“Okay.”
Cass took a second to check the cameras on the security console again. Not yet. They couldn’t go yet.
She dug into one of the equipment bags piled behind the desk and came up with a handful of the breaching charges they’d taken from the armory at the FBI. Cass looked them over, thought about adding some of the C4 as well, but decided that the breaching charges would do the job.
“Mickey,” she said, moving into one of the elevators. “Drag those equipment bags into the other elevator.”
“They’re kind of heavy…”
“Mickey!”
“Okay, okay. What are you doing in the other one?”
“Rigging explosives.”
Cass could feel Mickey’s look of alarm more than she saw it. There wasn’t any time to explain. Mickey and the rest of the team would all have to take it on faith that her plan would work.
She could hear her team talking over the radio as she set the charges in the second elevator.
“Lys, slow your fire,” Dread said. “You’re going to burn out the barrel.”
“If I slow down, they’ll start getting through.”
“If you burn out the barrel, they’ll definitely get through. Shifty, start pulsing your shield more often to save your strength. Jolly and I can hold back what slips through.”
One more look, to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, and then Cass ran back out to the security console. Dread gave her a look as he reloaded another belt of twelve gauge ammo into his weapon.
“Cass,” he said.
“Wait for my command.”
“It’s getting pretty thick, here.”
“Not yet.”
She stared at the cameras, waiting for the right moment, waiting to see what she was looking for, watching the creatures crowding the stairwells in thicker and thicker numbers. Any second now, they wouldn’t be able to hold the tidal wave back, and the press of bodies would simply overwhelm any amount of firepower they could throw at the horde to hold it back.
“Cass,” Dread said again.
It was going to have to do. Cass took a second to destroy the security console with a burst from her submachinegun before saying, “All right, fall back and collapse onto the elevator! Lys!”
“Go now,” Lysette said. “I can catch up.”
“They’re going to pour into this lobby like a mudslide,” Dread said. “Don’t get cocky.”
“I know what I’m doing, Beef,” she said. “Just go.”
“Mickey, hold the elevator door open. Jolly, go now,” Cass ordered, taking Jolly’s place next to Shifty and Dread.
“Go, Dread,” Shifty said. “I can plug up the door with a shield for a few seconds while you move.”
The heavy gunfire from the LAV stopped. Cass glanced to the left. The horde was already pouring into the lobby on that side; too many, too fast, to possibly hope to hold back without Lysette’s machinegun.
“Malfunction,” Lysette said.
“I told you that you would overheat the gun,” Dread said. “Cass, shift left with me. Shifty has the right.”
Cass lined up with Dread on the left, firing as fast as she could into the ghouls and creatures swarming into the lobby. She saw bouda, Hell Hounds, and then some large spider-like creatures that gave her bad flashbacks to the fight against Polonius, all rushing out of the stairwell door to spread out into the lobby in a wide mass.
“Lys, haul ass,” she said. “We can’t hold them. Shifty?”
“I’m good, but hurry.”
Cass risked a glance at the LAV. Lysette had already vaulted off of the armored vehicle and was tearing across the lobby at inhuman speed, firing her weapon with one hand into the horde as she ran.
Cass looked back and forth between Lysette and the onrushing horde. They had to time this right, keep firing long enough for Lysette to make it into the elevator before collapsing back themselves, or even Lysette’s magically enhanced speed wouldn’t be enough to save her.
“Now, Dread,” she said, as Lysette streaked past them and into the elevator. “You too, Shifty!”
The next handful of seconds was an adrenaline-soaked sprint to the elevator doors, every second filled with the sure sense that someone was about to stab them in the back, followed by a desperate and awkward crowding of everyone into the elevator. Mickey jammed her finger on the CLOSE DOOR button several times once everyone was inside.
“Come on,” she said. “Come on, come on!”
Two Hell Hounds and one of the spiders rounded the corner into view. Cass shouldered her weapon, already knowing she wouldn’t be able to shoot them all before at least one of them got onto the elevator with them, when the doors chimed and closed shut in the snarling faces of the charging creatures
They all took a breath.
“I think I just shit my pants,” Jolly said.
Cass ignored him. “Mickey, you said the restricted floors were the fourteenth through sixteenth?”
“Yes.”
“Hit thirteen.”
“Why not go straight to the fourteenth?” Shifty asked.
“I told you, you need a special key card thingy to take the elevator to the fourteenth floor,” Mickey said. “Nobody listens to me.”
“Oh, simmer down,” Shifty said. “People sometimes listen to you.”
“Not you.”
“Usually not.”
The elevator began to move. Cass dug the remote detonator for the explosives out of a vest pocket and flipped up the safety catch.
“What’s that?” Jolly asked.
Cass held up a finger for silence, counting slowly in her head. When she hit ten, she pushed the button.
A muted boom, and their elevator shook like a rung church bell. The vibration made Cass stumble into Jolly, who looked at her with wide eyes.
“I blew up the other elevator,” she said.
“Oh, right,” he said. “Of course you did.”
“Okay, so what now?” Mickey said. “You said that if we took the elevator they would follow us up the stairwells.”
“There aren’t going to be any stairwells,” Cass said.
“What does that mean?”
“When we reach the thirteenth floor, we push left to the first stairwell, as fast as we can.”
“Then?”
“Then we use the rest of these explosives to blow the stairs, collapse them down.”
“Won’t that blow us up too?” Mickey said.
“We’re not going to be standing there when it goes off, Mickey,” Dread said.
“That’s right. Because we immediately push to the other stairwell, repeat the procedure, get up to the fourteenth. And destroy the second stairwell.”
Dread nodded. “Trapping all of Kel’s troops on the floors below us, with no way to get up the stairs to pursue us. That’s why you had us wait in the lobby so long. To make sure Kel had committed her entire army down the stairwells, so that you could trap them all on the floors down below us. Damn, Cass.”
“Yeah, well, it hasn’t worked yet, so hold the applause.”
The elevator chimed and the doors slid open, letting them out onto the thirteenth floor. Just as Cass suspected, a single ghoul stood as a scout outside the elevator doors. Lysette killed it with a headshot before any of them could move out of the elevator.
“Just a scout,” Cass said. “But now Kel knows where we are. We need to move, fast. Jolly, jam one of those trash cans into the elevator doors. Keep it on this level. That way nothing can climb the elevator shaft after us.”
“Oh, good idea,” Jolly said.
Cass waited until he placed a nearby trash bin in place to hold the elevator doors open and then waved everyone down the hallway. “Let’s move.”
They pushed down the corridor to their left, weapons up and pointed in all directions. Cass kept them moving at a fast pace; the camera feed from the lobby had showed her that this floor was clear of any serious threats, so she decided it was worth the risk to move quickly
in order to make sure they could destroy the stairwells in time to trap Kel’s army below them.
Nothing challenged them on the way to the first stairwell. Cass planted explosives on the stairs leading up to the fourteenth as quickly as safety would allow, cursing her fingers the entire time for not moving a little faster. She could practically feel the creatures swarming up the stairwell from below them.
“All set,” she said. “Push to the other stairwell, fast. Shifty and Lys up front, Dread holds our six.”
They moved out, once again without challenge. Cass hit the detonator on the explosives as they passed the elevators, and the floor shook from the distant explosion.
One down, one to go, she thought.
The clock had to be ticking, though. She knew Kel would’ve caught on to her plan by now and would be sending everything rushing up that last stairwell in search of them. Her scout would’ve told the death mage that they were on the thirteenth floor, so trouble had to be coming fast.
They burst into the second stairwell, weapons pointed high and low. Nothing. Nothing in sight.
Plenty of growls and snarls, though, mixed with twittering inhuman laughter, rising up from beneath them.
Dread leaned out over the handrails to look down the center of the stairwell. “Yeah, they’re coming.”
Cass forced herself to ignore the sounds echoing into her ears from every angle, ignore the impending doom rushing up at her, and focus on the job, focus on her hands planting the explosives in place. As she worked, the rest of team moved up to the fourteenth floor landing.
“Should I drop a grenade down there?” Shifty said.
“We’re sitting on a good sized pile of explosives here, Shifty,” Cass said.
“Okay, but, they’re coming up quick.”
“Plug up the stairwell with a shield as best you can if you have to. I’m almost done.”
“What about the door?” Mickey asked, pointing to the key card reader next to the doorknob leading to the fourteenth floor. “You need a key.”
“I’ve got one,” Dread said. “Step back.”
Two quick bursts from his F-shok to either hinge, and another to the lock, and he was able to stomp-kick the door off its moorings. It fell flat into the corridor beyond with a metallic clatter.
“Hallway clear,” Dread said.
“The rest of you, push into the hallway with him,” Cass said. “Not you, Shifty. Hold the stairwell until I’m done, then we move into the hallway and you hold the doorway with the strongest shield you’ve got.”
“And then you make the stairs go boom?” Shifty said.
“And then I make the stairs go boom.”
Lysette lingered in the stairwell for a moment, looking upwards. “Hurry, Cass. Something’s coming from above us.”
Trying to pincer us, Cass thought. Kel realizes what we’re doing and she’s desperate to stop us, so she’s throwing everything she’s got down the stairs in hopes of catching us before we can blow it all to shit.
“Contact,” Dread said, blasting apart a trio of ghouls who rushed into the hallway in front of him from a nearby intersection. “Clear.”
“Can’t fight on three sides, Cass,” Shifty said.
She looked over her handiwork one last time. It would have to do.
“That’s it,” she said. “Into the hallway and get that shield up in the doorway. This is going to be heavy.”
As soon as they were all in the fourteenth floor hallway, Shifty turned and put a shield up across the open doorway. The horde rushed up onto the landing and began pounding on the magical force field, ghouls and bouda and worse growling and snarling at their targets barely out of reach.
One of the ghouls was staring intently at Cass, who pulled out the detonator and held it up for the ghoul… and Kel… to see. The ghoul had just enough time to bare its teeth at her before she hit the button.
Shifty’s shield held back the blast, but the concussion shook the floor beneath them like a mild earthquake. The shield disappeared, with nothing but a gory mess and shattered concrete beyond the doorway.
“Wait, there’s no door now,” Mickey said. “Can’t they…”
“Anything that was on the other side of that door that wasn’t blown to shit by the explosion, is trapped downstairs with a ten foot gap to the fourteenth floor landing,” Dread said, poking his head through the doorway to look down at the wreckage. “Good job, Cass.”
“Hey, that’s okay, Dread,” Shifty said, breathing heavily with his hands on his knees from his magical exertions. “It’s not like I had anything to do with it.”
“Suck it up, Buttercup.”
Shifty looked at Cass and shook his head. “I’m just going to say it. Some days I feel unappreciated.”
“So, wait, that’s it?” Mickey said. “We’re good?”
“Hardly, Mickey,” Cass said. “We’re only getting started.”
Cass
Blowing the stairwells to trap Kel’s forces below us had bought us some time, but only a little. I knew it wouldn’t be long before that death mage bitch figured out a way to deal with my little roadblock.
Not to mention, she’d definitely held some troops back on the upper floors as a reserve to protect her position. And then there was the matter of Revived Martin and whatever monstrosities he could conjure up fresh and new to send after us.
So we weren’t exactly sitting pretty. But, it did give us a chance to catch our breath and figure out what the hell to do next.
There weren’t any immediate threats visible to us in the corridor, so I moved us into a nearby conference room and took stock. Dread dropped one of the equipment bags on the table and everybody started digging magazines and belts of ammunition out of it to refill their vests and weapons.
“How’s our ammo doing?” I said.
“Not amazing,” Dread answered. “We had to burn through a lot of it to hold back the horde downstairs. We definitely don’t want to get caught up in a war of attrition with Kel and Martin’s welcoming committee.”
“Have to cut off the head of the snake,” I said. “We kill the mages, their creatures go with them.”
“Really?” Jolly said.
“Well, at least that’s how it works with Conjure mages,” I said. “You kill one of them, and all the nasty shit they’ve got on their side goes with them. They sort of disappear into this black smoky stuff.”
“Oh. That’s what it looked like when Martin conjured up his bouda at the mall. So will it work the same with Kel?”
“Gotta figure. At the prison, when Mickey blasted out Kel’s mind, her agony transmitted through all of the ghouls at once. So I figure if she goes, they all go.”
“All the more reason to get moving,” Dread said. “Every second we wait, more civilians outside are getting torn up by the same things we’re fighting in here.”
“Our priority is finding Kel and the Intron Code machine,” I said. “Any ideas on where it would be, Mickey?”
She shrugged. “I was never on these floors. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll do it the hard way. Sweep this floor first, see what we find. Keep your guard up. Kel is definitely trying to put something together to throw at us, or Caleb and Martin and Oswald could come after us.”
“Oh, I hope that asshole Oswald comes after us,” Dread said. “I really do.”
“Anybody spots anything that looks like a clue as to where the machine might be, call it out,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Dread took the lead, moving slowly down the corridors, angling his big F-shok shotgun back and forth to keep it pointed at the nearest door or window or whatever might hold a threat. Lys and I stayed on either side of him, helping him to cover all the angles when we reached an intersection of corridors.
Every door was a possible threat, and a possible clue. There was no way to know which of them might hold some misshapen monstrosity waiting to ambush us, or might hold something that would tell us exactly where
Kel was holed up with her precious sphere and the Intron Code machine that Revival Tech had built for her.
It was taking too damn long. Every second we spent searching door to door, was another second that Kel could use to come up with some way to counterattack us. Plus, like Dread had said, there was an army of nightmares running around the city tearing up civilians this entire time.
When you’re creeping along, wondering at any moment when you’re going to be thrust into a sudden fight for your very life, the silence begins to take on a palpable thickness. Your ears strain for any tiny vibration in the air around you, desperate to find something, even more desperate not to, since hearing something meant that the fight was coming.
It’s a strange sensation. You’re desperate to hear something, and yet just as desperate not to. Hearing something means you finally no longer have to linger in the vagaries of wondering what might happen; it focuses all of the innumerable possibilities into a single certainty… no matter how awful that certainty might be.
Not hearing anything meant you might be safe… might be. You also might be missing whatever tiny clue that could’ve kept you from being torn limb from limb by teeth and claws or whatever other terrors might come out of the unknown.
I found myself looking over at Lys and watching her for cues. Physical Adepts use their magic to enhance the capabilities of their bodies; most people were dazzled by their extraordinary strength or speed or agility; but Adepts also enhanced their hearing and vision.
While she’d taught me as much as she could, I was nowhere near her level, and honestly, never would be. She would hear anything long before I would. I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous, and that made me think about Adjani and his desperate desire to become like the mages he had been working with.
Lysette tensed up and stopped, lifting a hand to bring us all to a halt. After a moment or two, she tapped Dread on the shoulder and indicated by pointing that something was up ahead and to our right.
All I could see were doors and corridors and walls. Like I said, though, Lysette’s hearing was as extraordinary as her strength, so I took it on faith that something was hidden off in that direction and gave Dread the nod to move to where Lysette was pointing.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 73