I traded a look with Dread and nodded. “Go.”
“Let’s toss some grenades in to soften up whatever is in the water,” Dread suggested once they’d left.
Shifty shook his head. “Bad idea. The more we agitate the water, the harder it’ll be to freeze it. We want this ice to be thick.”
“Right,” I said. “Peter, can you hit the water with a bolt of lightning, fry out whatever is in there?”
“No can do, boss. I fire one off into a body of water, maybe it comes back and nails me as well.”
“It can do that?”
“Unh-hunh.”
How about that. You learn something new every day.
“All right, then, let’s get started. Do your thing, Shifty,” I said, gesturing towards the pool.
Shifty rubbed his hands together, as if to warm them up, and knelt down on the stairs by the edge of the pool. He lowered his hands until his palms hovered above the surface of the water.
I knelt down next to him and pointed my flashlight across the pool. “There’s the door we need to get to. Remember to make the ice thickest where we’re going to cross.”
Shifty nodded. “I’ll try.”
The stairwell went dead silent as Shifty fell into a near-trance. Below his hands, tiny ice crystals spontaneously formed on the surface of the water, stretching spiderweb-like out and around until they met and knitted together.
“Unbelievable,” Dread said, shaking his head.
I tended to agree, but this was business, so I whispered, “Shhh. Let him concentrate.”
The tempo of crystal formation sped up exponentially, until the web formed a solid sheet of ice. The sheet began to spread out from the pool’s edge, stretching out of the stairwell and extending itself toward the door on the far end of the room. There was a crackling sound, the sound of butcher paper being crumpled, as more and more of the water froze solid. We all marked the progress of the ice bridge with our flashlights, each of us mentally urging it further and deeper, until it reached the far door at last.
The six-foot-wide bridge then began to expand laterally, widening to the left and right simultaneously, until it reached the walls and covered the entire floor. Even then, Shifty didn’t stop, but kept concentrating, driving the ice deeper, piling layers on as thick as possible. His breath began to show in puffs of frost, and at last he stopped, almost falling forward onto the ice in exhaustion.
Dread caught him by his body armor vest and pulled him back onto the stairwell.
Shifty looked like he might pass out. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“You did good, trooper,” Dread said, patting him on the shoulder.
Peter tested his weight on the ice. “Good, nothing! He did great! You covered the whole floor, Shifty, damn!”
Lovely. Now all we needed were some ice skates.
***
“Cass?” Stephen said, returning with Mike. “I brought down some ropes, figure we can use them for something.”
“Do you have the gravel?” she said.
“Right here,” Mike hefted a small rucksack. “What are you going to do with it?”
“You,” Cass said, “are going to sprinkle it on the ice as you make your way across the room, to give yourself some traction. That ice is going to be as slippery as greased owlshit.”
Mike nodded. “That’s good thinking.”
“Let’s do it. Mike and Dread first, trailing this rope. That support strut there is about halfway across the pool and on our way; tie the first rope off there and anchor another one to trail to the far door.”
Cass tied the rope onto the stairwell’s steel handrail before handing it off to Mike. “No sudden movements. We don’t know how thick the ice is, so don’t take any chances. If it sounds like it’s going to break, get back over here. Shifty and I are next, then Peter and Tara, and Stephen is last.”
“Cass,” Shifty said softly. “I, uh, need a minute, here.”
Cass patted the exhausted mage on the shoulder. “Okay. I’ll go solo; you take a minute and bring up the rear with Stephen. Cool?”
“Cool. Thanks.”
Cass gave Dread the nod, and he and Mike stepped onto the ice, gingerly at first, then more confidently. By the time they ducked through the half-filled doorway, they were moving as fast as they could on the slick surface, the rope trailing along behind them.
“It seems pretty cool,” Mike shouted back to the group. “Plenty thick enough.”
Cass took her turn, taking a few steps to get used to the new surface, careful to stay on the path of scattered gravel left in Mike’s wake. She stayed to the left of the rope, on the same side as Dread, and took a second to look back before ducking through the doorway.
“If something happens, pull on that rope like crazy,” she said. “Wait until Dread and Mike are almost to that strut before you leave, so we don’t all get caught out there.”
Then, she was through the half-filled doorway and on the twenty-fourth floor, stepping carefully across the slick ice which seemed to stretch into forever. She tried shining her flashlight down into the pool, to see if there was anything under her, but after a second or two, she forced herself to give it up. She needed to concentrate forward, not downward, or she’d never get anywhere.
She followed about twenty feet behind Dread, seeing his form mostly in negative from the contrast with his flashlight beam in front of him. She stole a quick glance back at the stairwell and cursed herself for it.
Eyes ahead, Cass. Keep your eyes ahead.
It only took a few more quiet steps for paranoid thoughts to creep in. The water beneath the ice seemed filled with such silent, brooding potential, she almost would’ve preferred hearing something, seeing something, anything at all to break the silent stalemate which seemed to strangle her.
There’s got to be something, she thought. No way this room is empty. No way Polonius filled up an entire floor with water and didn’t put something in it.
Images started forming in her mind, imagined shapes of the twisted creatures Polonius could have conjured to lie in wait for them. Each creature was worse than the last; black carapaces, sharp claws, gnashing teeth...
“Fuck!” Mike shouted, taking a quick step backwards and nearly slipping.
Cass’s gun was up before she knew it. “What? What?”
“I saw something!” Mike said, pointing his weapon at the ice.
“Don’t shoot the ice!” Cass said.
“Something moved, I’m telling you!”
“What?”
“I... I don’t know, but it was big and it slipped past quick!”
Cass’s breathing picked up. “Um... okay, let’s back off.”
“We can’t, Cass,” Dread said. “We have to cross this sooner or later. We’re almost at the strut; we should at least try to tie this rope off before we think about a retreat.”
“All right. Hurry,” she said, walking as fast as she dared toward the strut marking the halfway point.
Something big under the ice, she thought. Maybe more than one something big.
Dread and Mike reached the strut and tied off the rope. Cass forced herself to slow down. They couldn’t start bunching up… too easy to wipe out the entire team in one attack. All the same, she kicked herself for volunteering to cross the ice solo.
“Should’ve sent the Vive across first,” she muttered to herself, feeling a little guilty the moment after she’d said it.
“We’re tied off, Cass,” Dread shouted back to her. “We’re going for the far side.”
“Watch yourselves.”
Cass stole a glance backwards. Peter and Tara’s waving flashlight beams danced wildly out of the half-filled doorway, and then they ducked out and around the half-broken door, visible in the spilloff from their lights.
When I reach the strut, Cass thought, that’s the time to hit us. Two groups caught on the ice, me in the middle...
“Shit! Contact!” Mike shouted again.
“What?”
&nbs
p; “I saw it again!”
“The same thing?”
“Uh, yeah, I think! I don’t know!”
Dread shook his head, keeping the muzzle of his shotgun trained on the ice. “I don’t see anything.”
Mike’s hands were shaking, sending his flashlight beam skittering across the ice. “I’m telling you, I saw it!”
Cass knelt down, wiping away a film of frost so she could see a little better. The ice was clear, almost crystalline, but she could barely make anything out; maybe she could see all the way through to the floor, maybe she was fooling herself.
A shadow broke her flashlight beam, a phantom through the crystal, a black mass which was gone as soon as it appeared.
Cass shouted and jumped back involuntarily, losing her footing on the slick ice and slipping backwards. For the split second as she fell, she knew she’d crack through the ice, fall through, fall down to where it could get her and drag her down into the icy prison Shifty had created.
“Cass!” Dread shouted, and started to run toward her, as if he could make it in time to catch her.
Then, she hit the ice, but the ice held, and she merely scrabbled backwards in a panic a few feet away from where she’d seen the creature. The strut was there, marking the halfway point, and she grabbed onto it like it was a life raft.
“Cass?”
“I’m okay, I’m okay!” she said, waving him off. “Just bruised my ass… and my pride.”
By the time she pulled herself together, Dread was by her side. “You all right?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I feel like a damn idiot, is all.”
Across the ice, Peter and Tara were halfway to the strut, using the rope as a guideline. Peter stopped, glanced back at Shifty and Stephen peering out of the doorway, and grinned like a kid about to pull his favorite stunt.
"Check this out, Tara," he said, and laid flat on his back on the ice. Pulling himself hand over hand along the rope, he zipped along the ice quickly, sliding like a sleigh.
"Oh, great," Cass said. "Now Peter's showing off."
"See?" Peter said as he went. "Easy!"
"Quit screwing around, idiot!" Tara shouted at him, stopping for a moment.
Peter slid up to the strut in no time and sat up next to Dread with a smile. "Pretty good, hunh?"
"You're amazing," Dread dead-panned. "How about walking your amazing ass over to Mike and keeping him company?"
"No problem," Peter said, hauling himself to his feet and walking fearlessly toward the far side.
"Peter!" Shifty shouted from the stairwell. "Stick close to the rope! The further you get from it, the thinner the ice is!"
"Gotcha!" Peter said, already almost caught up with Mike.
"What's Tara waiting for?" Dread asked.
Cass frowned. Tara's feet seemed frozen to the ice, as if she were afraid movement would draw the attentions of whatever was beneath it.
"Tara?" she said. "Come on!"
Tara looked up to wave her off, and then a fierce thump from under the ice made her eyes go wide and her feet hop involuntarily. She jumped back slightly, barely able to keep her feet underneath her, and the ice began to hairline crack, from another and another and another blow from underneath the surface.
"Contact! It's right here!" Tara shouted, and lowered her gun toward the cracking ice.
"No don't shoot..." Cass began to shout, but it was too late. Tara blazed directly into the ice with her weapon, at the dark form trying to smash its way to the surface. The bullets catalyzed the monster's assault; the ice cracked loudly and suddenly gave away like a trap door.
Tara screamed as she fell through, reaching out for any kind of purchase, but the edges of the ice broke away underneath her weight and she fell on top of something wide and slippery and misshapen. Long, clawed limbs reached up for her, wrapped around her, tried to pull her off her feet and under the water. She fired her weapon blindly beneath her, heedless of the possibility she might blow her own legs off, desperate to drive off whatever was pulling her down to her death. The bullets kicked up splashes of water, driving down into the creature, and then the clawed limbs slipped away, off her, and retreated below the surface.
"Tara? Tara?" Cass said, heading toward her.
"Hey, is she all right?" Peter yelled from the far side of the room.
"Get across the room and tie that goddamn rope off!" Dread ordered, louder than he needed to, debating on whether he should follow Cass or cover the team from where he was. He should stay put, so he could cover as many people as possible, but he found himself following Cass over toward the hole in the ice.
Shaking with wet and cold and mostly terror, Tara shrieked, "Somebody get ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"
"We're coming!" Cass said, when more ice-straining blows cracked the ice on the far side of the room.
"Contact! They're coming up over here!" Peter said.
"Dread!" Cass pointed toward Peter, the order to assist implied rather than spoken. She moved as quickly as she could toward Tara; Shifty and Stephen were on their way, too, but as fast as these things could move...
"Tara," she said, "grab the rope, and try to jump and slide up along the ice so you don't break it!"
Gunfire thundered from the far side of the room. Something screeched before splashing back into a hole in the ice. Cass forced herself not to look, not to split herself onto two fronts, and kept on toward Tara.
"Damn it!" Tara shouted, breaking off another section of ice as she tried to climb out. "It’s not working... ahh!"
Her body toppled backward under the impact of something heavy hitting her legs. The submachinegun fell from her grip, slipping with a splash under the water. She grabbed onto the edges of the ice to stay on her feet, screaming in pain as sharp fangs bit down hard on the inside of her thigh. She tried to hold on to the ice with her left hand while drawing her pistol with her right, but the creature was pulling, tugging her down with immense strength, and her hand began to slip off.
Stephen
Having your throat slashed open is a hell of a thing.
When I first began studying the mage arts, I knew right away I wanted to be a Healer. It wasn’t only that it was considered the most challenging of the basic Disciplines; Healing resonated with me, the idea of being able to treat the injured and repair what was often irreparable through natural means.
At the time, the only way for me to afford school was a military scholarship. As you might imagine, the military was all too eager to pony up a couple of bucks to get their hands on a combat medic who could not only save the lives of fellow soldiers, but get wounded men back into the fight within minutes, rather than in weeks or months.
It was a good fit. I’ve always had an aggressive streak; well hidden, usually, but it was there. Early on, it was clear I could hold my own with the other soldiers with weapons and even hand to hand fighting.
On the battlefield, though, I rarely fired my weapon. Usually I was running around like a madman, answering that desperate call, “Medic!”, that’s been used by soldiers to plea for help for over a century.
Madman, is an understatement. I swear, there are no sane people who become medics. You run right into the teeth of a firestorm, not guns blazing, but oblivious to the gunfire around you, focused completely on your injured comrade. And you work feverishly to save them, ignoring the death whizzing by your ears, as if the act of ignoring the danger would dispel it somehow.
God loves medics, I suppose. I was never seriously wounded as a military combat medic. Once I did my five years of service, got out, and ended up in a Wreck Squad, I still never took that bad of a hit, even though I was right in the middle of things, rushing about, patching everybody else together without a thought for my own safety.
That night, That Night, it was no different. The Slashers were dangerous, certainly, but most of the wounds they were inflicting were not immediately life-threatening. Painful, bloody, gruesome, yes, but a slashing wound is usually nowhere near as deadly as a penetrating woun
d.
Think about it. We use bullets to punch holes into people, rather than launching circular saw blades or some other nonsense like that. You have to cut through quite a bit of tough tissue to reach something vital; it’s much easier to punch a hole in order to disrupt that which counts in a body.
Still, deep cuts can disable, especially psychologically. People who are cut badly often fall and give up even if the damage inflicted wasn’t enough to physically drop them. That was the real weapon of the Slashers… fear. They were too thin to shoot; they zipped around the room like insects, and they cut people to ribbons. Such an attack induces panic and gets a team to shoot each other by accident or simply freeze up from either not knowing what to do or the terror of facing a whirling forest of straight razors.
Inexperienced people shrug off how seriously a deep cut can terrorize you. I think of it much the same way in which people secretly shake their heads at a drowning victim. Hey, just keep swimming, you dummy, they think… that’s what I would do. Then they get into a swimming pool for the first time in a few years, and barely make it two laps before they clutch onto the lane rope for dear life before they suck a gallon of water into their lungs.
In the armchair, everyone thinks they’re invincible. Everyone thinks they’ll keep their cool. Everyone thinks the cliché can’t happen to them.
And yet, it does and it did, and I’m hardly an armchair warrior. I ran from person to person that day with the Slashers, patching together the gory lacerations that made my teammates bleed like crazy. I slapped them on the back hard after I’d put them back together, shouting “Go!” each time. I had to snap them out of that I’m hurt I’m hurt I can’t do anything shocked state of mind that comes with a painful and gory injury. Otherwise, they would stay stuck in a dazed, deadly haze.
I jumped from casualty to casualty, patching my friends back together, and came to Cass, who was sliced up badly enough that she was in danger of passing out without quick attention. I did what I do, and as I straightened up and gave her a smile, her eyes went over my shoulder and like an idiot, I turned right into it.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 8
