Mason drew out his Howdah shotgun pistol and unloaded both barrels high, loads of tungsten and iron oxide, into the face of the charging horde.
The twin blasts shredded the forefront of the enemy wave and splattered the monsters behind them with the burning pieces.
Every second they fought, more of the children got past them and could keep running.
Thulkara on his left, and Blondie on his right.
The Pistolero stood his ground and poured burning death at their enemies. His friends cut down any stragglers he missed.
But the horde was insane with bloodlust and numbered in the thousands.
Thousands against three.
Mason’s guns were almost empty. They pulled back. They had to. They needed to retreat and locate one of the reloading teams.
The horde rushed down that wide alley, filling it with their numbers once again.
Arrows zipped in, just missing the three.
Merc and horde archers were getting up onto the taller buildings on either side.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Thulkara cried, just as a charging gozog smashed into her, and they rolled back, fighting hard.
Mason fired his last round.
A child’s cry alerted them. A little blond girl, about three, crouched in the shadow, whimpering and crying. She was either too scared or too exhausted to run.
“Blondie!” Mason cried, drawing his Spillers. “Grab that kid and run. I’ll hold them off!”
Blondie slung his crossbow over his back, crouched down, and held both of his hands out to the small child. She retreated more at first. “No, no…come to me, little one. Let’s both get away from this place.”
As soon as she stepped out, a black arrow pierced her through the side. She fell, her mouth open and her big eyes blinking wide.
“No, no!” Blondie screamed.
He rose up, snarling like a beast gone mad.
His hands and arms glowed and pulsed with bright red power up to his shoulders.
Scarlet lightning shot from his hands like gigantic, electrical claws. First he used the claws like extensions of his rage and swept the archers off the rooftops.
Then he ripped through the top two levels of the brick buildings to either side down the length of the alley. He collapsed and toppled them inward onto the rampaging horde, in avalanche waves of masonry by the ton.
That part of the enemy advance was now broken and crushed.
Blondie came back to Thulkara and Mason, studying the child’s grim wound. She went into shock.
They broke off the barbed arrowhead, but they didn’t dare remove the shaft.
“How is she, Mace?”
“It’s pretty bad,” Thulkara said. “And she is so young.”
“Her only chance is to get her to an aid station, Blondie,” Mace told him.
“There’s one close by. I’ll take her. You two keep fighting.”
Blondie took the child in his arms without another word and ran for it.
Mason had never seen his friend run like that. Even the Thul couldn’t have kept up with him.
Mason and Thulkara fought their way back to the bulk of their unit.
Along the sixth defensive lines extending along Martin Luther King Drive to the west, and Ewing Avenue to the south, all available militia reserves were brought up to hold those positions at all costs. Every attempt was being made to halt the heavy enemy advance and throw them back.
Troops focused on stopping the retreat, and forcing the fleeing defenders to re-arm and turn about to face the enemy once more.
The greater numbers of the concentrated defenders helped them all feel slightly more secure than they had at the outset.
But the charging hosts of the enemy slammed into the sixth line just as hard.
Enemy magic blasts continued to strike at key points along the line, disrupting the defenders.
Mason and his company spearheaded one part of a desperate effort to break the enemy advance.
From east to west along the southern line, and north to south along the western front, in each place, two thousand hand-picked militia troops roared out in a fierce counterattack, flanking the enemy and driving into them hard.
The Shooting Stars led the flanking attack from the east, and the Pistolero and his people led the one from the north.
They moved as rapidly as they could, and blasted and cut down anything in their path in a skirmish line forty yards in length, cutting across the battle front.
An infantry phalanx with spear and shield marched directly behind them, screened by archers and a full company of fast-moving light lancers acting as protective cavalry on their left and right.
Mason managed to get reloaded, and blazed away with his pistols, handing them off to the loaders being pulled along in armored wagons directly behind him. Runners carried the guns back and forth, but he always kept his Spillers at his side, in holsters and on lanyards. They were his fallback guns, with their standard pattern of fire, if the reloading teams momentarily fell behind.
If a runner got cut down or wounded, two stood by to take their place. When the enemy arrow barrages came in, horn call warnings from the spotters allowed most to duck behind portable archery mantlets for protection
Once the flanking sortie passed through, then the massed defenders charged into the broken, forward ranks of the dismayed enemy, pushing them halfway back to the fallen fifth defensive line.
Mason engaged and gunned down at least five enemy combat mages who tried to come against him along the way. One on one, they could not match his devastating rate of fire. At one point, he fanned one of his Spillers, not only disrupting a necromancer’s death ray spell, but disintegrating the enemy mage where he stood.
Then the bulk of the enemy mages seemed to retreat from the front lines, not wanting to be swept away. The defenders saw no more of them for a long while after that.
The enemy mages did not enjoy becoming casualties. When the going got tough, they almost always broke and ran. They only liked to attack when they had all of the advantages in their favor.
The defenders had succeeded at last in pulling their own surprise off on the attackers.
But once played, such attacks grew difficult to make them work a second time. Surprise was fickle on the battlefield. Just as the militia would, the enemy would also regroup, recalculate, and respond–ever striving to come up with some way to counter such tactics, and make them far less effective, if they were tried again.
By the time both sorties had traveled and fought the length of three miles, well over an hour had passed. If they kept driving forward, they could meet up with each other, but by then there was no need. They had broken the enemy advance, but they were also all fought out and utterly exhausted.
They had to retreat back behind the sixth defensive line, while the rest of the militia and reserves fought back and forth the rest of the night, just to hold what they had partially regained.
But the enemy mages voided the field completely for the rest of that night. They most likely regrouped to rethink their own strategy from behind their lines. It became very clear that the enemy mages did not like being eliminated so easily, and sought to protect themselves during the conflict in every way possible.
Militia spotters and observers could not be certain of their estimates, but they calculated–from the spacing and positioning of dead mages found near the battlefront–that the enemy might have as many as two hundred mages supporting their troops. At the very least, no fewer than a hundred and twenty, divided up evenly between the two lines of attack, from the south and west.
What the actual numbers of mages the enemy had in total was not known, or what their reserves might be. Thulkara told them that the entire nation of Sylurria were practically all mages. Every man, woman, and child. Very few of that race were non-magical. That did not sound very promising or encouraging.
According to recent history, entire boatloads of mages had crossed the ocean of Tharanor from the Old W
orld to the nationalistic colonies of the New World. Entire fleets had come from Sylurria, bearing them and their mercenary armies to bloat their city states on the southern coast and found the city state of Vaejan far to the north, up through the inner seas. They also controlled the southern city states of Kavendo/St. Louis, and Jashakal/New Orleans.
The Sylurrians had fought legendary battles all along the inner seas of the Mississippi to found and hold their new colonial territories, and some of the mages and their mercenary armies were apparently making a huge power grab after the cataclysm.
Mason shuddered and wondered what was it like now, after the Merge, to have city states like Vaejan mixed up with the vast Urth population of Chicago, not to mention all of the monster hordes of the wilds surrounding those regions. It boggled the mind.
And how many of the enemy had been sent this way to wipe out the pesky Urth humans isolated in Michiana? How many more were there that could be sent?
They were already outnumbered as it was. If only the defenders had some way to expose the enemy mages to direct fire, and concentrate attacks on their positions at the front. A war of attrition could go both ways. If the defenders could degrade the numerical advantage of the enemy mages, that would be an enormous help.
If they could kill enough of the enemy mages, perhaps the foe would reconsider their military strategy and withdraw.
The defenders had a large number of wounded to deal with after the battle. More wounded than ever before. Everyone was enlisted to help retrieve and process them. That included Mason and his unit.
It was definitely not a time to be selfish.
The medical corps set up triage stations all along the front. At first, the dead were left on the field. Only those still living were brought in, as quickly as possible.
Triage was brutal and efficient.
Anyone who could be saved was transferred further behind the lines to the aid stations. Troops or people who were expected to die anyway were put in a comfortable place, given painkillers if possible, and left with someone to comfort them until they passed. This could be both random and somewhat arbitrary.
Mason got paired up with a badly wounded guy in his early forties, pale, his torso awash in blood. The medic slipped him off the stretcher and spoke quickly, propping up the trooper’s head and shoulders with the man’s own bedroll.
“Multiple stab wounds to the gut; he’s a goner. I gave him a pill that should take away most of his pain. Stay with him until he slips away. I’ve already black-tagged his boot.”
Black tags wired around a boot meant KIA, to be collected after the wounded.
The medic got up to move on as the triage team kept the stretcher waves sweeping across the battlefield.
The poor guy had been staring up at both of them the whole time.
Mason glanced at the older guy, and then shouted at the medic, his voice trembling. “What do I do?”
The medic was obviously overtaxed as it was. She shouted back while checking another casualty. “Hold his hand, dumbass. Talk to him.”
“I’m Mike…Mike O’Connor,” the dying trooper said.
Mason took his hand and held it tight. “Mason Tyler.” Mike squeezed back at about half-strength.
“The Pistolero?”
“I guess so. Call me Mace.”
Mike grinned. “You know, I was in a lot of pain until she gave me that pill. Now it’s like I’m going numb. I wanna get up and walk, but I can’t get my legs to do it.”
Mason didn’t know what to say.
“You know, I don’t feel like I’m dying. It’s funny.”
“Is there anyone you want to send word to?” Mason asked.
“The bastards killed my wife, my Jane. I’m glad I took a few of them down before they got me. Our twin kids, a girl and a boy, were away at Ball State when the Merge happened–Mark and Elizabeth. I thought I’d never see them again. I guess…I don’t have anyone left in town to send any kind of word to.”
“I’m sorry about that, mister.”
Mike sighed heavily. “I guess it’s all right. Mr. Pistolero, it was a real pleasure seeing you fight for us. I saw you jump up on that wagon and unload on those creeps. You mowed them down with those guns of yours. It was a thing of beauty to watch. I wish we could kill all of these bastards for what they’ve done to us. You must be the bravest of us all.”
“I’m not as brave as guys like you, Mike. Tell you the truth, I’m mighty scared the whole time, every time we go in on the line. I just try to do what I have to do and keep going.”
“Aww…you’re just saying that to make me feel better. All of your amazing powers? You sure don’t look afraid to me.”
“Mike, it takes a lot more courage for guys like you–without any powers–to stand up there on that bloody line and fight toe-to-toe with our enemies. Since I can do something special, I’d better get off of my ass and do whatever it is that I can. It’s an obligation, the way I see it. But that doesn’t make me any braver than guys like you or anyone else.”
“You got a girl, Mace?”
Mason bowed his head. “Yeah.”
“Young guy like you…famous. I bet you have all you want.”
Mason licked his lips. “I only want the one.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I was with my Janey. Twenty-one years together and we still made love three to five times a week. God, I couldn’t get enough of her. It was even better after the twins went to college–like we were back in our twenties again. You like loving that girl of yours, Mace?”
“Can’t think of anything much better than that.”
“Good man. Love her all you can. Life is short.” Mike paused. “Those rotten sons of bitches killed my Janey. I joined the militia the next day. I wish I could have taken more of them down before they got me. From now on, Mr. Pistolero, every time you put fire on those assholes, you just blast the living shit right out of them for me and my Janey, and all the other innocent people they’ve cut down–for nothing!”
“I’ll do that, Mike. Any else?”
“No…I guess that’s it. I am feeling kinda tired now, Mace. I think I might…close my eyes and rest for a spell.”
“That’s fine, Mike. I’ll stay here with you for a while.”
“I’ve already asked the Almighty to forgive me for anything I’ve done wrong, and to forgive others who have wronged me. To watch over my kids, if they’re still alive somewhere. I’ve made my peace.”
“That’s good, Mike.”
“Mace, it’s okay for you to slip away…if I don’t wake up.”
“Sure. Don’t worry about any of that, Mike. Rest if you want to. Keep talking to me, if you like.”
“Do you think I’ll find my Janey waiting for me somewhere?”
“I sure hope you do, Mike.”
“I do, too. Boy, I’m kind of looking forward to that, now.”
He had a smile on his face.
Militia trooper Mike O’Connor’s hand slipped out of Mason’s a few minutes after that, his eyes already closed.
Mason found his friend Blondie about a half hour later, way out behind one of the aid stations set up behind the lines, sitting in front of a tree in the dark with his head in his hands.
Quite plainly, his friend was sitting there bawling his eyes out.
Mason had never before seen Blondie cry. Not once–not even when Ginger got hurt that time. He left his friend to it for a while.
When it appeared that Blondie’s grief was letting up, Mason stepped forward and made his presence known.
“It’s just me, Blondie. Don’t worry about a damn thing. I’ve had a rough night of it, too.” Mason hesitated. “The little girl?”
Blondie nodded and hung his head once more. “She didn’t make it.”
Things got real quiet for a long while. Neither of them said anything.
“Why, Mace? All the power you and I have, and it don’t mean shit!”
“Blondie, we only have the power to destroy, and thank goodness th
ere are powers far greater than that.”
“I…I didn’t even know that little girl’s name. I ran as fast as I could, but by the time I reached the aid station, she smiled up at me and then her eyes just glazed over. She went limp my arms and that was it. She was gone. I couldn’t save her…and she was so beautiful, and so little. I’m not worth a shit, Mace. I would have given my life for hers, right then and there…if only I could have.”
Blondie sobbed again for a while.
“They put a black tag on her tiny foot and took her from me. I lost it and fell to pieces. I’ve been here ever since.”
“Come on, Blondie. I’m your friend, your brother. Think about all those hundreds of kids we did save tonight. People are dying every day. We can’t save them all. Let’s go back to the unit.” He held out his hand. Blondie took it and stood back up, wiping his eyes.
They made their way back to their camp. Both of them had their hands in their pockets.
“I told you, I hate kids, Mace. Hate ’em. Don’t you remember me saying that?”
39
The crazy old guy wrestled with a great deal of power. He was surprisingly stronger than David and almost as quick.
Almost.
David flipped over and grappled with him. The man tried to whack him in the face with a small ball-peen hammer. He must have had it hidden in one of his pockets.
The blow bounced off David’s helmet as he turned, like a bell being struck.
He kicked the older man under the chin and flung him back down into the entryway. Then, instead of pursuing the assailant, David raced up the stairs
He did not slow down, and crashed through the locked bedroom door where he thought the noises had come from.
A small, frightened girl matching the description of the missing five year old flopped on the floor, thrashing around. She had beaded cornrows similar to the picture her mom had showed, and lay tied up and gagged, wrists and ankles taped and bound with nylon rope. She wept and moaned, her eyes big and streaming with tears.
The small child was frantic.
Lengths of the same rope had her tied to the bedposts. Somehow she slipped free and bumped around, striking her bleeding head against the floor, the bed, and the upended nightstand and lamp.
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