by Evan Currie
“Why are you here?” Norton demanded as he squared off against her again. “I expected you to be a fresh rising, but you’re too powerful, and you know the old words. You did not rise here.”
She snarled, baring her teeth. He could see her shriveled gums had long since pulled back, making the teeth look large and protruding.
“I woke here four nights past, I think,” she growled. “With no sun, I cannot be sure.”
Norton’s mind reeled. On the one hand, the answer made sense, but it created new questions rather than resolving anything. He felt his control slipping, the power in his voice breaking as he frowned, genuinely puzzled.
“Then you don’t know how you got here?”
“No,” she growled, flashing forward, “and it hardly matters. It is time for you to die.”
Norton barely had time to curse before she was on him. He got an arm block up against the first hit, but was out of position and took the full brunt of the strike. It lifted him off the ground and threw him back several feet, barely leaving him standing as he struggled to get his guard back up.
She blew through his defenses as though his arms were made of tissue paper, hammering him with blow after blow. Norton gritted his teeth, but kept putting his forearms up to protect his head and torso from the potentially lethal hits.
That softened the strikes, but didn’t stop them. He felt a rib crack, a distinctive pain like a knife driving right through his body. He hissed, trying to block the pain, but there were limits to what he could accomplish while under direct attack, even with his considerable talents.
Norton roared, filthy words rolling off his tongue. He barely had any idea what he was saying, but it made him feel better, and he stepped into the attack and swung back as hard as he could.
She just sneered at him, taking the hit evenly across the face, and then looking him in his black eyes.
“Too little. Too late.”
“Oh shit,” Norton swore, recognizing the shift in her stance as she went into motion.
The fist rocked his head to one side, and the follow-up keeled him over as all the air rushed out of his lungs. He never even saw the knee coming up to meet his face before the whole world became a rush of wind, pain, and blackness.
* * *
Hawk Masters slammed the buttstock of his AA-12 into a frozen body that was blocking his way, sending shards of ice and gore to the ground at his feet as he brought the weapon back to his shoulder and opened up.
That little girl scares me.
He emptied the last of his slugs into the attacking horde, aiming past the ones closest to him to get the most out of his last few really decent long-range munitions. His backup didn’t fail him, however, and the creatures closest to him went down hard in a hail of double-aught buckshot that mangled their faces.
He let the drum fall, and it clattered off the cement floor as he reached for a replacement. There was only buckshot left, but it was better than nothing.
Masters was reloading when a blur of motion from above caught his attention. He glanced up in time to see a body slam into the railing of the catwalk. He recognized Norton almost instantly, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as he prepared to watch his friend fall the more than thirty feet to the cement below.
Somehow, miraculously, Norton had managed to hook his arms over the railing, however. Now he was hanging there by the arms, head slumped into his chest. Honestly, Masters didn’t know if his friend was dead or alive, but that didn’t change what he had to do.
“Eddie!” he called, getting the master chief’s attention. When Rankin looked over, Masters just nodded up. “Look.”
The tough-as-nails SEAL did as he was asked, and instantly paled to match Masters’s own pasty complexion. “Holy sh—! Is that Alex?”
“Yeah, and I need a way up there,” Masters growled.
“You want to try taking on something that can kick Alex’s ass?” Eddie asked, incredulous. “Are you out of your idiot mind?”
“ ‘Want’ is a strong word, Eddie’ ” Masters said. “ ‘Need’ might be more accurate.”
“Need all you want, the damned stairs are clogged with these bastards,” Eddie roared over the report of his M4, “so unless you can jump like Alex, you ain’t getting up there.”
Masters growled in frustration, his eyes locked on the flood of inhumanity they were just barely holding at bay. The unstable undead had now reached the point of tripping over their own fallen comrades, and since they clearly had a hard enough time stumbling around on even ground, it was proving to be a major stumbling block for them.
Pun not intended.
That said, there were still too many of the damned things in the room, and they were clogging up every path he could take to the stairs. Alex was still slumped there, hanging off the walkway, but Masters didn’t see any way he could get to him from where he was. The stairwells were literally clogged with the shambling creatures that were attacking them.
“Stop thinking like you’re some kind of superhero, Hawk!” Eddie shouted at him. “You and I both know there’s no way you’re getting up those stairs.”
Masters didn’t bother replying, even though every permutation he could think of was coming back with exactly the same numbers his friend was trying to hammer home. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try, however.
“Yo! Goth girl!” he called over the noise, gaining the attention and the ire of the woman in question.
She glared at him for a moment before speaking, her voice shockingly soft considering that he was able to hear every syllable she uttered.
“The name,” she said clearly and distinctly, “is Hannah.”
He ignored the chill her tone sent down his spine and nodded toward the closest stairwell. “I need some of that ice voodoo you do.”
She scowled at him again, but looked over in the direction he’d indicated. “Fine. I can only freeze a couple, though.”
“Not them,” he shook his head. “Can you do the stairs?”
“The…,” she trailed off, eyes shifting slightly before she nodded and smiled. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
“Do it,” he ordered.
“What are you going to do?” she demanded as she brought her fingers up to her forehead.
He shrugged with a bit of a silly grin as he tensed to move. “I’m going to play superhero.”
Hannah shook her head, but focused on the target as Masters broke into a sprint for the stairwell.
“Freeze,” she intoned, gesturing out and sending a pulse out ahead of her.
Mist and ice swirled through the air, narrowly missing Masters as he sprinted toward the stairs and the inhuman mass that waited for him there. The bolt struck the metal of the catwalk stairwell, instantly dropping the temperature well below freezing. As it froze, moisture wicked out of the air and condensed onto the metal, transforming instantly into ice.
The vampires weren’t the most stable creatures under the best of circumstances, and when the surface under their feet decided to become slick, it took very little for the first to topple and turn into a domino that began to bring down every other being around it.
Masters hit the writhing mass at a full sprint, leaping over the first few and planting a foot into the chest of one of the figures, using it as a jumping-off point. He made it halfway up the stairwell before a clawing hand got a grip on his ankle and he pitched forward.
He managed to grab the handrail as he kicked off the arm and kept climbing. Some of the bodies were riper than others, and Masters desperately tried to ignore the squelching sounds his boots were making, to say nothing of the smell.
The report of Eddie’s M4 was accompanied by the whine of a bullet passing much too close for comfort, but the meaty slap of its impact was followed up by one less hand clawing at him, so he resolutely tried to forget that his friend was trying to pick off enemy combatants within two feet of his position.
God, I hope he’s a better shot now than he was back in BUD/S.
He knew that there was a whole lot worse waiting for him once he got there, after all.
* * *
The Coast Guard helo orbited the town from a little over a thousand feet, all eyes on the bird looking out over the sleepy-looking burg with varying degrees of nervous energy.
Captain Andrews could feel a cold chill originating inside her gut, something she’d never experienced before.…She knew that she was right on the edge of panic, and there weren’t even any enemies within sight. But what she couldn’t see and what she knew to be there were two very different things.
I’ve seen nightmares made flesh, Judith thought stonily, and now I can see nothing else.
“Radio traffic says that they were heading for the electricity co-op!” Mack called, pointing to the building in question. “But I don’t see any signs of action down there now.”
“I’ve got movement on a nearby rooftop!”
“Where?” Judith demanded, looking for anything to distract her from her fears.
“There!” Hayes said, pointing. “Heat signature!”
She put her NODs to her eyes to look, and it only took her a moment to identify the source. “It’s Hale!”
“You sure?” Hayes asked.
“Unless those things have started lugging around a light fifty!” she called over the sound of the rotors.
Mack snorted. “Let’s hope it’s Hale.”
Judith leaned forward, tapping the pilot on the shoulder even as she spoke into the radio. “Take us back around and closer to the buildings.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The helo banked around, losing altitude as it circled the area while Judith switched the radio over to the team frequency.
“Djinn, this is Andrews. We’re in the orbiting helo,” she said. “Respond if possible.”
She repeated her message once, then started again when a blinking light from below stopped her. Judith frowned. “Why is he using his signal light?”
Mack shrugged. “I don’t see anything on thermal.”
“Infrared?” She asked, looking over at Hayes.
“Negative contact, ma’am.”
“Damn,” she swore under her breath, keying open the frequency again. “We see you, Djinn. Are there hostiles nearby?”
An affirmative flash had her swearing again.
“We have no positive contact from here,” she said. “Say again, no positive contact. Are you certain?”
The light below flashed more quickly, looking almost angry in its intensity.
“Roger that. Last signals intercept put Hawk and co in the power co-op,” she said. “Good intel?”
The light flashed an affirmative.
“Good. Will deploy to provide backup.”
This time there was no responding flash, not that she had been expecting one. The Djinn was one of the navy’s best snipers, but the man was downright antisocial. Even for a shooter.
CHAPTER 16
“Stop. Biting. My. Ankle!”
Masters repeatedly slammed the butt of his AA-12 down on the head of the offending corpse until he finally managed to dislodge its teeth from his leg.
I really should have thought about the whole superhero plan a bit more, Hawk thought grimly as he pulled loose. Thankfully they didn’t get through my boot. I really don’t want to know what kind of bacteria these things have in their mouths.
With a last kick he made it up onto the catwalk, leveling his shotgun from the hip and squeezing the trigger. The automatic weapon bucked in his hand as he emptied the remaining couple dozen rounds of double aught into the few shambling corpses in front of him. The mess made by that much steel shot really wasn’t something he wanted to think about, but it did the job.
He dropped the drum as he stepped over the twitching bodies, locking the last one into place while jogging over to Alex’s hanging body. He let his shotgun hang in its sling as he reached his friend, grabbing Alex by the shoulders and pulling him back over the rail.
“Damn, boy, you got your ass handed to you,” Masters muttered, shaking his head as he took in all of his friend’s visible injuries.
Alex just groaned, not appearing particularly lucid.
Either that or he wasn’t about to dignify that comment with a response. From what Masters knew of his friend, either was a valid possibility. He patted the groaning man’s shoulder and rose to his feet, looking over the catwalk railing and into the generator enclosure and, more specifically, the woman or thing standing on it.
She, it, had apparently lost interest in Alex and was looking down upon the fight like a general surveying the battlefield.
Time to take the fight back to the boss, I guess, Masters thought as he planted a hand and a boot up on the rail, preparing to vault the distance to the enclosure.
“Don’t be stupid.”
He looked down, surprised by the weak sound of his friend’s voice. “You all right?”
“Hell no, I’m not all right,” Alex grunted, rolling up onto his knees. “I just got my ass handed to me by that damned thing over there. It’s a whole different league of beast, and you’re not going to help anyone by letting it kill you.”
“That thing is controlling the rest, right?” Masters demanded. “We have to take it out.”
Alex paused to catch his breath, resting on one knee and wincing as his fractured ribs informed him quite soundly of their presence. “It’s also undead, Masters. Not barely animated like the rest of the filth shambling around this town, but really undead. I don’t think even your overcompensating shotgun there is going to do much to it.”
“That doesn’t mean I won’t try,” Masters said, turning back to the railing and kicking off hard.
“No!” Alex’s scream made for a nice backdrop, Masters supposed as he soared across the gap, fully realizing that he had no chance of making a clean jump.
Nice, he thought, stretching out as he watched the cement come closer. All poetic and shit.
He hit the generator enclosure hard, barely managing to get his hands over the edge of it and pull his upper body up before gravity tried to drag him to a painful death thirty feet below. Okay, maybe the fall wouldn’t kill him, but Hawk Masters was in no way deluded enough to think he’d be able to fight anything off after he’d driven both his legs up into his torso.
He scrambled for a moment, clawing at the cement, then managed to pull himself the rest of the way up, throwing one leg over the side before rolling over onto the enclosure. He took two deep breaths before forcing himself to his hands and knees, then his feet.
Luckily, he supposed, the thing didn’t seem to give a damn about him. He stood up, hefted his AA-12 off the straps, and pointed the weapon at the female-looking figure that was a few paces away.
“Yo!” he called, walking toward her with the weapon leveled. “From my understanding, you control those fucks. Is that right?”
She turned, the wiry hair that masked her skin from the back giving way to gaunt features that didn’t belong on anything mobile. Like all of these creatures, her eyes had the fogged look of death, but hers darted around with a feral intelligence, like a reptile tracking prey. He didn’t know how these things could see through their glassy eyes, but this one had no trouble locking right onto him.
“And if I do?” she asked, her tone taunting.
“Well, then I’d ask you politely to call them the fuck off,” he said, keeping the tremor from his voice.
He could feel a strange mixture of fear and excitement building deep inside of him. The pre-action jitters, ironically enough. As if everything else he’d done so far on this mission had been just a warm-up. His mind had problems with the concept, but his body had no such doubts.
The thing laughed at him.
It was a dry sound, chilling he supposed, but that part of his brain was shutting down now. He didn’t need
his survival instincts anymore — they’d only get in the way.
“And why would I do that?”
She sounded genuinely bemused, and what little he could read of her features backed up that impression. Masters took another step toward her, closing the distance one stride at a time.
The closer I get, the better my chances. Only buckshot left. It’s worthless past a couple dozen yards, but inside of six, I’ll be damned if there’s a thing alive that can take thirty-two rounds of double aught and walk away.
He conveniently decided to ignore the fact that he wasn’t looking at anything living.
“Because I’m asking nicely,” he told it, taking another step.
“I have no use for nice.”
“Neither do I.” He shrugged, his insides going cold as he continued to move forward.
“You’re brave, human. Few would approach me so brazenly — even your friend had more respect for my power.”
Keep talking like some Bond villain, bitch.
Masters took another few steps. Fifteen feet now, and the gap was closing.
God, I wish I had some heavy munitions for this thing.
Timed grenade rounds in twelve-gauge would be a good start, but he might as well ask for a deck-mounted cannon and ship’s gunner with an itchy trigger finger. Flatten the whole damned place like the hammer of an angry god, just to be sure.
Having no genie to grant his wishes, Masters kept moving. He was a step or two away from his goal. He could probably open up now without losing much, if any, effectiveness, but this wasn’t a probably situation.
“You’re a curious one.” The thing smiled at him, her ragged lips stretched over razor-sharp-looking teeth. “Perhaps I’ll keep you around.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I have my standards.”
She laughed, reaching out for him as she took a step. “What makes you think you have a choice?”
Masters’s eyes flicked down as she closed the distance to within six feet. The chill vanished from his guts, the nervous tension gone like it had never been, and he looked up at her with a smile on his lips.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said as he squeezed the trigger on the AA-12 and held it down.