by James Axler
Through the bullet rips in the hood, McCreedy saw shiny blue where the heavily corrugated skin had been blasted away. Was it bone under there? Could it be metal? It looked wet, but there was no sign of bleeding.
Dropped back on his feet, he was shoved past the duty desk. Behind him, he could hear the sergeant’s sustained scream between pulses of the Klaxon. Then the screaming stopped. The alarm continued.
As the purple mob lumbered down the adjoining hallway, he struggled to keep up—it was either that or be trod under. The little one had no such worries; it was being carried like a dummy again. The odd potshot zinged overhead, but there was no concentrated resistance. Through open doorways, McCreedy saw officers and civilian employees taking cover behind desks and file cabinets.
If the creatures’ goal was to kill a bunch of cops in their own house, they were letting a lot of them slip past. If the mission was to free fellow monsters held in the precinct’s jail, how and when had the police managed to subdue them? He had seen no evidence that that was even possible. Bullets had no apparent effect. The beasts’ physical strength seemed limitless. He doubted that the steel bars of a cell would contain one for more than a New York minute.
He couldn’t think of any other reasons for them to be here, for doing what they were doing.
It was like a French horror movie—maniacally gruesome, but even with subtitles, it made no sense.
* * *
OFFICER CRAIG WESTER thought the day was going to be totally boring. He was stuck behind a desk after a beat-down incident involving a robbery suspect. One kick to the head too many, and as luck would have it, the action had been caught on a tourist’s video camera.
Now he was running for his life.
The first pulse of the Klaxon emergency alarm had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. At the sound of rapid pistol shots from the precinct’s entrance, he had jumped to his feet. When he’d stuck his head around the doorway, he’d seen the duty sergeant struggling feebly in the grasp of a very wide person in a purple hoodie and more purple hoodies barreling down on him, like a herd of rhinos. He’d recognized them at once as the suspects in a series of terror attacks all over the city. Responding to those attacks had left the precinct house woefully undermanned.
Wester had drawn his weapon, but there’d been nothing he could do. There’d been too many hostiles between him and his sergeant. In a moment of panic—or heroism—he’d turned and now ran down the hallway ahead of the intruders, shouting warnings into the side rooms as he went.
There was an emergency plan in place in case of an all-out, armed assault on the station house. Though such a thing seemed highly unlikely, every officer in the precinct was drilled in the procedure until they could follow it in their sleep. Behind the brass’s backs, the rank-and-file referred to it as Plan Nine from Outer Space and “fighting Martians.”
But as a result of that training, Wester knew exactly what to do.
Ahead of him, the hallway bobbed with black-uniformed cops. They hit the entrance to the fire stairs and flowed quickly and smoothly down them, not quite stepping in cadence but close to it. Wester brought up the rear, last man through the door. He didn’t look back.
The alarm sounded even louder inside the stairwell. It would have been hard to think if he had been thinking. But he wasn’t. He was acting by rote, like a programmed robot, following those ahead of him, following the action plan like a lifeline. They trooped down the stairs, past the story where the holding cells were, then through the door on the next floor’s landing. Their destination, the precinct’s armory, was a concrete-lined, steel-reinforced bunker. To reach it, somewhere out of sight in front, an officer used a keypad to unlock the heavy hallway door.
As last man through, Wester pulled the door shut until he felt the lock click. He turned but couldn’t start down the steep staircase because there was a momentary bottleneck of black uniforms below him.
When he reached the bottom of the steps, the armory’s heavy wire door was open and officers were pouring through into the brightly lit, windowless room beyond.
Above and behind him at the top of the stairs, something hit the other side of the door, hard. The shock wave rattled the walls. It sounded like a battering ram.
Wester knew Plan Nine protocol included the immediate recall of all available units and personnel to the station. Basically, it was “drop whatever you’re doing and come running.” But from the sound of the battering ram, the shit storm was going to hit long before reinforcements arrived.
When he entered the armory, he was handed an armored vest, a black Kevlar helmet, an M-16, three 30-round magazines and a set of ear protectors. The weight of the automatic weapon felt good in his hands; the earplugs dulled the noise of the alarm and the booming from the door upstairs. He cracked in a magazine but did not touch the charging handle. Again it was Plan Nine protocol. No rounds were to be chambered until the targets were in sight and the command to fire was given. The last thing anybody wanted was the accidental discharge of a fully automatic weapon in a crowded, concrete-walled room.
The armory was equipped with a video monitor connected to the station’s CCTV cameras. Everyone was looking up at it, at a massively built, hooded individual who was kicking the living shit out of a steel door. It was caving in under the rain of blows. Behind the kicker were more just like him.
There were none of the usual Martian wisecracks.
“Switch the camera,” someone behind Wester said. “Let’s see the rest of the station.”
The picture changed to the ground floor, but what it showed was even more startling. Cops and civilians were down everywhere, and they weren’t moving. It looked as if a tornado had ripped through the station house.
Between the blasts of the Klaxon, the booms of the kicks at the door, muffled gunfire erupted from directly above them.
“For Pete’s sake, switch the camera back!” an officer said.
The view on the monitor shifted. In the hallway outside the armory door, three brave cops were taking on a half-dozen hoodies. They had their Glocks up and were blazing away at can’t-miss range. Wester could see the suspects’ heads jerking at the impacts.
The bullets didn’t seem to have any effect.
“They aren’t going down,” someone in the rear said. “Why aren’t they going down?”
As they watched, the purple hoodies stepped right up to the muzzles of the discharging weapons, picked up the officers as if they weighed nothing and drove the tops of their heads into the concrete wall. The limp bodies slumped to the floor below starbursts of skull, brains and blood.
“Who are these fuckers?” the cop beside Wester snarled.
“You mean, what are they,” someone else corrected.
An officer at the armory counter slammed the phone down so hard the black plastic base shattered. “I was on the horn to One Police Plaza trying to get some backup here,” he said. “She put me on hold! The bitch put me on hold!”
Then the door above them banged open. The rhythmic booming stopped.
“They’re coming. Jesus Christ, they’re coming!”
A woman’s voice in the rear shouted over the emergency horn, “Get in position.” It was a female lieutenant and she sounded all business.
Just as they’d trained, eight officers kneeled in front, and five stood behind them.
“Safeties off. Ready your weapons.”
Charging handles clattered as thirteen first rounds were chambered. Kneeling, Wester looked through the security screen that walled off the anteroom from the armory proper. The distance between the service counter and the bottom of the steps was less than ten feet. The stairs themselves were just wide enough for two people to pass in opposite directions. The hatch above the service counter was pulled down, closed and locked, as was the entry gate.
“Let ’em hit the wire, then we all open fire at once,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve got plenty of ammo here. The screen should hold them back. Clean shooting, now, just lik
e at the range. Stay on target. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Do your job.”
Wester settled the M-16’s butt into the crook of his shoulder. He knew he was as ready as he was ever going to be.
When he saw the feet of the first purple hoodie come down the steps, his chest constricted. The feet weren’t in shoes, and they weren’t human. They looked like the final touch on a full-body Halloween costume.
The first hoodie was joined by a second, then a third. Their bulk practically filled the anteroom. The hoods cast their faces in deep shadow
Then as if on some silent signal, each raised a clawed hand and pushed back their cowl.
They looked...prehistoric. Wester had no other word for it. As if they had been hatched out of beach-ball-size eggs buried in the sand of some Jurassic Park riverbank. He let go of the M-16’s pistol grip to wipe the sweat from his palm.
The purple hoodies were clearly not afraid of what was lined up on the other side of the screen. Their eyes were slitted, the corners of their wide mouths turned up, revealing rows of sharp teeth. It looked as if they were smiling.
One of the cops in the back row let out a scream and cut loose with his assault rifle.
The full-auto burst was contagious. Training and discipline out the window; they all opened fire. Even with earplugs, the clatter of so many automatic weapons going off in a concrete box was deafening.
The cop kneeling beside Wester went down, his right eye keyholed by a ricocheting 5.56 mm round that blew off his helmet and the back of head. Then an officer standing behind him dropped and then another. Bullets whined off the walls. Wester kept shooting, because through the smoke, he could see the purple hoodies were still standing, leaning into the torrent of blasts as if it was a hurricane-force wind. If someone was yelling for them to stop shooting, it couldn’t be heard over the din. He let up on the trigger only when the M-16’s last shot was fired.
Four hundred rounds of ammo expended at near point-blank range in an enclosed space should have done the trick, but it hadn’t.
The monsters stepped up to the heavy wire screen. Then they pulled it apart as if it was made of wet paper.
No time to reload, Wester discarded the assault rifle and drew his handgun.
As he watched helplessly, a kneeling cop was jerked to his feet by a purple hoodie, then pulled apart, like a fly in the control of a small, curious boy. While the officer screamed, his arms and legs were torn off and then his torso was sent pinwheeling over their heads to the back of the room.
Wester shot the grotesque reptilian bastard in the head, punching out shot after shot at a distance of less than four feet. The impacts of the 9 mm bullets barely registered on it. Clear snot streaming from its nostrils, it grinned at him and kept coming. Still firing, he backed up, aiming for an eye.
A fucking yellow eye.
* * *
MCCREEDY COWERED ON the staircase, fingers stuffed in his ears. Below it sounded like World War III. Standing between him and the full-auto meat grinder were three of the big boys. He knew they weren’t protecting him from the bullets. They were protecting the little one who stood on the step next to him.
When the shooting finally stopped, he took his fingers out of his ears, but for only a second. The screaming—and the sound of the little one laughing—made him stuff them back in. Steel guy wires slid in and out of its cheek grommets, raising and lowering its lower jaw as it chortled.
It took several minutes for the screaming to end. Fearing that it wasn’t really over, McCreedy kept his ears plugged as he was shoved down the steps. In the glare of the fluorescent ceiling light, brutally detached body parts lay scattered all over the floor. There were black-uniformed bodies without heads, arms or legs, blood still leaking from the various ragged stumps.
McCreedy removed his fingers from his ears and covered his nose and mouth with both hands in a feeble attempt to block the stench of spilled gore and voided bowels.
The room’s purpose was obvious to him at a glance. The rows of assault rifles and combat shotguns lined up in racks along the walls were a dead giveaway.
Kicking a path through the body parts, the wide boys began gathering M-16s, olive-drab cans of ammo and crates of grenades.
They were using the police station as a gun shop, he realized. A free gun shop. It wasn’t an aha moment. It didn’t explain why creatures like them needed guns in the first place.
A purple hoodie stepped up to him and dumped a half-dozen black assault rifles in his arms. He stood there, meekly holding them until the little one decided they had enough loot.
They started back up the stairs with their burdens, tracking bloody footprints on the treads.
No one challenged them as they walked down the ground-floor hallway and out the front doors. There was no massive police presence waiting for them outside, no rows of squad cars, no phalanx of officers with weapons raised. In the distance he could hear a steady wail of sirens and the string-of-firecracker rattles of full-auto gunfire. The limo was where he had left it double-parked.
One of the big boys popped the vehicle’s rear trunk lid. Inside, curled in a tight ball, eyes bugging out with terror was their other captive—Dr. James Nudelman. The strips of duct tape over his mouth and around the back of his head covered most of the big ruby-colored birthmark on the side of his face. McCreedy knew his name from the attack on the hospital. He had no idea why the man had been taken. Why would these creatures hold someone for ransom when they could barge into any bank, rip the doors off the vault, take what they wanted and leave without worrying about law enforcement? It didn’t make any sense. Cops couldn’t stop them, not even with automatic weapons; he’d seen the proof of that.
The purple hoodie rolled an unprotesting Nudelman to one side like a big bag of dog food, and then they began stacking the stolen weapons and ammo in the trunk. There was a lot of it to stack. What wouldn’t fit with the lid closed, they took into the limo with them.
The sirens in the distance didn’t seem to be coming any closer. Whatever the police were doing elsewhere in the city, they thought it was more important. Either that, or they knew they couldn’t help here.
McCreedy was pushed behind the steering wheel as the limo’s side door closed. He felt numbed to his core. Shell-shocked. Utterly lost. With a dry mouth, he babbled a prayer.
“Dear Lord, I know I’ve forsaken you...I know I don’t deserve your mercy...but if just this once...”
“Drive!” the little one shrilled at him through the privacy window.
McCreedy drove.
Chapter Fifteen
Standing up, Ryan leaned into the EMT truck’s front compartment. “Looks like we’re in the clear for the moment,” he said. “We can’t just keeping driving around. Pull over, Vee. We need to figure out a plan.”
Vee steered the truck to the curb and stopped, leaving the engine idling.
In the distance he could hear the distinct crackle of blasterfire between the wail of sirens.
“We need to pick up Magus’s trail, and fast,” Ryan said.
Vee reached up to the headliner and hit a switch on the console there. Police and emergency calls instantly blasted through the radio’s speakers. “How about that for a start?” she said.
Ryan didn’t understand the code numbers or locations being rattled off, but their guide to Manhattan did.
“Now your pal from the future is attacking police stations,” Vee said. “That’s what we’re hearing outside. Three precincts in the south of the city have been hit in the last ten minutes. What’s in a police station Magus would want?”
“Weapons,” Mildred said without hesitation. “Full-auto assault rifles and stores of ammo.”
“You don’t have guns like that in the future?”
“We have blasters, guns,” Ryan said, “but hardly anyone is making new ones. And the new ones are very crude in comparison to what you have now. The fine points of steel making and machining have been lost. In our time we rely on the blasters that weren’t destroyed
in yours.”
“What is the point of taking guns if Magus has enforcers?”
“Predark weapons and ammunition are pure gold to the residents of Deathlands, my dear,” Doc said. “Hard currency, like jack, jolt and joy juice.”
“Magus uses them to trade for slaves and supplies, to bribe favors from the barons and field an army of sec men if needed,” Krysty told her.
“But police stations?” Vee said. “Attacking one is like asking to get shot full of holes.”
“Bullets not stop enforcers,” Jak stated.
“All hell is breaking loose here,” Mildred said. “The cops aren’t going to be sitting in the barn drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. They’ll be out responding to the widespread attacks. The stations will be almost undefended.”
“What other source of blasters is there?” Ryan asked.
“National Guard armories, I suppose,” Vee said. “But I don’t know if there are fully operational ones in the city. I mean, which ones, if any, actually hold stocks of automatic weapons. They’re historic buildings.”
“Magus is under the same time pressure we are,” Ryan said. “Can’t go far to get the shopping done.”
“Hitting an unmanned National Guard armory wouldn’t have the same shock effect, either,” Mildred said. “Attacking police stations head-on is a dagger in the heart of America’s largest city. If anything, Magus is all about the gruesomely theatrical. And the eve of the world ending is the biggest stage that will ever be. Given the opportunity, Magus is putting on the opening act, warming up a global audience for the headliner, the ultimate terror.”
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc groaned, “even for Magus, that seems over the top.”
“How does any of this help us?” Krysty said.
“I’ve been keeping track of the locations,” Vee said. “Out of twenty-two police precincts on Manhattan, so far the Thirteenth, Tenth and Midtown South have been hit. The assaults are zigzagging back and forth, but seem to be moving in a northerly direction up the island. If that is a pattern and it continues, the next stop is the Eighteenth Precinct police station, Midtown North.”
