Felicity is hemmed in. She snaps off shots with increasing speed. Where one cultist falls, another steps in. They are mindless in their relentless assault. She runs out of bullets, scrambles for a fresh magazine.
The cultists charge.
I slam into them like a wrecking ball. Kayla’s wooden sword whips through flesh, tearing muscle, ripping at bone. I catch the first one low in his back, wrench sideways and send him tumbling and tripping through his own spilling guts. The blow carries on, smashes into another thigh, bites deep. The woman yells, spins, whips her massive blade at me as she falls. I leap sideways, my stick gouging a great funnel of flesh from her as I do. Her screams spill with her blood.
The cultists’ charge falters. Felicity drops her gun. I see it clatter on the gravel of the trail. She closes distance, ducks under a blade, gets inside their reach. She punches the same way she shoots. Short sharp jabs, aiming for nerve cluster, for weak points. A knife strike to a man’s wrist. His sword drops. The other hand buries a stiff finger into his Adam’s apple. He follows his sword to the ground, gagging. She whirls, ducks another blow. Her cupped hands clap down hard either side of a woman’s head. The woman howls, reels away, blood streaming from her ears.
Three more. A sword whips up in front of my face. The tip of my nose screams pain. Blood is running down from a cut across my forehead. I try to blink it away.
It is the big man with the electrified sword. The one who set the blood to steaming. I thrust at him. Maybe if I can end him, I can end his spell.
He bats my blow away, the momentum of his massive sword sending me reeling sideways. There is a massive spark as my stick meets his sword. Wood blackens. His blade is still electrified.
My mind scrambles as fast as my feet. The current is still active. He’s sustaining whatever spell is animating the blood. If I can get him to drop the blade… Even better, if I can do it before he drops the spell…
Electricity, as explained to me, is the lubricant needed to reach between realities. Without it there is what Clyde and Tabitha refer to as “inter-reality friction.” In my experience that largely resembles the spell-caster blowing up.
I redouble my attack, feint left, feint right, then go in hard left again. I want to get in close, inside the reach of the cultist’s blades. These bastards are useless at close quarters. But my opponent knows that too. He pushes me back. I feint again. I step forward and in.
The flat of the cultist’s blade smashes against my shoulder, sends me flying. I jam out a hand, skid over earth, skinning my palm. My mouth feels full of blood.
By the time I get my bearings he’s coming at me. The sword is held high over his head. His mouth is wide open, an utterly silent howl of victory. His blade descends.
I jump forward, toward him, desperate. Close the distance. But I don’t close it enough. Oh shit. Oh nuts. I whip my stick upwards in a flat arc.
Wood bites flesh. I feel the tug of resistance, then free air.
His wrists. I just chopped through both his arms at the wrists. Holy shit. Kayla really knows how to carve a stick.
His sword flies away over my head, flipping end over end, arcing down, bisecting a cultist perfectly, balls to brow. Blood is a monochromatic rainbow launching from my attacker’s truncated arms.
The spell. He didn’t drop the spell. And the electricity is gone. And I got in close.
Realization strikes me just before the detonation does. It catches me full in the face. I am bowled over massively. I eat dirt, gasp at sky, eat dirt. I am a ball of flying pain. I can feel chunks of the detonated cultist digging into my skin.
I land on my back. The sky spins.
Around me—more explosions. The steaming pockets of blood all detonating, like small land mines. The valley rings with the cacophony of violence.
I don’t know how long it is until I can pick myself up. The world seems curiously silent now. Everyone is standing dazed. Somehow I am still alive. Given the pain I’m in, I’m not sure I’m glad. Still, at least I haven’t rewritten reality just yet.
I see Felicity stand, her features obscured by dirt and blood. And that galvanizes me somehow. While she’s still here, I do have something to fight for.
A cultist struggles to his feet before Felicity. He bares his teeth. They have been sharpened to fine points.
She shoots him in the head.
God, my job is weird.
“To me!” I yell. “MI37, to me! Make for the fort. We can defend the fort! We can do this! MI37 to me!”
I start to jog forward. It’s as much as I can manage. Running is beyond me, as much as I need to do it. Felicity falls into line beside me as I pass her. Then Clyde and Tabitha are up and with us. Tabitha still clutches her laptop to her chest. A chunk of plastic has been gouged from its case, obscuring the manufacturer’s logo. Clyde’s face looks scorched, blast marks giving him panda eyes. Kayla and Hannah fall in with us too. Kayla has Hannah by the wrist, helping pull her along. Behind us I hear the pounding footfalls of Volk and Hermann. I glance back. They are stumbling too now, wires and pipes hanging ragged from them. Hermann has a cultist’s dead body caught in a jagged knee joint. The body flops obscenely.
Around us, cultists stagger back to their feet, into a run. They flock after us, a great ugly wedding train of murderous fuckers. We are haggard and bewildered. Only the fact that we’re more used to being blown up than they are seems to have given us an edge. My limbs scream at me that death would be better than this. But whatever inner core of sheer obstinate stubbornness has kept me alive so far makes me stay on my feet.
We stagger round a curve in the trail and Lang’s lab is before us. A yellow stone fortress hacked into the mountainside. Our goal. Our safety. Our savior. Little more than a hundred yards away.
Except it is not safety. It is not our savior. It’s where the bastard cultists are coming from.