Myrmidon

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Bullets pranged and skimmed off the metal lip of the roof, so close Chapel could hear them snarling all around him. He shoved himself backward, away from the edge, even as a bullet tore through the silicone flesh on his artificial arm. He rolled over and looked around the rooftop for any kind of cover. The stairwell he’d come up was enclosed in a small structure that might provide some cover, but the nearest thing he could see was the hood of an air-conditioning vent, but even as he crawled toward it, a launched grenade arced over the roof and smashed into the tar paper, sending up a great plume of smoke and debris. Chapel threw his good arm over his face to protect his eyes. When he dared to look again, the air-conditioning hood was just a tangle of warped and distorted metal. It would offer no cover at all.

He had to get down there, had to get into the igloo where Belcher had taken refuge. It seemed impossible, but there had to be a way. He looked around for the quadrotor that Angel had commandeered. If he could communicate with her somehow, if he could get a message through to the advancing army troops, maybe they could send him a Stryker vehicle that could plow through the neo-Nazi lines. Maybe he could—

He looked up just in time to see the quadrotor buzz away, up the street, and away from all the gunfire.

He barely had time to curse before another grenade came sailing over his head. This one didn’t explode on impact, which was a damned good thing—it landed not two feet from his leg. Chapel kicked it and watched it roll across the roof to fall down through the broken corner of the building, into the offices below. A moment later, he felt like the whole building had been picked up, then dropped from a height as the roof shook under him.

His only hope for survival—achieving anything else was little more than a pipe dream—was to get back inside the building, where he would have some cover. Maybe he could find a working phone down there, maybe he could communicate with Angel that way. He started crawling toward the stairwell that led back down into the building, even as bullets rained all around him.

Then, down in the street, one of the tanks opened fire with its main gun. Chapel had forgotten how loud those weapons were and he threw his hands over his ears to keep them from bursting. He couldn’t see what was happening, but he understood what that shot meant. When the neo-Nazis opened fire on Chapel’s position, the army must have taken that as their sign to begin their main assault. The sound of AK-47s firing in short bursts from Belcher’s line was joined by a constant chatter of machine-gun and M4 fire from down in the street. He heard people screaming, and others shouting for assistance, while the building underneath him thrummed with all the noise and the constant explosions. The building wasn’t going to last very long—it was still taking the brunt of the neo-Nazi fire, and the return fire from the army was probably going to collapse it at any second. Chapel redoubled his efforts to get to the stairwell, knowing it was probably hopeless.

Behind him, a grenade struck the metal lip on the edge of the roof, and it came off all in one piece, a bright ribbon of semimolten metal twirling in the air. The concrete wall of the building started to crumble away, calving off great sheets of debris. The building was disintegrating behind Chapel. He got up, no longer caring about whether he was in the line of fire or not, and started running for the stairwell.

Behind him, something a lot bigger than a grenade hit the building. The tar-paper roof cracked open in two halves, caving in down the middle. Chapel threw himself forward and grabbed for the doorway of the stairwell as the tar paper beneath him sloped downward over a great rift of debris and sparking wires. If he fell down into that pit, he would probably get impaled on a length of broken rebar, if he wasn’t electrocuted first.

His artificial hand just grabbed the doorknob. His good hand was still holding the hunting rifle. He had no choice but to drop it and flail for something to hold on to.

Underneath him, the building started to collapse once and for all. The walls were rumbling, bulging outward as they could no longer hold up their own weight. The tar paper on what was left of the roof peeled away as jagged cracks ran through the concrete underneath. The stairwell was still upright, but it wouldn’t last much longer.

Chapel could only wonder how he was going to die. There was no more if.

Except just then a new drone rose over the crumbling lip of the building, hovering in the air on three huge rotors. It was a prototype design Chapel had only ever seen before in photographs, similar to the quadrotor but a much bigger model designed for civilian use. Its powerful ducted propellers were precise enough to let it maneuver inside buildings and large enough to carry firefighting equipment or SWAT gear.

It also had a loudspeaker built in.

“Chapel, jump on!” Angel said, the words bellowing in his ears.