by Tad Williams
I hadn’t necessarily expected to see the little bastards again, but I’d wanted to be ready for surprises, both human and otherwise, which was why the silver spray. In the seconds after the first wave had melted into puddles of hair and twitching fingers (making an entirely new, astoundingly foul odor I’d never encountered before, even in Hell) I had my machete out of its sheath, and I was wading into them. I’d economized by only having Orban silver-plate the edges of the blades, but they seemed to do the job just fine that way. Every time I managed to hack into the body, another of the creatures fell into burning, jiggling bits. Even when I only got an arm, it crippled the little horrors nicely.
Clarence had his machete out too, and together we were able to keep a clear space open at the top of the stairs, but the army of scurrying things seemed endless. Oxana sprinted back and forth along the wall so she could spray the contents of her tank across the hairy, skittering wavefront. It was like napalming them, but I knew that she couldn’t keep doing it forever. Even if it didn’t clog, the tank didn’t carry that much because the silver nitrate made it heavy as hell. I could only pray that no more of the things would show up.
Even as I was swiping away with my blade at the nasty, faceless creatures in front of me, tiny fingers clawed at my pants leg. I reached down and grabbed the nearest wire-haired squirmer and ripped it off me like a starfish off a rock, then threw it as far as I could. The exercise in clearance was pointless, because even as I pulled another away several more climbed the back of my legs. Within a second or two I could feel the terrible little fingers clawing at my neck.
I’m not a squeamish guy. You’ve probably guessed that by now. But being swarmed by those things brought me very near the screaming-and-running-in-circles stage. I was distracted from my growing fear when a great billowing cloud of flame rolled across the main force of crawlers. As they blackened and shriveled, the little monstrosities sent up an even higher-pitched chorus of inhuman shrieking that made my skull ache.
“No, Halyna! Save it!” I yelled. We weren’t really in terminal danger, not yet anyway, and I didn’t want her to set off the fire sprinklers, for oh-so many reasons, not least of which was the priceless works of art. I also didn’t know if Wendell had remembered to disable the fire alarms or not.
By now Oxana’s tank was spitting out little more than drips of silver solution. The Nightmare Children were still coming, but I thought I could see the end of them and felt pretty certain that we could hold them off at least long enough to escape the museum. Of course, it raised some questions—why were the crawling horrors here in the first place? Did Anaita use them too? And were they the only thing we had to worry about?
I was still making like Conan the Haloed Barbarian, hacking and slashing with my silvery sword, when I heard a wrenching noise from just above me, louder even than the shouts of my friends and the boiling-lobster squeals of burning swastikids. I didn’t dare look up, but I didn’t need to, because three seconds later several hundred pounds of living blackberry jam crashed through the vent in the ceiling and tumbled out of the air duct on top of me.
“Bird bug!” shouted Oxana.
While still thrashing around on top of me, the rubbery mass hit Clarence with a flailing appendage and tossed him across the room. He skidded and crashed into a display case with a noise like a grenade going off, flinging glass and irreplaceable ancient knick-knacks everywhere. As I writhed beneath what seemed to be at least two bugbears, I saw more large blobs force their way out of the ceiling through the ruined vent. You may remember that one of those bugbears by itself damn near killed me, and now it looked like at least a half-dozen were paratrooping in. Oxana vigorously blasted the newcomers, but their shiny hides only dimpled and blistered a little. Then the spray ended, and I knew her tank was empty. One of the hanging mucus-monsters swung at her like a pendulum, and although it didn’t hit her square, it still knocked her spinning into the near end of the Asian section. She slammed into a case containing a Buddhist thangka, fell, and lay motionless. Clearly, she had been knocked cold, but it looked like she was crouching at the Buddha’s feet. Yeah, Existence is Suffering, I thought. Stop. I get it, already. Oxana wasn’t an angel, and she wouldn’t get issued another body. I prayed she wasn’t hurt too badly.
Bugbears aren’t Hell creatures, I’d learned since the first encounter, but something older and stranger. They can be summoned and put to work, as some demons and most fetches can, but they have very little mind of their own. That means they’re limited but also fairly foolproof, since they’re not actively trying to figure out how to eat their summoner. The average bugbear really is about the size of a smallish bear, but beyond that the likeness is pretty shaky. They’re made of something heavy but soft like jelly, can stretch and even break apart before reassembling themselves, and wrestling with one that’s wrapped itself around you is like trying to pull apart a car tire by brute force.
So are they constrictors, I hear you ask? Shit, I wish that was all they did.
See, the weirdest thing about bugbears is that they can harden selective bits of their gummy selves, as I’d already discovered while fighting for my life inside my late Datsun 510. A blobby hole of a mouth can suddenly grow sharp, jagged edges; a flabby, fingerless paw can sprout hornlike claws. The only reason you know it is because the bit that’s hardening goes from the usual near-black to a sort of purple-white. But even if you chop those harder bits off, they just turn back into the rubbery dark stuff and then flow back to the original, which is why even in this extreme situation I wasn’t bothering to waste bullets on them.
So, General Dollar’s battlefield report: one unconscious Amazon, Clarence at least momentarily out of action, Halyna (and her flamethrower) somewhere in the darkness behind me, hacking gamely away with her own silver-edged blade. Which left me struggling by myself against two bugbears the size of young hippos, with more jelly on the way. The one nearest my face had gone toothy as a hagfish and was armoring itself with pale purplish spikes like a giant rubber sea urchin, but it was the one coiled around my chest that was squeezing me breathless. I got my machete into it and cut off as much as I could (which was about as much fun as sawing through old chewing gum that hates you and wants to hurt you) but at last it fell away. I staggered back a few steps, doing my best to saw away the parts of the other one that were biting me. Nightmare Children were still swarming me too, but I could only deal with one shrieking horror at a time.
You could slow the bugbears down by chopping them into pieces, but eventually they’d pull all their bits back together. Fire worked, but Orban had reminded me several times that Halyna’s flamethrower only had three good bursts in it, and she’d already used one.
I had the strange experience of watching my machete pass through what would have been the face of the bugbear trying to eat my head. I almost cut my own nose off, but twisted the blade and managed to do enough damage that the thing slid off me and dropped to the floor, already repairing itself.
I backed toward Halyna so that we could protect each other while we fought. Clarence (who was proving to be pretty darn tough) had recovered, and although he was limping and dribbling blood from his cuts, he picked up unconscious Oxana and then dodged and slashed his way through the swastikids and bugbears to join us. The three of us put our backs to each other and waited, weapons raised. For a moment it almost looked like a stalemate, except for the fact we were clearly losing. Three or four more bugbears oozed out of the ceiling and plopped to the floor, then raised themselves up on pseudo-legs so they looked like larger, hairless versions of the Nightmare Children. This was turning into an evil-jelly jamboree, and I really didn’t like the odds.
“Save the fire, Halyna,” I said as she aimed the nozzle.
“Why? They will kill us!”
“Trust me. It’s the only thing we know that works. We may need it to make an escape route.”
“Escape route!” Clarence’s voice was hoarse,
and he sounded like he was close to losing his composure. Fighting supernatural creatures can do that to you. “That’s a good one.”
“Hang in there, Harrison. We’ve still got blades. I’ve still got a bunch of silver bullets and so do both of you. I’ll tell you when to go to the guns.”
And then the nearest bugbears suddenly rose up like cobras, spreading themselves at the top as they surged toward us, humping up and down like fast and furious caterpillars. I slashed at the leading attackers with my machete, but the bugbears were wedged together so tightly it was like trying to chop the top off an entire ocean wave made of putty—I’d get through one and the blade would get stuck in the next, or the next. Also, the silver bothered them, but it didn’t kill them like it did the Nightmare Children.
We gave ground, but they were forcing us back against the nearest wall. I grabbed the first shieldlike object I could find, a broken Chinese screen, and used it as a bulldozer blade, trying to shove a way through them so we could make a run for it, but although it kept the nearest of the rubbery creatures off my face, the screen was too flimsy. One of the bugbears just reared up and flowed over the top of it like an octopus pulling a crab out of a hole. The monster’s weight nearly collapsed everything on top of me, so I let go and scrambled out of the way. A few seconds later the Chinese screen broke and disappeared under a mass of rampaging jelly.
Just when the wave of purple-black death had risen up so high in front of us that I was about to let Halyna buy us a few more seconds (because long-term planning takes second place to short-term not dying) the bugbears around us started to erupt in flashes of fire, a stitchery of sparkling little explosions that blew them instantly into smaller pieces, some of which continued to burn. A man-sized figure was running toward us through the flailing, smoking blobs. Our savior wore a shabby overcoat, and waved a pistol with a big silencer on the end. No, not just big, immense. I mean, it looked like something you’d see in specialty porn.
I confess to being surprised. “Sam? What the—?”
“Sam!” yelled Clarence. He sounded like a kid spotting his dad in the Little League stands.
My old buddy leaped over a bubbling pile of bugbear glop. Watching Sam jump is a bit like watching a rhino trying to fly, but I have to admit he got pretty good air, even though he didn’t quite stick the landing. “Talk later,” he said as he skidded to a tumbling halt beside me, almost knocking me over. An ugly, rubbery tentacle had wrapped around my leg, and I was busy hacking it off before its owner could get a more intimate grasp on me. “I’ve only got one more clip of these incendiaries,” Sam said, panting as he climbed back onto his feet. “If I’d known you were fighting the fuckin’ Shmoos I would have bought one of those crazy-ass drum magazines.”
I cut myself free, then got out my backup blade, a big old Bowie, and handed it to Sam. God, it felt good to see him, even if it just meant we were going to get fatally slimed together. “Silver-edged. It’s great on the spidery guys, not so much on the jellies. Give ’em a little more fire when you’re ready, and we’ll make a break for it.”
“I told you I’d try to make it to your party,” he said.
Even in the midst of the ongoing nightmare, I was irritated. “You did no such fucking thing! I left you about a hundred messages.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the kid.”
“Thanks,” said Clarence.
I decided to let the matter slide for now. “Let’s get going before we destroy any more of our priceless cultural heritage, people.” I wasn’t really making a joke—what had happened to the West Asian collection was pretty horrifying,
Oxana was still unconscious if not worse. I unbuckled her empty silver nitrate tank, then lifted her. She let out a moan of discomfort as I threw her over my shoulder, so at least she was still alive. “Light ’em up!” I shouted. “We’re getting out of here.”
Sam swung his Glock toward the thinnest part of the wall of ugliness before us. I don’t know what kind of suppressor he had on it, but for something that looked like it should be mail-ordered from the Big Jim Steele catalogue, it worked damn good. Even right next to him, I could hardly hear the sound of the shots, but I could see what they did, and I liked it. When they went off inside the gelatin-monsters, the monster blew to bits. Some shots cut through the nearest bugbears without exploding, but then blew up others farther back. Blazing jelly was flying everywhere, and some of it landed among the remaining Nightmare Children, who scurried away in flames.
I was heading us toward the nearest exits through a minefield of squirming swastika-monsters and quivering Jell-O bits trying to reform even as they smoldered. Keeping our break-in secret was now a lost cause, but I was still hoping to get out without setting off any alarms, just to improve our chances of escape. That said, there was no way I was going to fight all the way back up to the top floor. I still had bullets in my automatic: if worse came to worse, we’d blast our way out through a ground-floor window.
Sam’s Glock began clicking on empty chambers when we were only halfway across the room. Several bugbears were following us, hunching along the floor like elephant seals or waddling on distorted legs like mutant turtles, wide and low to the ground. The remaining Nightmare Children were also massing again, this time at the far end of the hall, spread between us and the exits. I was hoping that Halyna’s flamethrower would be enough to get us through the whole mess, but there was still another short hallway to cross before we would reach the door, and I didn’t think we’d make it past all those obstacles even if we had enough diesel fuel to set the entire museum on fire. I was using my own gun to try to clear some space in front of us, but the silver-tipped bullets weren’t very effective against so many enemies. I wished I’d thought of incendiaries like Sam had.
Swastikids began to drop down on us from the ceiling. Halyna screamed that one of them had got between her tank and her back.
In other words, things were really looking shitty.
Then three human-shaped figures stepped out of the shadows of the hall beyond, right in our path, but on the far side of the bugbears and the way-too-many Nightmare Children. These newcomers had guns—big ones, military assault rifles—and they were pointing them right at us. I put Oxana down so I would have my arms free.
“Drop your weapon,” said the tall one, pointing that wicked barrel not at me but at Halyna. It was my neo-Nazi Norwegian friend Baldur von Uruk von Dickhead, of course, dressed in some kind of formal black commando wear, wearing a massive medallion that, with his high collar, made him look a little like a Nehru-jacketed swinger in some old movie. So, all the time the creatures Sitri had taught him to control did his dirty work, the bastard had been waiting to step in when things were safe. I wished I’d killed him back at his little racist storefront.
“Drop it now, Robert Dollar, and do not try your disappearing trick again or I kill your girlfriend.” His two chums Timon and Pumbaa were with him, done up in some kind of homemade stormtrooper drag. They looked excited enough to piss themselves, but their barrels were steady, and I didn’t doubt they could take us out pretty easily. Four or five more Black Sun stormtroopers stepped up from the shadows, all armed with automatic weapons. That made more than half a dozen of them all together, and with much better guns than we had.
I didn’t want to risk Halyna getting killed just so this cheapjack, would-be Hitler could make a point. I held my Glock out carefully so he could see it, then tossed it away.
“And your sword, too. All of you. Throw away the weapons.”
I dropped my machete, then kicked it away. Sam and Clarence and Halyna followed suit. I was hoping von Reinmann would forget Halyna’s flamethrower, admittedly a long shot, but he made her take it off. Timon carried it back out of range, then he and Pumbaa looked it over like a couple of kids inspecting a video game they’d heard of but never seen.
“Now, Mr. Dollar,” said BvR, “the horn.”
/> “I told you, I don’t have it.”
“We are going to search you, anyway.” He nodded to Pumbaa. Instead of coming to me, the blond one grabbed Halyna and shoved her stumbling toward von Reinmann, who put the muzzle of his weapon against her head. “And do not be cute, Mr. Dollar.”
“You know, I just can’t help it,” I said as Pumbaa returned to frisk me. “Cute is part of my nature.”
He made me take off my backpack and kick it over to Timon to inspect. Timon found my backup gun immediately and slipped it into his own pocket, the little fucker. I’d had that.38 revolver for a long time, and the idea that some fascist punk was going to walk off with it burned me almost as much as anything else that was happening. Then Timon patted me down and removed a couple of more blades, some mags, and once again the cosh sewed into my sleeve lining. He slit the jacket and squeezed it out, waving the little cylinder for his friend to see, like he’d found gold.
“Man!” Timon announced as he found my last sharp thing, the razor blade in my boot heel. “This guy thinks ahead.” They’d clearly decided not to skip my shoes this time.
“Too bad you don’t,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be knee deep in felonies and probably selling your immortal souls in the bargain, just to push some tired old Nazi bullshit.”
“The Nazis were well-meaning amateurs,” declared Baldur. “We have bigger goals. But I am not bothering to explain to you. Where have you hidden the horn?”
“We didn’t hide it. We don’t have it.”
“Really? We did not give you time to find it? You are disappointingly slow, Mr. Dollar.” He looked at me for a long moment. Our Boy Baldur had very shrewd, very intense eyes. If you’d passed him on the street you wouldn’t have given him a second look, except for his height, but I’d seen enough of him now to recognize the gleam of real madness. “Then you will find it for me now, because I know that is what you came for.” He looked across the room to the hidden stairwell beneath the mosaic, now visible to all. “What is down there? That is not on the floor plans.”
