Resistance (23 page)

‘Whoa,’ Thresh-Trev’r drawled, unable to help himself. ‘Awesome.’

The three Regimental commanders actually reared back from the altar, the fuckin’ pussies, but Thresh-Trev’r leaned in close to get a better look now the Diwan had turned off the zoom function. He knew exactly what he was seeing. A B-52 or even a couple of stealth bombers lighting up a kill box. Thresh-Trev’r had fond memories of spending untold hours in
Call of Duty
and
Battlefield
on this sort of thing.

‘What sorcery is this?’ Myrthr demanded to know.

‘Big ugly fat fuckers,’ said Trev, with not a little smugness at knowing what was happening while these three muppets were shitting themselves.

‘Explain, Thresh-Trev’r,’ said Guyuk. ‘As simply as you might.’

‘Giant iron Drakon,’ he said. ‘So fucking high in the sky even your Sliveen couldn’t spot them. They shat lots and lots of Drakon turds down on Sh’Kur’s regiment. You know, the fresh laid turds that explode when they hit you. And there you go,’ he said, gesturing at the hologram with one sweep of his fore-claw. ‘Barbecued Djinn with all the fixin’s.’

Silence fell over the cavern and Guyuk motioned to the Diwan to bring her display to an end. She merely touched one of the Seer Stones and the world Above went away, the inky curtain of blackness surrounding them receded and they stood where they had been a few minutes earlier, in the lord commander’s war chamber.

‘But
. . .
how
. . .’
said Urddun of the 1st Regiment. ‘How are we to bring battle to . . . to
. . .’

‘Magickal cows?’ asked Thresh-Trev’r, peeling his lips back from his upper fang tracks.

‘Enough,’ said Lord Guyuk, sounding tired. ‘As Thresh-Trev’r well knows, this is not magick,’ he said, pointing at the granite altar top which was now just lifeless rock. ‘It is what the humans call their
. . .
technology.’

‘Magick by another name,’ cried Sepcis. ‘How are we to defeat such as these?’

‘By learning the ways of men and turning the knowing of it against them. As I have just done. The Dave knew he was being drawn into a trap, but he did not know that trap was not for him, but for his minions.’

18

Captain Heath settled the argument over whether Dave would fly to the ambush in a helicopter with the SEALs.

‘You go ahead, Dave. You get there as fast as you can, and do what you can,’ Heath grimaced as a medic quickly strapped up his damaged half-leg. ‘We won’t be more than a few minutes behind.’

Dave could hear the chopper approaching, even over the uproar on the far side of the river. Half a dozen tanks and armoured fighting vehicles ploughed up the scorched earth over there to run down small war bands of Djinn foolish enough to regroup and attempt a counter-attack with bows and arrows or sword and shield against chain guns, high explosives and flechette rounds.

‘And you’re sure it’s Hunn? The Horde?’ said Dave. ‘Not Djinn?’

‘The attackers were identified as the same hostiles we met in New Orleans,’ Heath confirmed. ‘And then we lost contact with the headquarters group.’

‘Got a Blackhawk, one minute out, sir,’ said Zach.

‘We got played,’ said Dave, hot shame colouring his face, with real anger rushing in behind it. ‘That Guyuk bastard. The Grymm, he . . .’

Heath cut him off. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Moving fast, striking back. That’s what counts.’

‘I can probably get there in less than a minute,’ said Dave, viciously twisting the tops off a couple of energy gel tubes that had survived the shredding of his vest. His Armando-approved silk blend dress pants weren’t looking so flash anymore either. The world seemed to hiccup as he accelerated while he ingested the gel shots, tore the wrapper from a protein bar, and ate that too. He felt like he was still running on an almost full tank, courtesy of all the fine eating he’d done the last twelve hours. But the conversation he’d had with Zach on the plane was haunting him. He was pretty sure he could cover the distance back to the Cracker Barrel before these guys even got airborne, but he had no idea what shape he’d be in when he got there. Or what he’d find. He dropped back into real time after topping up his tanks, and saw a couple of the soldiers who weren’t used to him suddenly disappearing into a high speed blur jump back a little in surprise.

The night was alive and glowed with the golden red lustre of war. Gunfire still cracked and clattered from the gentle wooded slopes behind them.

‘I’ll see you there,’ said Dave. Lucille’s improvised scabbard was too badly torn to use, so he took as comfortable a grip as he could, with his right hand up near the heavy steel head, and his left about three quarters of the way down the hardwood shaft. He didn’t like the idea of running through the dark without a weapon to hand, no matter how good his night vision was now, or how quickly he was moving. There were no guarantees he wouldn’t run headlong into a nasty surprise.

But he didn’t. And he was wrong about beating them there in a minute.

Dave covered the distance between the bridge over the River Platte and the parking lot of the Cracker Barrel on the edge of Omaha in just under a minute and a half. Twelve and a half miles through open country. If the physics of the real world had applied to him he would have been travelling at a very large fraction of the speed of sound. He was able to make the calculation as he flickered up I-80, past the frozen tableau of Hazmat teams cleaning up the mess Igor had made of the Tümorum. At that speed the wind in his passage should have ripped every stitch of clothing from his body and started to pull the flesh from his bones. But he was beginning to understand that he was not so much moving through space as through time. Somehow passing between moments, rather than through the landscape across which he travelled. Or some shit like that. Not like losing control of a car at high speed, when everything seemed to slow down. Not like that time he’d come off the trampoline as a kid and broken his arm, when for long, stretched-taffy seconds, he hung in midair wondering what would happen when he finally did hit the ground.

He had never moved this fast, for this long. He had no sense of physically exerting himself. Instead he simply willed himself to move through space. He chanced a look up toward the stars, hoping to find a jet plane against which he might pace himself. But the skies were empty and he had a feeling that no aircraft, even a Super Hornet, could have kept up with him.

Except of course, those Sumateem arrows had moved at a fair rate, hadn’t they?

What was that about?

And when he thought on it further, the bullets hitting the Djinn had kept hitting them, even when he was in warp.

He let go of the paradox, vowing to return to it later, when people weren’t depending on him. People he’d probably left to their doom.

In his hands Lucille felt lighter than usual, but yet as substantial as ever. She was somehow lending her power to him. Or maybe adding to it? He had no idea. He literally had no fucking idea. And everything that Zach had said to him on the plane hit home. He had no fucking idea what he was doing, or what he could do. As he blinked up the last 200 yards of interstate freeway, slow fire lit his passage; burning vehicles and the pulse of the flashing lights on the roof of a police cruiser, the impossibly slow red throb like the last beats of a giant’s dying heart. Dave decelerated at the edge of the pavement outside the Cracker Barrel, hefting Lucille, ready to hit pause on the world again so he could lay waste to any monsters dumb enough to challenge him. But none did. None lay in wait.

A pit seemed to open in his stomach as Dave encountered his first body, porcupined with war-shafts almost as long as the man they had killed. They pinned him to the ground, his weapon still gripped in his hands. Under the helmet the sightless eyes of a boy stared at the night. Blood clotted around the body, spreading out with syrupy slowness. Dave put one hand over his mouth, an unconscious move that was more about giving him time to think than holding back a rising gorge of Cracker Barrel’s finest. He wasn’t nauseous. If anything, he was thinking he could go for one of those hams which were hanging in a bag by the hostess station inside, maybe two or three of them along with a dozen jars of cherry cobbler mix. That hunger pang made him feel a bit nauseous – about himself.

His shoes crunched across shattered asphalt and the brass shell casings which lay everywhere. Above the burning army command tent the American flag flickered and disintegrated, caught in the flames. Below it the flag of the army unit was already gone. The radios were silent and the computer screens dead. Cops and soldiers were piled like cordwood behind police cruisers and Hummers, many of which were also burning, adding to the collective funeral pyre, but no daemons.

He knew without counting that twenty-three dead men and women lay outside the restaurant. Some had been pierced through by war-shafts or the smaller, but just as deadly, iron bolts. Sliveen darts, fired from a comparatively small, handheld weapon, something akin to the bolt of a crossbow.

One dead Sliveen lay in a gory heap of parts, like an enormous insect squashed under foot. He hadn’t seen it at first because of the burning Hummer lying on top of it. Dave knelt down and examined the body. The tattoos, he knew – thanks to Urgon – marked this one as something special. A seer-scout for the Diwan of the Sliveen.

For just a second the old Dave, with the paunch and the problems and the job with the petrol company, stood over the huge insectile corpse and shook his balding head. A little ‘what the fuck’ moment. A man was entitled to one every now and then. But then the new Dave, with the enchanted and homicidal splitting maul, a full head of thick hair, and six-packs on his six-pack, processed it all. The Diwan of the Sliveen had dispatched her elite warrior scouts, probably to scope out the destruction of the Djinn, but also to effect the trap Guyuk had actually been talking about when he warned Dave he was flying into Sh’Kur’s ambush.

Because he wanted Dave on that bridge by himself, and he wanted Dave’s lieutenants, his ‘minions’, tucked out of harm’s way, where the Djinn could not reach them, but Guyuk could.

Dave Hooper roared a curse at the sky as he understood just how he’d been bent over the barrel and corn-holed by the lord high bastard of the Grymm. He stomped down on what was left of the daemon’s head, crushing bone and brains under the heel of his expensive Italian loafers, spraying his ruined pants with wet chunks of sickly-looking grey and green matter. It was only the muffled thumping of helicopter blades coming in from the south that gave him pause enough to regain control of his rage.

He stood, smeared and spotted with gore, breathing heavily and taking in the scene again. There were no other Sliveen corpses, no Grymm casualties at all that he could see. He noted another couple of human dead, a male and female cop cut to actual pieces around the side of the building. He recognised the slaughter as professional. Or maybe Urgon did. The cops had been cleaved apart by one murderous blow of an edged weapon, but their killer had not stopped to celebrate by feasting on the fresh meat or drinking deep of
dar ienamic’s
bloodwine, as a Hunn or Fangr warrior would almost certainly have done. They had been taken by stealth, cut down and left behind as the killers moved on looking for
. . .
what?

He already knew, but didn’t want to face the truth of it.

Tell me
, Guyuk had said,
do you intend to take the field with your lieutenants as you did in New Orleans? For whatever snare the Djinn have laid in your path will prove hazardous to yourself, and certainly lethal to your inferiorae.

His inferiors. Heath, Emmeline. Zach and Igor. Boylan. And Compton, of course. Compton was definitely his inferior. Guyuk couldn’t strike at Dave, not yet apparently, so he’d done the next best thing. An even better, smarter thing, really, if he was looking to damage the human cause. He’d reached out for the people around Dave.

For a moment his nuts tried to crawl up into his body as he recalled another threat to those around him. Trinder implying his boys were in danger.

But Trinder was not Guyuk, and Guyuk had said nothing of Dave’s family. Still, he thought, stepping away from the ugly mess he’d made of the Sliveen, it might be an idea to get Boylan to call
. . .

He caught himself, just the same way he had caught himself again and again in those first weeks after Annie had left him, thinking that things were one way, when in fact they were another.

Boylan.

He was nowhere among the dead out here. None of his guys were. When he gave himself permission to think about it now, he recognised nobody lying among the corpses strewn about the car lot. His stomach, feeling suddenly empty, seemed to contract as he stared at the
burning
wreckage of the big tent that had served as the operations centre for the two generals he’d met, and he knew he ought to search through the torn and bloodied canvas to see if Emmeline was in there. Or Compton, he supposed. It seemed more likely he would have been caught ass-kissing the big dogs when the Sliveen attacked. The last he’d seen of Emmeline she was inside the Cracker Barrel with Boylan, both of them working on their laptops. His skin tingled, feeling alternately hot then cold as he stepped over the lower half of a severed human torso, grimacing at the long ropey strands of entrails. He moved toward the restaurant, peering through the vast hole smashed in the facade and into an interior lit by fire.

Nothing but the flames seemed to move in there. No sentry challenged him, no survivors rushed out. Stuffed animals for the road danced in the firelight, wilting under the heat as their innards, made in China, caught flame and filled the air with a black toxic smoke. He stepped over piles of broken crockery and shattered displays, moving toward the long wooden counter to his left where a cashier lay sprawled out over the bar, head on the floor, arms reaching as if to put it back on. Blood tainted the stacks of Tootsie Roll logs. A good ol’ boy in flannel and Carhartt still gripped a cast-iron frying pan looking as if this were the perfect place to lay down for a nap. The ragged slice from crown to jaw meant he would never wake up again. Dave pressed on into the interior of flickering lights and flame.

Lucille approved.

The prospect of imminent combat set her humming with satisfaction, a tonal shift in his weird link to her that annoyed him at first, but quickly served to soothe his frayed nerves and to steady his breathing and rapidly beating heart. Dave’s stomach rumbled and he took the cap off another energy gel before sucking it down, preoccupied by the scene before him. There were bullet holes in the ceiling and the counter. Vivid slashes of drying blood painted a couple of heavy tables in a corner that had been turned over, perhaps as a barricade, but no bodies or torn limbs or cooling piles of human meat were in evidence. In contrast to the butchery outside, it appeared as though the Sliveen and the Grymm had forced their way in here not to kill everybody but to
. . .
To take them?

The thump of rotor blades from the helicopter grew thunderous as the aircraft landed outside on the street. Dave could hear voices, men shouting orders and acknowledgements at each other, the crunch of heavy boots on the tarmac. The fire, which must have been contained by the building’s automatic safety systems burned feebly here and there, throwing a shifting, yellow light out across the dining hall. Dave stood, feeling utterly useless. He could take a guess at what had happened here, but being honest with himself, again, he had no fucking idea. Lifting Lucille into a better position to swing the cutting edge of her heavy steel head into any threat, he ignored the navy commandos calling his name outside. He accelerated over the counter, landing on the balls of his feet outside the kitchen, ready to split the skull of anything that might be lying in wait for him. But there was nothing, and he dropped back into the normal flow of time.

The kitchen seemed less shambolic than the rest of the Cracker Barrel, apart from the small fire burning on the stovetop. He took the fire blankets and doused the flames, regretting it for a moment as the dark of night closed in around him, but only until his own much-improved night vision adapted. A large bag of frozen potato wedges was thawing into a puddle and a giant pool of light-coloured waffle or pancake batter covered the floor near the grill top. His stomach rumbled.