Emergence (32 page)

‘So that’s a bust,’ he muttered.

The Gerber, the small black fighting knife, seemed pathetically inadequate for the job of carving up Satan’s own rhino. He might as well have at him with a plastic coffee spoon. Nonetheless, he concealed the blade behind his forearm, gripped in the palm of his right hand, and closed with the giant Hunn. Knees bent, empty hand forward, just as his stomach cramped painfully and his vision greyed out at the edges.

‘I can make this painless for you if you hold fast and bare your neck to the mercy stroke,’ Scaroth said in what passed for a whisper. ‘I would do you that honour, for you have rid me of those inconvenient Grymm.’

They circled each other in front of the shack. Dave was vaguely aware of onlookers nearby. Not just the SEALs watching from cover but local people huddled fearfully in the shadows, peeking out from behind curtains as if thin doors and glass might protect them.

‘Scaroth?’ Dave sighed. ‘You talk too much.’

Dave hit the accelerator and with a flick of his wrist threw the Gerber straight into Scaroth’s right eye, where it buried itself up to the hilt. The Hunn screeched in pain and fury as Dave tried to run for Lucille, dizzy with hunger. The giant daemon lashed out with one foot, extending a talon that tripped Dave as he tried to slip past.

Scaroth howled, bringing his blade down again. With only one eye his aim was off, and Dave rolled away from each strike until he could scramble to his feet. He ducked a slashing attempt to behead him and drove a solid right hook into the BattleMaster’s naked crotch. Cock-punching an enormous monster penis was among the most unpleasant things he’d ever had to do in his life. A bellow erupted from within the creature’s chest as he sailed backward.

‘You know
. . .’
Dave gasped for air as he staggered over to collect Lucille. ‘For once I’m actually grateful someone has balls bigger than mine.’

He made it to the splitting maul and felt a measure of his strength return as his hands closed around her. Scaroth gathered himself, still unsteady from the low blow, facing Dave, both hands on the hilt of FoeSunder, claws out. Blood ran down his face from the Gerber that was still embedded in his right eye.

‘Trickery,’ he grunted. ‘Feeble trickery is all you offer.’

‘And a prize-winning cock punch. Gotta give me credit for that.’

‘There will be much pain for that!’

Dave was at the point of collapse. The members of the thrall were piled up across the roadway, straining against their bloodlust, wanting to charge him but mindful of the grave dishonour they would bring to their clans and nest if they intervened. Allen had disappeared back into the darkness, and those residents who had foolishly gathered or stopped in their flight to watch his challenge were all slipping away as quietly as they could. Time to roll a hard six. Summoning the last of his energy, drawing what he could from Lucille and not really understanding how that was even possible, Dave launched himself into the air, bringing the hammer up behind his back. Scaroth turned to carve him in half, but Dave was moving too fast, bringing Lucille down with the last of his rapidly failing might. The splitting maul shattered the forged metal of FoeSunder and bit into Scaroth’s right shoulder. Dave roared his own
shkriaa
as the great wedge of American steel sliced through the BattleMaster’s armour, hide, sinew, and bone, bisecting him diagonally from shoulder to hip in a geyser of blood and horror. The two halves fell to the ground with a wet, spurting plop.

The Horde stood silent as the choppers circled overhead and sirens wailed in the background. Another Hunn stepped forth to look at the body of the slain BattleMaster. With a couple of kicks to the shoulder, the daemon grunted, nodding to itself.

‘We shall withdraw from your realm, ur Dave,’ the beast said, its voice thick with contempt and shame.

Dave, hyperventilating now and swaying on his feet, took a gulp of air and nodded. ‘Well
. . .
bye, then. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.’

The Horde turned as one and began to retrace their steps. And that was it. They were done. None broke ranks to feed on the calflings of New Orleans or even to gather the bodies of their fallen. With heads low, they trudged back to the construction site where the portal grew wider with each passing minute.

Dave leaned on Lucille, feeling a wave of fatigue and nausea building, threatening to sweep him away. Casting a glance at Scaroth’s corpse, he searched for some feeling but came up empty.

Chief Allen and the SEALs emerged cautiously from cover, tracking the monsters with their weapons. Dave knelt down to pluck the Gerber from Scaroth’s sightless eye socket, and his knees gave way, spilling him onto the ground next to the thing he had killed. Igor, towering over the pair, took a long look at the BattleMaster’s carcass before giving a nod of approval.

‘You need training,’ Igor said. ‘You fight like an idiot.’

Dave shook his head. ‘Nah, I don’t think so. We’re done here. Next time we see these cocksuckers, it’ll be at the multiplex.’

‘I’ll bet they won’t show their junk,’ said Igor. ‘Not if they want an M rating.’

Marine Corps helicopters roared overhead as he spoke. A mechanical ripping sound, perhaps the longest fart Dave had ever heard in his life, tore through the darkness. Long streams of tracer fire arced away over the roofline, and a shower of brass casings rained down on the street, a line of tinkling metal charms that raced away in the wake of the gun run. Dave spun around. He could see Heath looking at him, as shocked as he. He hadn’t ordered the attack.

The war party scattered under the onslaught of the helicopter’s nose-mounted machine guns, but the surviving leaders of the thrall were there in the chaos and madness, organising their forces back into a rough line of battle facing to the east, toward the tightly packed grid of slum housing in which hundreds, maybe a thousand people still cowered.

‘Betrayers!’ a Hunn commandant shrieked. ‘Kill them all!’

‘Zach, get him to stop,’ Dave gasped. ‘We’re breaking the deal. We had a deal.’

Chief Allen shook his head, dragging Dave out of the fire zone. ‘Dude, I’m sorry. I dunno what –’

Tracer fire and rockets reached out from the sky, lightning bolts of technology breaking monster bodies apart, splitting muscle and bone, spilling the blood of the Horde into the soil. Dave took a step to intervene, to stop the Cobras himself if needs must.

Heath half ran, half hobbled over to where Allen and Dave had taken shelter on the porch of a small home. He was holding one finger to his ear as he ran with an increasingly debilitating limp, screaming into the headset that connected him back to the command truck and presumably up the chain of command. With his other hand he fired short bursts at any of the thrall that made to charge at him.

The screaming started again, the sounds of slaughter as dozens of Hunn and Fangr that had escaped the conflagration of high explosives and flying metal burst into the surrounding streets and fell upon the fleeing populace.

‘What the fuck did you do?’ Dave shouted as his head swam and his muscles cramped. Allen tried to feed him a drink tube from his own CamelBak, and Dave knocked it away at first before angrily grabbing the nozzle and sucking for all he was worth.

‘Well, tell him to shut it the fuck down,’ Heath yelled into the tiny microphone of his headset, ignoring Dave. He looked truly out of control for the first time since Dave had met him.

‘We just avoided a war, and that fucking idiot starts another one.’

The SEAL officer almost ripped the comm equipment off, but training and discipline got the better of him and he repeated himself in a calmer voice. He was still quivering with anger and stopped to fire two more bursts from his assault rifle but was no longer yelling.

‘What happened, Heath?’ Dave asked when the officer signed off.

Heath let go one long, bitter exhalation of breath.

‘Compton,’ he said. ‘Compton did an end run around us. Plugged himself right into the command authority and got the green light for the gun run.’

Heath took up a firing position on the porch, sweeping the street with his rifle, taking head shots when he could. Beside him, Allen did the same thing after emptying his pockets of energy bars for Dave.

The whole street blazed and crackled with gunfire that was cutting into the surviving warriors of Urspite Scaroth’s broken thrall and probably killing dozens of innocent civilians as the high-powered rounds passed through flimsy walls and open windows.

‘Compton?’ Dave asked dumbly. ‘He can do that?’

Heath waved a hand despairingly at the street as if that answered the question.

‘But I thought you were in charge here.’

Heath cracked off another double shot, knocking over an unleashed Fangr that was dashing to and fro like a rabid dog.

‘I’ve never been in charge of anything but a couple of men on the ground, Dave. I don’t make the big calls.’

‘And that fucking moron does?’ Dave exclaimed.

‘No,’ said Heath, ‘but he’s got the number of the morons who do.’

The gunships opened up again a couple of hundred yards away, lighting up the vacant lot through which the Horde had emerged into the world.

Three Cobras were working the kill zone now. Miniguns, rockets, and door gunners were churning up the field.

Heath listened to something over his headset again, acknowledged the transmission, and climbed slowly and painfully to his feet.

No. To his one good foot, Hooper thought.

‘Chief, round up your squad and Ostermann’s if you can. The hostiles have mostly broken and run for it. Back to the
. . .
the
. . .
what did they even come through, Dave? How did they get here?’

‘No idea,’ he said without emotion. ‘Neither do they. But I guess there’s some sort of portal thing in that lot. And under the Longreach. And on the highway up to Area 51. And who the fuck knows where else now?’

Heath and Allen both stared at him.

‘Chief,’ the officer finally said, ‘priority one right now is protecting the civilians. Sweep and clear the AO. Establish a perimeter with NOPD, then sweep and clear again. Casevac will need protecting when they roll in. There’s sure to be stragglers here and there. And find me Ostermann. He’s gonna have to run this. I need to get on the line and let the bosses know we’re at war.’

Dave tried to stand up, but the world tilted on its axis and tipped him off into darkness.

*

The thresh did not think.

The thresh did not look back.

The thresh ran like a hunted urmin.

It ran through fire and steel, past warriors who did not know what to do. It sent out quickthinkings for them to follow, but their minds were shocked and unmoored by the fire of the men’s captive metal Drakons.

It found the entrance to the UnderRealms and picked up the tempo, matching the speed of a Sliveen scout headed in the same direction. The thresh took some solace from that. The scout bore many scars and inked markings of skirmishes and battles below. None could doubt its proven courage, yet it outpaced the thresh on the race to escape this accursed realm.

The Sliveen’s head exploded just as it raced past.

Quick panicked glances dagger- and shield-wise finally revealed black-clad human warriors wielding magick staffs. They sent dark enchantments in the thresh’s direction, condensed bolts of searing sunlight that crashed like thunder as they whipped past the thresh, impossibly faster than the swiftest arrowhead. Bodies and pieces of bodies were blown through the air every time the bolts touched the thrall.

Puffs of dirt and stone erupted around the thresh as it redoubled its gallop for the portal, churning up the filthy maelstrom of mud and ichor that had turned the small field where they entered this realm into a quagmire.

The thresh stumbled, and a young Hunn warrior changed course to offer help, only to be blown apart a few feet away. Gore splashed over the thresh just before another explosion covered it in soil. This whole world was an insane mandala of explosive violence in which the lives of individual nestlings and even grand storied BattleMasters were meaningless.

A cloud of smoke puffed from the ruined buildings on the thresh’s shield flank as a single Fangr disintegrated in a ball of flame.

Thresh could hear its own voice wailing wild thinkings inside its head, shaken and terrified and somewhat disgusted with itself as it recalled the words of Her Majesty.

‘This shall not stand. We shall not be mocked thus. Not by the likes of men.’

A Hunn zigzagging in front of the thresh lost his head to a long ropy ribbon of bolt fire licking out from the dark, foreboding tangle of the human village. The thresh was so close to the portal now. But even there the path was not clear as a solid crush of broken, terrified thrall-mates attempted to climb over one another to get away from the dire magicks of mankind.

Torn and blasted bodies of clan warriors and human fighters lay entwined together in death. Almost promiscuously, until one could see that the nest lovers had bitten one another’s throats out, torn their bellies, raked one another to offal.

The thresh slowed as it approached, not sure how to proceed. It could not scramble over the frenzied press of bodies at the portal mouth. It could not even crawl under them. But neither could it stand and wait while sun bolts and Drakon fire rained down.

It could only
. . .

Some human wizard riding a metal Drakon solved the puzzle by throwing down one of the hissing, shrieking war bolts that exploded like small fire mountains, utterly destroying the crush of Hunn and Fangr at the portal mouth.

Seeing its chance, perhaps the only one it would get, the thresh raced forward, ignoring the smoking remains of the slain and the cries of its thrall-mates.

Once within, the thresh raced down into the passages, past the straggling survivors of the once proud Vengeance. It waited a few moments for others to come through after it. There surely had to be more. But reaching out for the thoughts of those still on the surface, the thresh found only silence.