Resistance (19 page)

‘I’ll do it,’ Igor said to Heath, his face a blank mask as he moved toward the Hummer to retrieve a weapon.

‘If he doesn’t, I’ll have to,’ said Dave. His heart was hammering hard enough that he thought everyone could hear it. ‘And I don’t know if I’m immune to their shit. So make a call, Heath. But do it now.’

No emotions played out across the man’s dark features. His expression was as stony as Igor’s. The mother and girl child had given up on trying to stand and disentangle themselves and were crawling toward the men like some sort of mutant crab.

‘Do it,’ said Heath.

Igor had his rifle out. In the giant’s hands the gun looked small, but Dave could tell it was not the sort of compact firearm he’d seen the spec ops guys take into New Orleans. Igor pulled his weapon apart, setting the upper half on the hood while reaching into a bag. He pulled out something which looked like the piece he had just popped off his rifle, except the barrel was thicker. Not for the first time in his redneck life did Dave feel his lack of interest in guns left him at a disadvantage. Igor popped the two pieces together and went through a complex series of movements that Dave could not decipher. Once satisfied, Igor unfolded the bipod on the barrel and rested it on the front hood of the Hummer.

‘Did you really need to fit that with a bipod?’ Zach said. ‘Clock’s ticking, dude.’

‘At close quarters I didn’t want there to be a doubt,’ Igor replied.

He took aim over iron sights.

The Tümorum were getting uncomfortably close now. You could see details of who they had once been in the wreckage of their faces. A middle-aged man, probably a white-collar worker, his small paunch split open, entrails and long scraps of flesh swinging low. The boy had light sandy-coloured hair like his sister, before the blood and crusted yellow mess got into it.

Igor fired.

The sound was enormous. A trip hammer, super-compressed into a fraction of a second. He squeezed off two bursts, traversing the muzzle just an inch or so to target the larger Tümor and then its smaller companion.

Better if you didn’t think of them as father and son.

The first one came apart in three distinct pieces; a red blowhole erupting from the chest, a pot roast worth of meat and bone disappearing from the torso at shoulder level, and the head disintegrating. The effect on the smaller one was even more spectacular, leaving little behind save for twitching limbs, disfigured with toxic bone spurs, and a gaudy spray of offal that painted the road surface in a great fan behind them. Heath’s stone face never slipped, and he never looked away. Zach grimaced and the grimace turned into a wince. The other soldier swore softly.

Igor changed magazines, adjusted something on the rifle, carefully took aim again and squeezed off two discrete rounds, taking the heads off the crawling horror which was still dragging itself toward them. They were close enough for Dave to throw a football at. The old Dave.

The SEAL kept his weapon fixed on the Tümorum, but nothing moved. Finally he dropped the muzzle and flicked another switch, presumably the safety.

‘Beowulf fifties,’ he announced as if at a tutorial. His voice was flat and strained. ‘Go through an engine block. Dum dums every third round. Been meaning to try it out after New Orleans but
. . .’

He trailed off.

Heath put a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘My order.’

The look he turned on Dave was not so understanding.

‘What the hell was that? You didn’t say anything about tumours. Not ever.’

‘Hey,’ Dave shot back at him. ‘You know the fucking deal. I don’t know most of what’s in here now.’ He knocked on the side of his head with a fist. ‘And it’s Tümorum. Urgon had never seen one because there hasn’t been a fucking Tümor to be seen since they all got jammed under the capstone.’

Heath’s eyes were blazing. Chief Allen’s were wounded and wet with emotion.

‘Why, Dave?’ he asked.

‘Because you need
people
to make Tümorum. And the Hunn don’t even use them. Spoils the meat,’ he added with a bitter, nasty edge to his tone that he regretted.

Heath looked at the ruination of a Nebraskan family splattered all over I-80. He breathed out, a ragged-sounding release.

‘And the Djinn?’

‘Dunno,’ said Dave. ‘I got nothing. Maybe they use them like the Crusaders used plague victims in catapults, just throwing ’em out there to fuck up the enemy? But the Djinn are just the Hunn with different tattoos and slightly flatter faces. They can’t eat Tümor flesh either.’

‘Opportunistic infection,’ Zach said. His head was turned away from the carnage, but his eyes kept slipping back there. ‘Must be a pretty big gate, or portal, or whatever these things are coming through to put a whole regiment in the field. Maybe one snuck through at the edges?’

Dave wiped the sweat from his brow. The sun was lowering in the big Midwestern sky, dropping slowly toward the endless horizon. But it was still plenty hot enough. His hand was slicked with perspiration and his hair thick with it.

His hair.

Didn’t seem like such a good deal now, did it?

‘Maybe, Zach. I dunno,’ he said, around a shuddering breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

‘Dave?’ said Heath, who was staring at him coolly. ‘When we are done here you are going to sit down with Professor Compton and tell him everything you know. From Anubis to Zombie and all points in between. You are not going to lunch with Brad Pitt, or waving your dick at Jennifer Aniston until Compton is satisfied we have everything we need to know about what’s coming down the turnpike at us.’ He spoke with rising anger, and jabbed a finger at the dead Tümorum. ‘Do I make myself clear, mister?’

‘As mud,’ said Dave, reining in his resentment at being told what to do.

‘Right,’ said the navy captain, pulling an iPhone in a ruggedised case from his body armour. ‘Igor, you secure the area with your team. Do not approach the remains which I’m classifying as an extreme biohazard. I’ll inform De Brito and Salas of the new threat, call this into Atlanta as a quarantine situation and make sure we have new and robust rules of engagement for dealing with it.’

Igor’s small group of SEALs acknowledged the order, but without enthusiasm.

‘Sir, what do we do if more of them come?’ asked one of the men.

‘You saw what Igor did?’ said Dave. ‘That’s a start. And the further away you get ’em, the better.’

‘Just don’t go shooting the town drunk,’ said Igor, who had recovered at least some of his balance. He detailed his men off to set up a series of roadblocks before turning to Heath.

‘Sir, I’d
. . .’
he seemed to think the better of whatever he was going to say, and then went ahead regardless. ‘I know we’ve gone dark now, but I’d like to call Sammy, soon as you say I can.’

Igor surprised Dave with his tone. Apologetic, deferential, and not at all hopeful. Heath surprised him with the softness of his voice in reply.

‘We’re not in Helmand or the Sunni Triangle here, Chief Gaddis. Get set up, make a call if you can get any bars out here. I trust you. You’re not going to give it away. And I know Sammy’s cool too. He’ll understand.’

‘Thanks,’ said Igor. ‘Good luck.’

They climbed back in their Humvee and Zach turned over the engine again. The two Hummers staying with Igor took up blocking positions on I-80 facing toward Omaha. His men had their weapons out. Within moments one of them fired a shot. Dave could see another poor bastard out in the cornfield drop, finished permanently.

Something was bothering Dave, but it took him a while to pin down the source of his anxiety. Throughout the encounter with the Tümorum, Lucille had remained utterly silent. In fact, thinking back on it, she hadn’t hummed so much as a single note as they’d passed any of the shambling corpses. A hell of a change for her. She was a fucking Valkyrie when the Hunn were around. But the Tümorum?

It was like even she was frightened of the fucking things.

There was something else nagging at him, too. But he couldn’t figure out what.

14

‘I thought all the roads were jammed with refugees,’ Dave said, not knowing what else to say as they left behind the edge of settlement in the late afternoon light. The westering sun picked out hundreds of solar panels, throwing a star field of sunbursts back at them. And then the burbs were gone, cut off as if by a guillotine and they rolled through pasture land and tilled fields, blemished here and there by small patches of forest.

Heath was on his phone, scrolling through texts and emails. He’d just spent a tense ten minutes trying to explain to General De Brito that they now had to defend themselves against undead members of the local populace who might come looking for a bite to eat. For a small mercy they hadn’t seen any more on the road but Dave thought he spotted one on a low hill. When he craned his head to look up out of the window he could see the contrails of jets high above them. Lower down, helicopters swept over those patches of forest or circled what he assumed were entrenched positions of the national guard and De Brito’s army units. Once or twice he caught sight of thirty or forty men in camouflage gear digging holes into a slope and he wondered how much use they would be when 10,000 daemons came thundering up on them. As they approached their destination – ‘Five minutes out,’ Zach announced – he saw the first evidence of real defensive positions. Or what he thought of as real defensive positions. Bradley fighting vehicles ranged in a long, shallow half moon behind maybe a hundred men frantically preparing fighting pits and setting up mortars and heavy machine guns. He looked to the other side of the highway and saw a similar arrangement, all of the guns pointing toward the Djinn.

The light was leaking out of the day.

‘Is that it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Heath said. ‘These are just light blocking forces. The stuff they had available to throw into the breach. We’re here to buy some time for De Brito to get his big dogs in place
. . .
If they’re needed,’ he added.

A few clouds were drifting in from the west, scattered and scrappy, but throwing shadows over the gently rolling plains, making it just that little bit less dangerous for Hunn and Fangr and Djinn and Gnarrl and Sumateem and whatever to be about their business. Dave wondered what the Djinn called their own Fangr leashes, the ‘leashed’ daemon inferiorae that every Hunn warrior learned to control.

Thinking on it, he was pretty sure they just called them Fangr, too.

Through the gathering gloom a collection of Hummers, five ton trucks and Nebraska state patrol cars appeared around a long, looping bend in the road. Hidden by a low hill they apparently marked the forward line. Zach slowed the Humvee to a stop.

‘Hey! Wait,’ said Dave. ‘Sammy’s a he?’

*

A tall soldier in a helmet and body armour walked up to the driver’s window as Dave looked at more men, working away at positions on the hill he’d just driven around. These positions looked much better prepared, some of them actual bunkers with logs and sandbags for roofing. It’d help against an arrow storm, he supposed. And the many, many long barrels poking out of the firing slits promised to rake the riverbank in front of them with deadly waves of fire.

‘Is there a Captain Heath present?’ the soldier asked.

‘That would be me, soldier,’ Heath said. ‘And you are?’

‘Sergeant Ryan Mecum, 1-75th Rangers,’ he said as he turned and pointed down the road. ‘Your rendezvous is to take place in the southwest bound lane of I-80 on a bridge over the Platte River. We’ll have eyes on you if anything goes wrong. Is this Mr Hooper?’

‘That’d be me,’ Dave said, but his attention was on the Djinn. Or rather, his attention was divided between the Djinn and the bewildering revelation that Igor’s Sammy was Samuel, not Samantha. Assuming he’d heard right, of course. Assuming he’d heard Heath say
‘Sammy’s cool too. He’ll understand.’

‘No fucking way,’ he whispered to Zach as Heath spoke to the ranger. ‘Igor bites the pillow?’

The look CPO Allen gave him could have curdled fresh milk.

‘Okay,’ said Dave, quickly putting up his hands. ‘Not asking. Don’t tell.’

He went back to watching the Djinn camp about two or three miles away over the river. There was no missing it. Even if he’d mistaken the dark hide tents, hundreds of yards to a side, for tilled fields, the eye could not slip over the giant siege towers arrayed behind them. They stood four or five storeys high, the tallest point on the plain for miles around. War banners flapped from them and inside, he knew, whole companies of Jorrn awaited the order to assault the human city.

His first thought was, ‘Fucking idiots’. They had no idea. But then he wondered just how big the rip between the realms would have to be to march all those bastards and their toys through.

He realised Mecum was trying to tell him something. The soldier didn’t look impressed to be meeting the hero of New Orleans, not like the lovely ladies at the Bellagio last night; a thousand years ago.

‘They asked for you specifically.’

‘Who? How?’ said Dave.

Mecum’s cheeks blew out.

‘Best I show you, if you want to come along. They’re on the way.’

The three men climbed out of the Hummer.

‘Dave,’ said Zach, his voice still a little clipped and cold. ‘You’re not really dressed for this party.’

And he wasn’t, still wearing the outfit Armando had put him in for
Fox and Friends
that morning. Another thousand years ago.

‘Here, take this,’ Zach said, removing some sort of camouflage vest from the rear of the Hummer. Dave was about to say no, to explain that even Kevlar wouldn’t stop a Sliveen arrow or the blade of a monstrous battle-axe swung by a nine foot tall daemon with shoulders as big as watermelons, but he held his tongue. These guys didn’t need to hear that, and as he examined the vest he realised it was less about armour than it was all the pockets and loops to carry energy gels, snack bars and other high calorie treats.

‘Gatorade in the CamelBak,’ said Zach. ‘Igor rigged this up for you with four combat knives, in safety sheaths. Figure with the arm you got on you now, you could probably throw them right through a Hunn.’

‘Igor did this for me?’ Dave asked, his cheeks warming a little.

Zach nodded. ‘Yeah. Gonna be a problem now?’

‘No! No, not at all,’ said Dave. ‘No problem. Just not really a knife guy,’ Dave said but he thought he could feel Urgon in the back of his head, nodding with approval. The more sharp, pointy, stabby things, the better.

‘Okay, and the best part,’ said Zach, sounding a little wary, but wanting to move on, ‘we got a couple of reinforced loops for you to slip Lucille through. Way more convenient than hauling her around everywhere, possibly dropping her on the toes of a passing chief petty officer.’

He helped Dave into the vest, just like Armando had that morning.

Big gay Armando.

‘Thanks, Zach. I’ll be sure to thank Igor too when we see him again,’ said Dave. He was touched by the gesture, even if he was still reeling at the idea of being touched by Igor. Not that Dave was prejudiced against gays, you understand. It was that he was
. . .
that Igor was
. . .

Hell, it was just that Igor was so fucking manly.

No. Not manly
, he thought quickly.
Just
. . .

Fuck.

‘I didn’t get you guys anything,’ he said, weakly.

He snapped on the clasps and tested the seating for Lucille. She slid in and drew out in a nice fluid motion. He had to change his grip to take a fighting hold. It wasn’t like drawing a samurai sword in the movies, ready to cut. But it did mean he could forget about her while he walked around. As long as she wasn’t humming to him. And she was right now, a soulful sub-aural hymn to the slaying they would do here.

The crazy bitch.

They hurried a few paces to catch up with Heath and Sergeant Mecum who hadn’t waited for them. They were striding down the slope toward
. . .

Dave wasn’t sure. It looked a bit like the Octagon on Ultimate Fighting Championship, but fashioned out of crash barriers, razor wire and scaffolding.

‘What kind of overwatch can you provide, Sergeant?’ Heath asked, as Dave and Zach caught up with them.

‘Patchy, sir, to be honest with you. We’re on a flood plain here and while I can get men close to the bridge, they won’t have a good line of sight on the deck itself from down there,’ Mecum said. ‘There are no real high points of terrain which dominate the area, so there is no way for me to provide any high cover. But we do have some good snipers I’ve put up on top of the bigger vehicles. Any word on additional forces?’

Heath shook his head, ‘What we have now is what we go with, if we go. We’re not looking for a stand-up fight, Sergeant. I hope this will be a negotiated withdrawal. For them. We’ll talk it out. Buy time for more of the heavy metal to get in here, but you can look to the heavens for deliverance if the shit kicks off. The air force has them in the box and they are weapons hot already.’

Dave didn’t like the sound of any of that. Sounded to him like all those fine words about covering his ass weren’t worth hen shit on a pump handle. Heath didn’t seem much fazed by it, however, and he’d be coming down with Dave to talk to the orcs, so maybe this was one of those things it was best to let the professionals worry about.

Besides, they’d reached the Octagon and he had other things to worry about. Specifically, half a dozen reanimated corpses, all pressing themselves up against the razor wire, trying to reach through for him. It certainly put his discomfort with the idea of Igor reaching for his Johnson into perspective.

Unlike the Tümorum back on the highway these shamblers were talking, after a fashion. Or rather, moaning. His name, over and over.

‘Daaaaave.’

‘You got groupies,’ Mecum explained, his features twisting into a mask lost somewhere between revulsion and unease. ‘Been like this all day. Just kept coming in one after another.’ He turned around to Dave. ‘Calling your name, Mr Hooper. Calling out “Daaave” and what sounded like “Come”. Afraid we put a couple of them down before we realised they weren’t like zombies on TV or at the movies. They didn’t seem to want to eat anyone. They’re more like
. . .’
He shrugged.

‘Ushers,’ Dave supplied. ‘To lead us to the meeting.’

He squinted into the setting sun, looking out across the plains. The squares of the Djinn regiment were dark blocks, as neatly arranged on the far side of the river as the chequerboard pattern of the fields from under which they’d emerged.

‘Somewhere out there, or maybe even behind us,’ he said, waving at the landscape, ‘but somewhere within a mile or two, you’ll find a seven foot tall, creepy-looking fucker, looking like he could turn to mist and vanish into a crack in the earth if you gave him even half a side-eye. And he could. But then he’d lose his hold over these poor bastards.’

‘Daaaaaave
. . .
coooome
. . .’

There was nothing ghostly about the voices. They rasped out of dry mouths with swollen tongues.

‘Are they alive?’ asked Mecum, staring at a stringy blonde teenager whose face was half eaten by maggots that dribbled out of her sinuses and dropped to the ground.

‘No. They can’t be. But the Revenant Master had to raise them when they were fresh. Chances are he had someone kill them for him. If you see him, put him down.’

Mecum pushed his helmet back and gave Heath a pained look.

‘What the hell we dealing with here, sir? I just got home from Uruzgan. But I’m thinking I might like to go back there now.’

Heath smiled, the same humane smile Dave had seen on him when he assured Igor that shooting that family of Tümorum was his responsibility because he gave the order.

‘We’re all just doing our jobs, Sergeant. And speaking of mine, I should check in with your CO. It’s almost game time.’

‘He’s up slope a little, sir. Checking on the firing positions.’

As Dave followed them up the gentle rise he was followed in turn by the moans of the dead.