“Oh, yeah?” Rodney spat out a mouthful of dark slime. “Want to see if your people scream when my army tears down these walls? Want to see who’s scared then?”
The exes lumbered forward like a wave. Weathered hands closed on the bars. They all pulled. They all pushed. The hinges squealed.
Derek shouted and his gate guards leveled their shotguns a mere yard from the barrier. Their first volley went off at eye level and a score of exes packed against the gate dropped. Fourteen slides racked and the second volley dropped another dozen as they surged forward. Rifles went off along the top of the walls and another score of exes vanished beneath the mob.
Rodney waved his arm and the Seventeens shot back. A few people fell from the wall. Most of them dropped low and hugged the concrete.
“We can keep this up all week,” shouted Gorgon over the gunfire.
“All week? This place be rubble by sunrise,” yelled the dead giant. “We got the manpower, the firepower, the willpower! What you got? A couple freaks in costumes? You got nothing!!”
The Seventeens hollered and roared and punched the sky. The dead threw their arms up as well.
Gorgon stood up on top of the arch and looked down at them. Hundreds of Seventeens. Thousands of zombies. “We’ve got brains, Rodney,” he shouted with a grin. “And superpowers or not, you’re still the same idiot you’ve always been. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t’ve brought an army of people who’ve never met me before.”
“I’m gonna chop your fucking head off and shove it so far up your ass it’s gonna come back out your neck!” bellowed the giant. He pointed a finger as thick as a baseball bat and a dozen Seventeens trained their weapons on the hero. “You got anything else smart to say?!”
Gorgon laughed and clapped his hands over his head. “Ladies and gentlemen of the SS,” he shouted, “if you could give me your attention, please.”
A good third of the gang members were already looking at him. Half the rest glanced up as Rodney yelled “DON’T!!”
The goggles opened and Gorgon cast his vampiric gaze out at the frozen crowd.
They shuddered and twitched as he tore their strength out. His body shook with the raw power of it, like the greatest sex of his life. Tier ten or eleven. Maybe higher. Weapons lowered and then clattered to the pavement.
Almost three hundred Seventeens collapsed in the street among the exes as the irises snapped shut.
Gorgon rolled his shoulders once and tried to settle the strength buzzing in his muscles. “Told you he was an idiot,” he said to Stealth.
Shots echoed in the air as he leaped off the arch, dropped twenty feet, and drove a kick into Rodney’s head. He rode the malformed skull to the ground and it made a satisfying crack as it hit the pavement. The hero slammed his fist into the giant’s throat and followed it up with a strike to the solar plexus. He drove two-three-four more punches home, flashing the goggles on each one, before Rodney’s arm swept him away.
It was like getting hit by a speeding car. Gorgon flew across the street, knocking down a dozen exes as he went.
“Your eye-magic don’t work on me,” said the giant as he stood up. “Not so tough when you can’t make the other guy weak, are you?”
A handful of exes grabbed at Gorgon’s arms and shoulders and he felt a tiny bit of his strength simmer away as he shrugged them off. “Man enough to test that?”
Rodney roared and charged.
St. George landed at the Van Ness gate and Jarvis limped to him. “Moved past,” shouted the salt-and-pepper man. He had one arm in a sling, and pointed north with the rifle clutched in his other hand. “Heading for Lemon Grove.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Radios are out. We sent runners.”
The hero nodded and hurled himself back up over the rooftops.
Lemon Grove had been a tiny pedestrian entrance, over a block north from Van Ness. When they’d moved into the Mount, they’d welded the rolling gate shut, jammed its drive chain, and boarded up the tiny guard shack with layers of plywood.
Two long, clawed hands gripped the top of the small gate and forced it back down its tracks.
There were six guards. On top of an office trailer, Ilya, Billie, and two others were picking off exes one by one. The Marine was shouting into her walkie. The two guards on the roof of the shack were shooting at the demon on the far side.
“Oh, thank God,” one of the shack guards said. “I didn’t think anyone—”
“Radios are dead,” St. George interrupted. “Stop wasting ammunition!” He punctuated it with a burst of flame.
They stopped firing and the gate squealed. One of the welds snapped with a sound like a cymbal.
“The demon’s bulletproof. I’ve got him. Take care of the exes.”
St. George leaped up into the sky and arced down to land just behind Cairax. He kicked two exes away and threw a few fists and elbows that shattered skulls. Then he latched onto the demon’s tail and yanked.
The monster flew away from the gate as the hero swung it up, over, and slammed it into the crowded street. He leaped across the distorted body, dragging the tail with him, and shoved another ex away as he landed. He set his boots to the pavement and whipped the demon in a circle, swatting zombies away like flies. After two spins he hurled it across the street into the parking structure, decapitating a handful of exes on the way. The dead thing struck the concrete pillar like a wrecking ball and left a crater. It dropped to the ground in a heap of overlong limbs.
Behind the fence, the guards were cheering.
St. George waded through the exes, cracking heads and necks with each swing of his arms. Gunfire dropped the dead near him. He was halfway to Cairax when the demon lunged back up. Its head panned
