Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  The enemy fire stopped.

  All that was left a few seconds later as the fire boiled away was a black circle on the ground maybe thirty feet across, in a mound, where the heat had sucked the very earth up in a low scorched dome, some unrecognizable lumps, and a small mushroom-shaped cloud of sullen red flame that vanished into black smoke.

  There was a second of stunned silence, and then one of the volunteers, damned if it wasn’t Randy, shouted, “We’ve got a goddamned wizard! Fuck those guys!”

  The rest of the volunteers roared their defiance. I ran forward, and they followed.

  While we did, two of my people bled to death from their wounds. They . . . just went out. One moment, I could feel their terror and pain as if it was my own. The next . . . there was only silence.

  Eleven hundred and eighty-five.

  And I didn’t even have time enough to find where they’d fallen and look at them.

  The footbridge isn’t just a simple, straightforward bridge over an underpass. It’s this enormous, gleaming, serpentine thing that winds like a river, made out of concrete and gleaming polished steel. It’s solid. Like, really solid. And the only place it could reasonably be taken down was over Columbus itself, where it thinned out to normal bridge proportions.

  I drew up to a halt at the mouth of the bridge and turned to Sanya. “Deploy our people in two ranks. One along the side of the bridge and the other along the wall over Columbus.”

  “And you?”

  “Those trees are blocking our line of fire. I gotta take them out, then go out on the bridge to take it down,” I said. “Be right back.”

  “Not alone,” Sanya said.

  “He isn’t,” Butters said, firmly.

  I eyed the little guy and didn’t have time to argue. So instead I grunted, jerked my chin to indicate the direction, and started off.

  I couldn’t get over how easy it was to use magic in the boiling air. I’d already performed several spells that by all rights should have left me in need of a breather and a meal. Instead, the latent magic in the air made me feel exhilarated, eager to do more. Which isn’t different from any other kind of power, I suppose. And it held the same dangers. So I was careful about how much force I used on the trees. Just enough to rip through each trunk and send them crashing down toward the street below.

  Once that was done, I raised my shield preemptively and hurried forward, following the curve of the bridge, even as some of the volunteers pounded out onto the bridge to take up firing positions overlooking the underpass.

  The enemy clicks became louder and more erratic, and I saw them for the first time as I stepped out onto the bridge.

  The Fomor army seemed to be organized in warbands. Each one had maybe three hundred creatures in it, in a distinct group, gathered around a central standard. No two groups looked the same. Some were simply a collection of turtleneck handlers, each holding a pair of large, hairless, vaguely canine animals. Some were packs of shapeless, deformed . . . things, naked, neither human nor animal, their faces and bodies twisted and ugly, the cruelest combinations of expressed genes imaginable. Some were orderly ranks of armored warriors, their arms a little too long for their bodies, their shoulders too wide. Some looked like troops of more modern militaries and were armed with rifles. And at the center of each warband was a knot of Fomor proper, frog-faced jerks in badly clashing clothing, seven feet tall.

  There were a couple of thousand of them. And those were only the ones I could see. The haze must have been concealing the rest.

  When I was spotted, things got a little crazy.

  Shots rang out and my shield lit up like a disco ball. Butters yelped and jumped behind me. I pressed forward. I had to get far enough up the bridge to bring it down.

  Someone shrieked something, and one of the groups of those tormented abominations came howling toward me, their locomotion ragged and swift.

  Butters peeked out from behind me and said, “Wow, red carats everywhere.”

  I blinked and poured more energy into the shield. With this much available, it wasn’t hard to hold it up. “What? What the hell do vegetables have to do with anything going on right now?”

  “It’s kind of a Knight thing.”

  I crouched low and got out of the worst of the fire. The walls on either side of the footbridge were about five feet high, and there was no way for them to get a clear line of sight to us. I felt clever as I hurried forward.

  And then I heard several phoont sounds.

  Grenades began to fall.

  Some of them went right on by and over. Trying to land a grenade inside the sheltered area of the footbridge was a damned tricky shot. But the enemy did what the enemy always does, and showed up with more skill than they had any right to possess.

  I shoved Butters against one of the walls, pressed my lower back against his chest, and melded the shield’s edges against the wall behind us.

  Half a dozen grenades went off in the space of maybe fifteen seconds, and the world was just one enormous crunching sound after another.

  “Down,” I growled as they stopped falling, and I lowered my shield. We dropped to hands and knees, below the level of the bridge’s walls, and I started crawling forward faster than I would have believed humanly possible. Butters followed.

  Evidently, they figured dozens of grenades had done the job, because we didn’t take any more fire—until we rounded a corner and found ourselves face-to-face with fifty turtlenecks in full tactical gear.

  “Forzare!” I shouted, and unleashed a broad stroke of pure kinetic force. I hit them harder than I’d meant to. The first three ranks of them went flying back like they’d been on wires, and collided with the men behind them. The impact brought instant massive confusion.

  “Butters!” I shouted. “Kill the bridge!”

  And I charged, slamming my right hand forward, screaming, “Forzare!” with every stride, knocking the turtlenecks around like ninepins.

  “Harry!” Butters screamed.

  “Kill the bridge, dammit!” I shouted back.

  I heard the Sword of Faith come alight in his hands, and a glance over my shoulder showed him hacking through the bridge at his feet as if it had been made of so many soap bubbles.

  I spun back to the enemy, brought my shield up—and stood tall.

  “You!” I said, relishing the moment. “Shall not! Pass!”

  They replied with a hail of automatic weapons fire. The impacts against my shield all but blinded me.

  And a freaking Fomor sorcerer popped out from behind a veil that had concealed him from me and lobbed a viscous-looking ball of quasi-liquid at me.

  I’d been burned once before, hah hah, by assuming my shield would be ready to stop whatever came at me. I ducked and skittered forward and to one side, and the blob hit the bridge where I’d been standing.

  Whatever that stuff was, the xenomorphs’ blood had nothing on it. It started chewing at the concrete and the steel itself, bubbling and hissing as those substances were dissolved, and a hideous stench filled the air.

  The Fomor smiled his froggy smile at me and tossed another, to my other side. I dodged again, but I had less space to do it in—I did not want to walk in one of those puddles. Whatever that vitriol was, it would probably devour my feet in seconds.

  And then one of the turtlenecks lobbed a grenade high, aiming for it to come down behind my shield.

  A flicker of will and a muttered word, and I batted the grenade out of the air and back down among the turtlenecks.

  There was a fine amount of screaming and confusion as it went off, and I checked over my shoulder.

  Butters had hacked through the bridge, but the thing hadn’t fallen yet. He dashed twenty feet back and started chopping again, to drop that entire length out of the bridge.

  I held my shield and my ground as the turtlenecks recovered, way too swi
ftly to be acceptable, and poured it on again. The Fomor sorcerer had vanished. Those creeps didn’t like to expose themselves to danger when they could whip their minions forward into it instead.

  “Harry!” Butters shouted.

  I started backpedaling, my shield bracelet beginning to overheat from use now, dribbling green-gold sparks everywhere.

  I made it back to Butters and he slashed down with Fidelacchius one final time, before both of us rushed back, around the curve of the bridge, and out of line of sight with the turtlenecks. There was an enormous groaning sound, then a rumbling crash and a scream of ripping concrete and twisting metal.

  And now that we were out of the line of fire, the volunteers on the bridge started hammering away at the turtlenecks. Yeah, those guys were professionals, but they weren’t bulletproof. I saw several go down before they started returning fire and . . .

  I felt phantom rounds hit my chest, my head.

  Eleven hundred and seventy-nine.

  I fought not to throw up. There wouldn’t have been much to come up anyway.

  The clicks rose to a sound like heavy canvas tearing, and the Fomor army came rushing forward in a storm of shrieks, wails, and screams.

  With the bridge out, their only option was to cross Columbus on foot—and they went bounding and leaping forward, jumping off the higher ground and down into the underpass without hesitation.

  And nothing happened.

  “What?” I demanded. “Where is Sanya?”

  “Beats me,” Butters said, panting. He was covered in concrete dust.

  The enemy massed on the far side of Columbus and then rushed forward, toward us. They crossed the first traffic lane without being fired upon. They reached the median of the divided road while more of their numbers piled into the underpass, a wave of flesh and steel and weaponry.

  They crossed the median and the first lane of traffic.

  And Sanya bellowed, “NOW!”

  Eight hundred men and women of Chicago popped up from behind the wall overlooking the sunken drive and opened fire with shotguns from a range of as little as thirty feet.

  The slaughter was indescribable.

  Shotguns are not precision weapons. But at thirty feet, and in the hands of an amateur, they don’t have to be. The volunteers’ fire swept the enemy’s front ranks like a broom, killing and maiming without prejudice or mercy. The sound of it was a roar like I’d never heard before, with too many individual blasts to distinguish any one round going off, a deadly martial thunderstorm.

  The volunteers fired until their weapons ran empty, and if they’d killed fewer than a thousand of the enemy, it was only by a couple.

  The enemy howled in their dismay and tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. Some tried to run up or down the street, but Sanya had positioned people all along the ground overlooking the sunken road, firing from defilade, and they enfiladed the ever-loving hell out of the Fomor army. Volunteers screamed their fury and defiance at the enemy. The volume of fire was so heavy that it magically turned a couple of stalled cars the enemy tried to take cover behind into Swiss cheese.

  Blood ran down the street in small rivers. The air grew thick with the iron stench of it.

  The enemy wasn’t done. They took up positions of their own, across the sunken road, behind just as much wall as my volunteers had. Then it became a gunfight. At that range, the professional weaponry of the turtlenecks wasn’t substantially better than the volunteers’ shotguns. Arguably, the shotguns were a better weapon for the shooting-gallery scenario, since they needn’t be aimed as carefully or as long. But that only made it something like a fair fight.

  Men and women who had followed me died.

  I felt them dying. There were very few instant deaths. Even the people shot in the head had time to thrash and scream for a handful of seconds before the end. Some of them were so close I could hear them pleading for mercy. But Death plays no favorites and makes no exceptions.

  Eleven hundred and fourteen.

  “Hell’s bells,” I muttered, shoving away the phantom sensory input to the best of my ability. I’d lost seventy-three volunteers, while the enemy dead numbered in the hundreds.

  We were winning.

  Granted, we weren’t going to get any more effective surprise attacks. From here on out, we’d have to work for all of them. But we were doing it.

  We were holding them off.

  Until the Titan appeared.

  Ethniu strode out of the haze, nine feet of terrible bronze beauty. She walked forward through the ranks, and while the enemy wilted and died all around her from my volunteers’ fire, she herself was unscathed, as if she’d been walking through a gentle rain instead of a storm of slugs and buckshot. She stood observing our positions for a moment or two, utterly ignoring everything the volunteers tried to do to her.

  “Jesus,” I said, realizing her intent. “Butters, get them off the bridge!”

  I took off, screaming for the volunteers to follow me. I ran back until the bridge met the park on our side of Columbus, then hopped up over the sidewall and slid down the shining steel slope on its other side to the ground. Then I ran toward Sanya.

  He had seen what was happening, too. He was screaming for a retreat, but over the roar of gunfire no one could hear him.

  Then Ethniu turned the Eye upon our side of the street.

  The world went red and howling. She simply tracked the Eye up and down the retaining wall, blasting it into a slope of finely ground rubble.

  Some of my people saw it coming in time, and ran.

  Most didn’t.

  They died. They died badly, consumed in a fire made from the raw, seething hatred of a Titan. Whatever pain they feared most, they felt as they died. Images of despair and doom flashed in that fire, and so much fear that many of my people went mad in the partial second of suffering they had left before their bodies were broiled and blasted to dust.

  And I felt it with them.

  Seven hundred and thirty-two.

  It hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe.

  In the space of a long breath, Ethniu had wiped out more than half of the offensive component of my little army.

  Winning. What a joke.

  Mortals could not stand against that.

  The Titan lifted her hand, the gesture elegant, and pointed forward with one finger.

  And with a roar, the Fomor army surged forward, down into the sunken road. The wall on our side of Columbus had been blasted into a slope, one the enemy would have no trouble climbing en masse. If we stayed, we’d be swallowed up in moments—and the enemy came at us eagerly, scenting victory, literally baying for our blood.

  “Retreat!” I screamed. “Retreat!”

  Most of the volunteers were way ahead of me.

  But many, eighty-seven, in fact, had been injured and could not run.

  They went down fighting.

  Six hundred and forty-five.

  The rest of us ran for our lives.

  Chapter

  Twenty-six

  It isn’t a very long run from the bottom of the bridge to the pavilion. It’s maybe a couple of hundred yards.

  That distance feels a hell of a lot longer when there’s an army chasing you. Without the pall of smoke and dust, their shooters would have gunned us down. It was bad enough for a while anyway: The enemy soldiers on the far side of Columbus fired furiously into the haze. They couldn’t see us once we were maybe ten feet back from our side of the street, but there wasn’t anything to stop the bullets from coming, either. I felt phantom wounds tear into me as more of my people were hurt by pure, merciless statistics.

  I threw up my shield as wide as I could and turned to face the enemy while walking backwards. “Get behind me!” I shouted.

  Some did, a little knot of defenders gathering around Butters and Sanya. The Alphas came hurtli
ng out of the haze, muzzles bloodied, and also crouched down in the shelter of my shield. Both groups huddled behind me, and I kept my steps slow and steady so that they could match my pace. The volunteers reloaded their weapons in the safety my shield offered.

  “How long can you hold it, Harry?” Butters asked.

  “Won’t have to be long,” I shouted back. “They’ll stop shooting as soon as—”

  The enemy fire abruptly stopped.

  “—their vanguard gets to the other side of the street and obstructs their fire,” I shouted into sudden quiet. I dropped the shield. “Hell’s bells, move!”

  We ran. Every single volunteer who had followed my banner was willing, but not all of them were terribly able. The folks who had gathered around Butters and Sanya were almost all older citizens who weren’t going to be winning any marathons anytime soon. I’ll give them credit, though—they still held their weapons as if they meant business.

  “Weapon,” I snarled at one of the more weary-looking men, and he passed me his shotgun. “Keep going, head for the pavilion!”

  I dropped back to the rear of the group and found Sanya, Butters, and the Alphas already there ahead of me. I passed the shotgun to Butters, who reduced the Sword of Faith to a wooden handle again, stowed it, and checked the firearm with, if not professionalism, at least confidence. Without a word, I traded looks with Sanya, and then the three of us spread out and turned to scuttle along backwards, Sanya and Butters with their weapons raised, me holding up the glowing tip of my blasting rod. The Alphas, meanwhile, darted out to our flanks, their furry forms vanishing swiftly into the haze.

  The first shapes to emerge from the haze were those hairless canine things, of course, running across the ground at a low rush.

  “Get some!” I shouted, and raised my blasting rod. “Fuego!”

  Butters’s shotgun bellowed, and Sanya’s Kalashnikov hammered away at a metronome’s pace. Creatures snarled and screamed and fell. Fire bloomed among them, sending dozens running and screaming with their injuries. Our pursuers, though clearly still desperate to reach us, juked back and forth, both exposing their fellows to the fire and slowing the entire mass of them, until we could see the shapes of those broad-shouldered, long-armed, armored figures approaching behind them.