Apocalypse Unborn (18 page)

Not of this earth, Doc thought.

He was stunned that the realization hadn’t come to him before this. But Bell and Kirby, also trained observers, hadn’t seen it, either. Sometimes the obvious was the most illusive. No creature born of this planet could evolve with the trainers’ limitation, their fatal flaw. Copious flammable perspiration was nonadaptive, which meant the trainers had to come from elsewhere, or as a doomie hag once described it,
elsewhen,
a place where the physical laws of earth did not apply, a place where the combustion of volatile materials occurred at a much higher temperatures.

“Good God, Graydon’s gone,” Kirby moaned, his head in his hands. “After all this, and he’s gone.”

More trainers appeared in the control-room doorway. They peered in, leery of the smoke.

“You didn’t know him,” Kirby said, tears racing down his mahogany cheeks. “You didn’t know his incredible brilliance. Graydon Bell was one of the greatest minds in the history of humankind. He was a second Einstein. And on top of that, a truly valiant and courageous man. He gave up everything to turn back the clock.”

“We must leave now,” Doc said.

“Agreed. The mission must succeed.” With that, Kirby keyed in the jump sequences.

The ambient hum got much, much louder. The metallic floor plates beneath his boots began to glow softly, growing brighter and brighter as the power level climbed. Doc smelled ozone, and when he looked up at the ceiling he saw the tendrils of jump mist beginning to form, drifting down around them. The armaglass walls started pulsating as if alive. The seams between the floor plates at Doc’s feet appeared to part, to spread wider and wider. And then he was falling through the yawning gap, falling into blackness at terrific speed.

Krysty Wroth’s spine tingled from the base of her skull to the small of her back. Her breathing was shallow and quick. It felt as if she were only using the top inch or two of her lungs, right under her collarbones. She had come very close to meeting a very bad end. She could still see the underside of the Wazl’s jaw as it dragged her along, its serrated overbite, still feel the hot, fetid huff of its breath as it flapped its wings. If the lizard bird hadn’t been preoccupied first with escape and then with Jak’s throwing blade, it would have chewed off her face, or readjusted the grip of its claws to bite into her flesh instead of the shoulders of her coat.

There wasn’t time to brood on the near miss, even if she had wanted to. Magus had sprung his lethal trap, and the companions were caught in it, up to their eyeballs. Swimming to safety was out of the question. The uniforms with autorifles in the boats would put a quick end to any attempts to reach the big island. There was only one option: when the time was right, to put their heads down and go for broke.

By choosing to stay back on the rim and battle the Wazls, Ryan had given stickies time to fully commit themselves. Only when the muties had almost split the norm force in two did he shout and wave the companions on after him. As Krysty charged past Captain Eng, the islander realized what was happening and ordered his men to follow and join in the attack.

The idea was simple and straightforward, pure Roman Legion: meet the point of the stickie wedge with as much power as they could muster. Break the wedge apart so the recruits already in the bowl could encircle and chill the fragmented groups of stickies.

First, however, they had to push through the ranks of their own kind. They jumped over the bodies of the fallen, of the wounded trying desperately to pull themselves away. These were nothing like the casualties of Great Caesar’s army. This was altogether different sort of hand-to-hand meat grinder. The wounds were not clean-edged cuts and punctures from blades and spears. They were ragged holes, divots where skin and muscle had been ripped—or bitten—away.

Krysty ran on Ryan’s right, close on his heels. Around his broad shoulder she could see waving pale arms and swinging blades, and a red mist rising up from the hellish field of combat.

Mildred sprinted on her left; J.B. and Jak were right behind them. Before they reached the killzone, the islanders bringing up the rear started a war chant, or perhaps it was a death chant. Strange words shouted to the beat of their running footsteps, defiantly, grindingly out of sync with Magus’s barrage of predark music. The last recruits in their way saw what was coming and gave ground. Ryan was the point of attack, the tip of the norm wedge. His panga flashing, he hurled himself into the enemy line.

His fists and feet and blade sent bodies flying to either side.

Right behind him, Krysty faced the screaming mutie horde, a yammering, jittering wall of dead eyes and drooling mouths. To keep her bayonet from getting stuck in bone, Krysty slashed and hacked with it, using the double-edged point and razor-sharp edge rather than the full length of the blade. To get the most power while continuing to move forward, she swung overhead, adding her grunts of effort to the roar of battle. The bayonet point drew lines of red down the middle of the pale faces, dividing them from forehead to chin. Clutching the split seams together, blood gushing between their sucker fingers, the wounded stickies twisted away and dropped to their knees.

The chanting islanders finished the job she and Ryan had started, slashing the fallen with their sabers, widening the column’s breach.

The term “bloodbath” was invented to describe a scene like this. From the tips of flashing swords and bayonets, from the heads of falling hammers and axes, sprays of gore flew in all directions, falling like hot, copper-scented rain. The ground underfoot was crimson and slick, like it had been lubricated with axle grease.

The muties that melted to either side of the wedge point found themselves caught under islander steel or trampled by islander feet. It wasn’t in the stickies’ nature to ever take a step back. They lacked the hardwiring for retreat. Or to put it another way, they couldn’t think that far ahead. Once they got their chill lust up, they pressed on, to victory or death. Nonfatal wounds didn’t stop or even slow them. Missing arms, hands, parts of their heads, they threw themselves forward with snapping jaws.

As one already wounded mutie jumped at Krysty’s face with arms and sucker fingers outstretched, she pivoted and bracing her back leg, as she let it slip past, thrust fifteen-and-a-half inches of steel into its exposed side. The blade slid in to the hilt, stopping with an elbow-jarring impact. It didn’t stick in the rib cage or vertebrae; when Krysty jerked back the blade, it slipped right out. As she turned back to meet another adversary, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the stickie she’d just stabbed popping up from the ground like it was on springs, just in time for the top of its bald head to meet J.B.’s tomahawk downswing.

The impact made a hollow, wet sound, but the skull shattered like a dinner plate.

Forward motion was the key to Ryan’s strategy, a strategy that Doc’s swordstick would have furthered immeasurably. In the back of her mind, Krysty was still stinging from the way he had abandoned them. She was still furious, and not just at the old man. She couldn’t imagine what the two mutie hunters could have offered that could lure him away. Maybe they hadn’t offered him anything. She knew how vulnerable Doc was when he was having one of his spells. Sometimes the companions had to tie a rope around his waist just to keep him from wandering off. They should have seen the breakdown coming, and done something about it.

Caught up in the headlong advance, Krysty didn’t look around to see how Mildred was doing. Because the woman was keeping up the pace, Krysty figured her friend was using the same technique she was, for the most part cutting rather than stabbing with her predark bayonet, slashing throats instead of trying to pierce hearts.

Krysty could hear the swish-swish of the islanders’ sabers behind her. And what sounded like cabbages being chopped in two, one after another. The crisp crunch wasn’t from cabbages, of course. Nor from anything vegetative, for that matter. The islanders’ sword slashes were sending bald heads leaping from necks, arcing away into the melee.

Ryan’s strategy worked like a charm. The shattered column of stickies found itself caught between gauntlets of norms. The recruits attacked them from one side and the companions and islanders from the other. Three deep, the trapped muties were battered front and rear by blades and ten-pound hammers. In panic, with nowhere to go, they leaped straight up in the air. Steel rang on steel as they were chopped down.

Krysty joined in the slaughter. She could see the blood-spattered faces of the recruits on the other side of the stickies’ wildly jerking bodies. The eyes of the ex-mercies and sec men were full of triumph—at last they were getting the upper hand.

As she whipped the blade point across the neck of the stickie facing her, a sledge hammer came down on its head from behind. The weight of the impact drove the mutie instantly to its knees. The rounded top of its head had become a concavity, all the way down to its earholes. The dead black eyes stared at eternity while a long strand of drool swayed from its chin. Then it fell on its face.

Another mutie side-hopped inside her guard, straddling the one who had just been dropped. If it hadn’t been for the wide stance, it would have had her by the throat.

Before it could grab her, Krysty jumped off her left foot to gain momentum, then snap-kicked with her right leg. The toe of her boot connected solidly with the point of the stickie’s chin. With a loud crack, its head whipped back and the chin aimed not just skyward, but somewhere over its right shoulder. The body toppled backward.

As she brought her blade up, on the other side of the gauntlet, she saw stickies jumping on the backs and heads of the recruits. The forces at the rear of the mass of muties had broken ranks, circled around the norms, and were pulling them down from behind.

Rapidly the neat battle lines blurred and the companions’ forward momentum slowed. As knots of fighters, norm and mutie, tried to surround and isolate each other, combat became chaos.

Krysty and the other companions moved into a back-to-back position. No command was necessary. No discussion. It was standard protocol, the only way to survive under the circumstances.

With Ryan on one side and Jak on the other, the tall redhead fended off her attackers, striking with blade and boot. Overhead, the Wazls swooped, snatching at their heads with claws and beaks. The lizard birds didn’t seem to care for the taste of stickie. They ignored the muties and concentrated on the norms. It was an instinctive choice. Wazls couldn’t be tamed or trained to hunt. The wounded recruits who managed crawl away from the stickies were subject to savage attack from above.

Under the leaden sky, with music written for dead heroes hammering their ears, the companions valiantly fought on.

R
YAN PUSHED
between the shoulders of the norm fighters, heading for the tip of the stickie spear, the point of their deepest penetration. He knew he couldn’t turn back the muties, but he could force them to either side; with his size and momentum, his chilling power, aimed a small focal point, the enemy had no choice.

The last of the recruits jumped out of the way and Ryan drove into the pale, writhing mob. He literally stomped down the first few stickies in his path, cracking their long bones under his boot heels.

When a mutie jumped at him, its needle teeth bared, Ryan punched instead of stabbed with his panga hand. The hard straight right had every ounce of his body weight behind it. His fist landed just above the nostril holes and he could feel the crunch of yielding bone all the way up his arm. With two hundred pounds of moving mass behind it, the blow jolted the stickie off its feet and sent it helicoptering sideways into the chests of its fellows.

A row of pale dominoes toppled. More bones yielded—sternums, ribs, skulls, pelvises—to the one-eyed man’s crushing boots.

Another mutie leaped from the left. Ryan down-blocked it with the edge of his forearm, and as the body swept past him to the right, he ripped the panga blade across the front of its throat.

Then it was back and forth with the eighteen-inch panga, cutting down the stickies who didn’t step aside. As Ryan charged and hacked, pushing deeper into the mutie ranks, he could hear the islanders’ rumbling baritone war chant behind him.

“Patu! Patu! Whakangaro! Patu! Patu! Whakangaro!”

Under the circumstances, Ryan didn’t need a translator to get the drift. The three-hundred-pound, tattooed warriors were bellowing, “Chill ’em all! Chill ’em all!”

The war chant was punctuated by the whoosh of Calcutta steel. It didn’t matter that the blades were dull and nicked, that the metal had been forged more than a century ago in a dirt floor foundry. The islanders’ swings were so powerful they could have beheaded their foes with three-foot lengths of unmilled bar stock.

As Ryan plowed into the muties’ midst, he saw that some of them were otherwise engaged. The stickies farther back in the column, separated from the hand-to-hand by their brethren, were kneeling or squatting, taking the opportunity to feed on the fallen recruits. They raised gory mouths from the whipsawn carcasses as he bore down on them. They looked up at him with dead black eyes, still chewing.

Ryan would have had to lean down to strike them with the panga, which would have cost him time. Instead he kicked them in the head with his heavy boots. The impacts sent shock waves to his hip sockets. His bootprints branded their vacant faces. Vibram, stamped in reverse.

Because the feeding stickies farther along could see him coming, they were forewarned. Ryan rammed headlong into multiple attackers. He fired off a straight kick into a stickie’s chest, knocking it sprawling. Then he backhanded the panga, side-slashing across an undefended throat, opening yawning second mouth under its pale chin. The forehand stroke that followed hacked into the side of the next mutie’s neck. As the stickie spun away, its arterial blood spurted in a fine spray.

This was slow-mo war, combat as brutal and primitive as it could get.

Fighters crashing together, bone on bone, for the viewing pleasure of a jaded audience of one. Blaster chilling at eleven hundred feet per second and ranges of a hundred yards was warm milk and cookies by comparison. In this savage brand of warfare you had to look into the eyes of the thing you were butchering. You had to watch as the power of your muscles unzipped a kissing face from ear to ear.

Ryan been in the eye of this hurricane many times before.

He knew its secrets, its pitfalls—and its allure.

Being turned loose with a sharp blade or a heavy bludgeon on a mob of inhuman murderers, without rules of engagement, with no limitations of honor or respect for the enemy’s innate right to life, imparted a terrible freedom, the freedom to act without conscience or regret. At some point under such conditions, after the fear of death vanished in adrenaline rush, when the fighter was no longer battling out of desperation for the sake of survival, an unholy desire took hold.

The desire to do his or her worst.

Not simply to win, but to devastate.

Ryan saw that urge as part of his animal nature. It was something that couldn’t be denied, or altered. Without that deeply buried spark, he could never have become the warrior he was.