Winterfall

by John Conroe

“Don’t be ridiculous. He just beat up both queens of Fairie and flattened a dragon,” she said, slipping out the door.

  Yeah, exactly. What did she expect a normal human to do?

  Five minutes later, he was back out in the garden, his stuff all packed and on his back. The others came along almost as quickly, with Ashley and her dad last, as the dragon speaker had packed up Jetta’s stuff for her, while Jetta sat with Ari and Aylin, who were still completely terrified of Declan.

  “Is that thing ready or what?” Stacia asked Declan, who was studying his portal uncertainly.

  “What? This? Yes. Ready to go,” he said, suddenly noticing the others had all arrived. “We all set?”

  Nods, affirmatives, and a hell yeah from Jetta confirmed they were a go, so the witch turned back to his work, kneeling by the drawing. He touched one hand and the portal opened. No rip in space this one, but a full rectangle with a perfect mirror finish.

  “Okay, let’s go. This train is leaving,” he said, waving Mack toward the gate. “There’s no one at the portal stones except the Watchers on duty.”

  Mack raised his eyebrows and Declan tapped the side of his head. Oh, right. Tied to the land. Got it.

  Mack stepped through, rifle ready despite his buddy’s reassurance, and found himself on the plains at the base of the fifteen hills that were each capped with a portal stone. The sun was just slightly lower in the horizon here, as the jump west had taken them about a hundred miles or so, not enough to change what would be a time zone back home, but still later in the day than Idiria.

  Ian came next, followed by Charm the pit bull, then Ashley, Jetta with Ari and Aylin. Finally Stacia stepped through, her arm pulling Declan’s hand through along with the rest of him.

  Declan looked around, then turned and touched the edge of the open doorway torn through space. As soon as his index finger touched it, the mirror shrank down toward the tip of his digit, disappearing completely like it had been vacuumed into his hand.

  “Smooth,” Mack said to his roomie. Declan looked unsure of what he meant, brow furrowed. “The portal, it was much smoother than the others, not that I’m complaining.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, if I thought I had access to power before, I was sadly mistaken. What I can do right now, touching this ground is… well, crazy. Beyond crazy,” he said.

  “Are you going to be able to leave it?” Mack asked. Declan didn’t answer right away, which worried Mack more than a little.

  “I will likely feel a bit—crippled back home,” he said thoughtfully. He turned, a speculative look on his face, to Stacia.

  “Nope, I’m going. You are too. You’ll be mad as a hatter in a week if you stay here tapped into all this. No wonder the queens are malevolent bitches,” she said.

  “But the things I can do from here?” he protested.

  “Omega needs you back on Earth, D. Super-intellect or not, he won’t fully grasp humans for a least a bit. And he’s less likely to wash his hands of us if you’re there,” Mack said. “No offense, Omega.”

  “No offense is taken, Mack. I do need my father home. My resources are not endless and I am running operations on three planets and fighting an invasion of un-killable biological weapons in China.”

  “I forgot about that. How is it going?” Declan asked. Mack hadn’t heard any of this before, so he glanced at his sister and saw she was just as puzzled.

  “Currently Chris and Tanya are fighting all-out against a number of larger, more lethal versions of the nano fighters, which appear to have come through a gate into China. There are issues. My own drones on the invaders’ staging world are closing in on the open gate. I will have to assault it from that side and try to close it. I need help,” Omega said.

  “Shit. Let’s go,” Declan said, turning toward the fifteen portal hills. He looked at them thoughtfully, then pointed at the fifth one from the left. “That one comes out somewhere on Taiwan.”

  “How do you know that?” Ian asked.

  “I can tell you how many tons of copper are in that mountain to our east and what direction the herds of Fairie deer are running four miles west of here. I can tell you the queens have left Idiria and there are no dragons roosting there either.”

  “Sounds like we should get the hell out of Dodge and we should just trust that he knows what he knows,” Jetta said, turning and heading for the hill Declan had pointed out. With a shrug, Mack followed, as did the rest of the party.

  When they got up the switchback path that climbed to the top, an elf in a robe stood silently before them. Mack brought his rifle up, but Declan just pushed the barrel down and shook his head.

  “Greetings, Watcher. We will travel,” he said to the elf, who simply nodded and turned to the upright stones of the interstellar gate and began to move his arms through a series of motions, chanting softly to himself.

  “I am sending all of my TRAPPIST drones against the open gate to China. There are still converted aliens massing to pass through. Drones one through six are distracting with massed weapons fire. Drones seven, eight, nine, and ten are combining into a single explosive missile formation. Numbers eleven and twelve are overwatch. Impact in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” Omega paused. “Detonation complete. Gate is destroyed along with sixty-three percent of alien forces. Assault drones are preparing to retreat. Drone four damaged. Drone two destroyed. Drone five is captur….”

  The phone went silent.

  “Omega?” Declan asked. “Omega, what’s happening?”

  Their cell phones were unresponsive . Aylin asked Jetta something. The phones didn’t translate.

  “What the hell? Let’s go. We gotta get back now. Watcher, is that gate open?” Declan said, suddenly frantic. The mirror surface and the bowing Watcher were answer enough. Declan started heading for the mirror, only to stop and turn. He looked at the other hills, raised his right hand, and made a gesture. Then he turned and jumped through the open portal.

  On all the surrounding fourteen hills, the towering stones of the portals all rumbled and then sank down into the earth of the hilltops.

  “He’s locking the doors,” Stacia said. “Everyone through the looking glass, now!” she said.

  Mack didn’t need to be told twice. He got in line behind the mother and daughter refugees and once they were through, he leapt into an image of himself, noting his expression was part panic and part something else. Was that what determination looked like?

  Chapter 28

  Chris

  China, Earth

  “Omega? Omega, talk to us!” Lydia yelled. I saved my breath for the fighting. Ryanne had been wrong. It wasn’t twenty of those things. Hell, it wasn’t even thirty. We had already fought the better part of thirty-eight seven-foot-tall monsters coated in black crystal armor, and more were still coming.

  “Get Chet on it!” Tanya yelled, chopping into the leg of a zombie that had to go eight feet tall. She had refined her technique on the fly. Drop low and chop the knee, her tungsten blade hard enough to buckle the lighter armor around the knee joint. As the body followed natural physics and folded toward that side, she’d jump up and hit it with the opposite sword on the side of the head while dodging its long, diamond-sharp arms. Then, as she did in this case, a roundhouse kick to the same side of the body as the head blow, bending the monster even further to one side, the neck as close to horizontal as she could get it. Finally, with a karate yell that gave her strength and somehow weakened its neck armor, she would hit it fast with a one-two sword strike to the neck. In most cases, it would just about decapitate the thing. In this instance, the head hung from shiny black plates of glassy armor.

  Even un-killable armored zombies pause for a moment when their heads are mostly detached. Which gave one of her assistants, in this case, Nika, a chance to dart forward and stuff a white phosphorus grenade down its throat.

  We’d discovered that WP was almost better than thermite. It happened when we ran low on thermite and were forced to improvise. The phos
phorus wasn’t as hot, but much more… dynamic. All kinds of fireworks and flames. Neck stumps shooting sparks like a damned Fourth of July fountain. There was more than enough thermal energy for most of the Fire witches to work with. The one standing behind Nika was fairly new, a freshman at Arcane named Isabelle. Now on her sixth or seventh burn job, she was still a bit wide-eyed, although she didn’t hesitate anymore.

  My own combatant was stumbling backward, which was exactly what they all did at this stage. Instant healing, diamond armor, massive size, strength, and speed. But stupid. Overall, the enemy changed tactics, but as a group. One on one, they followed the same protocol almost each and every time. So I’d discovered that if I could get my hands on their heads and twist them around, two things would happen. One, the armor, which resisted impact extremely well, couldn’t stand axial shear forces for shit. And two, a zombie with its head facing backward tended to walk backward. Or spun in place. Eventually it would get its head straightened, but that could take as much as five minutes.

  So I went in close, broke necks rapidly, moving from enemy to enemy, while my own clean-up crew took down the stumbling remains. There weren’t enough uninjured Fire witches left to have one for myself, but in the jungle, with a temporarily disoriented monster zombie, a human flamethrower crew worked just as well. I finished number three and stepped back, grabbing the bowl that was thrust my way while Zombie boys one and two got hosed with liquid fire and number three was spinning in place, trying to coordinate itself.

  “Look, the drones are just hovering on station. No firing, no maneuvers, like no one is home,” Lydia said.

  I took the spoon out of my mouth, swallowed the cold lump of rice and fish, and took a breath.

  “Before you say it, I already spoke to Chet by radio. All signs of Omega have ceased. Everywhere. The only trace Chet has seen was a final screen change on the big central monitor in HQ that briefly showed a spinning cursor symbol before the whole thing went blank,” Lydia said.

  Tanya appeared beside me, trying to focus on her tiny vampire pal but thoroughly distracted by my shoulder. I glanced at it and saw a trickle of red. Wadding the final two spoons full of rice into a single massive gob, I dropped the bowl and shoved my left wrist in the direction of her face, while the huge slug of congealed rice and spicy fish went into my mouth. She paused to search my face and even watch the pulse in my neck before she nodded and took my arm.

  “Just when I think your mouth can’t get any bigger. Like a damned anaconda eating a pig,” Lydia said, ignoring the fact that her vampire princess was chomping down on my wrist like a fat kid with a bowl of brownie mix. Sorry, I mean obese kid. Or lean mass challenged, if that’s better.

  “Anyhoo, Chet thinks Omega is being hacked,” Lydia said. I almost choked on my food. “Yeah, your neck even swells out like a snake’s,” she said, expression half fascinated, half grossed out.

  I swallowed as fast as I could clear my esophagus, but she held up one hand. “Don’t hurt yourself. I can read the thoughts on your expressive and oh-so-simple face. He thinks that one or more of the Omega’s TRAPPIST drones got grabbed by the enemy and that they have a computer powerful enough to attack our AI.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, finally able to talk.

  “We don’t know. Chet thinks Omega has pulled back from everywhere at once to concentrate on fighting the attack. He thinks that if they had already won, these drones would be attacking us instead of hovering uselessly, or maybe even our own nukes would be going off in our cities.”

  “Can we help Omega?” Tanya asked, pulling away from my wrist briefly. Lydia handed me a liter bottle of water while turning to answer.

  “We have no idea how. The only way he can think of is if Declan can somehow reach Omega through some of that magic bullshit the kid is always pulling out of his ass,” Lydia said.

  “And he’s a world away,” I said.

  “Funny you should say that. I got a cell call ten minutes ago. Stacia was calling from the countryside in Taiwan. The whole lot of them just gated over from Fairie. I’ve got them on a Chinese military chopper headed this way,” Lydia said.

  “That wasn’t important enough to tell us?” I asked.

  “Not in the middle of a wave of those things. Can’t have you distracted because I sure as shit can’t fight those things. It’s one of your best uses, and you don’t have that many to begin with,” she said, smirking.

  “Really?” Tanya asked, clearly annoyed enough to pull away from the fountain of wrist.

  Lydia’s smirk vanished. “Honestly, I had to pull every string I could to get them out from under the gun barrels of the Taiwanese police, who Stacia said were getting pretty close to dying by witch, then onto a military base with no entry stamps on their passports, which they didn’t all have, and finally coordinate the whole chopper thing. And you two were neck deep in monsters. Plus all the military types are running around trying to get their nukes back now that our computer overlord is MIA,” she said. “Chet said all the big alphabet groups are going nuts while the thing’s not responding.”

  “Thing?” I asked.

  “Come on Chris. It’s not a human. It’s not actually male at all,” Lydia said. “It’s so different, I don’t know what to call it.”

  “Lydia Chapman, biological racist,” I said, taking a long pull on my water. Tanya was still snacking on my wrist, but following our byplay with lots of telling expressions, with an eye roll for my latest shot.

  “How far away are they?” I asked.

  “They haven’t lifted off yet, hotshot. But I pulled some magic shit of my own and they should be here in an hour or so, which, considering the bureaucratic red tape I had to cut, is pretty freaking amazing,” she said.

  “I’d be more amazed if I didn’t know you just splashed Elder Tzao’s name all around like a bucket of cold water to get whatever you wanted,” I said.

  She drew a breath to argue, but a quiet voice interrupted. “I’m sorry, but there are more coming,” Isabelle said.

  Tanya instantly stopped snacking, her quick, dainty lick on my wrist to heal the wounds a habit more than a necessity. Together we moved out onto the combat field.

  When the Chinese army first lost control of the situation, it wasn’t for lack of trying. They napalmed the shit out the first two villages, but the TRAPPIST zombies are wily bags of infectious shit and some got away. The cordon of soldiers surrounding the area had tried to fight them in the thick, thick jungle. The results were a new bunch of zombies wearing army uniforms.

  When we started fighting the secondary villages, the Air Force burned the jungle to the ground with incendiaries all around both sites. The new no-zombie-land was a uniform two hundred meters wide, patrolled by witches and flamethrower crews, lit brightly day and night. There were fifteen-foot-wide strips of sticky acid paper running around the perimeter of the zone, a last-ditch attempt at body part control. Big trenches had been cut diagonally and filled with flaming oil to funnel the aliens directly at Tanya and me. These were backed up with tanks, machine gun crews, and some old Soviet-era truck-mounted flamethrowers.

  My vampire and I moved out into the zone. Our team of witches followed behind, along with a number of flame throwers and whole wheelbarrows of WP grenades.

  Overhead, military helicopters circled pretty much continuously, keeping an eye out for anything the witches missed. That’s what the drones had done as well. Now they just either hovered or, if out of power, sat on the ground.

  Three black figures burst from the foliage and we got real busy, real fast. Four more followed those a few minutes later.

  It had been suggested by the general types that we should just bomb the remaining village to cinders, but we had argued that was a last resort. With the talents of the Arcane students and the local Chinese witches, we could dial right down to each and every alien, insuring that every infectious part was accounted for. The generals finally agreed but warned that if anything happened to Tanya and myself, they would
firebomb the crap out of the whole province if necessary.