“Incoming!” Ree shouted. She pulled out her phaser, which was probably also running close to empty. She fired on the contraption, clipping one of the goblins. The creature dropped out of view, but not before a goblin with aviator-style goggles fired the mini-ballista. A baseball-bat-size bolt shot at her, and the only way for Ree to dodge was down.
She took a deep gulp and dropped prone, into the still muck and ichor of the fallen monsters.
Ewewewewewewewew, Ree thought, then pulled herself out of the muck, fighting the sticky suction. Well, at least I was wearing goggles, she admitted, wiping the sewage off the lenses as she rushed forward to get onto or under the contraption before it could fire again. If she’d gotten some of that in her eye, it’d take an hour in a medical shower and a fifth of tequila to wash it off.
She fired the phaser at the ballista, but the movement threw off her aim, and she just caught a wooden box to the side, which was either some kind of support or a step for the diminutive drivers.
The two remaining goblins were cranking the ballista back into a ready position, but they were only ten paces out. Ree fired again with the phaser and hit a goblin square in the chest, but the beam cut off as soon as it hit, the weapon going dead. Five paces out, she drew the switchblade from her soaked apron and flipped it open as she jumped up to the ledge on her left, then jumped for the goggled goblin, leading with her knife. The creature ducked, cursing in a language that sounded like a mix of Mars Attacks! Martian and Gaelic.
Ree overshot the goblin, but landed on the rickety cart. She grabbed onto the cart with her free hand and tried to flip back around to face the goblin. The creature was on her as she turned, and she found herself grappling with a bitey-scratchy-dirty thing for at least the tenth time that night. But even her average strength let her overpower the goblin, and her knife struck home.
The goblin stopped struggling, and she dropped it from her blade and then tried to figure out how to stop the cart. There were levers, switches, and gauges all over, none of them labeled. And the only lighting was from the dim lights in the roof of the tunnel.
For lack of a better option, she tried to repeat what had happened to Grognard’s cart just a month earlier. She rocked back and forth, moving the cart with her. Then she jumped straight up, grabbed the cart as it rocked to the right, and pulled that direction with all her weight. The cart lurched, then pitched and rolled down into the central muck. The wooden cart cracked, and spindled itself into a wreck as the engine of the cart tried to keep moving.
Well, that’s done, Ree thought, sighing from the muck. A wall of fatigue hit her with the sigh, and she had to force herself forward, sloshing back toward the door and her compatriots . . . whom she had left on their own when she’d spotted the cart.
Eastwood’s glow sticks still shone yellow, refracting through the mulch to illuminate the twenty feet of tunnel around the door to Grognard’s shop.
Eastwood, Talon, and Chandra were backed against the door by a cloud of animated weapons. Axes, swords, knives, maces, and more flew around one another, slashing and hacking at the group, moving on their own.
Huh. Don’t see that every day, Ree thought, flashing back to magic swords that flew around and fought on their own in D&D. But she’d never seen that many all at once, a golem of animated blades.
And all she had was a knife. Talon was parrying with insane skill, warding off three of the weapons at any given time. Eastwood’s lightsaber was out of sight, and he fought with a long German dagger. Chandra shuffled to the side, but a longsword arced out from the center of the cloud, cutting into her path and forcing her back.
But why hasn’t it gone in for the kill? Ree asked herself.
Using her meager momentum, Ree jumped over to the opposite side of the tunnel, and came in to flank the weapon cloud, for all the good that would do. When she got close enough, the longsword spun around and sliced out at her, the rest of the cloud following.
“Get back inside!” Ree said, backpedaling to try and outrun the flying tsunami of weaponry.
“What about you?” Talon asked.
Ree’s knife more of a liability than a defense—parrying wasn’t an option. It was all-dodge, all-the-time. And she was already tired. Every juke and duck required her to dig deeper, and she didn’t know how much she had left before the shovel of her determination would hit the hard slate of burnout. “It’ll be easier for you to sneak me inside once you’re inside, right? Get a shield to ward this thing off.”
Ree ducked, hopped, and jogged out of the way of the weapon cloud as Chandra and Talon made their way back inside. Eastwood tried to bait the cloud himself, hacking at blades and hafts with his long knife. But the cloud had apparently decided on going after the muck-soaked skinny chick instead of the merely ambiently stinky scruffy-looking guy.
“Hey! Oy! Come at me, gorramit!” Eastwood said, laying into the far side of the weapon cloud as Ree huffed, keeping a quarter step ahead of the whirling blades.
The blades turned, and pressed in at Eastwood, backing him against the wall by the door. Ree’s lungs threatened to collapse in on themselves and lock the alveoli shut, so she stumbled as she moved forward to help Eastwood.
Through the cloud of weapons, she saw several plumes of blood and a tattooed arm. Then Eastwood disappeared.
Leaving her alone in the tunnel with the cloud of weapons, on the wrong side of the tunnel from any backup, and completely unable to breathe.
Fuck.
Chapter Eight
The Right Hand of Vengeance
As her mind raced to figure out a way to get past the cloud of whirling weapons, Ree heard a voice from inside.
“Talon coming out!”
The door opened just enough for the warrior woman to slide out, leading with the huge scutum. The shield was big enough to cover both women . . . assuming Ree could get to her without becoming a pincushion.
“I’m running on fumes here,” Ree said, hyperventilating just to try to get her lungs to bellow. She knew it was the exact opposite of the best thing to do, but desperation and exhaustion had teamed up on discipline and were winning handily.
Talon shield-bashed the cloud of weapons, then shuffled to the side and hustled over to Ree. The big woman hauled Ree’s arm over her shoulder, then pulled her along as the cloud of weapons hacked, stabbed, and hammered away at the scutum.
Ree focused on putting one foot in front of the other, with a side of trying to keep her lungs from jumping out her throat and ballooning their way to Paradise Falls.
One of the blows knocked the both of them against the wall, and several overhand cuts glanced off of Ree’s skull.
When did I go to the salon? Ree asked herself, the world getting very far away.
She felt a hailstorm of blows against the shield, then heard a mess of voices and smelled a gust of fresher air. Finally, she heard the slamming of a door and the clattering of something large hit the ground. Then she joined it.
* * *
The original series Base Star welcomed her back to consciousness. Someone pressed a hot mug into her hands.
“Drink this.”
Warm hands raised the mug to her mouth, and she drank. The whatever-it-was tasted awful. A familiar awful, though. She opened her eyes and saw Drake holding her hands and the mug, grease smeared on his face and in his hair.
“Is this that make-your-soul-better goop?” Ree asked, her voice coming out froggy. He’d made a gallon of it for her the first time they’d gone into the Spirit realm. It tasted like ass juice but worked wonders.
“That it is. It should ameliorate some of the fatigue.”
Ree held her nose closed and took another long drink from the mug. The wretched taste fell back a bit with longer gulps, though only from a rating of “puke my guts out” to “this may no longer be food.”
She released her nose and took a few halting breaths before downing the rest of the disgusting tea. She’d once asked Drake what was in it, and he’d promptly changed the subjec
t. It was probably for the best.
The tea kicked in fast, the rest of her body waking up, warmed like she’d just had a hot bath. Ree looked around, and saw Talon and Eastwood bracing against the door, Chandra standing a pace behind them with a crossbow at the ready.
The door shook under regular blows, and once again, the zot of Grognard’s wards was gone. There were several gouges in the door, and Ree saw several dozen shredded cards on the floor by the entranceway.
“How long until the brew is ready?” Ree asked.
“Still another half-hour. The intermediary step of channeling the energy into a device to speed the fermentation process has only a thirty-seven percent efficiency rate, and that was after making several aggressive modifications, and several trial-and-error cycles.” Drake gestured to his grease-stained and singed clothes. His left sleeve ended just below the left shoulder, and his pants looked . . . crispy.
“But it’ll work?” she asked.
Drake pursed his lips. “I doubt that we will have sufficient time for a field test. Eastwood informs me that the door may not last until the brew is ready.”
Ree sat up, wobbled, then found her feet. “Then we have to get back out there and thin the herd again.” It’s not like there were many other options.
When forced to choose between “fight and maybe live,” and “wait and probably die,” Ree was finding that the former was always better. At least then she was doing something instead of sitting on her hands and praying for the cavalry to arrive. Especially since her normal cavalry was all already there.
The tea had helped, but she still felt like death warmed over.
“Where’s my phone?” she asked. She left it inside before each sortie, since even with a mondo-tough case, it wasn’t going to stand up to the beatings she went through.
But since Eastwood, Talon, and Chandra were a little busy, only Drake was really present to answer, and he didn’t seem to know. She searched through the St. Patty’s Day–level mess in the bar and found the phone underneath a torn half of a Fantastic Four comic.
Clicking the phone on, Ree saw that she had 23% left on the battery. It’d be enough for two more doses of power, maybe three. But going the Spider-Man or Buffy route again wasn’t going to cut it. She needed to think non-Euclidean, get sneaky on the situation. Every single time they’d gone out to clean house, Lucretia had answered with another wave of nasty, and it didn’t seem like she was running low on cannon fodder.
So what, then? Ree thought, browsing her media list.
It didn’t seem to matter what power she had, they would just keep coming. So either she needed to get past them and find Lucretia, which would mean leaving the rest of the group another person down, or she had to change the way that she fought.
She scrolled past clips of superheroes, detectives, psychics, and chosen ones.
And found herself a winner.
The last fights had all been about endurance, about pressing on no matter what happened.
She didn’t need super-power; she needed staying power.
Ree plopped onto a chair by the nearly bare weapons table and fired up a clip from Die Hard. John McClane, the patron saint of action heroes, the man whose ingenuity, inexorable will, and smart-assery had carried him through endless trials and launched Bruce Willis’s seemingly unkillable career as an action hero.
She’d picked out two clips from Die Hard for her power playlist. One for his MacGyver-ness (taping the gun to his back), and one for his indomitable will (walking across broken glass). She played the latter, and did her best to feel McClane’s pain, use it to fuel her own determination, make the hero’s will her own. Internal powers seemed to last longer than the external, flashy stuff. If she could dig into Die Hard well enough, she should be able to fight on even through the exhaustion of a dozen skirmishes on top of working on her feet for six hours.
Die Hard had, for Ree, opened the doors for action movies where it actually seemed like the hero was in pain, that he’d really struggled through, and that struggling made him all the more heroic. It was that grit she needed. The kind of grit that Eastwood had earned over years fighting in the astral plane of the World Wide Web, that Talon had earned on the battlefields of Pennsic and Pearson both. Ree was still in her rookie year as an urban fantasy heroine. It seemed like she’d seen more than most in that time, but she needed to dig deeper than her reserves would allow, the way that McClane had.
The sound of cracking wood pulled Ree from her media communion, and she accepted the jian straight-sword pressed into her hand by Drake.
“Good luck,” he said, then dashed back into the office to join Grognard.
Ree stood, set her phone back on the table, then hustled over to the crew by the door, which now had a splintered head-size hole around shoulder level. A broad blade hacked into the wood again, widening the gap.
“Go time?” Ree asked as she stepped up.
“Go!” Eastwood said, undoing the locks as Talon stabbed back through the hole in the door with the naginata.
The door swung open, revealing another adventure module’s worth of nastiness.
That would have normally been the time when her stomach sank at the vastness of the creatures’ numbers, the skeletons, gnomes, eagle-size winged lizards, and especially at the purple hippo (WTF?).
But not this time. This time, she had the determination of John McClane. The power of Die Hard was different from most of the others she’d taken on using Geekomancy. When she channeled Buffy, Trinity, or Spider-Man, she felt the power buzzing in her mind and in her body, always just right there waiting for her to tap into it. This was more like a solid sense of certainty, a cool well of confidence buoying her up.
I could get used to this, she thought.
Eastwood dove forward, lashing out with sword and long dagger. Ree pegged his style as the Niten-do of Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, though he was using western weapons instead of the samurai’s daisho.
Chandra followed, moving more cautiously than Eastwood, her kukri spinning in tight patterns.
Ree went third, letting Talon and her polearm take the anchor role behind them. Uncle Joe was on door duty, his well of courage properly spent.
Leading with the sword, Ree stabbed at one of the winged lizards, which pumped its wings and dodged up and away from her blow.
She followed the thrust with a cross-body cut, which caught a leaping gnome’s arm and carried through to cut it across the collarbone. The diminutive devil went down, and Ree continued her swing, spinning her weapon back around to her right to ward off another gnome before it could jump.
If she let the blade stop moving, she’d get overrun. Already feeling her barely mustered energy flag, Ree dipped into that cool well of magical energy, thinking of how John McClane hadn’t stopped, hadn’t given up, had always pressed on.
For understandable reasons, “Ode to Joy” started playing in her head, making the fairly workmanlike task of cutting down scads of monsters seem instantly more epic.
But even with her epic soundtrack, they were outnumbered and out-gunned. (Out-sworded, really. All of the prop guns were spent, and Lucretia didn’t seem to be a gun bunny.)
Just a few minutes. Just need to keep them from knocking down the door for a few minutes. Except that twenty minutes in fighting time was approximately forever. She’d competed in Taekwondo tournaments for years, and even those ninety-second matches dragged on like they were the battle of Helm’s Deep.
“How are we going to keep this up?” Ree shouted to Eastwood. If the monsters understood her, then so be it. She knew she was screwed, and the monsters might well know it, too. There were just too many.
“Don’t know!” Eastwood said, fighting on. “Just do it!”
Determined he was, but Eastwood was no speech giver. But he was holding his own, even though he’d lost the long knife somewhere along the way and was fighting with just the one sword and judiciously applied dirty tricks.
Pressed up against the wall, Ch
andra was favoring one leg. Beside her, Talon fought with her personal sword, a hand-and-a-half blade that she wielded like she’d had it since she was in diapers and baby tunics. And as a second-gen Scadian, that might even be the case.
Ree was drinking deeply of the Die Hard determination, but the creatures kept coming. The sewer channel was running with ichor, a stream of fallen monstrosities flowing away from the store, but not fast enough.
A boxy robot that looked like a teakettle on steroids launched forward, spout-butting her knee. She hopped back, lashing out with the sword, which sparked and clattered off the machine’s domed top.
In the next minute, she heard several more cries of pain. Chandra went down, and Talon dropped to one knee, warding everything off of the fallen punk.
Which left Ree and Eastwood nearly alone against the pressing horde. If there had been more space, they’d have been overrun long ago. As it was, the four of them half stumbled over one another as they tried to keep the store side of the tunnel at their flanks so the creatures couldn’t cut them off from the door. Ree took wounds along her arms, back, and legs. The Die Hard magic started to go faster and faster as she fought on with injuries that even adrenaline couldn’t push through.
Talon screamed as an arrow embedded itself in her shoulder, then dropped out from Ree’s peripheral vision.
This isn’t going to work.
Ree adopted her best get-the-whole-damn-bar’s-attention voice and shouted “Joe! Evac!” while pounding on the door with the pommel of her blade. Then she twisted the blade to spear another gnome as it leapt for her throat.
The door opened, and Ree held her ground, taking scratches and bruises under the ever-more-crowded press of monsters.
Attack the Geek: A Ree Reyes Side-Quest Page 8
