Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  11

  Immediately inside the foyer, five cops and the dual axe-wielding firefighter lay in spreading pools of blood next to a quivering Hunn and two bullet-riddled Fangr. The fireman’s axes were matted with coarse hair and clotting daemon ichor. The wounds which had killed the men were grosser, uglier than the bullet holes in the monsters, but they were all just as dead. Except for the Hunn, which was twitching in the last moments of its life. Karen put a bullet into the big orc’s melon without even pausing to aim as she walked past. The action had no more significance for her than picking lint off a lapel. Then she paused and backtracked. She put another round into the monster’s giant flaccid dick. Shrugged. Moved on. The loose bands of cops and firemen still on this floor, mopping up, tending to the casualties, jumped at the first shot, but not the second. They settled when they saw it was her. Dave was dumbfounded to see them so obviously relax. She’d sent them in here, killed them all to be honest, and yet the observable composure that passed over at the sight of her reminded him of a Mexican wave at a sports ground.

  ‘Are you doing that?’ he asked. ‘Chilling them out?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, without even attempting to dissemble.

  ‘Well fucking knock it off.’

  ‘No. They need it and we need them. And you’re not going to do anything about it because you’ll get more civilians killed.’

  She was right. He honestly didn’t know which was worse. Sending these guys to their doom, or brainwashing them into liking it. He stared, whey-faced at the corpses on the floor near the concierge desk.

  At least they died happy. Sort of.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Dave muttered. ‘You turned them into pod people.’ If Trinder found out about this, Hooper had no doubt he’d order a sniper to put a bullet into Karen’s brain. Bad enough when she was Agent Romanoff. Worse now that she’d morphed into Rasputin too.

  Karen stopped to scavenge weapons from the dead officers. Or ammunition, anyway. She’d discarded the submachine gun, keeping only the pistol and she moved quickly from one body to another, stripping them of ammo. ‘Armour-piercing and tracers,’ she said, checking the contents of one magazine. ‘Not your standard load.’

  Nobody objected. They just continued doing their jobs. Dave recognised Mahoney and the paramedic who’d tried to tend him earlier. They worked on a screaming fireman and they had the same dopey, satisfied ‘just-fucked-by-Karen’ look about them as everyone else.

  He gripped Lucille a little tighter. He could hear the terrible sounds of close-quarter battle and atrocity coming from the upper floors. Most of the cohort which had initially stormed into the building had not been at the windows firing down on them, or in the reception area, waiting to receive the attack. Hunn and Fangr rampaged, unseen, slaughtering the residents on the floors above them. He could hear it. War hammers and axes smashed open heavy doors. Giant, horned feet kicked at makeshift barriers of furniture piled high in doors and hallways, shattering the feeble defences. Bone cracked open, sucked clean of marrow. Closer to them, shotguns blasted away followed by submachine-gun fusillades smothering the growling death roars of the Hunn. He had to close his mind to the garbled, babbling horror of defenceless human beings begging for mercy, pleading for their lives which were ending in blood and terror.

  Instead, while Karen stripped the dead and rubfucked the feeble minds of her cult followers, he tried to work out the numbers, to get some idea of what they faced. Two Hunn war bands. That meant anywhere between four to a dozen Hunn in each band, with each of the warrior daemons controlling a leash of two or three Fangr. He had no idea how many Sliveen they had with them. There could be as many again of the giant insectile stealth daemons and from the tattoos of the ones he’d seen shot down, they weren’t untested, unnamed fighters either. The first one had been inked with the stories of battle against four other sects.

  There could be as few as two dozen ienamic, or anywhere up to a hundred of them.

  ‘Would you stop humming that stupid song,’ Karen said as she stuffed the last of the pistol mags in a pocket of her motorcycle jacket. Dave hadn’t realised he’d been subvocalising his duet with Lucille.

  ‘Fucking Wagner,’ she added, muttering mostly to herself. ‘Fascists and their fucking oompah music.’

  Dave stopped humming. Lucille didn’t.

  Ugly organic splatters painted the wall behind the reception desk and a thick smear of blood covered the black and white granite tiles in front. The polished stone desk was shattered as though by the blows of great war hammers. Filthy footprints or claw marks spoiled the once pristine public areas of the exclusive condominium. Hundreds of stray bullet holes pockmarked the walls, but older, more primitive weapons had wrought great damage too. Twilight fire flickered from the destruction, ignited by the fierce fighting. Karen took note of it.

  ‘Armour-piercing I approve of,’ she said. ‘Tracers, not so much.’

  Dave, the safety engineer, figured it out without being told. The tracers were a fire hazard in a building already ablaze within a dense city. With the firefighters busy playing at Conan the Barbarian there was no one on hand to quell fires great and small. He held Lucille in a firm but supple grip, ready to swing on anything that came at him. Including Karen. She held the katana in her right hand, blade pointed at the floor, angled slightly away from her, the pistol in her other hand. Nine reloads sat in the zippered pockets of her leather jacket and biker pants, clinking softly against each other when she moved. He hadn’t consciously counted them as she picked them up. It was just one of those things he knew about these days.

  ‘Why are we waiting?’ Dave asked.

  Warat sighed, making no move to join the fight upstairs. ‘Americans. No sense of patience at all. Do you know anything of Russian history?’

  ‘No,’ he said, not hiding his impatience, which he had plenty of.

  ‘How about your own Civil War?’ she asked, kneeling down to search one of the cops again.

  ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a war boner like a lot of guys. Lots of people died. That’s all. Lots of people always die. Like tonight.’

  Satisfied, she stood up with a radio in her hand and unplugged the earpiece. The speaker, at low volume, began to give a running play by play from the battle upstairs. It was incomprehensible to Dave. The radio chatter reminded him of Omaha, warping through cornfields, trying to find Emmeline.

  He tuned the radio out. He was getting better at that too, dialling down certain channels.

  ‘They’ll die,’ Dave said. ‘Your little fan club. They’ll all die. That’s the only fucking history lesson I got here tonight, Karen, or Karin or Ekaterina. Whatever your name is. Lots of people are gonna die because they can’t deal with this shit, and for some reason you won’t. They’ll end up like these poor fucks.’

  He waved a free hand at the desecrated corpses.

  ‘Poor fucks, we can get more of,’ Warat said. ‘The world is full of them. Even this country. Especially this country,’ she added wryly. ‘Do you know where they can get more of us?’

  ‘That’s a bullshit argument,’ he shot back, raising his voice. His anger got the better of him.

  ‘Shush, now,’ she said, as if cooing a baby. She moved quickly. Not just with the animal swiftness they both possessed, but with the surety of someone trained to move that way. She drove a fist into his solar plexus, punched all the air from his body, left him doubled over and gasping. Partly from shock, but mostly from the precisely aimed blow. She was possessed of enormous strength, like him. But unlike Dave she was familiar with honed violence. He had been punched more than once in his life. Starting with the beatings his old man liked to hand out, he’d taken more than his fair share. Handed a couple on too. But no man had ever hit him as hard as Warat just did. Not even Marty Grbac that time he’d busted his nose and laid open his cheek for taking the name of the Lord in vain. If he had to guess, Karen Warat was throwing about eight or nine times as much power into a punch as any man who’d ever put one on h
im.

  She hadn’t hit him to shut him up or stop him from charging off and messing up whatever plan she had, however. She’d hit him to distract him long enough to put one hand on him more gently. As he collapsed to his knees and tried to find some air to breathe in, he felt her cool fingers on his head.

  ‘Be still and be quiet,’ she said.

  And she pushed. Hard.

  *

  It was only a short time later that Dave regained the ability to speak and to move, but it was not quick enough. More people had died. Warat was seated in a chair by the stairs, her katana between her legs. She breathed slowly, and gazed into the middle distance, reminding Dave of his wife – no, his ex-wife damn it – when she was doing yoga, or meditation, or whatever the hell it was. It would have been spooky were it not for the even spookier detachment of Warat’s pod people, who simply went about their duties after she’d decked him as if nothing had happened.

  ‘What do you hear?’ she asked, coming out of her semi-trance.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean?’

  Resentful Dave climbed to his feet. Cautious Dave kept his distance from her. Lucille, too, seemed to vibrate just below the level of perception, like a warning bell struck some time ago.

  ‘I mean, what do you hear? On this floor? The next one up. Anything? Because I’m not getting anything. Threshers are somewhere nearby, but I think they’re a few floors up now.’

  Dave had shut himself off to what was happening inside 530 Park while he was down. It was too hard, not being able to do anything about it. He’d withdrawn into himself to wait out whatever Karen had done to him.

  ‘The fuck should I do anything to help you, you murderous bitch?’

  ‘If you want to help these people, Dave,’ she said, her voice light and calm, where his was full of dark resentment and barely restrained fury, ‘you’ll do as I ask. I know your abilities. Better than you do, I suspect. Now shut the fuck up, listen hard, and tell me what you hear upstairs.’

  Dave was inclined to flip her the bird and get himself upstairs and into the fight, but her eyes held him.

  ‘I’m not going to push you into it, Dave. It gets harder every time with you. It’s like you’re building up a resistance. It wearies me, to be truthful, trying to push you around. If you’d just do as I ask, I promise, we’ll kill everything which needs to be killed a good deal quicker.’

  Rifles still cracked outside, singly and in short barking bursts of automatic fire, but the massed thunder that covered their charge into the building had abated. Dave was close to storming off and leaving her here but it was the fact that she didn’t push him, that he could tell she had withdrawn whatever hold she might have had over him, that gave him pause.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘People dying.’

  He frowned and tuned out the sporadic gunfire and concentrated on the eerie calm around them, letting his senses expand, almost as though he was detaching from himself, drifting up through the floors above them.

  He listened to gunshots, war shouts and terrible screams. Edged weapons powered by honed muscle and fury snapped through bone, and sliced open flesh. He heard radios. The small unit Karen still carried. Other radios carried by her fighters. She wasn’t forcing them to fight. She simply drew on the empathic power of dar Threshrendum to amplify the natural human bent toward savagery and vengeance-seeking. At the same time she dialled down the fear and uncertainty that was just as natural a reaction. Dave didn’t think she was having that effect on him, but he could feel it in the ether.

  Emergency Services Unit teams spoke in their own tactical language, which Dave did not understand. He could also hear the firefighters. They had their radio channels. And when they didn’t, they shouted and roared at each other as men in battle always had. He heard all of that.

  Karen smiled, breaking in on his thoughts.

  ‘I didn’t expect that,’ she said, as though she’d heard what he’d heard.

  Of course she had.

  ‘They’re actually scaring these ublyudok. The Hunn weren’t expecting a pit fight. Just dinner and a show.’

  ‘These what?’ Dave said, thinking he’d missed the debut of some new horror.

  ‘These bastards. Your countrymen are giving a good account of themselves, Hooper. The Horde warriors are surprised. They were ready to die at our hands. Yours and mine. But not to be killed by the entree.’

  Dave ignored her and concentrated again, searching with mounting frustration for any sign of the Threshrendum which had turned off his warp engines. Kill those things and Karen was right, they would blow through this place like a hurricane.

  He could hear the dial tone of a landline phone, knocked from its cradle. White noise, probably from a television or radio, in a room somewhere to his left. He could hear water running, splashing on a hard stone floor two storeys above them. A clock, an old one, ticking. But nothing else nearby. No grunts or snarls. No bones crunching between powerful jaws. No chewing. No screaming.

  ‘This is murder,’ Dave said, reining in his need to get going, a need for kinetic violence that Lucille was only too happy to sing him toward. ‘They’re not dying for us, Karen. We’re killing them.’

  ‘This is war,’ she said. ‘You should be familiar with it by now. Your country has visited enough of it upon the world.’

  Dave had no response to the taunt. He’d said much worse in the years after his brother had been lost to the war. Much worse. Instead he spoke softly, while most of his attention remained detached, elsewhere, seeking their prey.

  ‘Karen?’

  She opened her blue eyes and looked at him. ‘Yes, Dave?’

  ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Why, Dave, I’ll bet that’s the first time you’ve ever said that to a girl. But I’ll bet they’ve said it to you more than once.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I know. And these are all the fucks I do not give,’ she said, holding her arms wide and letting her own irritation and impatience show through for the first time. ‘Stop whining and get on with it.’

  ‘Whatever. I’m not the killer here. You are.’

  ‘Trinder told you that?’ she asked as she rose out of her seat. Her boots crunched on shards of broken pottery. A vase which had once sat atop an antique table, now reduced to splinters.

  ‘No, well yes, but my common fucking sense tells me that too. You’re trained for this, or shit like this anyway. I’m not. I’ll do whatever needs doing in here, as best I can. But I’m not your tool.’

  ‘Well, arguably you are a bit of a tool,’ Karen said, but without any obvious malice.

  ‘On your left, on your left,’ the radio squawked. A heavy axe thumped against a wall or a door. Dave heard wood cracking and screeching. Karen closed her eyes again, reciting something under her breath. He heard a sound like a chicken or a joint of beef being pulled apart. And screams. Gunfire roared. He didn’t need any Spidey senses to hear that. Everyone in the foyer could hear it, and yet, they just went about their tasks. Karen continued muttering, or praying, or whatever she was doing to maintain things.

  ‘Third floor clear,’ a voice on the radio said. ‘I need medics in here. Officers and firefighters down.’

  A male voice, urgent, but not nearly as garbled with fear or even excitement as it should be.

  ‘Continue with clearance,’ another voice on the radio.

  Karen came back to herself. ‘I suppose you do not play chess, Dave, but let me explain what is happening now. You and I? We are the most valuable pieces on this board and we’ll find the Threshers by using our pawns. We find them, fix them in place and we take them off the board.’

  The radio squealed and squawked as two different signals competed for the same channel. Karen turned her radio down a notch.

  ‘Panic,’ she said. ‘Can you feel it?’

  He could. She breathed deeply, exhaled, and the feeling cleared like mist burned off by the sun.

  She can wind them dow
n. Or wind them up, he thought. Her little toy soldiers. Just like that.

  The radio squawked. ‘I need more men. I’ve lost half of . . . oh, shit.’

  There was a blood-curdling scream. Inside his head.

  ‘Our cue,’ Karen said, moving fast again. Gun forward, sword ready, a weird mix of iconography. Gunslinger, samurai, biker babe from Hell. Dave’s boots made small ripping sounds as he ran across the drying blood on the floor. She seemed to avoid stepping in it without apparent effort. Taking the stairwell next to the lifts, Karen climbed to the third floor in a series of leaps and turns. Dave followed.

  12

  ‘They’re close,’ Karen said. ‘The way they reach out and touch us, it has a limited range. It manifested at less than a hundred yards before. I know them, Hooper. I was very intimate with that Thresher.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘That’s nasty.’

  She waved it off. ‘I’m a veteran of the GRU and the New York art mafia. I’ve done worse.’

  They broke out onto the third floor. The smoke-filled hallways looked like a hospital corridor after a mass casualty event. The wounded were propped up against walls, illuminated by the flickering firelight that trickled forth from cleared apartments. There was more shadow than light for the dead, stacked like cordwood in the corners where they wouldn’t get in the way. The lights were out but enough of the first responders carried their own torches and emergency lamps that Dave didn’t need his night vision. Warat advanced with the gun in her left hand and the sword in her right. A ripple of movement flowed away from them, down the hallway. Karen’s surviving pod people, turning toward her, gazing as if rapt. Dave found that spookier than stalking the Horde in the dark.

  She stopped and froze in place. Chief Gomes, her white shirt splattered in blood, knelt on the floor in front of an open door next to her own gore-matted fire axe. She was trying to staunch the bleeding of one of her comrades. The entryway of the suite was blocked by a quartet of dead firefighters. Dave expected her to rage at them, especially Karen, but she didn’t. She smiled when she saw the Russian.