CHAPTER 20
There had to be hundreds of them, each the size of the original being. Every bit of the monster’s mass was converted into new bodies all at once, and it had been huge. The kneeling giant collapsed in an avalanche of skeletal blue bodies. The parts that had just been blown off by the explosives split into monsters too. All of a sudden, I was looking down at a concert-sized crowd of glowing horrors. The ones who had been born in the middle of our lawn inferno insta-died. The rest charged MHI HQ.
“We’ve got lots of monsters incoming!”
The Hunters opened fire. Only ghostly flintlock pistols materialized in about half of the Drekavacs’ hands and they shot back. Tiny blue bolts smacked into the walls around us as Hunters had to duck down. The pistols seemed far less powerful than the blunderbuss, but each impact still left a glowing blue hole.
While we were being pinned down, the other half of the army formed spectral swords or axes and charged our front door. I tossed a grenade out the window, and by the time I’d reloaded Cazador, it had detonated. Then I stood, picked out a Drekavac with a gun, and shot him in the face. I swiveled, picked up another monster, and shot him through the side of the head. Both of the creatures dropped. Which meant that they were probably only about as tough individually as the Drekavac’s first iteration. Too bad there were piles of them now. I had to duck as half a dozen ghost bullets clanged into the wrecked Audi.
The monsters may have all been aspects of the same being, but they sure didn’t act that way. It was like each one had an independent mind because they were moving in every direction and trying multiple lines of attack. Some were breaching our doors. Others were climbing up the walls to get in the opened windows. A bunch were taking cover and shooting at us. Milo’s turrets were slicing them down, but then groups of monsters began targeting the turrets. It was nuts.
Julie was shouting orders, sending most of us downstairs to reinforce the first floor, while she kept a crew up here to pick off the monsters in the open and climbing up the walls. “Owen, go with them.”
“On it,” I said as I jumped up and rushed to the stairs. My wife knew me well. Close-range face smashing was my specialty. I was wearing rifle pouches, but I’d left Abomination leaning in a corner with a belt full of drum mags, so I grabbed my shotgun along the way. There were several other Hunters ahead of me, including Milo and Holly.
Earl was in the lead. “These sons o’ bitches ain’t getting through us.” He shoved another mag in his Tommy gun and yanked back the bolt. “We kill as many as we can and leapfrog back as we need to. They’ll be heading for the vault.”
“We’ve got a problem,” Milo warned.
“No shit?” Holly said sarcastically.
“No, I mean a math problem. I don’t know his original density, but square cube law and all that, figure that big fella had to weigh one or two hundred tons at least.”
“That’s a lot of fog,” I said.
“Magic fog, so I’m assuming it’s less dense than something solid like a kaiju, and he looked kinda wispy so I’ll guess a hundred tons. The baby Drekavacs look pretty skinny all thin and wiry like that, but he’s probably heavier than he looks because of the strength displayed, no wonder he wears the big coat and hat, really bulks him up—”
“Milo,” Earl shouted. “Get to the point.”
“Quick math, if each of these little guys are between a hundred and two hundred pounds each, there might be up to a couple thousand of them out there right now. But that’s assuming a perfectly efficient system, and even magic recycling can’t be that good, but still we’ve probably got a thousand of them at least.”
“That’s your low estimate?”
We reached the ground floor and ran for the reception area.
The giant Drekavac’s sword had chopped our heavy reinforced door in half, but the Hunters stationed here had dropped the emergency portcullis to block the way. A bunch of the man-sized monsters were currently hacking and tearing at it. And from the way the steel bars were popping, these things were still freakishly strong.
Several Hunters were already here, using the wall corners and our big reception desk for cover. They were shooting down the hall through the gaps in the portcullis . . . and from all the glowing holes in the walls, the monsters were shooting back. One Hunter was being dragged away by his friends, screaming because of the smoking hole that had just gotten punched through his thigh. He left a red trail on the tile.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Dorcas was there, even though she was a one-legged senior citizen, whom Earl had specifically told to go home because she was too old for this kind of roughneck shit. She was leaning on her desk, shoving 12-gauge buckshot shells into the mag tube of a Mossberg 590. “About damned time, Earl.”
“I thought I told you to sit this one out.”
“Oh, stick it. This is my turf.” Dorcas pumped the shotgun. Over the decades those two had known each other, he had only aged a few years but she’d gone from young girl to crusty old lady, so Dorcas was one of the few people around who gave Earl lip. “Ain’t no assholes gonna run me off. Now get to helping. That gate ain’t gonna hold them for long, and they’re hitting the other doors too.”
Earl started grabbing various Hunters and sending them in different directions to reinforce those entrances. I flipped over the table next to the memorial wall, braced Cazador over the top, and started flinging .308 rounds down the hallway. Milo crouched next to me and started shooting too. Ejected brass bounced off my armor. There were so many bodies throwing themselves against the gate that we couldn’t hardly miss. All I needed to do was not accidentally hit the portcullis.
We killed a pile of them and they just didn’t care. Bars bent. Welds snapped. The portcullis was down. They were coming in.
Dorcas picked up a clacker. “Fire in the hole!”
We got down as she set off the claymores.
MHI’s entryway was shredded by hundreds of projectiles. Dozens of monsters were torn apart. The air was filled with smoke and drywall dust. Then there was only the briefest delay before the bad guys came pouring in.
There were several of us shooting down that narrow channel. It was a fatal funnel filled with flying silver and lead. The Drekavacs pushed forward anyway. The wire strands of their thin limbs unraveled beneath the high velocity impacts. But not every aspect of the monster was suicidal because some of the creatures used cover and fired back.
There was a blue flash as the table Milo and I were hiding behind was struck. Splinters flew. Milo got hit and the impact knocked him down. He landed on his back and clutched at his chest. As more bullets hit the table, I grabbed Milo by the drag strap on his armor and pulled him down the hall and around the corner.
“Ouch! Ouch!” Milo was struggling to get one of the pouches open on his armor. He yanked out a magazine that was dripping molten plastic from the glowing blue hole burned through it. The spring shot out of the damaged mag and rounds went rolling across the floor.
“You okay?”
Milo grimaced as he shoved one hand inside his armor. “Oh, that hurts.” He pulled it out. Clean. No blood. “Oof. Low velocity. Not enough penetration to punch our armor. Lots of energy dump though. About like getting kicked by a horse.”
“You can analyze the ghost bullets later. Can you walk?”
“Sure.” Milo staggered to his feet and winced, clearly in a whole lot of pain. “Uh-oh. You know that feeling when you put a rib into one of your lungs?”
“No.”
“It’s not pleasant.”
I glanced back toward my previous firing position. It had been turned into Swiss cheese. The reception desk was a smoking wreck. Hunters were falling back. Earl had picked up stubborn Dorcas and was carrying her over one shoulder. She wasn’t wounded. She was just too pissed off to retreat. In fact she was still shooting her shotgun as Earl ran. One of the blue streaks nailed her in her fake leg and blew her foot clean off. “Not again!” Dorcas tossed the now empty Mossberg and pulled out her hand cannon. She managed to crank off a couple of shots before Earl got her out of the line of fire.
I leaned out to cover them and dropped another monster with Cazador. They were close enough I just twisted the rifle to the side and engaged them with the micro dot sight instead of the much more powerful scope.
Earl passed our angry little receptionist off to Milo and Holly. “Get all the wounded to the cafeteria.”
“That looks like most of us, Earl,” Milo said.
“I know. Holly, keep them alive. There’s only one way into the pantry. That’s the choke point. Hold it.” Then he clapped my shoulder and gave me orders even as I was shooting. It was a good thing my rifle was suppressed so I could still understand him. “Basement, Z. We’re gonna reinforce them.”
We had only sent a small crew down to guard Sonya in Earl’s cell. Trip was in charge and he had his shit together, but if this many bodies came at them at once, they’d be overwhelmed.
“Got it.” I dumped my last few shots the Drekavacs’ way and then followed Earl, reloading as I ran. I had a rifle in my hand, my shotgun bouncing at my side, and a bunch of drum mags slung over my shoulder, so it wasn’t exactly smooth. These were tight quarters so I threw Cazador around my back and switched to Abomination.
It was just the two of us and there were monsters swarming everywhere. Earl had point, I kept looking back, which turned out to be smart because a couple Drekavacs crashed through a door behind us. I immediately wheeled about and started blasting. Silver buckshot ripped through their thin bodies, except this time I had to put several rounds into both of them before they came apart.
It was like each of these shattered aspects was getting tougher. That was troubling.
I got my confirmation of how that was happening a moment later as a Drekavac blundered around the corner right into Earl’s path. He ripped a long burst from his Tommy gun into the monster’s chest and head. It went down and ruptured into pieces as it hit the floor. The bits melted into glowing fog . . . which then flowed quickly along the ground and around the corner, to congeal around another Drekavac.
Earl shot that one at least a dozen times before it went down. Only the monster was still alive and crawling by the time I got there and put an anchor shot in its cranium. It came apart, and this time the fog oozed up the wall and disappeared into a vent.
For each of these we killed, some of their strength was being fed into the others. Each surviving Drekavac would get stronger and stronger, until there was just one left, who would probably be as powerful as the epic thing we’d just had to hit with a shit ton of anti-tank weapons to kill.
Oh, shit.
We reached the stairs to the basement before the Drekavac who’d breached the front door did. I could hear lots of gunfire coming from above and to a lesser extent below, which was a bad sign. Some of the monsters must have found another way into the basement.
“Aw, hell . . . ” Earl looked back the way we’d come from. There was a lot of fog flowing in that direction and the eerie ghost light was growing. There were a bunch of Drekavacs heading this way and this narrow stairwell was the best place to delay them, but it sounded like the Hunters below needed our help too. “Alright, Z, I’ll stay up here, you go to the bottom of the stairs and kill anything that gets past me. But no matter what, help Trip and Cody protect Sonya. I made a promise to her mother.”
“You going to wolf out?”
“Probably have to in a minute.” Twice in two nights not even close to the full moon and around friendlies? That showed how incredibly desperate our situation was. “I sure hope their glowy shit don’t work like silver.”
“I’ve got to warn you first. I think each one of these we kill, it feeds into the others. They’re getting stronger as they go.”
“You got a better idea than killing them?”
“Not yet.”
“This job ain’t ever easy.” As Earl said that, a bunch of Drekavacs rushed around the corner. It was an angry mob of cold-fire skeletons, and they shrieked when they saw us. “Go, kid.”
I went down the stairs as fast as I could.
This part of the building was mostly storage rooms and the entrance to the archives. On the other side of that was a straight shot to Earl’s cell. There was gunfire coming from that direction. I wanted to help, but they had a defensive position, and I’d help them a whole lot more by not letting another squad of Drekavacs down the stairs to join in.
I could hear the chatter of Earl’s Thompson. Then a grenade went off. Then six fast shots from a revolver. During all that was a bunch of the hiss-cracks of the Drekavacs’ magic guns. Thankfully from the rate of fire, Silas Carver’s idea of guns was limited to the single-shot types that he was familiar with from when he’d been alive. Earl appeared, stumbling down a few steps. There was a glowing impact on his leather jacket, but it hadn’t penetrated the incredibly tough minotaur hide.
Then Earl got shot in the cheek. His head snapped around. Blood hit the wall as the bolt tore through him.
“Earl!”
Except my boss didn’t fall. He grabbed onto the railing to steady himself, shook his head like he’d just taken a punch, and spit out a tooth. There was a bloody, smoking hole right through both sides of his face. He reached up and touched the ghastly wound.
“Nope. It ain’t even close to silver.” I could see the white of his jawbone through the dangling flesh as he talked. “I tell ya, that’s a relief!” Then Earl Harbinger leapt up the stairs and got right back into the fight. A second later a Drekavac was hurled violently down the stairs. I put a round of buckshot into its head as it bounced.
The next few seconds really sucked, as I stood there, useless, not helping anybody, torn over which direction I should go, but also knowing that I was supposed to hold this spot. From the sound, Earl was going all savage werewolf on them. He’d been doing this so long, a full transformation only took him a few seconds, and he could fight while doing it. The Drekavacs were shrieking and Earl was roaring. I don’t know which one was scarier. Wire body parts were being thrown down the stairs: arms, legs, heads.
And the whole time that damnable fog was drifting past my legs and into the archives. It was going to buff the monsters who were attacking the vault.
Then the Drekavacs started pushing past Earl. They didn’t bother taking the stairs, they just vaulted over the railing and started dropping straight to the bottom. I opened up Abomination, nailing them before they even reached the ground. I went through a twenty-round drum in a few seconds, and by the time I got another one rocked into the gun, more Drekavacs had hit the ground. I blasted those at conversational distance. I took an arm off at the shoulder, and the ax it had been wielding still hacked into the doorway I was using for cover. Ghostly or not, those blades could cut.
Our werewolf came tumbling over the edge. There were four Drekavacs wrestling him. One got its skull flattened on impact. Earl wrapped his claws around another monster’s neck and slammed him into the wall hard enough to put a crack in the concrete. He bit the third one on the neck and shook him. The fourth one ran Earl through the guts with his sword. I shot that asshole in the chest. Then Earl backhanded the wounded Drekavac and sent him flying. There was blue fire and red blood all over the stairwell.
But then I had to concentrate on keeping myself alive. Monsters were cascading over the edge, and then getting right up to fight their way through me.
I flipped Abomination to full-auto and dumped the rest of the drum into the mass of creatures. One made it through and I had to leap back as he swung a sword at me. I transitioned to my pistol and shot it in the eye. It still tackled me and we fell into the hall.
The monster was on top of me. It was squirting ghost fire out of its shattered socket as it clawed for my throat. The thing was so damned cold that it felt like it was sucking the life right out of me. Good thing I had my anger to keep me warm. I caught its arm, levered it hard to the side, jammed my .45 into the spot where its ear would have been and shot it dead.
I leapt to my feet as more monsters reached the door. I dumped them with my STI. I fired to slide lock, did a speed reload, and downed another Drekavac with a pair of hollowpoints to the head. There was a brief delay, so I holstered, grabbed Abomination and the last of my drum mags, and retreated.
A few seconds later, monsters were pouring through the doorway. Some of them had already been deprived of limbs or were wearing claw marks, but they were leaving just enough bodies in the stairwell to keep Earl occupied while the rest headed for the Ward.
I was standing in a T intersection. There was zero cover here, so I ran for the library. At some point the power had gone out, but I could still see by our dim emergency lights. Some of the Drekavacs went after me, but more veered off down the other halls. Those would also get them to the vault, it was just a longer route.
There was a series of blue flashes. I dove behind a bookshelf. Precious tomes were hit by bolts. Antique paper was turned into confetti. I tossed my last grenade into the hall. It landed and rolled between the feet of a bunch of Drekavac. The explosion took out the glass wall in front. Lee was probably at the vault with the others, but when he saw this mess, he was going to be furious.
I got up, shouldered Abomination, and moved out. The Drekavacs were spreading out through the stacks. The instant I saw blue fire moving, I killed it, so these had learned to keep their heads down. They were crouched, shooting, moving. I moved behind another shelf. A couple of monsters thought that meant I couldn’t see them so they got up and moved my way. They were going to flank around both sides of the shelf, but I shoved a bunch of books off to make a gap in the shelf and gunned them down through it.
There was a terrible impact on my back. It spun me around and sent me crashing into the books. My shoulder blade was on fire. A ghost bolt was lodged in my back. It hadn’t punched through my armor, but it was stuck there, cooking me. The weird blue fire that powered their bodies wasn’t hot, but their bullets burned like a motherfucker. I reached back, dug it out with my fingers, and then had to drop it on the carpet because it was making my gloves sizzle.
The Drekavac who had shot me willed a sword into existence and chased after me. I turned around just in time to stick Abomination into his face. It was a good thing that the severed-head thing didn’t reset the process now, because I literally blew his head off. That had been way too close.
Moving into the aisle, I methodically worked my way toward the vault. It was look, shoot, move, duck, repeat. Monsters kept coming at me and I kept blasting them. Abomination ran dry and I yanked out my last drum. I was nearly out of shotgun shells, but on the bright side, I could toss my super-awkward bandolier. I flung a couple rounds at the monsters pursuing me, and then sprinted for the rear door.
Except a Drekavac appeared before me, pistol already raised. CRACK.
It punched me in the sternum so hard it swept me off my feet. The pain was incredible, but I sat up just enough to cut that monster’s legs out from under it with Abomination. He fell facedown, and I put a final round through the top of his skull.
Gasping for air, fire radiating through my torso, I stumbled upright. But the other monsters had caught up. I got shot again. Just a bit higher than the last one and I ended up flipping over Albert’s desk. My body took out his computer monitor and collection of Funko Pops before I landed on his office chair. The little wheels shot out from under it and I spilled onto the floor.
I lay there for just a second, stunned, but having two molten slugs scorching your chest brings you back to reality fast. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pull them out because the Drekavacs were approaching, swords and axes raised. I climbed up, rested Abomination on the desk, and started shooting as soon as my sight covered blue.
MHI must have killed a slew of these things, because the remainder were getting really tough. I ran through the rest of Abomination’s ammo to drop three of them. There was still one left, and it was coming at me with only one arm and half his face torn off, so I dropped Abomination and picked up Albert’s chair. I hurled it. The monster slashed the chair out of the air with his sword. I used that time to draw my pistol. The Drekavac lunged at me but I pumped six rounds into him before he fell to pieces.
Every monster in the archives was dead.