A beam of light tore through the sky where she’d been hovering, moments earlier.
Moth, one of the Flyboys from Stormwatch, was less quick on the uptake. A second beam of light caught him as he turned to see where the first had come from. It lanced right through him, and sent him careening from the sky.
“Lucian? What are you doing?” Tempest looked to the distant figure high above, but the Cape’s only response was another blast of light, crackling through the air. This one exploded into the military troops clustered on the ground, launching broken and blackened bodies into the air.
“Joining the winning side, it would seem. So much for your reinforcements,” whispered Fallout, shadows collecting around his long, slender fingers. “It’s time I showed you mine.”
I couldn’t see what was happening from my place on the ground, but the front lines of Capes and army suddenly stiffened and turned, spinning to react as some unseen force struck them from the rear.
•—•—•
“Be a fellow of good cheer and kill the young spoilsport, Maul,” hissed Fallout, still audible even over the cacophony of screams, battle cries, and chattering assault rifles. “The rest of you, form up on me.”
The good thing about having a table leg practically welded to your hand is that it makes for a convenient means of levering yourself to your feet. My power did the rest, quiet and empty, keeping the pain distant, controlling my body like I was a Walker in truth.
With every step in my direction, Maul got larger. Ten feet away, he scooped up the twisted remains of one of the meeting room tables, holding the entire thing in one hand like it was a giant club. Five feet away, he roared and swung his weapon.
I was already moving. If I’d dodged backwards or to the side, like the Titan had clearly expected, I’d have ended up a man-sized smear out there in the Mojave.
Instead, I charged forward.
The first lesson in fighting someone bigger than you is to nullify their reach advantage. Maul was large and terrifyingly strong, but he wasn’t any faster than a normal. I let my power push my body to its limits, eking out an extra bit of speed. If I somehow survived, I’d pay a price for that… but it got me inside and under the arc of the Titan’s swing.
The second lesson in fighting someone bigger than you is to not let them touch you. Thanks to my fights with the Viking, I knew punching Maul would be a terrible idea. I also knew not to try scaling his back and choking him out, no matter how cool it might look in vids. This time, I kept things simple; I thrust the sharp end of my half-melted table leg into the vulnerable skin at the back of the big man’s knee.
The metal table leg, as battered as it was, was a hell of a lot tougher than my fist… just not tough enough. The sharp point hit the Titan’s skin, and glanced off, leaving little more than a narrow scratch behind. Even worse, the jarring impact tore the table leg right out of my hand, taking with it multiple layers of skin.
My power kept me on my feet somehow, but when Maul’s club came swinging back through, the only option for avoiding it was to drop down. I hit the ground hard, and the shard in my chest slid even deeper. I could hear the audible wheeze that meant I’d finally punctured a lung. It was all I could do to roll onto my back.
Maul was standing above me, blocking out the dark and stormy sky. I watched a foot the size of a trash can lift up then drop toward me like a meteor falling from the sky. I gritted my teeth, snarled soundless, bloody-lipped defiance into the air, and braced for the impact.
It never came. Something white streaked in from my periphery to strike Maul’s leg with an audible ring of metal and a storm of sparks. When my vision cleared, a tall man in silver chainmail and a white surcoat stood above me, a shield strapped to one arm, and a bloody sword held in the other.
They called him the White Knight. One-time leader of the Los Angeles Defenders, he’d retired a decade earlier to take an advisory role with the Hammers of God. He had to be pushing seventy, but his movements were as fluid as ever.
Maul howled in anger, his club whistling through the air. It was the sort of blow that would have obliterated a tank, and the White Knight didn’t try to take it head-on, but instead swayed to one side, letting it whistle harmlessly past. He slid back in at an angle, leading with his shield, pushing Maul’s arm and weapon out wide. Then his other hand thrust forward, driving his famous sword right through the Titan’s torso.
Maul grunted, but his free hand punched the White Knight in the chest. The old Cape lost his helm and flew back a dozen feet. As hard as he went down, he was back on his feet almost immediately, white mustache and beard slick with sweat and sticking to a gaunt, wrinkled face.
“Come and die, old man,” taunted Maul.
“I think I’ll stay right here,” said the White Knight, breathing heavily, “but thanks all the same.”
“Coward!” Maul raised his club and charged the Cape.
“I call it prudence.” On the third step, Maul slowed. On the fourth, he dropped to one knee, his free hand clutching at his chest. “That was your heart I hit,” continued the White Knight. “Every step you took just tore the hole open further.”
The last shreds of strength evaporated from Maul’s arms. Still five feet from his opponent, he fell to the earth and died.
The White Knight hurried over, still breathing heavily. A seasoned eye looked me over, taking note of my wounds, and the old man shook his head. “Stay still, lad, and keep pressure on that wound. When this is over, the paramedics will—”
I never got to hear what the paramedics would do, as something hit the Knight from behind, tossing him twice the distance Maul had already sent him.
One of Fallout’s reinforcements had broken through the army’s line. That was bad enough on its own, but when I saw who it was, all hope of victory fled.
He was the leader of the Legion of Blood and the one Black Hat even Fallout feared. Unofficially ranked as a Mid-Four Titan and a Mid-Four Stalwart, he’d fought the adult Paladin and several members of the Defenders to a stalemate on multiple occasions.
Carnage was here, and we were all going to die.
•—•—•
The infamous Black Hat didn’t spare me a glance as he stepped forward. Even at nine feet tall, he moved with that grace unique to Stalwarts, his long, powerful legs crossing the distance at inhuman speeds.
The White Knight barely got to his feet in time. Blood poured down the right side of his face, but he’d held on to both shield and sword somehow. Pale eyes widened as he saw who was coming toward him, and then a sort of resigned determination set in. He raised his shield and his sword. “So be it. Let’s see what you have.”
I’d seen Orca and Matthew fight more than a dozen times, and I’d seen WarChild and that anonymous Stalwart compete in the Graduation Games, but nothing prepared me for seeing two Cat Four Stalwarts in battle. It wasn’t just that they were fast and skilled… even the first-years were like that. It was like they were communicating in a language I couldn’t even comprehend. Every strike was a puzzle instantly divined and solved by the opponent. For almost thirty seconds—a lifetime at that speed—not a single blow landed.
Carnage’s gruesome smile widened. “Tiring already, old man?”
“Come and find out, monster.” Sweat mingled with blood, but the White Knight blinked both away.
Carnage was already in motion, gliding past the Cape’s defensive sword thrust. The other man lashed out with his shield but Carnage stopped it dead with one giant hand. With a low growl, the Black Hat ripped the shield up and to the side.
I don’t know what the old man had done to try and brace himself, but it didn’t work. The shield went flying and his arm went with it, torn from its socket in a spray of blood, shredded tendons and splintered bone.
The old Cape’s scream was lost in the sounds of dying men all around us, but as I watched, something like triumph entered his eyes. The sword strike Carnage had dodged on his way in had been one last, risky feint, pulled back at t
he very last moment. The Black Hat was too close to dodge, too far out of position to block.
The White Knight drove his sword forward, all of his remaining bodyweight behind the blow.
Still on my ass, still struggling to rise without even a table leg to support me, I watched the Titan’s body heave up and down, as if trying to dislodge the sword I couldn’t quite see. Then I heard the sound, drowning out even the roar of machine guns firing in unison.
Carnage was laughing.
He hoisted the White Knight into the air. In the Cape’s left hand—now his only hand—was a golden hilt, and the three-inch fragment of blade which was all that remained of his legendary sword.
“I hear you used to be something back in the day,” Carnage said, leaning forward to let the other man’s blood cascade down over his face. “You should’ve stayed retired.”
The hand holding the White Knight came down like a hammer, smashing the old Stalwart into the earth again and again. By the third impact, there was nothing left but a broken body in shredded chainmail.
CHAPTER 74
Carnage tossed the White Knight’s corpse aside and headed for the ridge where Fallout and the others were making their stand.
A costumed Flyboy came crashing down out of the sky twenty feet to my left, hitting the earth like a missile of blood and bone. Above me, the sky crackled with lightning and thunder as Tempest brought the storm’s fury to bear on the Morning Star. The traitorous Cape was on the defensive—building shields of solid light as he was tossed about by hurricane strength winds and sheets of rain—but that was the only good news I saw. Over half the original Capes were missing, and the handful who remained with Tempest were being overwhelmed as additional Black Hats took to the sky.
On the ground, the situation was somehow even worse. The staccato crackle of gunfire mixed with the crash of thunder, but the First Battalion’s lines had broken, and what had once been a strong, if hastily assembled, perimeter had fractured into chaos. Pyros, Lightbringers and Telekinetics rained down death on each other from a distance as Titans, Stalwarts and Jitterbugs waded through the sea of soldiers and civilians like earthbound Gods.
I sucked air into my one working lung, spat out blood from the other, and lay there, useless and injured, as people died around me.
Maybe Nikolai had been right all along. Maybe if I’d taken Amos’ advice and worked toward an academic scholarship, I wouldn’t have ended up in the desert, bleeding out while multiple teams of Capes fought and died. Hell, maybe I even deserved to have it end like this.
But you know what?
Fuck going out on my back.
Fuck going out easy.
Never lived easy. Wasn’t going to die that way either. Not even if the world ended around me.
I rolled to one side and slowly, painfully, pushed myself back to my feet.
•—•—•
There wasn’t any part of the White Knight that remained recognizable, just a hunk of meat and bone, discarded in Carnage’s wake. I was staggering past the corpse, too worried that stopping would make it impossible to start again, when something caught my eye.
The hilt and broken blade of the Knight’s sword.
I shouldn’t have been able to bend down to grab it, but I did anyway, scooping it out of the dirt without slowing. More pain, but it blended in with the rest, still distant if no longer possible to ignore.
I passed Maul’s body next and then, not much further on, found Tremor. The Black Hat was on his back, eyes wide open, with a strangely neat bullet hole through his forehead, and what remained of his brains spread across the desert beneath him.
Score one for the men and women of the First Battalion.
As I reached the ridge, I found Carnage and Jaws in a field of broken bodies. The Shifter was limping badly, his natural regeneration overwhelmed by the sheer number of injuries he’d suffered. Carnage was covered in gore, but otherwise untouched. As I watched, he scooped up a dead Cape with one enormous hand and threw her twenty feet through the air into a cluster of soldiers.
At the center of the space they’d cleared, Fallout was at work. The Black Hat was turned to the sky, his long hair streaming out behind him. Spindly fingers wove invisible patterns in the air, and high above us, shadows stretched from the clouds to grasp one of the last few soaring Capes. The unknown Wind Dancer faltered, his mouth opening in a silent scream, and shadows poured in through that mouth, through his eyes, his nose and his ears.
Moments later, the Cape’s wind deserted him, and he dropped from the sky like a stone.
A fresh storm of bullets came down from the far side of the ridge, where soldiers had formed a knot of resistance around a handful of Capes and the wreckage of another shuttle. Jaws staggered yet again, then he and Carnage turned to crush the opposition. For a moment, there was nobody looking in my direction.
I staggered through the bodies toward Fallout.
I wasn’t quiet. There’s no such thing as being quiet with a punctured lung and four barely functional limbs. But with Tempest’s storm raging around us, with soldiers screaming and dying, and Capes and Black Hats sounding their battle cries, the sounds of my passage almost went unnoticed.
Almost.
I was three feet from Fallout, creeping up behind him, when the cry went out.
“Fallout! Look out!”
Somehow, I’d missed Jaws’ wife in the sea of corpses.
I didn’t have time to kick myself for making the same mistake twice in a row. I didn’t have time to even think. Instead, I lunged forward, the White Knight’s broken blade fully extended in front of me.
Fallout’s own shadow reached up and stopped me cold, one tendril wrapped around my outstretched wrist like a steel manacle, even as another twined itself around my feet. The Shadecaster didn’t bother to turn in my direction. His sight was fixed on Tempest, long fingers momentarily paused, as if he was waiting for something.
High above us, the Weather Witch brought her arms together. The hurricane winds Lucian had been fighting suddenly reversed, and the Morning Star soared forward.
Right into a storm of lightning the likes of which I’d never seen before.
Struck hundreds of times in less than a second, the Lightbringer plummeted from the sky like a fiery comet.
Tempest paused to watch him fall.
Fallout’s fingers began to dance.
I’d been straining to reach the Black Hat from the moment he caught me, but his shadowy grip was as strong as any Titan’s. I watched darkness gather around his spindly fingers, seconds from lashing out with lethal force.
I thought of the low-level Shadecaster that Red had inadvertently killed down in the Hole.
And then I reached up with the bloody mess that was my free hand. I tore the metal shard out of my chest, and I stabbed down into the shadow that held me.
For just a moment, Fallout staggered, and the grip around my wrist and feet loosened. I took that final, all-important step, and drove the White Knight’s broken blade into the Black Hat’s back.
•—•—•
If there’s one thing I’d learned in the Academy, it’s that there is no such thing as unnecessary overkill. I twisted the broken sword, pulled it out, and stabbed again.
The hand that stopped me this time was flesh and blood and as large as my head. With a flick of his wrist, Carnage threw me backwards all the way across the ridge.
I landed hard in a pile of dead or dying soldiers, and felt something in my spine give way. My legs splayed uselessly to the side and blood fountained from where I’d removed the metal shard, but my eyes still worked.
I saw Fallout on one knee, both hands still extended upward.
I saw shadows stab down from Tempest’s own thunderclouds like the negative images of lightning strikes. I saw her obliterate some with lightning of her own, saw her build a wall of wind and rain against the others.
And I saw the shadows slide right through that defensive wall to strike her.
I
saw Tempest die.
And two hundred feet below her, I saw Carnage turn and start to come my way.
Fuck this fucking shit.
•—•—•
I couldn’t feel my legs. I could barely move my arms, and darkness was starting to creep into the edges of my vision, but what I remember more than all of that was the emptiness of my power spreading from my core. I felt it reach my heart, felt my heart skip one beat, then a second. Felt it reach my mouth, making my tongue go numb. I felt it reach my eyes, felt them flutter shut.
Some people say there’s a great tunnel of light when you die, and an uncontrollable urge to travel toward it. Some people say you see your own life flashing before you, every decision made, every mistake, every blessing.
I opened my eyes and saw ocean.
It wasn’t the Pacific, not really. There wasn’t any water and there wasn’t any sky. There was just darkness, like an ocean’s waves, tiny pinpricks of light reflecting off the surface. Except even that was wrong, because it wasn’t darkness; it was emptiness, and it wasn’t light, it was something else, something that pooled in increasingly shallow puddles in the dead bodies about me, something that barely glimmered in the imperceptible forms of ghosts across the battlefield.
For the first time, I saw with my own eyes that balance of life and death of which Sally had spoken.
Even in this strange perspective, Carnage was a giant; a bonfire of energy twenty feet tall. I watched him come as the last bits of life trickled out of me, as my emptiness spilled over into the earth and the corpses around me. He stood there and said nothing, content to watch me bleed out on my own.
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again,
Fuck going out like that.
I pulled on that dark-watered ocean around me, the dead and the almost-dead, even the pockets of buried decay in the desert beneath me. I pulled that death back into me, kept pulling until metaphysical seams started to tear, as my core struggled to contain the emptiness I’d taken.
See These Bones Page 40