Ascendance (33 page)

‘
Karen
,’ Dave called out over the cacophony of battle.

She turned away from her firing post and as soon as she saw him she knew.

‘Oh gross! You didn’t! You ate its brains?’

‘He totally did!’ Jack cried out. ‘And that’s what I said.’

‘It was awesome but,’ Toby said from where he crouched hidden behind Dave’s legs. ‘Dad went UFC on that Bigfoot.’

‘Sounds more like your Dad went KFC on him,’ said Annie as she scrabbled across the floor, never raising her head above knee level. ‘Toby, Jack, to me,’ she said in a high voice. ‘I’m going to get them out the back on Dad’s boat.’

‘No you’re not,’ both Dave and O’Halloran said at once. Pat had taken up position near the window where Igor had been standing before he’d run out to the Growler. Immediately after speaking he lifted his shotgun in a smooth, unhurried motion, and fired off a round with a dull roar.

‘You won’t get ten yards,’ Dave said. ‘Archers will cut you down.’

But he had a thought.

‘Haul them down into the root cellar. It’s better than up here.’

As if to emphasise the point a flurry of iron bolts poured in through the window, provoking an answering hail of fire from Karen.

‘Go. Go on now,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll hold them off up here.’ Knowing he was lying to them as he said it.

Well, it wasn’t like that was the first time.

He shielded the boys with his own body, ushering them into the kitchen which ran off the lounge. Annie crawled through after them. The root cellar was an old damp dugout carved from the granite of the rocky headland. Pat used to tell stories about bootleggers having used it, and Annie’s old man had indeed kept a few crates of booze down there. The kitchen windows looked out on the waters of greater Penobscot Bay and for a second Dave considered whether Annie might be right and they could escape over water. But he dismissed the idea for the same reason he’d rejected it before. A Sliveen archer could put a war shaft through them hundreds of yards out into the bay. At its leisure.

They were much less exposed to
arrakh
fire in here. Dave hauled up the heavy trapdoor, and he was about to jump down into the dark hole and check it out for them when Karen called to him.

‘Hooper. Better get out here now.’

‘Get in,’ he said to Annie, no time to argue.

The boys, who were forever sneaking into the cellar to play, needed no invitation. Annie hesitated.

‘Is it going to be all right, Dave? Are we going to get through this?’

‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Just get down out of sight and stay there. Don’t come out until I come to get you. No matter what you hear.’

‘Hooper. Hurry the fuck up.’



‘Coming,’ he yelled back at Karen. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Everything will be fine.’

Annie looked back out the door toward the lounge room, where things were obviously not fine.

‘I don’t blame you,’ she said, turning her eyes on his. ‘I don’t blame you for this. You came back for them.’

‘And for you,’ he said. It seemed the right thing to say.

‘Now I know you’re lying.’

She followed their boys down into the cellar and he closed the trapdoor behind them, wishing he had time to find them some candles or a torch.

‘HOOPER!’


‘Coming. Fuck. This is
just
like being home.’

He ran back through to the lounge. Something was missing. The big guns had stopped firing.

They were about to be overrun.

33

‘N
ow, Superiorae! Up, up and into the fight. We will hack them down.’

The Lieutenants Grymm who had prevented Lord Guyuk from charging pointlessly into the teeth of the human fire now flanked him, ready to charge alongside their commander. The entire thrall, what survived of it, was moving as one.

The terrible fires of the human warriors had sputtered, and although they had not died away completely they no longer cut through the ranks of the Dread Company like the hot breath of
dar Drakon
. Individual Hunn and Grymm still fell to aimed fire, but their loss only meant greater glory for those who remained.

‘Have at them, Threshrend,’ roared Guyuk. ‘We have exhausted their magicks, broken their defences and now we shall crush them under our dead if the need of it be so.’

He plucked the tiny daemon from where it hid behind the cover of a rocky spur, and thrust it into the charge, not judging the little creature for its cowardice, for he too had wisely sheltered from the worst of the firestorm. Instead, Lord Guyuk ur Grymm felt sincerely grateful to the mutant empath, the daemonum and the host of calfling souls it had consumed.

Its plan seemed to be working.

They had the Dave trapped and at their mercy.

He roared with good-natured laughter at that. The mercy of the Horde. Compt’n ur Threshrend squeaked something like a protest but Guyuk was having none of it.

‘Stiffen those eyestalks, Threshrend! Summon up the ichor. Set your fang tracks a-blur and stretch wide your jaws to feast upon
DAR IENAMIC
.’

‘Dar ienamic!’ roared the Lieutenants Grymm, and within moments Guyuk’s entire thrall had taken up the chant to honour the foe it was about to devour.

‘Yeah yeah, the fucking enemas,’ cried Compt’n ur Threshrend. ‘We all love the fucking enemas.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Lord Guyuk shouted over the din and crash and mad shrieking tumult of war and murder.

He started at a run through the thin forest, toward the little barracks house where the Dave and his thrall were entrapped. It was pricked and feathered with the shafts of arrakh-mi and arrakh-du. The path forward was beset with the fallen bodies of Grymm warriors and Hunn dominants, some of them burning fiercely with the eldritch flames that consumed those touched by Drakon fire. But Guyuk knew there was no magick to this. Just the human magick of ‘science’ which had fashioned the tiniest of the calflings’
arrakh
munitions and locked within them the secret of fire. Even now, a long sinuous line of yellow calfling fire licked out of a port in the stone redoubt and took the head off one of his own Lieutenants Grymm, spraying hot steaming skull meats over the lord commander’s face.

‘It is good,’ he roared at the Threshrend he half-carried, half-dragged along beside him. ‘It is meat for the Horde, Threshrend.’

*

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Karen shouted at Dave.

She tossed something through the air and he caught it without thinking.

Lucille.

The return of the strength and spirit he’d felt upon choking down the brains of his slain
ienamic
redoubled as the hardwood shaft slapped into his palm. Lucille’s battle song swelled with the power of a massed choir in Dave’s head. He felt her strength, her will, her killing soul flow in to him. And he saw that it was still useless.

They were all going to die.

The night moved toward them.

A dark, unbroken line of Horde warriors charged across the short distance between the cleared forest and Pat O’Halloran’s perfectly maintained front lawn. Or at least it had been perfectly maintained until Zach had parked a jeep on it and he and Igor had raked the free-fire zone with bullets and bombs. It was the dark hour before dawn. Not the gloaming pre-dawn in which the promise of sun is present in the creeping grey light where shadows take on form. No. It was the darkest of hours and monsters moved through it.

‘Don’t bother,’ Karen warned him, sensing his instinctual reaction to warp out there and start swinging. ‘Threshers.’

Having exhausted the big, jeep-mounted guns, the SEALs had retreated inside again. Zach stood in cover by the same window he’d first guarded. He fired two short bursts from his machine gun, and threw a hand grenade out into the night. It exploded a few seconds later. Igor fired blind, poking the muzzle of his machine gun out of the window while remaining in cover, squeezing the trigger once, twice, three times. He cursed, swapped out the magazine and turned back to the fight, loosing a strangled scream into the chaos when two arrakh-mi, shot from an extreme angle, punched into his shoulder and thigh. The big man went down, his gun dropping to the floor amongst dozens of spent shell casings.

Dave leaped to him, covering the fallen commando with his own body as he swept up the gun and stood in the ruin of the window frame firing into the mass of accelerating Hunn and Grymm berserkers.

‘Hunn. Hunn. Hunn ur HORDE.’

The gun bucked in his hand, surprising him. He’d half expected to have to fuck around with the safety, which he doubted he could find in time.

‘Hunn ur HORDE. Hunn ur HORDE.’

The mad horror of the monster charge slowed down, but only in his mind, the way everything slows in extreme moments. It wasn’t magic, just human neurology. There was magic, however, in the way he was able to size up the shots he took. The lines, angles and calculations of timing and effect he had first experienced in New Orleans were available to him again, like a pull-down menu of enchanted options. He squeezed the trigger and the gun roared. Two armour-piercing rounds and one tracer bullet left the muzzle, travelling straight and true across the fifty yards to the leading dominant, taking the Hunn at the base of his throat and climbing up the fright mask of his face. The monster’s head exploded like a fat piece of jungle fruit dropped from a great height and he went down, lifeless arms and legs tripping two more Hunn behind him. Dave killed them with three round bursts, right into the cabbage. The gun, Dave understood, was set to fire three bullets for every trigger pull, and he wished he knew enough about the weapon to quickly set it to single shot. He was certain he could make every shot he took.

But there was no time.

Igor disappeared from beneath him, crying out as Zach dragged him away from the exposed position by the window.

‘Get him in the cellar with the others,’ Dave yelled as he cut down a Sliveen scout that had cocked a long arm to launch a clutch of throwing stars at him. Multi-tasking like a boss. ‘We can retreat there. Hold them off.’

‘HUNN UR HORDE.’

The chant seemed to grow in volume as more and more of the beasts emerged at a run from the trees, undeterred by the pathetic blatting of O’Halloran’s Ruger; the dry cough of Karen’s submachine gun clicking on an empty magazine.

‘Do it,’ she cried at Zach as he struggled to haul Igor out of harm’s way.

Dave snorted with laughter at that.

Maybe they’d be out of harm’s way in Tasmania.

‘Hooper is right. We can hold them at the choke points,’ she shouted, and she sounded mad for it.

‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Dave said as she drew the long killing steel of
Ushi to yasashi to.
‘But hot. Crazy hot.’

‘No. I am not crazy,’ she said, and her voice was different. It was
her
voice, in his head, not his ears. She spoke into him as Ekaterina Varatchevsky, a loyal daughter of the Rodina. ‘I am Russian,’ she cast into his mind, holding her katana so that it glinted in the moonlight. ‘And this is my fate.
Ushi to yasashi to.
Sorrowful and unbearable.’

‘Hunn. Hunn. Hunn ur HORDE.’

‘Help Zach with Igor,’ Dave yelled at O’Halloran. The Navy SEAL had dragged his comrade all the way into the kitchen, a thick blood trail marking his passage. But he was going to have trouble getting him down the ladder into the root cellar. The old seadog slung his shotgun over one shoulder and hurried to lift the trapdoor as Zach manoeuvred the wounded man over the lip and down into the dark. A monstrous face appeared at the kitchen window, then disappeared in a gaudy green and yellow splash as Dave swung the submachine gun around and snapped off a tight burst, threading a bright, neon ribbon of tracers over Zach and Pat as they bent to the task of lowering Igor down.

The machine gun was empty. It might have had a grenade he could have fired off, but there was no time to check and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to work the underslung launcher anyway. He tossed the weapon aside and took up Lucille as Igor slipped out of sight and Zach unseated his fighting knife. He too was out of ammo.

Dave heard him reciting the Lord’s Prayer as the first of the daemon killers hit the front porch at a run.

‘. . . thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven . . .’

O’Halloran’s Ruger barked fire and thunder and seemed the loudest noise Dave had heard in the confined space all night. A swarm of super-heated wasps flew past his face and punched into the chest, throat and face of the first dominant to reach the house. The Hunn collapsed in a crashing train wreck of armour plate and flopping, flying limbs. The corpse slammed into the window frame, blocking it just a little with its bulk.

‘Go!’ Dave yelled at the remaining SEAL. ‘Get down there with Igor and my family. Take Pat. He keeps trying to shoot me.’

But Zach did not. He bundled the protesting old seadog down the steps and slammed the cellar door shut on top of them.

And the three remaining calflings, champions all, stood into the thunder of the Horde. Dozens of the beasts, hundreds of them, were mere yards away now, moving as fast as big cats. Dave heard glass breaking. Wood cracking and crashing. The charge hit the little red brick cottage like a tsunami made flesh. Rank, profane, corrupt daemon flesh. The entire structure shook and shuddered and unknown tonnages of snarling, seething monster meat piled up outside, trapped for a few, undoubtedly short moments, like a crowd in a theatre piling up at the doors after someone shouts ‘Fire!’

Karen’s magic blade flashed. Sorrowful and unbearable. Carving meat and cleaving bones.

Zach produced another firearm from somewhere. A handgun, which he fired slowly, methodically, into the pile-up at the doors and windows, picking his targets carefully. He had all the time in the world because his time in the world was surely done. He was building a barricade of dead monster bodies, laying down each huge stone as carefully as a master mason.

In Dave’s hands, Lucille did not so much sing as she pealed to the heavens, like the ringing of a great, black cathedral bell, while the ur-Champion swung mightily at the press of unyielding muscle and bone, forcing it to yield to the savage bite of the enchanted weapon’s cutting edge. He and Karen fell into a dance, a rapid blurring ballet of slaughter that hacked and smashed at the black wave which crashed on them. The Hunn and their Grymm allies howled and bellowed in rage and pain and the psychotic need to close and kill, but all they did was close and die. At least as long as the champions held.

And then, at last, inevitably, they fell.

Not through fatigue or a failure of will. Not through a want of courage or
gurikh
. It was simple math. Speed and mass. So many daemonum piled on so quickly that first one sword swing missed, and then a hammer blow, and then another, and then the room was full of thrashing claws and blades. Zach’s gun fell silent as the last magicks of men petered out.

Hot drool spat and flew as Dave swung Lucille’s axehead into the skull of a Sergeant Grymm, hacking off the jaw. Beside him, Zach stabbed a Sliveen MasterScout in the throat as the creature scrabbled to free itself from the seething crush. His knife hand, his whole arm, was dark with daemon ichor. In his other hand he held a single grenade, unable to use it without a clear throw. Karen was no longer slashing, she simply plunged her steel into the mountain of monster flesh, stabbing deeply again and again. Dave smashed at the writhing pile, severing arms, cracking skulls, showering brains and bone and fangs around him. He thought, for one brief shining second, that they might just hold them. And then the dam burst and hell poured through.

Zach Allen screamed as a Sergeant Grymm impaled him on a broken pike and threw the dying SEAL over his massive shoulder, into a ravening horde of teeth and claws.

‘NO!’ Dave screamed, even louder than Zach. He launched himself after his friend but was thrown back by an explosion. The grenade Zach had been holding. He must have already pulled the pin and been holding the lever in place. It detonated in the savage, roiling tempest of Hunn and Grymm as they tried to tear him apart.

The Horde surged in and over them. Dave lost sight of Karen and lashed out with boot and fist, and in the final moments with fingernails and teeth. The fiends piled on top of him, protecting their prey momentarily as he closed his jaws around the throat of a Grymm warrior, felt the monster’s own fangs puncture his shoulder. The world was a cyclonic gyre of madness and violence and loss. He was buried under mountains of writhing, roaring monsters. He had lost contact with Karen. He had lost Zach. Lost Igor. Lost Annie and his boys and soon enough he would lose his life.

He forced his teeth together, his tiny jaw not suited to ripping and tearing like these brutes. The crush of so many foul-smelling creatures muted the uproar around him, but he thought he could hear the howling of the Grymm as its hide tore between his teeth and the thick, acidic daemon ichor flowed into his mouth, choking him. Almost drowning him. The Grymm wailed and flailed and tried to get away from the ridiculous little calfling which had dared to nip at it. Dave saw, or maybe imagined in a blurred shutter-rush of imagery, a giant chunk of A-Grade Dave steak being torn from his torso. Imagined his head being pulled from his body.

The Grymm bayed in horror as Dave refused to unclamp his jaws, instead working them harder, sucking more and more of the monster’s blood from its veins. The snarling death throes of the elite warrior increased in volume until Hooper thought he might go deaf before he died. With one snarling bellow of his own he tried to rip another mouthful of hot meat from the Grymm, coughing and all but choking as the head fell away.