Annika picked two more targets and, after one shot went wild and ricocheted off the wall, landed two body shots. The streaks of blood confirmed they’d found flesh and not chitin. For once, luck was on her side. With one Vant’therax down and four stricken by her Karamels, she threw open her Ruger’s cylinder, preparing to reload with conventional ammunition.
But the skeleton crew was grappling with crisis. Carl shrieked as the curled claws about his neck sank into his skin and began to draw blood. His machine gun clattered to the floor, and he groped blindly for his pistol. He drew from his hip and fired three shots, each missing the beast’s head. Its claws pressed deeper into his flesh, and then stopped abruptly. The Vant’therax’s entire arm convulsed, and then it dropped him. The monster looked down at its own arm, perplexed, perhaps even horrified, before one of its legs gave out beneath it. A burst of rounds from one of the other Marauders ripped through the thing’s shoulder and sent it crumpling to the floor.
“It’s getting back up!” one of the yellow-coats shouted from behind—a mere whisper in the raging storm. The first Vant’therax to fall victim to a headshot was moving, clawing its way back to its feet as though under an undead curse.
Retreating from the charge of cloaks, Ronald pulled his own pistol and fired into an approaching monster. His first three bullets found nothing but chitin, but his last blasted through the beast’s forehead and sent it to the floor in a heap. He gave a brief adrenaline-charged shout before ripping a clip from his belt and shoving it into his machine gun. But moments later, that creature too began to rise despite the gaping hole in its face. One of its eyes hung from its shattered socket, and its mouth seemed to shiver with unspoken syllables and silent words of curse.
One of the living ones—one struck by a Karamel—bounded over a shaking husk of a fallen body and fell upon Carl. The creature sank its forest of teeth into his throat, and a deathly howl signaled his end. Annika fired off a few shots at it, but the bullets only scraped its skull as it ripped Carl’s throat out and painted the floor with a torrent of blood.
As Edgar and Ronald backpedaled, spraying bursts into the advancing zombie-beasts, Annika took two more shots at a robe with a pair of grotesque legs growing from its shoulders, but it reacted to her attack and retreated behind cover. And then it collapsed. There came a crash as another of the Vant’therax fell, writhing as it attempted to regain control of its muscles. A baleful howl echoed throughout the chamber as its legs and arms began to operate under a phantom locomotion.
The sound of the blazing guns sputtered as Edgar’s weapon reached the bottom of its clip. Ronald’s own ran empty and fell silent once more. The silence left a harsh ringing that punctuated the ferocity of the battle. Though that quiet was an unnerving juxtaposition, far more unnerving was the sound that began to crawl through that ringing as the men scrambled to jam new clips into their guns. It was a putrescent gurgling and lapping that seemed to come from the two revived Vant’therax. Edgar’s reloading maneuver finished, and he began to unload into the shambling undead once more, erasing the fragile silence.
One of the reanimated puppets—a Vant’therax with serrated chitin hooks for arms—suddenly surged forth. Ronald took a horrified step back, trying to reload his weapon, but it was already too late. The Vant’therax lunged and swept his blades. The attack severed Ronald’s arm below the elbow. Eyes widening in shock, Ronald clutched the stump of his arm and began to shout curses and obscenities. The putrid face of the monster moved as though it were boiling, its unhinged jaw seeming to laugh a disembodied shriek.
Edgar backed up, again choking the last shots out of his clip. The bullets tore through the shoulders and extremities of the reanimated creatures as they shambled toward him. When the bullets ran dry, he threw the machine gun to the ground and reached for his pistol. He rattled off four shots into the nearest husk before its claws sank into his torso and sent him into the steel floor. The horde of creatures fell upon him like hungry vultures.
From beneath Edgar’s screams, Annika heard a writhing, discordant chanting. She had to pause, for she could not make sense of what it was she was hearing. As she focused, however, it became clear that it was the two reanimated Vant’therax making the sound. They were speaking in grotesque unison, spilling liquid upon the floor with each syllable. “And now for you, Bordon,” they said in chorus. “I won’t let you get away this time! This time I’ll eat your skin!”
Annika bit her lip, and her fingers loaded fresh cartridges into her Ruger’s hungry cylinder. In the back, the last of the Karamel-stricken robes had fallen to its knees and was now struggling to get up. That made four in all. That just left the clawed freak, which was now advancing upon her and Arthr, seemingly content that the now-silent skeleton crew would feed the hungry dead.
“I won’t let you get away this time!” Nal shouted, his ripped maw splattering blood across the floor. “This time I’ll eat your skin!”
Mark dodged back, left, then back again, narrowly avoiding each of the huge swipes thrown by the surging Vant’therax. As soon as he put a hair of space between them, he leapt back over a table of unlabeled fetal specimens. He cringed at the pain in his shoulder; it was making his whole arm heavy and forcing him to devote too much power to deadening his nerves. If only I hadn’t been so careless.
But he had no time to rest. Dyn flew to one side and, with a thrash of his arm, sent a heavy table careening through the air toward him. Mark raised his hand and summoned another surge of force. A burst of power deflected the table into a wall of wires just as the one-armed Nal closed in. He ducked to the side and avoided the strike. He raised his hands to counterattack, but Rith was already upon him. The Flames burned around him, and a moment later he emerged from the teleportation spell on the other side of the room. He gasped, and the scent of formaldehyde stung his throat and lungs.
The three Vant’therax, laughing in horrible unison, began to advance again, their steps even and meticulous. Mark eased himself backward toward the wall, away from the skulking robes. His fingers twitched. The monsters were too dangerous to play defensive with for much longer. It was time to go on the attack. He threw both his hands forward and clenched his fists. A flash distorted the air. As the invisible blades plunged into Rith and Dyn’s chests, shouts of agony burst from their mouths. Their arms and legs began to quiver in response to the searing pain. Mark clamped his jaw and dug those blades deeper, searching for the vital organs hiding beneath the layers of protective chitin. The screams grew louder and more violent until, suddenly, they stopped altogether.
Mark started at the abrupt silence. The dead eyes of the Vant’therax still considered him, now with greater anger than before. His blades, still sinking into their nerves, had lost their effect. Damn, he thought. Seems he’s figured out how to use some of their magic. And no sooner had he thought it than those two robes darted off in opposite directions, and the shadows began to gather about them, swirl, and disperse. Mark snapped to attention, following the trace increase in darkness underfoot. It drew near, and so he willed his muscles to enhance and move. A huge, empowered leap backward, just as the two robes rose from the shadows like a pair of breaching sharks.
The Flames burst forth in either hand, and Mark swept them in front of him, leaving trails of crystallized spacetime in their wake. The Vant’therax’s blows fell like two sledgehammers into the Flames. Mark felt the impact in his bones as the temporal aberration shattered into diffuse molecular foam. He stumbled an uneven step back, a spike of pain ripping its way through his skull. And then he heard the swirling of the shadows again. The third robe! He turned his head just in time to see Nal falling upon him, teeth bared, his fist pulled back, ready to kill.
There, Nemo thought as Nal plunged toward Mark’s exposed back. I have you now, Warren!
But before he could view the outcome of the attack landing, his mind was stricken by a booming voice. “Not yet!” it screamed. So near was the voice that Nemo was startled out of Nal’s mind, and his visio
n returned to the command center. The air burst from Nemo’s lungs. Two amber eyes hovered just in front of his, gleaming, burning. A bladed smile beneath a purple bowler. The chill of a knife blade pressed to his neck. It was him, Nemo realized with a quiet terror. The man who had killed him—who had killed Dwyre.
“Hello, Nemo,” the purple-suited man said.
Nemo’s breath became shallow, ragged. The chill of the blade at his throat. It was too familiar, too real. His skin crawled with goose bumps, frigid trails of horror. All sensory perception of his Vant’therax puppets faded.
The purple man laughed, low and insidious. “Please accept my apologies. But I cannot have you ruining everything just yet, my friend.” His smile growing wider, the purple-suited phantom drew his knife across Nemo’s skin, leaving a shallow incision.
His whole body tensed, terrified that making even the smallest motion would be fatal. The heat of the faintest portion of blood warmed the length of the cut. And when the tip of the knife came to rest just below Nemo’s Adam’s apple, the purple phantom stopped. Again he laughed that foul laugh. “As you were, Nemo.”
A shocking pain shot through his brain, as of a molten spear puncturing his skull. He clenched his eyes shut for a mere moment. When he reopened them, the suited murderer had vanished, leaving only the line of hot pain across his throat. Panting, whole body trembling upon his cross, Nemo gave his head a shake and began to scream. “You all conspire against me, but I am awake! I am free! I will not be defeated! I will kill you, each and every one of you who oppose me! I am doom! I am death! I am Nemo!” And with that, his mind dove back into the glistening webbing, hungry for blood.
When Nal and the other Vant’therax recoiled, as though struck by some psychic blow, Mark jumped out of range of where the blow was about to fall. Seizing whatever moment of weakness had saved his life, he drew a magic focus into his hand and released it directly into Nal’s head. Like an invisible javelin, the ray of energy bored through skull and brain matter alike. He held the spell for a moment, watching the contortions of Nal’s paralyzed face, and then released what remained of the energy in a single burst. With a flash of light, Nal’s skull exploded, sending chunks of bone and flesh and spiders raining in all directions. Unwilling to wager that the mind spiders couldn’t form a primitive brain on their own, he swept his hands and quartered the robed monster with a pair of ethereal blades. As the dismembered Vant’therax fell into a heap, he leapt laterally and pivoted as he landed.
That was too close, he thought with a shallow breath. The pain behind his left eye was growing in intensity. One down, at least. He could afford to kill one off completely, he thought. It wasn’t likely to scare Nemo away at this point. He turned his attention to the remaining two Vant’therax. He gritted his teeth and looked into the dead eyes of Dyn, beyond which the crackling blue void seethed and waned with the Helixweaver’s thoughtstream. Come on, Annika. Don’t let me down.
As the undead scythe-beast and the clawed Vant’therax approached, Annika threw a quick glance over her shoulder to where Arthr was standing. “What are you doing?” she shouted. “Open fire!”
Beginning to shake, Arthr nodded.
Annika snapped her head back to the monsters. She pulled back the hammer and took aim at the skull of the living claw-wielder. But as soon as her target revealed itself, the scythed thing flew toward her. She discarded the shot she’d lined up and dove to the side. A blade whistled over her head and smashed into the wall. She rolled as she hit the floor and vaulted back into a crouch. The pain in her right arm was growing in severity, but she ignored it and put two shots into the Vant’therax’s legs. But though it was possessed by the spirit of the Conduit, it made no cry as Gauge had.
The living Vant’therax leapt at Arthr, sweeping its claws through the air with a terrifying speed. Arthr ducked the attack, and the grating sound of those chitin claws scraping the wall put his teeth on edge. He fumbled back and raised the sights of the Rhino. Before he could pull the trigger, a second attack forced him to evade to the side once more. He hit the floor of the catwalk hard, his ribs ringing in pain. No time for bitching and moaning, he thought. He flipped himself onto his back and again raised the revolver.
But as the eyes of the hideous clawed creature gazed into his, Arthr found himself filled with a nauseating terror. He was transported to a night not too distant, when he had watched in helpless paralysis as one of the Vant’therax had come into their living room and smashed through all resistance they’d been tenacious enough to summon. Those dreadful, soulless eyes were indifferent to all of this suffering.
His body grew heavy, like it had been turned to stone.
Annika leapt backward, avoiding another of the zombie’s downward strikes. She put another bullet into its gut out of habit before a lunging attack threw her footing off and sent her Ruger clattering to the grated flooring. She regained her balance in time to throw a kick through one of the thing’s bullet-punctured kneecaps. The joint shattered, and the beast went down. Again, there came no cry or sign of pain, but a collapsed leg was good enough.
She backed up again, and beyond the thing’s crumpled form she caught sight of Arthr cowering on the ground, the Rhino shaking idle in his uneven grip. Her heart thudded to a stop. “Pull the fucking trigger! Shoot it!” But she could only watch as that Vant’therax reached down toward Arthr with its leg-like claws and wrapped its appendages around his throat. The Rhino tumbled from the boy’s grip as his hands and spider legs all went to try to free himself from the monster’s chokehold.
Goddammit! She sprang forward and vaulted over the crouching scythe-fiend. She ran toward the Vant’therax, all concern for anything else melting away. Her hand snatched the knife from her ankle-strap, and she pounced. A stabbing strike buried the knife to the hilt in the monster’s neck. A spray of blood gurgled out from the wound. In a single gruesome motion, she tore the knife free and plunged it again into the back of its neck, aiming to sever the spinal cord. Instead, the blade met a flexible layer of subdermal chitin. Before she could pull the weapon free and make a third attempt, an arm swung about and smashed against her, throwing her off the platform and onto the lower grating.
Head spinning, she pushed herself back up despite the dull ringing in her limbs. There was a scraping sound from behind—the other revived robe had grown weary of Edgar and was now stumbling toward her. The dead eyes were on her, and so she got back to her feet and threw her gaze back toward Arthr’s oppressor. She cursed under her breath. No gun. No knife. Arthr’s life was on the line, and it was three against one. She wasn’t going to last long without a weapon. The scythe-armed beast thrashed its way to its feet behind her, and soon it would be upon her as well. She bit her lip and stared beyond the dead eyes of one of the zombie creatures—into the eyes of the Conduit. She prayed Mark was listening to the Conduit’s thoughts at that moment.
“Mark,” she shouted, “I’ve done all I can. Now quit watching like a fucking pervert and do something!”
Annika’s voice reached Mark through the distorted images read through the hissing universe of blue-firing synapses. He could only see two other simulated minds in the mental whirlpool, but the rest were at least disabled. The element of surprise should ensure they met their end as well. Either way, he wasn’t going to let Annika die because of the imperfect circumstances.
He ducked to the side to avoid a blow from Dyn. As Rith leapt in with a huge arcing smash, Mark blurred backward with his temporarily enhanced muscles. The attack split a steel table in half, shattering amniotic jars and sending twisted metal spinning in opposite directions. This was his chance, and so he wasted no time. He stretched his right hand out, and the verdant blaze came to life in his palm. He flashed forward, pouring all of his remaining magic into closing that gap before Dyn could counterattack. Time slowed. He stared into the blue network of nerves behind Rith’s eyes. “The Gate is closed to you,” he shouted. “The Void awaits!”
His momentum carried him to his target in an
instant. Before the howl of protest could leave Nemo’s puppets’ lips, Mark thrust his blazing hand into the robed abomination’s chest. There was a flash as the green fire passed through Rith’s body, and then—finding the trace of the soul made manifest within it—the flash fizzled out.
Unceremonious though the attack had been, Mark was assaulted by the dramatic reality of its effect. A skull-splitting pain ripped through his head as the sorry creature’s soul cracked and shattered beneath the Flames. He stumbled back, clutching his temple, as Rith dropped dead onto the floor. And a moment later, Dyn, too, slumped into a defeated heap.
And then the domino effect began.
Annika had no time to see if she was right about Mark’s plan. She spun away from the encroaching robes and sprinted toward the Vant’therax throttling Arthr. A scythe ripped through the air near her, but it missed of its own accord. Sights on the handle protruding from the back of the Vant’therax’s neck, she vaulted up onto the platform. As soon as her feet touched down, she leapt into the air. She shouted—a mad, desperate sound—and threw a hard kick into the handle of the knife. The blade spun from the impact, cutting through flesh and opening the artery in the monster’s neck.
The Vant’therax hunched over, a gurgling sound overflowing with the tainted blood. Annika wrapped her arms around the creature’s neck and pried it away from Arthr. She spun on her heel and heaved, sending the monster off the lip of the platform. In shock, it fumbled and fell prone on the lower grating, leaving a trail of black and red fluid behind. Arthr wheezed and coughed beneath her. Ahead of the nearing puppet Vant’therax, the living claw-wielder recovered its senses and rose again to attack, its menacing claws stretching outward like a fan of blades.
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 49