MoonFall (15 page)

For all the wild fluidity, there was still some kind of hierarchy among these attackers. The last Dionite to have emerged from the buildings was a well-muscled man with a towering mohawk, like a great bleached white crest rising up from the top of his head. As the injured man fell back this leader ordered others to fill the gap. There would be no reprieve, no breathing space or exit for Sergeant Burns.

Noah flipped the lid from the box of bullets, pulled the lever on Bourne that let him swing the chamber open.

The Dionites closed in tighter around her. One of them struck her arm with a club. A crack exploded through the air as the blow hit a chunk of plastic armor. Burns swung wildly as she tried to break clear of the pack surrounding her.

With a couple of bullets in hand, Noah quickly slid the first one into Bourne’s chamber. There was something satisfying about actually putting bullets in the gun at last. It felt good.

Burns dived at one of the Dionites, but he dodged out of the way and as she ran past she almost collided with the remains of a brick wall. She turned, now with something to her back but no room to maneuver, nowhere left to go.

Noah turned the chamber ready to load the next bullet. Something rattled as he did it and he peered at Bourne in concern.

“Not now buddy,” he muttered. “Don’t go breaking on me now.”

It was hard to make out details in the darkness. He prodded at the bullet he’d put in and it shifted in the chamber, rolling around a couple of millimeters’ gap.

The bullets were too small.

“Shit.” He tipped Bourne up, let the useless ammunition fall out.

The Dionites were getting ever closer to Burns. She lunged right with her sword, catching one of them in the leg, and then darted left. But as she swung around a club collided with the back of her forearm. Her hand spasmed and the sword fell from her grasp.

Noah dug around in his pockets, feeling for the other bullets. Maybe they’d be the right size. They hadn’t come from the box, right?

He found them, dropping one as he fumbled them out of the depths of his pants. They felt bigger than the bullets from the box. Holy mother of desperation, they might actually fit.

Burns flung herself shoulder first at one of the Dionites. They fell together in the street, rolling over and over, kicking and punching and gouging, the club falling from the Dionite’s hand.

Noah pressed a bullet against the hollow in Bourne’s chamber. It wouldn’t quite go, slid from his grasp and bounced away. He rolled another bullet from the palm of his hand, pressed this one against the chamber, hoping the problem wasn’t what he thought it was.

Of course it was. These bullets were too large.

The Dionite rolled clear of Burns, reached out for his club. But she’d grabbed a brick, slammed it into his side, sent him sprawling. She staggered to her feet, even as the other Dionites circled around her again, weapons raised. The mohawked leader let out a yodeling yell, gestured for the others to close in. He had his back to Noah now, but Noah would have bet that his expression was one of of terrible, feral glee.

Noah clicked Bourne’s chamber back into place, grabbed the gun by the barrel. Maybe he could use the butt as a club. Not that it had done him much good in the school library, but it was better than no weapon at all, right?

He looked at Bourne, then over at the Dionites with their long clubs and axes. One even had a spear. Maybe this wasn’t much better than no weapon.

Then he saw it lying in the road, some kind of bar or narrow plank about five feet long. He leapt to his feet and ran over to it, shoving Bourne away in his holster, the useless bullets entirely abandoned. It was an old stop sign, its pole snapped off at the base and starting to rust, the sign itself scuffed and dented. He picked it up, felt the weight in his hands. He sure wouldn’t have liked to be hit with it.

Of course, he didn’t like to be hit at all, and attacking the Dionites wouldn’t help with that. But Burns was one person ganged up on by seven, and Noah never could stand to see those kind of odds.

She was kicking and struggle, fighting with her bare hands as four of the Dionites closed in and tried to grab ahold of her. One of them staggered back with a bloody nose, and another curled over as her knee hit him in the stomach, but there were too many of them for her to fend off any longer. As they yanked her arms back, thrusting her forward into the circle of their menace, the leader stepped up, an axe raised above his head.

“Let’s see your gods save you from this,” he said.

It was now or never.

Noah grabbed the end of the pole with both hands, swung it back behind his shoulder. Then he ran, forcing his muscles to go as fast as they possibly could, charging for all he was worth straight towards the Dionite leader.
 

He let out his best impression of a deep, blood-curdling scream. It seemed like that kind of moment, and if he was fixing to die stupidly then he might as well do it in style.

The Dionites turned toward the sound, noticing him for the first time. Their leader spun around, his axe still raised, a look of confusion spreading across his face.

Noah swung the sign with all of his strength, all of his frustration, all of his anger and terror built up over the past few days. It scythed through the air. The Dionite raised a protective arm but it was too late. The stop sign slammed into the side of his neck and he was knocked to the ground in a spray of blood.

The rest of the Dionites stared down at their leader, as if waiting for him to tell them how to respond to his defeat. He clasped one hand to the side of his neck, and with the other tried to push himself upright. But Noah had hit the jugular and blood was spraying out between his fingers in long pulses, spattering the ground, his body, the white curve of his mohawk. He looked up at Noah one last time, mouth hanging open, and then slumped down dead.

Six Dionites left, one of them injured, against Noah and Burns. He still didn’t like the odds. The stop sign had been a passable weapon when he had surprise on his side, but he could hardly deflect a blow with five feet of rusted metal pipe with a blood-stained plate on the end.

One awesome moment of victory, and now the face of inevitable defeat. It had been that kind of night.

But the Dionites didn’t turn on him. They didn’t reorganize under a new leader. Like a pack of wild animals they stared down in numbed horror at the body of their leader then turned tail and fled, vanishing into the ruins of the old town.

“Yeah, you’d better run,” Noah called after them, trying to wave the stop sign and appear more intimidating than he actually was.

Then he let the weight slip from his fingers, hitting the broken asphalt with a clang. He looked over at Burns, now freed of her grasping captors, looking almost as stunned as he felt.

“Molly, isn’t it?” he said, forcing a smile. “Still reckon I’m a Dionite?”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

F
IGHT
OR
F
LIGHT

T
HE
FUNNY
THING
about pain was how much you could block out while it was happening. Not that Noah hadn’t noticed the scrapes and bruises he’d acquired on his way out of jail and through the wall. Not even that he’d been oblivious to the resistance of his exhausted muscles as he pushed himself, to get out of the building, out of the town, out of that gap in the wall, even to save Burns from her attackers. But on some level he’d been ignoring the exhaustion and the injuries bearing down on him.

The other funny thing about pain, about exhaustion too when push came to shove, was how much worse you could feel when you finally rested.

As Noah stood watching Burns look around for her sword, as he realized the cold gray of dawn was starting to lighten the sky, as he felt the sweet freedom of being clear of Apollo, all of that strain and pain finally caught up with him. A weariness so complete that all he could think to do was surrender.

Noah let his legs sag beneath him and sank to the ground. Sitting on a busted up road might not be comfortable, but it was a damn sight better than staying upright at the moment.

He looked over at the body of the Dionite leader, still and silent, the blood pooled beneath him soaking into the white spikes of his hair. They darkened and wilted, turning from a bright crest to one more patch of shadow flopped across the road.

In a way he was kind of disappointed. Some small part of his brain, raised on Hanna Barbera cartoons and Quentin Tarantino movies, had expected a more spectacular result. That the edge of the stop sign would slice through the guy’s neck, send his head flying on a crimson fountain. Could that happen? He didn’t know if even Blood Dog had the strength, and he sure as hell didn’t know the science to work it out.

Still, there was something melancholy about looking at the corpse. Not that it was Noah’s first kill, just that there was always something sad about a body, whoever’s it was.

Except maybe Blood Dog’s. And one or two others he’d left behind, back at the start of his wandering.

He looked up, realized that Burns was looking down at him. She had her sword again, and she’d picked up the lead Dionite’s axe. She was holding it out toward Noah, and he thought she might have said something.

“Sorry, what was that?” he asked.

“I said, take this.” She waved the axe at him. “They need every warm body they can get at the gates.”

A loud thud announced another explosion somewhere back in town. Why did it feel odd that there was still a fight to be had?

“You sure you want to be giving that to a Dionite spy?” he said.

“If you were a spy then we wouldn’t be here right now,” Burns replied. “Either you’d be off setting bombs or you’d have helped them take me out. No point maintaining a cover past this, especially one I never believed in.”

“You believe me now?”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“Guess I wasted a whole load of effort then.”

“Huh?” She was frowning at him, still waving the axe in his direction.

“I worked real hard working out how to convince you,” Noah said. “I learned all sorts about Dionites. Tattoos they wear, how they’re led, how they live, all kinds of stuff that ain’t who I am. Even some kind of hint of what they got planned. All that strain on my brain, and I could have just waited for shit to kick off.”

“Jesus you’re pitiful.” She shook her head. “You done feeling sorry for yourself? Because right now we’ve got a city to save.”

“And I thought Iver was the insane one.”

Noah eased himself to his feet, muscles and mind all protesting at the effort. But she was right about one thing at least – he was being pitiful, when what he should be right now was safe and clear.

“You’re not going to help?” Burns glared at him. It was a glare he was getting used to, one he might even miss if he left it behind.

“In case you ain’t noticed, your precious town’s overrun with wild folks charging out of the woods. They’ve blown up the gates, blown up the jail, blown up who knows what else just this past few minutes. That’s a mighty fine town you’ve got there, as these things go, but if it’s still standing by noon then God’s a kinder guy than I’ve been led to think.”

“So what are you going to do? Just run away?”

“Not just run away. Run away hard and fast, as far as I can get with what strength you and these Dionites ain’t beat out of me. And if you’ve got the least lick of sense you’ll come with me. Find somewhere safe to live, instead of staying in some goddamn war zone.”

“You lousy piece of shit.” She threw the axe down on the ground, shoved him back up against the remnants of a garage wall. “Just when I start believing you might have some decency, it turns out you’re nothing but a coward.

“Run away if you want. Go hide in the woods while the world rots around you. Let everything die, if that’s what kind of man you are. But this here, this is something more.” She pointed towards Apollo, its walls looming over the surrounding devastation, towers rising above it like the spires of the only city left in the world. Which right about now, it maybe was. “This is the best hope there is of getting back what we once lost. This is order and safety and civilization. This is people standing by each other, not just running wild in the woods or running away whenever things get tough. We’ve got a hospital, you know that? You seen a hospital since the Fall? How about a school, or a college, or a workshop making new engine parts? You seen anything looks like people working together?”

“I’ve seen people together.” Noah thought back to what he’d seen on the road, and to the way he’d been treated in the prison. The way she’d treated him. Anger flushed hot in his cheeks. “It ain’t always pretty. It ain’t always right. And if that’s civilized then I’ll take the wilds any time I’m choosing.”

“No-one said it was perfect. We make mistakes, and gods know I’ve been trying to make less. We all have. But we started with nothing but ruin and death, and twenty years later this is what we’ve got. What have you achieved in that time? Walked some roads, smoked some cigarettes, used up what the dead left behind instead of trying to spend time on the living?

“You know what’s out in the wilds? This is what’s out in the wilds.” She pointed at the Dionite lying dead beside them. “Thugs ganging up on the weak. Seven killing one. The rule of the vicious, following each other only as long as you’re forced to and then it’s each man for himself. The minute things got tough they turned tail and left their friend behind. Is that what you want from life?

“Course it is. Because you’re a coward. And in a world where there’s just one thing left worth fighting for, you’ll still turn your back on it.”

She strode away, back towards the gates and the sounds of struggle. Noah watched her go, sword raised but limping, angry and disheveled, and about to face her enemies on her own all over again. All that risk and effort to save her, even that amazing moment with the road sign, and she was about to get herself back into the same danger all over again. What kind of woman did that?