quite left when the attack began, and saw no reason to announce his good health. He touched the pouch containing his homing device. It was like a talisman to him, a source of comfort and great power. A way to make this dangerous world vanish.
With a few simple taps on the keypad, he could eliminate the threat altogether. The hadals would turn into illusions. But so would the mercenaries, and they were still useful to him. Among other things, Shoat didn't enjoy paddling. He held his apocalypse pouch and considered: Use you now or use you later? Later, he decided. No harm in waiting a few minutes more to see how the dust settled out there. It seemed the hadals might have driven home their point, so to speak, and boogied back into the darkness.
'What should we do?' shouted a soldier.
'Leave. We got to leave,' yelled another. 'Everybody get onto the boats. We're safe on the water.'
Several of the rafts were drifting unmanned. The chain gunner was paddling his own boat back to shore. 'Let's go, let's go!' he shouted to three comrades crouched against
the fortress wall.
Uncertain, the three landbound men stood and peered around for any more ambushers. Seeing no one, they snapped fresh clips into their rifles and tried to prepare themselves for the sprint. The soldiers in the boats kept waving at them to come along.
'A hundred meters,' one of the trapped mercenaries estimated. 'I did that in nine-point-nine once.'
'Not in sand you didn't.'
'Watch me.'
They offloaded their packs and shed every extra ounce, their grenades and knives and lights and inflatable vests.
'Ready?'
'Nine-point-nine? You're really that slow?' They were ready.
'Set.'
A woman's cry fell upon them from the highest reaches of the fortress. Everyone heard it. Even Ali, winding her way down through the fortress, stopped to listen, and knew that Troy had disobeyed her.
The mercenaries looked up. It was the feral girl, leaning from the window of the tower overlooking the sea. With the tape pulled from her mouth, she unleashed a second call from deep in her throat. Her ululation echoed upon them. It felt like their own hearts lifting across the waters.
She could have been calling to the earth or the sea. Or invoking God. As if summoned, the sand came to life.
Ali reached a window in time to see.
Midway between the fortress and the water, a patch of beach bulged and grew into a small mountain. The hump rose up and took on the dimensions of an animal. The sand guttered from its shoulders and he became a man. The mercenaries were too astounded to lay waste to him.
He was not muscular the way an athlete or bodybuilder is. But the flesh on him stretched in ropy plates. It seemed to have grown on his bones out of need, and then grown some more, with little symmetry. Ali stared down at him.
His bulk and height and the silver bands on his arms evinced pedigree of some sort. He was imposing, as tall as most of the mercenaries, even majestic. For an instant she wondered if this barbaric deformity might not be the Satan she was seeking.
The mercenaries' spotlights fixed his details for all to see. Ali was close enough to recognize him as a warrior simply from the distribution of his scars. It was a forensic fact that primitive fighters classically presented their left side in battle. From foot to shoulder this barbarian's left hemisphere showed twice the old injuries as his right. His left forearm had been sliced and broken from parrying blows. The calcific growth sprouting from his head had a fluted texture, and the tip of one horn had been snapped in battle.
In his right hand he carried a samurai sword stolen in the sixteenth century. With his ferocious eyes and earth-painted skin, he could have been one of the terra-cotta statues inside the fortress keep. A demon guarding the sanctum. Then he spoke, and it was London-accented. 'Will you beg, lad?' he said to his first kill. She had heard this voice over the radio. She had seen Ike's eyes grow wide at the remembrance of him. Isaac shook the sand from his body and faced the fortress, oblivious to his enemies. He searched the heights, dragging masses of air in through his nostrils to catch a scent. He smelled something. Then he called back to the girl, and there was no question what was happening.
They had stolen the beast's daughter. Now hell wanted her back.
Before the soldiers could pull their triggers, the trap closed. Isaac leaped on the first
soldier and snapped his neck.
The main raft pitched upward and dawdled on edge, its occupants windmilling into the black water.
More lances harpooned up through the raft floors, and a desperate man machine-gunned his own feet.
Spotlights slewed. Strobes auto-activated.
Obsidian hailed down on hadals and humans alike. The last of Walker's outfit faced their own weapons here and there, taken from their dead comrades over the past months. Those who could figure out the safety mechanisms and triggers wreaked as much havoc on their own kind as on the soldiers. Many simply used the rifles as clubs. The three soldiers trapped near the fortress tried for the doorway, but hadals pounced from the walls and blocked their way. Backed against the wall, one bellowed
'Remember the Alamo!' and his partner, a macho from Miami, said, 'Fuck the Alamo, viva la Raza,' and nailed him through his brainpan. The third soldier shot the gang-banger on principle, then sucked the barrel and triggered his last round. The hadals were properly impressed by the suicides.
Out on the water, the chain gun hosed arcs of light into the black horizon. When the belt feed finally jammed, the lone last gunner grabbed a paddle and set out across the sea. In the silence that followed, you could hear his dogged flight, stroke by stroke, like the beating of wings.
Inside the fortress, Colonel Walker was feasted upon alive. They didn't bother cutting him down from the wall, but simply carved pieces off while he raved scripture.
High in the honeycombed fortress, Ike raced in search of Ali. The minute he'd heard the wild girl cry out, he'd started his race. Still dripping water from his hiding place at the edge of the sea, he sprinted up stairs and down corridors.
He might have known Ali would use his knife to free the others. Of course a nun wouldn't know when to let well enough alone. If only she had done as he'd meant and left the others hog-tied to their fates, her disappearance would have been immaculate. This storm of hadals would have swept through like a summer shower. They would have had their washing of spears, then gone on and left Ike hidden with Ali, none the wiser. Instead the People were now combing this cliff structure, hunting for their property, that feral girl. They would not stop until they got what they wanted, he knew, and that would include Ali now. One way or another, that girl would betray her, no matter what kindness Ali had shown her.
He had to find Ali first, and take it from there.
The hadal assault had been crystallizing for days. In their ignorance, Walker and his mercenaries had failed to see the signs. But tucked in a cubbyhole in the cliffs, Ike had been watching hadals arrive almost from the hour Walker landed, and their strategy was clear. They would wait for the soldiers to begin departing on boats, and during the transition from land to sea, they would attack. Anticipating all of that, Ike had arranged diversions and scouted hiding places and selected what parts of the human depot he wanted for himself. In addition to Ali, he wanted two hundred pounds of military rations and a raft. They didn't need more. Two hundred pounds would feed her to the surface. And he would live off the land.
Ike's one hope was his disguise. The hadals did not know he was operating on their fringe, dressed like them, in powdered rock and ochre and rags of the human enemy. For months he had been eating as they ate, harvesting creatures of all kinds, feeding on the meat, warm or cold, raw or jerked. He had their smell now, and some of their strengths. His spoor was hadal spoor. His sweat tasted like hadal
