by Matt Forbeck
As the mutant stood up, Mitch lashed out with his foot and kicked it back toward the pit. As it fell, it grabbed at the cable and snagged it. It used its momentum to swing around the rusted line and come back to grab the pit’s edge.
Mitch swore under his breath and prepared to empty an entire clip into the thing as it climbed up from the pit again. He had no idea if that would stop it, but he intended to try.
Before he could pull the trigger, though, someone grabbed him from behind. Mitch wound up inside another elevator lobby with Samuel hauling him in. Together they flung themselves forward and slammed shut the elevator gate just as the mutant leaped up to attack. It slammed into the other side of the metal bars, trying to batter them down, but the gate held—for now.
The two men leaned their hands against the doors, keeping them wedged closed as they caught their breath. As they did, someone opened up with automatic weapons fire far up the shaft.
It could only be Juba, Mitch knew. That meant the mutants had finally caught up with them from that direction too.
“They’re bottled up in there,” Mitch said. He couldn’t leave the others in the shaft to die. With mutants coming at them from both directions, they wouldn’t stand a chance.
Mitch drew his sword and prepared to open the door. He hadn’t had a lot of training with long blades like this, but he figured it couldn’t be much worse than a knife fight. He’d been in plenty of those.
“Wait!” Samuel grabbed Mitch’s arm before the soldier could pry open the doors.
Mitch snarled at the monk and tore his arm free. Then, by way of explanation, Samuel smashed the glass of his lantern against the steel elevator doors. Burning oil dripped out of the center of it as he handed what was left of the lamp to Mitch. He nodded at the monk, finally understanding the man’s plan.
Up above, the gunfire suddenly stopped. Mitch winced. Had the mutants brought Juba down? Would they come sliding down into the shaft any second now?
Then the barrage of bullets started again. Apparently Juba had just needed to reload. That meant he was still alive, although Mitch wondered how much longer that would be true.
Over the racket from Juba’s gun, Mitch heard El Jesus yammering, “We got an ugly down here!”
Mitch held the broken lantern in one hand and his sword in the other. He nodded at Samuel to move, and the monk hauled open the doors.
From somewhere up above, Steiner said something, but the creaking of the door drowned it out.
As soon as the elevator doors opened, the mutant leaped at Mitch and the monk. Mitch smashed the broken lamp into the mutant’s face, and the creature burst into flames.
The burning oil didn’t seem to hurt the mutant at all, but at least the fire blinded it. Mitch dived at the creature with his sword, hacking away at it.
Above him, he heard Duval say something, the same word Steiner had used. It sounded suspiciously like “Grenade!” Between the chatter of Juba’s gun, the horrible acoustics of the elevator shaft, and the blazing mutant slashing at him, though, he couldn’t be sure.
The mutant circled warily, listening for the sound of Mitch’s footsteps as Mitch swerved around the room. As he went, he swept Samuel along with his free arm, keeping himself between the monster and the monk. Taking the hint, Samuel moved back into the elevator shaft, getting as far away from the fight as he could.
Mitch ducked beneath a wild slash of the mutant’s burning boneblade, then stood up and delivered a two-handed blow to the creature’s neck. Its head went spinning off into the corner. Meanwhile, its body kept flailing about, not seeming to give a damn about the fate of its cranium.
Mitch gritted his teeth and started hacking away at the mutant in earnest. His first cut removed the creature’s left arm. The next sliced through both its legs at the knees. Then he brought his blade around in a mighty swing that chopped the creature’s chest in half.
The mutant collapsed in pieces at Mitch’s feet. It still twitched like mad but was no longer any kind of threat.
Mitch glanced over at Samuel and saw the man peering back at him from inside the shaft. It was then that he remembered what he thought he’d heard Duval shout. He started toward the shaft, even though he knew he’d be too late.
Samuel looked up then and flinched as he saw the grenade coming at him. He put up his arms in a pointless attempt to shield himself.
Mitch could hear the grenade’s timing coil whining. It was just about to detonate.
Just as the grenade was about to smack into the monk, a hand snaked down from above and seized it. The fingers clamped down on the timing coil, stopping it and keeping the grenade from going off.
Mitch dashed to the shaft to see Severian and her arm attached to the hand that held the grenade. She hung upside down from her harness, her winch groaning from the strain. She must have slid down most of the shaft at top speed to be able to have caught the damned thing in time. Her winch glowed red hot from the friction.
El Jesus whizzed to a braking stop just above her. “Chingame! Girl, don’t you drop that match.”
Still silent, Severian reached up and popped the release on her winch’s clamp. She flipped over as she fell, landing next to Samuel with the grace of an acrobat, the grenade still clutched in her fist.
Mitch stared at the grenade and saw how little of the timing coil was left. If Severian hadn’t snagged it, it would have killed them both for sure.
The woman crept to the edge of the pit and hurled the grenade down it with all her might. Mitch peered over the edge to watch it as it fell. Not even twenty yards down, it exploded, lighting up the floor below.
Mutants covered the floor from one side to another, and the grenade had barely hurt any of them. Once the initial surprise at the explosion wore off, they looked up and spotted Mitch and the others looking down at them.
The mutants knew they were there.
42
Juba had not had a good day. He’d thought he’d known what he’d ordered up for himself when he had volunteered to take up this defensive position, but even his worst fears had been horribly naïve. He figured that with his gun he was the best equipped of the soldiers to hold off a pack of mutants.
He just hadn’t counted on a whole damned horde.
As the others had slipped down the shaft on their whizzing harnesses, he’d waited silently, listening for any hint of an intruder. He’d heard the noises following them as they’d made their way through the ossuary and then in through the building to the elevator lobby. He knew they were coming, but he hadn’t imagined how many.
After waiting for half of forever, Juba had heard the sounds again: scritching and scratching down the long hallway that separated the elevator car from that horrible entrance into the building. He had imagined the mutants sharpening their boneblades by rubbing them along any piece of metal they could find, unable to stop themselves, like a dog licking an open wound. When the sounds had gotten close enough, he had lit a flare and chucked it down the hallway as far as he could.
It had landed in front of a wall of mutants that stretched back down the hall as far as he could see.
That was when Juba had started firing.
The bullets slammed into the mutants and through them, picking them apart bit by bit. He wondered if he shouldn’t have gone with high-explosive bullets or at least dum-dum cartridges. They would have had more stopping power, but they were almost impossible to find in belts. He’d opted for more instead of better bullets. Quantity over quality.
It seemed the maker of the mutants, whoever or whatever that might be, had made the same choice. Juba’s storm of slugs chipped away at mutant after mutant, eventually putting down each one that charged into his field of fire. As each one fell, though, another charged forward to take its place.
When the belt had run through, Juba’s hands were vibrating so much that he felt like the gun was still firing. Without a word, he reached down and grabbed the end of a second belt from his bag. He fed it into the gun as steam rose from t
he glowing barrel. Water-cooled or not, he had to take care or his weapon would soon jam. Until the crushing wave of mutants coming down the hallway stopped, though, that would be the least of his problems.
By the time Juba ran through the second belt, his arms hurt from hosing down the oncoming horde. He’d blasted them back a bit farther this time, and he hoped that would give him more time to reload. He set the butt of the gun down on the elevator floor and reached down into his pack to grab the third and final ammo belt.
Before he could start to feed it in, though, he heard a scratching on the roof of the car. He had just enough time to take up his gun before the mutant dropped down through a hole in the ceiling to land next to him.
With no bullets in his gun, Juba fired the gun’s attached grenade launcher instead, but the tight quarters of an elevator missing a chunk of its floor made that difficult. As he squeezed the trigger, the mutant knocked the long barrel upward.
The grenade punched through the ceiling of the elevator car. Juba held his breath, then looked into the blood-mad eyes of the mutant standing before him. It had no idea what was coming next.
The grenade exploded above the car. The blast severed the cable holding the car in the air, and it began to slide straight down the shaft.
In free fall, the car plummeted, sending up a shower of sparks every time its sides scraped the inside of the shaft. Despite the insane danger, the mutant kept fighting. It leveled a savage blow at Juba that sheared through his gun’s red-hot barrel and sliced into his shoulder beneath.
Dropping the rifle, Juba wrestled out his sword and smashed the mutant in the face with the hilt as he freed it. As he struggled with the beast, its foot knocked over his pack, and a box inside of it tipped over. The lid gave way, and a dozen grenades tumbled out.
The sword was too long to use properly in the elevator, so Juba half-sworded it, gripping it about the blade. The razor-sharp steel went straight through his skin and cut his fingers to the bone, but he ignored the blood and pain.
He parried another slash of the mutant’s boneblade, then smashed it back with his blade. Every blow was agony for him, but he kept on fighting, refusing to surrender. He was going to die either way, but he’d be damned if he’d let this bastard kill him.
Despite his efforts, the mutant stabbed him in his shoulder with its boneblade again, and he dropped his sword. The creature slashed down at him again, and he reached up and caught the blade flat between his palms.
The mutant stared at him, surprised. In a heartbeat, he had his sidearm out.
The mutant came at him with its boneblade again, but he caught the creature’s elbow with his hand. Seeing his chance, he stuffed his pistol up into the mutant’s armpit and fired, blowing the creature’s arm clean off. While it stared in dumb amazement, Juba reversed the now-free arm and jammed the tip of it right through the mutant’s mouth, pinning the creature to the wall behind it.
Still falling faster than ever, Juba glanced down the hole in the car’s floor. There he saw the bottom of the shaft choked wall to wall with mutants. He smiled and prepared to say hello to his ancestors, knowing they would welcome him with open arms.
This would be a good death.
43
As Juba gunned down row after row of mutants from the elevator car high above, Mitch and El Jesus stood at the edge of the hole in the bottom of the shaft, doing the same to the creatures trying to crawl up through it.
Mitch fired burst after burst from his M50, picking his targets one at a time. He tried to hit the ones that stood atop the shoulders of others, hoping that he could knock a whole line of them off the wall at once. They rarely came off more than two or three at a time, though.
He stuck to the top and right side of the wall while El Jesus took the bottom and left. The big man’s shotgun created craters wherever his white phosphorus shells struck, raining burning destruction down on anything below.
Still, the bastards kept coming.
Just as Mitch was about to exhaust his clip, he felt something land behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see Duval unhitching herself from the cable. A moment later Steiner landed next to her and did the same.
With those two clear, it was time to go. The only one left up top was Juba, and he would have to survive on his own. Mitch hoped the man would find some way to escape from all this alive. If not, he hoped Juba sold his life dearly.
Duval and Steiner moved into the lower elevator lobby first, then unlimbered their weapons and prepared to lay down covering fire. Mitch backhanded El Jesus on the shoulder, and the two of them dashed back toward the lobby to join the others. Mitch stuffed a fresh clip into his gun as he turned around.
The four of them stood at the far end of the lobby, showering the mutants with a leadstorm as they swarmed out of the pit. Despite the amount of metal flying through the air, the mutants continued to make progress. Mitch knew they’d have to fall back soon, but to where?
“I’m out!” El Jesus said. With the mutants this close, he had no time to reload his shotgun. Instead he dropped back and drew his sword.
Steiner was next. “Leer!” the man said. He dropped both of his machine pistols to the floor and pulled his blade.
That left only Mitch and Duval with loaded guns. Mitch began to choose his targets more carefully, firing even shorter bursts. Despite his best efforts, the mutants continued to pour up into the elevator shaft. It would only be a matter of time before they joined the soldiers in the lobby.
Mitch’s assault rifle finally ran dry. He tossed it aside in favor of his sword. He drew the sword quicky and took up a defensive stance between Steiner and El Jesus.
Duval’s rifle came up empty then too. With nothing to deter them, the mutants began to crawl out of the shaft and into the lobby.
The men held their ground as Duval struggled to reload her weapon. Mitch glanced backward to see Severian step between Samuel and the coming horde. He stood there behind her, his sword in one hand and his book—now unattached—in the other.
“Any last words?” Steiner asked.
Mitch scowled at the man. “Shut the fuck up.” He had nothing profound to say and didn’t want to hear any feeble attempts from anyone else.
A horrible screeching sound came screaming out of the elevator shaft. For an instant, Mitch wondered if some new and different kind of mutant had come out to play now that the others nearly had them cornered.
Then the elevator car slammed into the bottom of the shaft like a meteor smashing into a moon. Dust and debris showered out of the shaft and into the lobby. If that kind of impact had happened outside, Mitch would have expected to see a mushroom cloud. Instead, the mess was forced in the only two directions available to it: up the shaft and into the lobby.
For a long moment, Mitch couldn’t see a thing past the tip of his sword. The dust obscured everything. Whatever had happened, it had bought the soldiers some time. Now they had to take advantage of that.
“Reload!” Mitch said while the dust still hung in the air. He had no idea if anything could have survived that crash, but fate had given them a chance to go back to their guns. He meant to take it.
As Duval slapped a new clip into her weapon, Mitch and Steiner scooped up their guns and began changing the clips. El Jesus did the same with his shotgun, thumbing fresh shells into the weapon’s magazine.
When the dust started to settle, the entire team stood locked and loaded, ready to go. Mitch took the point and nosed forward, his gun before him, and he peered down into the lift shaft. The wreck of the elevator car lay crumpled there, blocking off the pit. Rubble had fallen over everything, covering the remnants of the car.
Mitch looked up, wondering if Juba had managed to get out. Had the man sent the car plummeting down as a way to save the rest of them? If he was still alive, was he trapped up top or working his way down the shaft? Had he managed to stop the mutants that had been following them above? If not, why didn’t Mitch hear any more shots?
Before Mitch could
spend more time pondering Juba’s fate, the rubble at the bottom of the shaft began to shift and move. A leg pushed free from the broken concrete, then an arm, then one boneblade and another.
Mitch swore and readied his gun to start blasting away at the creatures as soon as they were clear. Duval, Steiner, and El Jesus stood shoulder to shoulder with him, worn and dirty but ready to try it all over again.
Maybe the crash had killed some of them, Mitch thought, or at least sealed the top of the pit. Maybe some good had come of it. Maybe they still had a chance.
None of those possibilities sounded convincing in Mitch’s head, especially as more and more of the mutants shoved the rubble off themselves and started toward him, snarling with inhuman rage as they rasped their boneblades across each other.
As the mutants moved forward, one of them pushed aside a massive piece of rubble, exposing a human arm still attached to a buried body. Blood trickled from the arm, red and fresh, and Mitch recognized the sleeve as Juba’s.
The Mishiman’s hand fell open then, and the grenade in it flopped out and rolled through the legs of one of the mutants. The creature looked down at it, but Mitch didn’t see what happened next. He and the other soldiers had already turned to dive away.
44
“Down!” Mitch shouted.
Juba, as Mitch remembered, had been carrying a lot of ordnance. Besides the three belts of ammo, he’d had an entire box of grenades with him, plus who knew what else. When the grenade that tumbled from his dead hand went off, it must have blown everything else the man had with him, too.
The shock wave from the explosion knocked the entire squad off its feet. It carried Mitch clear across the elevator lobby to tumble against the far wall. As he fell back to the ground, he saw the others roll up against the back wall too.
The blast itself had deafened Mitch, so he didn’t hear the shaft fall in on itself as much as he felt it. The ground shook and rumbled for only a few seconds, filling the room with thick dust once more, blinding Mitch as well. He curled himself into a ball against the back wall, covering his head as well as he could, and waited to learn his fate.