Angeli (23 page)

What did matter was what she saw next. She reached an intersection at the bottom of a slope. Her gaze fell on a mass of shades wider and blacker than any she’d seen. The sizzling howl was so loud she winced. And the smell! If she weren’t careful, she was going to be throwing up the breakfast she hadn’t had.

Dotting the expanse of creatures were the tops of several sickly-white mounds, around which the blackness boiled and bubble. The begetter drones. The monsters that made monsters.

She was there. It was almost over. Somewhere, beyond those creatures lay the doorway to hell.

Adelita climbed a debris heap to get a better look. Her feet scrabbled on broken glass, and she fell to one knee. The mesh protected her from getting cut.

Wheezing, she reached a higher vantage point and inspected her goal.

Opposite her, on the other side of hell, was a half-collapsed parking garage. Another garage lay to the west in somewhat better shape. The sun, rising in the east, was beginning to heat the air. Its rays fell across the accumulated shades in wan stripes.

No sign of the nexus. Nikolas had assured her she’d know it when she saw it, but all she saw were the drones and far too many shades.

East of the begetters, the shades poured into a gap between buildings. The mass burbled purposefully in that direction. Yet, after a minute or two of watching, the density of shades remained the same.

How could they crawl to the east in a constant stream without diminishing the horde? Were they never-ending? Perhaps and perhaps not, but as she watched, they halted their easterly course and redirected their attentions.

To the south. To her.

They’d sensed her. They were coming. Behind her, beside her—in every direction—were more blotches, amassing and slithering along the roadways. Over the rubble. Closing in.

She had nowhere to go. Might as well go forward. Dios indeed. She would be seeing Him soon.

Please let this work, Lord.
Nothing else mattered.

Shades had collected at the base of her lookout post. They oozed together like drops of mercury sliding into a larger puddle. Would any daemons show up to help them? She cleared a route down the rubble, sending shades into nonexistence and concrete chips flying. Firing and limping, she ran straight toward the begetters.

In seconds, she was in the thick of it, completely surrounded. She swung her blasters, cursing. Using a trick Nikolas had described, she clasped her sprained wrist in her other hand to create one big, fat laser and started spinning in a circle.

Bought herself a couple seconds. With a grimace, she swept a corridor forward, a short one, because shades kept bloating into it. She had to stop to torch them out of her peripherals.

Her injured leg threatened to crumple whenever she pivoted. Really, whenever she put weight on it. She crept ten feet closer to the drones. Then ten more feet closer. At this distance, fine cracks in the drones’ surface glimmered with red fire. The stench in the air brought tears to her eyes. She could see more drones beyond the first ones, forming the defensive circle around the nexus.

She had to get past them.

The skin on her forearms crackled with the heat from the blasters. She flinched when the damage grew intense, and one of her laser shots went wild. It struck a begetter dead center.

The monster keened with a noise so high and horrible, she had to clap her hands over her ears. The lasers, sputtering, arched into the sky. Luckily she didn’t blow off her own head.

A stray beam exploded through the parking garage to the north. Oops.

The dilapidated structure groaned. Adelita stared, her heart in her throat. A huge slab tumbled through the air, right toward a begetter drone.

Would it crush the monster?

No, dammit. Despite being much larger than the drone, the masonry bounced off as if the entity were made of rubber, landing in the expanse of shades.

The giant chunk of building was bare for a second before shades oozed around the edges, through the cracks. Then they crawled over it. The begetter that had been struck quivered. It had withstood a blow that would have flattened an elephant.

Adelita expressed her disappointment by razing more shades. She’d just blasted the space in front of her when a rush of icy death absorbed her whole body. It overtook her consciousness and blotted out all sounds, sights and smells. Her sense of touch was the only thing that remained in the blackness.

She’d been caught from behind. She was dying, her soul being eaten by a shade.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t run. Horror crushed her like a falling building. Her knees threatened to buckle, and her arms went limp.

Her still-blazing lasers carved through the shade that had touched her, freeing her from its grasp.

Adelita’s senses returned with a violent wrench. She vomited. As suspected, there was nothing in her stomach. Her body convulsed until the air returned to her lungs. Firing in every direction, she stumbled along the shrinking passageway she’d blown open seconds ago.

Shit, shit, shit! Too close. She’d almost died. She couldn’t do this. How much of her soul had they taken? She’d never make it past the begetters to plant the bomb.

But she was still conscious.

She could kill more shades. Maybe a begetter, which had definitely not enjoyed the touch of her laser. If she killed enough begetters, would it disrupt the kill zone and enable Nikolas or Gregori to enter? Or was that too simple, something they’d tried before?

She heard a loud rumble, and a layer of the parking garage she’d shot collapsed. Dust billowed out in thick clouds. The shades continued to squeeze her from all sides.

She shot more. Inched toward her goal, shade by shade. The darkness lay so thick near the begetters, it resembled a bottomless pit. She had to spin in place for many seconds at a time, her lasers firing nonstop, to keep them from touching her again.

Inch forward. Spin.

Her arms screamed with pain. The bands felt welded to her bones from the repeated sessions of heat and agony.

Soon she reached a point where forward momentum ceased. In fact, it seemed as if the shades had solidified. She was slowly but surely being driven from the nexus. It was all she could do to keep the shades from eating her. No matter how many she killed, the begetters spat out more.

There were too many, and she had no idea how to deal. No idea what she’d do if daemons showed up. No comm to ask Nikolas for advice. No way to get help from anyone except God, so as she kept shooting, she prayed, harder than she’d ever prayed before, for inspiration.

If you want me to do this, Lord, I’m going to need a boost.

If only she had wings. If only she could leap over the monsters, fly above them, climb past them. Where was a handy vine when you needed it?

Another thunderous complaint from the damaged parking garage gave her an idea.

Concrete wouldn’t crush the entities. But if there was enough of it, it would take the shades time to seep to the top of the pile. All she needed to do was create the rubble and beat them to the top. The nexus, which Nikolas had told her would suck anything that touched it into itself, wouldn’t stay covered, and she could drop the bomb right into it like a stone into a well.

Plunk
.

…

It took both parking garages before there was enough wreckage covering the nexus that Adelita could move forward with her plan. Plus, she had no more buildings to destroy. The massive concrete knoll she’d created shuddered and groaned, unstable but as-yet entity-free. The eastern side seemed to be collapsing. The nexus, she guessed, dragging pieces of building into itself.

The entities’ initial base of operations had been located underground, beneath this very parking lot, during the months after the angeli had arrived. A fierce but furtive unit of daemons and shades, responsible for locating planets full of sentients, had settled there to begin the process of creating a dimensional rift. Her people had suspected the infestation was in this area, based on daemon and shade sightings before the apocalypse, but they hadn’t had the technology to figure out where.

The angeli and their evil Ship hadn’t shared its coordinates until near the end, when they’d spurred the US government to evacuate the West Coast. That was back when they’d all assumed their Chosen Idiot could wipe his own ass.

Adelita was, ironically, the Chosen One now.

Many begetter drones had been buried by the buildings, but she could see the ones on the edge closest to her. Now she just had to torch a path to the rubble without getting the rest of her soul eaten.

…

Gregori swooped past Nikolas, who was encumbered by a woman dangling in a tactanium flight harness. The woman was an excellent shot, but even an excellent shot could only wield two guns at a time.

He aimed carefully and took out the last daemon in blaster range. More approached, tiny dots in the clear blue sky. They wouldn’t arrive for several minutes.

As soon as they were out of immediate danger, Niko started shouting at him. “Damn the void, you can’t go in there, Gregori.”

He floated in an updraft, wishing he could shoot Niko out of the sky. But the woman helping the bilge-brain didn’t deserve that fate. “I can and will.”

“There’s no getting out of there alive. I barely made it out to meet Tracy, and that was thirty minutes ago. With all the activity, too many daemons have been summoned to protect the aerial approaches.”

“I’m not so sure they’re guarding the nexus. I think they’re all headed toward your bait,” Gregori pointed out, letting the anger bleed into his voice. “You disgust me, Niko.”

Niko’s expression turned stony. “I did what had to be done.”

“Niko didn’t force us to be bait.” Tracy, who was small and round and brown-skinned, pointed a gun in the direction of her fellow Terrans. “Every single one of us volunteered, just like your lady. Without our help, Adelita wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“She doesn’t stand a chance now!” Gregori bellowed.

“She’s our savior. She has increased our chance of success to something measurable.” Tracy slapped her thigh. “Until she agreed to do it, it was going to be me making the nexus run. I’m not pregnant, but I use crutches. Pretty poor odds, right? We couldn’t trust or train anyone else on such short notice.”

“How long have you been planning this, Niko?” Gregori said.

“Two and a half weeks.”

“By the void, why didn’t you include me?” Together, they could have been so much more effective, so much smarter. And he’d never have met Adelita. “She could already be dead because you didn’t include me.”

“I should have told you. I didn’t. Had my reasons. Now we move on.” Niko’s headset lit up. “Have faith, Gregori.”

“In what? Her god or our code? Or am I supposed to hope the Shipborn cavalry is coming?” They were so far out of the realm of code here, if they survived this, they wouldn’t be imprisoned. Sent dirtside somewhere miserable.

Ship might actually have them put down as a danger to itself, themselves, and all others.

“Have faith in Adelita,” Niko said with a wry smile. “I’ve learned not to underestimate what Terrans are capable of. More importantly, Terrans whom Ship didn’t choose for us.”

“What are you saying?” Gregori asked.

Niko looked as though he wanted to talk, but instead he shook his head. “Later. We have to go. More daemons reached the women.” He adjusted the straps suspending Tracy. “Come with us.”

While the women did deserve protection, there was no guessing how many daemons and shades surrounded Adelita. “No. I’m getting her out of there.”

Niko flew closer to Gregori, the camaraderie they used to share burning in his eyes. “Direct your efforts where they’ll do some good. There’s no way you can rescue her. Even if you find her without getting eaten, she has to plant that bomb.”

“I should be the one transporting the bomb.”

“The risk is too high. You can’t enter the kill zone, and trying to hit the nexus with the bomb from a distance…it’s impossible. Adelita is the better candidate.”

“I can do it.” And he would—if he could find her in time.

He arched his wings to fly off, but Niko’s enraged yell stopped him. “Don’t be a fool! Adelita’s death won’t wake the leviathan, but yours will.”

“We have no proof one will be woken after the nexus is sealed,” Gregori said. He could accept his fate, but he could not accept deserting Adelita to hers. “I won’t fail to close it.”

“As many entities as there are on this planet? A leviathan’s a guarantee,” Niko spat.

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe this. If you go, we’re dead.”

“You’d know about death, wouldn’t you?” Niko had sent Adelita to her death, and there was no guarantee it would benefit anyone, much less the planet. She was neither trained nor prepared for such a mission. Granted, she was a better candidate than a sharpshooting Terran on crutches or a team of pregnant shade magnets, but it was still an inconceivable gamble.

Gregori’s internal chronometer ticked off the seconds while he argued. It had now been approximately thirty-seven minutes since Adelita had been abandoned in the shade zone. If she were still on track, at any moment, the bomb could explode and suck the life from all of them.

At any moment.

This was his decision. If he and Adelita couldn’t escape, the bomb would take them together.

“Good-bye, Nikolas.” Gregori saluted his former lieutenant. “Get those poor women out of here.”

“Poor women,” Tracy scoffed. “Should I shoot him?”

“It won’t do any good,” Niko answered bitterly. “He’s shielded and we can’t waste time fighting him. We’ve got to switch to plan C.”

The last thing Gregori heard was Tracy’s cursing, almost as inventively as her sister Claire.

…

Adelita made it to the garage mound, but gaining the top had been another matter. First she’d killed three begetters. They were easy targets, sitting there like giant rotten eggs, though their shrieking had deafened her. Everything sounded fuzzy and full of echoes. And then, halfway up the slope, a daemon had dive-bombed her, and she’d had to kill it, too, which had delayed her further. Now the shades were oozing up the rubbish heap after her.