Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  ‘Go!’ Dave yelled at the remaining SEAL. ‘Get down there with Igor and my family. Take Pat. He keeps trying to shoot me.’

  But Zach did not. He bundled the protesting old seadog down the steps and slammed the cellar door shut on top of them.

  And the three remaining calflings, champions all, stood into the thunder of the Horde. Dozens of the beasts, hundreds of them, were mere yards away now, moving as fast as big cats. Dave heard glass breaking. Wood cracking and crashing. The charge hit the little red brick cottage like a tsunami made flesh. Rank, profane, corrupt daemon flesh. The entire structure shook and shuddered and unknown tonnages of snarling, seething monster meat piled up outside, trapped for a few, undoubtedly short moments, like a crowd in a theatre piling up at the doors after someone shouts ‘Fire!’

  Karen’s magic blade flashed. Sorrowful and unbearable. Carving meat and cleaving bones.

  Zach produced another firearm from somewhere. A handgun, which he fired slowly, methodically, into the pile-up at the doors and windows, picking his targets carefully. He had all the time in the world because his time in the world was surely done. He was building a barricade of dead monster bodies, laying down each huge stone as carefully as a master mason.

  In Dave’s hands, Lucille did not so much sing as she pealed to the heavens, like the ringing of a great, black cathedral bell, while the ur-Champion swung mightily at the press of unyielding muscle and bone, forcing it to yield to the savage bite of the enchanted weapon’s cutting edge. He and Karen fell into a dance, a rapid blurring ballet of slaughter that hacked and smashed at the black wave which crashed on them. The Hunn and their Grymm allies howled and bellowed in rage and pain and the psychotic need to close and kill, but all they did was close and die. At least as long as the champions held.

  And then, at last, inevitably, they fell.

  Not through fatigue or a failure of will. Not through a want of courage or gurikh. It was simple math. Speed and mass. So many daemonum piled on so quickly that first one sword swing missed, and then a hammer blow, and then another, and then the room was full of thrashing claws and blades. Zach’s gun fell silent as the last magicks of men petered out.

  Hot drool spat and flew as Dave swung Lucille’s axehead into the skull of a Sergeant Grymm, hacking off the jaw. Beside him, Zach stabbed a Sliveen MasterScout in the throat as the creature scrabbled to free itself from the seething crush. His knife hand, his whole arm, was dark with daemon ichor. In his other hand he held a single grenade, unable to use it without a clear throw. Karen was no longer slashing, she simply plunged her steel into the mountain of monster flesh, stabbing deeply again and again. Dave smashed at the writhing pile, severing arms, cracking skulls, showering brains and bone and fangs around him. He thought, for one brief shining second, that they might just hold them. And then the dam burst and hell poured through.

  Zach Allen screamed as a Sergeant Grymm impaled him on a broken pike and threw the dying SEAL over his massive shoulder, into a ravening horde of teeth and claws.

  ‘NO!’ Dave screamed, even louder than Zach. He launched himself after his friend but was thrown back by an explosion. The grenade Zach had been holding. He must have already pulled the pin and been holding the lever in place. It detonated in the savage, roiling tempest of Hunn and Grymm as they tried to tear him apart.

  The Horde surged in and over them. Dave lost sight of Karen and lashed out with boot and fist, and in the final moments with fingernails and teeth. The fiends piled on top of him, protecting their prey momentarily as he closed his jaws around the throat of a Grymm warrior, felt the monster’s own fangs puncture his shoulder. The world was a cyclonic gyre of madness and violence and loss. He was buried under mountains of writhing, roaring monsters. He had lost contact with Karen. He had lost Zach. Lost Igor. Lost Annie and his boys and soon enough he would lose his life.

  He forced his teeth together, his tiny jaw not suited to ripping and tearing like these brutes. The crush of so many foul-smelling creatures muted the uproar around him, but he thought he could hear the howling of the Grymm as its hide tore between his teeth and the thick, acidic daemon ichor flowed into his mouth, choking him. Almost drowning him. The Grymm wailed and flailed and tried to get away from the ridiculous little calfling which had dared to nip at it. Dave saw, or maybe imagined in a blurred shutter-rush of imagery, a giant chunk of A-Grade Dave steak being torn from his torso. Imagined his head being pulled from his body.

  The Grymm bayed in horror as Dave refused to unclamp his jaws, instead working them harder, sucking more and more of the monster’s blood from its veins. The snarling death throes of the elite warrior increased in volume until Hooper thought he might go deaf before he died. With one snarling bellow of his own he tried to rip another mouthful of hot meat from the Grymm, coughing and all but choking as the head fell away.

  He’d bitten it right off.

  The twitching corpse rolled away and Dave clawed his way up out of the heavy scrum, laying about him with his fists like a drunk in a car lot brawl, swinging and hitting nothing, because there was nothing to hit. The Hunn. The Grymm. The Horde.

  They were dead or dying.

  Dave Hooper perceived this only dimly through the red veil that hung over everything. He shook his head, throwing off long ropy strings of daemon offal and ichor. The Grymm he had decapitated was not snarling and he had not bitten its head clean off.

  A woman, not Karen, stood in front of him, her face a mask, painted in blood. She was short and thin, birdlike he would have said, dressed in an army uniform of some sort. She wore a strange collar.

  A priest’s collar, he realised, without being able to accept the truth of it.

  And she carried a snarling chainsaw.

  *

  Threshy knew something was wrong before the pile-up at the doors and windows of the cottage. He could have told them that would happen. Not that he gave a silver-plated shit. The more of these dumb, bloodthirsty fucks got jammed up between him and Hooper, the better as far as the Superiorae dar Threshrendum ur Grymm was concerned. Unlike Guyuk, he’d be happy with leftovers.

  Hell, he’d be happy kicking back watching the movie in his pad with little Polly Farrell riding his monster cock like a pussy cat on a Roomba. That was wrong he knew. He should be thinking about eating her – not, you know – eating her. But as he was dragged beside or mostly behind Lord Guyuk ur Grymm, rushing headlong toward the human champions, all he wanted to do was get as far the fuck away from them as possible.

  His stomachs knotted and sloshed with acid and anxiety as Guyuk hit the rear of the tightly compressed daemonum multitudes surrounding the cottage. Hopping and stumbling over the corpses of dozens of scarred and tattooed veteran Hunn and Grymm to get there hadn’t helped. But as Guyuk elbowed and shouldered his way into the heaving pack, Threshy couldn’t help but think about what a tempting target it would make for a gun run by an Apache, or even a flurry of rockets from a Warthog. There were so many of them mounded up in a dense press around the house that for a good pilot it would be like carving a big old hunk of breast meat from the Thanksgiving turkey. And stuck here at the back, his cock would be first on the chopping block.

  Suddenly Compt’n ur Threshrend was raking and snarling and muscling his way deeper into the rank and overheated throng of warriors. His only hope; to bury himself in a bunker of armoured daemon-hide.

  ‘Now you have found your gurikh, small one,’ Guyuk roared happily. ‘Have at them, Threshrend. Honour to your nest and proof that She of the Horde did beget you.’

  But Threshy was too scared to pay much attention to the murderous old fool. He had not just been eating doughnut-sellers and pointy-headed neckbeards after all. He’d snacked down on some prime special forces grey matter and those dead souls were telling him that his warty little ass was sitting on a big red bullseye. He needed cover. It was all too easy to imagine the ripping snarl of miniguns, the cracking boom of rockets exploding, the protective mass of monster flesh and iron armour disint
egrating around him. A shudder seemed to run through the ground, through the very mass of Guyuk’s thrall as though Threshy’s fears had propagated outward, possibly riding the carrier wave of the Threshrend Majorae. And then he was no longer imagining the industrial jackhammer sound of machine guns. He could hear it. For fucking reals.

  The crushing weight of hundreds of enormous daemonum pressed in on him even harder for just a moment and then disappeared entirely. The near total blackness of being caught beneath so many behemoths gave way to the relative darkness of open night, and the terrible man-made lightning of explosive ordnance and high velocity cannon fire.

  *

  ‘By the withered scrotum of A’brctson ur Grymm,’ Lord Guyuk thundered.

  Human Drakon fire, the eldritch rivers of light which tore through good armour and hard flesh as though they were but insubstantial dreams, ploughed great furrows through his host. The lord commander, old but wise in the ways of war, dived sideways, narrowly avoiding a hot, bright torrent of fire that swept over the ranks immediately in front of him, disintegrating them.

  He could hear the fearsome reverberations of human war machines now, the iron Drakon they called ‘choppers’ – a grimly appropriate appellation as the flying engines hacked gruesome chunks out of his command.

  The fog of war was thick upon the world.

  He knew not the disposition of his forces, but in a moment of insight he knew that Superiorae Compt’n ur Threshrend would describe them as ‘fucked’. Of the empath there was nil to be seen as Guyuk thudded to the wet earth, landing on a sizeable boulder which broke the bone cage of his upper torso in a place or two. The last he had seen of his pro-consul Compt’n had been lost in the blood frenzy, raking and snapping at the tightly packed thrall to have at the Dave and his lieutenants. The brave little urmin squirt had proved his mettle after all. Were he fallen, his fall alone would be enough to do the Sect grave loss. The lord commander would see to it that the scrolls reflected this. But first he must survive the engagement himself.

  Guyuk rolled and grunted. The pain was a sweet and familiar balm, bringing him back to himself as he climbed to his aging knees and quickly up on to his hind-claws. The cloak of night still lay across the Above, but the darkness was rent with the fire and lightning of Man.

  Guyuk was no fool.

  He had known a counter-ambush was always possible and his Grymm at least were drilled in tactical withdrawal under fire. The Hunn were not. It was good. Their sacrifice would cover his departure from the field. He cast about, looking for his Guardian Grymm, the surviving officer at least, but could find no sign of the lieutenant in the chaos. Another swooping attack by a great iron flying machine further reduced the survivors of the first attack and Lord Guyuk ur Grymm turned on his heel.

  They had come close.

  So close.

  The risk had been worth it, but the rewards had proved meagre.

  He turned and began a loping run back toward the Way back to the UnderRealms.

  The inky blackness of the portal hovered on the breach between the worlds in the thicker woods from which they had emerged. He hoped he might see Compt’n ur Threshrend already in retreat toward the demesne of the Horde, but of the brave little empath and adeptus there was no sign.

  *

  ‘Mr Hooper?’ the woman said, not even flinching as two shotgun blasts rang out and another wash of daemon ichor sprayed walls that were already running with it.

  Dave spun around, giddy, almost losing his footing in the charnel house. An enormous black woman in a police officer’s uniform racked another round into her riot gun – that’s what they used to call those things in the olden days, Dave thought, stupid and numb. They called them riot guns. The blast took the head clean off a Sliveen which had been crawling out the front door.

  He heard thudding, the sharp-dull thudding of helicopters, and for no reason at all he thought J2 had come to get him from the Longreach. The jackhammer pounding of heavy machine guns cut through the chop of rotor blades. The snarling chainsaw was loud enough to muffle them both.

  ‘Mr Hooper?’

  He ran shaking hands over his face and through his hair, which was matted with gore.

  He had hair again. That’s right.

  ‘Mr Hooper, sir?’

  It was the woman. The black lady. Although, he thought dully, you weren’t allowed to call people black anymore. Were you? Or ladies. No. You definitely didn’t call your modern Ms a lady.

  ‘Where’s Karen?’ he asked. His voice sounded muffled to him, as though he was talking through a pillow. He put a finger in his ear and it came away crusted in blood.

  ‘Ms Varatchevsky?’ the black woman, the sheriff, said. ‘She’s out front, with the medics and Ms Ashbury.’

  ‘What?’ Dave said. ‘Emmeline? What? The fuck?’

  It was hard to hear himself over the chainsaw and he frowned at the other woman, small and white. He hoped she would understand him, because he understood very little.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. She turned it off. The chain stopped turning, the teeth came to rest. They were strangely shiny. How could that be? The woman and the body of the chainsaw were as badly soaked in blood as him. But those sharp steel teeth gleamed as if they had just been cleaned.

  ‘Hooper.’

  ‘Dave?’

  Everyone knew his name but nobody was saying anything. He knew these voices. He tried to turn toward them but his legs were still caught in the thick carpet of monster corpses and he toppled forward. The thin, grey-haired lady with the priest’s collar and the magic chainsaw reached out for him with surprising speed. Her free hand clamped securely but gently around his arm.

  ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want to get hurt.’

  ‘No,’ Dave said. ‘Thanks . . . Em? Heath?’

  Professor Emmeline Ashbury and Captain Michael Heath stood at the front door, both looking tired. It was still dark outside. They looked like the only people hereabouts who hadn’t been swimming in the rendering vats at an abattoir.

  ‘Where’s the others?’ Dave asked.

  ‘We’re looking for them,’ Heath said. ‘I was hoping to find them in here with you.’

  ‘They’re not?’ Dave asked.

  But that was a stupid question.

  Stupid questions were all Dave had.

  Emmeline hurried over to him, bearing medicated swabs and protein bars. She had to climb over a raft of bodies, some of them twitching. He thought the obvious digust on her face was down to this and his appearance, but then he remembered that despite his appearance she probably wanted to fuck him as soon as she got within spitting distance. That was probably difficult for her.

  ‘You’d better clean yourself up,’ she said, all busy work and stern advice.

  ‘Who . . .?’

  He waved a hand numbly at the two women.

  ‘Sheriff Sheila May Robertson,’ the black woman said. ‘Buttecracke County.’

  She pronounced it ‘Beyoo-cray’.

  ‘Hi. I’m Pastor Nancy Kemp,’ the other woman said, saluting him with the chainsaw. It seemed to weigh nothing in her hands.

  Neither of them looked even remotely interested in a taste of ol’ Dave’s special sauce. They were like Karen, he understood dimly.

  Dave pulled one leg out of the monster mash, as though extracting a boot from the sucking mud of a swamp. Emmeline let him lean against her, but she backed away, her face flushed, as soon as he had his balance.

  ‘You guys are . . . you’re like me, right? You killed something.’

  They both nodded, but Dave stumbled away toward the kitchen. There were fewer bodies in here, none of them human. He wondered if Zach or Igor were back out in the lounge, buried under the dead, like he had been. And then he remembered. Zach was dead.

  And Igor?

  The trapdoor was closed, just as he had left it. Heath and Ashbury followed him into the kitchen with some difficulty. Heath’s artificial leg wasn’t made for hiking over bodies.


  ‘I couldn’t leave New York until I was sure we had Sheriff Robertson and the padre,’ he said. ‘They were in transit. We came straight here.’

  ‘Karen said you would . . . do . . . She said there were five of us?’

  Dave trailed off. Not sure what he was even trying to say.

  Heath frowned but nodded.

  ‘Mr Johnson remains in LA. He is, ah, working with another agency.’

  Something about that sounded familiar, but Dave couldn’t figure it out and right now he didn’t care. Instead he kneeled down at the trapdoor and knocked on the thick wooden boards. Nothing. He pulled at the ring and heaved the door open. It swung and fell to the flagstones with a crash. Dave flinched away at the last moment in case Pat decided to let him have another face full of shot.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

  Another lie. But one he could live with.

  His heart felt as though it was slowing, possibly stopping, as he peered into the darkness. Nothing moved down there. No sound reached him from below.

  Until he heard Annie.

  ‘Dave? Is that you? Can we come out now?’

  Dave’s knees gave out and he collapsed to the gore-slicked floor.

  Heath appeared beside him and helped Dave back to his feet. Emmeline produced a small torch which she shone down the hole.

  ‘I’m sorry about Zach,’ Dave said. ‘He died. He’s gone.’

  Emmeline stiffened for a moment and he saw her working her jaw, biting down hard on the need to say something she probably meant and might even regret. Heath took in the news with a brusque nod, turning down of the corners of his mouth. The first face appeared in the small square of thin light that penetrated down into the root cellar.

  O’Halloran, still holding his shotgun, pointing it up into Hooper’s face.