Emergence (27 page)

SWAT started shooting. The SEALs dashed for cover. Chief Allen, Igor the giant, and a cop grabbed the body of the man who’d been struck and dragged it out of the middle of the road. They hadn’t moved more than a few steps when another police officer screamed and fell, run through by a shaft that pierced the back of his body armour.

Dave already was turning toward the source of the danger when he saw the second arrow fly, a dark blur in the night. Not waiting for permission, not bothering to ask or consult with Heath, he exploded from a standing start, moving in the direction of the Sliveen. Everything seemed to slow down around him.

No, that was wrong. Time didn’t
seem
to slow down; some monstrous force actually did apply the brakes to the flow of reality as he suddenly accelerated into motion. Part of his mind, detached and curious, noted how slowly Heath was dropping through the air as he leaped toward the command truck for cover. Ashbury cried out, but not in fear. She raged at Compton, wrestling for the door handle with him. Her infuriated screams reached him as a weird, elongated sound effect, as though he was watching the scene in super slo-mo. His own mind was unaffected. Dave was able to calculate the flight path of the second arrow as he found himself again calling on equations and math solutions. The deadly path of the war shaft led from the slowly crumpling body of the SWAT officer back into the night air at an angle of thirty-two degrees between the point of release and impact. In his mind’s eye he saw the passage of the arrakh-du as a dark red trace image, a slight parabolic curve accounting for gravity’s downward pull on the shaft. He could, if he chose to, examine gently floating clouds of calculations that would lead him to understand the speed of the projectile, the pounds per square inch of pressure it had delivered to the spinal column upon impact, the draw strength needed to use a conventional Sliveen war bow, the time to
. . .

But he chose none of these things, ignoring them in favour of calculating a path to the place where the daemon scout stood atop the bell tower of a red-brick church one and a half blocks up Fourth Street. It looked like about
. . .
No, it
was
a distance of 169 yards. Or 169 yards and nineteen inches from where Dave was launching himself toward the ancient
ienamic
to where the Sliveen, which looked like a much thinner, darker, more insectile version of a warrior Hunn, was slowly, slowly, slowly reaching back over its shoulder into a giant quiver for another war shaft. The Sliveen, he was pleased to note, moved no more quickly than Heath or Ashbury or any of its targets. So pleased was he to note this interesting fact that a wolfish grin spread over his face, giving him a fierce canine aspect.

Lucille was singing to him again, but a soft and soothing love song this time. A gentle melody that paradoxically urged him toward violence at even greater speed.

The path to the daemon opened up before them, an imagined trail that ran straight and true for half the distance to the monster, jagging left around a pick-up that was slowly, slowly, slowly rounding the next corner, up on two wheels, impossibly balanced between tipping over and making the radical turn. Then it veered to the right to avoid a clutch of a dozen or so fleeing residents, all of them bunched tightly together, none moving at anything faster than a fraction of a fraction of half speed, with one in mid-turn, pointing back and upward, quite possibly at the dark shadow of the UnderRealm scout. A leap onto a Ford F-150 emerging from the parking lot of the church would help launch Dave onto the steeply sloped roof of the nave.

He remembered the term ‘nave’ from a long-ago lesson in a compulsory first-year civil engineering class. EGR 151: ‘A History of the Built Environment’. He knew, without bothering to test the knowledge, that he could recall every detail of that class now if he so chose. A wonder, given how close he’d come to failing it the first time around. He’d bothered turning up only because there was a particular hottie who was enrolled that semester and
. . .

The leap onto the nave would present him with an interesting physics problem, he realised, consciously putting aside his memories of the hottie, which was a non-trivial effort. She’d banged like an outhouse door in a high wind when he’d finally nailed her, and he could remember every tactile detail of that encounter, too, now. But he would, if not careful, punch right through the tiles and into the attic or even the main body of the church where the congregation would be seated of a Sunday on the pews.

Where some worshippers undoubtedly were seated or kneeling right now, he thought, praying by candlelight for deliverance.

Better to just get the fucking job done, Dave. Monster first. Hotties later.

He saw that he would have to hit the steep tiled roof at a shallow angle, bleeding off the energy of his touchdown by running away from the Sliveen for
. . .
eight and a half yards
. . .
before performing a tight, looping turn and coming back at his foe from what would then be his right flank. What the Hunn called shield-wise when they deigned to pay their enemies the honour of carrying a shield into battle.

The Sliveen bore no such protection.

Dave performed the calculations required to map out his route between his first step and his second. Those two steps carried him more than twenty feet, so great was the explosive power of each stride. He passed through the floating world like a thought through a line of dead text and experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance that was rooted in the realisation of just how quickly he was moving. The air itself cleaved apart at his progress, roaring in his ears as a gale force wind. Some part of him felt as though everything should have blurred around him, becoming an indecipherable smear of colour and movement. But the world was slow and everything within it impossibly unhurried and deliberate. Suspended.

He was the blur, flashing past the fleeing terrified residents at such a speed that he was long gone before the most alert of them had turned even partway in his direction. He slapped his palm lightly into the side of the pick-up, imparting just enough of a hit to tip it back toward safety as it curved ever so slowly around the corner.

As he leaped onto the hood and then the cabin roof of the F-150, he felt the metal crumple under the enormous pressure of his lift-off. But his calculations were good, and as the windshield exploded outward, Dave launched himself toward the roofline. As he sailed up and up, his boyhood self called him back toward memories of that summer when he and his cousin Darryl had imagined something just like this and pushed the trampoline up against the back fence and
. . .
But he closed off that remembrance, too, for it served no purpose now as he touched down on the grey roof tiles lightly enough that only a couple cracked under the soles of his boots. More shattered as he decelerated, channelling the enormous velocities he’d generated into the structure of the building. One foot slipped as he reached the apogee of his own particular flight path and turned toward the Sliveen.

It had sensed the shocking swiftness of his approach and was turning much more rapidly now as Dave lost his footing on the disintegrating tile. The long, sinewy arm had drawn out the length of the arrakh-du war shot and in a heartbeat would have it notched and aimed. But Dave Hooper, the defender of this realm, moved within the space between heartbeats. Feeling his feet lose traction, he allowed the stumble to become a controlled drop, dipping his shoulder toward the peak and allowing the muscle memory of a judo roll he had performed only a few times as a child in a free class, and with no real grace or skill, to well up from within.

He hadn’t even wanted to go to judo. It was a stupid martial art. Not like fucking karate, which kicked ass. But his mother said judo was good for his brother’s asthma. So they went to a few classes, decades ago. Dave executed the roll over the handle of Lucille and up the incline of the steeply pitched church roof perfectly, as though he’d never stepped off the
tatami
.

The Sliveen had the arrow notched and half drawn as Dave powered toward the creature. It almost certainly knew in its cold reptilian way that it could not afford to indulge in a full draw of the bowstring, which would deliver enough energy to punch the shaft through the human’s torso with momentum enough to fly on for hundreds of yards beyond it. Dave Hooper doubted he’d recover from a wound like that as easily as he’d healed from the cut in the hospital.

Knowing it had to act quickly, the Sliveen scout loosed the shot as Dave closed the gap between them to talon range.

Too slow. Too late. Too poorly aimed.

Dave saw the long, spidery fingers of the scout let go of their grip on the taut wulfin-hide bowstring. He had time enough to watch the arrowhead of sharpened Drakon-glass begin its short journey away from the recurve bow. Time enough to shift his weight and bring Lucille up, one hand gripping her base and the other wrapped around the throat of the splitting maul just below the heavy steel head. He was certain she was singing. A light, skipping child song, almost laughing the melody.

He pivoted and swept the air in front of him, tilting his head, watching curiously as the dark hickory knocked the arrow off course, sending it flying high, soaring at a greater angle of elevation, to land safely, he hoped, in the waste ground of the new housing development or even, should he be exceptionally lucky, in among the ranks of the raiding party. That, he thought, would be sweet. A Master of Hunn shot in the ass by one of his own thrall’s arrows.

They’d be yucking it up about that one around the ol’ blood pots for a dark age.

Momentum carried him on toward the scout, whose savage features were only now beginning to contort in rage and dawning confusion. Dave’s thoughts were running at such an accelerated pace that his head felt warm, even fevered. He turned his next step into a driving kick that caught the shocked Sliveen amidships. Although smaller than even a simple warrior Hunn, the stealth fighter still enjoyed a considerable advantage in height and weight over any but the largest human opponents. Even Sergeant Swindt would have to give away a few pounds and a good half foot in height to this bad boy. The kick landed square and true. Dave felt some of the force of the blow travel back up his leg and into his hips.

Most of the power, however, was transferred from his body into the daemon. It began to fly.

Talons screeched on tiles as the creature scrabbled for purchase. Dave took another step toward his now airborne opponent, swinging Lucille like a baseball bat, swinging for the parking lot. The twelve-pound head caught the beast in mid-thorax. Dave had not thought to check his grip on the weapon. If he had, he would have made sure to attack with the cutting edge of the axe lest he strike any sort of armour. But it was the dark metal fist of the sledgehammer that struck the Sliveen.

The daemon exploded, flying apart with a dull, wet roar of detonation. Viscera, bone shards, purple-black ichor, and flesh all expanded outward in a foul blast of organic chemistry. So great was the force of the blow that it spun Dave around, turning him away from the sight of the carcass, which was trailing long strands and loops of offal. He turned back in time to see most of the corpse land in the middle of the crossroads.

As if released from suspension, fleeing residents suddenly sped up. The tyres of the pick-up screeched as they bounced down and the rubber bit into the tarmac again. The odd, distant damping effect on Dave’s hearing cleared, and he could hear screaming and sirens and gunfire. A shaky breath leaked out between his trembling lips.

Turning slowly around, taking everything in, he observed the scene back at the po’boy shop, with medics running to attend to the wounded and the dead and the SWAT and SEAL teams still hunkered down around the command unit for whatever cover they could find. He saw Ashbury punch Compton on the nose, and he actually laughed as another quarter turn found him facing west, where the beleaguered marines were bunkered down at the abandoned McDonald’s on Claiborne.

The laughter died at the back of his throat.

*

Dave hurtled toward the marines without thought or intent or any notion about what he might do when he landed. The muddy, weed-choked lot in which the helicopter had crashed was a good half mile away, but he covered at least a third of that distance with one convulsive leap. He did not hit fast-forward this time. The world did not slow to a crawl around him.

For a moment he was able to watch Heath and Allen and Ostermann whipping their men into action, and then his forward flight carried him away from them and into the airspace occupied by five helicopters. Two were civilian, carrying news crews, and the crash of their colleagues in the Bell had induced at least some caution in those pilots. They stood off a ways, circling the burning wreckage, their spotlights picking out the charge of the Horde across the wasteland toward the downed aircraft and the small contingent of marines who now defended it.

He landed on the road surface, which buckled slightly under the impact. Two more strides and he leaped for the stars again, taking care this time, as he had not before, to note the short looping flight paths of the military helicopters that swarmed and swooped and raked at the thrall with their guns.

Wouldn’t do to jump into a rotor blade.

Dave wondered why the choppers didn’t just unleash seven kinds of hell on the orc swarm, hosing them down with everything they had, but it was no mystery. The thrall was so close to the marines and the survivors of the chopper crash that letting fly meant killing any number of people, too.

And so he sailed on, not quite sure what the fuck he was doing but carried forward as much by Lucille’s sweet song, which now sounded undeniably real and human inside his head, as he was by the power of his leap. That power was even more unexpected and frightening to him than it had been when he had intercepted the flying barbell back at Camp Mysteryland.

It felt as though there were no limits to what he might do. Jump hard enough and perhaps he’d find himself in the vacuum of space after a few minutes. A ridiculous thought, but how much more ridiculous than whatever he was doing right at that moment?