Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  I stood them both by one of the doorways that had been knocked off its hinges during the probe, and dragged a dead ghoul down that cell block’s hallway about fifteen yards or so. There was a support strut there, and I was able to prop the ghoul up in a seated position against it to use as a target. It wasn’t exactly the best shooting range, but it would have to do.

  “Is it going to be loud?” Mickey asked, holding the weapon away from her like a hot potato.

  “Hold it in tight to your shoulder. No, it won’t be loud. That thing on the front is a suppressor. It won’t make the weapon silent, but it will only make as much noise as a loud BB gun. We’ll be able to hear each other talk over it.”

  I had Mickey go first, then Jolly took a turn, taking shots at the dead ghoul I’d propped up as a target. Mickey was scared of her weapon at first, but after a few shots, she realized how easy it was to control, and she started getting some hits. Jolly, on the other hand, was too excited, and shot too fast… I had to get him to slow down and take his time so that he could hit the target rather than waste ammunition.

  I needed more time to train them; a lot more time, but we didn’t have it, so this limited handful of practice shots would have to do. At least they would be able to point their weapons in the right direction and make them go bang.

  At that point, Cass was hanging out with Lysette by the shield device’s concrete pedestal in the center of the room. Once I had Mickey and Jolly sorted out as best I could, I joined them by the pedestal, watching the smooth metal sphere spin around silently in its metal housing.

  Such a small, stupid thing for all of us to fight and kill and die for. Then again, the plutonium pit of a nuclear warhead is only about as big as a softball, and plenty of people would line up to fight like hell to take possession of one of those.

  “How do you want to play this?” I asked Cass once I’d joined them.

  “We don’t have enough shooters for an all-around defense,” she said. “You try to defend everything, you end up defending nothing. Kel can concentrate her forces at one or two points of attack. We need to do the same.”

  I nodded. “Flying squad?”

  A flying squad works like this. You keep a strong reserve force in the center of your defenses. You have a light force spread around the perimeter, to serve to spot the enemy and point out where the main attack is, and the flying squad moves to strongly support whatever area is being attacked at that moment.

  Cass was right; if you tried to defend everywhere at once, you ended up defending nothing at all. Spread your assets around evenly, and the enemy will concentrate all their forces in one spot, overwhelming your spread-out, thinned-out defenses. But with a flying squad, you could concentrate your defenses wherever the enemy decided to concentrate their attack.

  “Two flying squads,” Cass said. “Shifty and his Wreck Squad are one. You, me, Lys, Jolly, Mickey… we’re number two. Are they up to speed?”

  I shrugged. “Jolly might be okay. He’s never been in a gunfight, but he grew up in a rough neighborhood. During that probe, his instincts were good… he triaged the worst cases, saved the ones he could, left the ones he couldn’t. Kept his head.”

  “But?”

  “But, he’s used to making friends and fixing people, not drilling holes into monsters,” I said. “I think he’ll hold it together as long as we do the heavy lifting.”

  “And Mickey?”

  I shook my head. “She means well, but this is just too much for her. She’s never dealt with any kind of violence until today. She may try to step up, but I think we’re asking too much of her.”

  “No choice,” Cass said. “There’s no safe place here, and we’re not doing her any favors by trying to keep her from the fight. The hub gets taken, and she’s as dead as the rest of us.”

  “It’s a shame we don’t have more time to prep her… if she could find her fangs, she’d be a hell of an asset,” Lysette said. “Back when we first came to the hub, she stunned this entire room of people simultaneously. Who knows what else she could do?”

  “She did that to the living,” Cass said. “We don’t know if her Tricks would even work on Kel’s ghouls.”

  I shrugged. “Like you said, Cass. There’s no safe place. May as well give her whatever chance we can.”

  “All right,” Cass said, pointing down at the sphere spinning silently on top of the pedestal. “So this is the football. I confirmed with the guards that there is a failsafe that will electrocute anything that touches it, but let’s not count on that doing our job for us.”

  “We need to keep the sphere out of Kel’s hands,” I said.

  “At all costs,” she said. “She gets her hands on that thing, as powerful as it is now, God only knows what she’ll be able to do with it. Not to mention we’re going to need it should we actually survive this mess.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Cass traded a look with Lysette. “We’re going to need it, Dread, if we’re going to get out of this place.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about getting the hell out of here,” Cass said. “Out of this prison. I’m talking about finding that dirtbag Adjani that ruined our lives and putting about a thousand bullets in his ass.”

  “Cass…”

  “Don’t you ‘Cass’ me, Dread,” she said, practically snarling. “Don’t you be Mr. Reasonable on this. That son of a bitch ruined our lives. He experimented on us, lied to us, made us think that we were Vive Jobs and doomed to insanity just to see what happened next. We never would’ve gone after Revival Tech if we didn’t think we had no future. We never would’ve ended up in here. That asshole took everything away from us. Everything. Don’t you see that?”

  “I see that now, we have a second chance,” I said. “Jolly was right. We hit the damn lottery. For four months now, I’ve been rotting in a cell alone, with nothing to think about except how long I’ve got until I go insane and lose myself. It’s been a death sentence hanging over me… hanging over us both… and now it’s gone. Gone, Cass. We’ve got a second chance, the kind of second chance that nobody else gets in life.”

  “A second chance for what? To keep rotting in a cell? To sit in there, knowing that the son of a bitch who put you there is out free in the world, laughing at you?”

  “We’re the ones who put us in here, Cass. We did. We were cops… God, what were we thinking? Destroy a building? For what? Because we were pissed off? Because we felt like we were wronged? I should never have gone along with that. I should’ve talked you out of it. But after everything that happened with Polonius… I was just too damn tired, I guess. Too beat down. I forgot myself.”

  There were tears in Cass’s eyes, tears of rage, and I knew I was losing her. “I haven’t forgotten anything. I’m not going to forget anything.”

  “That bastard has to pay, Dread,” Lysette said.

  “You say the hell out of this,” I said. “Is this you? Have you been whispering this crap in her ear? I don’t know what sick, psychotic shit you did to get yourself thrown in here, but don’t go dragging Cass down with you.”

  She let out a laugh. “Drag her down? I’m the one who’s helping her become better than ever before.”

  Something about the way she said that made me pause. “What’s she talking about, Cass?”

  “You’ve been alone,” Cass said. “I haven’t been. There’s been a lot of empty hours, and I’ve been spending them… training.”

  “What does that…” I stopped, pinching my eyes shut. “Jesus, Cass? A street mage? You’ve been training as an Adept?”

  “Damn right she has been,” Lysette said. “She picks it up fast, too. She’ll never be able to go too far with it because of her age, but she’s definitely a step up from before.”

  I should’ve known. Back in the infirmary, when she’d pulled her pistol and fired a head shot on that gangbanger holding Mickey hostage… I knew that she had moved faster than before.

  “
If anyone finds out…” I said.

  “What? What are they going to do, throw me in prison?” Cass said. “We’re not cops anymore, Dread. We don’t have to be the good guys, or play by the rules.”

  “We didn’t play by the rules or do the right thing because of the badge,” I said. “We did it because of who we are.”

  “Oh, spare me,” Lysette said. “You were right, Cass; he is a Boy Scout.”

  “Hardly. But I’ll bet you think so. You graduated pretty quickly from SOCOM into… what, black ops? God only knows how dark you had to go for the twisted bastards who run black ops to think that you’d gone too far. What exactly did you do to get thrown in here?”

  “What I had to do before all of this is none of your concern.”

  “Had to do?” I said. “People like you always say had to do, when they really did exactly what they wanted to do.”

  “People like me?” Lysette said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And what’s that, Dread?” Lysette said. “Pray tell.”

  “Psychopaths trying to fit in.”

  That must’ve cut a little close to the quick, because Lysette’s face got hard… well, harder… and she took a step toward me. For a second there, it looked like things might end up getting physical. Even as strong and as fast as I knew she was, I didn’t care; at that point, I was willing to die on that hill if it ended up making even a little difference to Cass.

  It didn’t go that route, though. Cass stepped between the two of us and stopped it before it started. Probably for the best. I don’t think I stood much of a chance against Lysette in a hand-to-hand contest.

  “Enough, Dread,” Cass said. “Lysette’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Oh, I think Lysette’s got everything to do with this,” I said. “This isn’t you. What do you plan to do, Cass? Shoot your way out of here? Kill a bunch of cops along the way? That isn’t who you are.”

  “No, you know what?” Cass said. “Lysette’s right. You are a Boy Scout. Well, not me. I’m sick of being the obedient little doggie. I’m sick of letting people like Adjani roll all over me. I think it’s time I started looking out for myself for a change.”

  “Damn it, Cass… it’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore,” I said, and immediately regretted it. It was the wrong thing to say, but I was too damn tired to fight against it any more.

  “Maybe you don’t,” Cass said. “Maybe you should stay here, then, and rot in your cage like a good little boy. But I won’t.”

  She stormed off, and Lysette followed a moment later. I was left there, staring at the sphere spinning silently on the pedestal, wondering how everything had gone so wrong with Cass in the course of a short conversation.

  She’d always had a temper, and more than once, had said something out of anger to me that she had later apologized for, but this… I hadn’t seen her like this since we were first told that we’d been Revived, since our decision to destroy the Revival Tech building. Then, I’d been too tired and too lost in my own misery to talk her out of it. Now… now it felt like there was no way I could.

  It felt like I was losing her. It felt like I’d already lost her.

  I had to put all that aside. There was a fight coming, and a serious one at that. I couldn’t be lost in my concerns over what dark paths Cass might choose to follow once the fight was over. I looked down at my hands, clenching them into fists over and over again.

  Kel was coming. Let her come. I needed something to work out my rage on. Slowly, my mind stopped thinking about Cass and started focusing on the fight that was coming.

  “Dread?” Mickey asked, joining me as I strapped on my gear and loaded the SAW.

  “What’s on your mind, Mickey?”

  “Can I ask you a favor?”

  I wasn’t really in much of a mood for favors, but Mickey had that way of looking at you that made you give in. “What is it?”

  “I know… I know people don’t like me looking in their minds, but the thing is, if I do it to someone like you, who’s, you know, really brave and confident about fighting and all that… I get a little bit of that confidence in me. I know you don’t…”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Sure, why not?” I said. “At least I can get someone’s mind in the right direction.”

  She was quiet for a bit, during which time she must have been doing her Mentalist thing, I guess.

  “Wow,” she said after a second or two. “You, uh… you really want to kill something.”

  “Yes,” I said, raking the action on my machine-gun. “I do.”

  ***

  “What are they doing?” asked one of the prison guards.

  Cass looked over the bank of monitors displaying the feeds from all the cameras scattered around the prison. On several of the cameras, she could see ghouls dragging bodies and piling them up near the far entrances of several of the cell blocks.

  “Pre-positioning reinforcements,” Cass said. “Kel must have a limit as to how many ghouls she can raise at once. Once the attack begins, as we drop some of her ghouls, she’ll use those bodies to create more.”

  “Jesus,” the guard said.

  “That’s the bad news,” Cass said.

  “What’s the good news?”

  “It’s also telegraphing her moves. Now we know which cell blocks she’s planning on charging down to come at us.”

  Cass waved at a few of the prison guards to move. “Double up on One, Two, Four, and Seven.”

  They had designated each of the entrances to the hub with a number, to more easily keep track of them once the fighting started. The first entrance counter-clockwise to the hallway leading to the gate was One, with the rest sequentially numbered continuing counterclockwise, with Seven being the last entrance to a cell block. The hallway leading to the front gate was numbered Eight.

  Two, Four, and Seven all had their doors smashed halfway off their hinges from the probe, leaving Cass to wonder how Kel planned to take down the doorway to One. Most likely the same golems Kel used in the probe would also be used to take down the fourth doorway.

  “The cameras! The cameras are going dead!” the prison guard said.

  In ones and twos, Cass could see various screens going blank as ghouls tore down the cameras. Too late, Kel, Cass thought. You’ve already shown me your hand.

  “She’s blinding us,” she said. “Everybody, lock and load! Here it comes!”

  She took her place with the flying squads in the center of the hub and checked her weapon. The magazine loaded on top of it was made of clear plastic, and she could see that it was topped off with ammunition. A quick check of the chamber told her she was ready to go.

  “Dread, you’re our base of fire,” she said, flicking off her safety. “Lys and I take any that get too close. Jolly and Mickey, step in where you can. Watch where you point those weapons.”

  Her nerves were crackling and sparking, the old surge of anticipation before a fight, and Cass forced herself to push slow exhales out of her lungs to keep it under control. She needed that charge to give her an edge, not to overload her circuits and throw her off her game.

  “On me!” one of the guards suddenly shouted. “On me! On Four!”

  “Shifty, that’s you,” Cass said.

  Shifty led his Wreck Squad at a run over to the ruined steel door lying twisted at an oblique angle in the entrance to Four. He took a second to glance through the entrance and down the cell block’s hallway to assess the situation, then lined up his shooters in a firing line. The two prison guards joined the four Wreck Squad members and together, they began firing their rifles down the hallway in controlled shots.

  Cass bit her lip, fighting down the urge to run over and see what was happening. She couldn’t spread herself out like that; she had to trust in Shifty and his squad hold down his end of things so that she could hold down hers.

  After a few tense seconds, during which time Cass nearly broke and ran over anyway,
Shifty turned toward her and gave her a thumbs up before returning to firing his weapon down the cell block at the ghouls rushing toward his squad. He had it under control.

  Cass barely had time to settle before another guard stationed at Seven called out, “On me! On me! On Seven!”

  “We’re up!” Cass said, leading her squad at a run over to the entrance to Seven.

  What was left of the mangled door wasn’t going to be any help; it was completely off its hinges and lying on its side in the doorway. The ghouls would be able to rush right past it without any trouble. They were going to have to hold them back with gunfire.

  “Go back up One,” Cass told the prison guard who’d called out to them. “There’s only one guy over there.”

  She could see the enemy rushing down the hallway of the cell block toward her; at this distance, the charging bodies seemed to meld together into a single, churning mass taking up the entire width of the hallway. Cass could sense her entire squad stiffening up at the sight of it… a mass charge could shake the resolve of even a seasoned veteran like Dread.

  He stepped up next to her and shouldered his weapon, shaking the belt of ammunition coming out of the side of it in order to make sure there were no kinks in the feed. He had more belts of ammunition draped over his shoulders, but Cass knew those would go quickly once the shooting started.

  “Hold your fire, Dread,” she said.

  He looked at her in surprise. “Cass?”

  Normally, once the attack began, she would’ve had Dread start off the show and hold back the ghouls with the heavy firepower of his belt-fed weapon, but she needed to get Jolly and Mickey in the game. With as bad as she knew things were going to get, she couldn’t afford to let anyone be useless, so she needed to ease them into the fight while she could.

  “Mickey,” Cass said. “You’re up.”

  Mickey’s eyes got wide. “Cass, I…”

  “Don’t argue. Don’t talk. Put your weapon to your shoulder. Now, Mickey!”

  The little Mentalist raised her submachinegun, hands shaking. Cass moved so that she was standing next to and slightly behind Mickey, looking over her shoulder down the cell block at the charging ghouls.