Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  Karen mouthed a word to her. Where?

  Gomes inclined with her head down the hallway and whispered back. ‘To the left, ma’am. All the way down.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Dave said as he slipped past, but Gomes just pressed harder on the bloodied poultice she’d stuffed into the sucking chest wound.

  ‘S’okay,’ she said, as though he was a few minutes late for a coffee date. ‘Had to be done.’

  ‘Hooper,’ Karen said. ‘Down the hall, on the left. Corner apartment. It will be in there somewhere. Just like down on the street. I’ll hold it. You kill it. It had guards, but they’re mostly taken care of. Mostly.’

  Dave nodded and moved forward. A dead Fangr, its head taken off by gunfire, had been kicked out of the way and fetched up against a door. None of the casualties paid him much attention as he slipped past. They all looked to Karen. He was certain if she suggested they throw themselves at the Thresher to distract it for him, they would.

  Pain swelled in his temples with each step, like knuckles grinding in on the soft spot. He felt pressure building behind his eyeballs and a sick feeling of dread, but he recognised it as coming from somewhere outside him. He ran one hand up and down Lucille, tested his grip, and felt better for it. She was back to humming one of her own tunes and it filled him with warm content, like a long pour of good bourbon in front of a fire on a cold night.

  Doors stood open here and there, some of them smashed off their hinges. One propped open by a dead cop, a Sliveen bolt in his throat. Bullet holes riddled the walls, interspersed with large gaping rents where the axes had missed. Brass casings littered the floor, sticky with the coagulating monster gruel that puddled around his boots.

  The survivors of an ESU fire team gathered around the doorway at the end of the hall. They looked like hell, slumped over each other, against the walls. One of the men was sitting with his legs out in front of him, trying to reload his weapon, a submachine gun. He’d lost a hand and he used his remaining hand to seat the magazine in place. It looked like someone had fashioned a tourniquet from a tea towel and tied off his bleeding stump. He kept at the task like a small boy, the tip of his tongue just out of his mouth, fixated on the most difficult part of gluing together a model airplane.

  ‘I’ll take it from here, boys,’ Dave said. His voice was thick.

  To a man they all looked to Karen for confirmation.

  ‘Okay,’ one of them said, after a moment. The man with one hand persisted with trying to load his weapon. What the hell was gonna happen to that guy? He probably wouldn’t be partying in LA with Jennifer Aniston or Paris Hilton, Dave thought.

  He stood in front of the door now. Took a breath and tried to discern what lay behind it.

  Dave listened.

  The steady if laboured breathing had to be a Thresher, for sure. A pair of grunting, snorting sounds, as if someone had a sinus infection, those must be Hunn, perhaps a couple of them. And maybe their leashes. Going straight through that door was gonna get bloody. Dave knew it in his bones. Hadn’t stopped any of these guys though. He glanced back toward Karen and found her a few steps away, the pistol holstered somewhere, her free hand up, palm out. He recognised the attitude from the struggle she’d had with the Thresher back at 42nd Street. There were no special effects, no streamers of colour or distortions of space and time. She stood, one hand out as if about to wave to somebody. Some of the survivors gathered a short distance behind her, watching, transfixed. Even the wounded had dragged themselves down the corridor to be closer to her. Iron filings drawn to a magnet.

  Dave shook off the shudder that wanted to run down his back. They reminded him of the walking dead in Omaha. Not the Tümorum, but rather the meat puppets raised by the Revenant Master. A different kind of Muppet, he snorted nervously to himself.

  If one berserk Hunn with a couple of blades got in amongst them it would slaughter them all, those that didn’t go down in the crossfire.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to Karen. ‘I’m going in.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ she said. Her voice was strained and her eyes appeared to be sunk deep in shadow. ‘You’re standing around out here scratching your ass. Now get going. This one’s strong. Three Hunn somewhere,’ she added with a grunt. ‘No leash.’

  Awesome, Dave thought.

  He used Lucille to open the door, pushing on it with the steel head, ready to start swinging if anything came at him. It was unlatched and swung open slowly. A couple of ESU shooters, one of them bearing a pump-action shotgun, formed up on his six and he stopped for a second, surprised that he was now thinking things like ‘They formed up on my six.’

  His brother used to say shit like that. Like he had faith in it, too.

  Shit like that got his brother killed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Dave started to say, ‘I got this . . .’

  He wanted to warn them off. There was no point in getting anyone else killed for such a meagre return. They couldn’t move as quickly as him, even with his warp drive crippled. They couldn’t mix it up with the Hunn when they ran out of bullets. And they weren’t even doing this of their own free will. Not entirely. Not with Karen pushing them around. He wasn’t being noble. They’d get in his way, stop him from busting out his biggest, baddest Hulk Smash for fear of catching them by accident. And he had enough guilt to be getting on with for now. The dead were piling up around him so high you couldn’t see past them.

  ‘Karen told us,’ they said in unison, like horror movie twins, and that was creepier than anything he’d seen so far.

  ‘All righty then,’ Dave said. Karen had told them. There would be no warning them off. ‘Just don’t shoot me in the ass.’

  The apartment, a vast and airy space, was trashed. Hooper moved through upturned furniture and shattered electronics. Tall windows looking out over Park Avenue and East 61st spilled enough city light inside that neither of his wingmen needed their night vision goggles. Not in the main living area at least. Blood had pooled in the carpet and was partway gone to the consistency of molasses. A dark trail led away from the lounge and veered into a dark-panelled room.

  ‘Let’s go then,’ said Dave. Bert and Ernie followed obediently.

  The blood trail ended in a grotesque mound of meat and gore piled atop a billiard table.

  Man, that felt is ruined, Dave thought. He couldn’t help it. His mind had to go somewhere and he didn’t want to contemplate the mess on the table. The billiards room, or library – bookshelves reached up to the plaster ceiling – was all but demolished. Hundreds of books lay torn and crushed as though a bomb had detonated in here. Great, obliterating axe blows and the heavy crunching impacts of maces and mauls had destroyed all the shelving. Dave had never been much of a reader after high school. Sports and reports mostly. But he keenly felt the violation of this room. The Horde had rampaged through here for the pure moronic joy of it. He knew that, because he felt in his own meat Urgon’s pleasure at the thought. He thought he could make out the scraps of a uniform in amongst the butchery on the stained and ruined surface of the pool table.

  ‘A cop, you reckon?’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘One of your guys? Maybe the concierge?’

  He was talking to the ESU guys but was surprised by Karen’s voice. Not in his head, thankfully. She’d followed him in, without her entourage.

  ‘Just the hired help,’ she said.

  ‘Well, nobody who could afford to live in a place like this, that’s for damn sure,’ Dave replied. His own voice sounded sad to him. He worked for people who lived in places like this, and even if he didn’t like them much he wouldn’t wish such an ending on them. It seemed especially mournful to him that the hired help, as Karen called them, had died in their place.

  The Russian turned a slow half-circle, sweeping the room with her katana. Clearing it.

  ‘Little thieves are hanged,’ she said. ‘But great ones escape.’

  ‘Is that Russian?’ Dave asked. ‘It sounds Russian.’

  ‘Very,’ was all she said. ‘It’s this w
ay. Keep moving.’

  French doors, reduced to splinters and crystal fragments, hung off their hinges at the entrance to a second kitchen. A space for caterers, Dave supposed. Everyone should have a space for caterers. The demolition work in there seemed perfunctory, uncaring, without the gleeful spirit animating the rampage in the library. A stone bench sundered by one or two mighty blows. But no bodies. He pushed into the kitchen. Feeling bad about it, but not enough to stop himself, he opened the fridge. Inside was a sad collection of bean sprouts, rice, tofu, and detox drinks. Not even a single imported beer.

  He expected Karen to give him an earful but she pushed past his elbow and reached in for the tofu brick, never taking her gaze off the middle distance where she remained focused on the Thresher. She said nothing, but he took her snack attack as permission to fuel up too. The only thing that even halfway appealed was a block of cheese. Some sort of cheddar, wrapped in a cloth so you could tell it was worth paying extra. He grabbed it out and scarfed it down as quickly as he could, feeling better for having done so. Matter of fact, he felt so much better after eating it that it might have been a good idea to linger and take on some more fuel, even it was just hipster gruel. But Karen had already moved on.

  He closed the refrigerator and followed her into a small laundry closet where she stood, staring at the wall. The muppets trailed after him, as if leashed. Dave was certain he could hear the steady, rhythmic breathing of the Threshrend on the other side of the wall.

  ‘It’s in the bath,’ Karen hissed, red-faced and bug-eyed, sounding as though she was suffering an asthma attack. Her breathing was ragged and the ESU guys seemed to come out of a trance. One of them fumbled his weapon and dropped it. The machine gun discharged and his offsider swore, confused and distressed, like a man coming awake from a night terror.

  ‘Shit!’ Dave spat, heaving Lucille up and swinging with all of his might and hers at the wall. Masonry and wood splinters exploded into the adjacent bathroom, opening up a massive breach and distracting the Thresher enough for Karen to gain the upper hand.

  ‘NOW,’ she yelled at him. ‘Kill it.’

  Dave didn’t need telling twice.

  He threw himself at the opening. Dived right through it, ignoring the scratches and abrasions he picked up. They healed as he sailed over the squat, toad-like figure of the Threshrend daemon. Warat was right. It was in the goddamn bath. Not just squatting in the big spa-style tub, but enjoying a splash. With bubbles. Or it had been until Karen had target-locked on it and commenced their duel. Dave rolled as he hit the hard granite of the bathroom floor. It was wet and he slipped trying to get to his feet, but he still moved a lot quicker and with more freedom and agility than the Thresher with its ass jammed into the hot tub. He could not see the Hunn who were supposed to be guarding it. Lucille keened a high, sweet killing note as he swung for the bleachers. He meant to split the thing in two, but his range wasn’t good. Nonetheless the glancing blow with the cutting edge of the steel head sliced the creature open from crotch to neck. It squealed like a stuck daemon pig as a steaming tide of Threshrend guts and tubing spilled into the tub. A reverse swing punched the steel fist into its ugly skull, which burst apart with a loud, wet pop. Dave felt the creature’s death as a great mass lifted, not from his chest or shoulders, but from deep inside his head.

  A roar behind him. He turned on the three Hunn which had lain in ambush for him in the walk-through closet between the bathroom and the master bedroom. They struggled now to get inside.

  They were also blood drunk. Shit-faced and reeling with it. Their gross free-swinging genitalia flapped and slapped in Dave’s face as they struggled to have at him.

  He charged them, his face distorted by disgust and something more. By contempt and a strain of shameful remorse. He hadn’t loosed these things on the world. He knew that. He’d been sleeping off an epic debauch with a couple of five-star hookers when the Longreach had broken the barrier between the realms and let monsters back into the world.

  But still . . . the dead were piling up, weren’t they?

  Before he could finish the Hunn and wash away just a little of his guilt – guilt he totally should not have been feeling – a storm of automatic gunfire ripped into the orcs. It was Karen, freed from her duel with the empath daemon, firing both machine guns she’d taken from the ESU muppets. Tracer rounds and armour-piercing. A lashing torrent of white fire that she directed at the Hunn nearest her. The armour-piercing slugs blew through rudimentary chain mail and leather breast plating. The tracers set the daemon on fire, incendiary rounds hitting home with dozens of tiny, flaring explosions which quickly merged into a flaming pyre. A smoke alarm shrieked and sprinklers opened up in the bathroom and the walk-through, but they did nothing to douse the small inferno. The two surviving warriors flinched away, forgetting Dave altogether.

  He had seen plenty of fires in his line of work, but nothing like this. The flames did not spread. The small, intense blue-green inferno was strangely contained, never making the leap from the burning remains of the Hunn to the lacquered joinery or the carpets of the closet or the clothes hanging in there. He saw the plastic wrapping shrink on some freshly dry-cleaned suits nearest to the pyre, but that was all.

  ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘That’s weird.’

  And then he and Lucille set to laying some righteous payback on the two remaining Hunn.

  13

  ‘Now we kill as champions,’ Karen said. ‘Until the second Thresher finds us.’

  ‘You mean until we find it? Right?’

  Her expression told him otherwise.

  ‘The only certain way to find an ambush is to spring it,’ she explained. ‘And so . . .’

  They warped.

  The noise of the dying city fell away, replaced by the sibilant hiss and droning hum of a world held in suspension. The bizarre, self-contained flames that licked at the corpses of the slain Hunn danced no more. Dave could still feel the heat coming off them, and he sensed that he could pass his hand as easily through frozen flames as living ones. But he wasn’t that dumb.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘So, this thing . . .’ He twirled his finger around, indicating the warp field. ‘You really can’t do this on your own, can you?’

  ‘No,’ she confirmed. ‘But I can borrow the ability from you. As long as we’re within range of each other.’

  ‘And that range is?’

  ‘Unknown.’

  ‘Okay. Just thought it might be useful to know.’

  ‘It would be.’ She sighed. ‘But later. For now, we should put down as many daemonum as we can before we move into the range of the other Threshrend.’

  ‘It’ll be upstairs, right?’ Dave said, looking at the ceiling. ‘At least, what, a hundred yards or so up?’

  ‘A few floors, yes.’

  ‘All righty then. Let’s get to work.’

  They took their time. Leaving Karen’s followers behind, stopping back in the kitchen to fill themselves with more fuel. Dave couldn’t come at the tofu, but he found tins of tuna and sardines in the cupboard.

  ‘Your breath will be enough to wither the enemy,’ Karen said as she finished off the last of the tasteless white goop.

  ‘Whatever it takes,’ Dave grinned, wiping olive oil from his chin. ‘Except tofu.’

  He licked the oil from the back of his hand, dug the last sardine out of the final tin with one dirty finger, and then drank the remaining oil in that tin for good measure. He had reason to ponder Zach’s good sense while he ate. Again. The Navy SEAL had been right more often than not. They weren’t in a video game. There was no power bar telling him he was running at fifty or sixty percent. Both he and Karen had eaten massively before, mostly fat and protein too. But how much energy had he burned since? How much was left and what reserves had they just consumed? His metabolism seemed to be settling down fast after New Orleans. It’d burned like a runaway nuclear reaction when he first woke up after the Longreach. It wasn’t doing that now, but he was still having to consume fou
r or five times as many calories as he’d once eaten. When he was a fat bastard.

  Zach had told him he would need to know all this one day. All this and more. And here Dave was with no fucking idea. He’d been hungry after the fight with the unnamed Hunn at Broadway – and after healing himself, a process over which he had no control. He did not feel as hungry now, after scarfing down the tinned fish and cheese, a combination which once would have made him gag. But he did not feel sated either. Not even close. He knew he should keep eating, but they had to be about their work.

  Naively, Dave had expected to enjoy it, if only in the grim way that finishing a hard, unpleasant job was enjoyable. Warping through the condo, revenge-killing orcs who couldn’t fight back? What’s not to love? But he was forgetting why it was necessary. On the next floor he had a reminder, as they chanced upon the remains of what looked, from the decorations, like a kid’s party – before three Hunn and their leashed Fangr had turned the apartment into a charnel house. They were caught now, in the warp field, eating the last of the scraps.

  Even Karen, who seemed unaffected by the most hideous of scenes, blanched at this and went about the business with a cold efficiency. She drove the tempered steel chisel point of her sword into the nasal cavity of one beast after another, with enough force to punch it out through the back of their skulls. Dave had room enough in the high-ceilinged apartment to work up a good swing with Lucille, who was singing a fine sweet song of vengeance, keen to get in amongst the foe. But, like his companion, he gave in to no flourishes or extravagant gestures, simply crushing the skulls of the Hunn and their slaved daemonum inferiorae like a worker on a production line. Whenever his eyes strayed to a corner of the room where the children or their carers had died, he quickly averted them again.

  They left the apartment in less than a minute.

  Karen could tell him when a group of monsters or an individual daemon was nearby. She could sense them. Dave found he could too, if he concentrated fiercely, but he had nothing like her radar for picking them out and he deferred to her amplified senses. In this way they passed by those apartments where the doors remained locked and the inhabitants unmolested, or where entry had been forced and the occupants slain, but where no members of the Horde remained.