DIRE : BORN (The Dire Saga Book 1) (33 page)

“If you had insisted on it, you would not be the person you need to be here, and History would go on.” He looked me up and down. “But the battle is not won yet, and History may grind on without you regardless.”

“WE SHALL SEE, JANISSARY. WE SHALL SEE.”

Bunny snorted laughter, and both Khalid and I looked at her, confused.

“It's just... wow you sounded like a classical supervillain with that statement. All you needed was a sinister laugh at the end, and a vat of acid to lower him into or something.”

“CUTE,” I remarked. I was a little stung, really. Not much I could do to help matters, old me had done her level best to mold me into a villain. But I was doing good here, regardless of whatever label I ended up with after all was said and done.

A cold wind blew, rustling the tents, and I watched people get down to business. Husbands embraced wives, mothers embraced children, and goodbyes were said. My people were solemn and quiet. A gray light filtered through the overcast clouds above, lending a gloomy air to it all. A light snow started to fall, and I sighed as I surveyed the place that had been home to me, for most of my remembered life.

I had the uncanny feeling that I would never see it again.

CHAPTER 19: Going Down Fighting

“They didn't follow Barbatos because he was strong, though he was. They didn't follow him because he was vicious and brutal, though no one else came close. They followed him because he was sharp. Motherfucker covered all the angles. Called all the shots. He was somethin' else, and Dire's first plan... well, it didn't go so good.”

--From the statement of Martin Jackson, survivor of the Y2K incident, and former confidant of Doctor Dire.

We moved west. The APC took the lead, crawling slowly as I flew above. The thirty-odd people we had fanned out behind, taking both sides of the street. Inside the APC, Bunny drove and Sparky manned the turret. And we put blocks behind us, as we rolled toward the Towers. A light snow fell over it all, and the morning was silent save for the thrum of the APC's engine.

We made it about eight blocks before the first shots started coming our way. A few whistled by me, a few poked at the APC, and a very few headed toward our 'troops', who were still a good couple of hundred feet back.

I switched the mask to thermal sight, and found the shooters holed up in a parking garage to the south. I swooped that way, sent a couple of spike rounds into the lip of the garage. The impacts sent puffs of concrete shrapnel up. They ducked back and stopped firing, but it didn't matter. I hadn't shot at them to hit them, I'd fired at them to mark them for Sparky. And sure enough, he obliged with a seriously heavy bolt of lightning that sparked through the floor they were on, sizzling between cars and sending the shooters jerking and twitching to the floor.

They might have survived it, since it wasn't a direct hit, but I didn't spare the time to check on them. This was war, now. They were on the side I wasn't, and all we could do was get through it. I played spotter, waiting for the gunshots and pointing out positions to Sparky. In the few cases where the barriers they were behind were too solid for his bolts, or too insulated, I used spike rounds to drive them back. Only once did I have to zoom in for a close-up fight, bursting through a brick wall to get at the snipers who had set up lightning rods in the windows to either side of their occupied apartment. It was clever, but when faced with the bulk of my upgraded armor, they had no chance. I dropped one as he went with a beanbag to the back, and let the other go. He'd dropped his guns, and I threw them out the window before I left. Though I'd been drilled at point blank range by hunting rifles, I was pleased to see that the heat increase was quite minor. By the time I got back to the battle group it had faded entirely.

We didn't face the first serious ambush until we were about three blocks from the Towers. The sound of approaching vehicles alerted me, and I saw incoming garbage trucks from the north and south. It looked like they were trying to get in position to ram the APC as it came through an intersection. I gnawed my lip as I considered the heavy vehicles. It looked like more metal had been bolted to the front of them, so my coilgun wouldn't be sufficient to stop one without a lot of work.

This was going to cause some trouble.

I fired the coilgun at the southern one, twisted, and dove toward the northern one. I dropped onto the hood, scrabbling with my gauntlets, managing to dig in before the truck started twisting and turning. Behind the armored slits on the windshield, I could see a grizzled man with an untrimmed beard. He was yanking on the wheel for all he was worth, trying to shake me off.

If he was in a car, he might've had a chance of doing it. But the truck was slow and lumbering, and handled poorly. I waited until the turn was done, whipped my arm up and punched metal-clad fingers into the windshield armor. With a scream of tearing metal and shattering glass, my armor's hydraulics ground and thundered, and I ripped away a huge patch of armor. My next punch went through the windshield, grabbing hold of the wheel and ripping it away. That done I threw myself from the hood, kicking in the gravitics and hovering up as the truck twisted and went out of control. I heard it crash as I rocketed back toward the APC, and saw Sparky throwing bolt after bolt of flashing lightning at the other truck. Its hood slagged, the armor smoking, it nonetheless plowed into the APC in a crunching crash. I held my breath as the truck rebounded, and the APC tipped up, up, and hung on edge for a split-second before crashing down on its wheels again. I exhaled a long sigh of relief. That couldn't have been good for the transmission, but it could have been much worse.

Distant popping, and my forcefield rippled as it registered a hit. The Black Bloods had used the distraction to move their people up, and I juked right as I surveyed the ground. Our troops had come into play as they moved up. They used cover as best they could, and fired back. Some had fallen already, and I didn't have time to count them or see how bad their wounds were. Sparky's scrap shield was jerking back and forth, splinters flying as the Bloods did their level best to shoot it to bits, and Sparky wasn't returning fire. I hoped he had enough sense to stay down in the main body of the vehicle.

Right.

First priority, getting Sparky back into play.

I landed, raced towards the garbage truck as it backed away from the APC. The driver flung open the cab and ran. The thing was pouring smoke out from under the hood anyway, I estimated a cracked battery. It was out of play, but it gave me a bit of cover as I followed it back and checked sightlines as I went. There! Up on top of some sort of civic building, judging by the artillery piece on the front lawn. I rocketed up, firing beanbag rounds as I went to keep the sniper's head down. Thanks to the work that Abes and I had done, firing the coilgun didn't mess up the forcefield in any appreciable way anymore.

Which was good, as there was a squad waiting for me when I ascended to rooftop level again. Four men leveled machine pistols my direction and cut loose as I roared forward, sweeping my arms wide. The sniper ran for cover as my armor started to heat up, but then I was among them, catching two of them in the stomach and throwing them back in a perfect double clothesline before dropping my feet to skid to a stop. They flew backwards and fell off the roof with despairing screams. More screams rose as I triggered the flamethrower in the general direction of the last three. The sniper never stopped running, jerking open an access door and descending. The other two couldn't get out of the way as the flame washed over them, and I left them screaming and burning and trying to put themselves out as I turned and jetted toward the second sniper's nest.

This one was in the middle of a defunct shopping mall. It had been long-abandoned, judging by the wear-and-tear, broken windows, and empty concourses visible as I burst through a sheet of plate-glass and came to a stop on a cracked, dirty tile floor. This had been a food court once, I noted as muzzles flashed.

I turned my flight into a lumbering run, scooping up a table as I went. I hurled it at the group firing at me and they scattered... one of them too late, as it bowled him over with a despairing scream. He didn't get up. The coilgun accounted for another, and the third one nailed me in the chest with both barrels of a shotgun as I stomped toward him. The forcefield ate it, and I welcomed the warmth against the cold of the day. I grabbed his throat with one hand, picked him up, and shook him before kicking in the stungun. I dropped him as he went limp, and let the heat sinks do their work for a minute as I turned to the window and the fight outside to consider my next move.

And then my world was light and fire and an eerie silence, and I realized that I'd been at ground zero of an explosion. The heat level in my suit rocketed upward, and I sweltered as I fell down, distinctly aware that I was smoking, vapor pouring out of the armor's vents to sizzle in the cold air.

I'd gotten cocky. Couldn't do that again. Poking my head up I scanned with thermal sight, saw nothing— Wait! A small, hot sphere rocketed in the window, bounced randomly, and detonated a couple of hundred feet to my right. It sprayed shrapnel across a defunct escalator. Grenade? Yes. Coming from below by the angle, just sheer bad luck I'd been caught the last time. Or was it?

I turned off the forcefield, and the heat sinks went into overdrive to vent the accumulated charge. Hearing slowly returned as I crawled towards a long-abandoned Frickin' Chicken, getting a heavy counter between me and the outside. My ears were ringing, and I wondered about permanent damage, but at this point it was the least of my worries.

Thermal sight caught two more grenades coming up, and I winced. They had multiple launchers out there. Probably more waiting for me to come out a window. I'd been bottled up, right at the point I was needed most.

This had to be Barbatos' doing. He was supposed to be the strategist of the operation. 

Well, no matter. If things were going to plan, then Roy would have fired the flaregun we'd gotten from the Midtown Militia by now. That had been the pre-arranged signal for the Steampunks to take the Towers. Also had the side benefit of maybe involving the Militia, if they cared to show up.

Another grenade rolled in and detonated. My counter sprouted holes as it took some shrapnel, and I shook my head. Couldn't stay here, couldn't go out... I checked my heat levels, found them good, and activated the forcefield again. Then I stood and jogged toward the central atrium of the mall, activating the gravitics as I leaped off my current floor, and headed to the ground.

A shower of sparks, and the whine of my forcefield, as a heavy hit struck my back! I twisted, feeling the heat rise again, and caught a glimpse of a silvery metal mask staring down at me from a second floor balcony. I landed, my legs flexing as I crouched on the tile. I looked up at my attacker. He didn't have a gun out. What was he doing?

My answer came as his arm flashed and I had no time to dodge as a silvery blur sped out from him. It hit the forcefield, and my heat jumped to sweltering levels as the object ricocheted away. It stuck in a nearby directory board, quivering.

It was a butcher knife. He'd thrown a butcher knife hard enough to trigger my forcefield, and it had struck me with about half the force of a grenade.

I ran for cover and he vaulted the railing, leaped down. A silvery mask gleamed on a seven-foot giant... he was muscled, stocky, wearing a black shirt with torn-off sleeves and sweat pants. He wore a broad leather belt, with various knives and hatchets hanging from it. They provided a clinking cacophony as he moved, that I barely heard through my ringing ears. He moved in front of me, and I turned the forcefield off. I'd have to take this on the armor, or he could cook me alive with only a few hits.

And as I analyzed his threat, I remembered where I'd seen him before. The church... Sangre had called him 'Sir.' Given what I knew now, that meant that he had to be—

“BARBATOS.”

“Yes.” And that was the voice I remembered. “You've done well to get this far,” he said, stalking forward as he pulled out two knives. He spun them in his hands, as I backed up.

“AND YOU'VE DONE WELL TO BOX DIRE IN.” I confirmed, sidling around him, looking for an advantage. “DIDN'T EXPECT TO SEE YOU THIS EARLY IN THE GAME.”

His mask turned to track mine. It was round and featureless save for eyeholes and a few circles punched in for airflow. Someone had called it a hockey mask, I remembered. That didn't help me right now, though.

Then he leaped for me, and I met him with a fist to the face. After that it was a slog as we danced back and forth across the floor of the atrium. I'd punch at him and hit with about half my blows. Or try to clinch or grapple him, and those he'd dodge or take it on an arm and twist free. He'd respond with a flurry of attacks with the knives, chopping and hacking at my armor with hideous strength. And as we traded hits I realized I was losing.

The flamethrower tube had been hacked open and fuel spilled, coating the area beneath us. The stungun's circuitry had been split by a deep hit, that came close to getting to my flesh. My gauntlets and arms were getting wrecked, and the torso armor was battered and dented all to hell and back. I was starting to lose synch as circuits became damaged, and he... he wasn't slowing at all. I was hitting him with blows that should be breaking bone, or throwing him around like a ragdoll. But the worst that happened was that he'd stagger back a step or two before coming back in swinging, or turn so that I couldn't hit him in the same place twice.

As we fought, my hearing slowly returned, and I realized two things. One, that people had gathered on the third floor railings. They were looking down into the atrium and howling, cheering, yelling at him to finish me off. Black Bloods, by the look of them, at least twenty. That worried me. If he felt confident enough to bring in this many and keep them out of the fight outside, it meant that the fight was done and they'd won. Or that or he wasn't worried about it whatsoever.

The second thing that I realized, was that the bastard was laughing. Every time I hit him, he'd laugh. Every time I dodged or parried a strike, he'd laugh louder. And as I stumbled, as I showed signs of fatigue, his moves became more exaggerated and mocking. He was enjoying this. Aside from the dent I'd put in his mask from the first punch, I hadn't landed a serious hit on him. This was not going well, and I needed a game changer. Fast.

I flicked on the forcefield, and a split-second later his knife slammed into me, rebounded. He hesitated, and I knelt and slammed my stungun into the ground, tried to trigger it. Only sparks... but sparks were all I needed. I kicked in the gravitics and went airborne, as the fuel I'd spilled all over the atrium floor ignited.