42

RAT RACE

Nothing resembling a phone or radio was working in the sewer tunnels beneath Rockwall Tower West, so I heard about the strange cloud outside of it through an ad hoc telegraph system. Werewolf observers were spread out in a line aboveground and below—it didn’t take many wolves—and they relayed information verbally, relying on each other’s sensitive hearing. The only difficulty was the human tendency to reinterpret. Psychologists have done studies where a group of people will pass a single sentence down a row by having each person whisper in their neighbor’s ear, and the sentence will almost always get distorted by the time it reaches the end of the line, usually in minor ways, sometimes to the point where meaning is drastically altered or open to interpretation. With twenty people, “The roof of my house caved in” might become “The top of my house collapsed.” With forty people, it becomes “I lost my house when the stocks collapsed.” With sixty people, it becomes “I lost everything in the stock market crash.” With a hundred people, it becomes “Some loser died in a stock car crash.”

We only had eight werewolves relaying information, and the sentences I heard coming from farther back down the sewer tunnel were simple and straightforward.

“Some kind of fog just sprang up. The snipers can’t see anything.”

Long pause.

“We can’t see nothing either. The B team is going in.”

Long pause.

“It’s cold.”

Brief pause.

“Helicopters won’t work.”

Much longer pause.

“Some kind of giant thing is in the fog.”

That was enough for Ben. Simon had been forced to stay behind to coordinate all of the different teams moving on the tower above-and underground, and Ben had taken charge of the underground efforts simply because that’s where the most werewolves were concentrated. Wolves do well in the dark, technology or no technology, but we don’t do so well in organized formations once the blood starts spraying. Ben could keep a large group of wolves in line when no one else could. Kasia and I were scouts, and Sig was behind us in case we met something spooky. We were going in, and I don’t know if it was the right decision, but I don’t know that there was a right decision. It was Ben’s call, and he made it.

I put on my helmet. Its base had pressure-sensitive tabs that locked into small openings in the iron collar that was sheathed in my body armor. The openings showed through vents in the Kevlar, and when the helmet was engaged, little studs stuck out of my neck Frankenstein-style. The setup protected my carotid artery and made it harder for beings stronger than me to snap my neck. I also had a katana sheathed on my back, a sawed-off shotgun in my hands, a Ruger Blackhawk on my right hip, two silver steel knives in sheaths built into the outside of my boots, and some shotgun shells and chem sticks in various easy-to-reach loops, pouches, and pockets. I was more loaded down than I liked, and I still didn’t feel prepared.

A safe distance ahead of me was a mismatched brick wall that covered up an access point to the tower’s central air system. If by some miracle the industrial-sized fans were working, we would flood the building with nerve gas; otherwise, forget it. A low-explosive charge took the wall out.

The resulting dust cloud provided some cover, but it also meant that Kasia and I were partially deaf, mostly blind, and unable to smell much when some things cloaked in dust mess and darkness gagged and hacked loudly in front of me. They were distinctly animal sounds. I had a feeling that whatever was making that noise wasn’t there to confer with me about the possibility of setting up a social engagement, so I discharged one of the barrels of my shotgun on general principle.

More than one creature screamed in response, high-pitched shrieks of rage and agony that cut through the ringing in my ears. I discharged my other barrel, and Kasia’s handgun, a Desert Eagle without a suppressor, began sparking and roaring beside me. It gave me enough time to reload, but then Kasia gave a surprised grunt, and her gunfire ceased. I discharged both barrels of my shotgun at once, dropped the weapon, and drew a knife in each hand. Sharp claws made several small slices in the armor over my left forearm, and I disemboweled whatever large furry thing was behind them. I know I disemboweled it because … well … never mind.

Something else tried to skitter past my left side on clawed feet, and I tripped it and stabbed down into a writhing and squealing mass. A chem stick flew over my head from behind, and by the time it landed, the dust was clearing enough for me to get partial glimpses of bodies: fast-moving furry bodies in a square tunnel maybe eight feet wide. There were at least a hundred of the things. They were humanoid and clambering over their dead, some of them clinging to the sidewalls on all fours. Not werewolves. Rats. Man-shaped, human-sized rats. I tore out a throat and then went down beneath a biting, squirming avalanche, still holding on to my knives in that mosh pit of the damned.

It actually could have been worse. I’m stronger and heal faster than your average idiot, and my throat, eyes, wrists, groin, and stomach were protected from sharp edges by Kevlar and dense plastic plates, or reasonably so. I managed to kill the rat thing that was most directly on top of me, then killed the next ratling that tore the corpse away, then the next. Slice, rinse, and repeat. Doing this helped me keep a barrier of dead flesh between them and my most vital organs. Most of the damage I took was minor, claw slashes and fang punctures to my calves, forearms, and shoulders. The immediate danger was a slash on the femoral arteries in my thighs or the veins in my wrists, or a hard blow to the side of my head. Something tried to take the time to gnaw through my right boot, and I kicked its teeth down its throat in a way that probably broke its neck in the bargain. A bullet or its ricochet fired by a knight behind me slammed into the top of my helmet, a real bell-ringer, but the bullet had passed through some meat to get to me and the helmet held up. So did I. I managed to hang on to my knives and stab something next to me in the groin. Sig was somewhere behind me, firing tracer bullets so that other knights and members of the Round Table could fire effectively into the mass that had buried me.

There was a flash and a bang and new heights of squealing, and the weight on top of me lessened slightly. Then my dark new world crumpled and bucked with an explosion that didn’t impact anything but air. A pressurized whispering sound filled my ears, and a hissing mist obscured my glimpses through the dim light of the chem stick. Teams made up of knights and werewolves from four different access points were flooding the tunnels with the nerve gas we’d brought along in case of skinwalkers. It was a crude, dense gas. It had to be. My helmet had a breathing filter built into it that scrubbed the contaminants out of the air before I breathed them in, and more subtle gases would have at least partially made it through or demanded a more sophisticated breathing apparatus. It was the only reason we Round Table members had agreed to wear knight armor and helmets. Wolves don’t like being muzzled.

The rat things around me stopped focusing on attacking, though their unfocused thrashing was almost as bad. They screamed and scurried off me in all directions, some of them charging the mass of knights and werewolves behind me with their last breaths, some of them trying to flee. Soon the rat things began convulsing violently, and the convulsions didn’t last for long. The dust had dispersed enough that I had a clear view of the proceedings. I kind of wished I didn’t. There was ichor and just plain ick everywhere. I was covered in small cuts and punctures and felt like I’d just been in a dodgeball tournament played with baseballs, but I could move.

The one bright side—other than me not being dead, I mean—was that the rat things reverted to just plain rats upon their death, though each body seemed to fall apart into multiple rat corpses. No wonder there were so many of the damn things. It might be that they were based on some kind of Nutcracker or Cinderella tangent, but more likely they were inspired by Gallic stories about loup-garou, evil spirits that fashioned humanoid bodies out of possessed animals.

I heard Kasia grunting to my left and looked over. She was sprawled against the remains of the brick wall we had passed through, tugging at a jagged piece of pipe that was embedded in the plastic plate over her heart. Her efforts were hampered by the fact that her right hand was still a nub, and a bloody nub at that. Some rat things had been chewing on it.

Somewhere fairly far off I heard a door shut. I almost took off running to pursue the sound right there, but in the last two minutes my function had shifted from scout to perimeter guard. The knights and werewolves behind me were performing basic first aid on the severely wounded and sorting out the injured. There was the unharmed group, the defenseless group, the ones who could still hold a weapon and maintain a line until reinforcements arrived, and werewolves who would regenerate enough to function on the go. The knights who could still continue on were already reloading, reorienting, and reorganizing, in that order, but they needed a sentry. I don’t know if it was deeply ingrained training or pack instinct that made me walk over to Kasia and grab the pipe by its shaft, grounding her with a foot on her thigh.

“Can I pull it out?” I didn’t want to yank the pipe if it was the only thing holding Kasia together.

“It is only in up to the tip.” I could hear the smirk behind her helmet. If Kasia was still up for sexual innuendo, she was fine. The pipe came out cleanly, and I didn’t hear any wet sounds or sense any fluid resistance. If the sharp point really had made it through the thick plastic plate and Kasia’s body armor, it hadn’t done so by much.

“Yo,” I called out. This was the call word that meant I wasn’t reporting something urgent, like an imminent attack or tunnel collapse or the smell of explosives. Ben was busy passing information to a werewolf further down the relay system, but he immediately stopped and listened to me. “What?”

“Those rats were conjured up just like the monsters in New York.”

“And?”

“So someone who can conjure monsters out of thin air knows we’re here. We need to make a mad dash for the finish line.”