Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (15 page)

And then it did. Shotguns and automatics awoke right beyond the church doors, echoing between the shopfronts while their spent casings clattered on the pavements everywhere.

A big shadow dropped into view just outside the church’s big stained-glass window. There, where the Virgin Mother’s head inclined tenderly downward, gazing on the Infant on her lap, the hovering shape outside dimmed the color from the Madonna’s face and shoulders. It rose and sank gently in its airborne position, a long, horizontal silhouette, bi-partite, the forepart bulkier than the tapered rear while—eerily audible within the stuttering roar of gunfire—a purring buzz seemed to come from it.

Until, in the same instant, the shadow rose sharply and the top of the window exploded beneath it in a rainbow spray of shards.

In the void left by the Virgin Mother’s destroyed head and shoulders, they saw plainly an alien shape of black and silver in the sun: a huge wasp hanging on the air, a dire, gorgeous thing: death perfectly designed.

Jool’s and the other four Thompsons opened up in almost the same instant, hammering it fore and aft, spraying its black tissue into the sunlight, while the gun outside that had just missed it, aimed from more directly underneath, now sent gouts of its substance geysering skyward.

Yet still it flew, slid sideways, upward, and—horribly distinct in the golden sunlight—reknit, the ragged holes torn in its thorax and abdomen shrinking, closing, the entire creature contracting slightly in its self-repair.

As it slid high and out of view, the sunlight flashed off the long, glossy spike of its sting. And through the portal the wasp had vacated, the women saw a piece of sky that swarmed with its brethren.

Jool heard amid the mêlée the fragment of a hoarse shout above them. Curtis’s voice, from up on the church roof. “Rake!” she thought she heard him howl. “… Behind you!”

XVIII

THE FIRST MOVEMENT

Giant bugs—we
knew that already. But airborne!

And how hard was that to forsee? Damn few bugs don’t have wings. The fucking spiders had been bad enough, but at least they had to run you down to kill you.

These bugs streaked down and froze midair, shifting a little side to side—almost like good old Margolian just wanted to give us a look at them before they killed us. I laid thirty-cal on them. Chunks whicked off their legs, wings, bodies. They zig-zagged clear, reknitting on the wing, their torn parts—slightly smaller—sprouting back. I looked at these things and I saw in them Margolian himself—his ugly will, his twisted mission. Always the entertainer, he didn’t just like killing us, he liked wowing us too.

Their heads were huge eyes, two faceted hemispheres flashing rainbow in the sun. Margolian was feasting on us with these eyes, all cameras, of course, that sucked us up, spread us out up there on his monitors, where he could watch us crouching and ducking and desperately gunning. The thoraxes were bulky and angular and looked muscle-bound dangling their long segmented legs. The abdomens were fat and sleek, arcing out and down to their saber-like stingers.

But showtime was over. Now they were coming at us everywhere, our gunfire zipping up through them like a vertical blizzard. We were trimming a hail of frags off them that melted midair back to gel and spattered down on our roofs and pavements.

Their stingers were lightning-quick and people were down everywhere. We couldn’t find a rhythm for defense. Bobbing and hovering, zigging and zagging they filled the air, but when they dove to sting they were sudden and quick as thrown knives.

I was up here to protect the church but I couldn’t cover the front of it—the street forces had to do that. I worked to nail everything that even came near it, but now and then a bug dropped past me. Then, was that a window shattering beneath me? And after that, gunfire pouring
out
of that window?

I couldn’t go down to her, couldn’t leave their airspace uncovered—could only send prayers with each round that they fired.

“Rake!” I screamed to a friend on a rooftop across the street. “Behind you!”

It nailed him in the upper back. He went slack, his astonished eyes fixed on mine, still standing because the wasp, like a skyhook, held him upright. I laid fire on it, but it hung there shedding chunks while its abdomen pulsed, and pulsed again. It dropped him then and climbed, healing as it rose.

They nailed one at last down on Glacier—drenched it with gas as its stinger was sunk in a victim, and gunned it alight. It went high all afire.

You could only call clenching what the fucker did then. Its body contracted, turned black and crusty and absorbed the flames. A smoking cinder with wings still whirring it hovered, and then raining off it came a shower of ash and the bug rose intact again, smaller perhaps by a third. Torching didn’t work on them!

Bullhorns were blaring, “Blobs! Watch your feet!” I saw ’Manda Drake, a woman that Momma’d been tutoring, writhing on the ground with gel globed round her foot. The guy that snatched her up slipped on another blob, almost falling as he dragged her clear. And because we couldn’t stop firing, gel just kept raining down on us.

And every so often I couldn’t help looking up at the Studio’s cam fleet sucking up every tick of this carnage. You could see them working, their whole formation seething as each boat shifted or tilted or rose or dropped for its camera angle, a huge flock of carrion birds feasting midair on our photons.

All was delirium. I was hammering monsters to pieces that flew back together, and the roar of my gun erased my mind. And as my brain went away my gunning got truer, my tracers a half-beat ahead of their movement and I was nailing them, nailing them just as they got there. I had one now, was tearing away at its upper thorax, and I kept it pinned just long enough that its head flew off.

Head and body dropped like stone—a fifty-foot fall, and both parts had reverted to gel before impact.

“Take off their heads!” I screamed to the town. Screamed it again. Did anyone hear?

I tried to do it again, but now that I was trying I couldn’t seem to manage it. We were all in unison once more, a town-size storm of gunfire that brought down nothing but a rain of gel spattering the streets. And that gel kept rivering, meeting, and merging. There were globs of it prowling everywhere underfoot.

And then there were no wasps in the streets anymore. They all hung at hover well above roof level. They dove and feinted and pulled back up. Drawing our gunfire aloft but no longer engaging.

It was like a musical pause. Panoply was setting a tempo, playing our town like an organ. Now it was filming our recovery work, the damage control we all had to turn to the instant this moment allowed it. Bullhorns called for fire control. Gas had sprayed wild from pump-gunners trying to drench diving targets, and hot shot had set the porch of the library on fire along with some walls here and there.

Other horns blared for medevac. This was grim work. There were casualties like Amanda—a guy who’d reached behind himself to break his fall and now had gel up to his elbow, and a few others losing feet or legs even as we carried them off for amputation. But apart from these, “medevac” meant carrying stone-dead Sunrisers back to the industrial zone, and laying them out in the big lot beside the lumber mill. One hit from those stingers and you were stone dead.

“Hey Curtis!” Cap, down in the street, had to shout because we had gunners still working the sky. There was a gash on his head and he was bleeding from both arms, his own blood on the grip of his machete. His shield looked hammered and splintery on the front.

“How’re those workin, Cap?”

“They work! Lock up their stingers, but we can’t kill ’em. Their legs tear ya up while you’re tryin to chop ’em. Cut off their stingers an they fly up an grow another. Half my guys quit, went back to guns. I heard you killed one!”

“Yeah! Shot its
head
off! Pass that around!”

He had to dodge as he ran off, because the wasps were coming down again. We’d already lost dozens of friends. Our score so far: one. My lucky shot.

*   *   *

Act Two was
over. The sun was near the far western hills. A chill breeze dried our sweat and made us shiver.

Japh and I were carrying a corpse out into the industrial zone—a big older guy, a Hanger whose name we didn’t know. We were tired to the bone, and black-grim at heart, and both of us trying not to let the other see it. The dead seemed so heavy, and we were so tired.

“Little closer, Curtis,” Japh said. We laid him up tight against the outermost body, one more flagstone in a pavement of dead. There was need of close stacking. The first rank lay tight to the side of the mill, and four more ranks lay beside that. More than a hundred dead, and at least fifteen people unaccounted for.

The battle had flowed out here in the Second Act. To have foot room for fighting we’d have to start laying the next act’s casualties two-deep.

Along Glacier Avenue, tired fighters huddled on porches and slumped back against walls. People circulated on bicycles carrying wine and water and bread and cheese for those not too exhausted to eat.

We walked in a kind of trance. When the APPs had swarmed off to the hills, amped voices from the shoot-rafts had called Intermission until full moonrise, more than two hours off. It seemed like a new kind of time we were walking through, where you could look around and draw an easy breath.

Japh went to find Kate and I started for the church to see Jool and our ladies. Everyone was OK. No APPs had gotten in, but a lot of gel was blown off them that’d made things risky underfoot in the church. We’d dragged the dormant stuff out before we’d sat down to rest together.

I commed her now as I headed back over there.

“Just come here, hon. Just come here,” she told me, and clicked off. I heard bad news in her voice. I started jogging. I saw from a couple blocks off that everyone had come out of the church and were grouped on the sidewalk.

She stepped out of the crowd to meet me, wrapped her arms around me and held on like a limpet. I knew now it was either my auntie or her momma, and then I saw Momma Grace weeping there, being comforted by Gillian, and Jool was saying to me, “I’m so sorry, hon. I’m so sorry.”

I don’t remember going inside the church—only standing beside the pew they’d laid her on. Her tight little face in its white puffball of hair looked like she’d gone to sleep angry and the anger was just fading out of her features as her sleep got deeper.

Her left leg was gone to the knee. She looked so small … and I realized that my auntie
was
small and always had been. And that it was only her fierce little mind, and the love in her, that had made me see her as larger all my life, even when I was nearly twice her size.

I knelt down and took her in my arms and let the tears come. Tears don’t help at all—that’s why they’re tears. But somehow when they’ve fallen they do help. They help to collect in your heart all you’ve lost.

I remembered her so pissed at me she smacked my hand with her mixing spoon for scooping out the dough with my fingers, and I remembered laughing at her for even
hitting
me gently. It made her laugh too, ticked though she was.

I remembered so clearly the morning she taught me what
reading
was. The sun was pouring through the window, and here on my lap was my pal,
The Poky Little Puppy
. And here was Auntie’s finger, touching these little marks below my pal, and saying a word with each one she touched. And it hit me: these little marks were talking to me,
me
, about the Poky Little Puppy!

I remembered the first bad fight I’d gotten into at school in the fifth grade. We’d both gotten pretty colorful, and the principal had really reamed us out about it, and Auntie had already been called when I got back home. There was thunder and outrage in her eyes, and she wouldn’t say a word to me, just started cleaning up my cuts and scrapes and none too gently either. I felt pretty low.

Then she went and stood by the window, glowering. I realized years later that she was thinking of when she’d been eleven, down there in the Zoo. She’d worked long and hard to get from down there up to here, but she was trying to recapture that long-ago girl down there and trying to find what to tell me.

She came and sat down in front of me and took my right arm and squeezed my wrist.

“Yow!”

“I know it hurts, Curtis. See how swollen it is? That’s because you didn’t keep your wrist straight. Give me your left hand. Now hold that wrist straight with your elbow like this. Now throw that whole arm with your punch with your back in it too.”

Of all the things she gave me, maybe that was the hardest for her.

Jool knelt near me. “Listen. People who’ve … lost parts to the gel. They say it’s not pain, just cold and pressure. We think it’s just shock that…”

“That killed her.” I nodded, trying to let her know it helped that there had been no agony in her passing. I laid Auntie back down on the pew and touched her face with both my hands, and drew them back. This touch, this sensation on my palms, was the last I would ever have of her. I said good-bye to her. I knew I’d be saying it for the rest of my life.

Japh was there. When he hugged me, I found I had more tears for her in me. So did Japh. He’d stolen her cookie-dough too.… We wrapped Auntie in blankets, carried her back to the altar, and laid her near it.

*   *   *

As they walked
together over to the theater, Japh asked Curtis, “Whaddya make of those?” Here and there along the street lay actual dead APPs—beheaded wasps that had not gone to gel, but lay like little wrecked planes on the pavement.

Curtis didn’t answer. Japh gripped his shoulder and answered himself. “I think it’s just cinema myself. For the visual effect. A lull in the battle, tired Sunrisers clearing the wreckage, and in the streets, dead monsters here and there. Their cams never sleep, right?”

“Margolian. I’m gonna tear that sonofabitch’s throat out.”

“We both are.”

More than half the crowd in the theater were asleep, in chairs or curled on the floor. Others leaned or lay resting, in a buzz of low, tired talk with their neighbors … or holding them as they wept.