For the rest of us, since we operated in such close quarters most of the time, we went with submachineguns with flashlights and laser sights attached. Some teams like the punch of a full size assault rifle, but in our training, we found it was easier to maneuver and operate with our little P90 submachineguns. Working in tandem with mages tossing around various Tricks changes the dynamics of how a team moves, and for us, the compact size of the P90 worked best.
Beyond that… ammo, knives, various kinds of grenades, charms for the mages, radios, medical supplies, and various entry tools. This time around, we’d each carry a heavy rucksack full of equipment… spare ammo, explosives, specialized hardware, that sort of thing… which we’d drop and leave on the roof once we inserted.
We weren’t leaving it behind to be wasteful. We’ve got to move fast when we’re on, and the last thing you need in a fight is a heavy anchor on your back.
Not to mention, it’s exhausting to carry all that crap around. Fighting is tiring all by itself; there’s no point in handicapping yourself with a ton of extra gear.
Still, we might need a resupply, and I was pretty sure nothing was going to teleport in after us. Polonius was too smart to get caught twice by the same trick. So we’d take our resupply with us and leave it on the roof.
We were geared up and ready to go in no time, and after that, it was time to teleport. We got in a circle facing outwards, with me on the designated twelve o’ clock position. Shifty was on my right at three o’ clock, Peter to my left at nine o’ clock, and I put Dread on six o’clock with his big old belt-fed F-shok. The rest were spread in between.
The time came to give the order, but I found myself staring up at the building like a little kid looking down from the high dive for the first time. Last week’s op was still so fresh in my mind; we should’ve had weeks to recoup from that one before getting thrown back in front of the cannons.
The images came back, unstoppable this time. I was there again, surrounded by the Slashers. They were everywhere; we were fighting with our knives now, trying not to hit each other as we swung at the skinny creatures zipping amongst us.
I got cut pretty bad and dropped. Dread flew into a rage, attacking the Slashers with a fire axe he'd found somewhere, splitting them down the middle like firewood. Stephen knelt by my side, patching me back together with his magic.
Then, disaster. A Slasher moved in, and spun close to Stephen while his back was turned, and his throat was sliced open.
He stopped and looked at me, holding a hand to his neck, staring at me as if to ask what had happened, and all I could do was stare back, wondering what I could do, when the answer was nothing. Of course there was nothing I could do, he was the damn Healer, for God's sake, what could I do?
I might’ve stayed there all night, staring at that building, lost in that too-recent memory. Shifty had been right. We should be waiting for the feds. We should have a goddamn army for this. This was too much to ask of anyone.
Dread saved my ass. A little cough to catch my attention, and he tipped me a broad wink, as if to say, hey, fuck it, another day at the office. “Ready, boss?”
I might’ve kissed him, that big meathead. It was exactly what I needed. Exactly.
He always seemed to know exactly what I needed. When this was all over, I promised myself… screw the rules, screw the chain of command. I needed to find out if there was more to us than just a working relationship.
But it would have to wait until this was over.
I gave Shifty the go and braced myself… teleporting is very weird. There’s no transition; one instant, your mage is counting down and hits “one”, and then, you blink.
You always blink, everyone blinks, it’s like some sort of natural protective reflex of the mind. I often wonder what that fraction of a nanosecond would look like if our minds could register it. I know teleporting is faster than the speed of light, I’ve read all the magazine articles, but there has to be some sort of time elapse.
In any case, you blink, and then you’re there. Talk about jarring. It takes a few trips to take the edge off, and even then, you never really get used to it. It’s too unnatural. But it works.
So, Shifty counted down for us, and hit “one”, and we blinked.
***
“Twelve clear.”
“Nine clear.”
“Contact! Contact seven!” Dread’s voice shouted. Thunder, crash, rumble, roar, a jackhammer’s rattle seemed to split the rooftop as Dread hammered out a lethal tune with his shotgun. A submachinegun joined in, and Cass was tempted to break formation so she could check out the seven o’clock arc of the circle, but then Shifty shouted, “Contact! Contact two!” and started firing himself.
There were four creatures running her way, to her right at the two o’clock position. They were short and bipedal, rushing toward them recklessly across the dark rooftop.
Shifty’s gun blew the legs out from under the closest one, and Cass shouldered her weapon and tore off three bursts almost before she knew what she was doing. All three creatures fell, headshot, and Shifty finished off the downed creature and waved his flashlight over his arc of the rooftop.
“Two clear.”
Another heavy rattle from Dread, and his deep voice announced, “Seven clear.”
“All sectors?” Cass asked, and after each of her team reported “clear”, she gave the official “All clear.”
They dropped their packs in the center of the circle, keeping their weapons at the ready and their eyes on their respective arc of the circle. “All right,” Cass asked, “who’s got the stairwell?”
“On mine,” Dread answered.
“Okay. Dread straight up the middle, Shifty and Peter on either side, Mike and Tara on the flanks, I’m right behind Dread, Stephen in the rear. Just one thing,” Cass said, pivoting to point her weapon at Stephen.
Stephen froze. “What the...”
“Your weapon,” she ordered.
Stephen balked. “Hey, no way...”
Five other flashlights converged on him as the rest of the team leveled their weapons at his chest. Cass’s face was granite.
“Give your weapon to Dread, now,” she said. “Until I know I can trust you.”
Stephen’s face fell, and he nodded, looking like he was accepting a guilty plea. “Fine, Cass.”
“Your sidearm, too.”
Submachinegun and pistol were handed over to Dread, who secured them without a word and turned back toward the doorway leading to the access stairwell. The others fanned out in an inverted V, with the mages on either side of Dread, and Mike and Tara the furthest out.
“You’re leaving me defenseless, Cass,” Stephen said, taking his place with her behind Dread.
“You’re surrounded by an entire Wreck Squad armed to the teeth,” Cass said. “You’re hardly defenseless. Take that rucksack with you.”
Stephen snorted and shouldered one of the heavy packs. “Might as well.”
Their V formation skimmed across the rooftop until they reached the bodies of a half-dozen creatures Dread had laid out with his shotgun. Cass didn’t recognize them, but they looked identical to the creatures she and Shifty had shot down.
“Hold up,” Cass said once they’d reached the bodies. “Let’s get a closer look at these things.”
Ugly bastards, was the first thought she had, once she got a good look at one of them. It was five feet tall at the most, with wiry muscles and bristling patches of hair. Jagged teeth pushed out at irregular angles from its mouth, and its open eyes were yellow.
“Do you recognize what they are?” Dread said.
“Nope. Never seen one of these before. Anybody else?”
“They look like goblins,” Shifty said.
“You’re making that up,” Dread said.
“No, I’m not, I’m… well, yeah, I kind of am, but I mean, when I think of a goblin, that’s what I think of.”
“There’s no such thing as a goblin, Shifty,” Cass said.
; “Except, right there, there is!” he said, pointing at the creature.
“No, I mean, you don’t get to just name it yourself,” Cass said. “It’s not our job to name it. It’s our job to kill it. Peter, take a bunch of pictures for the science geeks and let’s move on.”
Peter started taking some pictures of the goblins with his cell phone, tuning one over with his foot to capture the back. He would later transmit those images to Control, and then each of the images would get archived back at the station with the rest of the information stored on the various creatures the Wreck Squads had encountered over the years.
“They’re using weapons,” Dread said, nodding toward a claw hammer held in one of the goblin’s fists. “You don’t see that a lot.”
“Yeah, well, I think we can count on running into some new and unique specimens on this trip,” Cass said.
“Roger that. Why do you think there was so little resistance on the roof?”
“He didn’t think he’d need it,” Cass said. “He wasn’t anticipating this move, remember? So why put a lot of troops on the roof? These guys were probably put here more as lookouts than anything else.”
“I think we’re good,” Peter announced. “Unless we want to turn this into a photo shoot for mutant freaks.”
“We’ll save that for your next Tinder date,” Cass said. “Back into formation and let’s move on the stairwell.”
Peter took his place in the wide V formed by the squad and they continued to move across the roof. Finally, the formation came to a stop at the stairwell’s doorway, and paused as if to draw breath.
“Cass?” Dread asked.
“Shifty.”
Shifty let his submachinegun hang in front of his body on its sling. He blew out a breath, cracked his knuckles, and put both hands out palm-forward in a STOP gesture. “Ready.”
“Peter.”
The Striker mage let his weapon hang as well, and twisted his fingers into an arcane knot close to his chest. Sparks and crackles of energy zipped and popped amongst his fingertips, lighting his face like dim flashbulbs. “Ready.”
“Dread.”
The enormous man shifted his grip on his F-Shok and closed his eyes for a moment, taking a measured breath. He looked like an athlete preparing for the start of a race, or a karate master preparing to break a board with his fist. His body seemed to relax and tense at the same time, as if he were a thick coil of wire being depressed, ready to spring.
Another slow inhale, his eyes flicked open, and the coil sprang. A short trio of bursts from his shotgun, one for each hinge, the third for the lock, and then he stomp-kicked the door into the stairwell with a shout. It fell flat, like a Domino, and slid clattering down the steps into the darkness.
Dread was almost on top of it, aiming his weapon down into the blackness, finger on the trigger, ready to tear an army to pieces if need be. Shifty and Peter crowded in as best they could next to the huge man, Tricks on the tips of their fingers to match whatever horrors came screaming up out of the stairwell.
Nothing.
A beat passed, as Dread and the two mages stared down at the empty void, as if refusing to believe there wasn’t anything lethal coming up for them. None of them breathed. They couldn’t; the hollow air of the stairwell reached up and closed a fist around their throats.
“Dread?”
Dread shook himself and managed to inhale. “Clear, boss.”
“All right,” Cass said. “Down we go. Dread on the point with Shifty and Peter, then me and Stephen, Mike and Tara on our six. Go.”
They slid into the stairwell, picking their steps with care. There was no sound; only their shallow breathing, which seemed amplified into gasps in the enclosed space. Throats went dry and palms began to sweat, and Cass began to feel like they were climbing down a mile of steps, not just twenty feet, when Dread finally came to a stop.
“What is it?” Cass asked.
“Last couple of steps are under water,” Dread said.
She craned her neck around, struggling to get a look around his mile-wide back. Sure enough, water filled the last few feet of the stairwell, up to the fourth step. One end of the door Dread had shot out was poking out of the top of the water, the other end submerged and out of sight. Its twin was still standing, closing off the stairwell from whatever was on the twenty-fourth floor.
“Do you think the whole floor is flooded?” Shifty whispered.
“Only one way to find out,” Cass said, shifting her grip on her weapon. “Do it.”
“I’m not sure I can blow off the bottom hinge through the water,” Dread said.
“Don’t. Take the top one and the handle. The door will swing open partway, and slow down anything trying to come up.”
“Right.” Dread said, and aimed his weapon at the top door hinge. “One...two...”
B-B-BAM! The shotgun blew the door from its top hinge, and then tore the handle assembly to pieces. Two steps into the water, and a booted stomp from Dread, and the metal door twisted and fell half-way open, blocking the doorway diagonally. Dread squatted down, so he could aim his weapon’s flashlight around the twenty-fourth floor without getting too deep into the water.
“Whole floor is gutted out and flooded,” he reported after the first sweep of his flashlight. “Water’s clean, and looks to be... waist deep, maybe.”
“Waist deep on who, Godzilla?” Shifty said, trying as best he could to get low with Dread without stepping foot in the water. “There could be anything in there.”
“Yep,” Dread said with a nod.
“All right, Peter, trade; I need to have a look,” Cass said, sliding in next to Dread once Peter stepped up and behind her. “Keep a flashlight on the water right in front of us and watch for waves disturbing the surface. It’ll give us at least a second or two of warning if anything's moving under the water.”
“What do you think, Cass?” Dread asked, keeping his eyes and the muzzle of his heavy shotgun sweeping over the surface. “We’ve got to get across it.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Shifty muttered.
“We all know what you think, Shifty,” Cass said, frowning. The water’s surface was perfectly calm, broken only by the top of an occasional desk poking up like a desert island in the Pacific. “How did he do this? All the walls are gone, with only the support struts left, and not even that many of those... how is he containing it, keeping the water from spilling down onto the lower floors?”
“He’s a Maestro, Cass,” Shifty said, daring a single step into the water. “All bets with reality are off.”
Cass
All bets with reality are off. Wasn’t that the truth. Well, at least the challenges at my job are always new and exciting.
“Maybe we can get Control to send up an inflatable raft...” Dread began.
“Forget it,” I said. “Polonius is on to us. The screen’s probably up to... what, Shifty?”
Shifty seemed to consider it for a moment. “Um, feels like a hundred feet or so above the rooftop. Nothing is teleporting in.”
“So what do we do?” Dread asked. “Try to wade through? God only knows what’s in there, and how are we going to fight with... Cass?”
His words were a million miles away. I stared at the water, across its still surface, as if daring something to rise up and shatter its placidity. Random thoughts began to skip through my head. They may have seemed irrelevant on the surface, but I’ve been at this long enough to trust my instincts. Somewhere in that mental flotsam and jetsam was the key to this puzzle.
It’s smooth like a mirror... a pane of glass... desktops like icebergs... a pane of glass... sliding down a sliding board...
“Cass?”
I frowned, trying to block out Dread’s insistent tone and also drown out the latent fear of whatever was waiting for us in that magically created pool of the twenty-fourth floor.
Something was in there, all right. Something big and ugly and covered in claws, probably, and we once we waded into that water
, we’d be sitting ducks. It… or they… would drag us underwater and tear us apart as we struggled and screamed and drowned.
A little shake of my shoulders to chase those thoughts away, and I went back to trying to hear my inner voice. Thinking around corners is hard enough in the safe and comfortable daylight; it’s damn near impossible in the dark when very real nightmares are anxiously waiting for their chance to pounce.
Lobsters in a tank, taped claws tapping on the glass... sliding down the water chute... tapping on the glass... slipping on the ice... walking on the water...
“Cass?” Dread sounded as if he might start shaking me; in fact, he was pulling back from the doorway and was probably planning on taking the whole team topside when the pieces finally fell into place for me. “Cass?”
“Shifty,” I said, “remember when you put up that wall of fire between us and those ugly fuckers that Conjure mage sent after us, what, maybe, eight months ago?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I nodded slowly, looked out at the water, then back at Shifty. “Could you do it with ice?”
“Sure, but there needs to be a water source...” Shifty began to say, when the answer dawned on him. “Damn, Cass. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again... you’re a genius. Yeah, I can freeze the top of the water, maybe a couple of inches deep.”
“Will that be enough to hold us?” Dread asked. “And hold... them... below the surface?”
“We’re about to find out,” I said. “Mike, Tara, get topside and fill a bag with any kind of gravel or shit like that you can find. Dread, back up out of the water. Let’s make this quick. Where’s the main stairwell?”
“I’ll go up,” Stephen said. “You may as well send me up with Mike. I’m de... useless baggage to you in this stairwell.”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 7
