An NOPD command unit rolled up while Heath and his men were rushing to establish some sort of forward OP in the po’boy shop. Dave wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing there. Building a little fort? Constructing a blind, like hunters, from which to observe the Hunn? Maybe just setting up a bolt-hole into which they could flee if necessary. The shop was a solid brick structure that offered more cover than the shacks and shanties around it, but that didn’t fill him with confidence.
They weren’t facing a human enemy. The Horde wouldn’t stand off and throw stones or even spears at this place. They’d swarm it.
He already felt as though he was just baggage to these guys, and apart from telling them which orc was which, he didn’t seem much good for anything besides getting in the way. He stepped out of the store just as the NOPD truck arrived. It looked like a mobile home to Dave, and he found it all too easy to imagine a couple of Hunn carving it up with cleavers and war axes. Professor Ashbury, wearing police body armor she had picked up from somewhere, jumped down out of the rear cabin door before the vehicle stopped moving. Heath managed to look both pissed and relieved at their arrival.
“I hope this is not precipitate, Emmeline,” he said. “I do hope I have an OP to fall back to.”
“Your guys took over the café at the hospital,” she said. “It’s defensible. Compton even offered to stay and defend it—” She smirked, all ham and wry. “—but they didn’t need his help.”
Dave could pick out the sallow face, fiery neck beard and bald head of the anthropologist in the rear of the command unit. He was fiddling around with a bank of screens while taking notes on a stack of tablets and a block of paper. Jostled by the police and ignored by the SEALs, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth. When he wasn’t busy, he looked at his cell phone as if expecting it to ring.
It never did.
His problem is he never gets laid, Dave thought.
Ashbury’s eyes met Dave’s. Was there something there? Dave thought there might be something there. And he wasn’t even drunk.
“Hello, Hooper. I see you’re still hanging around like a fart in a telephone booth.”
Okay, maybe not.
“For now,” he said. “What’s on TV?”
He nodded at the banks of monitors inside the big van.
Heath didn’t wait for an answer, climbing the two small metal steps into the cabin. Ashbury followed him back inside, and Dave followed her, still carrying Marty Grbac’s splitting maul. There were half a dozen men and women seated at consoles in the command unit, all of them uniformed officers of the New Orleans Police Department. Compton and Ashbury were the only civilians besides Dave. For the first time in what felt like a long while, nobody paid him any attention. They were all transfixed by the scenes playing out on the two largest wide-screen displays. Both ran monochrome low-light vision from news choppers.
Dave could see the leader of the war party on at least two monitors. There was no missing the ugly prick. The Hunn was noticeably larger than any other creature in its … in its thrall, he thought. A war party assigned to a Master of Hunn is known as a thrall, a word from the Olde Scrolls that could mean everything from a small raiding party of half a dozen Hunn and their leash of Fangr up to a Grande Horde. This thrall ran to roughly a couple of hundred strong and faced the marines, who were taking up position in and around an abandoned McDonald’s. On another screen, an injured reporter screamed and pleaded for someone to come and save him. One of the uniforms turned down the volume on that.
For a moment Dave found himself searching for signs of a physical leash, a chain or a long thick rope of treated hide that could physically bind a Fangr to its master, but that was his rational twenty-first-century mind attempting to impose a preferred meaning on a much older form of understanding. The leash was not physical. It was like … the authority of a squad leader, he thought, satisfied with that. The BattleMaster held all in his thrall. A Hunn dominant merely controlled a leash of Fangr.
Chief Allen appeared at the door of the truck.
“All set up inside, Captain,” he reported to Heath before following Dave’s gaze. The Hunn leader was festooned with fangs, scalps, and skulls, with a headdress of Drakon scales forming a sort of Mohawk on his boiled-leather helmet.
“Nasty,” said the CPO.
“Yeah. That ugly ass monster could really use some wardrobe advice,” Igor said from the door.
“A little Queer Eye for the Straight Orc?” smirked Allen.
Dave’s skin itched with the need to get moving, as though something inside him wanted to burst out and fly to the scene of the battle. A dumb-ass move for sure. No way was he leaving the protective circle of these heavily armed professional killers. Even the lady professor was probably better suited to this than he was. She had her Asperger thing to make her a little scary. She was rocking it. He was a freak with a magic hammer, so far out of his depth that just remembering to draw breath was an effort.
So Dave Hooper just stared at the screens. There were banks of them up and down the interior of the command unit. The SEALs and NOPD had pulled in a lot of coverage. Or rather, Ashbury had. A lot of the video was from the news channels, but at least half came from feeds he didn’t recognize. Drones, maybe? Or even satellites. Perhaps the CIA was stealing the video from the phones of those idiots who hadn’t run away yet. There were plenty of them still hanging around. Compton pushed the occasional button or stroked a touch pad to pull in close on an image, but to Dave he looked about as useless … well, as Dave felt.
“There’s hundreds of those things out there,” said Allen.
“Yeah. Better to just take off and nuke them from orbit,” Dave said.
“Only way to be sure.” Igor grinned.
CPO Allen measured Dave with a look that clearly implied that he thought it could be a live option.
As much as his rational self knew not to be a damn fool, there was a damn fool part of Dave that wanted nothing more than to raise Lucille on high and charge into the Horde, swinging left and right. It was a hunger as needful as any he’d known since waking up in the hospital. Something inside Dave, deep in his blood, sang to him of the righteous urgency of closing with dar ienamic and destroying them. That was how part of him thought of the Horde now. Not as monsters but as an enemy. As ienamicae in the Olde Tongue. He shifted Lucille carefully from one shoulder to the other. The heavy maul had grown even more uncomfortable to hold while he watched the drama on the command van monitors. Dave felt like she was humming with a resonance below human perception and the only way to silence her was to give voice to that song. A hymn to murder.
When he could stand it no longer, he turned to exit the van, needing to move, to do something, if only to get away, but he found Heath in the doorway blocking his path.
“I need that air support, and I need it now,” Heath said urgently, holding down the push-to-talk button of his headset. The navy man listened to a response that Dave could not hear, shook his head, and cursed softly.
“Problemo?” Dave asked.
Heath stared mutely at Dave for a moment, perhaps wondering whether to let him in on the conversation. After a glance at the screens, where more and more of the Hunn appeared to be spewing up out of the earth, he made his decision.
“We’re trying to get some A-10s up, but the nearest units are in Georgia,” Heath said.
“And what? They’re on vacation? Or just sitting at home watching Cake Boss?” Dave asked.
“No,” Heath said, almost offended. “These are experienced combat aviators. But contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, we generally keep the munitions separate from the weapons systems themselves.”
“Why?”
“So they don’t blow up,” Heath said flatly. “Anyway, this sort of thing takes a bit of time.”
“What about your other choppers?” Dave asked, shifting Lucille over to his other shoulder. The heavy maul started humming to him again. Nobody else could hear it, of that he was sure. “They’ve got those big-ass guns.”
“If I need to, I’ll put them in, but I’d rather not risk the Cobras after what I’ve seen with the news chopper,” Heath said. “All I need now is a couple of choppers getting shot down and dropping through the roof of a mall. We have blocking forces in place, we have the initiative, and we have the advantage. I’ll wager where these things come from they don’t do close air support.”
“Not that I know of …” Dave thought for a moment, but nothing came to him. Flying creatures were not unknown to the Hunn, especially dangerous ones like Drakonen. Urgon, for his part, didn’t have anything helpful to offer. “Pretty sure they don’t, anyway.”
Heath’s eyes lost their focus as he pressed one finger to his earpiece and took in some new development.
“Acknowledged. I’ll have my second platoon of marines attack from their position,” he said. “They can still flank them.”
Allen was at the door again. “Sir, we can get there faster. Second Platoon simply isn’t going to make it.”
“Well, they’ll have to,” Heath said calmly, as if he were a commentator for a golf match. “Or we will. Air support is taking too long.”
“Too late,” Dave said. On the two big screens beside him, the Hunn had finally turned themselves to face the downed helicopter and the marines of First Platoon. With a loud, ground-splitting bellow that he could hear inside the command vehicle, the Horde charged forward.
Heath bounced out of the vehicle, grimacing as he landed badly on his artificial leg and hobbling to run in front of Dave. “You stay here. This is our job.”
“I’m cool with that,” he said.
But something wasn’t cool.
Outside on the street he found the SEALs ready to roll, but the SWAT team stood at the edge of things, arguing among themselves. Igor the giant jerked his thumb at the cops. “Sure glad we brought those guys along.”
Heath waved a warning finger at Dave—stay put—and limped quickly over to Lieutenant Ostermann. “What is the problem?”
The senior police officer looked pained as he pointed at his own headset.
“I’ve got the mayor arguing with the chief, and I can’t get clear orders,” Ostermann said. “Mayor wants us back at the hospital. Right now. Chief says we’ve been detached to you. Mayor says you’re not paying the bills. Chief—”
To his eternal credit, Captain Heath did not shout or curse or grab the SWAT officer by his collar and beat him to death. Dave watched the man grit his teeth and take one step forward into Ostermann’s space. He spoke in a calm, quiet, reasonable tone, low enough that even with his newly enhanced hearing, Dave could not tell quite what he said.
Ashbury stuck her head out of the command vehicle. “Second Platoon is jammed up with refugees and tourists. They can’t get to First Platoon.”
“Ostermann?” Heath said, with more volume.
“Yes,” the now-compliant SWAT officer said.
“Please get your Second Tactical Platoon to assist our marines on Claiborne at McDonald’s. The ones who are dying for this city right now.”
Ostermann reached up to his throat mike for his radio, presumably to call his fellow platoon commander. Dave ignored him, staring down the long road toward the waste ground where the Hunn had emerged. He could see nothing of them beyond a thickening crowd of refugees. Two cars had crashed at the intersection a block down, creating a dam in the flow of terrified civilians.
“First Platoon is breaking cover and advancing toward the downed chopper,” Ashbury said. “They say there are survivors. The hostiles are charging them.”
Shit was getting out of hand. Dave didn’t need to waste four years in ROTC to know that. Didn’t even need his limited chops in Call of Duty. Heath had a pickup team of disparate groups not used to working with one another dealing with something they’d never seen before. They weren’t in some shitty neighborhood in Baghdad or the mountains of the Hindu fucking Kush. They couldn’t just switch to full auto and open fire, hose down the problem. Even a dude like Heath could do only so much with limited resources and unlimited constraints. But he had to do something, and quickly. Dave could clearly hear the massed gunfire and the rumble of the Hunn stampede. It reminded him of being trackside at the Kentucky Derby.
He thought about putting his head back into the van to check on what was happening, but as soon as the thought occurred to him, he staggered, almost dropping Lucille, stunned by a low-grade electrical charge that ran through the handle, into his arms, and up through his skull. Or something that felt like an electrical charge.
“Prof, what’s happening over there?” he asked, almost gagging. “With the marines.”
She didn’t bother to look away from the displays, answering him by raising her voice.
“The Hunn are charging them. Getting shot down. Charging again. It’s keeping them out of the residential streets for now. Shouldn’t you be leaping tall buildings or swinging your mighty tool or something?”
Dave spun around, not really sure why but aware that he’d just heard something that sounded like a hissing whip crack.
A strangled cry and the sound of a man falling to the hard road surface drew his eye to one of the SEALs. Impaled by a four-foot war shaft. The arrow of a Sliveen scout. Blood boiled up out of the victim’s mouth as his body spasmed in shock, and everyone dived for cover.
“What the fuck?” gasped Ashbury.
Compton went rigid with fright, then launched into a tangle of uncoordinated action, diving for the command unit’s door and trying to slam it shut.
“Sniper!” Allen yelled.
“Sliveen arrakh,” Dave corrected him at high volume without thinking, without even knowing what he’d just said until he actually thought about it. “Arrows,” he cried out then. “It’s arrows.”
SWAT started shooting. The SEALs dashed for cover. Chief Allen, Igor the giant, and a cop grabbed the body of the man who’d been struck and dragged it out of the middle of the road. They hadn’t moved more than a few steps when another police officer screamed and fell, run through by a shaft that pierced the back of his body armor.
Dave already was turning toward the source of the danger when he saw the second arrow fly, a dark blur in the night. Not waiting for permission, not bothering to ask or consult with Heath, he exploded from a standing start, moving in the direction of the Sliveen. Everything seemed to slow down around him.
No, that was wrong. Time didn’t seem to slow down; some monstrous force actually did apply the brakes to the flow of reality as he suddenly accelerated into motion. Part of his mind, detached and curious, noted how slowly Heath was dropping through the air as he leaped toward the command truck for cover. Ashbury cried out, but not in fear. She raged at Compton, wrestling for the door handle with him. Her infuriated screams reached him as a weird, elongated sound effect, as though he was watching the scene in super slo-mo. His own mind was unaffected. Dave was able to calculate the flight path of the second arrow as he found himself calling on equations and math solutions he had not thought of in years, not since his college days. The deadly path of the war shaft led from the slowly crumpling body of the SWAT officer back into the night air at an angle of 32 degrees between the point of release and impact. In his mind’s eye he saw the passage of the arrakh-du as a dark red trace image, a slight parabolic curve accounting for gravity’s downward pull on the shaft. He could, if he chose to, examine gently floating clouds of calculations that would lead him to understand the speed of the projectile, the pounds per square inch of pressure it had delivered to the spinal column upon impact, the draw strength needed to use a conventional Sliveen war bow, the time to …
But he chose none of these things, ignoring them in favor of calculating a path to the place where the daemon scout stood atop the bell tower of a red brick church one and a half blocks up Fourth Street. It looked like about … No, it was a distance of 169 yards. Or 169 yards and 19 inches from where Dave was launching himself toward the ancient ienamic to where the Sliveen, which looked like a much thinner, darker, more insectile version of a warrior Hunn, was slowly, slowly, slowly reaching back over its shoulder into a giant quiver for another war shaft. The Sliveen, he was pleased to note, moved no more quickly than Heath or Ashbury or any of its targets. So pleased was he to note this interesting fact that a wolfish grin spread over his face, giving him a fierce canine aspect.
Lucille was singing to him again, but a soft and soothing love song this time. A gentle melody that paradoxically urged him toward violence at even greater speed.
The path to the daemon opened up before them, an imagined trail that ran straight and true for half the distance to the monster, jagging left around a pickup that was slowly, slowly, slowly rounding the next corner, up on two wheels, impossibly balanced between tipping over and making the radical turn. Then it veered to the right to avoid a clutch of a dozen or so fleeing residents, all of them bunched tightly together, none moving at anything faster than a fraction of a fraction of half speed, with one in midturn, pointing back and upward, quite possibly at the dark shadow of the UnderRealm scout. A leap onto a Ford F-150 emerging from the parking lot of the church would help launch him onto the steeply sloped roof of the nave.
He remembered the term “nave” from a long-ago lesson in a compulsory first-year civil engineering class. EGR 151: “A History of the Built Environment.” He knew, without bothering to test the knowledge, that he could recall every detail of that class now if he so chose. A wonder, given how close he’d come to failing it the first time around. He’d bothered turning up only because there was a particular hottie who was enrolled that semester and …
The leap onto the nave would present him with an interesting physics problem, he realized, consciously putting aside his memories of the hottie, which was a nontrivial effort. She’d banged like an outhouse door in a high wind when he finally nailed her, and he could remember every tactile detail of that encounter, too, now. But he would, if not careful, punch right through the tiles and into the attic or even the main body of the church where the congregation would be seated of a Sunday on the pews.
Where some worshippers undoubtedly were seated or kneeling right now, he thought, praying by candlelight for deliverance.
Better to just get the fucking job done, Dave. Monster first. Hotties later.
He saw that he would have to hit the steep tiled roof at a shallow angle, bleeding off the energy of his touchdown by running away from the Sliveen for … eight and a half yards … before performing a tight, looping turn and coming back at his foe from what would then be his right flank. What the Hunn called shieldwise when they deigned to pay their enemies the honor of carrying a shield into battle.
The Sliveen bore no such protection.
Dave performed the calculations required to map out his route between his first step and his second. Those two steps carried him more than twenty feet, so great was the explosive power of each stride. He passed through the floating world like a thought through a line of dead text and experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance that was rooted in the realization of just how quickly he was moving. The air itself cleaved apart at his progress, roaring in his ears as a gale force wind. Some part of him felt as though everything should have blurred around him, becoming an indecipherable smear of color and movement. But the world was slow and everything within it impossibly unhurried and deliberate. Suspended.
He was the blur, flashing past the fleeing terrified residents at such a speed that he was long gone before the most alert of them had turned even partway in his direction. He slapped his palm lightly into the side of the pickup, imparting just enough of a hit to tip it back toward safety as it curved ever so slowly around the corner.
As he leaped onto the hood and then the cabin roof of the F-150, he felt the metal crumple under the enormous pressure of his liftoff. But his calculations were good, and as the windscreen exploded outward, Dave launched himself toward the roofline. As he sailed up and up, his boyhood self called him back toward memories of that summer when he and his cousin Darryl had imagined something just like this and pushed the trampoline up against the back fence and … But he closed off that remembrance, too, for it served no purpose now as he touched down on the gray roof tiles lightly enough that only a couple cracked under the soles of his boots. More shattered as he decelerated, channeling the enormous velocities he’d generated into the structure of the building. One foot slipped as he reached the apogee of his own particular flight path and turned toward the Sliveen.
It had sensed the shocking swiftness of his approach and was turning much more rapidly now as Dave lost his footing on the disintegrating tile. The long, sinewy arm had drawn out the length of the arrakh-du war shot and in a heartbeat would have it notched and aimed. But Dave Hooper, the defender of this realm, moved within the space between heartbeats. Feeling his feet lose traction, he allowed the stumble to become a controlled drop, dipping his shoulder toward the peak and allowing the muscle memory of a judo roll he had performed only a few times as a child in a free class, and with no real grace or skill, to well up from within.
He hadn’t even wanted to go to judo. It was a stupid martial art. Not like fucking karate, which kicked ass. But his mother said judo was good for his brother’s asthma. So they went to a few classes, decades ago. Dave executed the roll over the handle of Lucille and up the incline of the steeply pitched church roof perfectly, as though he’d never stepped off the tatami.
The Sliveen had the arrow notched and half drawn as he powered toward the creature. It almost certainly knew in its cold reptilian way that it could not afford to indulge in a full draw of the bowstring, which would deliver enough energy to punch the shaft through the human’s torso with momentum enough to fly on for hundreds of yards beyond it. Dave Hooper doubted he’d recover from a wound like that as easily as he’d healed from the cut in the hospital.
Knowing it had to act quickly, the Sliveen scout loosed the shot as he closed the gap between them to talon range.
Too slow. Too late. Too poorly aimed.
Dave saw the long, spidery fingers of the scout let go of their grip on the taut wulfinhide bowstring. He had time enough to watch the arrowhead of sharpened Drakonglass begin its short journey away from the recurve bow. Time enough to shift his weight and bring Lucille up, one hand gripping her base and the other wrapped around the throat of the splitting maul just below the heavy steel head. He was certain she was singing. A light, skipping child song, almost laughing the melody.
He pivoted and swept the air in front of him, tilting his head, watching curiously as the dark hickory knocked the arrow off course, sending it flying high, soaring at a greater angle of elevation, to land safely, he hoped, in the waste ground of the new housing development or even, should he be exceptionally lucky, in among the ranks of the raiding party. That, he thought, would be sweet. A Master of Hunn shot in the ass by one of his own arrows.
They’d be yucking it up about that one around the ol’ blood pots for a dark age.
Momentum carried him on toward the scout, whose savage features were only now beginning to contort in rage and dawning confusion. Dave’s thoughts were running at such an accelerated pace that his head felt warm, even fevered. He turned his next step into a driving kick that caught the shocked Sliveen amidships. Although smaller than even a simple warrior Hunn, the stealth fighter still enjoyed a considerable advantage in height and weight over any but the largest human opponents. Even Sergeant Swindt would have to give away a few pounds and a good half foot in height to this bad boy. The kick landed square and true. Dave felt some of the force of the blow travel back up his leg and into his hips.
Most of the power, however, was transferred from his body into the daemon. It began to fly.
Talons screeched on tiles as the creature scrabbled for purchase. Dave took another step toward his now airborne opponent, swinging Lucille like a baseball bat swinging for the car park. The twelve-pound head caught the beast in midthorax. He had not thought to check his grip on the weapon. If he had, he would have made sure to attack with the cutting edge of the ax lest he strike any sort of armor. But it was the dark metal fist of the sledgehammer that struck the Sliveen.
The daemon exploded, flying apart with a dull, wet roar of detonation. Viscera, bone shards, purple-black ichor, and flesh all expanded outward in a foul blast of organic chemistry. So great was the force of the blow that it spun Dave around, turning him away from the sight of the carcass, which was trailing long strands and loops of offal. He turned back in time to see most of the corpse land in the middle of the crossroads.
As if released from suspension, fleeing residents suddenly sped up. The tires of the pickup screeched as they bounced down and the rubber bit into the tarmac again. The odd, distant damping effect on his hearing cleared, and he could hear screaming and sirens and gunfire. A shaky breath leaked out between his trembling lips.
Turning slowly around, taking everything in, he observed the scene back at the po’boy shop, with medics running to attend to the wounded and the dead and the SWAT and SEAL teams still hunkered down around the command unit for whatever cover they could find. He saw Ashbury punch Compton on the nose, and he actually laughed as another quarter turn found him facing west, where the beleaguered marines were bunkered down at the abandoned McDonald’s on Claiborne.
The laughter died at the back of his throat.
Dave hurtled toward the marines without thought or intent or any notion about what he might do when he landed. The muddy, weed-choked lot in which the helicopter had crashed was a good half mile away, but he covered at least a third of that distance with one convulsive leap. He did not hit fast-forward this time. The world did not slow to a crawl around him.
For a moment he was able to watch Heath and Allen and Ostermann whipping their men into action, and then his forward flight carried him away from them and into the airspace occupied by five helicopters. Two were civilian, carrying news crews, and the crash of their colleagues in the Bell had induced at least some caution in those pilots. They stood off a ways, circling the burning wreckage, their spotlights picking out the charge of the Horde across the wasteland toward the downed aircraft and the small contingent of marines who now defended it.
He came down on the road surface, which buckled slightly under the impact. Two more strides and he leaped for the stars again, taking care this time, as he had not before, to note the short looping flight paths of the military helicopters that swarmed and swooped and raked at the thrall with their guns.
Wouldn’t do to jump into a rotor blade.
Dave wondered why the choppers didn’t just unleash seven kinds of hell on the orc swarm, hosing them down with everything they had, but it was no mystery. The thrall was so close to the marines and the survivors of the chopper crash that letting fly meant killing any number of people, too.
And so he sailed on, not quite sure what the fuck he was doing but carried forward as much by Lucille’s sweet song, which now sounded undeniably real and human inside his head, as he was by the power of his leap. That power was even more unexpected and frightening to him than it had been when he had intercepted the flying barbell back at Camp Mysteryland.
It felt as though there were no limits to what he might do. Jump hard enough and perhaps he’d find himself in the vacuum of space after a few minutes. A ridiculous thought, but how much more ridiculous than whatever he was doing right at that moment?
What am I doing? he thought.
So did the pilot of the Cobra gunship as Dave flew past him, winking and cocking a thumb and finger play gun at the guy, whose mouth hung open in abject confusion.
“Yeah. Be cool. Super Dave’s got this,” he said.
Ahead and below, the double horn formation of the Horde swept around the downed helicopter. For a moment the flames and the coordinated fire of the marines held them back. Dave could easily imagine/remember the stinging sensation as the heat and light tightened their hides. It might have been enough to protect and shield the survivors and the handful of uniformed men and women—yes, that was definitely a woman in full battle kit down there—if a couple of Grymm had not targeted them with … what was that?
As Dave dropped down closer and closer to the encounter, he strained to make out what sort of weapon the elite Hunn warriors used, but even his augmented vision was not keen enough. Whatever it was, it worked. He saw a couple of blurred streaks shoot out from their hands before two of the marines spun into the dirt, their own weapons spraying ribbons of tracer fire into the sky. The Grymm worked furiously at the tiny handheld weapons, loading and cocking them, but to no purpose this time.
A Sliveen warrior loped up out of the half-light and put three war bolts into the remaining survivors before the Grymm could fire again.
Gravity steadily took hold, and Dave Hooper began to descend again, dropping below the nearest news chopper, descending toward the marines of First Platoon, who were precisely thirty-six strong. They had been forty-one before the squad was cut down around the flaming wreckage of the WVUE helicopter.
“Oh, hell, no,” he barely breathed when he realized that the better part of the platoon had broken from cover and the relative safety of the McDonald’s and was advancing in stages, fire and movement, toward the main body of the thrall. He dropped rapidly through the night, preparing to land. The thunder of the charge was loud under the sharp-dull thudding of the helicopters, the industrial jackhammer of heavy weapons, and the percussive thump and crunch of grenades. A last quick glance back over his shoulder showed the SEALs and New Orleans SWAT racing toward the thrall on foot. He could see Heath falling behind the more able-bodied men but struggling to stay in contact with them.
Hundreds of civilians, maybe a thousand of them, in front of the strip mall across the main stem had scattered like ants scalded by hot water when the Horde had bellowed its battle roar. Some were so freaked, they had run toward the engagement, and the others were spreading out through the nearby streets, making the job of herding them to safety all but impossible.
Then he was almost down, but with the perfect comic book hero landing this time. Dave had trouble focusing. A fast-growing headache tried to drill through the bone between his eyes.
Lucille chose that moment to become impossibly heavy.
If the splitting maul could speak, Dave, who felt a powerful wave of nausea sweep over him, imagined she would be telling him the same thing his wife frequently told him all the way down the broken road that was their marriage.
I tried to warn you.
The ground rushed up with impossible speed. Tucking in his shoulder, Dave plowed into the dirt as he attempted to roll off some of the momentum and energy he had built up. Lucille fell from his grip and landed next to a startled marine who looked all of nineteen. Dave probably had ass pimples older than this kid, who was sporting an impressive spray of his own acne. He looked only slightly more freaked out by the man who’d fallen from the heavens than he did by the rapidly approaching wave of slavering monster flesh.
All this Dave took in as a strobing, washed out color wheel of imagery while he rolled over and over, not stopping until he hit the remnants of a chain link fence, bending a thick steel pole.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Corpsman!”
Dave stood up and shook himself off.
The world responded by suddenly tilting, spinning, and dropping him back on his ass again. A giant iron vise snapped around his head and squeezed like a bastard.
“Dude, are you all right?” a soldier asked. Or maybe a marine. Or even something else. Possibly just some helpful asshole wandered out of a Cheaper Than Dirt gun barn loaded for orc. Dave couldn’t make him out through the migraine aura blooming across his visual field. Not that he could really tell any of these characters apart except for the SWAT guys in their natty black outfits. “Mr. Hooper? You jump out of a chopper or something? Did you break anything?”
This guy knew him?
He tried squinting through the distortion that lay over everything now.
“Feel …” Dave grunted, “… sick.” He rolled over onto his side, curled into a fetal position, and vomited.
“I got Hooper here. He says he’s sick,” the man shouted into a helmet mike.
Dave rolled over. “The Hunn …”
“We got them,” the marine said without sounding for a moment like he believed it. Hooper struggled up onto one elbow and tried not to retch again. His vision cleared slightly, and he realized he knew the marine. It was …
Everly? Enderson?
Everding!
His name tag read EVERDING. The guy from the Longreach. The big private who hadn’t been able to lift Lucille more than an inch or so off the deck.
“Hey. I know you. Do you know a guy called Swindt?” Dave asked groggily, feeling as if he’d just had a hit off a nitrous tank. “Likes to work out?”
“Who?”
He squinted at their surroundings. He was at the edge of the worst of the fighting now, stuck out on the end of the marine line, as best he could tell. The platoon had moved forward, taking what cover it could, denying it to the enemy, which was caught on open ground. A great tactic against a human foe, but against a daemon thrall intent on overrunning you no matter the cost? Not so much.
They had forced the Hunn, their leashes of Fangr, and a few sundry daemonum back from the downed chopper, where four marines frantically worked on one of their comrades who was showing signs of life. He squinted and turned his head over on its side, lining up an unaffected area of his eyesight on the scene. It was the woman Dave had spied a few moments earlier. The long shaft of a Sliveen arrow had entered her body at the hip and emerged from the opposite shoulder, but she was screaming, which meant there was breath in her body. Muzzle flashes from her comrades lit up the night. Gunfire raged in a storm of superheated steel. Tracers whipped from dozens of glowing, smoking muzzles, lashing at the thrall, cutting some down and knocking others back. Every now and then a bright yellow strand of tracer fire as thick as a fire hose and as bright as Vegas would light up a daemon. Like, for real. Causing it to burst into flames and scattering the monsters around it. In this way they broke three charges that Dave witnessed up close through the shifting veil of pain and distortion that had fallen over him. The Horde shivered under the firepower of the marines. Fangr and Hunn alike went to ground, diving into shallow holes and behind whatever meager cover offered itself, only to be thrashed, kicked, and manhandled back up onto their haunches by the tallest and largest of their number, a creature that made Urgon look small.
The BattleMaster, Dave thought, without being able to do a damn thing about it.
He had a bad hurting on him, way more serious than the worst hangover or fever he’d ever known. This felt like a sickness of the fucking soul as much as the body. A medic dashed over to them, yelling questions at Everding and then yelling more at Dave. But he had trouble understanding the corpsman.
That was what Everding called him: “Corpsman.”
The marines threw grenades like confetti and swapped out magazines constantly as they tried to wear down their foe. Bursts of pepper-black explosions bit into the front ranks of the Horde. Fire teams darted from cover, pushing forward through the spotlights of police and news choppers. He could smell the alkaline tang of their fear and something more. Something seemingly at odds with the terror. Their killing joy. They reeked of it, the madness and glory of it.
The thrall leader pointed his cleaver at the marines, who had formed a firing line to the left and right of the downed news chopper. As bullets sparked and flashed off his chain mail and plated armor and dug bloody chunks where they struck thick hide, the giant Hunn opened his broken-fanged mouth and a deep-throated heavy bass growl reverberated through the ground, bouncing off brick and wood, asphalt and concrete. It rattled the back of Dave’s wisdom teeth, drowning out every other sound except his own weak, thready heartbeat. Which sounded like a tom-tom inside his head. The BattleMaster’s war shout—his shkriia—made the previous call to slaughter sound like a feeble cough.
Everding cursed, eyes going as big and round as dinner plates.
“Uh oh,” the corpsman muttered. “This can’t be no good.”
Hundreds of surviving Hunn and leashed Fangr suddenly rose up from where they had cowered and burrowed into whatever cover they could find in the rubbish-strewn lot. They stood into the incredible volume of fire, ignoring the loss of an acolyte next to them, a warrior in front.
And then they surged forward, looking like nothing so much as a landslide of bristling muscle and tusk and hard armored, tattooed flesh.
“HUNN UR HORDE!”
Slowly at first but soon gathering speed, the Horde moved en masse toward the marines, the front ranks absorbing the bullet storm, warriors falling, Fangr shrieking and tumbling in broken tangles.
“HUNN UR HORDE!”
But never stopping, never faltering, just coming on with the mindless fury of beasts and all the concern of the rising tide about the fate of anyone it might drown. Dave struggled to raise himself, but his limbs were weighed down by some impossible burden. He was not paralyzed. He could feel and move his fingers, but he could no more push himself up off the ground than Everding had been able to lift Lucille off the deck back on the Longreach.
“HUNN!”
“HUNN!”
“HUNN UR HORDE!”
The first marine fell, cleaved asunder by one great swing of a blade that looked half ax and half machete. His dying shriek as the top of his body separated from the lower limbs cut through Dave’s miasma as cleanly as the edged weapon had passed through the man. His vision cleared, but not the crippling inability to move. He saw the firing line overrun. Hunn and Fangr and one lone, loping Sliveen vaulted over their own dead and wounded, knocking aside guns, ignoring ineffectual bayonet thrusts. Fangr fell on marines in threes and fours, pulling them apart with fiendish and violent glee. The awful sound of limbs torn from sockets with a sucking, popping sound would stay in Dave’s memory for the remainder of his days.
In less than a minute, the firing line disintegrated and the vanguard of the rampaging thrall broke out into clear ground, running straight toward the hundreds of civilians who had not fled quickly enough. The great mass of the devils was heedless of Dave and his two companions hunkered down in the shadows on the far left flank. But not all of them.
“Behind you,” Dave grunted.
The corpsman stood up with his weapon held low at the hip. Some sort of assault rifle. Normally it would have intimidated the hell out of someone like Dave, who had never had a thing for guns, a distaste that was only confirmed by his brother’s death. But in the hands of the corpsman, spraying fire at a charging rhino-size Hunn warrior, it looked utterly ridiculous. A toy. The corpsman emptied the full magazine into the Hunn, ignoring the smaller, more agile Fangr that bounded along beside it. Tracer rounds flashed and flared off the creature’s armor. Armor-piercing ammunition punched through boiled leather and dull gray metal plate, but to no avail. The killing frenzy had come over this one, too. Raked by deep gouges and bloody welts, the Hunn roared in pain and outrage, swatted the rifle away with the point of its cleaver, and kicked the corpsman in the chest. The giant horned claws impaled the screaming man, and the Hunn shook off the carcass the way Dave might try to shake off a piece of paper stuck to his boot by dog shit.
Still Dave could not move. Still he lay helpless in the dirt as Everding shouted useless obscenities and unloaded a full mag of tracer and penetrator rounds at the Fangr leash. The 5.56-mm ammo scythed into the three daemon slaves, cutting two of them down with extravagant sprays of blood and gore. The third beast jagged to the left and sustained only a few grazing shots.
“Run, Hooper! GO!” the marine yelled at him. But he could not. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t even crawl to where Lucille lay a few feet away. All he could do was lie there and wait to die.
Some fucking big league superhero he’d turned out to be.
Coughing dust and pink foam, Everding tried to draw his knife before the Fangr reached him, but it was moving with animal swiftness, and then it was airborne, jaws clamping shut around his neck before he could even raise the tiny-looking blade. Man and daemon tumbled over together, fetching up in a writhing, caterwauling tangle on top of Dave, who could not even squirm out from underneath them. Everding lashed out weakly with his bayonet before the Fangr tore out his throat.
Hot blood poured out of the terrible wound, blinding Dave, getting into his nostrils, flooding his mouth with the coppery sweet taste of violation and death. The great dead weight of the marine who’d sacrificed himself in vain suddenly lifted clear of his chest.
The Fangr loomed over him, a snarling, stooping vision of horror painted in human blood, jaws festooned with man meat. Dave’s heart was beating like a hammer just inside his rib cage
Beside the leashed killer the Hunn stood bleeding and panting and regarded him with slow deliberation. Dave could feel the will of the dominant creature, the physical force of it restraining the leashed inferior. The battle or its aftermath raged on elsewhere, but the world, which he was about to depart, contracted down to the small dark circle in which the three of them eyed one another.
“You have shortened my leash,” the Hunn said in clear English.
Then Dave realized it hadn’t done that at all. It had spoken in the Olde Tongue, but he had understood it as clearly as he would understand Brian Williams reading a headline.
“Go fuck yourself,” the rigger spit back at him, but it came out as a choking gargle, and he swallowed half a mouthful of Everding’s lifeblood before gagging and vomiting again.
The Hunn understood well enough what he meant, though, and roared like a wounded bear. It stomped on Everding’s head, crushing helmet and bone alike with a sick crunching pop. The Fangr snarled and strained at its invisible leash, which Dave could actually feel, the same way you feel inside you the vibrations of a church bell if you stand close enough when it strikes the hour.
The dead and the dying were all around. Screams and groans mingled with cries of fear as some of the laggard daemons stopped and feasted on the fallen men. Sporadic gunfire cracked through the humid air, adding the slightest tincture of more hot copper and spent powder to the night scent of blood and iron. Tires squealed and sirens wailed. Above them somewhere gunships pounded away, their rotors counting a drumbeat cadence to measure the pace of the massacre he, David Hooper, had spectacularly failed to prevent. In the distance, almost drowned out by the uproar, he could pick out the bass thump from someone’s overpriced car audio system. Pink. Telling Dave to keep his drink and just give her the money.
He felt tired beyond endurance, wanting to just lay his head down and wait for the end. The zoo sounds of the Hunn and Fangr seemed to fade away. Everything faded away.
He thought at first he was losing consciousness. The nausea, the deep body aches and burning pain, so many aches and pains that it was impossible to distinguish one hurt from another, the sense of futility and sorrow—they all faded as dark flowers bloomed in front of his eyes. He blinked, the eyelids sticking together with Everding’s blood. And then he blinked again at the statue of the Hunn and its evil butt monkey.
They roared no longer. They moved not at all.
Nothing moved, and no sound came to him except for one sweet high note of song. An old battle hymn. Old before men had the language to sing hymns.
Lucille.
The pain vanished, washed away on her song. His strength and all his energy came surging back, carried in on the same channel. When he moved to stand up, the world did not spin around to plant his ass in the dirt again. His arms and legs were no longer immobile and leaden. He was able to spring up onto the balls of his feet and perform a playful roll to gather up the splitting maul, which honest to God sighed as his hands closed around her.
“Marty Grbac says hi,” he snarled, and with one overhead blow collapsed the Hunn from head to foot into a shower of broken bone, torn flesh, and blood. Still nothing moved. Not any speed that a hyperaccelerated Dave Hooper could perceive as movement, anyway. He stepped toward the frozen Fangr and swung Lucille at its head like Barry Bonds aiming for the cheap seats. He imagined knocking the thing’s skull into orbit, but it merely disintegrated in a disgusting explosion of gore. A slow, strange geyser of thick daemonic ichor erupted from the creature’s neck, the physics all wrong, and time slowed down again.
Until a sudden jump cut fast-forwarded the world back into sync with him.
He spun around with the force of the blow to find a few dozen members of the thrall stopped in their tracks, distracted by their appetites. They hunkered down over human remains, tearing into the corpses and occasionally one another as they fought over the choice pieces. Many of the Hunn staggered about, snorting in a way that Dave recognized as laughter. Urgon had snorted at him in just the same fashion. They were drunk on the freshly decanted bloodwine of the First Platoon.
He found himself caught between the urge to charge in and start laying about him with Lucille and the more rational response of getting the hell out of Dodge. Running back to Heath and letting him figure out what to do.
After all, Dave had proved pretty conclusively that he wasn’t Marvel material. He’d jumped in here, hadn’t he, and look at the results of that. Forty men and women dead a minute later. Hundreds more dying now as the main body of the thrall ran them down and tore them apart.
He started to back away from the creatures, mopping Everding’s tacky drying blood from his eyes, ignoring Lucille, who seemed to be humming sweetly that she thought having at the thrall would be a fine and manly course of action.
The squeal of tires caught his attention. A deep bass thrumming rolled across the killing field from Claiborne. Tupac declaring his intent to ride on the enemy. Doors popped open and slammed shut as men and women, all of them black and gunned up, emerged from behind the Pizza Hut, walking down on the Horde with an arms bazaar of weaponry: everything from comically small pistols to AK’s and one belt-fed monster that reminded Dave of the old Rambo posters.
T-Qube, Dave thought.
The first rounds cracked out, targeted on the monsters feasting before him.
Not wanting to find out if he was bulletproof now, he did the only sensible thing.
He hit the dirt.
“Light them up!”
A wall of sound rolled over the battleground. The discrete pops and bangs of single-shot pistols, the hammering crack of a full auto, and the larger, heavy pounding of what had to be the big belt-fed gun.