Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(52)

And then, brave fool that he was, Reeves dashed forward to buy them time.

It was fighting like Beck had never seen. The thing most people outside the Watch didn’t understand was that the armor had hard limits that could not be overcome. Oh, the suits themselves were capable of strength and speed no ten humans could hope to match, but the fragile beings inside had joints that could only move so quickly and stretch so far.

Reeves moved at the outer edges of those limits.

He hurled himself toward the swarm, sword arcing as the enormous momentum of his armored mass sent him sliding across the road at a harsh angle. His arm traveled in perfect sync with his movement, angled just right to remove the heads of four infected. An unarmored person would have needed time to arrest the inertia of the sword; Reeves did not. As soon as the blade reached the end of its swing, his hand flipped over and reversed to attack in the opposite direction, his legs propelling him into the middle of the tide of bodies.

He was swallowed at once. As Beck moved away with the team, she saw the stunned expressions on the faces of the line of Watchmen—the two without their helmets, anyway, though she was beginning to be able to read the body language of men and women in armor now—as they scrambled to move over the barriers.

Being good soldiers, they wouldn’t remove the blockade. They had to keep defending the people beyond, after all. But they would help. Beck saw the desperation in their movements.

Reeves was not idle as this happened. Beck caught flashes of blood-soaked armor as he fought against the hands grasping at the plates of his suit, sword slowing as the sheer weight of numbers stole his ability to build up speed and force. She saw his fist collapse the face of a pale, his steel boot kick so hard it ruptured the gut of another. All the while he slowed, pulled down and down until all Beck could see were bodies frantically tearing at him.

All told it took about twenty seconds.

“No.”

She was surprised to hear the word come out of her mouth. More so to discover that her body stopped as abruptly as if running into an invisible wall. Her training told her to obey, to reach safety if at all possible and trust in the more experienced Watchmen to rescue the man. Her logic screamed at her that it was the correct thing to do.

Just not necessarily the right one.

Before she knew it was happening, Beck ran at a full sprint. Her lighter, thinner armor made this easier. Those same factors would put her in immense danger. Upon thinking about it for the seconds it took her to close the distance, Beck discovered she didn’t care.

She didn’t slow in the least. When Beck hit the swarm, it was at full speed and caught the infected completely unaware. The sound of snapping bones and shrieks of pain entered her awareness but had no effect. She lashed out without hesitation or mercy, every blow aiming to cripple or kill.

Her world became the fight. Punch, kick, throw enemies off balance, find an empty spot, and move there. Dance away just far enough to escape being overwhelmed. Strike again.

When two Pales latched onto her left arm in unison and let their weigh drop to the ground in an attempt to drag her with them, Beck instinctively locked her armor in place. The suit, though less robust than others, was more than up to the task even if the joints whined a little at the strain.

The Pales had the most glorious look of surprise on their face as they found themselves holding fast without moving her an inch. Beck repaid their kindness by putting her fist through the head of one, then throwing the other bodily through the air to slam into two more of its companions with bone-crunching force.

The local Watchmen took about thirty seconds to show up. By then Beck had fought through another ten of the infected. Reinforcements washed over her in a wave, sweeping the remaining pales away. She wasted no time stomping over the carpet of bodies in search of Reeves, whose locator beacon still flashed.

“I’m here,” he said over the channel. “I’m here. Still here.”

His voice was...not weak, but wavering. When she found him, he was covered in bodies that needed to be pulled away—though a scoop might have been more appropriate—before he could be moved. His helmet was fractured along the joints, the connective tissue of its sub layers broken and stretched, the outer panels pulled half off. Blood seeped from these wounds. Something managed to get hold of him.

The rest of his armor was in bad shape but functional. The infected weren’t as strong as Pales, unable to peel away the plates from the base frame beneath, so they’d beat the shit out of it with pieces of stone, hand tools, and anything else they could find.

“Told you to leave me,” Reeves said as she cleared a space for him to rise. “Should fail you for that.”

Beck shrugged. “Fail me if you want. It just hit me that I couldn’t be the kind of Watchman that leaves one of her own behind. If that’s worth a fail, then I’ll take it as a fair trade for you surviving.”

She helped him to his feet and steadied him. To her surprise, he unlocked his suit’s bio readouts and broadcast them. They weren’t as bad as she expected, though his suit was pretty sure Reeves had a concussion.

They walked together over the uneven piles of bodies, their next step unknown.

On a private channel, Reeves spoke to her in a tone of voice she had never heard from him. Soft, as usual, but thick with emotion.

“Thanks, Beck,” he said.

Smiling for the first time since arriving in Shān, Beck said, “You’re welcome.”