11: STORM FURY SIX
The Rim was weirdly quiet as Jane Kryskill parked her SUV in an empty lot beside Sacred Heart. All the enclaves seemed to be in lockdown with their front gates shut and windows shuttered. Rain had started to fall. It shimmered oddly as it interacted with the enclaves’ protective shields. It seemed like a giant bubble rose over the walled compounds, causing the rain to bounce off in a visible haze.
Jane wished there had been time to pull Bertha out of hiding. Her family’s cannon was hidden out at Hyeholde; Marc would have needed an hour to drive there, mount the gun to his Hummer, and drive back. Getting the radio station back on air was more important. Nor would Marc be able to operate Bertha alone. Jane or Geoffrey or possibly both of them would need to load and fire the gun as Marc drove. She wasn’t sure she wanted to use the cannon in an area as densely populated as Oakland. Bertha could turn a normal building—and all the buildings behind it—into Swiss cheese in a matter of seconds.
But if the oni army was massive, they might need that kind of power regardless of possible collateral damage.
She’d put on her body armor at her brother Marc’s house on Mount Washington. When she stopped at WQED to drop her team off, it had started to rain. She pulled their rain gear out of the cargo space, along with her weapons. Her poncho sat folded beside her with her double rifle case in the passenger foot well. She pulled the cape over her head, put on her bucket hat, grabbed her guns, and stepped out of her SUV.
She scanned the area as she opened the SUV’s lift gate, letting out her elfhound, Chesty. The big dog bounded out of the cargo hold, ready to work. He knew that when she had rifle case in hand, it was time to be serious.
The city landscape of Pittsburgh abruptly ended where the Rim cut through the area in a northwest-to-southeast swath. Following the curve of the Rim was a strip of no-man’s-land that had once been typical urban sprawl. Buildings, sidewalk, and side streets had been cut in half by the Rim; important structural pieces had been left on Earth when Pittsburgh shifted to Elfhome. The crumbling remains had been cleared away, creating a long, narrow, graveled parking lot. The elf-owned enclaves stood a few feet beyond the gravel, each half a block wide and a mile deep, surrounded by tall stone walls. Dirt side alleys ran between the enclaves, strategically wider than a man or elf could leap.
On the left side was what was now called Oakland. It was a “human city.” Two lanes of paved streets. Sidewalk. Businesses with big glass window storefronts. Town houses. Apartment buildings. An abandoned high school.
Or at least, there had been until August. Some idiot with a camera and telephoto lens had taken Peeping Tom pictures of Tinker domi in her nightgown, and Windwolf had not been amused. A short time later, an oni fired a rocket from one of the town houses, killing a gossamer airship moored in the airfield beside the last enclave. The Viceroy decided he wasn’t comfortable with human buildings overlooking his people. Jane couldn’t blame him; a sniper with a scope could hit anything that a camera could see. Windwolf ordered the entire human side of the street demolished. Before the work could be finished, though, Oilcan laid claim to Sacred Heart High School.
The building sat alone on the ruined left side of the street, opposite the elegant beauty of the enclaves. The rubble of its demolished neighbors hadn’t been totally cleared away, leaving a raw sense to the landscape.
Jane hadn’t seen Sacred Heart since the day that the gossamer airship had been killed. (Hal and Nigel insisted that they must seize the opportunity to examine the massive dead body.) It was an imposing century-old redbrick building with lovely stone accents. A twelve-foot wall of tan limestone been built around it, giving it a true enclave vibe. The ironwood gate that her brother Geoffrey had made had been installed just that morning. The invisible bubble of protection hazed the rain just like its elfin neighbors.
She’d parked beside Geoffrey’s pickup—painted Harry Potter scarlet and gold with “Gryffin Doors” written on the tailgate. Her little brother had spent the last few days crafting ironwood lumber into a large, sturdy front door and a massive back gate for Oilcan’s enclave. Roach had said he’d called Team Tinker to help move the heavy things. The team’s presence was evident by the number of hoverbikes next to Geoffrey’s truck. There was also Moser’s rusty passenger van held together by posters for his band, Naekanain. The van’s hood was up and a piece of cardboard slid under it, littered with tools, suggested that the van had barely made it to Sacred Heart and might not be able to leave. Guy’s vintage Ford was nowhere to be seen. Roach had said that his little brother Andy and Guy had gone someplace with Oilcan, to help move something heavy. It would explain Guy’s missing truck.
Several pickup trucks pulled in beside her SUV. Men and women spilled out of them, ranging between eighteen to thirty years old. Some were dressed in hunting camo. Others wore dark rain jackets. A few had on black garbage bags as ponchos. They carried rifles and shotguns and handguns and machetes. They were all wearing the blue boonie hats of Hal’s Heroes. It made for a sorry-looking, ragtag group. Jane recognized various cell leaders as they climbed out of their trucks. Each cell in the militia had taken the name of a local bridge to identify themselves. Smithfield Street. Veterans. Homestead. West End. McKees Rocks. Fort Pitt. Fort Duquesne. Hot Metal. Mon-Fayette Expressway. Pittsburgh had a lot of bridges and they were all named. They tried to keep the militia membership secret but every cell leader was well known to her. Her brothers. Old classmates. Neighborhood kids. Members of her church. Off-duty cops and firefighters.
Every death was going to cut deep.
Alton came up the street with his squad, darting shadow to shadow. Jane had hated getting her brothers involved in the militia but she needed their network of trusted friends to leapfrog the membership forward. As oldest of her brothers and the one with the lowest public profile, Alton was her second-in-command for the militia. He’d gathered together the foragers who supplied the enclaves with wild game, the members of his old high school rifle club, and some of the tengu elite for a ranger-style group.
“We’ve been sweeping to the east and north of the enclaves since the first black willow got reported,” Alton said. “The enemy seems to be concentrated entirely to the west. The tengu says that they’re advancing in a single column up Liberty Avenue. There’s no sign of them spreading out into the city or setting up any fortified positions. Their commander seems to be focused on taking the enclaves.”
That made things easier than if the oni were merely trying to establish a toehold within the city. The militia would have to simply block the oni from reaching the enclaves.
Jane nodded her understanding as the militia gathered around her. Chesty grumbled annoyance at so many strangers with guns closing on Jane. She patted him on the head to reassure him that the situation was fine.
The cell leaders greeted her murmurs of “Colonel” as their squads eyed her with surprise and interest. Up to this point, only the cell leaders knew who was leading the militia.
“What’s the plan?” Mon-Fayette asked. His family ran a small butcher shop deep in the South Hills.
“The oni are coming up Liberty Avenue from Herrs Island!” Jane pointed northwest. “It means they have to cross the busway to get to here. The gorge isn’t as deep here in Oakland as it is down by the Strip District but it’s filled with Jersey barriers and chain-link fences, making it difficult terrain. The oni will probably head for the bridge at the most shallow point, which would be the one at South Aiken. We’ll stop them at that choke point.”
The militia nodded their understanding. In the last two months, Taggart had drilled the cell leaders in the basics of urban warfare. The irony being that he’d become a nature documentary photographer to escape being a war correspondent.
“Homestead and Hot Metal, you’ll be point.” Jane indicated the leaders of the two largest groups. Jane had intended for the cells to stay small; she told her leaders to recruit only people they trusted with their lives. She discovered, however, that the more charismatic cell leaders quickly gathered large numbers of followers who were deeply loyal only to them. It seemed wiser to keep the larger cells together than to try and splinter them into smaller groups with leaders not entirely trusted by the members. Some of the “cells” were large platoons not small squads. Hot Metal was the members of the oldest elf fusion-rock band in Pittsburgh named Bow-Wow Mau and its rabid followers. Homestead were a bunch of off-the-grid sheep farmers in the South Hills. Rachel Carson Bridge was a single large family, headed up by the small, spunky blonde Martha Champagne, who had been in Geoffrey’s woodshop club in high school and a fellow fan of Harry Potter. Smithfield Street was Alton’s squad.
Jane pointed at the piles of material from the demolished buildings. “Use this rubble to build barricades. Pull out anything large but still easily moved and get it to the South Aiken Avenue Bridge. Smithfield, move to Baum and Centre in case they try to outflank us. Set up barricades in the intersection but take sniper positions in the four-story building at the corner. Play Whac-A-Mole. Carson, support Smithfield at Baum and Centre.”
Both Smithfield and Carson were small units but with different skill sets. Martha’s family were builders, understanding how to erect barriers quickly. Alton’s group was easily the best marksmen of the entire militia. By taking position in the four-story building, they should be able to provide support for much of Oakland.
“Mon-Fayette, we need a fallback position,” Jane said. “Scout the buildings at this location and pick one for us to fall back to. You want something tall, concrete or brick, with multiple exit points. Remember to stick to blackout protocols—light will make you a target as it gets darker.”
Ragtag as they were, they scattered to their assignments in an orderly fashion.
Sometime during the short briefing, Geoffrey had slipped out of Sacred Heart and joined the back of the crowd. As the militia melted away, he moved forward.
“Good boy.” Geoffrey let Chesty sniff the back of his hand. Over his elf-styled clothes, he wore his camo rain poncho and Hal’s Heroes bucket hat. He had his hunting rifle and scope covered against the drumming rain. “I’m glad you have him with you, Jane. This is going to be hairy.”
Geoffrey had Snapdragon and Moser with him. The young male elf was a drummer in Moser’s band but had trained as a laedin warrior before coming to Pittsburgh. Jane barely recognized Snapdragon. He had his long black hair twisted up into a messy manbun and wore the leather chest armor that marked his caste. He carried the normal laedin weapons of a bow, a quiver full of spell arrows, and a short sword of ironwood. He and Moser both had the woven straw capes that elves used as rain protection.
“Where’s Guy and Andy?” Jane asked the question closest to her heart. “Roach said they went somewhere with Oilcan.”
“They’re at my workshop,” Geoffrey said. “Guy called me before the phones went down. I didn’t really follow what he was saying—something about cotton candy ice cream, a baby dragon…and talking mice? They’re at my place because Oilcan needed to use my casting circle.”
Roach had mentioned that the kids were going for ice cream. “Baby dragon” could be the creature Nigel saw with the twins. Jane drew a blank on what “talking mice” might mean. Was it a new code word for the militia? At least it meant that Guy and Andy were out of harm’s way.
“What about Forge and Jewel Tear?” Jane had mobilized the militia on a guess that the oni would take out the heavy hitters first. She hoped that she was wrong. “Can we count on them for backup?”
Geoffrey and Moser shook their heads, making water sheet from the brims of their hat.
“A spell took them both out before yinz arrived.” Snapdragon used the Pittsburgh slang for plural “you,” since Moser had been the one who taught him English. “The sekasha have the domana on the second floor. They are not letting anyone near them.”
“The domana are alive?” Jane asked since elves usually burned bodies as soon as possible. She would hate for Forge’s people to burn Sacred Heart down while the militia was trying to defend it.
“I believe so,” Snapdragon said. “If the domana were dead, his sekasha would have stormed out for revenge. It is what the holy ones do.”
“They were polite but scary firm,” Geoffrey added. “No ‘outsiders’ are to step foot on the stairs. I’m human and Moser’s people are Wind Clan.”
That sounded like more than just Snapdragon was with Moser. “Who do you have here in Oakland?”
Moser blew out his breath. “My whole commune. We got the report saying that the oni were on Herrs Island. That’s only a few blocks from my place. I didn’t want to risk my people by staying put. We’re fortified against wargs and steel spinners, not full-out armies. Our van wasn’t able to make it more than a mile or two. I thought Oilcan would be here.”
Jane nodded to this. Moser had become Geoffrey’s best friend shortly after they learned to walk, as Moser’s family lived two houses down from their mother. The two boys teamed up with Roach when all three started high school and, sometime after that, Oilcan came into the mix. Their lives had been tightly interwoven since then.
“Will we be able to use the enclave at all?” Jane said. “In case we need someplace to fall back to that’s more fortified?”
“We control both the front door and the back gate,” Moser said. “But Briar Rose isn’t going to let just anyone in, though; she’s scared shitless. We came up with passwords.”
Moser told Jane the passwords; it was a nonsense string of Elvish words. It was a phrase that most humans had some difficulty pronouncing correctly if they hadn’t learned the language very young—like the locals had. Somehow Briar Rose had been able to confirm that the oni mangled the words worse than humans.
“There is the rest of West End Bridge.” Snapdragon waved to some incoming pickups. Their cell was made up of Geoff’s friends and fans of Moser’s band, Naekanain.
“Moser, find Mon-Fayette and let him know the passwords.” Jane pointed in the direction that the squad had gone. “Snapdragon, can you tell the enclaves not to freak out over all the armed humans showing up?”
The two nodded and took off.
“Geoff, you and Snapdragon are probably the best known to the enclaves. I want your cell to act as go-betweens. With the sekasha in Sacred Heart, we can’t be certain Briar Rose will stay in command of the gates. We might need to fall back to one of the other places if the fighting goes badly. Also some royal marines or Wyverns might show up. I don’t want them attacking our people out of confusion. Intercept any incoming elves. Explain. Be careful.”
“Me?” Geoffrey laughed. “You’re the one who’s getting married in two weeks. Mom will have a fit if you screw up her plans.”
Jane growled in frustration. Her wedding was the least of her problems. “Moser is the one that should be worried. Why did he pull his band?”
“We got that cleared up.” Geoffrey waved to the passenger van sitting with its hood up. “He meant his van wasn’t going to make it out to Hyeholde. He’s trying to track down a replacement but I’ll drive him there if I have to. I want Floss Flower and Snapdragon at the wedding.”
Geoffrey was dating both of the elves. He was never going to find a better time to break the news to their mother—as long as the wedding was going well.
Jane nodded to this. “I thought Snapdragon was living at Moser’s so he wouldn’t have to fight.”
“He didn’t want fighting to be his entire life,” Geoffrey said. “As a laedin living at an enclave, he would have had to spend every day training, patrolling, and maintaining his weapons. It wouldn’t have left any time for music. Worse, no one was willing to teach him drumming.”
Someone from the West End called to Geoffrey as the Chased by Monsters production truck drove up. For some reason Juergen Affenzeller was driving it. Since it came out that Chloe Polanski had been an oni mole, Jane had been suspicious of her coworkers. Juergen was the mechanic at WQED—he never left the station.
“Got to go!” Geoffrey gave Chesty one last pat. “Keep her safe, boy! Jane, be careful! You’re getting married in two weeks!”
Jane was looking forward to being married. The upcoming battle seemed less stressful than her wedding—but she had always seen killing dangerous wildlife as a good way to relieve stress.
Speaking of which…
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Juergen cried, backing away, hands raised. “Don’t kill the driver!”
“Why are you driving the Chased by Monsters truck?” Jane said coldly. “I wanted the PB&G truck.”
Chesty growled as he picked up on Jane’s annoyance.
“I’m in the militia!” Juergen cried. “I’m Greenfield Bridge!”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Jane snapped.
“Dmitri made us take the newer equipment,” Hal said, coming around from the passenger side. “The CBM truck has cameras with night vision and the like. He also wanted someone to stay with the truck in case it needed to be moved. For some reason, he thought we would need someone to babysit it.”
She wanted the Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden truck because it was ancient and thus more expendable in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t compatible, though, with the cutting-edge equipment that came with the CBM.
Jane had also wanted Nigel and Hal to stay with the truck. She didn’t want to go into battle with the two naturalists in tow. Much as she loved Hal and Nigel, they had the survival instincts of toddlers. (With six younger siblings, she had seen toddlers try to pull off impossibly dangerous stunts. It amazed her daily that her brothers had lived through their all of their misadventures.) But her grandfather had told her once that war was as much about the next century as it was about the next second. Her team might be the only people out in the field, recording the battle. It would be important to show the oni attacking civilian targets—not only to audiences on Earth, who hopefully one day would be able to send reinforcements, but more importantly to the humans of Pittsburgh who might believe that they could stay on the sidelines of this conflict.
“Fine.” Jane pointed toward the line of pickups heading toward the South Aiken Bridge, loaded down with rubble to build a barricade. “Try to find a parking spot that puts some buildings between the truck and the busway.”
* * *
Taggart and Nigel were gearing up in the back of the production truck. Jane climbed in with Chesty and signaled Hal that she was set. Nigel was doing vocal warmups while checking levels on the soundboard. Taggart had been tucking away memory cards where ammo clips normally went. He glanced up as the truck started to move. A warm smile spread across his face that sent giddy warmth all through Jane. It amazed her that she still felt that school-girl-crush feeling. She loved everything about him. It went beyond his wild-man good looks—his dark eyes, his thick eyebrows, his long black hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. It was the fact that every day he proved himself to be intelligent, artistic, compassionate, and brave. It was the fact that when he saw her, he smiled like he was looking at the most amazing thing he’d seen in his life.
“Hey,” he said.
“I love you,” she said because there was a chance that if she didn’t say it now, she would never have the chance to say it again.
His smile saddened a bit as he acknowledged the truth of the moment. “I love you.”
Unlike Geoffrey, he felt no need to tell her to be careful. He trusted her.
And she trusted him. Taggart had been a war correspondent for years, so he had the most combat duty experience in Pittsburgh. He even had his own combat vest that he had brought with him from Earth.
“I threw this in our truck at the last minute.” He made sure his vest covered his chest without blocking his neck movement. “Everything—the information blackout, the trouble with the visa, the news that Windwolf had been attacked and possibly dead—gave me chicken skin.”
It was the Hawaiian way of saying “goose bumps.”
“I promise to keep my head down low,” Nigel said to them. “I would stay in the truck but I think that I need to be the one that Earth needs to see on the front line. They’ll trust me to tell the truth. Also, I think I’ll be needed to keep Hal reined in so you can focus on the fighting.”
“Thank you,” Jane said.
The truck stopped moving.
South Aiken Avenue was a mix of big stately brick homes built a hundred years ago and ugly mid-century brick boxes. A huge, six-story brick, turn-of-the-century flour mill had been built on the hillside beside the bridge. Shortly before the first Startup, it had been converted into an office building with sleek modern windows. Its lowest floor sat far below the bridge, level with the busway. The fourth floor was at street level and accessed via a rear parking lot.
Juergen had parked in the rear lot. The rain started to thicken and lightning flashed on the western horizon. Jane, Taggart and Nigel ducked under a portico connecting the main building to a tiered parking lot on the hillside beside it.
Jane used her family call sign over her militia headset. “Beater One to Keeper.”
“Keeper here,” Duff answered, sounding tense. Her little brother was working as the militia’s communication hub. It was a lot of responsibility and danger to put on an eighteen-year-old but she wanted family that she could trust in the position. Too much rode on it.
“Any word on our target?” Jane said as thunder rumbled over them. The lightning storm was still far off, pushing rain ahead of it. It was roughly three miles from the Thirty-first Street Bridge to where Jane was standing now—all uphill. It would take a human an hour to stroll it. It had taken her ten minutes to drive from Marc’s house to Oakland. (Granted she broke the speed limit and ignored the possibility of collision at intersections due to lack of working traffic lights.)
“The city power is still out.” Duff couldn’t say that the traffic camera system was offline without endangering their use of that resource. “BW is scouting.”
BW, or black wing, was code for tengu. Most likely it was Yumiko, as the female had been blowing up black willows a few blocks away earlier in the afternoon. Yumiko could vanish in broad daylight, which made her a perfect scout.
“Copy that,” Jane said.
Hal and Juergen got out of the front of the production truck and dashed through the rain to join her under the portico.
Hal was beaming with excitement. He’d taken off his “Hal’s Heroes” hat, leaving his blond hair sticking up in short spikes. He had his boonie in his right hand and his antique pith helmet in his left. “Which hat would be better? The pith is more dashing.”
Jane covered her mic. “Don’t stand out. Wear what everyone else is wearing or snipers will target you. Get ready to go live.”
Hal’s smile dimmed slightly—probably at the prospect of blending in. His ego liked standing out to the point that it overwhelmed both the great intelligence and little wisdom that he had. “WQED has backup power but most of our viewers don’t. No one is going to be watching the evening news.”
“We’re going to jury-rig a connection to WESA via the walkie-talkies and broadcast over the radio.”
“Really?” Hal said. “We can do that?”
“Yes,” Jane said without explaining more. She and her brothers had kept Hal in the dark about many aspects of the militia since he was such a loose cannon. They decided that he might be less dangerous if he didn’t know everything.
Duff had reported a successful test last week. Jane hadn’t thought of the radio station needing an emergency generator at the time. She shook her head at her stupid mistake. Should have, could have, would have. Roach promised to get the radio station quickly back on the air. If anyone in Pittsburgh could track down a generator and get it installed in minutes, he could. At the moment, though, her portable radio was transmitting static instead of WESA.
“Roach is hooking up a generator so the radio station will be back on air shortly. Taggart, film Nigel’s intro now. We’ll do fill-in if there’s a lull.”
Hal pulled on his blue bucket hat and started his vocal warm-ups, trilling up and down.
Jane turned to Juergen. The parking garage had a heavy steel beam barring vehicles over six feet seven inches from entering. The Chased by Monsters truck was a whopping nine feet tall. “This is a dead end for the truck. If the oni push through the barricade, the truck will be pinned down here. Move it back up the street.”
Juergen nodded and headed back to the truck.
Nigel, Taggart, and Hal set up a shielded light on Nigel and started filming. “We’ve received word that a large oni force is heading toward the elf enclaves in Oakland. When we arrived, we were informed that the domana are unconscious, seemingly struck down within their walls by an oni spell…”
“Beater One, this is Keeper,” Duff said over Jane’s headset.
“Beater One here,” she responded quietly after moving out of earshot.
“BW has sighted oni on Liberty Avenue—two thousand feet and closing.”
Two thousand feet was less than a half mile, which would put the oni near Morrow Park.
“Copy that,” Jane said. “Going to command.”
“Copy that,” Duff said.
She switched channels on her radio. “This is Storm Six.”
She’d been thinking of an odd conversation with Tooloo when she picked out the call sign for the command unit. The old female elf had cautioned Jane to keep her cards close to her chest. It was the reason Jane later set up the militia in spy cells. The old elf had called Jane “my little storm fury” as she walked away with her pet rooster. The entire conversation had proved to be an earworm as Jane couldn’t stop replaying the exchange over and over in her head. “Fury” was too easy to garble but “storm” worked as a call sign.
“I’m in position,” Jane said over the headset. “Smithfield, Carson, what’s your twenty?”
“Storm Six, this is Smithfield,” Alton said. “We’re in the eagle’s nest.”
“Storm Six, this is Carson,” Martha Champagne said. “We’re establishing fortifications at current position.”
“Target is approaching Liberty and Baum,” Jane said. Smithfield would be able to see which direction the oni headed once they hit Baum Boulevard.
“Copy that!” Smithfield said.
“This is Hot Metal! Copy target position!” Hot Metal’s excited baritone chimed in. He was a good man but he liked being in the spotlight.
“This is Homestead,” Kate Emerson calmly added as the Homestead Bridge cell leader. She was legendary as an unshakeable hunter. “No sign yet at front line.”
Jane waved to Taggart to indicate that she was leaving. She headed around the corner with Chesty on her heels.
The bridge on South Aiken Avenue was two hundred feet long and wide enough for three lanes of traffic and sidewalks on both sides. Jersey barriers separated the vehicle traffic from the pedestrian walkways. A tall chain-link fence kept people from stepping off the bridge’s deck.
Far below were two sets of train tracks protected on both sides by high cement walls, topped with a chain-link fence to keep people and animals off the rails. The rail line continued past the Rim, laid down by the elves two decades ago, heading northeast to meet up with the main train line out of Station Square. Slightly higher were two lanes of bus roadway that stopped abruptly at the rim. Beyond the road, there was another fence, to keep people from trespassing on the limited access busway. While the oni could muscle their way across all barriers, it was unlikely that they would try.
Her side of the bridge was controlled chaos. Hot Metal and Homestead were using pickup trucks to ferry rubble from beside Sacred Heart to South Aiken Avenue. The front vehicle shone its headlights onto a wall of bricks and cinder block and steel girders at the end of the bridge, just shy of where the Jersey barriers stopped. The wall was already four feet tall and growing taller. The section on the left was higher to create a safe escape route to the driveway. Beyond the barricade, concertina wire created a web of sharp metal shards.
Doug Bowser was the leader of Hot Metal, although most people knew him as Dog Bow-Wow. He stopped what he was doing when he spotted her—they had beaten saluting out of him early on because it told enemy snipers who was in command. Doug was sporting his signature dog collar but managed to score true military camo rain gear. “Sir, should we wait until we see the whites of their eyes or what?”
“Shoot as soon as you have a target.” Jane suspected that the oni were going to come in a wave, hoping to overrun them with sheer numbers. Normally she would have ordered the militia to conserve ammo but the point of creating a choke point was to make it like shooting fish in a bucket. “Remember that the tengu are our allies. Don’t shoot at them!”
“Yes, sir.” Doug moved off to spread the word through the ranks.
Almost as if summoned, Yumiko ghosted out of the darkness. She was panting from flying. She’d dismissed her wings as if she was afraid of being shot. “There’s thousands of them. They have wargs on leashes and something in cages. They’ve got tarps over the cages, so I could only get a quick look at one of them. I didn’t recognize the creature but it had spell runes written all over it. I think the greater bloods plan to enlarge the beast like they did the foo dogs.”
Jane’s stomach gave a sickening lurch. Hot Metal and Homestead were less than a hundred people combined. They weren’t going to be able to stop the flood of oni. The bridge, though, created the only possible stopping point. If they let the oni get past it, they could spread out. It would turn fighting into a deadly game of hide and seek with the enemy having scent-tracking wargs.
Yumiko jerked around to stare toward Downtown. “Jin Wong calls!” She stood silent, listening to a voice that only the tengu could hear. “He’s ordering the Flock to Oakland! Tinker domi is awake and angry.”
That was the first good news of the day. The tengu admitted to having twenty thousand of their people on Elfhome.
“How many?” Jane asked.
Yumiko shook her head with dismay. “Everyone who is fit to fight. If Tinker falls today, we will lose our protection. More domana will come from the Easternlands to battle the oni but they will judge us as one of the enemy. Tinker must survive this battle.”
Jane winced. She hadn’t been entirely happy with the fact that the tengu yamabushi had been watching over her family, especially since the oni hadn’t moved against them after they rescued Boo. Today, though, she had found the knowledge comforting, especially in Duff’s case. She could understand why Jin Wong was committing everything to stopping the oni before they overwhelmed Tinker domi and the enclaves. At least it meant that the militia only needed to hold the bridge until reinforcements arrived.
Chesty growled softly, staring across the bridge.
“They’re coming!” Jane called out, taking hard cover. “Turn out those headlights! Take cover! Get ready to fire!”
She motioned to Chesty to lie down, as close to the wall as he could get. She crouched down beside him. “Stay down, boy.”
Quiet fell as the headlights turned off and plunged them into rainy darkness. In the silence, they could hear horns blowing. Jane couldn’t identify the type, it wasn’t as metallic as truck or train horn. It was mellow like trumpet playing a slow growling fanfare, but deeper. Chesty grumbled with annoyance at the strange noise.
“What is that?” someone asked fearfully in the darkness. “Are those kusei?”
“No, not kusei.” Kate had a herd of the shaggy Elfhome elephants. She would know. “Not saurus either. Maybe some kind of new monster.”
“War horns,” Yumiko said quietly. Apparently the tengu female thought it was up to Jane to decide if the information should be readily spread. “They’re made from the tusks of animals like kusei hollowed out into large wind instruments.”
“It’s just horns!” Jane shouted. “They’re like the horns that people play at football games! The oni are trying to psych us! Just ignore them!”
“Three worlds bridged by a single span,” Dog Bow-Wow sang in the darkness. “Steel that climbs from earth to sky. Freedom to create, freedom to fly—one world, one people, one kind. We are Pittsburgh.”
“We are Pittsburgh!” His people chanted to drown out the horns. “We are Pittsburgh! We are Pittsburgh! We are Pittsburgh!”
For a few minutes, it worked. Then the oni advanced and the horns grew louder.
“Pipe down!” Jane shouted. The horns and chanting were going to drown out orders. The rain grew heavier, beating down on her shoulders and the pavement around her. The gutters were starting to overflow. If the sun was still up, it was lost behind the thick clouds. The other end of the bridge vanished in the dark and rain. They were going to be shooting blindly.
Lightning grew closer, the thunder coming faster after the sky flashed to white.
Taggart, Hal, and Nigel came scuttling up to her, running low to keep behind the protection of the stone wall. Hal shook his head to indicate that WESA wasn’t up and broadcasting yet. Nigel was monologuing. Taggart panned over the militia. He had the Chased by Monsters’ night vision camera out that they used to film nocturnal animals, wrapped against the rain.
“Keep low,” Jane cautioned her crew. “What can you see on the other side of the bridge? How close are they?”
Taggart rose up slightly to film over the wall. “The front line is about three hundred meters from the end of the bridge. They’re spread from sidewalk to sidewalk.”
With the length of the bridge added onto that number, the oni were currently beyond the effective range of the hunting rifles and shotguns that most of the militia had. The bullets might hit them but they would have no penetrating power—not at that distance. They needed every bullet to count.
“How fast are they moving?” Jane asked.
“It looks like normal walking speed.”
Which meant the oni would be at the end of the bridge within a minute or two. The problem was that the militia couldn’t see what they were shooting at. Even if they turned the truck’s high beams on, it would illuminate the full bridge. It would make the militia’s thin ranks visible. Was it worth the risk?
“Strike a blow!” Hal suddenly exclaimed loudly, standing up. “For Freedom!”
“Hal!” Jane shouted.
Hal held a tube above his head. Jane realized it was a rocket flare as he pulled the cord, launching the flare. The rocket whooshed away. A heartbeat later, it exploded over the far side of the bridge—a sudden white nova of light. The parachute illumination flare started to drift downward, lighting up the street beyond the far side of the bridge.
The enemy troops surged forward, breaking into a run. They formed a massive wall of creatures, from pony-sized wargs to eight-foot-tall hulking oni. They carried a bizarre assortment of weapons. She caught glimpses of assault rifles, spears, shields, scimitarlike swords, and massive axes.
“Shit!” Jane reached up, grabbed the back of Hal’s collar, and yanked him down as both sides opened fire.
Guns boomed all around her in a deafening unending staccato. Bullets whined overhead and ricocheted off the pavement behind them.
Jane growled a few more curses as she gave Hal a shake to let him know how angry she was with him.
“We can see now!” Hal shouted, somehow projecting even over the deafening loud noise. “Look!”
Yes, they could see the enemy. They were terrifying. The oni could also now see that they vastly outnumbered the militia. They came charging forward, roaring.
The militia wasn’t going to hold.
“Go!” Jane pushed Hal toward the driveway. She tapped Taggart and pointed. He nodded grimly and took off in a crouching run. Nigel gave her a look of utter despair but followed Taggart.
The concertina wire slowed the oni down. The first rank stumbled to a screaming halt as they were entangled with the sharpened spikes. The second rank shoved them forward, ignoring their screams.
Jane fired as fast as she could pick a target, killing the nearest oni even as she scanned the ranks for their leaders. If she could take down the commanders, she might be able to sow enough chaos that the tide of enemies would check. The front warriors seemed to be all cannon folder. Boo had said that the true bloods were the most intelligent and they needed to wear masks to appear more fearsome to the animalistic lesser bloods. She spotted two that had stopped at the edge of the bridge, urging the others forward. She took them out with head shots through their fearsome masks.
The wave of oni hit the wall of rubble.
The rocket flare guttered and died, plunging them back into darkness.
“Pull back!” Jane shouted, shooting blindly. “Pull back!”
Two machine guns opened up, strobing the darkness with muzzle flare. The bullets crisscrossed in amazing precision, punching back the oni.
Who the hell on her side had machine guns?
Jane backpedaled from the wall, keeping low, as dead oni tumbled forward off it. Corg Durrack and Hannah Briggs crouched behind the very end of the Jersey walls that flanked the bridge sidewalks, using the concrete barricades to rest the tripod of light machine guns. They fired on full auto, unloading a massive number of bullets into the oni.
Jane paused to fumble her whistle to her mouth and blew it just in case the people around her hadn’t heard her shouted commands. If they didn’t move now, they would be overrun the moment that Durrack and Briggs ran out of ammo.
Lightning struck to the west a block away, whitening the sky. The thunder was almost instantaneous, momentarily drowning out everything.
In that moment of brightness, she saw an oni with a rocket launcher pointed directly at her.
She jerked her gun to the right to take aim. Her line of sight was eclipsed by a massive brute of an oni bearing down on her with an eight-foot sword. Cursing, she shouldered her rifle, caught the oni by the wrist, and used his own momentum to throw him. Chesty leapt forward, growling like a bear. Even as she threw the brute, she saw the rocket flashing toward her.
She swore and tried to leap away. The rocket exploded just inches from them. Jane saw it blossom into flame. Heard the oddly muffled boom.
She felt no pain. The flames stopped inches from her, spreading sideways instead of forward.
The oni brute was suddenly without a head.
Despite the fact it was still pouring down rain, it wasn’t falling on her anymore.
“Oookay,” someone said in the muffled quiet, sounding at once relieved and extremely stressed out at the same time.
Jane turned.
Oilcan stood in the center of the road, his left hand up and cocked in an odd position. He was panting slightly. The Pittsburgh Salvage flatbed sat a dozen feet back, doors open, windshield wipers going, headlights flooding the night with light. Oilcan looked like he did the few times that their paths had crossed over the years. Summer field parties. Pig roasts. Building Geoffrey’s casting circle. Places where Roach and Geoffrey had invited both friends and family. He still wore a T-shirt, blue jeans, and biker boots. The only difference was Oilcan’s ears were now definitely longer and pointed.
Flanking Oilcan were two sekasha, one male and one female, both with Stone Clan Black tattoos on their arms. The female, though, wore a Wind Clan Blue wyvern-scale vest. This must be the infamous Thorne Scratch on Stone who had killed Earth Son.
Who was the male, flicking blood from his sword after beheading the brute?
“You’re Geoffrey’s big sister, right?” Oilcan said. “Jane?”
“Yeah,” Jane said as she glanced around. The oni seemed to have realized that a domana with sekasha had joined the fray. They were falling back. It might be in fear, or it might be to change battle tactics.