The dead thing’s momentum carried it forward and it slammed into Bishop from behind, before rolling to the front of the cab, obscuring it from Knight’s view.
Bishop was knocked off his feet and simply rolled in one smooth move across the hood of the cab. He swung the barrel of the weapon back and fired at his previous position, blasting another creature and sending it smashing through the plate glass window of a cell phone shop. Broken plastic display phones skittered out of the shop across the pavement with clicking and clacking sounds, but again, Knight was denied a chance to actually see whatever it was Bishop was shooting at.
He began picking blurs and firing about ten to twenty yards in front of each, hoping to hit something. Every third shot or so, he needed to protect Bishop’s six from another speeding blur, but for half of those, Bishop himself swung around in a full 360? arc, firing with his machine gun. Knight couldn’t see if he was hitting the things, but he could tell, as they ducked and weaved before retreating, that Bishop wasn’t killing many of them, if he was hitting them at all.
Knight saw some the things tearing back toward the globe of crackling light. Then the movement was gone.
He looked for a new target and didn’t see anything moving down on the street. Knight finally had a chance to look for his fallen targets and was surprised to see so few. Damn, I missed more than I thought. He could see only three, and he knew there was a fourth in front of the cab.
“You seeing these things, Knight?” Bishop’s voice sounded loud in Knight’s earpiece as he shouted.
Knight looked through the scope of his rifle at one of the fallen bodies. He had hit it. It was missing a good portion of its muscular chest, but otherwise, the corpse provided him a pretty good idea of what they were up against. The beast was at least seven feet tall, and milky white. Long, powerful limbs were claw tipped, yet the creature was vaguely humanoid in appearance. The head was a bit blockish with a domed forehead through which he could see a white, spongy mass.
I can see through its skin, Knight realized and then wondered, is that its skull? Or its brain? He glanced over the rest of the body and saw bundles of long, sinewy muscles twitching beneath the translucent skin.
The creature struck him as somewhat feline, especially the way it moved, but it was really unlike anything native to Earth. The most obtrusive feature was its eyes, which were huge orbs on the outside of the sides of its face. Like a chameleon, Knight thought, separately mobile and stereoscopic-able to look in multiple directions at once.
“I’m seeing the fallen ones. Having a hard time tracking the moving ones,” Knight replied, still eyeing one of the corpses.
“Yeah, I hear you. I’m-oh shit, here they come again.”
Knight pulled back from the scope and saw several more shapes blitzing from the ball of light down the street. Bishop opened up fire on them again, strafing across the street. Knight began taking targets as they came for Bishop, one after the next. The creatures were falling this time-he’d figured out the effective range ahead of their paths to fire now-but too many of them were getting past Bishop’s arc of fire, leaving Knight to pick them off. One bumped against Bishop, throwing his aim off, his stream of. 50 caliber bullets passing harmlessly into the air. Knight could see more of the creatures advancing on Bishop. He fired again, taking down another creature and toggled his microphone, “Bishop, time to bug out man.”
Bishop dropped to the ground just as one of the creatures was about to hit him. Instead, it leapt over him and its momentum kept it going down the street. Knight let that one pass, even though he knew it would loop back on Bishop from behind. He focused on the next wave coming out of the glowing sphere.
Then an idea came to him. As he tracked another streaking form moving close to a line of abandoned vehicles, Knight chose a car three car-lengths in front of the speeding creature and unleashed the devastation of his sniper rifle on the fuel tank of a black Audi. The tank ruptured, sending fuel onto the ground, and Knight quickly fired a second round at the pavement, the spark of its impact igniting the fuel and the speeding creature. The explosion of the remaining fuel in the car made a deep bass thump and the car flipped over backward.
Bishop was on the move, leaping over the hoods of vehicles, then firing in a sweep, and then leaping again. Knight repeated the move, rupturing fuel tanks two more times before the creatures swept over to the boardwalk beside the river, well away from the cars.
“OK, tangos are intelligent, too, Bishop.”
Suddenly the staccato explosions of Bishop’s weapon stopped. Knight pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced up. He saw Bishop drop the big weapon, run up the hood of a Buick, and leap into the air toward the next abandoned car on the road, throwing a grenade behind him from the apex of his leap. Bishop landed on the roof of the bright red Ford in front of him, crunching in the thin metal, as the creature trailing him reached the Buick and the grenade as it landed. Knight targeted another creature chasing Bishop just as the explosion from the grenade sent up a huge cloud of smoke and debris, obscuring his shot.
“Damn.”
Bishop made for the river’s edge, as he had said he would do. Knight adjusted his stance, leaning further out over the parapet. He targeted the last creature chasing Bishop and fired. Then he pulled back from the scope to see yet another wave of speeding lines making waves in the air like heat haze, down on the street. Then one of the creatures mounted the roof of the cab Bishop had previously used for cover and turned its head up to the sky and howled.
The sound was hideous.
The noise was deafening and terrible, a deep bass rumble like a horn filled with every terror in the world. It vibrated through Knight’s body, rattling his bones. He dropped the sniper rifle and it fell to the next lower section of the tower. Goose bumps broke out across every part of his skin, sweat beaded and dripped as though he were clutched by fever, and a terror-filled scream that would shame him forever had anyone heard it ripped from his lungs.
Shin Dae-jung had never been so scared in his life.
FIFTEEN
Chicago, IL
3 November, 0100 Hrs
Well, this is embarrassing.
King thought he was going to die. Clutching the pants of a dead man with one hand, and the eject lever between the dead pilot’s knees in the other, King held on for dear life as the rockets on the underside of the ejection seat slammed him out of the crashing plane and across the sky laterally at close to 100 mph. He had just enough time to see that the thrust from the rockets on the seat were going to slam him, the pilot and the seat into the side of a building with darkened glass windows and five vertical stripes of dark tan concrete. Even in the brightly lit night scene, and at a point of view from which he had never seen it, he recognized it as the Park Hyatt building.
Then his next thought as the chair blasted across the sky was to try to crawl lower down the pilot’s legs toward the blasting rockets-so he wouldn’t end up between his impromptu getaway vehicle and the oncoming wall of stone and glass.
His brain didn’t have time to complete the next thought.
I hope I don’t get roasted The rockets died. The chute section in the headrest exploded outward with a pop, slamming into King’s shins and flipping him over the footrest of the seat toward where the rockets were propelling the craft just a second before. His body arced out and away from the seat and he lost his hold on the ejection lever. He clung for all he was worth to the dead pilot’s flight suit and twisted hard, scrambling in mid air to get his other hand back on the pilot before the impact.
When it came, it rattled him, but the impact was far less than he had expected. Two men, one chair. The normal propulsion of the seat might have pitched them through the glass and out the other side of the building, but because of the weight, the propellant had quit and their velocity had died down before the crash. The window around them shattered into tiny safety glass crumbles that rained down to the street. The chair lodged itself just inside the building, but King was dangling from the pilot’s ankles and swinging from the bottom of the chair, on the
