, atomizing it, and stepped over the wreckage. “Champion? Why do you hide from me? Do you wish dishonor to your realm? Come and let us finish this bargain of ours. Perhaps if you die well, I will spare a few of your kind from this realm. Her Majesty could keep them as pets.”
Dave got to his feet and stepped onto the front porch. In the distance, he could see Lucille lying in the middle of the street, calling dolefully to him. He wondered if he could just wish her into his hand. Like Thor’s hammer.
Tried.
Failed.
“So that’s a bust,” he muttered.
The Gerber, the small black fighting knife, seemed pathetically inadequate for the job of carving up Satan’s own rhino here. He might as well have at him with a plastic coffee spoon. Nonetheless, he concealed the blade behind his forearm, gripped in the palm of his right hand, and closed with the giant Hunn. Knees bent, empty hand forward, just as his stomach cramped painfully and his vision grayed out at the edges.
“I can make this painless for you if you hold fast and bare your neck to the mercy stroke,” Scaroth said in what passed for a whisper. “I would do you that honor, for you have rid me of those inconvenient Grymm.”
They circled each other in front of the shack. He was vaguely aware of onlookers nearby. Not just the SEALs watching from cover but local people huddled fearfully in the shadows, peeking out from behind curtains as if thin doors and glass might protect them.
“Scaroth?” Dave sighed. “You talk too much.”
Dave hit the accelerator and with a flick of his wrist threw the Gerber straight into Scaroth’s right eye, where it buried itself up to the hilt. The monster screeched in pain and fury as Dave tried to run for Lucille, dizzy with hunger. The giant demon lashed out with one foot, extending a talon that tripped the human champion as he tried to slip past.
Scaroth howled, bringing his blade down again. With only one eye his aim was off, and Dave rolled away from each strike until he could scramble to his feet. He ducked a slashing attempt to behead him and drove a solid right hook into the BattleMaster’s naked crotch. Cock-punching an enormous monster penis was among the most unpleasant things he’d ever had to do in his life. A bellow erupted from within the creature’s chest as he sailed backward.
“You know …” Dave gasped for air as he staggered over to collect Lucille. “For once I’m actually grateful someone has balls bigger than mine.”
He made it to the splitting maul and felt a measure of his strength return as his hands closed around her. Scaroth gathered himself, still unsteady from the low blow, facing Dave, both hands on the hilt of FoeSunder, claws out. Blood ran down his face from the Gerber that was still embedded in his right eye.
“Trickery,” he grunted. “Feeble trickery is all you offer.”
“And a prizewinning cock punch. Gotta give me credit for that.”
“There will be much pain for that!”
He was at the point of collapse. The members of the thrall were all piled up across the roadway, straining against their bloodlust, wanting to charge him but mindful of the grave dishonor they would bring to their clans and nest if they intervened. Allen had disappeared back into the darkness, and those residents who had foolishly gathered or stopped in their flight to watch his challenge were all slipping away as quietly as they could. Time to roll a hard six. Summoning the last of his energy, drawing what he could from Lucille and not really understanding how that was even possible, he launched himself into the air, bringing the hammer up behind his back. Scaroth turned to carve Dave in half, but the human champion was moving too fast, bringing Lucille down with the last of his rapidly failing might. The splitting maul shattered the forged metal of FoeSunder and bit into Scaroth’s right shoulder. Dave roared his own shkriaa as the great wedge of American steel sliced through the BattleMaster’s armor, hide, sinew, and bone, bisecting him diagonally from shoulder to hip in a geyser of blood and horror. The two halves fell to the ground with a wet, spurting plop.
The Horde stood silent as the choppers circled overhead and sirens wailed in the background. Another Hunn stepped forth to look at the body of the slain BattleMaster. With a couple of kicks to the shoulder, the daemon grunted, nodding to itself.
“We shall withdraw from your realm, ur-Dave,” the beast said, its voice thick with contempt and shame.
Dave, hyperventilating now and swaying on his feet, took a gulp of air and nodded. “Well … bye, then. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
The Horde turned as one and began to retrace their steps. And that was it. They were done. None broke ranks to feed on the calflings of New Orleans or even to gather the bodies of their fallen. With heads low, they trudged back to the construction site where the portal grew wider with each passing minute.
Dave leaned on Lucille, feeling a wave of fatigue and nausea building, threatening to sweep him away. Casting a glance at Scaroth’s corpse, he searched for some feeling but came up empty.
Chief Allen and the SEALs emerged cautiously from cover, tracking the monsters with their weapons. He knelt down to pluck the Gerber from Scaroth’s sightless eye socket, and his knees gave way, spilling him onto the ground next to the thing he had killed. Igor, towering over the pair, took a long look at the BattleMaster’s carcass before giving a nod of approval.
“You need training,” Igor said. “You fight like an idiot.”
Dave shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so. We’re done here. Next time we see these cocksuckers, it’ll be at the multiplex.”
“I’ll bet they won’t show their junk,” said Igor. “Not if they want a PG-13 rating.”
Marine Corps helicopters roared overhead as he spoke. A mechanical ripping sound, perhaps the longest fart Dave had ever heard in his life, tore through the darkness. Long streams of tracer fire arced away over the roofline, and a shower of hot brass rained down on the street, a line of tinkling metal charms that raced away up the street in the wake of the gun run. Dave spun around. He could see Heath looking at him, as shocked as he. He hadn’t ordered the attack.
The war party scattered under the onslaught of the helicopter’s nose-mounted machine guns, but the surviving leaders of the thrall were there in the chaos and madness, organizing their forces back into a rough line of battle facing to the east, toward the tightly packed grid of slum housing in which hundreds, maybe a thousand people still cowered.
“Betrayers!” a Hunn commandant shrieked. “Kill them all!”
“Zach, get him to stop,” Dave gasped. “We’re breaking the deal. We had a deal.”
Chief Allen shook his head, dragging Dave out of the free fire zone. “Dude, I’m sorry. I dunno what—”
Tracer fire and rockets reached out from the sky, lightning bolts of technology breaking bodies apart, splitting muscle and bone, spilling the blood of the Horde into the soil. Dave took a step to i
ntervene, to stop the Cobras himself if needs must.
Heath half ran, half hobbled over to where Allen and Dave had taken shelter on the porch of a small home. He was holding one finger to his ear as he ran with an increasingly debilitating limp, screaming into the headset that connected him back to the command truck and presumably up the chain of command. With his other hand he fired short bursts at any of the thrall that made to charge at him.
The screaming started again, the sounds of slaughter as dozens of Hunn and Fangr that escaped the conflagration of high explosives and flying metal burst into the surrounding streets and fell upon the fleeing populace.
“What the fuck did you do?” Dave shouted as his head swam and his muscles cramped. Allen tried to feed him a drink tube from his own CamelBak, and Hooper knocked it away at first before angrily grabbing the nozzle and sucking for all he was worth.
“Well, tell him to shut it the fuck down,” Heath yelled into the tiny microphone of his headset, ignoring Dave. He looked truly out of control for the first time since Dave had met him.
“We just avoided a war, and that fucking idiot starts another one.”
The SEAL officer almost ripped the comm equipment off, but training and discipline got the better of him and he repeated himself in a calmer voice. He was still quivering with anger and stopping to fire two more bursts from his assault rifle but no longer yelling.
“What happened, Heath?” Dave demanded to know when the officer signed off.
Heath let go one long, bitter exhalation of breath.
“Compton,” he said. “Compton did an end run around us. Plugged himself right into the command authority and got the green light for the gun run.”
Heath took up a firing position on the porch, sweeping the street with his rifle, taking head shots when he could. Beside him, Allen did the same thing after emptying his pockets of energy bars for Dave.
The whole street blazed and crackled with gunfire that was cutting into the surviving warriors of Urspite Scaroth’s broken thrall and probably killing dozens of innocent civilians as the high-powered rounds passed through flimsy walls and open windows.
Dave vs. the Monsters Page 32
