by Cole, Myke
Then it cried out, wreathed in lightning, as Harlequin swooped over its shoulder, ribbons of electricity arcing from his fingers, engulfing the creature’s head and shoulders. Black mist wafted from the wounds, so cold that Bookbinder’s teeth chattered despite being several feet away from the outpouring. The creature flailed, covering its head, snarling up at Harlequin, who somersaulted in the air and rocketed upward, dodging the feeble swipe it directed at him. He steadied himself for another blaze of the magic, then jerked aside as a roc dove at him, nearly catching him in its jaws. A white-painted goblin Aeromancer followed behind the giant bird, unleashing a torrent of lightning that Harlequin dove low to avoid. The goblin Aeromancer streaked past him and banked sharply, coming back for another pass.
Bookbinder scrambled in the mud as the Mountain God shook off its wounds and turned back to him, still bleeding that freezing black mist. He dragged himself forward, wincing as a fleeing guardsman stepped on his hand, scrambling to get to his knees. He jerked upright, planting his fists in the dirt to push himself to his feet, feeling his knuckles brush against a wooden cylinder.
The goblin’s spear.
He gripped the haft and spun, holding it at waist level, pointing it at the Mountain God. The creature paused, arms spread. The black smoke cascaded from its head and shoulders, rising above its curling horns. Bookbinder gritted his teeth to stop himself from shaking. Over the creature’s shoulder, Harlequin did battle with the roc, kicking it in the beak and using the momentum to carry him over backward as he channeled a burst of lightning that ignited the bird’s feathers and sent it flapping backward. The giant bird kept coming, keeping his attention as the goblin Aeromancer finished its turn and came at Harlequin from behind, extending its hand for another burst of lightning.
Bookbinder forced himself to take a step forward, could swear he sensed a look of incredulous surprise in the featureless black space above the giant mouth. Then he extended a hand, Drawing hard for the goblin Aeromancer’s magic, Binding it into the spear tip with everything he had.
The goblin Aeromancer screamed and plummeted to the earth, its magic suddenly gone. The Mountain God howled in time as the spearhead blazed into a dazzling cone of crackling blue lightning.
Bookbinder screamed and thrust the point toward the Mountain God’s chest. The creature batted it away with one long hand, then flinched as the crackle of electricity singed its claws, unleashing more of the freezing smoke. Bookbinder spun with the spear’s momentum, swinging it over his head, bringing the added length down so that the crackling tip cut across the monster’s face. It screamed, flickered backward into one of the giants, knocking it to one side with a growl. The Mountain God grunted, falling on its back, scrambling flickering arms to get to its feet.
Bookbinder was determined not to give it the chance.
With a yell, he leapt, reversing the spear, coming down to land one foot on the creature’s stomach, the cold penetrating his boots and making his knee ache and go numb in a matter of moments. The Mountain God screamed, and Bookbinder screamed back, bringing the point down, straight through the monster’s chest, pinning it into the mud and leaping aside as the black smoke fountained into the air, numbing his shoulders as he rolled away.
The Mountain God’s death throes drew the attention of the other two, who flickered backward in shock at the sight of their own being felled by a human. The giants stood their ground, dumbly staring at the thing dying at their feet. A moment later, Harlequin seized the momentum, blazing lightning down on another of the Mountain Gods, so that they shrieked, fading backward into the goblin lines.
Bookbinder pointed to the spear, still blazing with electricity in the sinking cavity of the Mountain God’s chest. ‘They . . . duh . . . die!’ He managed through chattering teeth. The fleeing guardsmen were mostly engaged with the goblins around them, but a few turned their heads, took in the sight, hefted their guns.
Harlequin blazed in the sky like a flickering star. Tongues of lightning lashed the two remaining creatures, who faded backward once more, until they were gone from sight. He swooped closer to Bookbinder, who knelt in the mud, recovering a carbine with trembling hands, only just beginning to regain some of their feeling. ‘You okay?’
‘Fuh . . . fuh . . . fucking . . . cold,’ Bookbinder managed. Then he knelt and opened up with the weapon, emptying the magazine into the stunned goblin horde, still trying to reconstitute around the fleeing Mountain Gods. He couldn’t feel his fingers, his own flesh chilled corpse rubber. But pulling a trigger didn’t exactly take fine motor skills. A few of the other guardsmen lent their fire to his, spinning goblins in circles before they collapsed in the earth.
Harlequin streaked overhead, making sure the Mountain Gods kept running, while Bookbinder and some of the guardsmen took cover behind a Stryker, pouring on fire. At last, the goblins gathered their wits and came on with a cry. He looked around him. A few of the QRF had found their courage and stood beside him, firing with the cold discipline he expected of professional soldiers. But they were so few. Nothing to be done about it now. Standing and fighting took courage, but it didn’t take a lot of thought. Bookbinder was happy to put his brain on hold and concentrate instead on the slowly returning feeling in his finger, pulling the trigger over and over.
As he paused to swap out magazines again, he heard the din of gunfire give way before screams and clashing metal as the first of the goblins slammed into the QRF’s ranks and the brutal hand-to-hand combat commenced. A goblin launched itself over the Stryker’s turret, gutting the gunner with a short, curving sword before plunging down the other side. Bookbinder upended his carbine and took a baseball swing as it passed him, smacking its skull into the Stryker’s side and knocking it off its feet. He jumped onto the Stryker’s turret, clubbing with his carbine and calling to the men behind him. ‘Come on!’
And then he raced down the other side, the QRF soldiers alongside him, batting aside a spear and kicking its wielder in the face. Bookbinder jumped onto the goblin’s body and laid about him, eyes half closed, the tight press of men and goblin barely leaving him room to swing, the heat of bodies like a furnace, the stink of sweat and blood thick in his nostrils.
For a moment, Bookbinder forgot where and who he was. There was only the steady rhythm of the carbine, rising and falling, the pumping exertion of his shoulders, the buzz of the fighting around him, coming to his ears as if from a long way off. He was dead. Every second he breathed, the pain lancing through his thigh as something cut him, was a stolen moment, borrowed from the reaper, filling his heart with joy.
Oh, Julie, he thought. When I see you in heaven, I am going to have such stories to tell you.
Up, down, the carbine went. Somewhere in the thick of things, the plastic butt stock had broken off, the heavy upper receiver was rimed with dripping blood, fragments of bone, gray slop that was probably brain.
A snarling face appeared before him, and he headbutted it, sending the goblin reeling back a pace before it shouted something and dove forward, slashing at him with a knife and sinking its teeth into his shoulder. He didn’t scream. The pain was a gift, another sensation, another moment of life. Instead, he thrust his fingers into the goblin’s eye sockets, businesslike, and yanked its head back before kicking it in the gut and clubbing it into bloody silence.
The ground shook, and Bookbinder looked up. Before him stood one of the giants, a steel pauldron belted across its scarred chest. It hefted an uprooted tree studded with iron nails the size of railroad spikes and roared at him, crushing a guardsman beneath one massive, hobnailed boot. Bookbinder craned his head, felt for a current. No one nearby was using magic. The broken carbine looked pathetic in his hands, now red and aching as the cold left them.
What the hell, Bookbinder thought. Might as well go out with a bang. He howled right back and charged, his stubby, broken carbine pathetic in his hands.
The giant lifted its club, then screamed, gurgling and falling back. Bookbinder swiped at its knee and missed as
the creature retreated. He looked up in surprise. A spear quivered in the giant’s throat.
A goblin spear.
He looked behind him. A cheer had gone up, horns were blowing. Banners waved, a gnarled tree on a square of blue. They flapped in the freezing wind, snapping back and forth before a flickering gate, its shimmering light dancing over the backs of hundreds of goblin warriors. A squadron of them, mounted on huge snarling wolves, leapt over the Stryker, plunging into the enemy, laying about with short, wicked swords, screaming a battle cry. Behind them, waves of their comrades followed, spears waving.
Bookbinder let the press of friendly goblins surge around him, seeing his exhausted, dumbfounded expression mirrored in the guardsmen’s faces. They stood, slack jawed, fatigue and wonder immobilizing them as the newly arriving goblins pushed their pursuers back.
‘Sir!’ It was Britton. ‘Let’s go! Get your men out of here!’
His voice broke Bookbinder’s paralysis, and he raced to stand on top of the Stryker. The Healer, Therese, rushed past him, disappearing among the retreating guardsmen, putting her magic to use.
With the last of the allied goblins through the gate, Britton snapped it shut. He nodded to Bookbinder and opened it again.
Bookbinder looked into the glowing curtain and smiled. Beyond it, he could see an access gate, tall fencing guarded by soldiers, now shouting and pointing at the portal that had suddenly appeared across the road from them. Bookbinder’s smile grew as he recognized that road. It was Georgia Avenue, now crowded with traffic as the cars screeched to a halt, their drivers gawking at the gate in their midst.
Bookbinder recognized the road and the gate. More importantly, he recognized the collection of buildings behind it.
The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
‘Go!’ he shouted to his men. ‘Everybody through! Right now! Carry the wounded! Ditch your gear! Gogogo!’
Around them, the allied goblins and their enemies fought, slowly creating a ring of open ground, free of fighting. The remaining original defenders and the guardsmen of the QRF poured into the void, throwing down their guns, their helmets, anything that might slow them down. Bookbinder plunged among them, dragging wounded men to their feet, slinging them over their comrades’ shoulders. His cold, burned flesh screamed at him, but he ignored it. The pain was thematic now, a dull undercurrent, omnipresent and easily ignored. He tripped over an airman howling in the dirt, clutching his shattered knee. Bookbinder dragged him screaming to his feet, pushed him into the side of the Stryker, and with the help of a Marine, bodily threw him into the portal. He turned back to the throng of guardsmen, seized another man by his carbine sling and yanked him through the gate. The man went stumbling onto the grassy curb along Georgia Avenue, blinking and staring, milling in the growing crowd of his comrades. Bookbinder took a step through the gate and shouted to the dumbstruck gate guards, ‘A little help here! We’ve got wounded coming through!’
He took a quick look around. Traffic had come to a complete halt, and police lights flashed as cruisers pulled onto the shoulder, their drivers shouting into the radios for instructions. A huge crowd of pedestrians was growing all along the center’s perimeter as civilians exited their cars or hospital workers left their offices to see what the commotion was about. Bookbinder was pleased to see a few of them have the presence of mind to go pelting back into the buildings behind the fence, presumably for medical supplies.
He heard a shout and felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. He whirled, seizing the wrist of a goblin, yanking it to the ground and crunching his boot down on its neck. There was a sharp snap, and the gnarled creature twitched to stillness in the middle of Georgia Avenue, blood leaking from its nostrils and mouth. The crowd of civilians surged away at the sight, pointing in horror. The president’s going to have a tough time explaining that, Bookbinder thought. He swiped futilely at his own back before one of the guardsmen put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Hold still, sir. This is going to hurt.’ It did. Bookbinder cursed and doubled over as the guardsman yanked something from the wound, then pressed something into it.
He reached around Bookbinder’s front and presented him with a short, bloody knife. ‘Here you go, sir. Souvenir.’
‘Thanks.’ Bookbinder’s vision swam momentarily, and he steadied himself with a deep breath.
‘I stuffed my helmet liner in the hole, sir. You won’t bleed out, but it’s dirty as hell. You need a medic.’
Bookbinder looked down and saw a sergeant’s chevrons on the man’s body armor. ‘Later. Do me a favor and make sure everybody here’ – he gestured at the now-huge crowd of servicemen and women retreating through the gate – ‘gets into there.’ He pointed at the sprawling hospital complex, which was even now disgorging teams of personnel in blue medical scrubs, rushing gurneys onto the now-still tarmac of Georgia Avenue.
‘Got it, sir.’
Bookbinder nodded and jumped back through the gate. The plaza was oddly silent. The goblins who had made it into the plaza were fleeing between the FOB’s buildings, pursued by squadrons of the allied goblin’s wolfriders. The goblins that pursued Bookbinder and his guardsmen had been pushed down the track a quarter kilometer, but the fighting still raged there. Bookbinder’s stomach roiled at the sight of ranks of goblin and human corpses, marching shoulder to shoulder, silently bulling the attackers back. He could feel the magic driving them eddying from Britton’s Necromancer friend, painted half-white and dressed like a goblin, standing atop the Stryker, arms stretched forward. He recognized him, Rictus from Shadow Coven. Brimstone reached his nostrils and his eyes swept the FOB to see most of it in flames.
Bookbinder felt a hand on his wound. He started to turn, then stopped as a delicious warmth flooded through him. The pain vanished. He could feel the trickle of blood stop, the severed tissues mending together. He felt the helmet liner dust past the back of his leg and settle to the ground. He turned to see Therese.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said.
She smiled.
Thorsson landed beside him. ‘Everyone’s out, sir. Britton’s indig buddies here bought us needed time. Even with your QRF, they’d have cut us up trying to go through that gate.’
Bookbinder met Britton’s eyes. ‘Thanks.’
Britton grunted. ‘I saw your rear guard coming apart as you fell back. Figured you wouldn’t be able to safely withdraw without more support. You didn’t think I’d leave you, did you?’ He cocked an eyebrow.
Bookbinder kept his face neutral, pursing his lips.
Britton smiled. ‘We better decide what’s next. I’m giving them another five minutes to get a solid buffer, then I’m going to roll the Mattab On Sorrah out.’
They stood in silence at that. Next, Bookbinder thought. What the hell do we do next?
‘This is the second time you’ve thrown this in Walsh’s face,’ Thorsson said, smiling, glancing through the gate at the chaos erupting outside the hospital complex. The first TV news camera crews were arriving in white vans, giant antennae waving from the tops. ‘I think he’s going to have a hard time getting around it.’
Britton grunted again. ‘Well, he should have accepted my offer when he had the chance.’ They paused uncomfortably.
‘I’m going back,’ Thorsson finally said.
Britton looked up at him. ‘You know what they’ll do to you.’
The Aeromancer shrugged. ‘No, I don’t. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. I signed up to serve, and I’m not done serving yet. I’ll deal with Walsh and his people inside the system.’
‘I was the same as you, Harlequin,’ Britton said. ‘That system ran me into the dirt.’
Thorsson met his eyes. ‘That system works when you work it, Oscar. I believe that.’
‘I’m going with you,’ Bookbinder said. ‘We’ll face whatever’s coming together, Major.’
‘You two are out of your damned minds,’ Britton said.
‘Maybe,’ Bookbinder said, ‘but my place is with my family . . . and with my t
roops.’ It felt strange to say it, but it was true. He commanded these men and women in battle. He was responsible for them. His people, his family. Maybe the terms were redundant. ‘Whatever’s going to happen to me, it’s going to happen to me alongside my own.’
Thorsson nodded. ‘Well, let’s secure this Hallmark card moment,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this, but’ – he extended a hand to Britton – ‘you’re a good man and a fine officer, Oscar Britton. I wish the circumstances of our . . . uh . . . interaction had been different. The president’s never going to say it, so I will. On behalf of a grateful nation, thank you.’
Britton shook his hand, then took a step back, saluting. ‘Thank you, sir. It’s my honor.’
Thorsson returned the salute, looking uncomfortable, then smiled. ‘Thanks to all of you,’ he said to the other SASS refugees who stood watching the exchange. Then he stepped through the gate and into the chaos of service members, hospital workers, camera crews, civilian bystanders, and police who mobbed Georgia Avenue beyond.
Bookbinder turned back to Therese. She smiled at him, dazzling. He rolled his shoulder experimentally. ‘Good as new, ma’am. Much obliged.’
‘Good luck,’ she said.
‘If you, or any of the other . . . uh . . . SASS escapees want to try your luck in the court of public opinion,’ Bookbinder said, ‘you can join me. I don’t know how much pull I have now, but you’ll have my support.’
‘I’m staying,’ Therese said, grasping Oscar Britton’s hand.
Britton squeezed her hand back, silent, choking back tears.
‘I’m staying with you, too,’ Stanley said. ‘We’ve got some ground to cover. Once we’re done, we need to go find your mother.’
Britton turned from Therese, faced his father. ‘You’re giving orders now?’
Stanley bit his lip. ‘We need to do this, Oscar.’
Britton grimaced and didn’t answer.
