Tara’s left hand was free of the tentacles, and while it was twisted with pain, she was still able to lift it up in front of the creature’s one large eye. A bright, blinding light came out of her palm, causing the creature to recoil back slightly in surprise.
It was a Trick that Cass had seen Tara pull a few times before, mostly in training. She called it Flare. It was a low-level Trick; Tara hadn’t progressed very far with her mage skills, so the few Tricks she had at her disposal weren’t much to talk about. Still, she kept Flare in her back pocket as a last-ditch move to distract or blind an opponent who had overwhelmed her.
Tara’s Flare Trick had only bought her a moment’s reprieve, though. Her right arm was pinned by her side, and if Cass didn’t do something, the creature’s beaked mouth would tear out Tara’s throat in the blink of an eye.
Cass charged across the short distance and crashed into the both of them like a linebacker, and the three of them… Tara, Cass, and the creature… crashed into the wall as one. In desperation, Cass threw her left forearm up against the bulbous, fleshy head of the creature, pinning it to the wall and keeping the beak from Tara’s throat.
Another jolt of electricity came through the creature’s tentacles, traveling through Tara and into Cass, and now it was Cass’s turn to scream and drop her weapon from fingers rent inoperable by the electricity. It felt like she’d just hit an electrical fence; intense pinpricks of pain twisted her muscles into cramps. Still, she was able to grit her teeth against the pain and slam her forearm into the side of the creature’s head, cracking it against the hard wall and pinning it there.
The creature let out a high pitched shriek, and the tentacles holding Tara released her and begin to whip around wildly. Cass leaned in and jammed that soft head against the wall, fighting the urge to cringe away from the feel of the tentacles that were whipping around her, striking her across the face, and wrapping around her torso. Slowly, she felt some sensation come back into her hands, and, still holding her enemy pinned to the wall with her forearm, she drew her sidearm with her free hand and jammed the barrel up against the creature’s head.
Her pistol was set on automatic fire, and she burned a half a magazine’s worth of ammo into the creature’s head before she let go of the trigger. Bits of grayish fleshy material and black blood sprayed all over her, and finally, the tentacles stopped their wild whipping and went limp beneath the creature.
Cass stepped back, letting the creature fall dead to the floor, and turned to Tara. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Tara said, wringing her hands like she was trying to dry them off. “The feeling’s coming back into my hands. You?”
“I’m good. Cover this sector,” Cass said, holstering her sidearm and recovering her dropped submachinegun. “Dread! Don’t them get close! They’ll stun you!”
“Roger that!” he called back. “I’m loading!”
“I’ll cover him!” Peter said.
The red mist lit up with the strobe light of magedarts flying in a rapid flurry from Peter’s hands, and Cass gave herself a second to check her surroundings. Peter and Dread were holding down their sector, Tara was back on track with hers, and Stephen covered his hallway, which still seemed to be clear of activity. Her own hallway was clear as well, for the moment.
“Shifty! Where’s that second shaped charge?”
“It’s ready!” Shifty said. “Firing now! Fire in the hole!”
Another muted explosion. Cass risked a look behind her. Sure enough, Mike was now free, his body held up by Shifty in the middle of the hallway. He still had the steel rods through him, but they could move him at last and get out of the death trap of the intersection.
“Re-deploy!” Cass said. “Dread and Stephen, pick up Mike and pivot ten meters down the hallway away from the intersection. Peter, cover their advance! Shifty, Tara! We’re rear security!”
They moved out of the intersection at last, sliding down the hallway as fast as Dread and Stephen could carry Mike. Now the game had changed. Now they didn’t have to fight in four directions while stuck in place; now they only had two avenues of approach to cover and more firepower to do it with.
A feeling of satisfaction crept through Cass, now that the worst danger was over. She found herself mentally daring the creatures in the red mist to come after her and team, now that the odds were shifted in their favor.
As if they heard her thoughts, half a dozen dark shapes came at them fast, lit from behind by the hellish light of the flares. Electricity crackled the air around their tentacles as they approached. Cass and Tara fired as soon as they saw them; two dropped before the remainder flew in close, only to crash into an invisible barrier covering the width of the hallway.
A Defensive shield, raised by Shifty, who stood with both his hands outward like he was pushing a heavy cart. As the creatures impacted with the shield, small spots of blue energy appeared where the fleshy bodies made contact, disappearing as they withdrew.
Cass allowed herself a little grin. The four creatures didn’t seem to know what to make of Shifty’s shield; they bumped into it, hovering just on the other side of it, staring intently at the three of them with their large eyes.
Cass
Ugly motherfuckers. Just looking at them made my skin crawl with the recent memory of those disgusting tentacles whipping around all over me… not to mention the electrical jolt that made me feel like I’d stuck my tongue in a power outlet.
I could tell Tara felt the same way, the way she glared at them as they bumped up against Shifty’s Defense shield. She’d taken a serious close call for the second time today, wrapped up like a burrito in that flying squid’s arms and nearly getting her face taken off by its beak.
We watched them for a second or two. They kept touching Shifty’s shield with their tentacles, sending little arcs of electricity out into it that spread out along the surface of the shield like water poured onto a table.
“Shifty?” I asked.
“We’re good,” he said. “Low level electrical discharges.”
“Didn’t feel low level,” I said, clenching and unclenching my still-tingling hands.
“Yeah, well,” Shifty said, “they’re no threat to breaking through the shield, but don’t make me hold it for too long.”
I glanced down at my weapon to make sure it was topped off with ammo and said to Tara, “You ready?”
“Oh, please let’s kill these fucking things,” she said, settling in behind her weapon.
“You take the two on the left. I’ve got the two on the right.”
Shifty dropped the shield and we fired, driving them into the ground with sustained fire. Felt good. Felt really good. After having them dance around us in the mist, toying with us, and then come in close for the kill, it felt extra satisfying to be able to definitively pound them into the dirt.
Tara moved forward and started stomping on one of the fleshy bodies, over and over until it split open and covered her boots in black blood. I let her do it. Call it therapy, if you like.
“The two of you, hold this side of the hallway,” I said. “I’m checking on Mike.”
By the time I’d gotten there, Dread had already pulled the rods out of Mike’s body and Stephen was finishing up patching him back together. Moments like that made me pause and remember once again how lucky I was to have a Healer like him on my squad. The kinds of wounds we’d all endured would’ve taken out half the squad by now if he hadn’t been with us.
Mike held his hands pressed to his chest, breathing in and out slowly, as if not quite believing that he no longer had a hunk of metal shoved through his lung. He caught my eye as I approached and gave me a thumbs up.
“I’m good, boss,” he said. “Help me up.”
Dread and I got him back on his feet and Stephen returned his weapon to him. I watched his face carefully; physically, he might be okay, but I couldn’t imagine what he’d gone through emotionally, impaled in place by two steel rods while a gunfight with monsters went on all around
him in the dark.
We didn’t have the luxury to stay in place long enough for me to assess him, though. I had to get my people out of this darkness and this heat and this humidity to someplace where we could catch a breath.
I gave Dread a little nudge on the arm. Mike had been hit harder, but Dread had been though a lot, too, and he’d rather die than show the slightest sign of weakness.
“You okay?” I asked him. “No bullshit, Dread.”
He gave me a wink to let me know that everything was good. “All they did was piss me off.”
I still wasn’t sure, but there wasn’t much to do about it.
“All right, Tough Guy,” I said. “Let’s push to the far stairwell and get off this hellhole of a floor.”
“Roger that,” he said, leading the way.
It might seem like a mistake, to have Dread take the point so soon after an injury like he’d taken, but it was exactly what he needed. A guy like Dread, you fix by getting him back into the action as quickly as possible, letting him lose himself in the pursuit of the objective.
As we moved past the bodies of the creatures we’d fought, Dread shined his light down onto one of them and said, “Hey, Shifty? You got a stupid name for these things?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Shifty said. “Giant floaty electrical octopuses?”
“Octopi,” Dread said.
“Are you being serious right now? Correcting my grammar?”
“Just saying.”
And that was when I knew for certain that Dread was okay.
Mike, on the other hand, I still wasn’t sure about, but that would have to wait a few minutes. In the meantime, I kept him in the center of the formation with me, in case his mind was still trying to process the terror he’d so recently endured.
I knew that was the right call when he stared at the stumps of the bloody steel rods as we passed by them. He didn’t do anything as overt as hold a hand to his chest, but you don’t go through something like that and walk away like nothing happened.
We kept moving, and didn’t encounter any more resistance on our way to the stairwell. I guess now that we had Mike and Dread free and we were no longer stuck in a tough position to defend, those floating bug zappers decided that they didn’t like their chances any more.
When I saw the doorway to the stairwell, it looked like the escape hatch to a burning building. I’d had enough of the heat and humidity and darkness for a lifetime.
Moving into that stairwell felt like I was diving in to a swimming pool after jogging five miles in the brutal July sun. The effect on everyone was immediate; their shoulders began to lower, their breaths came easier, and everyone generally looked like a knotted-up muscle starting to relax.
I brought them to a halt and had Stephen distribute the last of the extra ammo that was in the rucksack he’d been carrying for me ever since the roof. The roof. That had been, what, a few hours ago? It felt like a lifetime.
I watched Mike carefully now that we were in the cool and the light and the quiet. He seemed okay, joking around with Tara about stupid shit while they re-armed with the spare ammo from Stephen, but I still gave him… and the rest of them… a few more minutes before we moved onto the twenty-second floor.
Even though we were vulnerable in that cool, well-lit stairwell, I had to give my team a break after that dark, hot, humid, hellhole that was the twenty-third floor. Whatever else those floating creatures were, they had been creatures of terror.
Polonius had set his gruesome trap in the hopes of splitting us up. Trap two of us, in an environment that was dark and hot and uncomfortable, with terrifying creatures all around us, to scare us enough that we would abandon our people.
And even though that plan had failed, I could tell it had taken its toll on my people. So even though we ran the risk of getting bottled up in that stairwell, I had to give them enough time out of that terror and misery so that they could pull themselves together.
Because even as far as we’d come, the fight still wasn’t over. We were close, though, so close, and I promised myself that I’d make Polonius answer for the damage he’d done to my squad.
***
The twenty-second floor, like the stairwell, was well lit, so the team switched off their flashlights to spare the batteries. The hallway was wide, so they used the same formation as the floor above, moving on only after mining the doorway they were leaving behind with more of Peter’s explosive runes.
The carpet floor sucked the footfalls from their boots, and in the sudden silence, their sound of their breathing seemed amplified. Occasionally, someone's harness would creak or rattle, fending off the feeling of a pent-up breath, but Cass found herself drawing shallow breaths through her open mouth, as if she thought the whistle of air through her sinuses would betray their position.
They approached a four-way intersection. With hand signals, Cass orchestrated the advance: Dread and Shifty took the left hallway, while Peter and Tara took the right. The rest stayed just before the intersection, in reserve, waiting to see which side would be hot.
Neither.
"All clear."
"All clear."
Cass blew out a bit of her tension. "Stephen? Any idea which way Polonius is?"
Stephen frowned and looked around like he'd lost something. "I'm not sure. Maybe right."
"Shifty?"
Shifty shrugged. "Maybe. It's hard to tell so close up. I think Stephen's right, though."
"Okay. Back into formation."
From behind them… click.
Boots pivoted, weapons were shouldered, laser sights activated, and they all very nearly unloaded everything they had into the light bulb which had just burned itself out.
"Jee-eesh!" Peter shook his hands like he was shaking off water. "I hate when that happens."
Cass lowered her weapon, feeling almost as foolish as when she’d slipped and fell onto her ass on the ice. "Let's go. Back into formation."
They crept again down the hollow hallway, ears strained for any clue, fingers begging for permission to pull triggers if only to break the silence. The carpet, the walls, the air itself, all seemed to draw in and crush any noise they made. It was like stalking through a graveyard, a mortuary, where the hush seems more than natural, the quiet more intense, the sounds swallowed by the presence of the dead.
Cass stole a glance at Stephen, at the black turtleneck covering his mortal wound. Does he feel the same way? she wondered, as a slight twitch pulled along the skin of his face. It was gone as soon as it had come, but Stephen seemed a little off-set by it, as if he had shorted out for a second, and then come back on-line.
I wonder if he's thinking about a graveyard now. I wonder...
Focus, Cass.
Dread came to an abrupt halt. Everybody froze; there was nothing in front of them, only empty hallway, but nobody dared to move, as if they could become silent and invisible simply by freezing in place. Dread held up a fist, the signal to stand still, and took a few cautious steps forward.
Another boobytrap? Cass thought, but couldn't see evidence of anything like that. Dread stopped a few feet in front of the group, looking all around the hallway, seeming to sniff it like a bloodhound.
Cass was desperate to ask the question, but the hallway seemed to demand silence, so she waited until the tension through Dread's shoulders relaxed and he turned back to them.
"Well?"
"Nothing," he said. "It just felt..."
Thunder. Gunfire. Smoke. Explosions. Peter's head exploded into red and there were bullets tearing the air past Cass's ears and everything went to hell she could see Dread spin and start blasting into the wall before something came straight out of the wall and hit him she was firing too and pulling the trigger she couldn't see anything her lungs seemed caught in her throat she couldn't breathe and something hit her shoulder and she fell back against the wall her left arm wasn't working she couldn't get it to move so she fired one-handed and something wet hit the side of her face and someone was shou
ting "Illusion! Illusion!" but she could barely hear over the roar of the weapons and kept shooting to her right into the wall straight into the wall until her weapon clicked on empty and things started to get too hazy for her and she sank to the floor.
Cass
Oldest trick in the book. Find a T-intersection, pile up your troops inside the long part of the T, and cover the entrance with an illusory wall. Your target bops along, never realizing that there is an intersection, until you're pouring gunfire and God knows what sort of ugly monstrosities into them.
People always want to know what a moment like that is like. That foo-fooey reporter I ran into outside in the parking lot, strutting around in front of the TV cameras, with her painted-on face and deeply concerned mask of an expression, she wants to know.
Strike that. She doesn't want to know what it's like, not really know, not know like I know. She wants to hear about it. She wants to stare at the scene of the accident while driving by in her warm and cozy car. She wants to live it secondhand, and feel all worldly and wise now that she's got the exclusive.
There is no way to accurately depict that kind of battle. I can only approximate it for you.
Have you ever been caught out on a mountaintop in a storm? I mean, a really bad one? The lightning crashes down so close that you can't even see it anymore, and the thunder is right on top of you, deafening, right in your eardrums, and it rattles your spine like a tuning fork. There's nowhere to run, no place to hide, and your heart's slamming against your chest like it wants to burst out and run screaming through the trees. You can't think straight; shock numbs your mind and makes your skin feel like it's stretched away from your body.
It's sort of like that. Add in the smell of cordite, and the snap of bullets as they shatter the air around you, and the feel of blood splattered across you. You don't know if it's yours or not. People are shouting and screaming, but you can't hear them, or if you can, half of it is drowned out or unintelligible. Hands, or maybe claws, are reaching and grasping and tearing and sometimes stabbing or chopping with makeshift weapons, and if you're not careful, you'll believe the illusion your own mind creates; that it's not real, that none of it is real, that you're floating through a bad dream and you'll wake up soon.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 12