by Jim Butcher
Cold water engulfed the lower half of my body, and a second later a wave slapped me in the middle of the back, nearly throwing me off my feet. After the past days of muted physical stimuli, I staggered and gasped against the sudden shock of pure sensation. Salt spray filled my mouth.
I should have expected that. This was the spirit world, where the immaterial wasn’t. Gravity, heat, cold, light—they were all just as real as I was now. I was a civilian again. There wouldn’t be any fun ghost tricks like vanishing out of the cold water.
I spat, regained my balance, and got my bearings. I was maybe ten yards away from a pebble beach. The light was grey and somehow oppressive. The beach rose a couple of feet from the water across maybe two or three hundred yards, then ran right up onto the feet of a granite cliff.
There were . . . things, littering the beach. Imagine a jack from the children’s game. Now imagine it had babies with a porcupine the size of a dump truck. That was what lurked there: some kind of massive, lethargic-looking beasts, their bodies mostly dug into the ground. Each projected several enormous, bladelike spines seven or eight feet long in several directions from its hump of a body—along with hundreds of other spines about a quarter that size. They were scattered in a vaguely ordered pattern all across the beach between us and the cliffs, their sides heaving gently as they breathed.
My eyes tracked on the cliffs, to squat, ugly, blocky-looking structures at their summit. There were narrow slits carved in their fronts. In a couple of spots along the cliff face, the stone had collapsed into a very steep gradient. A particularly agile monkey might be able to make his way up to the top. All of those spots were covered in razor wire and surrounded by fortified positions that would make an ascension a particularly nerve-racking form of suicide.
A cool wind that smelled of rotten meat fluttered across the pebbles and sand, and it carried a bloodred banner mounted above the structures out to the side, displaying a black swastika within a white circle. I stared at it blankly for half a second while another wave hit me in the back and threatened my balance. Then it struck me where I’d seen this before: the first act of Saving Private Ryan.
“Oh, crap,” I breathed.
This was the Nevernever, the spirit world, and beings of powerful mind and will could reshape the world to their liking. Evil Bob had been the part of Bob the Skull, which had been in the service of this jerk named Kemmler, who had apparently been killed for good sometime during World War II. Evil Bob had been working with a theme when he designed defenses to his patron’s base of operations.
There were flashes of light from the firing slits in the bunkers at the top of the cliffs. Bullets that shone faintly scarlet hammered into the beach at the water’s edge and then tracked toward us. The hiss-splat of impact got to us a second before the chattering thump of the guns.
“Get behind me!” I shouted to the spook squad. I heard them splashing through the water in immediate obedience.
Right. As long as I was a spirit in the spirit world, I might as well take advantage of it. Since I didn’t really have my old duster, even though I’d been wearing it ever since Carmichael pulled me up off the tracks, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t have my shield bracelet, either. I focused on my left wrist without actually looking at it, exerted my will, and then shook my arm in the old, familiar gesture that would make sure the bracelet was clear of the sleeve of my duster. When I did, I felt its slight, familiar weight as it dropped down—a chain, its links made of several braided metals and festooned with dangling charms in the shape of medieval shields.
“Hah!” I muttered, and began to run my will into it to bring up a shield.
A heavy weight hit me and sent me to one side. I hit the cold water and went under.
Glowing red energy masquerading as bullets smashed through the water where I’d just been standing. I came up out of the water, sputtering, and saw one of the projectiles slam into a protector ghost who had been behind me. The round impacted as if upon a living body, apart from one detail: There was no blood. Instead, it tore away a section of the spirit’s arm and sent a spray of clear ectoplasm splattering out of him. He barely reacted, pausing to glance at his arm as if puzzled.
The next round tore away the largest part of his head, and the spirit simply dissolved into more transparent ectoplasmic jelly that was swallowed by the sea.
Sir Stuart’s shade helped me get back on my feet as a second stream of projectiles strafed through the spook squad, sending ghosts diving and scrambling for cover that was not there. Several more were hit, gaining savage, bloodless wounds. We lost another spirit, one of the Lecters.
“Behind me!” I shouted again, and channeled my will through the shield bracelet, spreading it out into a quarter dome of faint blue energy that came to life ahead of me. It attracted fire at once—and shed it, sending spalling projectiles hissing through the air as they rebounded.
I started forward, toward the beach, with Sir Stuart’s shade behind me and slightly to one side the whole way, steadying me as the surf kept trying to knock me down. The spook squad began to close in on me, taking shelter behind the shield, and we pressed forward to the beach as fast as I could walk while still holding the shield.
It turned into hard work within a few seconds. Even in magic, there are some laws you don’t get away from—like the conservation of energy. Those pseudobullets were hitting my shield with a certain amount of force. I had to expend a similar amount of energy to stop them. I was cheating by making my shield as rounded as possible, deflecting rather than directly opposing, but even so, it was taking one hell of a lot of my effort and will to keep the fire off us.
My shield wasn’t a solution, really. I was working too hard to manage a simultaneous counterstrike. Sometime soon, within the hour, I wouldn’t be able to keep holding it, and when it went, we were all going to be dead. Deader. I had to figure out a way to silence those guns.
“Sir Stuart!” I shouted. “Do any of the gang carry grenades?”
Sir Stuart’s hand and arm came into view from behind me. He was holding, I kid you not, a little black iron bomb about the size of a baseball. There was a hole in it that had been plugged with a cork, and a fuse stuck out of it. The thing was straight out of a cartoon, except for its size.
I looked back over my shoulder, and saw that several of the doughboys had produced more modern-looking pineapple grenades of their own. A couple of shades dressed in uniforms of the Vietnam era had them, too.
“Neat,” I said. “Okay, here’s the plan. We head for the base of that bunker right there, and your boys blow it up. Then we get the one next to it. Then we blow the nests on that slope between the two bunkers and get the hell off this beach.”
Sir Stuart eyed the ground ahead of me while fire rattled against my shield. He studied it intently for a moment, then nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the rest of the squad, his face devoid of expression. All of them simultaneously nodded back at him.
“That was not even a little creepy,” I muttered. “Okay, stay behind the shield!” And I started pushing forward again, striding across the pebble beach toward the cliff.
That was when the shells came in.
There was a high-pitched whistle from overhead and then a flash of motion. I had an instant’s impression of a skull plummeting at a steep angle and blazing with the same angry scarlet energy as the incoming rounds. It hammered into the beach about thirty yards ahead of us. It didn’t make any noise when it exploded. Instead, there was a sudden and absolute silence, as if the skull was drawing in absolutely every motion around it, including that of sound moving through the air—and then there was a flash of light, and an instant later, a roar of wind and fire. My ears screamed with the pain of the shift in air pressure. Pebbles slammed into my shield, sending it to blazing blue brightness as the incoming energy began to overload what the shield could handle, the excess energy being shed as light. When the dust cleared, there was a crater in the ground, as deep as my grave and twenty feet
across.
More screaming whistles came from overhead, and I felt a surge of raw panic trying to push the thoughts out of my brain. Hell’s bells. If one of those skulls hit closer to us or behind us, where my shield couldn’t cover, we were dead. Another near-miss might blow my shield down entirely, and then the machine guns would have us. There was only one place to go that might be safe from the screaming skulls.
“We’ve got to get closer,” I growled. “Come on!”
And I broke into a flat-out sprint toward the machine guns.
Chapter Forty-three
Things were pretty much a desperate blur between the water’s edge and the cliffs. There was a lot of running and gunfire and spraying dirt and pebbles. Several more shades were destroyed by screaming skull shrapnel. My shield took one hell of a beating, and as we got closer to the machine guns, the angles of fire from either side meant that the shield could protect fewer and fewer of the shades.
There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no direction to go but forward. It was either that or die, and I was as terrified as I had ever been in my life. Honestly, I’m glad my memories aren’t much clearer than they are.
There was a nasty bit in the middle, when I was running between two of the crouching spike beasts. I remember realizing that the things were so heavily armored in layers and layers of bony plate that they couldn’t stand up. The fire from machine guns and screaming skulls alike seemed only a minor discomfort to them. I remember a pair of reptilian eyes flicking toward me, and then dozens of the shorter spikes shot out upon greasy, living tendrils and started whipping around like a high-pressure water hose with no one holding it. One of them wrapped around my arm, and only the spell-armored sleeve of my duster kept the bladed spike from opening my flesh to the bone. Sir Stuart’s ax flashed, and the tendril, separated from the main beast, collapsed into ectoplasm.
I ordered the shades to use their blades, and dozens of swords, axes, combat knives, and bayonets appeared. We hacked our way through the spike beasts, and endured increasingly intense fire. We lost several more protector shades as we did—they were hauled into the open by tendrils and torn to pieces by machine-gun fire.
The mortar skulls stopped coming down near us about twenty yards out from the cliffs, and we finally reached the base of the first tower. The shades and I all crowded in close to its base, where the gunners couldn’t shoot us without getting out and leaning over the top or something. I reversed my shield, so that its quarter dome covered us in every direction that the cliff face or the ground didn’t, though the fire on us had lightened considerably.
“Grenades!” I ordered, in a firm and manly tone that did not sound at all like a panicked fourteen-year-old.
Sir Stuart held a pair of his black minibombs out to a Capone-era gangster, who produced a lighter and flicked it to life. Sir Stuart rose, the lit fuses trailing small sparks, took a couple of steps back from the tower, and flung the grenades swiftly upward, one at a time.
It was a little ticklish, taking the shield down in time to allow the grenades to pass by, then bringing it up again, the wizardly equivalent of interrupting a sneeze, but I pulled it off. Both of the little bombs made clinking noises as they bounced off the inner lip of the firing slits, and there were snarling sounds from above us for a second or two.
Then there was a loud whump of an explosion, and inhuman shrieks of what could only be pain. A second later, there was another whump, and clear fluid spattered out of the bunker’s firing slit and pattered down onto my shield.
“Cha-ching!” I crowed.
Sir Stuart’s shade shot me a fierce grin.
“Get ready to move to the next one!” I called. I scrambled down the cliff face to where stone gave way to sand and shale, and the steep slope swept up from the beach to whatever was above. We’d taken out the bunker on one side of the slope. We’d have to take out the one on the other side, or be riddled with fire from several directions as we made the ascent.
I brought my shield around and angled it as best I could as I stepped out into the open. Firing points at the top of the slope opened up instantly, intently, and my shield blazed into sight again as more focused enemy power came down upon it from the positions atop the slope. I crossed the thirty-foot gap to the base of the next tower, keeping ferocious will on the shield, and the spook squad came with me.
On the way, I got a glimpse of the opposition. They wore the blackand-grey uniforms of the old Waffen-SS, but they weren’t human. Their faces were stretched and distorted into the muzzle and jaws of a wolf, which looked damned peculiar without any fur covering it. Their eyes were black, empty holes—and I’m not being metaphorical when I say that. There were simply no eyes there. Just empty sockets. Machine-gun crews and riflemen—or maybe riflethings—alike poured fire into us, a panting, eager hunger to spill blood apparent on their monstrous faces.
I stopped at the other corner, holding the shield until all the spooks had made it across, then took cover myself, redirecting the shield, as I had the last time, to cover us all.
“Handsome fellows,” Sir Stuart’s shade noted cheerily. He looked less faded than he had only moments before. I had a feeling that Sir Stuart, in life, had been the sort of person who was invigorated by action—and that his shade was no different.
“We’ll send them a nice written compliment later,” I called back, and gestured up above us, at the second bunker. “Do it again.”
Stuart nodded and turned to the gangster once more. And again he made two excellent throws, pitching a pair of little bombs up the steep angle and into the bunker. Again, enemy ectoplasm sprayed, and again the tower above us went silent.
“Now the fun part,” I said. “We’re going up the slope. My shield won’t last very long—whoever is behind this is going to put everything he has into taking it down. So we close to grips with them as fast as we can.”
Sir Stuart nodded and gestured to the nearest of the mad ghosts. “Give them the order.”
I pursed my lips for a second and then nodded. “Hey, you guys,” I said, pointing at the twins.
Two little sets of dead, empty eyes turned toward me, along with dozens more, and I felt that same cold chill at the touch of their awareness.
“We’re about to go up that slope. The very instant my shield drops, I want you to close with the enemy as fast as you can and take them down. Don’t hold back. Give it to them hard. Don’t stop until they’re all down. Clear?”
More soul-empty stares. None of them moved. None of them responded.
“Sure,” I said. “You got it. If you didn’t, you’d say something, right?”
No response.
“God, it’s like Gallagher performing at the Harvard Faculty Club,” I muttered. “Here we go, folks. One! Two! Three!”
And I went around the corner again, shield held in front of me. It coalesced into a blazing blue-and-silver dome almost instantly, taking so much energy that the kinetic force began to transfer through, pushing against me like a gale-force wind. I staggered drunkenly, unable to see through the shield and anticipate my next steps up the steep slope. The footing was treacherous. Shale and sand and loose stone twisted and turned beneath me. Even with the occasional supporting shove from Sir Stuart, my forward momentum began to falter and I slipped to one knee, my bracelet getting hotter and hotter around my wrist.
I managed to lunge awkwardly forward a couple of times—and then something hit my shield like a runaway train, and silver-and-blue energy shattered into a coruscation of sound and light. I was abruptly able to see up the slope, where the enemy was momentarily reeling from the explosive feedback of the failed shield.
And the Lecter Specters went to work.
As I stared up the slope, the only thing I could think was that this must be what it looked like in the interior of a tornado. The mad ghosts of Chicago rushed forward with such speed and power that their forms blurred into elongated streaks that jostled to be the first to reach their victims, corkscrewing up the cutting. The
y ignored ridiculous constraints such as gravity and the solidity of matter, and as they rushed upon the enemy, they changed—and I gained fresh nightmare material.
I’m willing to share the least disturbing bits. The twins, for example, just leaned forward and seemed to slither sinuously through the air toward the foe. As they went, their bodies elongated, intertwined, and twisted into a single entity that looked like a demented artist’s rendition of a battle between a giant squid and some kind of unnamed, deep-sea horror fish with too many spines and too many fins and great, googly-moogly eyes. They reached the nearest bad guy, bobbed up, and then slammed down with so much grace that I almost missed the fact that they’d smashed the wolfwaffen so hard into the ground that he was no thicker than my old checkbook. Tentacles shot out and ripped a rifle from the wolfwaffen next to the first, then plunged forward into its mouth and throat, in through its nostrils, in through its ears. A second later, they came whipping out again—along with slime-covered chunks of whatever they’d happened to be able to grab while they were in there. They pulled the creature’s stomach out through its mouth, along with several feet of intestine—and then the tentacles whipped said loops of flesh around the wolfwaffen’s neck and strangled it.
It got considerably less cheerful and humane from there.
Snarls, then screams, filled the steep little opening in the cliff wall. Ghosts, twisted into monstrous forms by decades of hollow, mindless hunger, fell upon the wolfwaffen in our way, uttering howls and squeals and clicks and screams, filling the air with a nightmare cacophony that left me slamming my palms up over my ears and biting down on a scream of pain.
The enemy fought at first, and those who did died swiftly. As more and more hideous things dealt with the wolfwaffen, their morale faltered and they began to run. Those that did died horribly. And, toward the end, overwhelmed by terror, a handful of the enemy could only stand, staring in horror, and screaming high and piteously.