For Njinga, it felt as if time was slowing down drastically. Her vision stretched out in the front and blurred at the sides as tunnel vision took over, and she was able to pick up crisp, ultra-focused details of the carnage unfolding before her; the glinting of shells catching the light as they danced their haphazard jitterbug on the ground, and a spurt of blood spraying upwards in a grisly arc as a human skull exploded, struck by one of her shotgun slugs. The muzzle flares of many gun barrels, all flashing and flickering virtually imperceptibly against the tide of sun-like white light. A soldier covering his eyes while popping out random, stab-in-the-dark shots. A torso sliced near in half from a scything arc of heavy lead sprayed out from Zakaria’s relentless automatic fire.
The fight seemed to go on forever, and yet it simultaneously felt as if it had lasted but a mere fraction of a second. As she fired madly, Njinga felt the enemy’s bullets peppering her armoured body. She knew that the impacts were hurting her – the rational part of her brain was telling her this – yet even as the thumping force of the bullets pushed her back and she found herself almost losing her footing and being unable to breathe, somehow her arms, her shoulders, her eyes, and her coordination remained absolutely focused on the task at hand.
The task of killing, ofslaughtering.
Of ending lives.
And end those lives she did. As soon as she saw one man fall, she would swing the sights of the combat shotgun onto the next target, not bothering to lock down her aim before squeezing the trigger again. Half of her shots missed, but those that hit tore with a horrific force through battle armour, flesh, muscle and bone. Muffled, as if through the thick cotton of a dream, she heard herself roaring inside her helmet. It felt now as if pure, thousand-degree liquid magma was filling her body, engulfing the entirety of her system in flames of phosphorous that burned white and pink and violet, far beyond the temperature of any forest fire. No, this heat that blasted through him was as the heat of an ancient earth-goddess’s celestial forge, as this primeval super-being hammered out before her furnace the crudeness of thick rocks, sludgy water and jagged mountains that were to be the foundations of a planet.
The cries Njinga bellowed were beyond language; no words, no stretching of vocal cords or manipulation of the human tongue could come close to conveying the rawness of her emotion, the depth and intensity of the fury and terror and madness that howled through her core with the darkly beautiful anarchy of a hurricane.
These were the howls of ancient beings, of species long extinct, of fragile paradises ruined forever, of countless billions of innocent beings tortured to death for humankind’s trivialities, and they were belted out with vociferous violence and spat at the enemy with the same vehement velocity as the shotgun rounds she was blasting out of her weapon, again and again and again. Against all odds, in the face of the concentrated firepower of emotionless, brainwashed soldiers who were more machines than men, the tiny group of Rebels surged forward in this skirmish, this speck of violence in a blood-spatter of gore and skull fragments and globs of brain and purple and grey and crimson viscera, slick and slimy, this single droplet of resistance in this millennia-long war against the forces of a relentless and nearly incomprehensible evil.
These beings, these beastwalkers, these demigods of a long-forgotten time, had been reduced to this. They had been reduced to having to make use of the oldest and crudest tool with which all sentient beings capable of locomotion are both cursed and blessed: violence.
And violence they doled out, this gorilla-being and this puma-being, sisters and brothers in wisdom and sorrow and hope and unnaturally long life, and all the tragedy and possibility that that had brought them. Together they unleashed hell; with their trigger fingers they opened the door to Hell itself, and they let the caged demons fly from their grave-rot prison.
Njinga found herself squeezing the trigger again and again, but something was wrong: the booming had stopped. The shotgun’s furious kicking in her arms, formerly like a whipped mule possessed of a sudden and righteous wrath, had gone limp. Now the hot firearm, that purveyor of searing-lead death, was as still as a dead thing. Zakaria’s M-60 had also fallen silent, as had the chattering and bullet-spitting hammering of the Huntsmen’s guns.
All that remained was hanging smoke, thousands of spent cartridge shells, an almost tangible presence of impossibly bright, eye-searing light – and the warm frozenness of death, coloured so harshly with slick crimson, sprayed with ferocious abandon across every surface.
‘Light cannon off,’ Zakaria growled in the ancient language that only he could speak.
He abandoned the now-useless M-60 and unholstered both of his Uzis, gripping one in each hand.
‘Come, Njinga,’ he urged. ‘Time for phase two. You and I broke through, even without the girl. She is lost, she must be, but we cannot mourn her now; too much rests on the next few moments. We will do what we can to find her after the mission is over.’
Njinga did not respond; she was standing in shock, still robotically squeezing the trigger of her empty shotgun. Zakaria gently pried the weapon out of her hands and dropped it onto the floor.
‘You did well, sister. We beat them. We beat them. Come
