by Doug Goodman
Then a sliver of metal arched towards the ground and cut through one of the bear’s claws. It bellowed painfully as it retracted its paw.
“How does that feel, you son of a bitch!” Jax yelled.
“Where you going?” Dre asked.
“The Colonel,” Aidan said. “I can help him fight these things off. I know where they are. Do you want to come with us?”
“Thanks, but these people need all the help they can get. You’d think they’ve never done a mass evacuation before.”
Dre shook what was left of Aidan’s hand and then he went up the stairs.
The bear charged the stairwell entrance, and Jax and Aidan ran out into the atrium.
In the atrium, the problem was obvious. With stairwells to either side of the building clogged with tower residents hiding from the monsters, there was only one other way up to the fourth floor, the elevator shaft.
“Hang on,” Aidan said as Jax pried open the elevator doors.
“We can make it,” Jax said as he entered the elevator car and popped the service entry. He leaped up lithe as a panther, pulled himself on top of the car and looked back at Aidan.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Oh, my back, my side, my arms, my gut. Basically, I’m waiting on my entire body to heal up before I can go elevator spelunking. You don’t have a healing potion on hand, do you?”
“Sorry, man.” Jax looked at him with concern, as if seeing his damaged body for the first time.
“I got an idea,” Aidan said, and he left the elevator car. While he was away, Jax listened to the war outside. It sounded like there was a lot of human casualty going on. He only hoped they were holding the monsters back. In the time he and Peter and Riley had spent here before the others arrived, they learned just how protected the Tooth was. There were many layers of protection, much more than the nine rings. If the monsters could get them here, there would be no stopping them, ever.
Aidan appeared in the car again. He had long coaxial cables.
“Do you think that will hold you?”
“I only need it to hold part of me. My legs can take care of the rest. Think you can pull me up?”
“If you lost as much weight as I think you have, yeah.”
Jax flashed a smile that was all Hollywood. He put the cable over his shoulder and started climbing cat-like up the elevator shaft cable.
He remembered from climbing ropes with his sensei that the trick was to use the feet to push you up and not to try to climb with the arms. Still, he probably used his arms too much, and by the time he finally reached the fourth floor, he dropped out of the elevator shaft and sucked in air. Little black and white fireflies popped in front of his eyes.
“Throw it down!”
Jax took three more breaths, then began lowering the cable down the shaft.
The problem was not wrapping the coax cables around his body. It was tying the bowline knot. His little finger shouldn’t have affected his knot-tying abilities that much, but the cable just wouldn’t stay put. He got frustrated. C’mon, Aidan. The bowline is an easy knot. Beginner Boy Scouts. Maybe Webelos stuff. You just make a loop with one hand, then push the other end of the cable through the hole (the rabbit goes out of his hole), around the extra length of rope (around the tree) and push it back through the hole (and back into his hole). But the rabbit wasn’t cooperating. Fuck it. The hand holding the rabbit wasn’t working.
A loud booming roar like gunfire magnified through the atrium. Aidan looked across the tiled floor and saw the angry bear on the other side. It had given up on the stairwell and decided to come in through the front doors.
Aidan closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
The bear was woofing from its split mouth as it barreled for the elevators.
He pulled the knot tight, didn’t look at it, and yelled, “Pull!”
His body lifted up through the service door just in time for him to feel the bear’s hot breath on him. As he stood on top of the car, the bear pushed up through the top, too. Its multiple jaws snapped at Aidan, who hopped to the side. From on top, Jax saw the grizzly coming through the elevator. He heaved on the coax at the same time that Aidan was trying to run up the side of the wall, his hands splayed out for balance.
Aidan climbed to the fourth floor, and they both leaned against the elevator doors.
“Who knew coax cable could be so useful?”
“Right?” Jax added.
There was a large groaning of metal, and they looked down the elevator shaft. The grizzly was climbing. Four eyes focused on them.
“You gotta be kidding me!” Jax yelled.
The boys ran from the shaft and went looking for the Colonel. The cubicle farms were almost completely empty except for soldiers firing out of windows. Every once in a while, the giant shadow of a roc’s wing would pass over them, and then it would disappear.
Jax and Aidan ran back towards the front of the building. A plume of crimson and yellow billowed out from beneath them. It was the flamethrower from a turret, which was down one floor.
“What are you boys doing here?” the familiar gruff voice of Colonel Weatherford barked at them.
He was flanked by two soldiers, and he was carrying an RPG launcher.
“Whoa,” Jax said.
“Only thing I know that will stop one of these bastards for sure.”
Just then, the bear roared from the elevator.
“Fire in the hole!” Colonel Weatherford shouted. He kneeled down and pulled the trigger. The RPG flew over the cube walls and exploded in the shaft, spewing smoke and debris everywhere. Aidan and the others coughed.
“Now that is how you get rid of a bear,” he said. “Hooyah!”
While the other soldiers cheered, they also prepped the RPG launcher.
“I can help,” Aidan said. “I know where they all are.”
Colonel Weatherford smiled. “This time, we end it, son.”
More cubes. More and more cubes. Val looked around. This was not the parking garage.
“This isn’t the way,” Alyssa said.
Riley slapped her head. “Sorry. Brain fart. I should have said something. It’s back this way.”
An empty pit grew in Riley’s stomach when she knew she had screwed up. And with a screw-up like this, their lives were at stake. She could hear her mother taunting her. What were you thinking? You know better!
“What’s the matter?” Alyssa asked her.
“Is it possible that my mother is still criticizing me from the grave?”
“Yes, and ignore her. Where’s the garage?”
“Come on.”
Aidan had his eyes closed as he tried to concentrate on the images in his head. Once he gave the monsters his full attention, he found it was like being dropped into a large river. The Mississippi of monsters. He had to select which one to follow.
Aidan pointed to his left. “There will be a roc coming over my shoulder in a few seconds. It is diving from up above.”
“That doesn’t help us much, son,” Colonel Weatherford said. “You’re going to have to do better than that. 11 o’clock? 12 o’clock? Where?”
The roc zoomed past the open windows. Aidan felt the cold air on his face. Tried again.
“2 o’clock. Coming in three – two – now.”
The RPG lifted into the air and collided with a diving roc, which exploded into a fireball of aviary guts and bones.
“That’s getting it done!” Colonel Weatherford shouted. “One roc and one bear. Let’s see what else you can do.”
“What do you call the turrets?” Aidan asked.
“The one below us is Turret One. The numbers go clockwise from there.”
“Turret Three. Warg will appear at 3 o’clock in five – four – three – two – now.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the warg coming over the concrete divider. As Colonel Weatherford called it in, the soldiers fell back. The warg ran towards the closest soldier and was met with a spout of flame. For an instant, Aidan coul
d feel the flames boiling his skin. He jumped out of the stream. Jax grabbed him.
“Why don’t you sit down, man?”
They grabbed him a chair. Mr. Seward walked into the room.
“What is he doing here?”
“He just nailed one of the giant falcons and a werewolf.”
Mr. Seward took this information in and processed it. He was a man of education and not beyond learning a lesson where it was warranted. If the young man had powers that could save them, so be it.
“Everyone is in the stairwells, Colonel. The door to one was broken off, so the civilians there have retreated to a higher floor, the third to seventh floors.”
“Thank you, John,” Colonel Weatherford said. They nodded, the only time allowed for such formalities in a battle, and Mr. Seward left the war room.
With the help of Aidan’s monster Wi-Fi, rocs were falling from the sky and wargs were shrieking with their coats blazing. The winds of war were shifting in their direction. Then suddenly five rocs came together in a sudden formation. With amazing agility, they banked against the mirrored glass panes and dived on one of the turrets all at once. The soldiers there lit up the rocs like Christmas trees, but it was not enough to deter them. The monsters were cawing out in pain, flames leaping from their backs and reflecting in their eyes as they stomped out the soldiers and ripped apart the flamethrower. Aidan fell out of the chair in pain.
When he got back up, he felt a tug at the back of his head. Something was wrong. He followed the tug back. Felt its many-footed presence.
“I hope we’ve got traps,” he said.
He turned and saw them, hundreds of them, scurrying out of the elevator shaft. Each one was as big as a beagle, but gruesome and hairless, with a long, wicked tail trailing behind it.
“Oh, joy,” Jax said as he pulled out his parang.
“Hold on, son,” Colonel Weatherford said. “Follow me.”
The soldiers fell back, throwing chairs and cabinets in their path. The rats had no trouble climbing over, under, and through the obstacles and were able to stay close. They finally made a leap to one man and pulled him down. Hordes of slick bodies swarmed over him. He screamed as he felt a rat bite his finger off. Screamed again when a rat ripped his belly button off. Screamed one last time when another rat wrapped its giant incisors around his scrotum and bit hard. He would have screamed the hardest then except for the rat that took the chance to enter his opened orifice and bite off his tongue.
Colonel Weatherford opened a door and everyone entered. They were in a windowed conference room with a large oak table and framed photos of the Garden of the Gods. The Colonel didn’t close the door behind him, though. He yelled, “Keep going!”
They ran through the adjacent door on the far side of the conference room as the rats followed them inside. This door, the Colonel closed. One of the soldiers ran to the other door and closed it too, while everyone watched the rats crowding into the room.
“What now?” Jax wanted to know.
Colonel Weatherford put his hand on a circular handle. It rested above a large tank with an MSDS sheet he didn’t have time to read. The line led from the tank up into the paneled ceiling.
The table was almost unrecognizable with all the pink and white skinned bodies crawling over it, their tails dragging like snakes from the back of chimeras. Chairs toppled from their weight. They began crawling up to the ceiling. One stopped and stared at the group through the window.
The demonic rat growled at them and looked across at its horde. The rats began to retreat out of the conference room or to crawl towards the ceiling panels.
“Die, you bastards!” Colonel Weatherford shouted. He turned the handle. The fire suppression sprinklers turned on, and clear liquid sprayed all over the room. Immediately, the rats began squeaking with misery and their skins began to smoke, boil, and writhe.
“Acid,” the Colonel said triumphantly. “One of the many accoutrements to the Tooth. C’mon. There will be more. We didn’t get all of them.”
They entered another conference room above Turret 2. Aidan sat in a chair while the soldiers set up the remaining RPGs. The Colonel called in their location and asked for a resupply.
“There’s not much left, Colonel. We weren’t ready for an extended battle. I’ll see what I can do,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
Then they heard the rats coming at them again.
While Aidan reset his mind to the monsters, the soldiers and Jax pushed forward against the remaining rats. Some of the soldiers shot at the rats, which was only slightly effective.
“Hold your fire!” Jax yelled. “You haven’t dealt with rats before today. Guns only knock off ears and tails, but doesn’t kill them. Use your knives and stab these motherfuckers.”
Dre wanted the crowd moving upward, away from the gunfire. She figured most of the fighting was below the first four or five floors. If she could get the people to move to the sixth floor and above, they would be on much safer ground. As it was now, they were stuck between the second and fourth floors.
She was having a hard time communicating this.
“My son is out there fighting. No way am I leaving him behind!” an obese woman was yelling at her. She had short curly brown hair and pale folds of skin over her eyes.
“The best thing we can do for him is to keep us safe, and we will be safer on higher ground,” Dre reassured her.
“What if the stairwell topples?” a gray-haired old man asked.
“Then we will die no matter where we are.”
Some people gasped, but Dre sighed. This was tough.
“Just keep moving up in an orderly fashion,” she said. “And use the handrails!”
Some of the people on the fourth floor railings began to climb farther up the stairs.
An old man bundled in thick clothes stumbled next to her. Dre reached out to help him. The man’s arms felt excessively cold, almost like ice, and hard as iron. She looked into the dead man’s eyes and heard the man hiss “dry-der!” as his belly erupted with death and dismemberment.
Aidan concentrated on the river. He heard laughter from somewhere, but he shrugged it off. There was a whole river of thought out there.
But it was not laughter he heard. The raucous railings of the dead and dying cried out from the river. It was a very different river than the one he first dove into. If it was a river, it had changed from a murderous red color to a bright screaming blue. There were fewer and fewer of the thoughts in the river, too.
Then he felt something approaching, like a giant whale coming down the river. No, not a whale. A kraken.
Malifax?
In answer, he did not receive a name but a sound, a boom like the thunders he remembered from Lakewood. And even though he did not hear the particular vowels and consonants, he knew the name in his head.
Why are you doing this?
His head was flooded with laughter. Then the same question was posed to him. Malifax showed him images of the Tooth caving in, crushing wargs and humans alike. Skulls were squashed like jelly donuts and eyes popped like balloons under the great weight of the tower. The next image showed the Tooth intact, with wargs and rocs waiting outside. Humans tossed down their weapons and marched sadly, yet comfortably to the prison camps. There they were given food – grains and nuts and drink.
Fuck you.
His mind bent backward as if Malifax had struck him with one of his many grip-like tentacles. For a second, he remembered the wall of mouths and teeth that was Malifax’s tentacles. But these tentacles weren’t real, and this was just a feeling, just a sensation, but it was one hell of a strong feeling.
Before he could completely recover from the mental slap, Malifax sent him a crushing wall of images of soldiers being ripped apart limb from limb by the wargs, people in the stairwell being eaten alive by dryders, and the tower overrun by hell-spawned roaches and rats and other creatures that looked like nothing more than shadows with teeth. Bears and pumas of monstrous size p
ummeled the tower. Rocs carried children up the height of the tower and then dropped them for fun.
He saw each of his friends burning.
No. We will beat you. We are better than you. We have something you will never have.
Malifax did not respond at first. Then he showed Aidan images of Bridgetown falling. He showed pictures of other towns falling by monstercized versions of whatever stock of animal was available: snakes and coyotes in the southwest; eagles and bears in the North, sharks on the coast, and always the monsters that were blasphemies of cats and dogs.
Again, Aidan heard the laughter and ignored it.
Instead, Aidan thought of their victories. He showed Malifax a shot of himself smashing a Molotov on Black Fang’s face. He showed the bat being killed. He showed him rocs and wargs on fire on the battlefield. He showed Jax cutting off one of Malifax’s tentacles.
The thoughts were coming at him more red and black then ever before. Malifax showed images a thousand times worse than the ones Aidan showed. He showed him a hundred deaths in an instant, each death more disturbing than the last, and Aidan knew each one of them to be true. He did not know the people who died, but he knew how badly they had suffered. Malifax showed him people from Lakewood being skinned. Then he showed him Aaron dead on the lawn while Black Fang sniffed around him. Then he showed the bullet hole smoking in the back of Aaron’s head.
He hadn’t thought of Aaron in forever. You forced us to do that. He heard laughing, but he wasn’t sure if it was Malifax or his own stupid conscience laughing at him. He couldn’t bullshit here. Nobody forced him to do that. He took Aaron’s life because he thought it was the best thing to do for their survival. “He didn’t have any bleach.” Isn’t that what he said? Poor excuse to kill somebody, if there was ever a good reason to kill somebody.
The next set of images seemed to come from a crow or raven perched at Bridgetown. He recognized it. It was him standing there arguing with Jax over Riley. Riley put her hand on Jax’s shoulder and pushed him away so that she was centered on Aidan.