Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  He heard gunshots, a crackling volley, but not the automatic fire he was getting used to whenever the military opened up. Dave started to run toward the sound of battle, toward his boys, but Igor ran in front of him, a lot faster than Dave thought possible. ‘Hey! We do this together.’

  ‘Fine,’ Dave said. ‘Then keep up. I’m going to get my kids.’

  Karen caught up with him. Clinking and jangling with all of the heavy metal she was hauling. ‘Hooper, you can’t charge off on your own.’

  ‘Yeah, just chill the fuck out while we scope this,’ Igor said, scanning the roofline of the school for Sliveen. Zach swept the high ground, too, even as the sound of more gunfire reached them. Was Dave the only one paying attention? Even the aircrew back on the Osprey ignored the reports of battle, busying themselves unloading the Growler.

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t have time to play soldiers.’

  Dave stepped around Igor, who dropped the muzzle of his weapon.

  ‘Hooper,’ he said, ‘I will put a slug right through your fucking femur if I have to. We know you’ll get better. So don’t tempt me. This is our job. Let us do it.’

  Dave took a deep breath and forced himself to stop moving away from the chopper.

  ‘My boys are close, and keeping them safe is my job,’ he said, maintaining a tight rein on his desire to get the fuck gone, right now. ‘Karen and I can warp there in a fraction of a second. Annie’s old man lived on the far side of the village. It’s a five-minute drive – in the direction of all that gunfire.’

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the flickering dome of light which hung over the treeline. Camden was a small village, but heavily wooded and they couldn’t see much beyond the small forests which marked the boundaries of the school grounds.

  ‘I don’t have time for you and Zach to work through the SEAL Handbook,’ Dave said.

  Karen stepped up to him, grenades swinging from her tactical vest, but she made no move to lay hands on him or push him in any way. Gunfire and the sound of crashing glass reminded him of the apartment fight back in New York, but when he dialled in on the audio he didn’t hear as much helpless screaming here. A lot of shouting, mainly men and women yelling at each other to concentrate fire. But not as much screaming.

  ‘Hooper,’ said Karen. ‘Don’t be an ass.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, ignoring the sounds of the struggle. ‘I am going to get my boys, the quickest way I know how. Follow or not, fuck off or not. It’s all the same to me. There are monsters here,’ he said, fixing his eyes on each of them in turn. ‘Remember them? Fucking monsters. In the town where my boys live? Where Compt’n knows they live.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Igor. ‘So what does that tell you is probably waiting for you?’

  ‘My boys,’ Dave said again. ‘They’re waiting for me.’

  He was about to hit the accelerator when Zach spoke up.

  ‘Dave’s right,’ he said. ‘He should go, we’ll only be a few minutes behind in the Growler, and we’ll come heavy.’

  A leaden ball that had been sitting in his gut lifted and floated away like a child’s balloon.

  ‘Thank you, Zach,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Not a –’ Zach started, but Dave had already warped.

  First thing he noticed was that he could warp. There were no Threshers around to stop him. The air was warm and still perfumed with a hint of night jasmine under the burning chemical reek of smoke and fire. The stars, so infinitely far away, seemed cold in the sky. They would stare down impassively on whatever happened here.

  Dave stepped around Igor and took off, not really caring if Karen followed him. He had to get to his kids. It was a physical need. He accelerated from a run to a flat out sprint, blowing through the school’s parking lot, past empty bicycle racks and a couple of haphazardly parked cars, one with the driver’s door left wide open, but no sign of the occupant. To his right the town’s school bus was a yellow blur. He was stunned. He had never moved this quickly before. He could feel himself pressing against an envelope of sorts, some invisible membrane that lay just below the surface of reality. He could feel it threatening to give way, to tear under the stress of his impossible velocity. But he pressed on anyway.

  Around him the architecture of Camden Harbor, a quaint diorama of steep-roofed New England cottages, new-built clapboard shops and converted harbourfront warehouses stretched and twisted. Dave flew over a small stone bridge and banked around the tree-lined corner of Knowlton and into Mechanic Street. The road was wider there, dropping down slightly toward the centre of town.

  He slowed, dialling back the warp drive, killing the eerie, disturbing effect of moving at what seemed to be near super-liminal speed. He had no idea where that had come from, but guessed it was probably something like a normal person finding the strength to flip a car off their kid.

  The town remained trapped in stasis. Fall’s shimmering coat of oranges, browns and yellows had not touched the green trees, but that day was coming. In any other year, summer folks would soon switch out for those who wanted to sail the bay aboard one of the windjammers to view the Fall foliage. Dave had tried once, early in his marriage, to talk Annie into taking the boys out on one. Her father’s life had been the sea, but it had also swallowed one of her cousins, leaving her with a lifelong trepidation of the water. As far as he knew, the boys had never been out on the harbour, let alone the sea.

  Warping down Mechanic Street, into the heart of the little tourist village, Dave leaped over a seven-car pile-up, jumping high into the air to survey the town centre. It was as he remembered it, and yet utterly transformed. There was the familiar patchwork of streets with little cottages and grander New England homes, some of them burning, some of them dark. The shops and bars were all closed. Fire, frozen into eerie ghost forms by the magical physics of warp, poured in torrents from the upper floor of a two-storey house at the intersection of Mechanic and Free Street. A jaunty red fire hydrant seemed to glow an even brighter red in the flames, but no hoses ran from it, no tenders rushed to the blaze.

  While he was airborne and without being aware he was doing so, Dave counted the seven cars, six of them pick-ups and SUVs, parked neatly in the slots on either side of Mechanic. And he counted, without realising, the thirteen vehicles abandoned or crashed, higgledy-piggledy up and down the main route into town. A little hatchback had smashed into a power pole outside the tall, barn-like edifice of the Smokestack Grill, gift-wrapping the pole with its engine block. The windscreen was shattered and a thick blood trail led away into the dark. Downed power lines fizzed and snapped, shooting sparks. Or they would have, in real time. Here, where nothing moved, bright white fountains of electrical sparks hung frozen in space.

  Still in midair, Dave quickly scanned the high ground, as Zach and Igor had back at the school.

  No Sliveen waited on steeply pitched rooftops, no Threshers tried to knock him out of warp.

  Shit! he thought. What would happen if they did when he was a hundred feet in the air?

  Looking down the gentle slope of Mechanic Street, he saw a cohort of Hunn concentrated outside the single-storey brick bunker that was the Camden Public Safety Building. Burning police cars and an ambulance cast their long frozen shadows down the street, all the way back to the corner of Mechanic and Washington, where a handful of blood-drunk Hunn ran amok in The Owl and Turtle Bookshop. Annie liked to go to readings there. Dozens of books hung over Mechanic Street in arrested trajectories, flapping toward a growing pile, already ablaze. The orcs must have had a real Eve-Of-Destruction hard-on to have set a fire like that. They didn’t normally dig on naked flames. Too much chance of setting themselves alight.

  Dave reached the zenith of his leap and started to drop down. He bounced once on the far side of the pile-up, vaulting into a second jump, but not as high as the first. As he rose past the first floor of The Owl and Turtle he saw, suspended amongst the dozens of titles that floated before him, a copy of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss. D
ave plucked it from the air and turned the pages, both curious and full of dread. Jack had once borrowed this book from the library and smeared peanut butter handprints onto a torn page.

  Annie had given Dave the money to pay for the damage and sent him off to make things right. Instead, he’d made the repairs himself before sneaking the book back on the shelf and spending the cash on a sixer. Of course, this copy of Green Eggs and Ham from the bookstore was unmarked by peanut butter or Dave Hooper’s running repairs. It was new. He wondered if, like him, the library’s old and battered one had been replaced.

  Dave dropped the book to the ground as he landed in the middle of the Hunn laying siege to the police station. Lucille positively trilled with anticipation. They were surrounded by nineteen dominants wielding cleavers, clubs, mauls and blades, all of them matted with blood and gore. They wore full armour, too, no longer fighting in the old style, junk flapping around in the breeze. The windows of the Public Safety Building flared with muzzle flashes, and he had to take care to avoid the lines of tracer, which even now zipped toward him with the speed of an Aroldis Chapman fastball. The Hunn had used the cover of crashed and burning vehicles as protection from the gunfire, but not as much as any human with half a brain would. Five dead monsters, all of them riddled with bullets, one missing half its head, already lay on the ground. He got to work, cracking skulls, bloodying up his enchanted lady friend. Lucille seemed to shriek with pleasure every time her blunt steel head smashed open another monster melon. Hot brains splashed his face and daemon ichor exploded from the shattered skulls.

  The background rumble he’d grown used to in the warp bubble seemed louder, then he realised it was more than that.

  A large vehicle skidded out onto Washington Street, the whine of a diesel motor winding up to full throttle, stopping him in his tracks.

  ‘Get out of the road, you dumb zhopa!’

  He leaped again, with less control and grace than before, diving this time to preserve his skin as a yellow school bus roared toward him. He had time enough to recognise Varatchevsky behind the wheel of the GMC Short Bus. She leaned out of the window, firing into the pack of dominants frozen out the front of the police station. Armour-piercing and tracer rounds, unaffected by the warp, probably hyper-accelerated by it, punched through steel plate and chain mail with murderous effect. As Dave rolled on the asphalt, she ploughed the short bus into the remaining Hunn like a bulldozer. Bodies burst apart, still locked in warp, the orcs unaware they were dying.

  Speed and mass, thought Dave. Speed and motherfucking mass.

  Squealing brakes locked the tyres, mashing daemon body parts into the road surface.

  The bright yellow bus, extravagantly painted in offal and blood, finally lurched to a stop. Karen opened the side door and stepped out, katana in hand.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, stabbing three-quarters of the blade’s length through a Hunn’s skull. ‘U tebya s zhopu techka,’ she sneered at the dominant before turning back to Hooper. ‘I don’t know what the hell you just did, Hooper. But could you at least help me finish these last few off? Then we go back and get the others. And then we go get your boys. All right?’

  ‘Okay,’ Dave said, still a little stunned by the mess she’d made of the cohort.

  28

  He collapsed the imperceptibly thin membrane separating them from the world in which bullets and men, monsters and books, and buses and thought itself all moved in real time. Gunfire tore through the air around Dave’s head, hammering at the flanks of the bright yellow, blood-spattered school bus. Windows shattered and men cried out somewhere nearby in shock and confusion.

  He heard someone order a ceasefire, and somebody else ignore the order and unleash half a clip of automatic rifle fire into the street.

  ‘I said stop shooting, damn it!’

  Dave crouched, keeping himself out of the line of fire, or hoping to at least. Karen was already moving, a shadow flitting around the bus with feral speed. Her gun fired once, twice, sending short bursts back up the gentle slope of the hill into the remains of the small Hunn war band outside the bookstore. So intent had Dave been on blowing through the greater number of Hunn outside the Public Safety Building, he hadn’t heard or noticed she’d cut down the smaller breakaway group. He felt guilty heat flush his cheeks. He didn’t bother with the war band because they weren’t relevant. They were nowhere near his boys, and they weren’t in the way.

  They were someone else’s problem.

  A few more rounds of gunfire, a single booming blast of a shotgun and the same voice he had heard before yelled again.

  ‘I said ceasefire, goddamn it. We don’t have enough ammo.’

  The timbre or the tone of the voices changed as the man turned from whoever he had been yelling at to yell into the street instead.

  ‘Who the hell is out there? What just happened?’

  Dave shouted back, from behind the shelter of the bus. He could hear sirens now, and the crackle of runaway fires. But no more gunshots.

  ‘It’s Hooper. Dave Hooper. Annie O’Halloran’s husband. Or, you know, ex-husband,’ he added, feeling foolish. ‘The Hunn are all dead out here. I’m coming out. Don’t shoot, okay?’

  He held his hands up, gripping Lucille in one fist. She had gone quiet again. Not silent, but compared to the killing joy which had suffused her only a moment ago, she seemed almost tranquil. Like she’d just enjoyed multiple murdergasms. He heard Karen swapping out a magazine on her weapon.

  She didn’t put her hands up, but she wisely didn’t point the gun anywhere near the cops either. They picked their way through the remains of the cohort. The impact of the bus travelling at God-only-knew what relative speed had caused most of the creatures it struck to explode into large chunks of hairy meat. One of the Hunn dominants had only taken a glancing blow, however, and Dave put a kick into the side of its head as it tried to crawl away, its progress slowed by a shattered hip and severed arm.

  His heavy boot smashed into its dented helmet with a tinny crunch.

  The helmet collapsed and yellow-green monster brains burst out in a wet spray.

  A door cracked open in the front of the PSB, spilling a shaft of electric light out into the fire-lit night. A gun barrel poked through, then a black helmet.

  ‘Hooper? The Dave Hooper?’

  ‘The Dave, that’s right,’ he answered, causing Karen to roll her eyes. ‘You can come on out. It’s clear. That right, Karen?’ he said, quickly checking with her. ‘Your radar’s all clear?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of,’ she said, not exactly sniffing the air, but obviously testing the airwaves for something. ‘I’m not getting anything nearby, and my range is pretty good. I think we got them all.’

  ‘Like we got that extra Thresher back in New York?’

  ‘Picky, picky. I got nothing on the radar, Hooper. What about Lucy the magical hammer? She singing any murder songs for you?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘You can hear that?’

  ‘No. But you can, and that’s how I know.’

  He was almost relieved to hear that, but there was no time to ponder it as more men and a couple of women appeared from within the sturdy brick building where they’d made their stand. Some were cops, obviously, even though they were dressed in military camouflage and body armour. Others might have been civilians who simply took shelter in the bunker-like public safety offices. They were dressed in an assortment of odds and ends. Some of them in hunting gear. One man, toting a ridiculously long, double-barrelled shotgun, wore pyjamas.

  Nobody was pointing any weapons at Dave or Karen, but nor were they rolling out with smiles, baked goods and blowjobs to say howdy. Most seemed to be staring at the bus, which was only to be expected. The engine block was crumpled in as though from a serious collision with another large vehicle, or a number of them, and the bright yellow panels along the side were painted with grotesque smears and splashes of gore. Dave realised that to them the bus must have simply appeared to materialise in the midst of the cohort, sen
ding the monsters flying apart, quite literally.

  A tall ginger-bearded man in blue jeans, a checked shirt and tactical vest flicked the safety on his assault rifle – Dave assumed it was the safety – and nodded to the two surprise arrivals.

  ‘Well, we much appreciate your intervention, Mr Hooper and . . .’

  ‘Karen.’

  Her smile was hugely inappropriate, given the circumstances, but well-practised and utterly disarming.

  ‘Dan Bourke,’ the man in charge said, uncertainly. ‘Pleased . . . I’m sure . . . Karen.’

  ‘You the sheriff?’ Dave asked.

  Bourke winced.

  ‘Head of IT. Sheriff’s dead. Deputy Paulson is missing.’

  ‘So, how come you’re running this?’ Karen asked, looking at the uniformed cops picking through the detritus of battle.

  Bourke shrugged.

  ‘Ex-Ranger. I was in signals, but I was a captain.’

  Bourke’s posse, such as they were, fanned out among the bodies and body parts, covering them with their weapons. The streetlights had failed, probably when that little Nissan had taken out the power pole, but there was more than enough light from burning cars and buildings.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ Dave said.

  ‘Best to be sure,’ Bourke replied, still looking as though he wasn’t quite sure everything had turned out for the best.

  ‘Fair enough, but we gotta be going if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Whoa. Not so fast there, Mr Hooper. You seem to know who’s who in the goddamned zoo and I wouldn’t mind a little filling in.’

  Dave felt his impatience building up another head of steam. He’d done his bit, or, to be honest, Karen had when she ran the bus over the Hunn. The town was safe, and now he had to be getting on to his family. Karen’s hand closed around his elbow, and her mind seemed to flow around his frustration, restraining him physically and emotionally.