Eeep. Well, nothing left to do but the stupid thing. Ree rammed Sting into the Minotaur’s right arm, then used the sword as a handhold and did her best howler monkey impression, climbing up the side of the creature until she was perched on the creature’s shoulder.
And because she had learned to take precautions, she pulled out the Ring of Giant Strength she’d pocketed from Grognard’s case, slipped it onto her finger, then dove over the Minotaur’s shoulder, catching herself on the nose ring. All of her body weight plus her enhanced strength hauled on the ring, and she felt something tear in the creature’s nose. But it didn’t come loose.
“Dogpile, now!” Ree said as the Minotaur started to flail, whipping her around like a dog with a toy. Her stomach simultaneously tried to escape out her toes while threatening to defy centrifugal force and come back up her throat. Eeuuuccch.
Remembering long nights at the county fair riding the Whirl & Hurl, she tucked her legs up and then did an inverted sit-up, crouching against the creature’s face while the rest of the crew bound the axe down so it couldn’t take her head off. Springing off the creature’s chest, Ree wrenched with her ring-enhanced strength and ripped the nose ring off.
Consequently, this sent her flying straight into the wall.
Ree did her best to go limp, but she hit the concrete with the force of a thirty-foot fall. Pain cascaded across her body, rippling back and forth from a half-dozen spots.
For some long black moment, all she felt was pain. She heard shuffling, screaming, yelling, and the clash of blades, but mostly, she sputtered in bone-cracking agony.
A shadow fell over her, but this one came without the imminent sense of doom. Or maybe that was the shock settling in.
“Ree?” asked a voice. Ree focused on breathing, but her ribs felt like they’d collapsed into a jagged pile of lung-shredding shrapnel.
She opened her eyes, and saw a brownish blur, but not a fuzzy one. She felt a gloved hand touch her face softly, and then she blacked out.
* * *
Ree woke up feeling three-quarters dead. She tried to move, and her whole body was numb and cold.
She blinked her eyes open and saw the flat gray ceiling of Grognard’s, only identifiable because of that odd red-brown stain the shape of a classic Base Star.
“Did anyone get the name of that wall?” Ree asked, the world wobbling as she tried to sit up.
“It would be best to keep resting, Ree,” Drake said from her left.
Ree settled back against the floor? Table? And talked with her eyes closed.
“Is Grognard all right?”
“The drink kept the blow from being fatal. But we had to use extensive magical healing on both of you. Eastwood gave a detailed explication on metaphysical endurance limits and physio-spiritual strain. It was quite fascinating.”
“What’s that mean when it’s in English?” Ree asked.
“Your body has been greatly taxed by the repeated magical healing. He said you should expect substantial fatigue, low core temperatures, and disorientation.”
“Three for three,” Ree said, bringing her hands up to massage her temple. Where she expected to find her glasses, she felt something else, larger, that covered her eyes. Goggles, maybe?
“Where are my glasses?” Ree asked.
“We think they’re still in the tunnel. When we pulled you back inside, they were gone. I adjusted these goggles to your prescription,” Drake offered.
“Should I ask how you did that?”
“If you like. The goggles were designed with medical as well as tactical applications. It was a simple modification.”
“Did we get the Minotaur at least?” she asked, hoping the run had been worth it.
“The beast has been dispatched. But from the sounds, there are more creatures remaining.” Drake sighed. “I would be impressed by Lady Lucretia’s resourcefulness were it not currently leveled at us as artillery.”
Ree tried to roll over onto her side. Her whole body was on pins, like a limb that fell asleep and then stung when you started it going again. “She’s a regular bad luck ninja. Did Eastwood say when I’d be back on my feet?”
“You should be able to move shortly. Fighting may be another matter.”
“Unless our visitors decide to bugger off, we don’t have much of a choice.”
“There’s always a choice, Ree,” Drake said, his voice kind. “It just so happens that we appear to be bereft of favorable options at this juncture.”
Again, Ree wished that Drake and Priya had not met at that Steampunk salon, that they had not hit it off, and that somehow Priya was not one of her best friends. Then she could get with the smooching already. Honest, smart men with strong jaws and genuine smiles weren’t in great supply anywhere, especially ones who could shoot, fight, and cobble together devices that thumbed their nose at the laws of physics.
Stow the pining, Reyes, she told herself. She gritted her teeth and sat up to take a look around the room.
Grognard was laid out on the floor ten feet away, his chain-mail coat rent open across the chest, dried blood crusted onto his shirt.
Chandra and Talon sat at a nearby table. Chandra held a bundle wrapped in a bar towel to her side, and Talon’s shoulder was wrapped in bandages. Three empty bottles sat on the table, as well as two half-drunk pints.
Uncle Joe sat at another table, fiddling with several stacks of cards. His hair was matted with blood, and the left leg of his jeans ended below the knee, revealing bandages wrapped from his calf down to his ankle.
Eastwood paced the store. His coat was off, and she saw cuts up and down his arms, sealed over (probably with magic), but not bandaged. She stopped to pick up a prop Harry Potter wand, tested it for a second, then walked it back to the bar area and set the wand on a table that stood beside the steps between the bar and the store. It joined a small stack of other props—a dagger, the Sting replica, an Aliens-style pulse rifle, and several others that Ree couldn’t pin down unless she got closer. The goggles worked just fine, but they felt weird, even through her dulled sense of touch.
Ree looked back to the bar, expecting a sloppily drunk Wickham, but she was gone. Ree scanned the rest of the room, but didn’t see her anywhere.
“Where’s Wickham?” Ree asked.
Drake shook his head. “She’s gone. It appears that she took the confusion as her opportunity to slip away and take her chance in the sewers. Perhaps if we’re all fortunate, the gnomes have taken her to be their plaything.”
“At least she’s finally gone.”
There was a groaning sound, and Ree turned to see Grognard fumbling into consciousness. She walked, gingerly, over to her boss and knelt down to help him as Drake had helped her.
“You’re safe, boss. We’re inside,” Ree said, a soft hand on the brewmaster’s shoulder.
“How many bottles did you use?” Grognard asked, rubbing at his head, likely as fuzzy as Ree was.
Ree looked up to the others, who consulted between themselves for a few moments.
“Nine. Three for you, three for Ree, one each for the rest of us,” Chandra said.
Grognard nodded slowly. “Someone please tell me we got that bastard.”
“Done and done. But there’s plenty of company left outside,” Ree said.
Grognard sat up, and blinked several times. He started to pick himself up, and Ree offered her hand, leaning back as the big man rose to his feet.
“Then we’ve got to put this to bed.” The shopkeep looked around, to the pile of props on the table, and then over to Drake’s contraption.
“That thing is still charged, right?” he asked.
Drake nodded. “Indeed. It will need a siphon to shunt off the charge soon.”
Grognard smiled, as if Drake had said exactly what the big man wanted to hear. “I’ve got an idea. Bet it’ll take some tinkering, though. Think you could hook that thing up to one of my brewing vats?”
Drake quirked an eyebrow. “For what purpose?”
&
nbsp; “When you and Ree lost the cart, I decided to try out a new recipe. It needs to age a bit more, but if we rig that thing up right, we might be able to speed up the brewing and get ourselves a game-winner without having to wade out into that bullshit again.” Grognard waved dismissively at the door and the infrequent thumps, thuds, and weakening zots of magical backlash.
“How exactly will that work?” Ree asked. She noticed that Eastwood had fallen in beside her, several feet off to her right. Close enough to be in the conversation but not so close that he got into anyone’s bubble.
“Inspector Gadget and I can take care of that. Everyone else needs to keep those things outside long enough for us to make it work.”
Ree looked to Talon, Chandra, and Uncle Joe, who tensed up. None of them were fresh, and their arsenals were getting thin.
“We can do this, Ree,” Eastwood said from beside her. She looked to the bearded geek and saw determination on his face. Not the mad bravery that had been his default for most of the past year, just a tired certainty. As he slipped his trench coat back on, she couldn’t help but think of it as Grit.
Ree pointed at the door. “This, yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m in on your plan,” she said, rehashing the argument that had started their evening.
Eastwood nodded in a conceding-the-point kind of way. “Never thought it did. Lucretia first, then we can figure out how to get Branwen. We’re on the same side. Always have been.” Eastwood paused as Ree started to roll her eyes. He raised a hand to hold off her doubt. “Except when I went off the rails. You can trust me.”
Conflicting impulses threw a mosh pit in Ree’s gut, turning into a cartoon dust cloud with arms and legs sticking out as it rampaged across her emotional landscape. She wanted to deck Eastwood, hug him, and get drunk all at once.
And the whole time, the long-suffering door shuddered under the constant assault from outside.
Chandra, Talon, and Uncle Joe fell in, completing a circle with Ree and Eastwood by the door.
“Are we going back out there?” Uncle Joe asked, looking at his feet. Something in the end of the last melee had shattered his hard-won confidence, and he was back to the nervous collector she’d always known.
Talon was loaded for bear, longsword at her hip, a smaller blade over her shoulder, and throwing knives strapped to her hip opposite the scabbarded sword. In her hands, she held the naginata. She looked like an advertisement for Diablo III. Ree wanted to take a picture and post it on Tumblr. Unlike Joe, Talon—battered but unbroken—still had the fire in her eyes.
Chandra was somewhere in the middle—she looked hurt, and she was clearly running on empty, living in that place where you keep going on willpower until you’ve got nothing left to give. The punk Geekomancer held a kukri strapped to her hip and clutched the Aliens pulse rifle like it was a shiny, ass-kicking baby.
“If we go out, we need to plan for as many eventualities as we can,” Ree said. “We can assume there will be more gnomes, and maybe some of those bulldog crocodile things. But there could be more bruisers, and Lucretia herself.”
Nods all around.
Chandra spoke up. “We’d cleared out about half of what was outside when we dragged you two inside, but there was still one of the croc things, and about a dozen gnomes. It sounds like there are more now.”
“So we start with AoE from the door. Joe, that’s all you.”
The older man didn’t so much nod as bob up and down, rocking back and forth slightly.
He won’t last another fight, Ree thought. But she’d thought that last time, too.
“Joe, you stay inside. We can toss out some pain from the door, but there’s no need for everyone to dive out there if we don’t need to. Plus, someone has to be able to signal Drake and Grognard if things break bad. Sound good?”
Uncle Joe’s relief was palatable. He shrugged off twenty pounds of worry, his face brightening. “I can do that.”
“Talon, you’ll need to be anchor, keep them out of the door and at arm’s length whenever possible. They can’t be allowed to swarm us when we’re trying to fight ranged.”
Talon spun the haft of her naginata. “Got it. Just like the Bridge Battle at Pennsic.”
“I’ll take your word on that,” Ree said with a smile. She’d never been, herself, but hoped that Talon would keep delivering.
“Chandra, I say you use that rifle until it gives up the ghost. Follow up Joe’s AoE with some suppressive fire as we get out into the tunnel, then mow them down. Let us know when the gun’s dry.”
Ree turned to Eastwood. “Eastwood, Smash.” That got chuckles all around. She didn’t need to tell him what to do. To hear him tell the tales, he’d been living the life since Ree was in grade school. He fought like a man possessed. Dude would be fine.
“Everybody good?” Ree asked. She scanned the group, looking for questions, but mostly, for doubt. Doubt in her, the plan, or whatever.
Somewhere along the way, I became the leader, Ree realized. That’s what she got for being Grognard’s right hand, the Ivanova to his Sinclair (he was too stoic to be Captain Chuckles).
“Let’s go,” Ree said, and turned to the door, doing her best to tap into Ivanova’s confidence and epic badassery, even if she didn’t have the time to do it for real. But magic or no, Ivanova was a role model, and today, Ree would try to do both her and Grognard proud.
Ree hauled the door open about a foot, and then braced her shoulder to keep it from busting open.
She saw Uncle Joe tossing cards, and for another moment, he was a hero, a latter-day Gambit raining playing-card Hell on his enemies. She heard a firecracker rumble of several explosions, tortured screams from gnomes and other less-human voices.
After ten seconds of furious card-flopping, Uncle Joe stepped back and Chandra took his place, unloading with the pulse rifle.
“You like that, you sons of bitches! Woooh!” Chandra’s eyes grew wide with fury as she unloaded into the crowd.
That should be all the opening we need. Ree pulled open the door and let it swing past her.
“Close this behind us, and listen!” she told Joe in a stage bellow, taking up her lightsaber and pushing forward with Eastwood and Talon.
Several mounds of dead gnomes and other creatures were smoldering in the sewer, not yet popped to ichor. But there were plenty of bogies left in the neighborhood. More gnomes rushed forward, and Ree flipped her lightsaber on to spear through two of them mid-jump. Ree stepped to the side and the creatures fell in two pieces behind her. She kicked another gnome, then brought the lightsaber back through two more as they rushed in to overwhelm her.
The weapon wouldn’t last long, since it’d been used heavily and there hadn’t been much time for it to recharge, maybe an hour in total. So she had to cause maximum damage in minimum time. She spun through the creatures, blade always moving, a flowing techno-trance dance of death and dismemberment.
It was awesome. She’d reached that place beyond exhaustion, that place she found sometimes at work, sometimes out dancing, and all too often in her crazy adventures. That place where the conscious mind had buggered off to sleep and all that was left was pure instinct and muscle memory, action driven by necessity. She’d fight and win, or she’d die.
So she fought.
Keeping her dance Cuisinart going, she turned and Greater Cleave-d her way back to the others, where Eastwood was dancing his own Pwntentantz. Where Ree was fighting with her best Ataru-esque form, melding her Taekwondo and other martial arts experience into an all-speed-all-the-time fight, Eastwood was kicking it old-school, reminiscent of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He stood his ground, the enemy moved around him, and then fell still. When he did move, it was in fits and bursts, deceptively fast.
In the middle, Talon swung the naginata around like it weighed nothing. She speared one of the bull-crocs through the jaw, then raised the haft of the naginata to block the swings of several skeletal creatures who fought with rusty machetes. She pulled out a hammer that Ree hadn’t even seen an
d smashed in one skeleton’s skull. Then kicked the other one right into the swing of Ree’s lightsaber.
If we keep this up, we might just get out of here. The enemy’s ranks were thinning. She could pick a way through the gnomes on both sides of the tunnel.
Famous last words.
Just as she started to wonder which way they’d need to go to track down Lucretia, she heard the sound of a steam engine.
“What’s that?” Talon asked.
“Good question.” Ree cut through several more gnomes, then dodged to the side as another skeleton hacked down with a rusty blade. She slid her leg between the construct’s, then leaned in, knocking the creature off its balance and sending it toppling into the sewage. That bought her the time to jump off the ledge, stomp the skeleton’s skull in, then take another gnome out at the waist.
And then, as a whistle echoed down the hall, her lightsaber gave up the Force ghost, the weapon growing light and still, back to being just a high-end prop.
The gnomes wasted no time. Two jumped at her in concert, using their temporary height advantage to make for her face. She ducked and dodged left, reaching out with a jabbing punch to hit one in the gut. The other landed on her side, digging in as it climbed on her with all four limbs like a homicidal beast.
Ree spun with the extra weight, and reached over to pull the creature off her shoulder. Its claws bit in again as she pulled it off and slammed it into the concrete ledge. The gnome she’d punched came again. Facing only one this time, she reached around its spindly arm and yanked, sending the creature off course and tumbling to the ground at her side.
That move she’d picked up from an aikido instructor. It was also a babysitting hack, a way for dealing with aggressive kids without hurting them. The gnomes made those kids look like little cherubs.
There was another whistle, and Ree turned to see a ramshackle cart rolling its way toward them, one wheel each on the ledges that lined the tunnels. It had a mini-ballista of a crossbow mounted to the front, and held a trio of green-brown-skinned goblins. The goblins had wide, pointed ears and the large eyes of the Pathfinder RPG versions, which meant that they were just smart enough to be stupidly dangerous. Though that didn’t explain where they’d picked up the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang war machine.
Attack the Geek: A Ree Reyes Side-Quest Page 7