The Templar hunting party broke away from the demons and ran. Their amplified strength and speed gave them a slight edge on the demons, but—over the short distance they had to cover to the cliffs—that edge wasn’t going to be enough.
Simon ran, but he kept the Minion on the Fetid Hulk’s shoulders marked on his HUD.
EIGHT
The street was a war zone. Carnage erupted around Leah constantly. She kept her pistols up and fired continuously. As Pittsfield had said, there was no lack of targets.
After a few moments, they reached what was left of Satchel Team Three. Over a dozen blood zombies rooted among the remains of the six men and women. The foul creatures looked like blood-covered shambling mockeries of human beings.
Horrified, Leah realized that at least a handful of the abominations had been created from men and women who had died in this battle. Some demon somewhere was lifting them up from the gates of death and setting them on their comrades.
Pittsfield cursed and stepped out to fire the Grizzly Rifle. When the energy bursts struck the blood zombies, the creatures flew to pieces. Three of them disintigrated before the attention of the others riveted on Pittsfield. More blood zombies appeared from behind overturned vehicles and clumps of mortar and stone from nearby buildings.
“Run!” Leah added her own weapons fire to Pittsfield’s. “There are too many of them!”
“One of the satchel charges didn’t explode,” Pittsfield said. He made no move to withdraw.
One of the blood zombies leaped to the top of a broken mass of building wall from a nearby structure. Its maw opened as it prepared to leap down onto Leah and her companions.
Reacting instinctively, Leah leveled the Thermal Bolter and put a rocket into the blood zombie’s open mouth. The creature exploded into gobbets of charred flesh, and the smoky stink filled the air. Not even Leah’s mask completely filtered out the smell.
Pittsfield barely held his own. The blood zombies massed on him and drove him back. The Grizzly Rifle was too long to employ effectively in such close quarters. Leah stepped behind and to one side of the man and opened fire with the SRAC. The blood zombies wilted under sustained fire, but they didn’t stop coming.
“We’ve got to pull back,” Leah said.
“No one has penetrated the dome,” Pittsfield growled. “There’s a satchel charge just lying there.”
Leah saw the case that held the explosives. Two craters and blast markings showed where the others had exploded and only rearranged the wreckage along the street.
“If that bloody dome isn’t blown,” Pittsfield continued as he butt-stroked a blood zombie and shattered its head. He left the rest unsaid.
The blood zombie went down into a fetal position and started rocking. Leah knew from observation that the creatures sometimes regenerated. She kicked the blood zombie back and pumped a dozen explosive rounds into the corpse that scattered pieces in all directions.
If it comes back from that, she thought fiercely, it’s at least going to take a while longer. She looked at the satchel charge. “I’ll retrieve the explosives.”
Pittsfield slung his Grizzly Rifle over his shoulder and drew a HARP pistol and an Eruptor. The HARP pistol was a Harmonic Resonance Projection weapon that used electronic and sonic generators to produce a beam capable of rapidly changing sonic waves. The technology had first been developed for mining because the field was controllable, and it disintegrated nonorganic matter such as rocks, metal, and glass.
The HARP technology also destroyed organic matter that no longer generated natural body rhythms. The hearts of the blood zombies were stilled, and blood no longer pumped through the veins and arteries. They registered as inorganic things to the HARP.
When Pittsfield fired the HARP pistol, the weapon emitted a wide cone of destruction. The blood zombies in the beam’s path stopped moving, then shook and shivered to pieces. A second later, the parts of them—and sometimes whole blood zombies—broke apart into atoms and disappeared in the sudden blue-white arc of light that filled the immediate vicinity.
The blood zombies outside the destruction stumbled back. Evidently they felt some of the fallout of the HARP blast because they were too dead to know fear.
Leah also noted that two of the dead members of the satchel team had been hit as well. Only parts of their bodies remained where they’d fallen.
Pittsfield cursed.
Leah knew the man hadn’t intended to do further injury to those that had fallen. They didn’t feel it, she told herself. And they can’t be resurrected and turned against us now.
“I’ve got the satchel,” she said, and darted forward. She holstered the SRAC and kept the Thermal Bolter out so she could use it. Bending down, she caught up the satchel charge by its handle and kept moving forward. There was no time to think now.
A Darkspawn scout group appeared around the corner of a building and quickly knelt to take aim at her. She pointed the Thermal Bolter and fired a trio of rounds.
Only one of the rockets struck the group. The other two hammered the street and the building wall. Flames engulfed the entire area and clung to the Darkspawn that survived the initial explosion.
Leah ran, banishing all thoughts of survival or death. She concentrated on the effort it took to avoid her enemies and keep moving forward. The firefight had been so fierce that a smoky haze had mixed with the natural fog streaming in from the River Thames. The Isle of Dogs was barely visible out in the middle of the river.
“This is Blue Scout,” Leah said as she leaped over the headless body of a Fetid Hulk. A dead man dressed in black lay twisted and broken in the demon’s huge hands. Acid burns from the Fetid Hulk’s throat sac had eaten away the protective suit and charred the flesh beneath.
“Reading you five by five, Blue Scout,” Commander Hargrove replied.
“Blue Scout is now designated Satchel Team Three.” Confronted by a horde of Darkspawn, Leah ducked into a nearby alley as energy bolts and
