Attack the Geek (11 page)

Ree focused on putting one foot in front of the other, with a side of trying to keep her lungs from jumping out her throat and ballooning their way to Paradise Falls.

One of the blows knocked the both of them against the wall, and several overhand cuts glanced off of Ree’s skull.

When did I go to the salon?
Ree asked herself, the world getting very far away.

She felt a hailstorm of blows against the shield, then heard a mess of voices and smelled a gust of fresher air. Finally, she heard the slamming of a door and the clattering of something large hit the ground. Then she joined it.

The original series Base Star welcomed her back to consciousness. Someone pressed a hot mug into her hands.

“Drink this.”

Warm hands raised the mug to her mouth, and she drank. The whatever-it-was tasted awful. A familiar awful, though. She opened her eyes and saw Drake holding her hands and the mug, grease smeared on his face and in his hair.

“Is this that make-your-soul-better goop?” Ree asked, her voice coming out froggy. He’d made a gallon of it for her the first time they’d gone into the Spirit realm. It tasted like ass juice but worked wonders.

“That it is. It should ameliorate some of the fatigue.”

Ree held her nose closed and took another long drink from the mug. The wretched taste fell back a bit with longer gulps, though only from a rating of “puke my guts out” to “this may no longer be food.”

She released her nose and took a few halting breaths before downing the rest of the disgusting tea. She’d once asked Drake what was in it, and he’d promptly changed the subject. It was probably for the best.

The tea kicked in fast, the rest of her body waking up, warmed like she’d just had a hot bath. Ree looked around, and saw Talon and Eastwood bracing against the door, Chandra standing a pace behind them with a crossbow at the ready.

The door shook under regular blows, and once again, the
zot
of Grognard’s wards was gone. There were several gouges in the door, and Ree saw several dozen shredded cards on the floor by the entranceway.

“How long until the brew is ready?” Ree asked.

“Still another half-hour. The intermediary step of channeling the energy into a device to speed the fermentation process has only a thirty-seven percent efficiency rate, and that was after making several aggressive modifications, and several trial-and-error cycles.” Drake gestured to his grease-stained and singed clothes. His left sleeve ended just below the left shoulder, and his pants looked . . . crispy.

“But it’ll work?” she asked.

Drake pursed his lips. “I doubt that we will have sufficient time for a field test. Eastwood informs me that the door may not last until the brew is ready.”

Ree sat up, wobbled, then found her feet. “Then we have to get back out there and thin the herd again.” It’s not like there were many other options.

When forced to choose between “fight and maybe live,” and “wait and probably die,” Ree was finding that the former was always better. At least then she was doing something instead of sitting on her hands and praying for the cavalry to arrive. Especially since her normal cavalry was all already there.

The tea had helped, but she still felt like death warmed over.

“Where’s my phone?” she asked. She left it inside before each sortie, since even with a mondo-tough case, it wasn’t going to stand up to the beatings she went through.

But since Eastwood, Talon, and Chandra were a little busy, only Drake was really present to answer, and he didn’t seem to know. She searched through the St. Patty’s Day–level mess in the bar and found the phone underneath a torn half of a
Fantastic Four
comic.

Clicking the phone on, Ree saw that she had 23% left on the battery. It’d be enough for two more doses of power, maybe three. But going the
Spider-Man
or
Buffy
route again wasn’t going to cut it. She needed to think non-Euclidean, get sneaky on the situation. Every single time they’d gone out to clean house, Lucretia had answered with another wave of nasty, and it didn’t seem like she was running low on cannon fodder.

So what, then?
Ree thought, browsing her media list.

It didn’t seem to matter what power she had, they would just keep coming. So either she needed to get past them and find Lucretia, which would mean leaving the rest of the group another person down, or she had to change the way that she fought.

She scrolled past clips of superheroes, detectives, psychics, and chosen ones.

And found herself a winner.

The last fights had all been about endurance, about pressing on no matter what happened.

She didn’t need super-power; she needed staying power.

Ree plopped onto a chair by the nearly bare weapons table and fired up a clip from
Die Hard
. John McClane, the patron saint of action heroes, the man whose ingenuity, inexorable will, and smart-assery had carried him through endless trials and launched Bruce Willis’s seemingly unkillable career as an action hero.

She’d picked out two clips from
Die Hard
for her power playlist. One for his MacGyver-ness (taping the gun to his back), and one for his indomitable will (walking across broken glass). She played the latter, and did her best to feel McClane’s pain, use it to fuel her own determination, make the hero’s will her own. Internal powers seemed to last longer than the external, flashy stuff. If she could dig into
Die Hard
well enough, she should be able to fight on even through the exhaustion of a dozen skirmishes on top of working on her feet for six hours.

Die Hard
had, for Ree, opened the doors for action movies where it actually seemed like the hero was in pain, that he’d really struggled through, and that struggling made him all the more heroic. It was that grit she needed. The kind of grit that Eastwood had earned over years fighting in the astral plane of the World Wide Web, that Talon had earned on the battlefields of Pennsic and Pearson both. Ree was still in her rookie year as an urban fantasy heroine. It seemed like she’d seen more than most in that time, but she needed to dig deeper than her reserves would allow, the way that McClane had.

The sound of cracking wood pulled Ree from her media communion, and she accepted the
jian
straight-sword pressed into her hand by Drake.

“Good luck,” he said, then dashed back into the office to join Grognard.

Ree stood, set her phone back on the table, then hustled over to the crew by the door, which now had a splintered head-size hole around shoulder level. A broad blade hacked into the wood again, widening the gap.

“Go time?” Ree asked as she stepped up.

“Go!” Eastwood said, undoing the locks as Talon stabbed back through the hole in the door with the
naginata
.

The door swung open, revealing another adventure module’s worth of nastiness.

That would have normally been the time when her stomach sank at the vastness of the creatures’ numbers, the skeletons, gnomes, eagle-size winged lizards, and especially at the purple hippo (
WTF?
).

But not this time. This time, she had the determination of John McClane. The power of
Die Hard
was different from most of the others she’d taken on using Geekomancy. When she channeled Buffy, Trinity, or Spider-Man, she felt the power buzzing in her mind and in her body, always just right there waiting for her to tap into it. This was more like a solid sense of certainty, a cool well of confidence buoying her up.

I could get used to this,
she thought.

Eastwood dove forward, lashing out with sword and long dagger. Ree pegged his style as the
Niten-do
of Musashi’s
The Book of Five Rings
, though he was using western weapons instead of the samurai’s
daisho
.

Chandra followed, moving more cautiously than Eastwood, her
kukri
spinning in tight patterns.

Ree went third, letting Talon and her polearm take the anchor role behind them. Uncle Joe was on door duty, his well of courage properly spent.

Leading with the sword, Ree stabbed at one of the winged lizards, which pumped its wings and dodged up and away from her blow.

She followed the thrust with a cross-body cut, which caught a leaping gnome’s arm and carried through to cut it across the collarbone. The diminutive devil went down, and Ree continued her swing, spinning her weapon back around to her right to ward off another gnome before it could jump.

If she let the blade stop moving, she’d get overrun. Already feeling her barely mustered energy flag, Ree dipped into that cool well of magical energy, thinking of how John McClane hadn’t stopped, hadn’t given up, had always pressed on.

For understandable reasons, “Ode to Joy” started playing in her head, making the fairly workmanlike task of cutting down scads of monsters seem instantly more epic.

But even with her epic soundtrack, they were outnumbered and out-gunned. (Out-sworded, really. All of the prop guns were spent, and Lucretia didn’t seem to be a gun bunny.)

Just a few minutes
. Just need to keep them from knocking down the door for a few minutes. Except that twenty minutes in fighting time was approximately forever. She’d competed in Taekwondo tournaments for years, and even those ninety-second matches dragged on like they were the battle of Helm’s Deep.

“How are we going to keep this up?” Ree shouted to Eastwood. If the monsters understood her, then so be it. She knew she was screwed, and the monsters might well know it, too. There were just too many.

“Don’t know!” Eastwood said, fighting on. “Just do it!”

Determined he was, but Eastwood was no speech giver. But he was holding his own, even though he’d lost the long knife somewhere along the way and was fighting with just the one sword and judiciously applied dirty tricks.

Pressed up against the wall, Chandra was favoring one leg. Beside her, Talon fought with her personal sword, a hand-and-a-half blade that she wielded like she’d had it since she was in diapers and baby tunics. And as a second-gen Scadian, that might even be the case.

Ree was drinking deeply of the
Die Hard
determination, but the creatures kept coming. The sewer channel was running with ichor, a stream of fallen monstrosities flowing away from the store, but not fast enough.

A boxy robot that looked like a teakettle on steroids launched forward, spout-butting her knee. She hopped back, lashing out with the sword, which sparked and clattered off the machine’s domed top.

In the next minute, she heard several more cries of pain. Chandra went down, and Talon dropped to one knee, warding everything off of the fallen punk.

Which left Ree and Eastwood nearly alone against the pressing horde. If there had been more space, they’d have been overrun long ago. As it was, the four of them half stumbled over one another as they tried to keep the store side of the tunnel at their flanks so the creatures couldn’t cut them off from the door. Ree took wounds along her arms, back, and legs. The
Die Hard
magic started to go faster and faster as she fought on with injuries that even adrenaline couldn’t push through.

Talon screamed as an arrow embedded itself in her shoulder, then dropped out from Ree’s peripheral vision.

This isn’t going to work.

Ree adopted her best get-the-whole-damn-bar’s-attention voice and shouted “Joe! Evac!” while pounding on the door with the pommel of her blade. Then she twisted the blade to spear another gnome as it leapt for her throat.

The door opened, and Ree held her ground, taking scratches and bruises under the ever-more-crowded press of monsters.

She heard wincing and pained moans behind her, which she hoped were Talon and Chandra getting their ass out of Dodge.

“You next!” Grognard said, the end of his word devolving into a growl as she heard steel tear leather and flesh.

She felt a blood-slicked hand reach out and push her backward. Eastwood filled the doorway, pressed on all sides. His coat turned aside some of the blows, but not nearly enough. Ree grabbed the geek by the collar as she felt something pulling her back, and the three of them toppled onto the cold concrete floor of Grognard’s. She saw another spectral hand slam the door closed, breaking bones and severing limbs in a very un-cartoon-y fashion.

“Holy shit!” Ree said, the lack of immediate mortal danger reminding her just how many times she’d been stabbed, cut, and bludgeoned.

And they said I hit the healing limit last time. That’s just fucking great.

Grognard was there, with glasses of water and his medical kit. She assumed Drake was still with the brew, working on their Hail Mary.

Eastwood did his best to brace the door while Grognard bandaged wounds with the rapidity of an EMT on speed.

“Were you a medic or something?” Ree asked as her boss tore off part of her pants to get at the wound along her shin. He washed the muck and blood out, then glopped so much antiseptic on it that Ree nearly shot straight up in the air.

“Something. You can wrap the arm yourself. And keep your head elevated.”

“How’s the beer bomb?” Ree asked, but Grognard had already moved on. Chandra and Talon were unresponsive, but looked like they were still breathing.

“Not ready,” Eastwood said.

Ree looked at the door, where Eastwood was as much leaning on the door for support as bracing it against the hordes.

“Where did she get all of these things?” Ree asked.

“Lucretia has been at this for quite a while. Anyone who’s been in the game keeps some resources back. But I didn’t expect that she’d go this far, not for something that she frakking stole from me in the first place!”