by Rob Horner
So, we took the next left, which ran right up against the side of another trailer. Turning left a second time wasn’t possible, meaning we had to turn right. Fifteen feet up came another left, this time running straight for the length of two trailers, before we had to turn left again.
“Now it’s on the right,” she said.
“Is it any closer?” Scott huffed. A quick look back showed his hands full of shiny balls, like glow-in-the-dark purple marbles seen through the visor. When had he summoned those?
More importantly, considering his power, what did he intend to do with them?
“It’s still just a glow, but definitely brighter,” she said.
“I don’t like it,” Iz muttered.
“They’re pulling us in,” Brian said. “I just don’t know if they plan to spring the trap before we get to where we’re going, or after.”
“It’ll be outside the trailer,” I said. “It’s what they did to us the last time. Drew us in until we reached the trailer with the resonator, then sprang the trap.”
“If it worked before, they’ll do it again,” Fish said.
We turned right, high stepping over more wires and cables, then took another left and a quick right.
“We’re heading right for it,” Angie said.
“Are you sure, Johnny?” Michael asked.
I thought Fish was right, and it made sense considering how well Iz had been able to anticipate their tactics in the police headquarters. Call it a feeling or a hunch, but it felt right. All the images from my dreams returned, and in every dream, there was a wide space around the trailer, a place to do battle.
“They might try some hit and run strikes,” I said, remembering how the demons taunted me from the darkness. “Try to separate us, but most of them will be waiting at the trailer.”
We ran on for another thirty seconds, making a left when forced to only to immediately turn right.
“Still on course,” Angie reported.
“Jeez, how many trailers do they have back here?” Bradley complained.
Loud pops and cracks started up all around us, the boing and springing sounds of aluminum bending under a weight then snapping back after the weight is removed.
“They’re coming,” I said. “On the roofs.”
“Whatever you’re planning, go ahead and do it, Scotty,” Caitlin said.
“Keep us moving,” the teenager replied.
A trailer loomed up in front, and as we reached it a Dra’Gal landed on the roof, fully Manifested, multi-jointed arms raised high and a hiss like a scream of rage aimed at us. Then it stopped, like it was choking on its own spit, as Danielle came into range. Caitlin slammed a hand into the side of the trailer, rocking it violently on its springs and sending the convulsing demon falling to the ground. It deflated as it fell, the human persona emerging, a young man with a face that hadn’t seen a razor in quite some time, but we were still moving and there was no time for me to purge him.
Then we were beyond the man, and I could imagine him giving a shake of the head like a dog smelling something bad, before the Dra’Gal pushed out again.
More bangs and pops and rebounding metal sounded.
Harsh screeches breeched the night from different directions. There were other noises like the snuffling of a bloodhound with a bad cold. They didn’t need the demons with their weird ability to track by scent; we weren’t trying to hide or run away.
“They’re all around us,” someone said.
Slapping feet and more hissing cries came in from the sides, from one trailer row over or maybe two, certainly no more than two.
“Five seconds,” Scott warned.
“Left!” Angie said.
We turned left, then immediately right for the length of one trailer, then left again.
A Manifested Dra’Gal jumped off the top of a trailer, landing right in my path. It’s clawed hands reached and raked, but I was faster. Already running, I twisted and jumped forward, right leg tucked in and left extending. The jumping sidekick connected, blasting the horrid thing away in a burst of light.
I landed in stride.
“Right!” Angie cried.
We turned and Scott yelled out, “Cover your—” and then from behind came an explosion of light and sound, a great welter of boom and crash and shattering glass, screeching metal like nails on a chalkboard but which had to be aluminum siding sliding on concrete. Duller booms like secondary impacts happened immediately after, as trailers displaced or flipped by the explosion collided with others on every side. The outraged shrieks of the Dra’Gal rose in the gaps between sounds and were overwhelmed when the second explosion came, this one a little closer.
“Faster,” Scott urged, his voice barely audible through the helmet; there was no hearing anything without the electronics, not over the cacophony coming in waves from behind us.
A third explosion followed, and now we sprinted, around one corner, then another, no longer trying to reach the special trailer, just wanting to put more distance between us and the spreading destruction from behind.
The ticks and tacks of clawed feet on the roofs of the nearby trailers was continuous, snarls and growls coming from above us as often as from the sides.
“How many—” someone asked before his words were cut off by two more explosions that came close enough together for the second to be an echo of the first. These brought a hint of wind, a thrusting force that blew through the narrow pathways, driving us to move faster.
The screams of the monsters were all around, but nothing got in our way. I imagined the Dra’Gal were more concerned with fleeing the coming destruction than they were with bothering us. They loped along parallel pathways, bounding across the trailer tops, deaf to our noise in the cacophony of explosions and collisions.
A final twist, zig, and turn brought us to a clearing of sorts, as the trailers described a circular space perhaps fifty feet in diameter, with only a lone structure set in its center. Without thinking we ran out into the open area, seeing horned and scaled bodies cascading off surrounding mobile homes, some landing gracefully while others toppled to the concrete.
Like a scene from a nature movie, wild animals fleeing a mountain summit ahead of a volcanic eruption, the Dra’Gal poured into the open space.
Spinning in place, for the moment just as in awe of the explosive destruction as the enemy, I watched as Scott’s final bombs detonated. The boxy tails of two trailers humped up like breaching whales. I forgot for the moment the limitations of my visor, which turned from purple-lined beauty to blinding whiteness as the accompanying flash lit up the sky. Uttering a wordless cry of pain, I yanked the helmet off and stood blinking, willing my sight to return.
Someone grabbed me by an arm and pulled me to the side as a staggering rush of hot air blew through the gap we’d just come through, carrying with it shards of metal and glass that streaked through the open area, tinkling and pinging against the lone trailer in the center like hail against a doghouse.
If any of that had hit me…
The sounds of a battlefield bombardment decreased behind us as the screeches of a hundred or more Dra’Gal rose before us. The brightness faded from my vision as my eyes recovered from the overload, going from white to dusk to twilight to darkness in a matter of seconds. My helmet remained in my hands and I started to raise it.
Not having it on saved me.
Maybe it saved all of us.
The lights came on.
Like they were waiting for it, knowing it would incapacitate us, the Dra’Gal horde attacked.
Chapter 29
Looks like we were expected
Spotlights popped on all around the circle, bright things mounted on poles like streetlights from hell. Shadows fled as the audible slap-cracks chased one another around the circumference. The lights carried a heat, bearing down on us like several dozen miniature suns.
My fellow Chosen and rifle-bearing soldiers let out a collective scream of surprise and pain, their visors overloading. Even Fish had his
hands to his head.
But to me the light was a welcome change from the ubiquitous purple-darkness through which we’d come, a chance to see the demons and the dangers, to face my fears and stand in the light, rather than hide in the dark.
They knew we’d have on night vision gear and that bright light would hurt us.
My heart shrank from what that portended. All those others, half of our initial force, converted and turned against us. Jeff escaped, so at least they didn’t have the ability to teleport their new fighters to this battlefield.
What if they have their own teleporter?
The thought terrified me, but there was no time to worry about it.
The Dra’Gal closed in on us from all sides save the wall of trailers at our back, a shrinking semi-circle of running legs with backward-bent knees and swinging arms of sinew and muscle.
I stepped forward and slammed my hands together, once from side to side, and once from top and bottom, sending out shockwaves that arced vertically, spinning opponents away, or horizontally, catching four or five in their midsection, doubling them over as they flew backward.
With a thought, I brought my power to my hands, setting them aglow, and the rushing horde halted, Dra’Gal in the back bumping into those in front. Their faces didn’t show fear—or else I didn’t know what it looked like—but they look concerned. With a touch of my hand to their skin, I could banish them, and they knew it. They knew it before my hands glowed, but perhaps that visual reminder drove the point home.
I didn’t intend to go nova, not yet. No matter how many I banished or purged, there would be more that I missed, and I’d be completely helpless afterward; none of the others were recovered enough to help.
I stepped forward into them, charging the front rank not ten feet away, and they fell back. I swung hands and feet, connecting a dozen time in just a few seconds, saw flashes of light like a strobe effect in a haunted house. For a few seconds, it was just me and my power, a battlefield force tearing through them like a machete through the hanging vegetation of a rainforest.
And then they countered.
My attacks changed to blocks, desperate actions that couldn’t possibly stop every swing and swipe coming in at me. But everyone I managed to stop proved costly to them.
A blow across my back staggered me forward. My hands were out to stop myself from hitting the ground, and instead landed on the bare arms of another Dra’Gal, who promptly vanished in a flash of light. Swinging back around, I stopped an overhead fist from caving in my skull, only catching clothing but still able to push out and drive my attacker back.
From behind came the first sounds of gunfire as the soldiers unleashed hell with their rifles, only some of them using the special rounds that stopped a Dra’Gal and forced them to revert to human form. One or two others also fired live rounds, a continuous chatter of ear-shattering noise. To my left a group of six or seven Dra’Gal danced under the barrage, bodies twisting, twining, and twitching as the bullets tore through, blood splattering even as the spirit inside fled, leaving human corpses which dropped to the ground.
And then came the scream.
Hearing it shocked me to my core, forcing me to turn to seek the source. It was Danielle, helmet off and hands over her own ears as her voice went out. It ululated at first, like the call to prayer at a mosque, before rising in pitch. Glass shattered in the windows of the nearest trailers. Our soldiers dropped their weapons to cover their own ears. I’d never heard her power unleashed. It was supposed to be inaudible to us. Maybe she only did that when she had time to prepare.
And the Dra’Gal?
Their reactions were more dramatic and universal. Nothing attacked me, because everything around me…heck, everything within the reach of Danielle’s voice, was fully engaged with transforming back to human or fighting not to.
The noise climbed higher, passing out of the range of audibility, and my thoughts cleared. Dropping my hands from my head, I moved among the human looking Dra’Gal nearest me, purging them before they remembered they could still fight without claws and fangs. The gunfire stopped as Iz fought to restore order among the panicked soldiers who thought to mow down their enemies rather than try to save them.
Farther to my right, Gina established one of her walls, but wisely wasn’t trying to protect our group. Instead it curved out from the wall of trailers almost to the center and seemed more a guide, a way to funnel Dra’Gal around it rather than have them crashing in from all sides.
James used his power to good effect as well, sending balls of lightning like spitballs of electricity into the milling crowd of stunned people, shivering them, dropping them, but not lingering long enough to truly harm them. Hoping he was watching to make sure I didn’t catch a blast by accident, I ran to that side, my hands out to purge any I could reach.
Bradley stood next to Danielle, a glowing shard of light in each hand, ready to fling at the first monster to come near.
And then something large and round, a tire off a truck or a spare blown free from a trailer, sailed out over our heads, hovered for a split second, then drove down at Danielle. I yelled as soon as I saw the motion, and one of the women screamed something, but there was no way for any of us to get there in time to help.
The tire smashed to the ground, and the world moved in slow motion.
Danielle shot out to one side, arms and legs stretched back the way she’d come like she’d been thrown or showed by a great force.
Bradley flew the opposite direction, a perfect ‘O’ of surprise on his lips.
And Caitlin stood beneath the thrown tire, arms up and hands pressed in at its center. Blood poured down from a nose broken by the tread before she could halt its momentum.
But she stood.
Danielle hit the ground on one side while Bradley struck a slid several feet on the other.
Several of the guys cheered.
The Dra’Gal began to change again, freed from Danielle’s song. I didn’t know if she’d been knocked unconscious or simply had her power interrupted, and there wasn’t time to find out.
My eyes scanned the skies for Tanya.
“She’s over there,” Angie said, pointing to my left.
Across the sea of Dra’Gal I spotted her, a floating form hovering between two of the spotlights.
Danielle began to sing again, and I moved in that direction.
“There’s another one coming from the right,” Angie yelled, but I didn’t turn away. If I lost sight of her again, I might not be able to find her.
“I got this one,” one of the soldiers said, and a flash of light, brighter than any of mine, sent a confusing welter of shadows streaking away in front of me.
“Damn, you juiced those things, didn’t you, Johnny?”
Someone yelled for Jeff, and then I was beyond hearing them, beyond the range of Danielle’s song, once again taking hits and blocking, punching, shoving my way through to where she hovered, a general on high watching the troops battle below her.
A tree-trunk of a red-hued arm swung at my face and I leaned back, feeling the wind as it passed over me. Blindly my arms went out, twin flashes connecting on blue shirts and blasting two Dra’Gal away.
And now she looked down at me, human features twisted in a snarl of recognition and hatred. Maybe she tried to grab me with her power, I don’t know. It wouldn’t have mattered if she did since it wouldn’t have worked. Instead she threw whatever was loose that her power could grab. Tires and window frames, curtain rods and clothing, it all came hurtling out at me from the wreckage of the trailers behind her.
I sent out a shockwave, scattering the first batch, then quick-stepped right to avoid a twisting, twining cable that could have wrapped me up like a Christmas present.
My step put me directly in line with a tire smaller than the one Caitlin caught, but no less deadly coming at that speed. I raised my arms in a feeble attempt to block it, hoping it wouldn’t kill me, but a white light blossomed into a wall just wide enough to stop th
e thing, and a quick glance showed Gina running up beside me.
“That her?” the redhead asked breathlessly.
“Can you box her in?” I asked.
“One direction at a time. But how will you reach her?”
“Leave that to me,” I said, and charged.
She was ten feet away and twelve feet up.
Two more Dra’Gal stepped in front of me, taloned arms leading.
When would they learn to wear long-sleeved shirts?
My hands came up, angling to intercept. Light flashed and both vanished.
Then I was five feet away from Tanya, and she must have thought she was safe. Or the Dra’Gal riding inside of her did. She was twelve feet up and I was no Michael Jordan.
This is how you beat a hive mind. You adapted, innovated.
You jumped.
I hopped forward, bringing my feet together to land flat-footed directly below her. I pushed with my power and light flashed.
“Jeff!” Gina screamed.
Faster than she could react, I reached her, my arms scrabbling for purchase, grabbing at her shoulders. Too late she tried to move away, but Gina was there, a shining wall preventing flight. My hand caught the bare skin of Tanya’s arm. Light flashed again, and down we came.
Then Jeff was there. A split second of reach and grab was followed by the wrenching nausea of teleportation. Light faded, disappeared, and we were standing in darkness outside of the carnival. Tanya was in my arms, leaning forward against me. It was all I could manage to keep her from falling to the ground, when all that my body wanted to do was lean over and let go of whatever was left of my dinner.
“Sorry, there was no time to warn you,” Jeff said. “Here, let me take some of her weight.”
I didn’t want to let go.
Tanya was the girl who’d been my friend longer than anyone else. She knew me when I still had parents and consoled me through their loss. She was my first date, my first kiss. Even when that didn’t feel right, she was still my friend. And it was good.
Then we discovered the timing simply hadn’t been right. We’d tried to force our friendship into something more before we were done just being friends.