Twig

by wildbow

  “Him?”

  “It. The bag. Let me up, will you?”

  “Hm. Take this,” he said, “and don’t haul me down over the edge.”

  He extended his poke, the spiked mancatcher end, and I shifted my grip to one arm, the entire arm and hand trembling as I reached up and through the closed metal ring to grip the pole just beyond.

  I had to passively let him haul me up and over, because planting a foot on the edge and pulling myself up threatened to pull him down at the same time. Once I was high enough, I found a foothold in the gutter. A moment later I had one hand and both feet on the roof.

  “Everyone okay?”

  “Yes. I had to save Lillian before I saved you. I got her before she fell as far as you did, and she fell the other way. Dog got Petey.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He gave me a simple nod.

  I kept one hand on the mancatcher as we made our way to the peak.

  The bells continued to toll as we rejoined the others. I reached out with my less-sore left hand and took Lillian’s, noting how her hair was sticking up on one side. She had a bit of a scrape too, and it looked like her ear was bleeding.

  I looked down at the street where Catcher had created the cloud of smoke. It didn’t look like they’d gotten the door open. There was carnage, a body severed in half, no doubt sandwiched between wall and a sweeping tusk, and the lower body wasn’t visible or distinguishable. There were meaty bits amid the streak of flesh and blood, too ruined for me to tell what it was supposed to be.

  “Next time,” Gordon said. “We position better.”

  I nodded, then I smiled, “It has to have reached them by now.”

  “Probably.”

  “Good to walk?” he asked, glancing at one of my legs.

  I nodded.

  We made our way in the direction we’d estimated Fray’s meeting spot to be. As we walked, I pulled my raincoat off, freeing one arm from sleeve and strap of backpack before letting go of Lillian’s hand and doing the same with the other. I let the raincoat fall to the roof before pulling the pack on again.

  There was a crash a few streets over. A plume of dust or smoke rose from the impact site.

  Dog huffed.

  “Going ahead,” Catcher said, as he increased his pace. “Don’t fall again.”

  The streets below us were getting wider, and I realized we were approaching the city center. There were a few more patches of gore where the Beast had torn past bystanders, but less than I might have liked.

  We crossed a bridge and another section of rooftops, and reached the base of another tower, overlooking a plaza. It was an open area like we’d seen in the Academy, broken up by patterns in how the road was drawn out, with gardens in the spaces between the individual footpaths and a fountain in the center, set low to the ground. The Beast’s tusk had already torn through two opposing walls of the fountain, and a foot might have crushed another. Destroyed wagons and stalls littered the area already.

  There was a building that might have been a town hall, a hospital, and another set of larger buildings I couldn’t label. The Beast was here, with freedom to move as it pleased. The white of the thing’s tusks was stained with mud, debris and gore. Its eyes were dark compared to the mask it had been fitted with.

  Objectively, it was beautiful. Now that it wasn’t charging right for me, I could see the patterns on the armor, a mingling of old damage that had been left alone rather than repaired, and decorative etchings. Rainwater ran down the armor, pausing and helping catch the light amid the etchings. It looked like the lines of a maze.

  Rifles fired from windows, and I suspected they might have been exorcists. The Beast was too far away, and the rifles, as powerful as they were, were far too little to stop the Beast, even if they got past the armor.

  But the noise and the patter of bullets against armor did get the creature’s attention. It turned, focused on the source, and then charged from across the plaza.

  I imagined the people inside the building were doing much what we were. Though we weren’t the target, we scrambled to put distance between ourselves and the impact site.

  The Beast’s tusks retracted. Horns didn’t, but it lowered its head so the points of the horns were aimed almost straight down. It didn’t have a neck, only muscle and shoulder, and thus served as a massive battering ram, nearly as tall and far stronger than the building it assaulted.

  We had a fair distance, but I still lowered myself, pulling off the pack, and braced for impact.

  The crack of it made my thoughts skip, and the impact resounded, distorting the regular rhythm of bells. My vision jolted, and the fact that people manning nearby lights at the towers were jarred as well made the entire scene seem to wobble. The stone could have taken cannon fire and withstood it. The Beast didn’t care. It slammed through a foot of stone blocks with as much ease as Dog might a wooden door, plunging head and shoulders into the building.

  Forelimbs reached up, scrabbling for purchase, and its shoulders heaved upwards against yet-unbroken stone, splitting it and sending it sliding down either side of the Beast’s back. The feet were reaching up to the first floor, straining to reach the second, and tore the floors down and away instead.

  Huffing, puffing, the superweapon bucked, horns spearing up, striking at the floor above and the exterior wall, bringing more debris down.

  I doubted anyone inside had survived that. Tough luck to anyone who lived upstairs or downstairs from that particular group.

  It tried to retreat out, and its horns snagged on the stone masonry. It was a hair away from breaking the stone, but it didn’t haul itself free. Instead, the Beast remained where it was, huffing, puffing. Then it yawned, with no air entering or leaving its mouth.

  “Cover your nose and mouth!” Lillian shrieked. Then, in her haste to follow through with her own action, she got out another incomplete phrase, “Eyes!”

  I allowed myself a peek as I tucked nose and mouth into the crook of my elbow, lowering myself.

  The Beast was letting a dark fog creep out of its mouth, filling the cavity of the ruined building in front of it.

  The fog wasn’t reaching us.

  I started to lower my arm. Lillian reached over and jerked it back up into place.

  Something flickered. Like tentacles snaking through the dark fog, fire reached out. I brought my other arm up to protect my eyes as the fire expanded to find other pockets that would ignite, then others, swelling—

  Our position on the far side of the roof, with the roof’s peak between us and the Beast prevented the worst of the detonation from reaching us. Everything else was silenced by the crack, even Beast and warning bells, and then, as if all of the sound had been caught up and thrown our way, it rushed at us, a violent wind and torrent of noise. I could hear glass breaking.

  “Don’t breathe!” Lillian called out, voice muffled. It sounded like her voice was strained, as if she was digging for the last scraps of air in her lungs to give the order.

  I remained where I was, face buried in the crooks of my elbows, hunched over the peak of the roof.

  I felt my thoughts start to waver, my vision going dark at the edges, as my lungs burned of a need for more oxygen. The bells were resuming, and the deep thuds of the Beast’s footsteps shook the building and vibrated in the core of me, straining my already tenuous control over my struggling lungs and throat.

  But when a doctor-in-training said not to breathe, one listened. When they ran, one ran. When they said ‘oh shit’, one ran and held their breath at the same time.

  I was so focused on the singular act of fighting every bodily impulse that I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing as someone heaved in a breath. I registered, and chanced opening my eyes. Lillian had her mouth covered, but her eyes were open. She stared into my eyes.

  Three seconds passed.

  Then she took in a breath.

  I allowed myself to breathe, joined by others. We got our wind, and watched as th
e Beast assaulted another, shorter building, trampling it to the ground.

  I looked over my shoulder at the building it had already attacked. The back end had blown out, and parts had collapsed. Absolutely nothing still lived there.

  “Everyone okay?” Lillian asked.

  There were nods all around.

  “The gas,” Petey said. “What is it? I might have breathed some in.”

  “Probably a nerve gas,” Lillian said. “If he’s about twenty years old, then he’s part of the Wynn generation of warbeasts. A lot of them made their own from internal waste and byproducts. I’ve read up on it, a little extra because Ibott said he was thinking about giving Helen a reserve.”

  “That was a no,” Helen said.

  “You’re probably immune, by the way.”

  “Neat.”

  “What would happen if we breathed it in?” Gordon asked.

  “At this distance, that concentration, carried by the explosion? Probably nothing.”

  “Then—”

  “Only probably. But if you were unlucky, your throat might stop working, or it wouldn’t work as well, or you’d lose some function in your eyes. If we weren’t wearing clothes, we might lose sphincter control. Maybe bladder control, for the girls.”

  “Not the guys?”

  “I’m not going to get into anatomy 101, Sy,” Lillian said. “Doesn’t matter anyway, unless you’re taking your pants off.”

  “Don’t tempt him,” Mary said.

  “Hey!” I protested, to Mary. Then to Lillian, I said, “And it does too matter, I like my sphincter control.”

  “We’re all glad for your sphincter control,” Gordon said. “You’d be more unpleasant to be around if you didn’t have any.”

  “More unpleasant?”

  “Enough,” Mary said. “Look.”

  The Brechwell Beast was taking a side road. The lights were leading it on its way.

  I raised myself up and pulled my clammy shirt away from my chest, trying to make heads or tails of the runny lines there.

  “It’s headed in the right direction,” Gordon said.

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  “You got the distraction you wanted. They’re probably quaking in their boots,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Now what?”

  “We follow.”

  “Okay,” he said. “While we’re doing that, let’s keep an eye out for one of those rifles. If it can hurt the Brechwell Beast, I wouldn’t mind having one for myself.”

  I nodded. The wreckage of the building would be too much trouble to go through.

  The Engineer and Petey stared. Petey was especially quiet right now.

  “They open and close the gates, to control which routes the Beast can and will travel. It prefers lit area, I guess?” I asked.

  “Don’t most of us?” Helen asked.

  “Point. It reaches the area we mentioned to the Wry Man, and then, what, they shut the gates and trap it and our enemies in the same space? They hide indoors and…”

  Gordon said, “Presumably, the Brechwell Beast pulls the same trick it just did. Fills the area with gas, then ignites it. Nerve gas finishes off those the fire doesn’t.”

  I thought of how the horns had caught. “If it’s trapped.”

  Gordon nodded.

  I looked at Mary. “Is that okay? Percy might be with them.”

  She flinched visibly at the mention of the name. “I’d rather get him alive.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because if we didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to believe he wasn’t a clone, that this wasn’t a trick.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot. The Percy thing,” she said, her voice quiet. “I know how it looks and sounds.”

  “We trust you,” Lillian jumped in. “Or I do, at least.”

  “I do too,” I said. “I believe you. I think you’re right. Though you just put a nasty thought in my head. I’d really hate to find out that the corpse of Fray was a clone, and that the real her was running around somewhere.”

  “You might be getting ahead of yourself a little,” Gordon said.

  “More than a little,” I admitted. “Let’s go.”

  We rounded the perimeter of the oval plaza, picking our way carefully over the portion of roof that was still intact over the ruined, fire-charred stonework. Helen, Mary and I went first, verifying that the ground was steady, before the others. Petey was heavy and the Engineer was heavier still. The dense, hefty body of the machine man was on the most precarious point of a stretch with nothing but thick wooden beams when a somewhat distant impact rocked the city. He wobbled, found his balance, and hopped to safer ground.

  “He’s there,” Gordon said. “Fray’s area.”

  “You sure?” Petey asked.

  “Sure as dammit,” he said.

  A moment after he’d finished speaking, there was a flicker of fire. It took a full second for the rumble of the shockwave to sweep past us.

  “So soon?” I asked.

  “No,” Gordon said, under his breath.

  “No? Fray’s doing? She’s blowing it up?”

  “No,” Gordon said. He pointed. “If I’m right… then the Beast is there…”

  He moved his finger. “The explosion—”

  Another explosion occurred, this one close enough that I could get a sense of the particulars, that it was more than one thing detonating in close succession, in two very close-by locations. There was another.

  Gordon’s finger moved each time.

  “Screams,” Helen said. “Some nearby. It’s a signal.”

  “Down!” he shouted.

  We got down.

  The remainder of the explosions sounded. There was one at the north end of the plaza.

  They were hiding indoors. They had access to buildings. Fray’s people are scattered around the area, some on watch, waiting in windows with rifles in hand… but they’re also guarding something.

  Caches.

  I could see the damage at the north end. The front and back faces of the building were ruined. The floor was intact, but light did shine through.

  “Fray’s making her move,” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” Petey said.

  “She’s freed the Beast of Brechwell,” I said. “No, not free, but—”

  “Unleashed,” Helen said.

  They can’t use the gates to steer it anymore. It won’t be trapped. Fray has an escape route, and the Beast…

  …Brechwell belongs to the Beast, for now.

  I smiled.

  “Come on, and hurry,” I said, talking through the grin. “She’s given her response, and we’re still ahead. We’ve just got to take advantage before she gets away. We can get her.”

  Previous Next

  Tooth and Nail—7.6

  Periodic gunshots cut through the sound of the bells and the roars and crashes of the Beast’s rampage. Striving to find safe ground, some of the members of Fray’s group had started to climb towers. The rifle shots that didn’t hit were a form of discouragement and warning. The ones that did hit were even more effective at achieving those same two goals.

  On the rooftop, we had the benefit of being able to see over the other rooftops and locate the Brechwell Beast. The people on the ground didn’t—for them, there wasn’t a good way of distinguishing how far away the Beast was. It was as large as a wealthy man’s house and I very much suspected it was designed to create noise and make things rattle to batter at the enemy’s psyche.

  Tough enough to hold its own in a knock-down, drag-out fight with cannons and artillery, it wasn’t even playing that fair. When it moved and when it made contact, it was with speed and devastating force.

  In the distance, the Beast was working on plowing its way through a gap that explosions had created. I heard rifle shots, and saw the Beast react. It backed out of the gap, and began charging back into the designated area, searching for the attackers.

  A cle
ver trick, one that kept the Beast out of the city as a whole. But it wouldn’t work forever.

  “That has to be it!” Gordon called out.

  It was a cluster of buildings that stood taller than the rest. The style was slightly different, the design ostentatious, with access controlled by arches, opened further by explosions. Looking at the road, as we got closer, there were more wagons and carriages set to either side of the road, or parked in little archways beside residences.

  A number of bystanders, too, people bolting along the roads leading to the building.

  It was possible there were people caught out after dark, but I doubted it. Any ‘bystander’ here had to be assumed to be in Fray’s employ. The guns many carried and the company they kept were damning.

  The Beast was drawing closer.

  A door opened. A man shouted, waving them inside. Another group that would dodge the monster.

  “Oh no,” Lillian said. “No, no, no.”

  She was looking at the door.

  I looked closer, and I could make out a shape at the man’s side. In my haste to assess the situation, I’d taken a mental shortcut, figuring the lump at the man’s side to be an overlarge leg. A detail held at the back of my mind until I could put all my thoughts in the right order.

  We needed to get down to the street level, cross, and then deal with the group, and an otherwise unassuming man with that misshapen a leg was probably going to be less of a threat. Less mobile, a single leg wasn’t about to be something dangerous.

  But as I tapped into that impression of the man, recognized the lump, and processed what it was. I knew before I even double-checked what I was seeing.

  “Man with a little girl just let a group of rebellion thugs and some Ghosts into his house, to save them from the Brechwell Beast!” I called out.

  “Sympathizer?” Gordon asked.

  Oh, that would be so easy if it were true.

  Lillian squeezed my wrist.

  “Let’s assume no!” I called out.

  The Beast was drawing nearer.

  “The Beast passes, we go down behind it!” I called out. “Cross street, get inside, stop them!”

  “I thought we were going after Fray!” Gordon shouted.