The Sea Peoples(88)
He slapped the man’s shoulder; they hadn’t actually spoken much, but they’d shared more than human beings generally could.
“Front door clear,” he heard Thora call.
There was a rending crash. “Now it’s really clear,” Toa said.
“Quickly!” Deor said again.
The first floor was more intact, and hence darker. After a few glimpses of the stores to either side, John was rather glad of that. The children’s toy-shop with the dolls in a lynching game titled Catch Him and Run Him Up wasn’t the worst of it by any means, or the Pallid Mask masks. Half the front fa?ade of the building had slumped down, but Toa had heaved a load of brick and timber out of the way.
Thora looked back at it after she’d wheeled through. “Well, if you want to be crude,” she said, with a taut grin.
The street outside was half-covered by cones of collapsed buildings, some burnt-out, some still smoldering or sending flames and plumes of smoke into the lowering sky. A little farther away he could see the remains of much taller buildings, ones that reminded him of the giants that still stood in some parts of Montival. Some were on fire with flames pouring out of their endless rows of windows; others were shells of scorched girders; many had fallen into one another, like giant dominos scattered by the fist of some titanic child. You could see that the blow had landed north of here, running towards them in a wave of heat and force.
For a moment John’s memories blurred his sight; that day on the deck of the Tarshish Queen when he’d seen Reiko dancing an invocation to her Ancestress on the shore of Topanga, and the moment when her outflung arm and the Grasscutter Sword had brought down the wrath of Amaterasu-oˉmikami. He’d seen that wall of force sliding towards him, tossing aside the substance of Ocean itself and crushing Korean warships like toys made of matches under a knight’s armored boot. This must have been even worse, worse than the anger of a Goddess.
Then, flatly: “Look out.”
What Thora had warned of looked picayune by comparison, but deadly enough to a few lone strangers like them—and you couldn’t die deader than dead. The figure at the head of the crowd was dressed in a hooded robe of yellow tatters and for a heart-stopping moment . . .
“No, that’s just someone dressed like him,” John decided, going to ground behind an up-tilted block of concrete.
“Leading a mob of rotting lunatics carrying sticks with heads on them,” Pip replied. “Are they the undead, or what?”
“No, not dead,” Deor said, after he signed the air with a rune. “Not quite, not yet—and easier to deal with because of it.”
“Oh, I so do not want to understand what you just said,” John muttered.
“Dead people are usually fairly easy to deal with; you just need a shovel, or some dingoes,” Pip pointed out, articulating something John had not wanted to say because he suspected he might not like the answer. “Or the ants, if you’re patient.”
“Where we are . . . not necessarily,” Deor replied.
I was right. I don’t like that answer.
Meanwhile they’d all gone to ground. There was plenty of cover, though John had to suppress a yelp when his elbow came down on an ember hidden under the omnipresent ash. Meanwhile, the crowd was getting closer, more visible, and he profoundly wished they hadn’t. Whatever had killed the man in the corridor they’d just left had bitten these folk too. Hair had fallen out in patches, bleeding patches, and more understandable burns mixed with something that had singed them like acid and made skin hang in tatters over weeping sores. Clothes were ragged and stained with fluids and blood; one woman staggering in the front rank had eyes that had turned blood red and clutched a child obviously long-dead. Teeth showed long and dry in gaping mouths, where gums bled and fell away.
I’m glad we can’t smell anything but smoke and burning, John thought, uneasily aware that the ruins below him had plentiful bodies tumbled amid brick and metal and wood—a burnt, blackened hand protruded not far away.
Every second or third of the hundreds of walkers carried a stick or pole bearing a head—mostly human, though he saw a scattering of cats and dogs and one horse.
“And they’re heading straight for us,” Pip said. “Turn them or run, chaps, one or the other.”
“Too many to fight—” Thora began.
Crack.
The sound was loud and sharp, and one of the mob staggered and fell.
“Gunshot!” Deor said.
That was something nobody in the world had heard since the year of his father’s birth, forty-six years before. Except that this place was not in or of the world to which he’d been born.
Another fusillade of the cracks, and another that was like an endless series of the same sound jammed together. It was coming from the right on the street that joined the one they and the crowd shared, at a T-junction less than a hundred long paces ahead. Dozens fell, then scores and more. A vehicle jolted into view, with men—it was all men—in the same uniform they wore—firing rifles and a machine gun from its bed. The last survivors of the crowd broke and fled, shambling away and being gunned down from behind.
Tense silence gripped John and his comrades. He squinted through the fire-shot gloom, and saw that the troops were only a little less tattered than the mob they’d slaughtered. They jumped down from the truck and advanced on the bodies and the wounded, clipping long knives below the barrels of their guns. An officer led them, staggering and laughing and weeping and shrieking incoherently as he emptied his revolver into the bodies. His men stabbed and hacked. . . .