Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (21 page)

He commed Aidan Zadok, his Properties chief, and they talked about their APPs’ flight-speed maximum in short bursts. The mantids were clumsier than his wonderful wasps—foot soldiers more than airborne. They were
devourers
. To catch and eat weighty prey like men, they had to have mass, leverage.

His chat with Properties brought him solace. Yes, flight-speed might be an issue, but on balance, his props chief thought that, from rooftops, the mantids might very well be gotten aboard low-flying rafts.

XXIV

COMBAT

They invaded Glacier
Avenue. It wasn’t the pavements they swarmed, but the walls—they came in little squadrons running slantwise across the fronts of buildings, little arrowheads and dagger-blades of half a dozen mantids, scuttling in perfect synchrony zig and zag over verticals of plaster, carpentry, and concrete.

“Look at that!” barked Chops—and Cap could only nod. Chops meant an arrow of them darting from a brick façade and down across gray stucco. As they crossed the juncture their foreparts grayed, hindquarters brick-red till they crossed the instant after.

Their rippling camouflage was everywhere, pausing at windows and balconies, testing them, and here and there breaking through and pouring inside.

“They’re after refuges!” Cap shouted to the street—“They want max kills!”—as he and Chops were sprinting to intercept a squad slanting down the face of the three-story Traveller’s Rest. Cap came under them, shield hoisted on his left, his up-stretched right unleashing double-ought ammo that just missed, spraying off a gout of abdomen, chambered a second while still running and found his aim, tearing a hind leg out from under the bug.

One instant it faltered and the next it leapt off the wall, resuming its own color then, its wings unscissoring with a greenish flash to steer its swift dive straight on Cap.

He twisted his bulk down tight into his shield-shadow. The beast’s full weight pressed down, the graspers bit wood at both sides, the spiked tip of the left gashing his forearm deep, as its jeweled eyes and fangs thrust near Cap’s face and chawed at the air.

So intimate with the monster’s mass was he, Cap felt through his shoulder Chops’s shotgun blast, the concussion of its double-ought with the brute’s left grasper at the shoulder.

It sagged away to gel as Cap heaved his own strength up and outward against the bug’s half-grip on him, a grip it could not free from the soft wood that had snagged it. The mantid’s missing rear leg told—its center of gravity shifted sideward and it was torqued nearly to the ground. In this brief contest Chops found time to circle round behind and blow the mantid’s head off and to gel.

The APP did not for an instant cease to press its grim strength contrary to Cap’s muscle-cracking labor to pin it down. “Its other arm!” he bellowed, “Then it’s got nothing!”

But Chops was already doing it: Whack!
Slick-click
Whack!

And with that arm blown free, not only it but the whole mantid deflated to gel.

“Those skanky fuckers!” Cap raged. “The trigger’s both arms!”

They saw the street was now full of struggle. The wall-swarms had come leaking everywhere down onto the ground, were asphalt and concrete in color, but now there was no mistaking seven-foot eye-level monsters. It was full engagement, and everyone had to know now.

“Both their arms!” Cap bellowed to the town. “Take off both their arms!”

He knew his end one pulse before it came—a swift deployment of mass above and behind him. Barbs sank into his shoulders and his chest, hoisting him up and back into the jaws. A demon’s head with rainbow eyes engulfed his own, and closed the book of his kindness and courage forever.

Everywhere shield and sword teams had brutes down, barbs locked on shields, and with a frenzied diligence were hacking at every part of them. Headless thoraxes, half their legs gone, dragged sword teams in circles as our people hacked at any piece of the homicidal amputees they could reach.

But word spread, and after a timeless fury, a fugue of dark, adrenalized toil, new danger underfoot was everywhere, because bugs were collapsing wholesale to globes and big tongues of questing gel.

But then the bugs had flowed up to the walls again, resumed their evasive flow, their searching for entry into buildings. A lull had come to the attack down in the street. Chops, wiping his eyes, dragged Cap off the street and wrapped him in a tarp. The palm of his hand still stung with the stars Cap had put there. He laid it on the dead man’s chest, a good-bye and a promise of vengeance.

More than a dozen headless souls lay bleeding along the street, like toppled amphorae spilling their contents. People were grieving, were torching gel, were howling curses at the sky. Chops worked his way down the length of the street, shouting the message on Cap’s lips when he died. “Blow their arms off! Both their fucking arms!”

*   *   *

The battle plan
was spreading everywhere. “Reinforce refuges and get more armed defenders inside them. The bugs are only feinting in the streets, and going for maximum kills in refuges. And don’t waste shot on anything but their arms.”

Japh shouldered his gun—not too hot. The attack up here had been suspiciously thin—caught up a case of ammo belts, and got himself down into the street. Saw a guy he could use. “Ricky! Stop that truck and get a thirty! I need your help!”

He and Dawes jogged down the sidewalk weightily armed. “The Majestic’s harboring hundreds. Its entries need more cover. I’ll guard the front. I think you need to guard the back too.”

They jogged into the alley behind the theater. A Z of metal stairs climbed the back wall to the projection floor, reached through an ordinary door, not strong—and all the more obviously so as two mantids were well along in tearing it down.

“Cheap fuckin fiber-wood door!” shouted Ricky. “We gotta shotgun ’em. Thirties’ll fly on into the theater!”

Setting down their big guns they sprinted up the stairs drawing their sawed-offs. They stopped three risers below the brutes and opened fire on them. Chunks of their graspers went flying, but these parts’ quickness made them damnably hard to hit. One’s head came off, jounced past them down the stairs unregarded. Both mantids persisted in tearing at the doors until the double-ought’s damage commanded their attention.

They turned in counterattack. Then their graspers, outreached from above, made better targets. A half-dozen fusillades and they’d whittled them down to the shoulder-stubs.

An avalanche of gel poured down the stairs, and they were in.

The door was little more than a rag of wood fiber. They unhinged it and threw it aside, lay a big metal desk on its side and blocked the lower half of the doorway. Ricky mounted his thirty behind it.

“Cut ’em off at the waist,” Japh called, bounding back down the stairs, “and their arms can’t reach ya!
Then
, take their arms off.”

Ricky went inside, down a short hall past the projection booth to a little balcony above the theater itself, where projectionists had once enjoyed their movies from an armchair. He looked down from there at his neighbors in their cavernous refuge.

A sea of anxious eyes met his gaze. He gave them an awkward little wave, and got relieved waves in return. “Not to worry folks,” he called. “We got your backs up here.”

Japh found covering the theater’s front doors trickier. It had a shallow, plain atrium, where the box office and posters once were, then, just beyond a sketch of a lobby, the four old-fashioned swinging doors that opened with push bars straight into the theater. These bugs could hammer right through them.

He seriously needed more guns with him here. He set his thirty at the left of the doors to fire out at the incoming where they funneled into the atrium. Then he scanned the buildings directly across the street, figuring the angle of his gun’s elevation so his fire would hit only sky.

Dr. Winters and Trish jogged into the atrium. Winters, recognizing in Japh a young man he knew for a reader, immediately unburdened himself. “It’s ludicrous! These things are Mantidae! They’re not even of the same order as wasps!”

And, as if doing it only to express his anger at this phylogenetic outrage, when a mantis came sprinting toward them, he fired his twelve with a scowling, deliberate expertise that pleasantly surprised Japh—and blew one of its graspers off.

*   *   *

The banquet room
on the ground floor of the Masonic Building, big and unpartitioned as it was, made a refuge for many people, most of them older, though most of them were armed. The front door was stout, but it had two big street windows. These had woodwork bars nailed over them, sufficient screens against the wasps, but already badly splintered by the mantids.

Sheriff Smalls shouted, “Cluster-fire leftward! Those shutters are caving in!”

In the arc of the defenders’ line, Smalls stood point—knelt point, with so many guns firing from either side. The Georges Junior and Senior flanked him—George Senior seated in a chair whose backrest helped him bear the recoil of his shotgun. Flanking them and a yard behind were two young Rasmussen men and two McCaufields—fourth generation natives of the same stripe. A second line of older defenders had at its center Iris Meyer, her right shoulder thickly padded, and the wheels of her chair locked to damp recoil.

Near eighty people sat or lay behind, their gazes fixed on the fanged heads and spiked arms thrusting ever farther through the spray of glass and splinters.

The right window’s frame caved inward from the pressure. Two mantids erupted all the way inside, the uppermost launching off the lower’s back. This forced the lower to falter in its assault, and it suffered swift amputation of its left grasper, but helped loft the upper bug, so that one landed and threatened the Georges with its graspers.

George Junior thrust himself in front of his father to shield him. His first shot was off, only tearing a chunk from the thorax, and, off-balance already, the recoil dropped him to his knees before the brute.

But in the instant the graspers hinged out for him, his father seized him from behind in both arms, thrusting his son’s head down and his own forward.

Receiving the jaws himself, his head was engulfed, his neck sheared. His son, beneath them both, howled grief and rage, tilted up his barrel, and blew the killer’s graspers off with their barbs still lodged in his father.

Heavy gunfire raged beyond the shutters. The bugs crowding the break in the frame began to be jolted, taken apart from the sides while their forelegs still struggled for entry.

“Holy shit!” shouted a young McCaufield happily. “The cavalry’s coming! What a clusterfuck!”

“OK,” barked Smalls. “Get closer now! Trim off their barbs from below!”

Flanking their splintering barriers they crouched—tough postures for the older defenders—and began to bring down a clattery rain of sundered graspers, while the focused fire outside still whittled the invaders away.

A new danger arose inside with this turning tide: lopped parts puddling to gel, and melon-sized blobs pouring forth in attack.

“Flame in here! Flame here!” bellowed Smalls. “George Junior, get that door ready to open!”

Still wiping tears from his eyes, George did so. When the first flame-team burst in, Smalls shouted, “Small gas-bursts! Just get a little flame on each of ’em!”

The team got good at this light-touch torching. Their foam-spray backup had to kill some blazes on the floorboards, but soon they had a dozen little globes quivering and vague in their movement, lit only on top, but already beginning to flatten.

XXV

FINGERS FALTER ON THE KEYBOARD

Relentless artist that
he was, Val never stopped keying his visual music, adjusting, steering the flow of his forces, but he now faced a grave challenge.

The raft-gunners had been lethal. His own hands and those of his App control crew had toiled on their keyboards to reknit the programs that gunfire had scrambled in his cocoons. Many not blown to shreds had retained most of their tissue.

Now, an hour into the First Act, it was Lazarus-come-forth time. And bug after bug hatched inoperably deformed. Graspers merged with midlegs, or wholly legless, or half-winged or half-headless. They hatched, plunged straight off their trees, and crashed dead.

Val had lost sixty-four mantids still in cocoon. A stunning blow.

He’d known these extras would be tough. He’d wanted a battle, of course. But today he’d gotten a broken nose in the first round. The dangerous coals of anger glowed in him. He must not be angry.

The APP death toll for Act One already was harrowing. Bad enough their emergence into a sleet of gunfire, but the extras’ kill rate in the streets was accelerating. They developed tactics so quickly, shield-men to snag the graspers; paired swordsmen or shotgunners to sunder them.

His mantids, his lovely monsters! He’d been too enamored of their image, their glamorous monstrosity, to see their operational limitations.

Highly mobile and quick in their seizure—but narrowly frontal in their assault, and thus, in attack, poorly defended on both flanks. And building them with the bulk and leverage to snatch a man off his feet, he’d made them just a bit awkward against multiple assailants.

The upshot was, at the close of this act, he might withdraw well under two hundred APPs from the set. And assailed by so few, the extras would kill many more in Act Two.

Val had erred. His fingers had faltered on the keyboard of creation, and he was taking a grave beating. With APP-loss at this rate, his third act would be a farce, a festive town bug-hunt, conducted by the extras with jeers and hilarity!

But what of it? Was this too not a perfect story? The town triumphant!
Alien Death
itself all slain! It would be the first heartwarming Live Action ever shot! A giga-blockbuster!

But here Val hit a wall in himself. The town triumphant was not an option. He must not, would not go down so roundly beaten. His legions must not be swept from the field before the moon reached its zenith. Yet with all his forces fighting, what weapon did he have?