by Jody Wallace
Gregori’s insides twisted with dueling obligations. Save these women here, save his woman elsewhere. He took a step toward the edge of the tower, intending to launch himself at the horde, but Claire stopped him.
“You’ll want to put those on before you go,” Claire said to him, her voice raised over the hiss. She indicated a pair of wings near their gear.
“Why?”
She raised her eyebrows at his hesitancy. “They’re faster. And the force field’s better.”
Gregori allowed her to help him detach his pack and don the new one. She was rough, giving him no quarter with the endo-organics, but he didn’t care. Once he situated the new inserts, he expanded the wings for takeoff, even though he shouldn’t go. He wanted to…but he shouldn’t.
“Go,” Claire said.
Gregori’s heart buoyed him until he hovered several feet above the tower. “I can’t leave you undefended.”
“We’re not undefended. Send Nikolas back, and everything will be fine. As long as you don’t get yourself eaten.”
“Are any other Shipborn involved in this?” he asked. “They should be here, helping you.”
“Nikolas said we couldn’t trust anybody else. Not even you,” Claire told him. “Something about not knowing who was in on it.”
“Then he’s dumber than I thought.” Gregori had no idea what she was talking about, had had no clue Niko had been putting together a strike force. It made no sense. Why had Niko fought so hard yesterday? Why hadn’t he leveled with them, gotten their aid?
Perhaps because he’d known Gregori wouldn’t let him involve these women. And it didn’t matter right now. Niko’s plan was already in motion and Adelita was in deadly peril.
“I told Nikolas he should have gotten this fella involved weeks ago,” one woman whispered to another. “Ship wouldn’t have caught on if they’d played it cool.”
“He don’t listen,” the other replied. “Thinks he knows everything.”
“And he’s paranoid,” the first woman agreed.
Gregori stared toward the nexus. In the slowly brightening sky, at the farthest range of his enhanced vision, he could make out a flash of sun on tactanium and specks that might be Nikolas, hounded by daemons.
Beneath the specks, his sensors picked up an endless river of the horde at ground level, following the airborne sentients, calling the daemons, coming straight for these women.
Because the ladies were pregnant, the life force here was double or even triple what it would have been otherwise. They were a literal beacon to the ravenous entities.
But the terrifying black river that had almost reached the tower wouldn’t be all the shades. The kill zone would never be bare, and the shade zone would be dangerous for anyone rash enough to blunder into it. Worse, Adelita wouldn’t be able to move as quickly as someone with wings, giving the entities more time to react. Her native DNA would only deceive them for so long. If they sensed what she carried, they’d send all the daemons on the planet after her and that bomb.
“When did he last see her?” he asked the woman with the headset.
“I don’t know, honey. Let me check.” She closed her eyes, her lips moving with no sound. He had no idea how the headset worked for her when she wasn’t enhanced, and he didn’t care. “Twenty minutes, thirty-seven seconds ago. He put her down a quarter of a mile south of la boca del infierno. I think. It’s hard to tell over the yelling.”
“Have him verify,” Gregori said with a hard swallow, “that she’s still alive.”
“He can’t do that. He thinks her comm got destroyed.” She gazed at him with pale blue eyes. “Gregori, the bomb has a five-minute timer. It can’t be defused.”
Adelita had had twenty minutes to travel a quarter of a mile. Average humans could run anywhere from six to eleven miles an hour. Even considering Adelita had short legs and claimed to be out of shape… Even considering she would have to contend with shades, maybe daemons… She could have already reached the nexus and armed the weapon.
He jumped into the wind without another thought.
Chapter Sixteen
Sweat coated Adelita’s skin inside her clothing and the slouchy mesh armor. Her leg muscles burned as if she were trying to fire lasers through her feet. The backpack flopped with an irritating thump, thump, thump as she trotted along the cracked pavement, in an area that used to be a business district. Crumbled buildings lined the sides of the road, glass everywhere, wreckage sometimes blocking the road.
After the first five minutes of trying to pick off shades with short laser bursts, she’d learned aim didn’t matter. When there were more shades than she could dodge, she swiped the beams from side to side like a water hose, blasting herself a corridor. As long as she didn’t glance back at the shades closing ranks behind her—or bring a building down on herself—she was okay.
Shades in twos and threes dotted the debris everywhere she looked, with larger clusters negotiating the roadway. Daemons swooped overhead in pairs but mostly ignored her, intent on some other goal. She’d been attacked by two, which were now dead.
It had been touch and go. In the end, the laser had been mightier than the claw. Especially with the hideous, shrieking red faces near enough that she couldn’t miss.
She had a smashed earbud, a ripped hood, and a breach in the mesh protecting her leg to show for it. She was cut off from Nikolas, and a painful wound throbbed on her thigh. She thought maybe the ichor had cauterized the injury because there hadn’t been much blood. Still, she limped along, no longer as confident in the protective qualities of the armor.
A dense blot of shades crept out from behind a wrecked streetcar, hissing so loudly she couldn’t hear herself curse. Or pray. Hopefully the Lord could hear her pray, because she’d been doing it for the past fifteen minutes. When she wasn’t cursing.
Rather than risk exploding the streetcar, she darted around the entities, her thigh wound jabbing her with every step. She’d accidentally blown up an SUV a block or two back, and the detonation had almost whammied her into some lurking entities. For now she kept shooting and cursing and praying and panting and driving herself toward the kill zone with every ounce of determination in her body.
Determination that swelled with every stumble. Every agonizing step.
Ahead was a sketchy wall of dark monsters. The clumps were getting thicker. More frequent. She must be close. Please, God—let me be close. She’d already survived longer than expected. Had Nikolas’s plan to thin the entities worked? During their last moment of earbud contact, she’d been too busy screaming about daemons to ask. From her position halfway up another steep San Francisco hill, she couldn’t scope out what lay ahead.
She slowed for another onslaught, raising her sore arms and gritting her teeth. With an angry thought, fire shot through her hands at a barrier of black monsters. It didn’t matter that one wrist was sprained. She spread her fingers, which widened the beams, and brought her palms together slowly.
The entities disappeared when the light touched them like ice melting in hot water. They shrieked, too, louder than she did.
The trail she’d blazed wouldn’t be shade-free long. She shuffled forward, still firing.
The bands heated faster than she could switch them off. She hissed like a shade as they blistered her skin. She’d kept her mesh sleeves rolled down for protection. She hadn’t looked to see what the bands were doing to her poor arms.
Two more big clusters of shades, creeping toward her. Cars abandoned in the road. Buildings in heaps. Occasionally, what looked like animal bodies. Not much space to maneuver. Hills in every direction. She glanced to either side, seeking the best avenue, and ended up dashing between the globs of entities instead of taking the time to burn them out.
Her lungs protested along with her leg and arm muscles. The stitch in her side felt like a knife blade. That pain didn’t matter.
What did matter was what she saw next. She reached an intersection at the bottom of a slope. Her gaze fell on a mass
of shades wider and blacker than any she’d seen. The sizzling howl was so loud she winced. And the smell! If she weren’t careful, she was going to be throwing up the breakfast she hadn’t had.
Dotting the expanse of creatures were the tops of several sickly-white mounds, around which the blackness boiled and bubble. The begetter drones. The monsters that made monsters.
She was there. It was almost over. Somewhere, beyond those creatures lay the doorway to hell.
Adelita climbed a debris heap to get a better look. Her feet scrabbled on broken glass, and she fell to one knee. The mesh protected her from getting cut.
Wheezing, she reached a higher vantage point and inspected her goal.
Opposite her, on the other side of hell, was a half-collapsed parking garage. Another garage lay to the west in somewhat better shape. The sun, rising in the east, was beginning to heat the air. Its rays fell across the accumulated shades in wan stripes.
No sign of the nexus. Nikolas had assured her she’d know it when she saw it, but all she saw were the drones and far too many shades.
East of the begetters, the shades poured into a gap between buildings. The mass burbled purposefully in that direction. Yet, after a minute or two of watching, the density of shades remained the same.
How could they crawl to the east in a constant stream without diminishing the horde? Were they never-ending? Perhaps and perhaps not, but as she watched, they halted their easterly course and redirected their attentions.
To the south. To her.
They’d sensed her. They were coming. Behind her, beside her—in every direction—were more blotches, amassing and slithering along the roadways. Over the rubble. Closing in.
She had nowhere to go. Might as well go forward. Dios indeed. She would be seeing Him soon.
Please let this work, Lord. Nothing else mattered.
Shades had collected at the base of her lookout post. They oozed together like drops of mercury sliding into a larger puddle. Would any daemons show up to help them? She cleared a route down the rubble, sending shades into nonexistence and concrete chips flying. Firing and limping, she ran straight toward the begetters.
In seconds, she was in the thick of it, completely surrounded. She swung her blasters, cursing. Using a trick Nikolas had described, she clasped her sprained wrist in her other hand to create one big, fat laser and started spinning in a circle.
Bought herself a couple seconds. With a grimace, she swept a corridor forward, a short one, because shades kept bloating into it. She had to stop to torch them out of her peripherals.
Her injured leg threatened to crumple whenever she pivoted. Really, whenever she put weight on it. She crept ten feet closer to the drones. Then ten more feet closer. At this distance, fine cracks in the drones’ surface glimmered with red fire. The stench in the air brought tears to her eyes. She could see more drones beyond the first ones, forming the defensive circle around the nexus.
She had to get past them.
The skin on her forearms crackled with the heat from the blasters. She flinched when the damage grew intense, and one of her laser shots went wild. It struck a begetter dead center.
The monster keened with a noise so high and horrible, she had to clap her hands over her ears. The lasers, sputtering, arched into the sky. Luckily she didn’t blow off her own head.
A stray beam exploded through the parking garage to the north. Oops.
The dilapidated structure groaned. Adelita stared, her heart in her throat. A huge slab tumbled through the air, right toward a begetter drone.
Would it crush the monster?
No, dammit. Despite being much larger than the drone, the masonry bounced off as if the entity were made of rubber, landing in the expanse of shades.
The giant chunk of building was bare for a second before shades oozed around the edges, through the cracks. Then they crawled over it. The begetter that had been struck quivered. It had withstood a blow that would have flattened an elephant.
Adelita expressed her disappointment by razing more shades. She’d just blasted the space in front of her when a rush of icy death absorbed her whole body. It overtook her consciousness and blotted out all sounds, sights and smells. Her sense of touch was the only thing that remained in the blackness.
She’d been caught from behind. She was dying, her soul being eaten by a shade.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t run. Horror crushed her like a falling building. Her knees threatened to buckle, and her arms went limp.
Her still-blazing lasers carved through the shade that had touched her, freeing her from its grasp.
Adelita’s senses returned with a violent wrench. She vomited. As suspected, there was nothing in her stomach. Her body convulsed until the air returned to her lungs. Firing in every direction, she stumbled along the shrinking passageway she’d blown open seconds ago.
Shit, shit, shit! Too close. She’d almost died. She couldn’t do this. How much of her soul had they taken? She’d never make it past the begetters to plant the bomb.
But she was still conscious.
She could kill more shades. Maybe a begetter, which had definitely not enjoyed the touch of her laser. If she killed enough begetters, would it disrupt the kill zone and enable Nikolas or Gregori to enter? Or was that too simple, something they’d tried before?
She heard a loud rumble, and a layer of the parking garage she’d shot collapsed. Dust billowed out in thick clouds. The shades continued to squeeze her from all sides.
She shot more. Inched toward her goal, shade by shade. The darkness lay so thick near the begetters, it resembled a bottomless pit. She had to spin in place for many seconds at a time, her lasers firing nonstop, to keep them from touching her again.
Inch forward. Spin.
Her arms screamed with pain. The bands felt welded to her bones from the repeated sessions of heat and agony.
Soon she reached a point where forward momentum ceased. In fact, it seemed as if the shades had solidified. She was slowly but surely being driven from the nexus. It was all she could do to keep the shades from eating her. No matter how many she killed, the begetters spat out more.
There were too many, and she had no idea how to deal. No idea what she’d do if daemons showed up. No comm to ask Nikolas for advice. No way to get help from anyone except God, so as she kept shooting, she prayed, harder than she’d ever prayed before, for inspiration.
If you want me to do this, Lord, I’m going to need a boost.
If only she had wings. If only she could leap over the monsters, fly above them, climb past them. Where was a handy vine when you needed it?
Another thunderous complaint from the damaged parking garage gave her an idea.
Concrete wouldn’t crush the entities. But if there was enough of it, it would take the shades time to seep to the top of the pile. All she needed to do was create the rubble and beat them to the top. The nexus, which Nikolas had told her would suck anything that touched it into itself, wouldn’t stay covered, and she could drop the bomb right into it like a stone into a well.
Plunk.
…
It took both parking garages before there was enough wreckage covering the nexus that Adelita could move forward with her plan. Plus, she had no more buildings to destroy. The massive concrete knoll she’d created shuddered and groaned, unstable but as-yet entity-free. The eastern side seemed to be collapsing. The nexus, she guessed, dragging pieces of building into itself.
The entities’ initial base of operations had been located underground, beneath this very parking lot, during the months after the angeli had arrived. A fierce but furtive unit of daemons and shades, responsible for locating planets full of sentients, had settled there to begin the process of creating a dimensional rift. Her people had suspected the infestation was in this area, based on daemon and shade sightings before the apocalypse, but they hadn’t had the technology to figure out where.
The angeli and their evil Ship hadn’t shared its coordinates until ne
ar the end, when they’d spurred the US government to evacuate the West Coast. That was back when they’d all assumed their Chosen Idiot could wipe his own ass.
Adelita was, ironically, the Chosen One now.
Many begetter drones had been buried by the buildings, but she could see the ones on the edge closest to her. Now she just had to torch a path to the rubble without getting the rest of her soul eaten.
…
Gregori swooped past Nikolas, who was encumbered by a woman dangling in a tactanium flight harness. The woman was an excellent shot, but even an excellent shot could only wield two guns at a time.
He aimed carefully and took out the last daemon in blaster range. More approached, tiny dots in the clear blue sky. They wouldn’t arrive for several minutes.
As soon as they were out of immediate danger, Niko started shouting at him. “Damn the void, you can’t go in there, Gregori.”
He floated in an updraft, wishing he could shoot Niko out of the sky. But the woman helping the bilge-brain didn’t deserve that fate. “I can and will.”
“There’s no getting out of there alive. I barely made it out to meet Tracy, and that was thirty minutes ago. With all the activity, too many daemons have been summoned to protect the aerial approaches.”
“I’m not so sure they’re guarding the nexus. I think they’re all headed toward your bait,” Gregori pointed out, letting the anger bleed into his voice. “You disgust me, Niko.”
Niko’s expression turned stony. “I did what had to be done.”
“Niko didn’t force us to be bait.” Tracy, who was small and round and brown-skinned, pointed a gun in the direction of her fellow Terrans. “Every single one of us volunteered, just like your lady. Without our help, Adelita wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“She doesn’t stand a chance now!” Gregori bellowed.
“She’s our savior. She has increased our chance of success to something measurable.” Tracy slapped her thigh. “Until she agreed to do it, it was going to be me making the nexus run. I’m not pregnant, but I use crutches. Pretty poor odds, right? We couldn’t trust or train anyone else on such short notice.”