The Seahawk put down on the hospital helipad, and the SEALs poured out of the cabin to ring the aircraft. Christ knew what they were expecting to fight off, but they were all ready for it. Down on one knee, lying prone on the concrete, scanning left and right, the sky, the small structure where the local police officers waited. Compton, Ashbury, and Dave followed them.
As the big bird took off, Dave watched four more aircraft, weird airplane-helicopter-looking hybrids, orbiting the hospital. “Ospreys,” Ashbury said when he asked what the double-bladed machines were. A couple of faster-looking helicopters had joined the transports, bedecked with an assortment of weapons.
Gunships, Dave thought. For sure.
Captain Heath keyed his mike and ordered the marines to await further instructions. The noise from so many aircraft was enormous. Louder than anything he’d ever heard on a rig.
Dave felt as anxious and unsettled as he had when each of his sons was born. He’d known the world was changing then, too, the world of Dave at least. And it was one of those things he’d never told anyone, certainly not Annie, but he didn’t expect the change to be all for the better.
He felt the same worry gnawing at him now. He wanted to call it free-floating anxiety because a hot psych major he’d balled in college had said that once and he’d liked the sound of it. It seemed to explain a lot of shit, especially about the hot psych major. But when he examined the feeling, there was nothing free-floating about it at all. Nor was it a sensible reaction to the circumstances.
He looked at Marty’s splitting maul, which he held with both hands.
Lucille.
It was this fucking thing; he was sure of it. Lucille ached to be buried deep in the broken bone and flesh of the Horde.
“Not going to land them?” Dave asked, nodding at the choppers, as much to distract himself as anything.
“Can’t land them on this.” Captain Heath gestured at the pad. It was way too small. “No sense putting them here when they’re faster in the air. I’ll keep them as a reserve until I know what’s going on. I’ve got so many conflicting reports, it’s hard to know what we’re dealing with.”
Bent over, with the ferocious downdraft trying to knock them off their feet, the odd, disparate group shuffled over to meet the locals. The police captain gave Dave and Lucille a doubtful once-over but said nothing.
“You Captain Heath?” the man shouted. He looked to be in his fifties, with a small potbelly and thinning silver hair. He’d taken off his NOPD baseball cap to avoid losing it to the rotor wash.
Heath introduced himself and the two professors but not Dave. Or Lucille.
“Captain Eichel,” the cop yelled over the roar of the choppers. “Len Eichel, Sixth District, NOPD. We’re glad to have you boys with us, sir.” Eichel couldn’t help taking another glance at Dave. Though Dave was dressed in camouflage trousers and body armor, his navy blue hoodie and the growing tufts of decidedly unmilitary hair on his head marked him out as different even among the SEALs, who took a relaxed approach to their appearance. The splitting maul didn’t help matters, either. The two eggheads didn’t draw the police officer’s attention in the same way.
“What is the situation, Captain?” Heath shouted. “My briefing was pretty spare about details on the ground.”
“On the ground, under it. All over,” said Eichel. “911 is jammed with calls, and my people are having trouble sorting them all out. I’m getting reports of these things between Toledano and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. So far, aside from prank calls, there’s nothing outside of Sixth District that I know of.”
“Describe them,” Heath said.
“They’re like rabid people-eating dinosaur apes or something,” Eichel said. He consulted a notebook for a moment. “Hairless gorillas. The pig monsters from Star Wars. The bad guy from Galaxy Quest—”
Heath cut Eichel off. “Okay. Do you have firm numbers?”
“No, I haven’t been able to get that yet,” Eichel said. “What the fuck are they, Heath? Some sort of experiment gone wrong? Is that why you’re here? ’Cause those Greenpeace guys been saying on the news that this—”
“They’re dangerous. But we can take them,” Heath said, cutting him off. “Is that good enough for you?”
“It’ll have to do for now, won’t it?” Eichel said with a sour expression that sort of impressed Dave. This guy was pissed, but he wasn’t going to dick around. He just wanted to deal with the problem. Understanding what the problem was could wait.
“I can brief you on the way down,” Eichel said. “We’ve got armored transport that can take you right into Central. Roads are crammed with traffic coming out. Vehicles. People on foot. It’s a damned mess. There’s a lot of armed civilians down there, too. Most of the fire you can hear is from them, not my teams.”
As the choppers departed for whatever mission they had next, Dave was able to hear the crackle of gunfire that had been masked by their presence. A lot of gunfire.
Heath pushed a button on his headset and issued orders to get off the roof. A moment later Allen and the monster SEAL called Igor began moving among the SEALs, not shouting, just quietly directing them away from the roofline and toward the little concrete structure housing the stairwell that would take them down.
“Captain Eichel, we will need a firm estimate of how many hostiles we’re dealing with. Not an exact number. Just a good estimate.”
It was Ashbury, with her finger poised over a small, glowing iPad in a ruggedized case.
“Hostiles? Is that what we’re calling them?”
“Well, they’re pretty bloody hostile, I think you’d agree.”
Eichel nearly stumbled on his feet as they rushed down the stairs. “That they are, miss. And no, as I told your Captain Heath, we have no idea. It’s an unholy bedlam down Central. I got four officers down already. Hospital here’s overwhelmed with civilian casualties, mostly gunshot wounds. But there are some bad ones, too, people with animal bites on them. And there’s thousands more on the streets, heading out across the rest of the city.”
“Dave?” Professor Ashbury said. “You got anything?”
“Nada,” he answered quickly before thinking of something. “Captain … er, Eichel. How long since your first calls came in? How long these things been running around, you think?”
The SEALs had all withdrawn from their positions around the helipad, and the group moved en masse into the stairwell. Their boots hammered on the concrete.
“Who are you?” the cop asked, eyeing the big maul Dave carried over his shoulder.
“Consultant engineer,” Heath said before Dave could say anything.
Eichel wasn’t convinced, but again he had to take Heath’s word for it.
“We had initial reports of a vehicular accident at South Claiborne and Toledano, possible driver under the influence. That became a report of a rabid animal eating the driver and an escaped ape killing a bystander.”
Eichel shook his head. He’d obviously seen a lot in his years, but this …
“And it’s not even a full moon. When our officers arrived, they found two of these … things eating someone in front of a McDonald’s. Shots fired, which bagged one of the bastards. The other ran off,” Eichel said, half out of breath, sweating with stress and exertion.
They stopped on a landing for just a moment lest the overweight policeman have a heart attack. He caught his breath and motioned for them to move on. Dave recognized Eichel’s distress. It had been all too familiar to him until a day or so back. He was a big man, once powerful and still strong, but too many hours behind a desk sucking down bad coffee and free doughnuts had done its worst. The wheezing pant as Eichel sucked in breath, the high color on his cheeks—yeah, Dave Hooper recognized all that. One hand went down to his own stomach. Flat and hard.
As they started moving again, though, Dave felt just a touch weaker. Maybe a little light in the head and shaky on his feet. He pulled out an energy bar and chewed without joy or even much relief.
Eichel continued between breaths: “That was hours ago. Everything was starting to calm down. We had someone from the university coming out to look at the thing we shot down. Then a bunch of these medievalist-type bow and arrow bastards come boiling up out of the ground.”
“I need firm numbers on how many we’re dealing with. What you thinking, Dave?” Heath asked.
Hooper answered that by asking Eichel another question.
“Central City? Is it crowded? I don’t know New Orleans that well. Central City sounds like an office park. Did it flood in Katrina? Is it, you know, abandoned?”
Another flight of steps.
“Oh, hell, no,” Eichel told him. “No offices there. It’s residential. Must be twenty thousand plus live down there. A busy part of town for us most nights. Although a lot of the locals seem to be getting the hell out now. Why?”
Dave shifted Lucille from one shoulder to the other as he rounded another landing. She was starting to get heavier, and even though it was bullshit crazy, he’d have sworn she felt sullen or even despondent. Not that he’d be saying anything like that right now. Not to this police captain. He directed his answer at Heath and Ashbury.
“It’s just a guess,” he said, “but I don’t think they’ll have spread out too far yet. With that much prey packed in so tightly, the Hunn will feed. They won’t be able to help themselves. It’ll be like sharks in a frenzy. If there’s any Sliveen, they’ll be more disciplined, spread out individually in a loose circle around the raiding party. You’ll have to watch for them.”
Captain Eichel regarded him with frank disbelief.
“Son, what flavor of crazy are you?”
“Minty fresh,” Dave said as he rummaged through his memories again. “Of course, it could be a small hunting party, like back at the Longreach. There might only be a few of them.”
“A suggestion,” Professor Ashbury spoke up. “Dave, you said they last recalled us as being pretechnological, correct?”
“Yeah, they were the ones with the technology,” Dave said. “Such as it was. They haven’t changed much.”
Ashbury nodded. “They’ll be experiencing their own culture shock at the changes that have occurred since their last encounters with humanity. That may give us an edge.”
“They could be off balance.” Heath nodded, then raised his voice just a notch without yelling. “We have an opportunity here. Let’s expedite, gentlemen!”
The tightly packed pod of military personnel increased its speed down the steps, all but pushing Eichel in front of them. Dave had to marvel at Heath’s agility on that robot leg. It must have been hell where the metal joined the flesh. Compton, he noted as he turned on a landing, had drifted to the rear of the pack, where he didn’t have to move as quickly.
“Captain Eichel, can you get your patrol officers to disengage from any contact with the hostiles?” Heath asked. “Get them to work clearing civilians from the area. You got a SWAT team out there?”
Eichel nodded and puffed. “I’ve got two tactical platoons. One is at Sixth District station waiting for instructions. Other platoon’s with me, here. Also got Louisiana state police SWAT in by helicopter.”
“If you would, detach them to us,” Heath said. “I don’t have formal authority, but it would be best if we worked together.”
“Done,” Eichel said. “We can argue about the posse comitatus and invoicing later.”
That sounded like a joke, but it probably wasn’t, thought Dave, who was a veteran of many small but vicious bureaucratic wars with both the feds and his own head office.
They arrived at a ground floor parking garage. Hundreds of people were crammed into the space, which had been transformed into a triage center. Two armored vehicles waited on the street outside. A quartet of Crown Victoria police cruisers were parked at odd angles to the stairwell with their doors open, officers standing outside or opening trunks to gather up body armor and weapons. Dave smelled blood and fear and a rich stink of human waste thick on the air. It was chaos. There was no order to the mob scene. Men and women with terrible wounds bled out, screaming on the tiles. Children in hysterics ran around or simply rolled themselves into tiny balls and hid wherever they might. Medical personnel in bloody scrubs and in some cases street clothes moved around, trying to bring order to the mess.
Dave almost barreled into Emmeline Ashbury, who was brought up short by the spectacle.
“Watch where you’re going, Thor,” she snapped.
He experienced the strange warping and stretching of time he recalled from the morning he’d thrown the weight bar into the air. Everyone around him was moving as though caught in taffy. He adroitly stepped around her to avoid a collision, and the world suddenly sped up again.
Ashbury jumped as though he’d popped into existence in front of her. She uttered a little cry of surprise, but the momentum of the SEALs pouring out of the stairwell and making for the nearest exit at a jog carried them along.
“I need a map,” Heath said.
Eichel had one at hand. “Will this do?”
“That’ll be fine.” Heath stepped over to the hood of the nearest cruiser and unfolded the map, scrutinized it for a moment, found what he was looking for, and gave orders to the helicopters above.
“Captain Eichel,” Heath said. “I’ve got two Marine Corps Cobras in the air now. They’ll scout the area for us and see if we can get eyes on the hostiles. In the meantime, I want your patrol officers, street cops, and any other non-SWAT assets to fall back and form a defensive perimeter.”
“Where?” Eichel asked. “These things could be anywhere.”
“Where are most of your reports coming from?” Heath asked.
Eichel took the map and quickly sketched out a ragged rectangle with his pen. “Claiborne Avenue along the north is where we had our initial incident. I haven’t had any reports of these things west of Toledano or east of MLK Boulevard. South of Magnolia it gets hazy. Radio is spotty there. Always has been.”
“I’d say use those streets as your perimeter, then. That sound right, Dave?” he asked, turning to Hooper.
“If they stop to eat, yeah,” he said. “And if they have limited access to the Above.”
“We’ll have to plan on limited access by virtue of the fact that I don’t have the resources to deal with them popping up everywhere. We’ll work with what we have.” Heath turned back to Eichel. “You decide where to bunker up. Let me know soonest.” Heath started to move his hands over the map, indicating where he wanted to deploy the human forces. Dave pulled up a little at that thought. Human forces? How the fuck had it come to this?
“Eichel, if you can assist in evacuating the civilians from this area,” Heath said, circling a four- or five-block diamond shape south of Claiborne. “Meantime, my team will move north with your SWAT platoon. Hold the other platoon in reserve at the station until we have the hostiles spotted. Understand?”
“You got it,” he said. “You gonna call in the army? There’s national guard here, too.”
“We’re mobilizing every available asset,” Heath said. “But how many of your officers are also reservists and guardsmen?”
Eichel nodded. “Point taken.”
“Yep,” Heath said. “This will be over before the guard gets up on deck. As it stands, I have additional marines inbound from the Bataan, but their ETA is three hours at best. JSOC latest is that rangers and elements of the 82nd are en route, but that’ll be even longer; twelve to eighteen hours is their best estimate.”
Oh, man, Dave thought. You are going to need all of them and more before this is over. Small scouting parties lead to war bands, which lead to Cohorts, which form Talons and …
Eichel took a deep breath. “We’re on our own, then.”
“For now,” Heath said. “But we’ve got your back. It won’t be like Katrina, I promise you.”
Allen came back from the street. “Sir, it is pure chaos out there. We could take the vehicles, but it’d probably be quicker to move up on foot.”
“Fair enough,” Heath said, scrutinizing the map again. “Emma, what do you have on your feeds?”
Professor Ashbury set her tablet down on the hood of the car. A green-lit video stream from an airborne source highlighted a small party of creatures moving across an open lot. She brought the image out wide to show the surrounding roads.
“Louisiana Avenue is jammed with refugee traffic. But Toledano looks passable on foot,” she said.
“Let’s move north quickly and in force,” Heath said, wrapping up the map. “When we make contact, we’ll try to fix them in place. Any questions?”
Dave found Heath at his side, a hand on his elbow.
“I need you to stick close to me, Dave. Don’t go getting any ideas about charging off. I need you to tell me, as best you can, what’s happening.”
“I got no fucking idea what’s happening,” he said, trying to throw off the gathering depression that wanted to envelop him. He could feel every pound of Lucille on his shoulders now. They began to ache with the effort needed to carry her.
“But, er … Captain, if this is a scouting party, it’ll just be like an advance group. You get that, right?” he said
“Yeah. Come on,” Heath said. “I’m sure as soon as we make contact with the enemy, everything will become crystal clear. Let’s go.”
Now, that was a joke, Dave knew.
They cleared the hospital with its scenes of Dark Ages horror and misery, emerging into a cool night in which the SEALs awaited them, arrayed in a large semicircle, weapons out. Two armored personnel carriers, big eight-wheeled numbers in the white livery that made them look like ice cream trucks of the Apocalypse, stood growling and coughing diesel fumes around a crowd of police cruisers and civilian vehicles. Some of the SWAT officers worked with the regular cops to maintain some order of control.
Allen nodded toward the traffic jam. “See what I mean?”
If anything, the scene outside the hospital was worse than it had been inside. The crowd was thousands strong out there. Some streamed into the hospital grounds. Many were passing through and moving on. Still others looked to have set up camp with whatever they’d carried from home or possibly looted along the way. Music pounded from dozens of cars’ sound systems. A couple of flares burned bright pink and green. Dave counted at least four separate brawls. He heard more gunfire, much closer this time, but it had no effect on the crowds.
The rear hatch of the nearest armored car swung open, and a man in black coveralls hopped down to run over to them. He sought out Heath, introducing himself as Lieutenant Ostermann, NOPD SWAT.
“Sorry, sir,” Ostermann said. “Road net is jammed up. Might be best to go on foot. It is a mile and a half from here.”
“Fine,” Heath said. “We’re good to go. Can you get your men disengaged?”
Ostermann nodded. “Definitely; we’re with you.”
Dave chewed on another energy bar and sucked a mouthful of Gatorade out of his CamelBak, trying to sift some useful advice from the trove of race memory and lore stored within his head. It was still hard to know what to look for when you didn’t know what to look for. And it didn’t help that Ashbury and Compton were deeply invested in their own distracting argument.
“They will need us,” she insisted.
“They’ll have him,” Compton shot back, jerking a thumb in Dave’s direction. “You know the rules. We establish a reference point as far forward as possible but not in the combat operating post. We stay in contact—” He tapped a finger against his headset. “—but we don’t make contact. We …”
She looked ready to slap him when Dave intervened.
“He’s right, Prof. You don’t want to be getting snuggly with these things.”
“I followed your advice,” she said defiantly, quickly drawing a pistol from a concealed carry holster at the small of her back. “See?”
“What I see,” said Dave, “is someone who is gonna get bitten in two. Listen to Professor Compton, would you? He’s a professor and he has a neck beard. You don’t so he wins this round. Establish whatever it is you’re establishing as far back from the Hunn as you can. And be ready to get the hell out of there, too.”
“Dave. These men haven’t had a chance to study this problem at all. Five minutes. That’s all the time we had to brief them back on the rig. And what you said on the flight in. Shoot here, here, and here,” she said, summarizing the advice and pointing at her face, neck, and lower abdomen.
“I’ll go with them,” Dave said. “Whatever they need to know, I probably know already. But you don’t. Unless one of these things wants to explain the role of plumbing in the social hierarchies of the Grande Horde,” he said, winking at Compton.
Heath cut the argument short by returning from his conference with Ostermann.
“Got a contact report from the local PD that’s been verified by our Cobras,” Heath said. “We’re moving north to Magnolia Street.”
Heath looked to Dave then.
“Problems?”
The oil rigger shook his head.
“I dunno, Heath. You know your own business. Your plan sounded all plausible and shit before. But you don’t have a lot of guys, even with the marines and the SWAT dudes. You gonna be able to deal?”
“What will the Hunn do when they find out they’re surrounded?” Heath asked.
He knew the answer to that without even having to reach for it.
“They attack. Everywhere. All at once,” he said, leaning against Lucille as if she were a gentleman’s walking stick. “They don’t like being hemmed in. Drives them nuts.”
Heath thought it over.
“Actually, that is sort of what we would do; not so different from us, then. But we’d probe for a weakness and then concentrate. Let’s at least go measure their strength,” he said. “If it’s a company of sword-wielding orcs, no problem. A battalion or more, well, I got some air support en route or on station.”
“Those choppers you had,” said Dave. “Those big fucking Gatling guns could be handy. Leather armor ain’t gonna help when those things open up.”
“They’re refueling,” Heath said. “They’ll be back. But I have Cobras and more assets inbound.”
He turned to the professors.
“If the two of you would set up here at Touro, I think that would be best,” he said. “Any insights you can glean from the video feeds would be welcome. You can come up when NOPD has the resources to get you closer. Requisition a command truck or one of those armored units if you have to. But get everything shipshape here first, because we’ll fall back in this direction if we have to. If we don’t have an engagement first.”
Neither of the academics looked happy, but for different reasons, Dave thought.
More gunfire erupted nearby, this time eliciting screams and drawing the attention of a couple of SEALs. Ostermann joined them after briefing his own people.
“We need to get going,” he said. “T-Qube Suarez’s crew just rolled on Magnolia.”
“T-Qube. Local notable. That’s his turf down that way,” Ostermann explained. “Patrol says they’re rolling in force.”
“Gangsters?” Heath asked.
“New Orleans’s finest.”
“Great,” said the navy officer. “That won’t complicate things at all.”
He keyed his throat mike and sent orders out to both SEALs and marines on the command net.
Ashbury looked fit to be tied. He reached out to her, but she turned and stomped away, refusing to talk to anyone. The oilman shrugged it off.
“Sure you don’t want to come with us, Prof?” he asked Compton. “You might get lucky. Catch one of these things taking a dump.”