Lohengrin began to turn toward the hospital, and Michelle released her bubble. It wasn’t as powerful as she’d meant it to be, but she needed his attention back on her and fast.
The bubble caught him in the chest, and he went down hard just before it exploded. Michelle staggered back as the blast wave hit her. It hurt. It hurt bad.
Billy Ray appeared at her side. He was covered in gore. “You think he’ll stay down?” he asked, wiping his face with the back of his hand. It didn’t help clean his face at all.
As if in reply, Klaus struggled to his feet. Billy Ray immediately jumped toward him. But Klaus was faster. He threw his hand out, swatting Billy Ray away like a gnat.
Billy Ray crumpled to the ground. Michelle was shocked. She never would have believed he could be defeated by anything.
And now she was alone.
She was the only thing between Lohengrin and the rest of them having a chance to get Horrorshow away.
“C’mon, Klaus,” Michelle shouted as she began to move to his right side. If he followed, it would turn him away from Franny and Bruckner. “I’ve always wondered which one of us would win in a fight.”
It wasn’t fair odds. Klaus was filled with some otherworldly power and towered over her by at least two and half meters. But the only hope she had of saving Adesina was to keep him occupied.
She blasted the ground underneath him. Chunks of dead monstrosities and fleshy ground blew into the air. Lohengrin stumbled and fell to his knees. Then bubble after bubble exploded against him. Even with the massive amount of fat she had on, she was beginning to thin up. But there was nothing else to do but keep at him. Every time he tried to get up, she slammed him down. He was getting angrier, but so was she. The red mist was falling over her mind. There was only one way to end this. Only one way she could think of to take him down and give the rest of them the time they needed. Only one way to save her daughter.
The tranquilizers had worn off. So she stopped resisting and let the terrible rage slide in. She released a hail of bubbles at Lohengrin, pouring every last ounce of rage she had into them.
He collapsed, dropping his sword, which lost its bloody fiery sheen as it fell from his hands. The ground shook as he landed and Michelle staggered backward. He didn’t get up.
The other supplicants hurled themselves before Mollie. Seeking to impede her approach to the Maggot Queen, they attacked her, wave upon scuttling wave: gaunts, nightmarepedes, shambling suppurating mountains of flesh. But she held them at bay, portaling them into each other’s roly-poly bodies. Three at once, twelve at once, thirty-seven at once, until they erupted in fountains of gore. She strode through a landscape punctuated by geysers of blood and ichor. Not far to the Maggot Queen now. Not far before Her Putrid Majesty rechristened her with the robe of flesh like a second womb from which Mollie would be reborn. She licked her teeth in anticipation and tasted salty blood. It made her giggle. She was an invincible indomitable merciless goddess. She was a MOTHERFUCKING GODDESS wading through a lake of SCARLET TAINTFILTH, feasting on the jelly orbs of—
A bee stung her on the shoulder.
Somehow, a bee slipped through the nonexistent gaps in her armor to sting her in the arm. It STUNG her in the fucking ARM and tainted her with its SLIMETOUCH. She swatted the little fucker away—it had taken the form of a syringe, as though that would deceive her—and spun. A nest of broodcrabs had piled upon each other like a quivering tower of sinew and blood in caricature of a human fleshform.
A cool numbness trickled down her arm, to the hand that carried the fate of all who crossed her, to the fingertips black with the ichor of her enemies. The crab tower looked less and less like a crab tower and more and more like a human, an actual human. The deception—the gall!—angered her, stoked her fury. But the righteousness, the need to smite her enemies and bathe in their gore, felt just out of arm’s reach, dangling just past her filthy fingers. It was as though the bee venom had become an impenetrable one-way window keeping the hottest fires of her rage brightly visible yet just out of arm’s reach.
Bee? No. That was a syringe.
The crab tower, in fact, looked more and more like a person. It looked like Billy Ray, if somebody had tossed him into a stump grinder and then coated what came out the other end with blood and slime and shit for which there were literally no words. He swayed on his feet like a prize fighter who’d just gone the distance in extra rounds.
Behind him, Michelle looked scrawnier than a concentration camp victim. She raised her hand at the galloping three-legged slimegaunt bearing down on them, but the bubbles that emerged from her fingers were the size of champagne bubbles. Flat champagne.
Billy Ray clamped his hands to either side of Mollie’s face. She staggered. He was leaning on her, she realized. He couldn’t stand on his own any longer.
“Please, kid, get us out of here…”
His eyes rolled back in his head. He collapsed.
And then she saw it. Nightmarepedes and eyeball crabs, thousands of them, an enemy army stretching past the horizon in every direction. Hundreds of suppurating flesh mountains shook the ground as they converged on the five doomed aces.
Part of her wanted to join them.
Part of her wanted to fight them. Destroy them.
The rest of her wanted to GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE.
One last time, Mollie embraced the madness. The madness that let her do things with her ace she couldn’t do when she was sane.
Five portals opened simultaneously. One each beneath Bubbles, Billy Ray, Lohengrin, Recycler, and Mollie herself.
She fell through a ceiling.
For the second time that week, Fort Freak erupted in pandemonium.
Marcus grabbed Bugsy as he came out of the Committee meeting. “Hey, what’s going on?”
Bugsy wore headgear of some sort, with a mouthpiece and a tiny camera perched on the side of his head. He frowned at Marcus and kept walking. “Shit’s about to hit.”
Marcus kept up with him. “Which means what?”
“It’s coming. All of it. The whole nightmare of Talas, times a hundred and ten.”
“But you all have a plan, right?”
“Such as it is,” Bugsy scoffed. “Fucking long shot if ever there was one. Fate of the world in Tesseract’s hands? We’re all screwed.” He placed a hand to his ear and, confusingly, he added, “Oh, come on, Babel. Fuck confidential. He’s here, he might as well know everything.”
Marcus didn’t hear the Committee leader’s response, but whatever it was Bugsy went on. He gave Marcus a quick sketch of the plans, of Tesseract’s mission and the Highwayman’s role in it. None of it made much sense to Marcus—the old dude was the cause of all of it?—but he clung to every word. It had to work. These were aces, the world’s best. Their plan simply had to work. Just the fact that they had a plan at all was comforting. But only for a scant few moments.
Marcus followed Bugsy up a concrete staircase, his tail switchbacking as he climbed. The roof was crowded with people, loud with two helicopters whose engines were on, rotors turning. Bugsy gripped the railing and shouted to be heard over the commotion, “Behold, the coming apocalypse.”
That’s exactly what it looked like, something conjured up out of a fevered, ancient mind, one filled with images of hell. The end of the world, roiling toward the compound across the great dusty expanse of the plains. The cloud billowed and glowed. It ate up the distance with unnatural speed. Marcus could see shapes moving inside it, but what was worse was knowing that its vapor hid much more than it showed.
“They might as well,” Bugsy said, obviously speaking through his microphone. And then, with a change in the pitch of his voice, to Marcus, “Let’s see what the boys in uniform can do.”
Please, Marcus said silently. Please stop them. You have to, for Christ’s sake …
So, when it all came down to it, he could pray after all. Was he talking to God? Yes, but he was also talking to every ace here to protect the Cosmodrome. He was praying to t
he soldiers—UN and Russian and Kazakh—and to pilots of the jets and helicopters and the men in those tanks. He was praying to more than the God he didn’t believe in. He was praying to the entire world, asking all creation to see what was happening and to stop it.
Please, stop them …
The tanks opened fire. The muzzles spouted destruction, deep, thrumming blasts that Marcus felt right through his tail. The blasts tore into the cloud, exploding on impact, tearing creatures apart. In one spot, a tall, lumbering thing ripped in half, his upper body twirling away even as his legs stumbled forward a few more steps. In another, a mass of shapes disappeared in a spray of cloud and dust.
Yes. Keep killing them …
The machine gunners strafed the oncoming horde with wild abandon. Here and there Marcus saw the deformed bodies dance and jerk as bullets tore through them. Creatures fell, writhing, clawing their way forward, wailing as they died. Those that got out in front of the others took the brunt of it, soldiers training their aim on them and shredding them until they fell in bloody pulps.
Yes. Stop them!
Jets roared out over the plain, iron daggers that sliced through the sky at incredible speeds. They dispatched their missiles, banked before they got too close, and shot off to either side as the resulting blast lit the cloud from within with booming eruptions of light and fire and, hopefully, death.
Yes!
And the combat helicopters. What deadly beauties. When the tanks began to back toward the Cosmodrome, they flew in over them, a cordon stretching all the way across the oncoming mass. They opened fire with their mounted machine guns. The horde came on but the helicopters backed as they did so, chewing them ragged.
Yes, we’re doing it.
Each death seemed a small victory. A tiny burst of hope. The monsters were dying. There could only be so many of them, right? Marcus turned to Bugsy, who was staring at the scene as he spoke into his mouthpiece. He clutched him by the shoulder. “We’re doing it!” he cried. “We’re gonna fucking beat them!”
Bugsy yanked his shoulder out of his grip. He turned on him, pushed away the mouthpiece, and pointed. “I’ve got wasps in that shit. If you could see what I can you’d—”
A collective gasp cut him off. Both men looked back just in time to see something low and long-limbed racing out of the cloud. It crawled forward with incredible bursts of speed, like a desert lizard. It jumped and caught one of the helicopters from underneath. It clung there pounding and tearing at it. The helicopter stayed in the air a few frantic seconds, then it tilted and then fell like a rock. It hit the earth and became an instant ball of fire. Rotors chopped into the ground until they broke apart. Bits and pieces of them sliced through the air. Some of the debris hit the next nearest helicopter, which swerved wildly, trailing a billow of black smoke. It turned and retreated. It managed a crash landing, but creatures were on it the moment it touched down. The whole line of other helicopters turned, presumably on some order, and tried to pull back. The first few made it, but others began to teeter and weave. They fell one after the other. Some crashed. Some landed only to be overcome by the raging horde.
“No,” Marcus whispered. Just like that, the hope he’d clung to vanished. It got worse.
One of the jets flew too far. It disappeared into the cloud. It carved out of it a moment later and turned back toward the Cosmodrome, skimming just over the heads of the nearest creatures. The plane wobbled, its nose dove and then righted. Dipped again, tilted over to one side. It looked like a dead thing, a wedge of steel limp in the air instead of propelled by its engines. It went down a little ways out from the barricades. It tore a trench through the ground, collided with a tank and spun end over end until it crashed into the earthwork barricades, ripped through fencing and barbed wire. It exploded. Everyone on the roof hit the deck. The building shook with the force of the blast. Marcus stayed down until the cloud of debris that rained down on them lessened, then he rose up on his coils to survey the damage. It was bad. The jet had cut a jagged route right through all their defenses.
“Shit,” Bugsy said. “We just left the front door open.” He shouted, “Ana! Close the door, please!”
A woman—one of the other Committee members judging by her matching headset and mouthpiece—shouted back, “I need to get nearer. To see the ground better.”
“IBT,” Bugsy said, “help her. She’s Earth Witch.”
For the first time since coming up to the roof, Marcus realized he could do something other than just watch. With liquid, muscular speed, he slipped through the crowd. He swept the woman up, and as she cried out, he flowed over the railing and off the roof. It took all his strength to curve out of the plummet smooth, hitting the ground and churning forward with everything he had. He deposited Earth Witch near the trench.
“Thanks,” she said, stepping away from his embrace. “You might ask first next time.” That said, she went straight to work. She pointed. “There. That whole section of ground. Get everyone off of it.”
Marcus did, yelling and gesticulating to the soldiers. When the space was clear of everyone but himself, Marcus felt the earth beneath him trembling, a low-level vibration that made his tail tingle. “You, too,” Ana said, her voice tight with concentration. “Get on the other side of me.”
As he slithered around her, he caught sight of the trench again. It wasn’t empty anymore. Panicked soldiers were swarming through, in full retreat now and running as fast as they could. Behind them, the cloud loomed, and the creatures out in front of it were taking more horrible shape every minute. Marcus could hear them now, a cacophony of wails and roars, of misery and ecstasy and bloodlust. There were deeper sounds too, bellows of prehistoric dimensions.
Ana cursed. “Fools! The gates are still open for you.”
It didn’t matter. The soldiers looked crazed. Desperate. Soon the first of them were running past Marcus and Ana. They were so heedlessly frantic that Marcus placed himself in front of Ana, towering above the soldiers on his coils to keep them from trampling her. From on high, he could see over the mass of soldiers. The first of the creatures were in the mouth of the trench now. They were attacking the running soldiers, jumping on their backs and pulling them down, ripping into them with fingers and claws and teeth. “You have to close it,” he said. “They’re coming.”
“Let me see,” Ana said.
Marcus curved around and hoisted her up. She stared at the scene, lips tight. “Hold me steady,” she said. Marcus propped her against his chest so she could see, clinging to her torso to hold her in place. Intimate, but he wasn’t even thinking about that. He craned around and watched the horde approaching. Creatures he could only describe as monsters. They came in all shapes and sizes, no two the same. All of them marred by deformity. Massive jaws on that one. A too tiny head on another. Legs and arms that jointed in the wrong places and made their rapid progress grotesque. Many of them looked broken, but on they came. Masses of deranged humanity, people baring their teeth and shouting, driven by a rage that Marcus recognized all too well. He felt it now, wafting in on the hot breeze buffeted by the oncoming cloud. One of the creatures pulled out in front of the others. It was human-like but not quite, ghostly white, skeletal, with arms that curved like meat hooks. Its eyes were fixed on Ana.
“Put me down!” Ana shouted. When Marcus did, she dropped to her knees. She gripped the crucifix hanging from her neck and slammed her other hand down onto a patch of hard-packed dirt. The earth moved. Like an earthquake, the ground beneath them trembled and shifted. Marcus, standing high again to see, swayed. He felt for a moment like the earth was going to disappear beneath him. It didn’t, but that’s exactly what it did underneath the trench. The torn-up earth dropped away, creating a sudden, deep cavity. A massive protrusion of dirt and rock surged up into the cleared space, a tower rising as the earth was sucked from one place and thrust up in another. Most of the attackers—and more than a few fleeing soldiers—fell screaming into the abyss. The meat-hook creature managed to claw f
orward with his arms digging into the falling earth. He leapt clear of the trench, screaming. He flung his arms wide to pierce into Ana from both sides. Marcus lunged forward. He caught the creature by both arms and slammed his forehead into its face with enough force to smash the creature’s nose and snap its head back. He shoved it into the trench, bloody-faced as its limbs lashed at the air.
And then the tower poured down into the hole, a tidal wave of earth and stone that swept the falling creature away and buried everything and everyone it fell upon. A moment later, Ana pushed a wall of earth forward, a sheer block that more than plugged the breach in the defenses.
She was slow in getting up from her knees. When she spoke through her panting, Marcus knew she wasn’t speaking to him. “Thank you … I did what I could … It’s not going to hold them for long, Barbara. That’s for sure.” She listened a moment, and then said, “Okay.” To Marcus, she said, “Thank you. You just saved my life. I owe you one.”
Marcus rubbed his forehead. “Don’t worry about it.”
The NATO and Russian soldiers were falling back in an unorganized retreat, with Kutnesov and Lefévre shouting orders to their officers in Barbara’s ear. Barbara toggled from screen to screen; it was all the same. She reached for the toggles in front of her; the shouting voices died in her earphones. “Barbara?” she heard Ana—Earth Witch—say.
“It’s time,” she spoke into the microphone, to all of them, all the aces. “Do what you can to hold them back for as long as you can. Don’t let them have the weapons, and give Michelle and Ray the time they need. Beyond that…” There was nothing more. The plans they’d already made would work, or not. “Stay as safe as you can, and good luck to you all.”
She bit at her lip as she heard their assents. More lives risked on my orders. More deaths. How many more do I have to send?
There was no answer to that, and she could do nothing but watch.