Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles) (28 page)

He’d still wade into the swarm for these people.

“Ship agrees,” Dixie said grudgingly, her sensor array glowing.

“Then it’s settled. I’ll need an array to gather data for the scientists.”

“We’re out of those, too,” Dixie said. Then she frowned. “Claire, were you right about Randall?”

“He’s dead,” Claire responded. “His family shipped out with the vulnerables, but I already warned Elizabeth she might want to question them.”

More people came to the vehicle looking for recharges, and Claire and Adam got their asses out of the way.

It was time to save lives—or destroy them.

Chapter Twenty-One

Because of the magnitude of the daemon vanguard, Claire opted to keep the troops close to the walls of Chanute instead of taking the fight to the shades. It gave her people the chance for a breather by hiding behind walls or a roof.

She’d thought they could handle the daemons better than Riverbend had because they were prepared.

She’d been both right and wrong. The men from Riverbend and Fort Berthold said these daemons were more numerous than the ones that had attacked their communities. The vulnerables were safe, and their forces still had working Shipborn weapons, but she’d lost a lot of people. Good people. Some directly to the daemons, some because the daemons flew off with them, supplying the shades with sustenance.

They’d find the bodies later and give them a proper burial. For now, the shades’ leading edge could be spotted, sucking down the gleam of the powerful searchlights.

Will stood beside her, bouncing his weight from foot to foot, as they readied Adam to test himself against the massing horde. She’d given him her own tactanium vest, despite his protests. More important to keep him sucking down shades than keep daemon claws off her. She’d use Kevlar. Adam had also donned a bright yellow slicker so he’d show up against the black of the entities.

This would have been a hell of a lot easier in daylight, which was probably why the convergences began at night.

Claire knew she could round up her surviving people and leave. Let this horde and its daemons attack somewhere else, maybe Chicago, maybe farther east. They could chip away at its edges instead of confronting it head on. Shove the problem off on the U.S. government, even though Burroughs and company were already hard-pressed to oversee the safe zone. It would take some maneuvering to escape Chanute at this point, but it could be done.

But they’d voted to destroy the monsters here and now, just like they’d voted to let Adam do his thing.

“I don’t have my strength anymore,” Adam reminded her quietly, his green gaze calmer than she’d felt in a week. She got the impression he thought he couldn’t do this but was resigned to it anyway. She could relate. “It’ll be interesting to see how much it takes for that to return, if it does.”

“You shouldn’t need strength. You just have to touch them, right? Stand there and kill them while we shoot any daemons that get close to you.” She considered giving him her array and changed her mind. She still had to order everyone around. “Will, give him your sensor array. He needs to record what he does for the scientists.”

Unlike Dixie, Will didn’t hesitate. After the initial shock about Adam, he hadn’t remained as suspicious as the others.

“All right,” she told everyone involved in the spearhead, the group that had volunteered to escort Adam. “Three minute warning. Towers, don’t let them take out our lights. Dawn’s not for two more hours, and they have an advantage in the dark. Save the car headlights for last.” Sensor arrays could lend their wearer some night vision, but not everyone had an array or her enhanced vision. “How are we doing on replacing the lamps that the daemons busted?”

“Five more minutes,” a voice crackled over her headset.

“Dixie,” she continued, “start our countdown. Adam’s going to stream data to them straight through his array.”

“You gave Adam your headset?” Dixie fussed. “No, wait, you’re talking to me. You gave him Will’s. How’s Will supposed to—?”

“He’ll be right beside me, Mother Hen,” she reassured Dixie.

“It’s time,” Dixie said.

“Get in the Jeeps,” Claire ordered. Adam rubbed his face, grimacing. She and Will jumped into the first Jeep, Adam and a gunner in back.

The gates creaked open. The daemons didn’t change their pattern of attack. The walls were for shades and human riffraff; it took a bunker as fortified as the Shipborn’s base in Yellowstone to dissuade daemons.

Most in her group hadn’t faced off against a whole shade horde before, but they’d drilled for combat from day one. The folks from Riverbend and Fort Berthold, however, knew what to expect. Several had volunteered for the spearhead. The Riverbenders in particular hadn’t changed their opinion of the Chosen One after the revelation that he could kill shades with his bare hands. If anything, it had heightened their near-worship of him to embarrassing levels.

She switched to the array channel where Elizabeth and the others were waiting for updates. “We’re headed through the gates.”

They hadn’t asked the mayor to voice an opinion on Adam’s raid. They’d informed her after the vote.

It was clear to everyone at this point, from Chanute to the Shipborn to all dirtside governments, that the convergences weren’t going to stop. What happened here would change everything, but Claire couldn’t worry about the war until they’d survived this battle.

She braced herself as Will drove through the gates. Traveling toward shades instead of away from them seemed foolhardy, but war was foolhardy. Three more Jeeps followed, filled with some of her best people. Floodlights and headlights alike trained on the encroaching black barrier, lending the entities an almost nauseating swirl, like an oil slick on waves.

The Jeeps bounced across the dirty, half-melted snow and cleared ground in the area surrounding Chanute, which had been razed to prevent attackers from finding easy camouflage. The shades’ eager hiss filled the air, drowning out other sounds.

Tendrils of overeager shades reached toward the incoming sentients. Laser rifles, more powerful than bands, scorched the initial fingers, and the horde recoiled, shivering as if stung.

“That’s close enough,” Adam said through their arrays. “My skin is itchy. I’m ready.”

Without asking permission, he jumped out of the Jeep, grabbed her around the neck, and kissed her. Nobody said a word.

“Kiss for luck before you…don’t die.” Now she was quoting Lassiter.

He smiled. “I can work with that.”

She touched his cold cheek and studied his face. Was this the last time she’d see him alive? This decision wasn’t easy—sending him in. She had to have faith that he had this ability for a reason, that it could be used against the entities instead of against humanity. She had to trust that he could mold it into what their planet needed.

“Come back to me. That’s an order.”

He nodded before heading out. His yellow slicker gleamed in the headlights. They were a fifth of a mile from the shades, on level ground, and could see everything.

Those in the spearhead with sensor arrays trained their attention on the skies, guarding against inbound daemons. The laser rifles blasted apart creepers of shades, holding the horde back. If Adam couldn’t slow the entities, they’d need to be careful they didn’t get cut off. This section of the convergence, the one closest to their people, had to die first.

Adam reached the wavering line of shades in short order. All the lights, everything they had, focused on him.

It was as if the entire camp was holding its breath. He halted, every line of his body cast in sharp relief. The daemons’ cries faded into the background.

He backed up. The shades, in such a sizeable mass, didn’t advance quickly, yet they seemed hesitant to approach him. But then their edges swelled, encasing him in a fat semicircle of black.

Over a private band on the array, she thought she heard him tell her that he loved her…and then he waded in.

Every instinct in her body begged him to shy away from the evil. Some cynical part of her expected him to go down. But he didn’t. He remained head and shoulders above the shades, miraculously unharmed.

“I am receiving your data, Adam,” Ship’s toneless voice echoed through everyone’s array. “You are a miracle. Your efforts will not be in vain.”

He’d already shed his winter gloves. When he plunged his arms into the shades, Claire flinched.

Instantly, his head fell back, and he uttered something like a howl.

“Get him out of there!” She fired at the shades to one side of him, careful not to flame near his body. If they could forge a path, they could drive to him and—

“Hold on, hold on.” Will snatched her arm before she could hurl herself out of the Jeep. “He’s still standing.”

“Are you sure we should advance, ma’am?” their gunner asked. “He looks…I think he’s doing it. The entities around him are getting sucked in.”

That was when the first daemon dive-bombed Adam.

Laser beams slammed into it from two different directions, blasting it back, sideways, and down.

When it disappeared beneath the shades, it didn’t emerge.

Odd—current Shipborn theory taught that daemons weren’t eaten by the shades since they had no souls or essence, similar to most of the animals on Terra. While Terran wildlife didn’t appreciate the entities, the shades had no effect on them. Maybe the daemon was too wounded to rise, and maybe this was more evidence that the daemons had evolved, or devolved, into carnivores…with souls.

Claire’s array warned of an incoming daemon, and she scanned the sky, relying as much on her enhanced eyesight as the sensors. The stars blotted out far too close to her, and she fired.

The beam lit up the daemon, and it clawed at its chest. She maintained the beam, gritting her teeth against the pain in her blistered forearm. Another shooter—Will—joined her.

The daemon dodged. Since it was half on fire, they tracked it easily, as did others, and they all pummeled it. Lasers from all directions exploded it to bits.

“Don’t let the daemons fall into the shades if you can help it,” she recommended across everyone’s array. If the daemons had developed some kind of soul essence, why feed the shades with it?

Alternating between the daemons and shades occupied them for a solid ten minutes. She couldn’t tell if Adam was making a dent in the horde, but her band was keeping him safe. Her stomach alternately knotted and unknotted with each monster her people killed.

Cries and shouts from the walls, as well as frenetic reports through the array, indicated they weren’t faring well with some of the best shooters protecting Adam. She sent a Jeep back. She could be equal to two shooters for him. Or three. She picked up a laser pistol in her left hand and started double-timing whatever entities she saw. Will followed her lead.

Perhaps they should incorporate ambidexterity in their training regime.

The scent of scorched daemons and vaporized shades eventually had everyone coughing and gagging. Ship chimed in every so often with updates on how many shades and daemons it approximated they had killed.

“You are beginning to reduce the horde,” Ship told her. “Please be advised there is a large bulge in the right flank threatening the city walls near the garage.”

“Dix, can you send anyone to the roof of the garage?” Claire called through the array. “Ship says we have an influx there.”

“Can’t. Shades reached the livestock fields in the back of the encampment.” Dixie sounded frightened, uncertain, and she was at the weapons cache, not in the thick of things. “I’m not sure how long we can keep them from pancaking us.”

“If all else fails, get to a floodlight tower. Easier to hold them off from on high.” Claire studied Adam, deep in the shades. His yellow slicker glowed against the oily black sea that circled him. Because the horde was larger than the one at the farm, she couldn’t tell whether he was draining it. “I know we can do this, if Adam can just—ah, shit.”

Out of the darkness from the north, a daemon swooped across the horde. It careened over Adam and released a large piece of metal on his head.

Adam, in the throes of whatever he was enduring, managed to dodge, but his broken concentration sent the horde surging toward Claire and her soldiers like a wave breaking on the shore. They redirected their fire from the skies to the shades to avoid being overtaken. Lasers blazed along the shades’ front wall like flamethrowers.

That gave the daemons easier access to Adam. Another dove for him. Before it could drop its debris, their gunner shot the metal out of its hands.

Finally, Adam righted himself and plunged his arms back into the shade pool. The horde’s forward flow…halted.

“What’s going on?” Dixie asked. “Update me, Claire.”

“It’s okay. False alarm. Adam’s definitely making an impact,” Claire reassured her. If he could stop the slimy progress of this branch of the convergence, he was sucking down shades at a fast rate. “He’s doing it, Dix. It’s working. Once he finishes here, we’ll move him to the back half of Chanute.”

“Did you see that?” Will’s voice cut through the hiss of shades and buzz of laser weapons. “Those fucking daemons tried to drop a roof on Adam.”

“I did,” she said grimly. She relayed the new tactic to Ship, transferring the recording from her sensor array, though Ship probably had access to others. “Evolving.”

She ordered the guards on the spotlights to broaden their scope, encompassing the sky around Adam more than Adam himself. They couldn’t let the daemons bludgeon him with wreckage, but they couldn’t get any closer to him. Not with all those shades in the way.

Unfortunately, the daemons clued into their strategy, and Claire heard screams from the walls.

One of the floodlights chunked out. Dixie reported, “Daemons got floodlight D. Maybe the men there, too.”

“Get someone up there to fix it, now,” she told Dixie, though it was unnecessary. Dix might be scared, but she knew what to do.

Moments later, the giant revolving spotlight hurtled out of the darkness toward Claire’s Jeep. It crashed against the side, rocking the vehicle and spraying glass splinters all over everyone. The gunner swiveled the rifle and razed the air, slicing the daemon that had delivered it through the wing.

It screamed at him and flapped unsteadily into the night.

“Did you see that?” Will yelled again, dumfounded.

“Adam, the daemons are stepping up with the debris,” Claire warned, not sure if he could hear. “If they smash all the floodlights, we have to retreat. We gotta have light to keep the daemons off you. We’ll have to hit the towers until dawn.”

He didn’t respond—but far beyond him, near the edge of the flattened area they’d created to surround Chanute, Claire noticed something pale and unexpected.