Unearthed (55 page)

It didn’t provide much solace, though, since the Rog’tausch went on about the business of attacking, bringing a foot down with a stomp that threw him off balance, shaking the ground. The air was filled with constant gunfire, the loud boom of Alison’s rifle mingled with Bill’s smaller one, as well as Reeve and Erin’s pistols. The Rog’tausch’s nostrils smoked and Arch was reminded of dragons and darker things, stuff in movies he didn’t much care for.

He regained his balance and spun, slashing a crease into the leg of the beast. He ducked behind it and found the wound, then watched as it knitted itself back together over the course of a few seconds.

“Well … heck fire,” he said again.

Reeve was running through ammo like it was drinking water on a summer’s day, and it was having a pretty negligible effect on his target. He slowed down, aiming his shots carefully, before remembering, oh, yeah, they had an AR-15. “Son of a bitch!” he said aloud and hurried to the Explorer, grabbing the weapon off the floorboard where Erin had apparently left it resting. He shook his head and shouldered it, running back to the fray.

The redhead seemed to be getting most of the action. She was ducking and whirling, periodically landing a punch or kick that hobbled the big bastard for a second or so, but that was all. It always seemed about a half-second too slow to catch her, which he supposed was lucky for her. Her punches certainly weren’t staggering him like they had the first time, when she’d dropped out of the sky and had momentum on her side.

Reeve raised the rifle to his cheek, saw the antlers just above his peep sight, and thought of it just like taking a trophy buck. And he fired that sucker right into the giant demon’s left eye.

A roar of fury filled the air, and a gout of flame came shooting out at him. Reeve ducked instinctively, putting his arm over his face, burying his nose in his bicep. The heat ceased after a second and he pulled his face out.

His uniform sleeve was on fire, and he let out an “Ah!” of exclamation before slapping at the flames with his free hand. It took a few seconds, but he beat them out. The sting of the burns remained, but not too bad; maybe first or second degree at worst. “That’s gonna need some aloe.” Then he raised the AR back up, took aim, and fired again, watching a little more carefully for a fiery response this time.

Hendricks watched Duncan swing in, chipping a little skin off the Rog’tausch’s side with his baton, then rolling away from the inevitable strike back. “Good times, huh?” Hendricks called.

“The best of them, the worst of them,” Duncan said, and Hendricks couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or not.

Lauren stood back a bit, watching the fight unfold. It was an ugly, messy thing, with Duncan, Hendricks, Starling and Arch all swarming around the Rog’tausch, dodging stomps and thrown hands. It seemed to be Starling saving the day—or Lucy, as Lauren still thought of her. This certainly wasn’t like the girl Lauren had met in the ER all those months ago, the girl who twitched and shook, who blanched away from physical contact.

Lauren watched it all out of the corner of her eye. She had two bottles of holy water, roughly sixteen ounces each. She’d seen what the fights were doing to the skin of the Rog’tausch: pretty much dick. Maybe the holy water would help. That was theory one, and she was about to test it.

A squirt gun would have been best for this, but she didn’t have a squirt gun. What she had were latex gloves, two of which she judiciously filled with about eight ounces of water. She knotted the wrists quickly. It wasn’t the first time she’d used a latex glove as a water balloon, after all; this was first-year med school hijinks.

That done, she crept up behind the nearest car to the Rog’tausch, careful to avoid the half-dozen lines of gunfire that were being stitched through the area. She kept behind Reeve, who was letting it rip with careful bursts from his rifle, and Erin, who was doing her level best to pepper the thing’s face. She watched a bullet hit it in the eye, and it didn’t do shit except piss the thing off.

“This is gonna get real bad,” she muttered to herself. Someone was bound to get hurt, and soon, because this thing was swinging hard enough to kill a human. It may have been their good luck that it hadn’t connected with anyone yet, but that luck had to be running low by now.

Lauren prepared herself. She probably hadn’t thrown a baseball since high school, but she’d done one year of softball then, and been middling at it. She took a breath, raised her arm, and aimed for the biggest target she could find—the torso of the Rog’tausch.

She flung the makeshift holy water balloon and watched it sail right over the thing’s shoulder as it moved to strike at Starling. “Fuck,” she swore and prepared the next one.

This time she waited until the damned thing had over-committed on an attack on Starling. Lauren flung the balloon, watching it lob slowly through the air to where she though the Rog’tausch would be in a few seconds. It made its seemingly lazy arc next to the quick, angry movements of the demons, and landed right on his shoulder, distorting comically for a second of horror in which she thought it might not actually explode.

Then it burst.

Water splashed all over the Rog’tausch’s grey-skinned chest, running down him like … well, like water running down smooth skin. It lingered there, and he glanced at it, apparently unconcerned, before turning back to the battle. The skin was like armor, like heavy plating, and she watched the water slide over the surface.

When she saw the smoke start to rise off it, she thought at first maybe it was the nose again. But then, when she looked closer, she realized the Rog’tausch’s chest was actually steaming.

As the water ran down in drops, it started to leave trails of black where the skin looked stained, like iron with rust trails. The Rog’tausch’s bellowed another roar loud enough to be heard across town, but it didn’t stop for even one second in its attack.

But the damage was done, and she could see it. It was weak against holy water; now the trick was just putting what she had left of it somewhere that it would do the most damage.

“Motherfucker,” Lauren said, “it really is going to need to be taken orally.”

Brian stared at the wires in front of his face, like he was looking at the cipher that determined the answers to everything in the universe. Tragically, 42 was not an option.

“Fuck,” he said, “this is way harder than they make it look in the movies.”

Hendricks was impressed that he hadn’t been splattered all over the place yet. He’d come close once, when the Rog’tausch brought down one of those giant fucking paws. He’d been about a half-second away from a good mashing, from skull trauma that wasn’t going to be fixable by any potion, because his brains would be dashed all over this goddamned lawn, and that’d be the end of his story.

Really, though, his survival was down to a few factors that he was counting his lucky stars for. The first was Starling, and to a lesser extent, Duncan, for causing shitloads of havoc, comparatively speaking, to the Rog’tausch. He and Arch weren’t making much of a dent in the thing, after all, and what they were doing seemed to be healing itself seconds later.

Someone had thrown what looked like a water balloon, though, and it had burned the Rog’tausch, which was the second thing keeping them alive. Hendricks had landed a sword swipe in that area, and it hadn’t looked like that had healed at all. The strike was still there, about a quarter-inch deep line straight through its right nipple.

“Why does a mighty demon destroyer with no genitals need nipples?” Hendricks asked, striking one of them off with his next slice and then dodging back out of arms reach as the Rog’tausch attempted a half-hearted retaliation at him.

“Why does it matter?” Arch asked.

“Inquiring minds want to know,” Hendricks said, re-entering the fight.

Starling zipped past him and landed a punch to the Rog’tausch’s jaw that would have knocked down a full-grown horse. The Rog’tausch twisted and caught her with a backhand that sent her smashing right into the neighboring house, crushing a Starling-sized hole right in the wall.

“Uh oh,” Hendricks said.

The Rog’tausch twisted again and landed his second lucky-ass shot of the last minute, uppercutting Duncan while the OOC was distracted looking at Starling flying. The demon launched into the air and came down on the roof of the house. Hendricks heard the sound of structural collapse and knew Duncan was going to be out for a minute or so.

“Fuck,” he said, succinctly as he could, not tearing his eyes off the giant demon in front of him, even as he knew that he and Arch were the only ones left to engage it physically.

“Get out of there!” Bill cried, and Arch heard him dimly as he leapt into a low roll, avoiding the Rog’tausch’s full-bore attack at him. Fortunately for him, the demon came at both him and Hendricks at the same time, splitting its focus, and it looked like the cowboy went in exactly the opposite direction he did, a perfect 180-degree split that forced the demon to choose which of them he most wanted to kill, something he was clearly struggling with.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUUUUUUUCK!” Hendricks shouted as he ran, hauling ass in the opposite direction of Arch. The third thing keeping him alive was the constant harassing fire from four different guns at the Rog’tausch, but Hendricks knew that ultimately that was nothing more than an annoyance to the thing.

The Rog’tausch split its attention, spinning its head to look at him, then Arch, who was coming up from a roll and running in the opposite direction across the lawn. Hendricks was almost to the street, pretty sure that whichever way the damned thing went, either he or Arch was going to die.

Hendricks stopped, turning back at the thing, and pulled his gun, shooting it right in the chest where that balloon had left the scorch mark. It left a little ding in the chest, like a hailstone dent in a car roof. “Hey, fucker!” he called, and the Rog’tausch turned its head to look right at him, black eyes focused in on him.

The thought had been instinctive, barely conscious, but it tumbled right through him in that moment:

Better me than Arch.

Lauren had the other water bottle, but she was damned if she could figure out a way to get it down the Rog’tausch’s throat. It was standing there, looking back and forth, trying to figure out what to do, when Hendricks drew his pistol and fired, yelling at it over the ringing in her ears from all the gunfire.

The ringing started to die down, replaced by something else, something that shifted her attention rapidly, forcing her to look over her shoulder at bright lights, shining their way over the lawn as something came at her, zooming past at about fifty, making a fearsome clang with giant treads and tearing into the yard as it mounted the curb. The giant diesel truck’s horn bellowed into the night again as it went past her, straight on course for the Rog’tausch, and she thought she caught a glimpse of Brian Longholt in the driver’s seat, face fierce with determination as the truck thundered by toward its rendezvous with the demon.

“What … the—” Hendricks heard the Rog’tausch say before the semi smashed into him and kept going, driving him straight into the house next door. It was just a semi, no trailer attached, and it was really hauling ass as it came across the lawn. The grill smashed right into the Rog’tausch, with enough force to splatter a human being.

The truck drove right into the house and kept going, the brick exterior not doing a hell of a lot to stop it. The back of it stuck out, rear wheels slightly off the ground, like it was starting to sink into the basement.

“Holy shit,” Hendricks muttered and started toward the wreck. He was not alone.

“Go go go!” Lauren Darlington darted by Reeve, who was already in motion. He had the AR-15 at rest against his shoulder, trying to do it the way he’d trained with it all those times. When he’d bought the thing through the budgetary process, he’d figured it’d be Midian’s version of the SWAT team, and he was prepared to carry that responsibility himself. Still, it was unwieldy to run with, and Reeve didn’t run a lot anyway. The doctor outpaced him easily, hurrying toward the truck buried in the rubble. He heard tires on pavement behind him but didn’t have time to look at see what might be going on. Darlington was right, they had to hurry, to hit this thing with everything they had while it was down.

Kitty was watching from the shadows. She felt the sting of fury, the anger and shame from what had been done to her, and she wasn’t nearly ready to just let it go, not yet. She watched coldly, as the little hero team went running after the Rog’tausch. She’d need to be a little more careful now, would need to wait until they’d gotten closer to beaten.

Then she’d swoop in and make all of the survivors her bitches.

Brian didn’t lose consciousness in the crash, which was a fortunate thing. He’d seen the eyes of the Rog’tausch as he drove it right into the wall, watched those black pupils get really big, had the satisfaction of smiling as he ran it into a brick wall at about fifty.

Good times.

He also was awake when the thing started to move again, and he was acutely aware that it was probably pissed off, and whatever damage he’d done was bound to inspire some form of vengeance. He didn’t know much about demons, but he suspected vengeance was probably a thing with these fuckers, especially given it had chased his dad half a mile in the back of a truck just for taking a few ineffectual shots at it.

He shifted to reverse and started to back up, but it was slow going. He looked out the back window and floored it, listened to the tires skid and fail to gain traction. The whole vehicle was listing forward, and that probably wasn’t good.

Switching to plan B for Bail Out, Brian swung open the door and jumped into the rubble, scrambling to get out of the house. The engine was still idling, but he could hear more ominous noises below that, the sounds of shifting bricks and squealing supports that told him that the floor of this house was not going to be long for this world.