He scanned the enemy forces again and quailed. Their Transform charges were all stable, with none of the backsliding into inhumanity that plagued the Nobles. The Hunters could even speak in their Beast-forms. Compared to them, the Nobles and their charges were weak. The Law was too good.
They were all going to die.
Gunfire erupted from behind Gilgamesh. Stalin and her people had built a barricade in the far corner, tables on tables, and fired through impromptu slits. Shooting high and careful at Odin and his people. They were even high enough to get good sight lines out into the parking lot.
They focused too much effort on Odin, though. The first of the main body of attackers would reach the broken out windows in seconds.
“Bodyguards!” Gilgamesh said, shouting and pointing. “Help the Arm at the window!”
Tonya and Polly’s people retreated away from the doorway, as Odin and three pack-Monsters forced their way in. All four were sorely wounded.
“Shadow!” Gilgamesh said. “Drop Odin!”
Seventeen bodyguards, including Focus Mann and her people, made it to the window before the first of the attackers, a mostly dead tigeroid pack-Monster, leapt into the room. The Arm at the window beheaded it with a sword Gilgamesh hadn’t seen before she used it. Three wounded mostly humanoid pack-Monsters and an elephant-headed Hunter leapt in as the tigeroid head bounced toward him.
“Ignore the elephantine Hunter!” Gilgamesh called to the bodyguards. It would be too easy to lose himself in fear at the Hunter’s presence. They had to stop the Monsters and part-Monsters.
Three of the bodyguards fell, chopped up by the four enemies who made it in. The Arm dispatched the Hunter, while Stalin’s bodyguards shot and slowed down all the part-Monsters, dropping two. Focus Mann, wielding a Monster gun, got off a head shot at point blank range at a carnivorous giant turkey part-Monster. Focus Larson, standing but shaky, loosed low-end juice patterns at part-Monsters, one after the other, very quickly. The last of the part-Monsters fell.
Gilgamesh swiveled around when Odin screamed and went down.
“He’s not dead,” Gilgamesh said. “He’s regenerating.”
“How can you tell?” Sinclair. He still guarded Polly, now close enough to hear over the din.
“From his glow. Can’t you scan it in his glow?”
“No,” Sinclair said. “Not in this mess.”
“Son, none of us have your acuity,” Shadow said. “My skills are in other areas. Tell us what to do!”
“Shadow, can you disable Odin’s healing? We can’t allow him to get back on his feet,” Gilgamesh said, pointing where the Hunter had fallen.
“I can try,” Shadow said.
“Do so then, please, Guru Shadow.”
Tonya shouted something, and the remaining people backed farther away from Odin. Gilgamesh got a good look at Tonya and nearly froze; she fought while using the Focus juice metabolism trick, crippled by blood loss and low juice. It hadn’t stopped her, not in the slightest.
With a Terror roar that froze Gilgamesh in place and scattered reception guests, two Hunters scaled the windowless opening, thirty feet away to Gilgamesh’s left, and leapt into the room. One of them looked like a miniature King Kong. Joshua. The other was Enkidu, and he carried a leg in his mouth.
Kali’s leg. Gilgamesh’s shoulders clenched together and he hunched down. They were about to be overrun by the Beasts.
The Commander had lost.
Gilgamesh almost sicked up in sudden panic.
Before anyone got any shots off, both Hunters flattened on the floor, prone. The Arm went down as well, fighting with one of them. “Down and move,” Gilgamesh said to those closest to him. “They spotted us, and we don’t want to be where we were when they entered the room. Pass it on.”
“Surrender,” Enkidu rumbled from across the room, now waving Kali’s leg with his right paw. “I promise that as new citizens of the Empire of Hunters, you will be treated fairly.” It almost sounded like he read from a script. That had to be a Law effect.
“Sinclair, super skunk the one on the left. I’ll get Enkidu,” Gilgamesh said, as quickly as he could, as four more pack-Monsters and berserk male pack-Transforms clambered into the ballroom. As he spoke, he dropped his remaining dross on Enkidu. He metasensed his old adversary fall to the floor, writhing and unable to stand. From that, Enkidu should be out for the rest of the fight.
Then someone, somehow, began to clean the super skunks off Enkidu and Joshua. Crow work. Impossibly fast. Senior Crow work.
There, hidden among the last enemy group to enter the room and smeared out by antisense protections, was a Crow’s glow unlike any Gilgamesh had sensed before. A glow marked so deeply by the Law that the Law wasn’t just a set of scars, but was the Crow. It had consumed his free will, perhaps even his soul.
At Gilgamesh’s right, Shadow hissed. “Rogue Crow is with them. He’s among us, and now I know who he is and what happened to him. God save us all.”
Carol Hancock
I finally levered the automobile off me. Chrysler products aren’t the lightest cars in the world. They didn’t have to make them out of lead, though, dammit! My head spun, and I burned just a little to patch my leg. Simple fracture.
The mid-part of the battle was but a blur in my mind. Too much speed for memory, too much juice burning into my muscles for anything else in my brain to work at peak functioning. Lost in the Keaton-directed battle trance, berserk and wild, I missed it when she stopped signaling. I slowly came back to myself right about the time Haggerty and I were fighting Arm and Arm on Enkidu.
Haggerty and I had dropped a fucking light pole on him and it didn’t faze him. That damned doggie was tough. The light pole must have weighed three tons. Joshua, the Monkey Boy, returned the favor with the Chrysler. On me. Ouch. Only so much you can pay attention to at once. I had been out for a while, healing a concussion. Another reason why I couldn’t remember the middle of the battle.
I shook my head, ignored the headache, tried to get my bearings and metasense what was going on. I swore I had killed at least a dozen juice zombies, nine pack-Monsters, and the mature tyrannosaur Hunter all by my lonesome self. To start with, they had all been scared stiff of me, likely Polly’s doing, but her damned spell wore off after a while, or Rogue Crow removed it, or something else incomprehensible. While it worked, the Chimera Terror calls were little more than music to my ears.
I metasensed around, attempting to find everyone else. There, draped on the roof of a panel truck and safely out of sight: Keaton. Gravely injured, she was missing a leg and burned down to just above withdrawal. She had been fighting the barbed-tail lizard Hunter Thunder, a quarter ton snake Monster, a Monster who was Gorgon’s ugly sister, and a giant rat Monster, and winning, last I remembered. She was out of the fight.
Looking at the bodies, we had taken out all of them but Enkidu and Joshua. The dinosaur shaped Hunter I killed was well dismembered, while Thunder lay unmoving, a basketball-sized hole right through his middle and through his spine. His wound had to be from one of Keaton’s military toys, likely the anti-tank weapon Haggerty had been toting, over her back, when we had charged Enkidu. Heal from that, sucker!
Sirens wailed in the distance. If we didn’t get this solved quick, things would get real messy real fast.
I found Sky under a car, moaning, edging into shock. His legs were laying sideways, his pelvis powdered. I hoped Crows healed from damage like that. It took work, but I finally located Haggerty. I found her on the roof, being dragged away by three men in Mercury Catering outfits. She was in shit shape as well. Unconscious, in a healing trance, with a frayed metapresence. Did Joshua toss her up there after taking some of her juice? He was the last one Amy fought. I think.
The Nobles were all down, on the ground, gathering energy, dying, or in Count Knox’s sake, likely already dead. I couldn’t tell which. A few enemies from the center group did make it to the ballroom, but most lay on the parking lot, dissolving dead-Monster style, i
mmobilized by their wounds, or trying to crawl away from the fight. The enemy pack Monsters in this area were all down, but at least one squad of woman shooters and part-Monsters shadowed Enkidu and Joshua, guarding their backs.
We had lost the parking lot battle. I remembered Keaton’s comment about battles and wars, though. Losing the parking lot battle didn’t matter if I won the wedding reception fight in the end.
I had a war to win. I wiped the cold rain from my face and I ran as best as I could toward the ballroom, unable to reach anywhere near full speed because of the leg fracture. Ahead of me, the two last remaining real enemies I knew of, Enkidu and Joshua, slithered up into the ballroom, followed by half of their small troop of pack-creatures. The rest continued their devastation of the last group of Focus bodyguards hidden in the bushes. I looked around for my rooftop people. Tom was in charge of them, but nobody on the roof answered my signals. Some of the enemy must have gotten up there, or a nasty senior Crow trick had taken them out.
Hell, Odin was in the ballroom, blocking the other exit, trapping the Focuses and the rest. I ignored the pack women on the ground and leapt up to the ballroom, through the blown-out-window opening, a difficult thirty foot leap with a broken leg, and did a side roll. For my efforts, I got to see the tall unknown Arm ignore Joshua’s Terror roars and fight him straight up, muscle versus muscle. I shoved a knife in Enkidu’s back, for all the good that would do, and did a one-legged leap toward the ceiling eighteen feet over my head, where I grabbed hold.
I emptied my weapon at the fallen Odin and reloaded. He wouldn’t be getting up for many minutes, although I did waste three bullets fruitlessly trying to put a bullet into his brain. Skull too thick, or something.
“General! We need more of our people in here, dammit!”
I tried to identify the voice. No luck.
“Only the gleaners are left,” Enkidu said, spitting blood as he barked. “Master of Masters, you must flee.”
Right. I remembered the other male voice. Officer Canon. Rogue Crow. Wandering Shade. The angry man. The enemy.
The other Arm’s fight against Joshua turned against her. Monkey boy tossed her across the ballroom, streamers of bad juice curling in the air behind. Rogue Crow must have skunked her. Joshua tried to follow to finish off the Arm, but he fell, his legs a mass of compound fractures. The other Arm was strong.
Bodyguards began to fire again, concentrating on Joshua, who writhed on the floor. Gilgamesh and another Crow, Sinclair, started cleaning the skunking off the large Arm. They couldn’t do it quickly enough.
“Surrender, Innocence.” Shadow’s voice. The bodyguards ceased fire. “It’s all over.”
Oh. Our enemy was the supposedly ultra-fearful senior Crow named Innocence. I wasn’t too shocked, although once Shadow revealed himself among the defenders I had mentally put my bet on Rogue Crow being Snow, the manipulator whose games got Gilgamesh kidnapped.
I crept across the ceiling, keeping Enkidu in my sights. He crouched, readying an attack. Trying to triangulate on the hidden Shadow, I realized.
Two could play that game. I did some triangulation of my own, on Rogue Crow. I hoped the bastard didn’t look or metasense up.
“You made it here, my little fear flicker? Your days are numbered. Your image of civilization is doomed.” I moved across the ceiling, still unable to tell where Rogue Crow’s voice came from.
“By you? You walked right into this, Innocence. You’re facing the Commander.” At the edge of my metasense, I caught a build-up of immensely complex dross in the area. I smelled the incipient panic. Shadow and Rogue Crow were going to fight it out, senior Crow style, endangering everyone in the room. My instincts said Shadow would lose. Badly.
“And I have the General, Shadow,” Rogue Crow said. Enkidu, my rival for the Commander title. “Innocence is long dead. Your friends undid him long ago. I wear Innocence as a disguise, but if you want my mercy, call me Wandering Shade.” Right. You could just hear the crazy edging out of Rogue Crow’s voice. He had the same evil sociopath feel to him as good ol’ Dr. Manigault. All he needed was a good ‘bwaa-haa-haa’ laugh. Something had warped him, bad.
“What burden are you carrying?” Shadow said. I had Shadow located, over by Tonya and Polly. Not moving at all. Enkidu slowly moved, at ground level, readying to charge Shadow and the two Focuses. Waiting for an opportune moment.
“Shame. Shame that the Transforms are being led by a bunch of backstabbing gossiping grannies who won’t even admit we exist. Shame that we have to live under the floorboards of their skunky households for our dross.” Wandering Shade paused. “Shadow, come to me. I’ll show you a better way. Crows are made for more important things. They’re…” Crow charisma. Wandering Shade worked the crowd. I didn’t like this.
With a clatter of chitin, Duke Jeremy Hoskins bounded into the ballroom through the exploded windows, still in his astonishing land-crab combat form. I had thought he was out of the fight for good after Enkidu body slammed him into a visiting Focus’s converted school bus, crushing him flat. I had missed Hoskins’ approach – he was good enough to mask his metapresence sufficiently to fool me in a mess like this. Damn, those Chimeras could heal. Hoskins’ attack surprised Joshua, a bad thing when fighting a Chimera. The Duke pincered off Joshua’s head, and then scuttled to the side before someone on our side tried to plink him. Enkidu gave up on his Shadow stalking and leapt for Hoskins’ back, bowling him over and shredding one of Hoskins’ legs. For his efforts, a fusillade of gunfire splattered Enkidu, some quite accurately from me. Well ventilated, Enkidu staggered to the window and climbed up to the ledge to leap at Hoskins. I shot him in his right eye, and at least another dozen bullets caught him dead-on before he fell the thirty feet to the ground, unmoving. I ceiling crawled to a different location, trying to keep hidden. Hoskins slowly scuttled away, sorely wounded again.
“Your vaunted General has fallen, Innocence,” Shadow said. “You’re alone, now. Surrender.”
“Don’t use that name! Betrayer! Soul-less mortician of the Focus bit…” The thundering illness of horrific dross built toward a crescendo, threatening to bring back memories of my time in the CDC. I had to stop this. Somehow.
Innocence’s last warped psychopathic comment finally let me triangulate on him. With my sense of hearing.
Instincts told me to scream and leap.
Phooey on instincts. I didn’t face a mature Hunter, I faced a goddamned Crow! I emptied two magazines from my machine pistols in the general area at Innocence’s triangulated position. He appeared, visible, hit by a single bullet from my left machine pistol. I dropped my two machine pistols and got my HK holdout weapon from the back of my pants. Quickly. Quickly.
Keaton was fond of quoting her own advice at me, and one of her fondest was ‘Bullets are faster than juice’.
What do you know? She was right. After I emptied the HK, Rogue Crow, or what was left of him, fell to the ballroom floor very very dead.
The room grew Crow quiet. I don’t think anyone but a few canny Focuses knew I was up there on the ceiling. Crow Occum, hidden in the second and unused ballroom, signaled that the remainder of the enemy outside now fled in disorder, distracting the police, who, at least for now, no longer approached us. “Odin isn’t dead!” Gilgamesh said, his voice Arm loud. “He’s moved over to behind the bandstand.”
I turned and readied myself to jump, wondering what it would take to kill Odin. The large Arm answered my question by hustling over to Odin and beating his noggin into headcheese with her weapon of choice, a piece of a concrete support column, holding on to the two rebar rods sticking out of it and swinging the concrete end as a mace. Youch!
I hung there upside down, my legs wrapped around a ceiling support, stock still, and dripped rain and blood. The room grew quiet again. I felt naked up there as more eyes looked up to me. No more enemies. We had won. Casualties galore, but relatively few on our side died, at least in the ballroom. Not compared to my darkest fears. A miracle, a damned mira
cle. I gave silent thanks to Matt Narbanor.
I had commanded this fight from the start, arranging everything to my liking, and set up the battle strategy that had allowed Keaton to direct three Arms and three Nobles against four full Hunter packs and mostly win. The Commander title was mine.
For the first time, the title felt good. This time, I had truly earned the damned thing.
The other Arm smiled to the crowd and cracked her knuckles. She had been in victory situations like this before and she loved it. What the hell. I dropped to the floor and limped over to her.
“Good fight, Commander,” she said, a combat-sated half grin on her face. “Hell of a good fight.”
“So, who are you, anyway?” I said. This was Keaton’s territory and I was Keaton’s underling. It still didn’t feel right for her to be here. Even if she did just save our bacon by being the secret weapon no one, not even our people, knew about.
“Just your friendly neighborhood Arm,” she said, with a chuckle. “What’s it to you, short stuff?”
“Are you claiming to be my superior?”
“No claim needed.” She gave me a look along the lines of ‘move along, little cockroach’. “I saved your ass, Hancock. Leave it at that.”
“How’d you get in here? Why did you get involved?” I was angry mad. She had the advantage on me. She knew my name.
I found myself held upside down, by one leg, not the broken one, thank God. At arms length, so to speak. I didn’t even see her move. Annoying. I was supposed to be the quick one.
“I go where I please, Commander.” This time, she spat out my title as part insult and part praise. I was just another baby Arm to her, unproven as an Arm from her exalted perspective. On the other hand, she did respect my military leadership skills, the respect echoing strongly through her voice. “I do what I choose to do. I’m friendly with people who are friendly with me.” She paused, while I struggled, climbed my own body, and tried to climb her arm. Didn’t work. Worse, she shook me ‘just so’, and three of my knives fell to the floor, out of reach. “It just so happens that I got annoyed when Wandering Shade’s Male Monsters started to poach Transforms from my Focuses. I got royally peeved when Wandering Shade made off with my favorite Male Monster punching bag, Tyro.” I had dismembered Tyro in the parking lot. I didn’t feel any remorse. “I also took it personal when my Crow, Windsong, got himself killed when he started looking into the Transform poaching. Lucky me, one of my Focuses had contacts with one of your Focuses, and they happened to direct me to your Focus boss over there, Polly. The rest is, as they say, history.”
All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Page 38