“Whatever you do, don’t shoot them! Stab them! Put honey on your weapons!” Angkor cried out as he threw the back door open and rolled out. A spidery limb shot out from around the side of the car on my side, stabbing at anything within reach. Talya screamed, fumbling for the door, and I followed her with Binah tucked under one arm as it banged on the window and then broke it in with a shower of broken glass.
“You have to shift!” I yelled at her, pulling my knife. It felt too small for this fight.
“I can’t!” She yelled back. “I can’t, I’ll lose control again!”
The scorpion creature was bumping the car up and down as it struggled to free itself. Down the gravel driveway, a Morphorde like a giant bacteriophage – a virus that looked like a bizarre crystal moon lander – was being savaged by five raccoons. A dying fox was impaled on its stamping needle legs, but the DOG was stumbling with the jerkiness of the walking dead. Bursts of automatic gun fire rang out from behind the back of the club. Whoever was back there had assault rifles.
“Josie is in there,” I said. “They’ll take her back and they’ll kill her. Do what you were born to do.”
Talya’s eyes hardened, and she held the machete out to me without a word. I took it, and she undressed carelessly, throwing her clothing to the ground. Her skin was still bloody as she stepped out of her borrowed jeans, her eyes on the car as the huge Morphorde finally heaved it up and flipped it off. Her eyes focused, intent and predatory, and she took off at a run towards it with a high-pitched shout, tearing and distending into her Ka on her way across.
“Come on!” Angkor grabbed my arm, and pulled me off as the prehistoric lion and unnatural demon collided with a roar. I glimpsed Talya hanging from its back, raking bones and chitin from its belly as it thrashed and collapsed onto the road.
We ran across the street, past the smoking club, and emerged into the chaos of battle. Dead animals and people were scattered across the yard, some of them mutated beyond hope or sanity. Motorcycles and cars were trashed. The clubhouse was whole, but the entire yard was given over to combat. There were a dozen mutated Weeders and ten men with rifles battling six of the Tigers. A bear was grappling on the ground with a DOG all too like the one that had killed Vassily, an amorphous mass of giggling mouths and snapping jaws. Jenner’s tiger was taking cover from the heavy fire; Zane’s cougar and three wolves were cornering another one of the scorpions, snapping at its legs as it reared and stabbed at them with scythe-like claws. Of the child, there was no sign.
Angkor and I drew our pistols and split without speaking. I rolled behind one of the upended Lincolns, sighted down, and popped a round that took one of the advancing gunmen in the back of the head. He spiraled to the ground, and the others around him scattered, drawing fire from the windows. Three of them fell, mowed down, and their corpses began to bubble and twitch on the soil.
“Shit.” That was where the DOGs were coming from. Every single one of them were DOG-bitten carriers.
The other gunmen carried on as if they didn’t notice their fallen comrades, even as Doberman sized cockroaches peeled themselves out of the remains of the corpses and began to tear at them, shoving unnaturally rotted flesh into their maws. I almost reflexively shot one of them, and only remembered just in time. Instead, I holstered Wardbreaker, poured honey over the machete blade, and charged into the fray.
The nearest bug pivoted towards me as I ran at it, throwing its legs up like an angry spider as I closed in and chopped down, breaking it apart like a coconut. The honey clung, and the creature screamed as its carapace cracked and its innards burned. The others whirled and ran at me, their exoskeletons grinding as they scuttled forwards. I backpedaled, keeping an eye on the ground. If I fell and they swarmed me, I was dead.
The tiger broke out of her cover during a lull in the gunfire, barreling out with a roar that vibrated through the blade in my hand. Jenner smashed into one of the men as he reloaded, seizing him in a paw and hurling him to the ground to crush his face. And then she threw him at me.
I stumbled back around the car as the body landed in the cluster of bugs, who scattered, and then reformed around the new corpse. One of them wormed its way under the chassis and struck at my leg before I realized what was happening. Jenner fell on the rest, tearing them apart with teeth and claw, while I kicked and chopped down at the gnashing mandibles that had shredded my pantsleg and the skin beneath. I drove the machete down through its carapace and twisted, and it squealed, purple-black ichor bubbling up and frothing around the sticky blade. I glanced over to see Angkor fighting three of the things with the ax, his face a mask of grim focus as he smacked one back, cleaved the head of the next, and then got hit square in the leg by a glob of acidic slime that set his clothes to smoking.
Angkor limped back, reaching down into his pocket to clutch at his injury as I ran forward to help him, dodging under the lines of fire as bullets spanged and zinged across the increasingly decrepit cars we were using for cover.
“Na Vazeal!” He cried the words out like a command, and slashed his hand out towards the pair of bugs as they gathered around him and lifted their hooked claws to pull him down. I was almost there when both of them burst into green flames, wailing in agony, and fell back to thrash on the ground as huge growths erupted from their carapaces, sending insectoid limbs and pieces of chitin tumbling to the ground. Angkor stumbled back, exhausted.
His yelling had caught the attention of two men with guns. We were close enough to the house that I could see them properly for the first time. They weren’t battle-hardened Mafioso: they were neatly dressed, slacks-and-collar shirt guys with Mormon hair, and they were fumbling on their safeties and reloads. There was something not right about their expressions. The impression I had was of people trapped inside human-shaped prisons, banging on the walls while their bodies locked, loaded, and advanced on our position.
I caught Angkor’s wrist on the way past and dragged him down behind a stack of tires as a burst punctured the air. They made dull sounds as they hit the tires well above our heads. The gunman was shooting high: further evidence for lack of training.
“These guys don’t know what they’re doing,” I said, gulping air between words. Men with my build aren’t made for running. “They’re expendables. They don’t know how to use those guns properly.”
“Someone wants them to get shot.” Angkor grimaced, pulling his melted clothing away from his leg. “The Deacon. Fucking hell… get the honey out and pour it over this. I’ll cover us.”
I complied without question, unscrewing the lid while Angkor bent around the stack and fired three precise shots. He ducked back just before I poured. The honey hissed on contact, and Angkor gnashed his teeth, his face turning purple with the effort not to scream.
A flicker of movement caught my eye, and I looked back to see more of the bacteriophages skittering down the gravel pathway. They were dividing as they ran, feeding off the dead animals – Weeders, I realized. The dead were small animals, some of them bristling with StainedGlass, some of them merely dead. Each one of bacteriophage’s legs was a feeding tube: They liquefied the corpses and sucked their innards into their weird crystalline bodies on their way into the lot. Each time they fed, every bullet that hit them, they split into more creatures.
My heart froze in my chest at the sight of them. The dead animals were the souls of those Weeders. Every one that the Morphorde consumed was gone. They would never incarnate again. My fear reached a brief crescendo at the realization of what I was seeing, and then abruptly faded as my ears filled with a blurry whine. The haze of battlefield dissociation fell over my senses like a shroud. There was a point where the cocktail of hormones and overstimulation made sound and fear irrelevant. All I had to do was survive before those things got us, got me, and ate my body and soul.
The remaining Twin Tigers shapeshifters roared and snarled as they fought on. From the street, I heard a woman’s high-pitched scream, louder than any HuMan throat could produce. It raised the
skin on the back of my neck.
“Talya,” I said. “She’s being overrun.”
“Fucking Morphorde. They just keep coming.” Angkor rapidly dropped his empty clip, slammed a new one into the pistol, and looked alongside at me. “We need to get out of here. I agreed to help them out: I didn’t agree to have my fucking Axon turned into a Slimfast smoothie by Phitophages.”
“There is a child who is going to die if they get into that house,” I said.
Angkor paled. “You got the Weeder kids back?”
“One of them. Come on.” I risked a look, and then gathered myself into a crouch. “We’ll go around!”
There was another long, blood-curdling scream, closer this time. It echoed like a claxon off the walls. I broke cover, scrabbling on hands and feet from the stack of tires to the car, just before the entire contents of Noah’s Ark charged down the driveway. An elk, bugling the ear-splitting war cry I’d heard from the street. Horses, wolves, wolverines, with a full-grown black rhinoceros in the lead.
The rhino bellowed like a train as he charged the scuttling horde of phitophages with a double horn longer than my arm. Macrofauna streamed in behind him, snarling, barking and shrieking their rage and fury. Weasels tore into the nearest cockroach, shredding it with teeth and claws; the horse thundered past the car to smash into the phitophages, while a mixed pack of barking dogs, howling wolves, coyotes and hyenas dodged around the yard and set on the remaining gunmen. Talya’s lion brought up the rear, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, one cheek grotesquely swollen with venom. If she noticed, it didn’t show: the instinct to hunt Morphorde overrode everything else, and she fell on the crowd of phitophages with a deep-bellied roar, slapping them away from her chest as they tried to swarm her and the horse.
Some of the phages staggered around the ends of the car. I charged the nearest with a shout, hacking at it with the machete. The blade bounced off its surface like I’d hit a block of diamond, and I had to dive as it began to buck and kick, spinning crazily on its path towards me.
Angkor sprung past me as I tried to run backwards, burying the ax into the glittering body of the giant virus as it reared to stab down with its legs. He pulled it free, and the head and haft dripped honey as he ducked down underneath as it let out a shrill whistle and staggered to one side. I jammed the machete into the open, smoking wound. Chittering, it collapsed to the ground and shattered.
“Get away from it!” Angkor yelled. “Don’t get any of it in your eyes!”
I shielded my face as the crystalline pieces of the phitophage exploded. Without looking to see what was going on, I did the only sensible thing. I covered my eyes, nose and mouth, and ran like hell.
Chapter 36
The Weeders had the advantage now. Morphorde fell beneath hooves and talons. The gray and violet fog was lifting from the street and the parking lot, revealing a mess of blood and bodies among the melee. I didn’t realize I was staring until Angkor pulled me by the shirtsleeve, and I joined him to scramble around the edge of the fight, holding my breath as animals tore Phitophages and giant insects into pieces. We reached the entry to the clubhouse, where the bear was defending the entryway. It bellowed at us as we approached, but didn’t stop us as we ducked inside and into a makeshift infirmary. People moaned and writhed, or simply lay still. They were burned, disemboweled, unconscious. Normal HuMans, people who had been in the bar when it was hit by the first wave.
“I have to help them.” Angkor rubbed a hand back through his hair, damp and sticky with sweat and dirt. His hands were shaking from the cocktail of adrenaline and exertion. “But my Phi is REALLY low. I don’t think I can do much good.”
“We have more important things to do. If Vanya still has the children, he’s going to be moving them from their current location to somewhere else.” I sheathed the machete and started for the bedrooms. “We have to talk to Josie.”
“Hey. Before you go hassling Josie, you need to talk to me.”
Angkor and I turned as one to face Ayashe. She was still nude, tall and Amazonian. She wore her skin like a suit of armor, as if her lack of clothing meant nothing to her.
“Was that you who led the charge? The one with the horns?” I averted my eyes anyway.
“Might well have been,” she drawled. “Jenner SOS’d me when the first wave rolled in. A bunch of guys went in and shot up the club to start with, and then this. I tried to contact the Pathrunners and only found five or six of them still sane. They filled me in with the rest. I had to round up the combatants in the Fires.”
“Well, thank you,” I replied. “You probably saved our lives.”
“It’s my basic duty to kin and kine. Besides that, you saved Josie from the worst sort of people,” Ayashe said, rolling her shoulders back. “Jenner told me you fought DOGs for her, that you were badly injured fighting to protect Angkor from your old gang and from this ‘Deacon’. You got us that computer, and the wave of arrests starts tomorrow. I don’t like your methods, but I owe you an apology for doubting your motives.”
“Accepted,” I said. “I understand you occupy a difficult position.”
“Yeah.” Ayashe rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m gonna have a hell of a time explaining this one to my supervisor tomorrow, believe me. They’re going to arrest everyone here on principle, but I doubt it’ll go anywhere. The Vigiles just ain’t ready to handle a Morphorde attack of this size. Their first solution is just to shoot everything. That only makes it worse.”
“Look, I’m sorry to rush this, but if we don’t start moving, then Vanya will,” I said. “Lily and Dru were using the home as a cover for trade in drugs and children. I think that Vanya was providing transport and protection for the goods, as well as participating in the production of the pornography. They weren’t killed with glass: they ejected it from their bodies when they died. They had some kind of virus, some kind of disease that made them sick in the head. Mason has it. Duke got it when he was stabbed with a payload in a StainedGlass shard.”
“Yen,” Angkor said. “That’s what it’s called.”
Ayashe sighed, and turned her head to the side as she sucked a tooth in thought.
“Just before I left the Organizatsiya, my Avtoritet said something strange,” I continued. “He wanted me on a last minute cleanup job. One of the couriers was killed when he went to go and pick up a ‘regular delivery’. He said something about him being torn apart, something about symbols being left on the ground at the murder site. I think that Lily and Dru must have killed him, and then they were killed and the kids taken by force when whoever is controlling this realized that they were getting out of hand.”
“When was this?”
“Late August,” I replied.
“Spotted Elk initiated them as honorary Elders into the Four Fires around that time,” Ayashe said. She exhaled thinly through tight nostrils, frowning. “He has a bottle of some potion he’d gotten in a lifetime ages ago, and it’s supposed to clear out disease. You have to take it to be an elder in the Fires. He told me that’s how he can weed out anyone with ill intent.”
“Did you drink it?” I asked.
“Me? I couldn’t. I was already with the Bureau and they have a total ban on any Vidge consuming potions or unknown substances, magical or not.” She shook her head.
“Weird. The only thing I know of that’s anything like what you describe is called ‘whimsy wine’,” Angkor said. “It’s a really old draft that preserves Gift Horse blood in a suspension of elderflower cordial and honey. Literally lasts forever, if the Gift Horse who donated the blood is still alive.”
Ayashe blinked rapidly. “That sounds like it’d be sweet. The stuff he had wasn’t. I didn’t drink it, but I got a whiff of it once. It was like red wine, but really bitter. There were herbs in it.”
“Well… euun…” Angkor rubbed his chin, struggling to come up with words. “I don’t know many herbs that are capable of cleaning out a Yen infection. None of them are bitter. Morphorde are killed with honey, pepper
mint, sweet lemon oil, things like that. You know, I was supposed to tell people something about him or something he said. It about was a talk we had, but I can’t remember any of the last month.”
She guffawed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, seriously.” Angkor frowned. “The last thing I really remember before I was captured was… we were talking with about Korea and agreeing that I needed to look into the Templum Voctus Sol angle...”
“Templum Voctus Sol? The TVS?” Well, that was one mystery explained. “What happened at the bunker?”
“I got hit from behind by a really powerful Phitometrist,” he replied. Then he glanced at Ayashe. “The Deacon. He’s a Temporalist, a mage who can affect time.”
“Can he see the future?” I asked.
“Probably.” Angkor nodded.
She nodded. “Do we have any idea who this guy is?”
Angkor shook his head. “I was locked into a magic-suppressing collar and blinded for however long I was out, but I know for sure that he’s male.”
“I think that this Yen disease must have originated in the Pathrunners,” I said. “Michael must have been the vector. He gave it to his flock, then Lily and Dru, then Mason. He must have killed John Spotted Elk when they went to Lily and Dru’s changing ground.”
Ayashe pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know. The ghoul squad went to the changing ground yesterday to pick him up. I have to go I.D his body tomorrow… that’s going to be rough. Why do you think they killed him?”
“No idea,” I replied. “Maybe they thought he was too close to learning about their goals. Maybe he said something on the way up.”
Ayashe suddenly seemed very tired. When Jenner walked up and offered her a coat – Vassily’s old trench – she took it and slung it on, belting it at the waist like a robe.
“You get a good look at him?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jenner replied. “They caught him mid-shift, too. He was all fucked up. Half man, half deer.”
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