Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  But that was long ago and Andy was gone. That whole world was gone. And Dave discovered that he was a good twenty yards down Park Avenue, still pedalling furiously, his balance regained without conscious effort.

  He wanted to chance a look back over his shoulder. Part of him worried what would happen if and when those sharp splinters of plastic and glass found soft targets. Had he just accelerated a hundred jagged little missiles to some lethal velocity?

  He would never know, because he was already too far gone and far too late to stop and inspect any damage he’d wrought. Karen was half a block ahead of him, forging on through cross streets into the high 50s.

  East 55th.

  East 56th.

  The wider boulevard of E57th, where she threaded the needle between two large buses. A gaudy red double-decker, some tourist thing, the upper floor open to the sky, and one of the familiar blue and white Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses. He’d already passed dozens of them, including one which had either broken down a few blocks back, or been abandoned by its driver and passengers. Dave aimed his bike at the spot where Karen had passed between them, intending to blast through and trust to providence on the other side.

  But as he flashed into the gap between the grillwork at the front of the red double-decker and the exhaust puffing from the ass-end of the MTA vehicle, his vision blurred and pixelated and the world roared into motion. His shoulder caught on the grillwork of the tourist bus and he was thrown back to that day from his childhood, the bike wrenched from under him with incredible force.

  08

  Dave flew over the handlebars, tumbling through a swirl of colour and sound, all distorted by the same migraine kaleidoscope he recalled from the encounter with the empath daemon fifteen blocks downtown. He heard the teeth-rattling thump and crunch of steel on steel, the crash of shattered glass, honking horns, sirens, gunfire, screams. Part of him, the part of his mind sitting on its ass and chilling like Buddha, made a note to go back and fetch Lucille from wherever she ended up, because he sure as shit didn’t have her anymore. He had no idea what would happen if she landed on somebody.

  He was airborne, flying free, and then he was not. Another thump and crunch, this time not just heard but felt as an eruption of pain and damage through his body when he slammed into something.

  A town car. One of those big-ass stretch limos. All polished black panels and tinted windows. Or they had been tinted. Now they were shattered and starred, destroyed by the impact of one uncontrolled superhero landing. He felt the big, heavy car shunt sideways under the impact, a fraction of a second before he felt bones breaking and shearing and splintering throughout his body. Ribs, shoulder, forearms, wrist, hands, hips, spinal discs. The sound of it was enormous. Buckling steel panels, exploding safety glass, his own screams, incoherent at first, but resolving in a torrent of obscenities as he crashed to the hard ground and rolled and rolled and broke a few more bones here and there. White-hot pain lanced through his stomach and up his damaged spine into his neck, his face, his skull. He felt organs tearing and knitting back up again. He screamed and swore as bones rearranged and reset themselves. He was sweating, pouring out torrents of rank-smelling moisture from every pore as his body turned up the furnace to repair itself. The migraine and pixelated aura were gone, and he rolled like a log, grunting rather than screaming now, until he fetched up against the gutter.

  Not for the first time in his life.

  ‘Fuck this for a bag of dicks,’ he said, low and guttural, still short of breath and clenching his jaw against the pain and the shock.

  Dave Hooper lay in the soft damp litter which had collected against the kerb, and a madly inappropriate thought occurred to him; that it was wrong for there to be any litter on Fifth Avenue. In the gutter or not.

  ‘Hooper? You alive?’

  Varatchevsky. The Russian.

  No.

  Karen, the all-American girl.

  No.

  Ur Threshrendum. She was ur Threshrendum now. As he was ur Hunn.

  But it was just Warat.

  Karen Warat, reaching down, hauling him up by one arm.

  He cried out in surprise and real agony. That shoulder wasn’t quite finished healing. She let go of the injured limb and grabbed a handful of tattered, bloodied coverall, bunching her fist in the thick, tough fabric and using that to pull him to his feet. The material started to tear under the strain but then he was up and he felt her hands on his head again, the finger pads oddly cool and soft, but her palm ridged with rough callouses.

  ‘No,’ he said, and pulled away, instinctively. But it was too late. She’d forced her way inside him again, reduced him to a vessel. What little of him remained could feel her shaping him, working his anatomy like a meat puppet. He felt her willing his bones to mend and flesh to heal. The pain, or rather the discomfort of recovery, the prickling fever and maddening itch of it was more intense than ever before, denser and hotter, but after half a moment it was done and he was able to stand without her support.

  ‘You’ll be needing this,’ she said, handing him Lucille. No problems for her hauling that heavy bitch up, then. He felt the rightness of it as the hardwood shaft smacked into his hand, felt himself drawing on some of the weapon’s power, but without understanding how. The city was in motion around them again, but the crowds were not. He had fetched up against a stretch of pavement outside some antique shop. It was closed, as were most of the street-front businesses, some of them with security grilles locked in place, some with only polished glass between them and the world gone mad. They were in a very tony part of town, Dave knew, as he regained his balance. Jewellery, high-end fashion, cafes with small stupid food on big stupid plates, all the things he’d promised Annie she’d have when she married him. Just some of the many things he’d failed to deliver. Karen Warat, he was sure, knew this part of town well.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, already leaving him behind as she ran toward the apartment building at the corner of Park and 61st. She had the sword out and the long, evil-looking blade flashed and glinted under the lights of Manhattan.

  The city hereabouts wasn’t deserted. It wasn’t possible in a city this size. But as Dave started after Karen he didn’t have to fight his way through foot traffic. The closer they came to their destination, a medium high-rise condo, maybe twenty storeys tall, the fewer people they passed fleeing from it. He ran as fast as he could, and even without being able to slip the heavy chains of normal time, that was plenty fast enough to carry him toward the carnage that had cleared the streets. Ahead of him, Karen was a dark shadow blurring around and sometimes over abandoned cars and yellow cabs. Her boots landed on the hood of a taxi with a dull, hollow boom. The cab sank on its shock absorbers before rebounding enough to lift an inch or two off the asphalt. The driver had already abandoned the vehicle in front of a big-ass cathedral, right next door to the besieged apartment block. Both passenger doors stood wide open in back.

  Dave ran without regard to saving energy, trusting in the vast quantities of meat he’d only just consumed, and the energy gels he’d shotgunned like understrength beers. He wasn’t warping past the few frightened New Yorkers fleeing this latest horror, but to their eyes he must have moved with animal swiftness, because they pointed and gasped as he flew past. He’d seen the same reaction to Karen ahead of him.

  She was already at the police cordon hastily thrown up around the scene of this latest atrocity, and Dave, dodging around another abandoned car, frowned when he saw her slide into cover. She slammed into the side of a blue and white cop car, shunting it sideways and forcing the cops who’d already taken shelter against the vehicle to crab walk after it. He could hear them cursing her, could hear her telling them to shut the fuck up.

  The patrol car rocked as a giant harpoon speared into the roof, blowing out every window. Dave almost tripped over his own feet as he tried to arrest his forward momentum. Smaller bolts rained down on them from high above. He recognised them, or rather Urgon did, as the arrakh-m
i fired by Sliveen crossbows. Another spear-length arrow, a shot from a great war bow, punched into the police car, detonating the flashing lights on the roof. Dave didn’t need to be told twice. He dodged into a doorway across the street, getting out of the direct line of fire, just as a couple of bolts sparked off the pavement where he’d been standing, stupidly, gawping at the scene.

  Five patrol cars ringed the entrance to 530 Park Avenue, and one large white truck that he took for some kind of tactical unit transport. It was riddled with war shots and darts and, before getting his ass out of the firing line, Dave had counted seven dead men, dressed identically to him in black combat coveralls. Their bodies lay sprawled around the van, which was still running, occasional puffs of exhaust coughing from its tailpipe. Other bodies, some whole, some roughly hacked and torn into parts, lay in the road, or hung from open windows of the white art deco apartment block. Still others lay atop the crushed and crumpled vehicles where they’d landed. Or perhaps where they’d been thrown, as improvised missiles. The once white facade of 530 Park Avenue was disfigured with thick runnels of blood, shockingly red in the artfully arranged spotlighting that would once have shown the building’s architecture off to elegant effect.

  Lucille’s killing song was loud inside his mind, but soothing, especially after the violation he had so recently suffered at the hands of . . . what? His partner? His ally?

  Neither felt like they caught the truth of Colonel Karin Varatchevsky. Trinder had pronounced her a very dangerous woman, and that was surely true. He’d also called her the enemy, which possibly was not true. Or not exactly. Still, right then Dave was not much concerned with working through yet more relationship issues, and listening to Lucille’s hymn allowed him to shut out the violent mayhem he could clearly hear coming from within the high-end condo. Having a superhuman ability to hear conversations well beyond normal range was a mixed blessing. Not everybody loved Super Dave and it sucked ass having to hear them go on about it. But now his super-hearing was a form of torture, as he cowered, helpless to do anything about the cries for mercy, the screams of horror and of pain he alone could hear.

  If Karen heard them, it didn’t seem to bother her.

  The police fired back at the Sliveen, who seemed to be scattered from the ground floor to the rooftop of the condo. A daemon scout had even holed up in the tower of the cathedral next door. Handguns and a couple of shotguns roared, making life hazardous for any daemonum closer to the ground. The single shot crack of what Dave guessed to be sniper fire swatted at those higher up. He saw a Sliveen topple forward, out of the church bell tower. The giant, insect-like carcass bounced and skidded down the old stone facade, catching here and there on some irregular facet of the building. Newton’s Laws finished the job in spectacular fashion at street level where the Sliveen’s bony carapace cracked and explosively blew apart on the steps of the cathedral.

  Next door, at 530, glass shattered, masonry fell and iron-tipped arrakh-mi bolts clanged and sparked off the road in reply, or banged into the steel panels of the police cars. For one mad moment the vehicles reminded Dave of circled wagons in an old western. From his hiding place he watched Karen arguing with one of the cops. Sheathing her katana, she reached out and grabbed the guy’s face.

  ‘Whoa.’

  Dave knew what was coming. He knew too that he wanted no part of it.

  The cop, who had resisted fiercely whatever she’d been saying, suddenly changed. His whole demeanour, as outlined in his posture, even crouched so low in cover, switched from resistance to compliance at her touch. Or so it would seem to anyone other than Dave, or perhaps Trenoweth. He watched as the officer handed over his weapon, a submachine gun of some type and, presumably, a bunch of reloads for it. The small, dark objects looked like unusually large pistol magazines. Dave didn’t think beat cops packed that kind of artillery, but maybe he’d picked it off one of the dead guys. There was plenty of dead guy stuff lying around. Another cop handed over his weapon too, a pistol, although Warat didn’t appear to reach out and touch him in any way.

  Dave edged out of cover and tried to warp. The way this clusterfuck was killing people, it was worth trying. ‘Karen,’ he yelled. ‘We’ve got to get in there.’

  A force ten hurricane blew through his head. The pain blinded him, loosened his bowels and forced him to his knees. Looking up through the blurry haze he could just make out another Sliveen on the roof of the building far above, shooting down into the street. He was sure he heard SWAT snipers in other buildings nearby start firing at the exposed creature.

  A medic appeared from out of the blizzard of pain, dropped down next to Dave and tried to assess him. With great care he pushed her away. Careful not to break the black-clad, body-armoured woman.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with him?’ a voice asked. Male, gruff.

  ‘He needs a teaspoon of harden-the-fuck-up and don’t- be-so-fucking-stupid.’

  Karen. She was angry enough that he fancied he could detect the merest hint of a Slavic accent underneath her carefully curated American voice.

  ‘I told you not to do that,’ she said. The faint echo of Mother Russia gone again.

  As his vision cleared and the pain receded he saw she’d abandoned the cover of the patrol car and joined him in the entryway of the building across the street from the condo. He wondered how she’d made it across, if she’d been as fucked up as him.

  The two cops she’d left behind sat with their backs against the side of the vehicle, watching her with moon eyes, their legs splayed out in front of them, their posture and attitude akin to public drunkenness. A condition with which Dave Hooper was not unacquainted.

  The situation out on the street was chaotic. Corpses and parts of corpses everywhere. Body parts hanging from trees on the median strip: human and daemonum, but mostly human. Emergency vehicles, mostly police cars, pin-cushioned by Sliveen bolts and war shots. Ragged, uncoordinated gunfire duelled with volleys of arrakh.

  Karen appeared to ponder their situation for a moment, looking about her, calmly taking everything in. To Dave’s eye, the Russian agent could just as easily have been contemplating a difficult seating plan at a dinner party.

  She made a decision. ‘Sergeant, are you in charge here?’

  The cop she addressed was a squat, potato-headed character. He crouched as far back in cover as possible, while still firing his weapon at any monsters he caught sight of. The muzzle flash lit up their hiding place with flat white light every time the pistol cracked.

  ‘Just my squad,’ he said. ‘You guys going in? They told me you’d be going in. Said you’d know what to do.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dave, eager to take charge, to start kicking this pile of shit into some sort of order. ‘We’ll go in.’

  ‘In support of your men,’ Karen added, qualifying his reply. She was still searching the street for something, and her expression changed when she found what she was looking for. A couple of pumper trucks surrounded by firefighters eager to do their job. They were sheltered from the worst of the Sliveen’s assault by the angle of the street corner. She looked satisfied.

  ‘Sergeant . . . Mahoney,’ said Karen, checking his name tag. ‘Just wait here for a moment. I have a plan if you’ll bear with me.’

  ‘Can’t take any action until the incident commander gives the go ahead anyway,’ Mahoney said, pointing to a tall man in a black polo and a baseball cap about fifty yards away. He was speaking into a walkie-talkie while sheltering behind the bulk of an ambulance. There was a dead body at his feet.

  ‘We don’t need a plan,’ said Dave, feeling his impatience getting the better of him. ‘We go in, we kick ass.’ He tried to get up only to find Karen’s hand on his arm. She reached inside his head and pushed his thoughts aside again. Pushed him back down.

  ‘Hooper, your stupidity is wearing me out,’ she said. ‘Just sit your ass down for a second.’

  Suddenly feeling numb and extra stupid from her touch, he did indeed fall back on his ass, just as she had
ordered. He wanted to tell her to fuck off, to get out of his head, but he couldn’t even manage that. It was like she’d stupefied him by laying one hand on his arm and pushing him somehow. Pushing what she wanted into his head.

  He stared dumbly at the two cops she’d pushed a minute earlier. They were still gazing after her with the dopey expressions of contented milk cows – exactly how he felt now. He fought to throw it off as Varatchevsky ran to the firefighters. It was hard, like trying to wake up after a night on the tiles, but he concentrated and felt at least some of the fog clearing. She covered the distance to the fire tender as fast as a big cat chasing down its prey. The officer in charge over there, a woman Dave saw, jumped, startled by her arrival.

  Dave felt a tightness in his stomach, wondering if Karen was going to push them too. But she didn’t appear to. He finally forced himself all the way out of the stupor. It was not pleasant, nor easy. The fighting continued around him, the gunfire picking up as a Hunn warrior leaped from a first-floor window, nuts out, landing on the roof of an abandoned sedan, snarling and whirling a heavy mace above its head. The car crumpled under the impact and the beast, immature but still massive and dangerous, jumped toward the median strip. A heavy volley of fire caught it midair, spinning it around, punching out fist-sized lumps of hairy meat. It landed in a tangle of limbs and jangling armour amidst the shrubbery dividing Park Avenue. An automatic weapon opened up, and then another, the harsh industrial chatter of machine-gun fire throwing off showers of sparks as the bullets chewed into chain mail and armour plate. The Hunn didn’t get up again.