by Paul Kidd
Kenda lunged, his stiff sword piercing through another monster that raged towards Beau’s back. Above them, Throckmorton thudded down to land hard on a roof, whipping tentacles about a lamp post. His other tentacles writhed down and seized Kitterpokkie by one claw. The mantis was swung up and away, sweeping up millimetres from the jaws of a leaping Screamer. The mantis scrabbled up onto the roof, firing her pistol down into the pack below, covering Kenda and then Beau as Throckmorton hoisted them both up onto the tiles.
Bullets smashed down the Screamers in ones and twos. The cavalry arrived in a great smash of chitin, feathers and steel. Snapper and Onan, Samuels and four vaqueros came charging into the street, slicing into the remaining Screamers, the big war birds crashing the monsters aside. Pendleton ran with them, snapping and tearing. They hacked the last of the Screamers down, charging past Kitterpokkie’s perch and heading for the gates.
Snapper drew a revolver and fired into the wounded Screamers about the gate. She yelled up to the huge crocodile militiaman up on the walls.
“Close the gates! Get them closed!”
Men were running to the gates, to the walls. Beau whistled from the rooftop. Surprisingly, Pendleton came trotting obediently over beneath the eaves. Beau leapt down into the moth’s saddle, then rode up to Snapper’s side. He reloaded his guns, swapping cylinders, sounding quite out of breath.
“That’s it! I think that’s all.”
Snapper blinked and shook her head – her senses jittering. She looked out through the open gates as men rushed to close them.
The entire nightscape writhed. There were screams all through the eastern scrub. More to the north and west. The moonlight showed a slithering, screeching mass of Screamers racing through the plains towards the town.
Thousands of them.
“Oh sweet fucking Godfish!” The shark stood up in her stirrups and yelled to Samuels and Mrs Baker. “Beth! Sammy!”
Beth Baker was already mounted on a huge black cockatoo. She bellowed out across the crowds as riflemen raced towards the walls.
“Arm the ramparts! All citizens to your posts!”
A militia bugler rode up beside her, blowing the alarm. Grandparents, wives, young riders and old men ran from the pub. Armoured citizens raced for the walls in a drill practiced a dozen times a year. Up on the watchtowers, massive swivel mounted rifles were loaded with twenty millimetre shells. On the walls below, riflemen cracked open their weapons and fed brass cartridges into rifle breeches, clashing breech bolts home. Other men ran to make a group beside the pub, forming a reserve. Beth Baker rode past a group of men, shouting orders rapid fire.
“Get the town armoury open! Ammo boxes out – one to each company.” Each little district formed its own tight company of rifles. “Start the steam generator! We want power to the search lights!”
Toby came riding up to Mrs Baker, tying his helmet into place.
“Ammo’s low, Beth!”
“Everyone got minimum?”
“Minimum – but that’s about all!” Every household was required to field a good long arm and three dozen rounds. “How much in the reserve?”
“Ten boxes! Four thousand rounds!”
It sounded like a lot, but that was only eight shots per citizen. With multiple caravans coming to grief over the year, ammo had fallen critically low. The town council gathered about Beth, then each councillor raced to one wall. Beth Baker cantered her bird down to the town gate, where hefty beams were being braced behind the wooden gate leaves.
“Toby?”
“I’ll be here at the gate!” Old Toby motioned to Kitterpokkie, who was pouring fuel oil over the dray beasts corpses infested with Screamer larvae. “We got it under control!”
Over half the town’s forces were normally mounted, skilled at riding the open ground. Lancers, swordsmen and pistoleers. Most of these were now racing to the walls. Beth Baker saw an utterly distinctive figure on cockatoo back near the gates, directing the clearing of the street. Mrs Baker called out from across the road.
“Jemima Greyfin! You take fifty mounted men. One squadron. Find the best! You’re our fire brigade. We’ll race you anywhere that a hole needs pluggin’!”
Sapper saluted immaculately with her sabre.
“Yes ma’am!”
“Listen for the bugle!”
“Yes ma’am! Snapper signalled to the nearby fox-pheasant. “Beau, you’re with me!”
Snapper cantered off on Onan to organise her mounted squad. Samuels joined her, pulling men here and there back from the walls.
Kenda had climbed up to the walls. Feeling tight with emotion, Kitterpokkie finished her grizzly work burning dead dray beasts. Throckmorton kept well clear, fearfully backing away from the smoke. Kitterpokkie joined him, and they raced up onto the eastern wall beside the gates.
The scrublands and fields were filled with terrifying screams. Up on the walls, men and women stood silent, rifles loaded and eyes straining out into the dark. Young teenagers struggled up from the town armoury lugging heavy ammunition boxes upon to the walls. Voices called up from the streets, where old folks were setting up a second line of barricades.
There were perhaps a hundred rifles per wall – one citizen every three or four metres. It was desperately thin. Most had rifles, swords and pistols – though here and there a range rider might have a shotgun or a repeating carbine. The long wall guns threw a hell of a lump of lead shot, but in the dark their long range was immaterial. The night was clouding over, and the moonlight showed only great rippling shadows in the gloom.
Snapper came running up onto the walls, taking the steps two at a time. Beau was hard on her heels, with Kenda coming up behind him, frozen faced. Snapper patted the huge crocodile militiaman on the shoulder as she passed, and then joined Kitterpokkie and the wall commander at the ramparts.
“We’ve got the flying squad organised. Fifty sabres.” She swiftly reloaded a spare cylinder for her revolver. “What have we got?”
“They’re closing.”
Kitterpokkie’s eyes were well adapted to the dark, but not to distances. She leaned on the battlements, the double-barrelled pistol now her only weapon. The sound of the Screamers echoed back and forth, growing slowly louder. “I think there’s big mass to the north.”
Wall commanders were finally getting power to their spotlights. A steam-powered generator was slowly coming up to speed. Swivel mounted lights – headlights scavenged from ancient cars – flickered into life. Men swept the light beams out to sweep across dark, churning shapes that came running through the brush.
The crocodile militiaman knelt beside the wall gun, lighting the fuse of a hefty rocket. As the fuse hissed into life, he dropped the rocket into a tube of old gutter pipe aimed up into the sky, then ran well clear.
“We’re lighting up!”
The rocket hissed upwards and out into the sky, leaving a sparkling red trail behind it. It popped with a flash hundreds of meters up above the ground, and a fizzing green flare bust into life beneath a wide parachute. At the other walls, more rockets were fired. Eerie green light lit up the scrub to the north and east, showing black masses of Screamers thundering through the brush.
More Screamers.
Hundreds and hundreds of them – maybe thousands.
No two were alike. Some came on two legs, and some on four. Others were lurching and immense, looming like behemoths in the swarm. Claws and jaws and countless misshapen eyes flashed as the dark hordes smashed through the bush, trampling crops flat as they shattered wooden fences. They had missed the hefty ranch compounds along the river, and come straight for the town, piecemeal groups forming into great ragged hordes. Snapper shook her head, senses jangling, and then the Screamers suddenly broke into a charge.
“Here they come!”
Armoured citizens flung themselves to the battlements, resting their rifles in place. The wall commander came running along the length of the wall as searchlights picked up the front of the incoming wave. The heaviest block
of Screamers was aimed right at the north eastern corner of the town, coming in a vast black mass. Snapper took one look at the south east, along the road and river, and slapped the man on the back.
“We can take even numbers from the south half.” She kept an eye fixed on the Screamers that were headed along the river. “If they get too thick I’ll bring up the cavalry.”
“Do it!’ The wall commander ran towards the northwest corner of the town wall, ducking under a tower ladder. “Croc! You’re holding the gate to the river!” Half of the riflemen from the southern section of the wall came running hard and fast towards the northeast. “You come get me if it gets thick!”
The Screamers came on. Not as an army or a wave, but as a vast scatter of packs – packs that grew denser in places where terrain pushed them together. They came straight at the nearest parts of the Spark Town wall, never pausing. As the lead Screamers hit the open ground outside the walls, they hurtled themselves into a wild, screeching run. Hard dirt thundered beneath claws as they came on in a vast mass – hundreds upon hundreds of the creatures, filling the night with ear-splitting, deafening screams.
Up on the eastern wall, the wall commander ran up behind his men.
“Shoot straight. Let them hit the abatis first. Conserve your ammo!”
Other voices echoed the command all up and down the ramparts. “Let them hit the abatis first – conserve your ammo.”
Snapper ran sideways along the south east wall, eyes on the incoming horde. The deepest mass were heading for the northeast, but others had followed along the road, and were now running for the walls. The creatures broke into a maddened charge, heads rearing up, screaming and screeching. Snapper saw the densest knot and put herself right into their path.
“Hold fire…! Hold fire…!”
The Screamers ran, the fastest outdistancing their kin. The first of them crashed into the abatis - the slanting maze of sharpened tree branches set ten metres from the walls. Some literally impaled themselves on the branches – wood cracking and blood flying. Others crashed into these creatures from behind, driving them deeper into the spikes, or attacked the barrier in fury, biting and clawing at the sharpened branches. Wood cracked and splintered, then more and more Screamers arrived, packing in behind the first and filling up the killing zone. Snapper pulled back the hammer on her carbine and shouted above the deafening noise.
“Now! Hit the bastards!”
The first volley went off like a single huge explosion. Two dozen rifles thundered from the south-east wall, bolts working and spent cartridges ringing on the walkways as they fell. The next volley was more ragged, but slammed just as hard into the monsters down below. Dead Screamers were flung backwards – others fell onto the abatis. Bullets whipped and scythed into the night. Someone threw a hand flare down, and the leaping, rearing, clawing silhouettes of Screamers cast horrifying shadows through the scrub.
An enormous staccato crackle of fire came from the north east corner of the walls – deafening sustained fire, with the occasional deeper boom of wall guns. Gun smoke drifted, thick and sharp. The night was lit by constant gun flash as hundreds of men and women fired from the walls.
More fire sounded from the western wall – blessedly less compared to the north and east. Snapper emptied a full magazine down into the hordes, blasting back Screamers that were crashing and forcing their way through the abatis spikes. She paused and reloaded the cylinder, keeping her eyes scanning up and down the fight. The rifles were doing their work – the Screamers were being cut down. But it was all taking too much ammunition. She looked north, and saw Throckmorton whirring past, swooping to fire at a Screamer that had somehow reached the wall. He was out too far, and many of the Screamers seemed drawn to the plant’s movement.
“Throcky!”
Throckmorton was flying several metres beyond the wall, diligently firing his unwieldy crossbow. But down below, several longer necked Screamers came bursting from the scrub. The creatures spat, and sharp darts of bone streaked up towards the walls. One struck a rifleman and sent him spinning. Another hit Throckmorton in one of his woody gas bladders. Gas hissed and escaped, sending the plant yawing wildly through the air. He dropped his crossbow, but the plant was losing buoyancy and on a crash course to land amidst the horde.
“Throcky!”
Snapper fired at a Screamer that leapt high off the back on another and tried reaching for the plant. The bullet smashed the monster tumbling aside. But more homed in towards the plant. Beau ran along the battlements beside Snapper, desperately trying to find a way to help.
The huge crocodile – Snapper’s foe from the pub – was already in action. The rancher threw a lasso looping toward the plant. He caught Throckmorton as the plant dropped towards the walls and hauled him in, cracking Throcky against the battlements and seizing hold of him. More vicious sharp bone darts flickered from the Screamers below. One lodged in the crocodile’s armour, another rang from Snapper’s helmet as she raced to the man’s side. She targeted the spitting Screamers and opened fire, sending two of the monsters catapulting back in a spray of blood.
Kitterpokkie was attending to the injured man back on the walls. Four limbs moved deftly as she stripped back the man’s sleeve, but he was going into convulsions. The mantis managed to force a piece of folded leather between the man’s teeth. The town dentist and the doctor’s assistant ran forward with a stretcher. Kitterpokkie helped them load the man, then ran to Throckmorton as yet more numbing volleys thundered beside her.
Snapper had Throckmorton down in cover behind her, standing over and protecting him. The dense woody sphere of the plant’s aft portside gas bladder had been pierced through. He had lost buoyancy, but the poison thankfully failed to effect him. Kitterpokkie examined the wound, then pulled paper and sticking plaster from her shoulder pouch and set to work. Beau came running to her side, a scavenged rifle in his hands.
“Throckmorton! Are you all right, sir?”
The plant shakily waved a tentacle. “Ow…”
“Is he all right?”
“I can fix it. He’ll re-inflate.” Kitterpokkie taped thick paper over the wound to make an airtight seal. “Throckmorton – are you hurt anywhere else?”
The plant waved dazed tentacles in the air.
“Brain spinny.” The plant’s faces seemed dazed. “I okay.”
“Make gas!” A light bulb burned nearby. Kitterpokkie hauled the plant beneath the light, and stuck his roots into her canteen. “Rest there and photosynthesise!”
The Screamers had crashed and savaged their way into the abatis, some even snapping paths clean through the branches to reach the walls, but the monsters down below were dead or dying. The wounded ones had kept on attacking until a bullet struck them down.
The firestorm at the north eastern side of town was becoming more intense. There was steady firing to the east, but the southern river wall was still silent. Kenda looked down over the ruined heaps of monsters, then walked back to Snapper and the crocodile.
“They’re all on this side of the river. You could strip the south wall and reinforce the north. Just leave a picket.”
“Yeah, unless they’ve learned to swim.” Snapper heard a sudden chorus of orders and cries further up the wall. The fire was intense, but suddenly more ragged. “Bugger it – we don’t need ‘em! Beau, Croc – hold the line.” The shark was already halfway down the stairs to the street. “Riders! North west corner’s going pear shaped…!” The shark ran flying down the steps and launched herself onto Onan’s back. “Kitt – hold the gate. And get yourself a bundoo!”
The cavalry group were in the broad main street. Snapper drew her sword and the other men did the same. They rode thundering down the street. The bugler blew the alarm, summoning the cavalry to the north wall, but Snapper and riders were already racing on their way.
Deafening rifle fire filled the night with a constant roar. Spark Town’s north-eastern point was made where the broad north and eastern walls met in a great curved cor
ner. A fighting platform stood above, raised four metres above the walls on hefty beams. A searchlight, four riflemen and a wall gun commanded a view out across the market gardens and scrub. There were two other towers to the west and south – all wreathed in smoke as the guns fired in grim, staccato speed. Below them, men were hard against the battlements, firing fast. Boys came running with the last handfuls of ammunition, ducking as bone darts whipped up out of the dark. Some men fell back, feeling in empty pouches for cartridges. Here and there others scavenged ammunition from the dead and wounded.
“Hold the line! Keep shooting – hold the line!”
Samuels directed fire, standing right behind the corner of the walls. Men from the east wall had come racing to help hold the battlements. More came from the far end of the northern wall. But the entire mass of oncoming Screamers seemed to be slamming into the abatis and charging straight towards the north-east tower.
Bone darts slashed up from the Screamer horde, ricocheting away from armour or sending men spinning back. Down below, the sheer mass of Screamers had shattered the abatis, smashing branches flat and splintering them aside. Monsters tried to claw their way up the walls. The mounds of dead Screamers made a hellish launch point for more and more monsters, who hurtled themselves upwards and tried to reach the battlements. They gripped the walls with tentacles, or gouged handholds with claws. Rifles blasted them back, but each dead Screamer raised the pile ever higher.
Samuels held the line – shotgun in hand and calling orders. He directed new men running from the northern wall, sending them in to replace those whose guns had jammed.
