“Sedating him,” he answered. “Otherwise, he may literally tear himself to pieces.”
He jabbed the needle into Carl’s arm. In two seconds he rolled onto his back, out cold. Op Nine handed the kit to Ashley.
“Dress the wounds, quickly,” he told her. He scooped the 3XD out of the sand and held it toward me.
I hesitated for a second, then took it from him. The rifle was lighter than I expected. It weighed about the same as a broom.
Op Nine kneeled beside Carl, pulled the sash of cartridges from his body, and handed it to me.
“Remember, Kropp, the ammunition is limited.”
That’s okay, I thought, so am I.
I threw the cartridge belt over one shoulder and slung the 3XD over my back. I trudged back to the sand-foil, dragging my aching right foot in the sand. Ashley trotted back after a minute, carrying the first-aid kit under her arm and pulling off bloody surgical gloves as she ran.
Op Nine took the point now, as we raced southwest.
His voice sounded tinny and distant over the speaker in my helmet: “If another operative flees the engagement, we do not stop.”
It looked like the engagement was winding down. When it first began, the tracer fire lighting up the sky had looked like the cl**ax of a Fourth of July fireworks show. Now the firing was sporadic and the black holes punched through the searing lights appeared less frequently. Either ASSFOR-1 was running out of ammunition or it was running out of personnel.
I blinked rapidly behind my visor, because the lights in the sky now reflected off the sand, like the battle was taking place over a vast lake.
Suddenly a ball of light separated itself from the main firestorm and came barreling toward us. We were going about 130 miles per hour; this thing came toward us at three times that speed.
“Engage, engage, engage!” a frantic voice screamed over the speaker. The agents brought the sand-foils skidding to a stop, angling them into a circle. They jumped off, fell to one knee inside the circle, and swung their 3XDs toward the sky.
I plopped down next to Ashley, swinging my rifle upward too, but feeling a little ridiculous, to tell the truth. I’d been to a carnival or two where you fire at the little plastic cutouts of ducks as they slowly roll along the track. I never knocked down a single duck. But maybe saving my own skin from being fried by demon-fire would focus my aim better than winning the kooky stuffed monkey with the disproportionately big head.
“On my mark . . .” Op Nine said.
I rested the pad of my index finger on the cool metal of the trigger. Sweat trickled down my forehead and burned my eyes, but I couldn’t wipe it off because of the helmet, and I wasn’t about to take my helmet off. The memory of Carl writhing in the sand was still fresh in my mind.
“Mark!” Op Nine shouted.
“Fire, fire, fire at will!” someone else screamed.
The 3XDs erupted all around me and the night lit up in a fury of red. My finger jerked on the trigger, which slammed the weapon hard into my shoulder as it recoiled, nearly knocking me onto my butt. I didn’t aim, really—it was kind of a frantic repeat of my duck hunting at the carnival—but just jerked the barrel this way and that, firing randomly at any movement above me. Waves of furnace-level heat rolled down from the sky.
I could see them now, and the sight nearly made me throw down my gun and run in pure panic.
Thousands of demons—maybe tens of thousands— careened above us, diving, swooping, stalling briefly, then zipping away faster than you can blink, glimmering forms of men in flowing robes. They rode beasts with wings sparking with golden fire, the wings at least ten feet from tip to tip, with yawning mouths stuffed with fangs, hanging open as if frozen in midscream. I saw lions and tigers and bears and other beasts that I knew I should recognize. They reminded me of roadkill: you knew they lived once, but now they were twisted and smashed into distorted versions of what they once were.
Their screams mixed with the roaring wind and the whispering of the damned.
But they didn’t look like your typical comic book or movie demons—not like those hunkered gargoyles or the little grinning guys with pitchforks and horns growing out of their bald heads. These riders were seven feet tall at least. They wielded swords of fire, lances, or staffs that burned at the tips but weren’t consumed. This close to them I could see now the source of the orange and red light was the demons themselves; it radiated from their eyes and their open mouths.
Some wore flaming crowns, and the light springing from their eyes was especially harsh, purer and brighter than the light of the crownless ones, which was flecked with black. The light made it impossible for me to see their faces—not that I really wanted to see their faces.
Abby’s voice crackled in my headset, tinged with barely controlled panic: “Base One, Base One, this is Insertion Team Delta. We have a Level Alpha Intrusion Event. Repeat: confirm L Alpha Event! Request immediate air support at these coordinates!”
As I held down the trigger, the 3XD kept firing, and my shoulder began to ache from the kickback. I emptied my clip and fumbled at the belt for a fresh one, but then I couldn’t figure out how to eject the spent cartridge, and I wasted a few precious seconds yanking on it, trying to pull it free from the rifle.
The noise was horrible, the screaming of the flying road-kill, the howling of the wind, the shouts and static over the speakers in my helmet, the booming of the 3XDs. When a round slammed into one of the demons, it blew apart in an explosion of sparkling light mixed with black, but only for a few seconds. I watched, horrified, as the thing reassembled itself and was whole again. I remembered Op Nine’s words on the plane: What has never lived cannot be killed.
Holding them off was the best we could hope for, but our ammunition wouldn’t last forever, and then what?
I finally found the release button for ejecting the cartridge. It plopped hissing into the sand as I slammed a fresh one into the slot and yanked the trigger. About that same time, the demon swarm leaped straight up, dwindling into the velvet blackness of the desert sky.
A voice shouted in my ear, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
The noise died away until all I could hear was my own ragged breath inside the helmet. Even the whispering faded, but the memory of it lingered, like a slowly dying echo. We watched their shapes circle high above in concentric rings of fire, each ring turning in the opposite direction of the other one.
The eerie silence was shattered by a terrific roar, and my heart jumped. Ashley tugged on my sleeve and pointed toward the main body of demons about three football fields away. Something was coming toward us, moving slowly across the desert, bellowing as it came.