New world order, p.33
New World Order, page 33
part #6 of Crimson Shadow Series
The therion sisters, Karen and Sasha, had transformed and turned the vehicle into a makeshift projectile.
Because who needs bullets, Dianna thought, trying her best to shed some humor on her own personal sea of not-fear.
It didn’t work.
To add insult to injury, she saw, Zeek and Satoru had actually climbed atop the car before letting their lovers hurl it into the crowd of scattering Cebourists. Uttering a pair of war cries—one a deep, yodeling hum that would have been better set in a snow-capped mountain and another that, on any other occasion, would have most certainly come from a lion or a tiger—the two warriors rolled free of the car’s roof as it collided with the ground. Sparks shot off the concrete in a wave. Metal shrieked and folded. Zeek’s staff and Satoru’s katana swung out in blurs as the two rolled to their feet like synchronized dancers. Behind them, Karen and Sasha took to the air like a pair of identical furry missiles. Cebourist eyes couldn’t grow wide enough to take in the full scope of the incoming threat, and the ones who weren’t taken out by staff or blade were eviscerated from behind by tooth and claw. As this onslaught befell the front-end of the Cebourist horde, Isaac hacked a zig-zag path through their center, convening with Sawyer and several of the others who’d already made it to him. The chaos had the swarm of magic-wielding worshippers blindly throwing attacks, most of their spells falling without effect on their fellow humans while a few wound up shooting or stabbing their own in the confusion.
It was a beautiful thing.
But Dianna still had an uneasy feeling…
****
“Thought you said that you’d warned the others about these guys,” Zane whined as, with one hand, he slammed the barrel of one of his pistols against the chest of a Cebourist and fired a shot that had one of their ribs making a surprise visit to their spine. With the other hand, he retrieved his rusty axe, driving the blunt back end into an incoming attacker’s forehead before forcing the crusty blade into the meat of another’s shoulder.
Judging from the effort it took and the volume of the scream it earned, he imagined the victim was becoming increasingly aware of just how badly the weapon was in need of sharpening.
Zane made a note—but knew already that he’d forget in a matter of seconds—of trying to shed a tear for the man. He snapped his neck to hurry things along.
The split second it took for him to complete the task while releasing the axe was enough for Xander to “say,” I warned them about the group that was coming in from the front of the hotel.
“How’d you do that?” asked Zane, curious if Xander was being just as chatty with others out in the street.
They’re all convinced they heard somebody else call out a warning.
“Right…” Zane drawled, wondering what made him lucky enough to be hearing Xander with this degree of clarity.
I can communicate with you—do everything I can with you—because you believe I’m going to make it.
Not bothering to wonder how Xander could have known what he was thinking, Zane asked, “Why should that make any difference?”
Why should you be able to hear a radio station that you’re not dialed into?
“So what about the people who sort of believe that you’re going to make it?”
They’re sort of picking up on my static, I suppose. Dianna is… Xander’s voice stopped there.
Zane didn’t believe for a moment that he’d lost him.
“What’s going to happen to Dianna?” he asked, slamming the axe into the chest of a nearby Cebourist, dragging him side-by-side with another, and executing the both of them with a well-placed single shot to one’s head.
Xander remained silent.
Zane still knew that he was with him. Growling, he jumped into overdrive and repositioned himself behind a Cebourist who’d been trying to get the drop on him from a nearby fire door. He paused long enough to break the time-frozen human’s outstretched arm before dropping back out of overdrive and letting his would-be attacker stumble in a pained heap between him and a pair of pursuers. Three shots later the hallway was three Cebourists deader.
Not nearly ‘deader’ enough, Xander mused.
“Thought you mind-fuckers had some policy about not reading thoughts,” Zane groused after shooting another three Cebourists and hurling his axe into the stomach of a fourth.
I’m more-or-less occupying your head right now, Zane, Xander explained as Zane went about retrieving his weapon and putting a round in the still-squirming human’s chest. Your thoughts sound just as clear as your words.
Zane paused at that. “So you’re, like, all up in my business right now?”
In a manner of speaking.
Zane cleared his throat and then immediately wondered why. “I… uh, might’ve said some stuff about Estella to Serena that I don’t exactly want you taking out of context?”
You referring to “severely fuckable?”
Zane stayed quiet but nodded.
He immediately wondered why.
Well… Xander began, and Zane wondered just what sort of damage an ethereal Stryker “living” in his head could do up there. I suppose you’re not wrong.
Zane could have toppled over at that moment.
After composing himself, he said, “Really? You’re not, like, gonna blow a blood vessel up there or read me some riot act about what I said? Besides, aren’t you Mister ‘Too Good to Like Sex’?”
I can see more of the conversation than just the “severely fuckable”-part, Zane. I can see all of it: everything you said to Serena and to Estella.
Zane felt himself blush. “And?” he pressed.
And I appreciate it.
Zane was almost too stunned to react in time as a Cebourist charged from the stairwell with a shotgun leveled at him. Almost.
“Guess you’re not Mister ‘Too Good to Like Sex’ anymore, huh?” he offered with a chuckle.
You’d be surprised what nearly dying and being forced to float around without a body for this long does to a crazy thing like bashfulness.
“‘Bashful’ doesn’t begin to cover it,” Zane said, “I was actually beginning to think they called you ‘Crimson Shadow’ because you dressed in black and blushed whenever someone mentioned tits.”
What I wouldn’t give to have a set of hands to feel a pair of tits right now, Xander replied, actually sounding sad.
“Almost enough to make a dead man wake up, aren’t they?” said Zane.
If only.
“Well,” Zane smirked, “since you’re not POed at me for talking about how sexy your wife is, I guess it’d only be fair for you to say the same about mine.”
The chitter of Xander’s chuckle tickled at Zane’s ear. I might, he said, if I didn’t find her so fucking annoying.
Zane almost hated himself for laughing at that.
****
Enough of the Cebourist horde had been thinned out for Sawyer to slip free and return to Dianna’s side. She didn’t actually see him leave the battle—didn’t actually see him coming at all—but was just suddenly aware that she was no longer alone. Between his and the others’ efforts, several hundred armed foot “soldiers” had been reduced to only several dozen. Though Dianna had no way of checking, she was sure that it hadn’t even taken them half-a-minute.
Thirty seconds later, and close to two-hundred Cebourist corpses littered the street outside the hotel.
DiAngelo had obviously been hoping for better results, because Dianna didn’t need to be psychic to know that the roar that rose from the roof of the building was one of raw disappointment.
Then the shooting started up again.
Somewhere in the distance, the same voice from before rose, calling “FALL BACK.”
None of the humans seemed to hear it, and so it was that none of them were spared in the events that followed.
As every member of the ragtag remains of the Trepis Clan darted free—all seeming to know what area to avoid at that moment—the first shot struck directly in the thickest part of the remaining Cebourists. Both the living and the dead were ripped apart in an instant that sent a red mist billowing into the air. Two seconds later, another shot landed. The cannon firing the rounds was an automatic, this Dianna knew, but a weapon like that could feed in a fresh round only so quickly without jamming. The resulting impacts felt like the tremors of sprinting giants. Though most of the vampires managed to vanish from the scene at the first call of danger, those unable to jump into overdrive—among them were Zeek, Karen, Satoru, Sasha, and Isaac—were forced to run. With bodies littering the street and little immediate cover, this forced them to begin a serpentine dash with periodic hurdles back towards the parking lot.
And the sprinting giants gave chase.
The majority of Cebourists who were still alive gave up their mission—in that instant likely gave up their affiliation with everything Cebour-related—as their so-called leader’s automatic cannon became every bit their own problem as their enemies’. The few who tried to hold onto their “death to all mythos”-mentality were too blinded by hate to see the arm-length bullets that rained down on them. In a few short seconds, the entire street was awash in screams, panic, and blood.
And the sprinting giants’ steps were drawing ever nearer to Dianna’s friends…
Then her gun told her that she and Sawyer needed to go to room four-oh-eight.
****
“Why in the fuck am I in here dealing with these queef-nuggets if our guys outside are being kept busy by them?” Zane demanded.
They thought they’d be clever to send in two teams, Xander explained.
He’d finally gotten to the sixth floor only to find it just as congested with Cebourists as the fifth.
“Lucky us,” Zane growled, yanking his axe free as the now-dead body collapsed at his feet. He kicked it with relative ease into three incoming Cebourists. “Can’t you just, y’know, zap me up to the roof like you did with the staircase?” he demanded.
The magic doesn’t work like that, Xander explained. I could move you between those two points because there was nothing blocking the path from one side to the other. If I tried to do it now you’d come out of it with every person and obstacle between here-and-there fused to you on the molecular level.
Zane sneered. “So I’d come out of it inside-out?”
“Inside-out” doesn’t even begin to describe how you’d come out of it, Xander said. You ever see ‘The Fly?’
“Ain’t that a bit before your time, young’n?” asked Zane with a chuckle.
Jeff Goldblum version, Xander clarified, it was on cable. You’d be surprised how many movies I got to catch up on after my stepfather laid me out for a few months. Anyway… remember the man-fly fusion?
“Unfortunately,” Zane admitted, recalling David Cronenberg’s slime fetishizing, mid-eighties, sex-and-insects alike masterpiece.
You’d be Goldblum and everything that exists between here and there would be the fly.
The two were silent as Zane worked through a few more Cebourists; this information conjuring a number of mental images that had Zane thankful that Xander wasn’t about to try teleporting him again anytime soon.
“Gonna be honest, Stryker,” he finally said. “Knowing that now kinda makes me wish you hadn’t done it at all in the first place.”
Touch your shoulder with your left ear.
“Huh?”
NOW!
Zane almost forgot what Xander had said, but somehow managed to tilt his head at a sharp enough angle to try to bring his left ear to the side of his shoulder.
A gunshot echoed behind him.
The heat from the bullet nearly scalded his right cheek.
A Cebourist in front of him lost the upper portion of his skull and let out a barking scream-laugh as what remained of his brains tried to make sense of the impact. Before sense could be made of anything, he was dead and his body was sprawled on the floor in front of Zane.
Maybe time to start trusting my judgement. If you’d have taken the stairs you would’ve either been delayed and caught or, if you’d used overdrive, you’d be too winded to live through what’s coming.
“And what’s coming?” Zane demanded, shooting the gun-toting Cebourist behind him first in the belly and then again in the chest. He fired another three shots into whatever surface his bullets could find in the interval between standing and dead just to be sure there wouldn’t be any more surprises from him.
Can’t tell you that, Xander answered.
Zane growled. “Why the hell not?”
Because things need to happen as they’re meant to happen.
Zane felt his eye twitch. “That…” he said through clenched teeth as he took the opening to sprint up the stairs to the next floor, “is a really infuriating answer.”
I know, Xander said. And you don’t get used to it, either. I’m not exactly thrilled to finally be understanding it.
Zane let out a roar as he kicked through the door to the seventh floor. He’d have been content heading straight for the roof after his business on the fourth floor, but he’d discovered the stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors blocked off with rubble and been forced to cut across the hall for the staircase on the opposite side. Now, however, he was forced into the next hall not out of interference but, rather, out of safety regulations.
The stairs leading to the roof weren’t accessible from there.
While he understood the thought process behind this—Wouldn’t want people staying at the hotel to have easy access to the roof, after all—he nevertheless managed to place all sorts of blame on architects, hotel management, and a few more gods than he actually believed in for the inconvenience.
The door swung open under the force of the kick, fracturing the skull of a daring Cebourist who probably thought he was getting the drop on him. A short distance away, the noise drew the attention of others, and they turned, readying their own attack. Still cursing—now somehow pairing the Hindu Shiva with the legend of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—he opened fire on the group, one of which was in the process of trying to cast a spell on him with a small, triangular medallion.
“SWEAR TO FUCK,” he growled in their direction as the corpse bowled them over, “THE FIRST ONE OF YOU COCK-KNOCKERS TO BURN ME IS GETTING YOUR BALLS STUFFED IN YOUR OCULAR CAVITIES!”
Is that even possible? Xander asked.
Zane plowed forward, gun firing and axe making repeating swings at victims who quickly realized they would have preferred the gun. “Maledictus made it work a few times. Actually made a local coroner quit his job.”
How the hell could you know that?
“Zoey helped cover up a lot of the shit that monster did when he was rampaging around in my body back then.”
I’d feel worse for you and your history if I hadn’t just watched you prolapse a man’s asshole with your boot.
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same.”
I wouldn’t have, actually. I like my boots.
Zane actually laughed at that.
****
“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” Sawyer said as he tailed after Dianna, who was giving his vampire speed and reflexes a run for their money at that moment.
Dianna wasn’t sure how to answer him—somehow “My gun told me to” didn’t seem like a good way to motivate him—and so she said, “Zoey said we had to deal with the potential suicide bomber on the fourth floor. She said she’d help the others.”
The truth was Zoey hadn’t said anything. Not to Dianna, at least. Dianna had seen a shot from the auto-cannon that should have been the end of Isaac and the others erupt in midair, staggering the group but leaving them otherwise unharmed. Guessing this was the blue-haired auric’s doing, Dianna was, though lying through her teeth about the details surrounding it, confident that she wasn’t exactly lying about the facts:
Zoey had things covered in the parking lot, and a voice had told her to go to the room with the bomb-wielding Cebourist.
She wasn’t thrilled with the idea of lying to her fiancé, but Dianna had a driving need to get to room four-oh-eight and time, though she had no reason to believe this, was of the essence. There was no countdown—none that she was aware of, anyway—and, near as she could tell, they were taking more risks in rushing in like this than if they’d adopted a bit of stealth.
But all of that felt like the wrong path.
And still she refused to believe that her gun was telling her all of this.
All the same, she refused to holster it. She also refused to explain to herself that the reason behind this was because it might muffle more of her gun’s words.
God, she thought, I’ve finally lost my mind. I kept it together for years with Richard beating and threatening me and now I’m starting to crack!
Sawyer scooped her up in a fluid movement, hurdled through the broken window that Zane Vailean had made earlier in his similar mad-dash into the hotel, and, just as fluidly, he set her back down once they were inside.
“I could’ve done that on my own,” she chastised, giving him a “I’m mad but not really mad”-look for carrying her through.
Sawyer rolled his eyes and started ahead of her. “I won’t challenge your skillset, baby,” he said, keeping his voice low, “but I’m not about to let you gouge your palms trying to vault through broken glass. Get your vertical leap up to thirty feet and I’ll let you do it yourself.”
“Or I could just throw your body over the glass and walk in like royalty,” she offered with a grin.
Sawyer grinned back. “Nothing says true love like a belly full of window shards. Let’s go.”
The subject of the window had her looking back towards the makeshift entrance that Zane had created in his own (seemingly) insanity-driven dash to get into the hotel. Even then, moments earlier, she’d watched him commit to the effort along with everyone else, and, like everyone else, attributed a hearty amount of the act to insanity.
After all, she’d thought, any man who’s willing to settle down with that woman must already be a bit touched in the head, right?
But there seemed to be an eternity in the few minutes that divided then from now, and Dianna, with her uneasy feeling and her increasingly chatty gun, was beginning to wonder if maybe she and Zane Vailean shared insanity as a common trait.
