The police got no respect in New Orleans. They often had to brandish their weapons at the very people they were trying to help. As Dave kept an easy pace with the trotting SEALs, he could hear the choppers whirling overhead. Not just police and military, either. There were at least three news channels up there, shining powerful searchlights down over Central City, as if to light their way. Heath and Ostermann cursed them.
“That’s supposed to be a no-fly zone,” the SWAT leader complained.
Heath talked into his radio from time to time, giving brief instructions while keeping up the fast trot, his own rifle now at hand. Allen’s four men were to the right of Toledano, and Igor the Giant’s men were to the left. SWAT, for better or worse, had to stop and deal with one problem after another, then run to catch up with the SEALs.
“Captain?” Dave asked the naval officer.
“Yes?”
“You watch horror movies?”
“No,” Heath said with a visible effort to control his impatience. “If you’ve got a point, Dave, I’d appreciate your getting to it.”
“Just seems to me that splitting up like this is a bad idea,” Dave said. “In the movies it always goes badly.”
“This isn’t a horror movie,” Heath said.
“Says you,” Dave scoffed.
“Look,” Heath explained. “I’m not dividing my forces without reason. We have reserves. I can deploy them when I know where they’ll do the most good. I have air assets I can call down if we get surrounded, cut off. Believe me, we’ve been doing this shit for years. And I need to leave some forces back at that hospital because if the Hunn roll over us anyway, they’ll head straight there, won’t they?”
“The all-you-can-eat buffet?” Dave said. “For sure.”
“So we need some assets there to maintain a semblance of order and to rear guard the next evacuation if necessary.”
The crowds were thinning now, pushed south by police cruisers flashing their lights and using bullhorns to hurry everyone along as quickly as possible. This was a poor district. The SEALs and SWAT team jogged down long stretches of narrow one- and two-story homes broken up by a surprising number of churches. Many of them, Dave was disturbed to see, were full of parishioners. Lights burned brightly, and hymns drifted out on the autumnal air. A good number of the homes, too, were alive and alight. A few even seemed to be hosting impromptu parties. Ostermann peeled off to remonstrate with a couple of patrolmen who had demonstrably failed to convince the locals of the imminent danger they faced.
Another news chopper hammered low overhead.
“Flying to the X,” Allen called back over his shoulder.
Their journey north proceeded in fits and starts as the SEALs paused whenever they came to an intersection, with Zach Allen or Igor holding up his fist to bring them to a halt. They would do a quick survey of the danger area, followed by the all clear and a resumption of the run. The pauses often allowed the SWAT team to catch up after dealing with its own unavoidable delays. Ostermann didn’t like stopping to defuse confrontations between gangs of young men or to get thick knots of dawdling civilians on the move again, but he had no choice. The gang brawls could quickly turn to shootings, and the slow shuffling mobs that stopped to watch them were forever threatening to block traffic or, Dave knew, attract a feeding frenzy.
He motored along at a steady trot, feeling as though he could keep up this pace all night, and he didn’t doubt that Allen and the others could match his every step. It was Heath who impressed him the most, however. He could tell the man was favoring his good leg now, starting to drag the artificial limb a little, but he never slackened in his pace. Dave made a face at the idea of how uncomfortable it must be for him. That tender nub of flesh and bone pounding into whatever arrangement of steel, plastic, and padding marked the point where the body met the prosthesis.
They came across their first body lying in a pool of blood at Loyola and Toledano. An African-American male. As Allen’s chalk established security around the intersection, guns out, backed up by SWAT, one of the SEALs approached the body cautiously, covering it with his weapon. He used a boot to roll the corpse over. There were three gunshot wounds to the chest.
Ostermann arrived at a trot, sweating heavily. He shook his head and flicked off some of the perspiration with one hand. Around them civilians stood on porches, sporting an assortment of weapons ranging from baseball bats and kitchen knives to double-barreled shotguns and pistols. Dave took it all in, tasting the rain soon to come in the air, the fear and mistrust of the locals, and the waste of a life on the street. Nobody made a move to approach them, to explain what had happened. He wondered if one of them had cut the man down.
“Not our problem,” said Heath as the sound of distant gunfire echoed across the cityscape. “Let’s keep moving north.”
They resumed the long run, pushing on to Magnolia and turning east. Here the houses were even meaner and more dilapidated, often leaning over, surrounded by tall weeds. Small factories and warehouses, their functions often a mystery, took up double and sometimes triple allotments between the shotgun shacks. Dogs barked, sounding feral.
The street was dark, illuminated by a burning car that had run into a power pole and the blue-white sparks of the fizzing, crackling power line that now snaked across the crumbling tarmac. Ostermann ordered one of his men to call it in to the power company. To get the grid shut down on this block.
Chief Allen appeared beside Dave as they gave the downed line a wide berth.
“How you doing, Dave? Hungry?”
“Not yet, Zach.”
“You’ll want to keep your nutrition up, dude,” Allen warned. “Metabolism will be running hot now. Keep it stoked.”
The SEAL passed him a couple of gel packs that he sucked down gratefully even though they were unpleasantly warm.
As Dave finished the second gel pack, he could hear the sounds of battle. Or slaughter. The screams of people being eaten alive. Animal cries as tooth and claw tore open flesh and shattered bone. He didn’t want to, but he concentrated, homing in on one particular channel the way you might try to follow a single instrument in a song. He teased out something like the slurping sounds you heard in an Asian food court.
“Better hurry,” he told Heath. “It sounds like a full war band.”
“How many?”
Dave concentrated his hearing, trying to filter out the arguments, the sirens, a hundred cable channels of chaos. He could hear distinct chewing, bone-cracking sounds.
“Maybe a dozen, max,” he said. “Could be a scouting party. If they stick to form, there’ll be more of them soon.”
“A dozen’s bad enough,” Heath said, pausing to talk into his mike.
The Cobras passed over their position. Captain Heath signed off his comm net. “We’ve got eyes on targets north of Magnolia, but they’re already inside the residential blocks. Between that and the civilian aircraft overhead, the gunships can’t get a clean shot.”
Overhead, a pair of louder Ospreys roared through the darkness on their way north. One of the aircraft veered suddenly to get out of the bright white cone thrown down by the searchlight of a news helicopter above it.
Allen and a couple of the cops swore loudly.
“Ostermann?” Heath said, calm if somewhat exasperated. “Seriously?”
The SWAT boss scrunched his flushed, sweating face into a furious mask before snarling into his headset.
“I don’t care if you have to shoot them down; get those news choppers out of the AO. Now!”
As Dave tried to ignore screams and worse, he looked up into the cloudy night sky, where civilian helicopters dueled with the military and the police for airspace. A soft rain began to fall. He thought about saying something to Heath about loitering on open ground. About having so few men with him. The Hunn and Fangr would charge them if they encountered the group. They’d leap right over the snarl of cars blocking the intersection of Magnolia and Washington, picking up speed across open ground.
But it was the searchlights that brought him up short.
“Captain?”
“Yes, Dave?” Heath said, exasperated. “Let’s move out,” he ordered everyone.
“They don’t dig the light,” Dave said. “Those spotlights will be freaking them out.”
“Noted.”
Another body lay in the street ahead, this one undoubtedly a victim of the daemonum. They stepped around entrails crawling with ants and flies. A black man’s unseeing face looked up at Dave, the throat ripped open. The sickly sweet stench of drying blood, shit, and urine filled his sinuses. He swore, blew his nose, and cleared his throat loudly.
The SEALs stopped and looked back at him. Again he was sure he felt Lucille trying to speak to him, to admonish him in some ultra-low-frequency hum that he felt in his hands as an unpleasant, almost electric sensation. It was nuts, but this stupid fucking sledgehammer was nagging him somehow. His body ached from the effort of carrying it. The discomfort reminded him of how his back used to hurt from carrying his boys around as toddlers. They got heavy quick. He realized he’d been cursing loudly only when Heath hissed at him.
“Dave!”
“I know, sorry, my bad,” Contrite Dave stage-whispered back. “Be vewy quiet. Hunting wabbits. I know. I’m on it.”
“You okay?” Allen asked, concerned.
Dave shook his head. “I’m not sure. Let’s just get on with this.”
Moving down both sides of the street, the shooters kept their weapons at the ready, searching the rooflines, the alleyways, and the deserted lots. The SEALs, he noted, kept their weapons trained on the few civilians who passed by now. The SWAT guys lifted their barrels up, allowing them safe passage. Different strokes. Dave carried Lucille in both hands, ready to swing it. Trash, discarded clothes, and occasional bodies slowed their movement, but only slightly, as they picked a path around the obstacles in the dark.
“You boys headed to the lot?”
The SEALs turned as one, muzzles zeroing in on a graying African-American man who stood in the doorway of Jazz’s Po-Boys. He held a shotgun much the same way a hunter might, pointed toward the street, not quite away from them but not quite toward them, either.
“What have you seen, sir?” Allen asked quietly.
“The End of Days,” the old man said. “You boys army?”
“Navy,” Allen said.
“Huh, go figure. Long ways from the beach here, Popeye. Name’s Ferguson,” the man said. “If you head down on that street toward the builders’ lot, you’ll find all the trouble you’re lookin’ for.”
Allen moved quietly toward the shop keep. “The builders’ lot?”
Ferguson pondered the team for a moment as a Cobra flew low over the building, toward the lot, Dave assumed. “Over on Washington,” the old man said when the roar died down. “Big new development. For folks with money. Or was. Have to drop the asking price now, I reckon.”
Heath introduced himself. He was sheened with sweat, and his face was tight. “Sir, we could use a secure place to base from. Your establishment is definitely better than the location I had in mind.”
“And what location was that?”
“There’s a mosque—”
“Oh, hell, no.” Ferguson laughed, a rattling wheeze, as he pointed at a careworn shack behind them. It looked like a tumbledown garage to Dave, but Ferguson assured them this was the local mosque. “That ain’t one of them Ay-rab mosques with gun turrets and shit. That’s an American mosque, Navy. Bigfoots’ll run right through that.”
“Bigfoots?” Allen asked.
“Or whatever,” Ferguson conceded. “Figured them for indigenous monsters. Saw a show on the History Channel about them once. The Bigfoots. Figured they’d come back to take what we took off of them.”
Lieutenant Ostermann, delayed by dealing with the helicopter issue, at last caught up with the SEALs.
“Those boys with you?” Ferguson jerked his thumb at the approaching SWAT contingent.
Heath nodded. “They are. I need every gun. Will that be a problem, sir?”
“I ain’t broke no laws since I got an Article 15 in Oakdale after I got back from the Nam,” Ferguson said. “I got me no business with the po-lice. And they got them none with me. Go on, Navy; get yourself set the fuck up. But you break something, you bought it.”
A news chopper, one Dave hadn’t seen before, swooped low over the roof. Heath and the rest of the party looked up in annoyance that soon translated into incomprehension. Dave followed their gaze. It was his new eagle eyes that caught the problem.
A long arrow—a Sliveen war shot, arrakh-du for sure—had punched through the pilot’s window, pinning the dead man to his seat. The news chopper spun around and around in a tightening gyre, losing altitude fast. The nose dipped lower, and as the cabin tilted over crazily, a body dropped from the rear compartment. Dave grimaced as he watched the man plummet flailing through the night air. He recalled how much he’d wanted to toss Compton out of the chopper on the way in.
Not my finest moment, he thought. But I didn’t actually do it. So there’s that.
The Bell helicopter dropped just beyond the roofline, hitting the earth with a crunching explosion that shook the ground and threw a great gout of fire into the air. Dave reckoned it had crashed somewhere between the marines and the Horde.
Igor had come up, hefting a long-barreled weapon with a scope, which he handled with ease. He nodded at Ferguson and then turned to Chief Allen. “Anyone started a tab yet? I could murder a po’boy.”