God Hammer: A novel of the Demon Accords (41 page)

The devil book stuck to my hand and froze me solid. Even my eyes were locked, stuck staring at the binding of the book where I could see it was hand-stitched.  Like a repair stitch or maybe the sewing you’d use to fasten something into the binding.

Inside myself, I struggled, throwing my mind against the stasis that held me.  At first, I almost panicked, but even as the others started to move, I drew on the calm that Tanya was projecting over our bond and then drew on my aura.  Oh, and I called for Kirby, too.   

Suddenly, the God Hawk was flapping enormous wings directly overhead and something about his presence gave me the strength to move a bit.  Just my right hand, but that was enough to form a mono-edge on one finger and slice the binding.  The back of the book burst open and a long black object ejected, almost directly into my hand.  It was an oversized toe bone, a metatarsal maybe, complete with a wicked three-inch claw.  I knew instantly what manner of creature it had come from—after all, I had seen many of them during my brief visit to Hell. Demon in physical form, an impossibility here on Earth. But now, it seemed, perhaps not.

Moving with what seemed glacial slowness, I extended my arm above my head.  Kirby screeched at the sight of the bone and dove for my arm.

Two talons, each the size of a banana, pincered together, just catching the toe bone between their needle-sharp tips.  With two flaps of his wings, Kirby ripped the bone from my hand and the paralysis was gone.  But after rising straight toward the lobby ceiling, he did something he had never done before.  He failed to disappear from our dimension.  His wings flapped and strained, yet he was stuck, as if anchored to the Earth.  His cry changed to a scream of anger and suddenly, a second God bird popped in among us, the downdraft of its wings adding to Kirby’s and blowing magazines and newspapers across the lobby.  Kirby Two stretched out a massive foot and clutched the bone with two equally sharp and deadly talons, and then both birds pulled hard.

The bone resisted, as if held by gravity, then suddenly popped free.  Something black and huge flickered into form, the shape that of a bipedal being hanging from a toe, only the bone solid, the rest… fuzzy.  The Kirbys’ voices changed to triumphant as they jumped out of existence, the toe bone and the black form attached to it disappearing with an audible pop.

I looked at Tanya and then the others, Castille now looking much shrunken and withdrawn even as he cradled his left hand.  The agents shook themselves like they were waking from a haze.  Tanya opened her mouth to speak, but an insanely loud alarm began screeching throughout the building.

“The computer center is under attack,” she said.  A noise from outside spun us around in time to see two massive manhole covers shoot straight up fifteen feet into the air as if shot from a cannon.  The two protesting factions stepped back, but nothing happened.  After a few seconds, a few intrepid souls started to move forward.  Any horror movie aficionado could have told them what came next—at least the basic idea, if not the specifics. 

Sure enough, long, segmented shapes scuttled up out of the holes like an overflow of deadly metallic bugs bubbling up from the city’s sewers.

The first two out spun up their blades and turned toward the closest people, the unarmed humans of both factions.

There was no decision made, no consultation or deliberation.  Tanya and I were just suddenly outside, splitting apart to confront the first pedes even as more started to arise from the depths.

She headed for the one by the Church of the True’s supporters.  Most of the faithful had melted away at the sight of the massive metal monster, but one young kid still crouched before it, too confused to run.  He was maybe nine or ten and should have been home watching Ninja Turtles, not facing a death bug the size of a couch.

Tanya
screamed,
her voice pitched in a range of rage I’d never heard before.  The thing about my vampire is that her voice carries real power.  Her words could stun or even kill and in this case, the focused blast of sharp sound punched a hole completely through the middle segment and then broke the side widow of a car parked behind the bug.

Whether it was luck or scary accuracy, she hit the same segment that Stacia had discovered could paralyze a pede.  Both ends lifted off the ground, leaving the centipede in a horseshoe shape, vulnerable to the completely pissed-off vampire princess who proceeded to start tearing its legs and blades right off its carapace with her bare hands.

Then a second pede approached the boy and my vampire went bat shit crazy, chopping into it with two of the blades.  Her makeshift swords were ungainly and far from optimum, yet you wouldn’t know it from the mess she made of the second pede.

All this Grim processed as we sped toward the other centipede, its back to us.  Its sensors picked up my approach but even as it started to reverse its attack back at me, I was leaping over it.  Grim grabbed the deadly mandibles in my hands, flipping my body over and Pulling our feet to the ground on the other side of it.  It never would have happened without the addition of vampire energy; the robot’s mass was too much greater than my own.  But where I went, the bug and its body followed, flipping up and coming down hard like a bullwhip snapping out to clip a cigarette.

Turns out you can stun a pede that way, too, which leaves you plenty of time to rip the head off and stuff an arm down inside before casting out the mother of all aura burst from that very hand.

Centipede parts exploded outward, but I was left with enough of a body to use it as a flail against the next pede to poke its head out of the ground.  A series of robots flowed out of the hole but only one came at me, the other three scuttling in a deceptively fast run straight at the tower. 

Tanya was still circling the boy, her face a mask of protective rage.  Who knew she felt so strongly about kids?

More robots came out and attacked, but my own reinforcements arrived in a roar of ursine fury and the controlled bursts of gunfire that came from Lydia, Nika, and Arkady.  That was followed by Deckert, his guys, and Declan’s friend Caeco.  The girl had somehow acquired a HK MP-5 submachine gun and was firing tight, controlled bursts of 9mm ammo, the bullets sticking to any bug she chose to hit.  Half a magazine and the bug would freeze up, leaving it vulnerable to the predations of Awasos in Kodiak form.

Still more robots poured up from below, their numbers growing faster than we could stop with gunfire or makeshift weapons.  The crowds had fled and our group backed toward the tower as an army of pedes assembled before us.

“Wear them out,” Lydia called.  “Use up their batteries.”

“How?” Nika yelled.

“I don’t know… make them chase you or fight or something,” Lydia said, firing a burst from her full auto pistol.

The street rumbled and I had a sudden, alarming vision of so many robots that it could shake the very road we stood on.  But instead of more centipedes, a large chunk of the road lifted up and assembled itself into a humanoid shape that was half as wide as it was tall.   And it was tall.  Almost as tall as Awasos but heavier, being all asphalt and concrete.

“Don’t shoot him.  That’s Robbie, and he’s Declan’s,” Caeco said.

“I think the fact that it’s crushing bugs left and right might have eventually clued us in,” Lydia said, lowering the barrel of her pistol as the massive stone man went to town on the pedes.

Tanya was cradling the boy, moving him toward the now-distant crowd and specifically to a woman and man who were being held back by their companions.

“Gordon, three of them made it inside the tower,” Deckert said.

“How?  The wards should have stopped them.”

“Not sure, but they had an extra hump each on both heads,” he said, calmly observing the battle over the sights of his own MP-5.  “Perhaps you would like to check on them?” he asked.

Tanya was returning but I couldn’t wait for her to catch up.  I
moved
at a sprint into the building, then paused before entering the hole that was torn in the elevator doors. 

Same elevator that Declan had just finished fixing a few days ago.  Hearing nothing, I poked my head in and looked first down, then up.  Noises above told me where they had gone.  I followed, realizing that up led eventually to the computer floor.  Cling stepping up the shaft, I feared what I would find above me.

I was gonna win this no matter what it took. That nasty little slice of NSA virus fought me tooth and nail, but with Sorrow’s help, I slowly crushed it back.  To an outside observer, it probably looked like I was frozen in place, motionless except for the beads of sweat that started to drip down my face.  Then there was the credit card that started to smoke and melt as I forced Anvil’s clone back into the chip that had birthed it.

The sound of metal tearing penetrated my focus, followed by screams.  I turned my head, now picking up the clicking metallic sounds of many metal legs heading my way.  Then the familiar roar of an enraged werewolf in combat form, the clang of heavy tool steel meeting high speed metal, the ting and whine of shattered blades, and the floor-shaking thump of something heavy and fast slamming into robot bodies. The roaring, pounding, and clanging continued unabated, but more sound approached me.

Some of the clicking continued in my direction, resolving into the low-slung black form of a centipede charging across the outer computer room, desks and workstations bulldozed aside like children’s toys.

There was no time to prepare a war spell, only instant reflex sending a bolt of actinic energy into the body of the bug that now came rushing through the airlock, blasting it into a cloud of spalling metal as the
Ignis Solis
spell removed everything from below the head. 

The head itself continued on, flying directly at me with a horrible sort of grace and speed, zooming too fast to dodge. From a speck to a looming, vision-blocking ball of heavy metal and sharp mandibles. Then it hit and my body became weightless.  I heard rather then felt it crunch into me, and that was all.

The pedes’ trail led straight where I thought it would—the tenth floor, the computer floor.  The elevator doors were ripped outward into the comp center, at least two of the rippers strewn about as scrap metal, leg blades shattered, carapaces cracked like crabs at Red Lobster.  Stacia’s seven-foot blade breaker lay in the middle of the comp center floor.

A path of destruction ran through the cubicles, server racks, workstations, and at least one photocopier.  Droplets of blood sprinkled the debris, and one divider wall had been charred black as well as shredded by what looked like molten metal.

The outer door of the airlock to the quantum-computing lab stood open, as did the supposedly foolproof inner door.  In the center of the lab, a naked Stacia cradled Declan’s limp body while her shaking hand hovered over the decapitated arachnid head whose mandible pinned the boy to the plastic box on the worktable.  She turned at my approach, her face twisted by grief and anxiety.

“I don’t know what to do—if I pull it, he’ll bleed to death. If I don’t, he’ll bleed to death if he isn’t already dying of poison,” she said, voice shaky, tears blurring her green eyes.

“Is all that blood on the floor his?” I asked. 

“Mine,” she said, the gash on her thigh becoming visible as I got up close to them.

“He’s breathing and it looks like the sharp stuff missed his heart or lungs. Slice my hands, then pull the mandible.  I’ll coat both sides in blood.  More help is coming behind me,” I said.

“It’s here,” Tanya said from the doorway, Dr. Singh coming in just behind her.  “The centipedes outside suddenly froze.  Arkady and Nika are watching them while Deckert and the others bring up the heavy weapons.”

Doc Singh slid around her and quickly examined the unconscious boy.  “I concur with your plan, Chris.  The only addition will be
these
bandages after your blood treatment,” he said, producing heavy trauma pads from the first aid kit he removed from the wall mount in the corner.

Tanya sliced my hands with a sharp shard of centipede blade she found by the elevator.  Singh pulled the head and sharp mandible out of Declan while Stacia held him tight.  Then I slapped both bloody hands over his front and back puncture wounds, holding them till I felt my own wounds knit shut.  After that, Singh bandaged the boy professionally, then he and Stacia cleared a spot to lay Declan down.

“What’s the matter with his eyes?” Stacia asked.

The boy’s closed eyes fluttered as the eyeballs moved back and forth underneath, like he was dreaming or something.

“Look, this prototype is energized,” Tanya said, looking at the plastic case that Declan had been pinned to.

“And bloody,” I noted, pointing to the spot where the razor-sharp spike had punched through both Declan and the plexiglass, the kid’s blood pooling around the edge of the dinner-plate-sized disc of silvery metal.

“He appears to be in something like REM sleep,” Dr. Singh said.

“That’s dreams and nightmares, right?” Stacia asked.

“Yes, it is,” the doctor said, now examining her leg, which appeared to be healing shut on its own.

“What the hell would he be dreaming about after getting hit by that thing?” she asked.

All four of us exchanged glances, then looked at the door as Lydia came in.

“That’s kind of a disturbing question,” I noted.

“Especially because I think this unit is actually functional,” Tanya said.  “But just what it is functioning for is the question.”

“They taught it to play chess,” I said, picking up a slightly melted blue credit card with Susskins’ name on it.

“What?” Lydia asked, frowning as she looked around and tried to come up to speed.

“Anvil.  They taught it to play chess,” I said.  “And this is its end game.  Get quantum computer, end of game.”

“Well, let’s just unplug the computer,” Lydia said, approaching the plexi-box.  She suddenly bumped into a wall, an unseen wall.

“Ouch.  That wasn’t there a minute ago,” she said, spreading her hands out over an invisible shield like a mime on stage.  “It follows this circle on the floor.”

“That’s Declan’s work,” Stacia said, still naked and still holding my intern.  “But you’re right… it didn’t stop the head, or me for that matter.”

“Lydia, please get Nika up here right away,” Tanya said.

“You called,” the blonde mind reader said from the doorway.

“Damn, I’m just that good,” Lydia said in mock self-awe.

“I could feel something going on up here.  Oh?  Yes, I see,” Nika said, switching her gaze from the rest of us to where Declan lay, wrapped up in Stacia’s arms.  “He’s fighting. Trying to keep Anvil from the computer.”

“But that’s all over there,” Dr. Singh noted.

“So is his blood.  Sympathetic magic,” I said.

“Nika?  Did Declan activate the circle or did something else?” Tanya asked.

“I can’t tell.”

“Oh, right.  That would be bad if Anvil was able to activate a circle,” Lydia said.

“Ya think?  A hostile software package that occupied a quantum computer and could cast magic,” Nika said.

“We need advice.  We need Barbiel,” Tanya said. 

“We could take Declan up the street to that church,” I said.

“What about this mess?” Lydia asked.

“It’ll still be here and
he’s
tied to it by blood,” I said.

Tanya blurred over to the unconscious boy, scooping him from Stacia’s arms.  The were girl growled, but my vampire just looked at her calmly.  “Get some sweats on.  You can carry him,” she said, not unkindly.

Stacia studied her for a second before running out of the room.  Carrying the boy, Tanya led us out of the quantum lab.  Stacia had called an elevator, even as she pulled on a pair of torn leggings and an abandoned lab coat.  Then she took Declan from an unresisting vampire princess.

Outside the building, Deckert and his men faced off with the army of centipedes.  Only our guys were now packing heavy weapons.  Barrett M82 .50 caliber anti-material rifles, Auto Assault 12 full auto shotguns, most likely loaded with FRAG 12 armor-piercing high explosive rounds and a couple of suspicious tubes that might have been anti-tank missiles.  Stevens draped a tarp over those before I got a good look, though.  Above us, a Demidova helicopter hovered, the barrel of an honest-to-god M2 heavy machine gun poking out the open compartment door.

With just a couple hand signals, Deckert had the entire squad of security guys form up around us and then we were all trotting for the Catholic church two blocks away. 

The centipedes turned as one, like a flock of synchronized birds, watching but not moving.  The chopper held station overhead, the big Ma Deuce pointed at the bug army.

“They don’t know what we’re doing.  Anvil doesn’t understand the importance of the church,” I said as we jogged.  Nobody answered, but Tanya nodded and our party kept running.