Stained Glass

Chapter 35

Small figures passed in and out of the fray on the road ahead, and then a large one as an insectoid creature stumbled down the gravel pathway. It was a skeletal black scorpion the size of a minivan, screeching through three severed heads that had been melded into one tri-lobed horror. Its back was on fire, and it was hacking at small figures swarming around its feet.

“Brace!” I gunned the engine and aimed the car.

Wide-eyed, Talya fumbled the machete out of its sheathe as we thundered down the road. The rats and possums that were attacking the scorpion scattered when they saw us thundering towards them, but the Morphorde only spun around, front legs raised like a tarantula’s. The car was big enough and the hood sturdy enough that we hit the DOG like a snowplough. It screamed with a high, tortured whistling sound as its legs crumpled and it collapsed. I backed up, tires screeching on the wet road, and drove at it again as it stumbled up to its knees and coughed a gout of slime onto the hood. The stuff melted the windscreen where it spattered, but it rolled off the paint and we hit it with a satisfying crunch. The Morphorde went under the wheels, limbs flailing.

“Whatever you do, don’t shoot them! Stab them! Put honey on your weapons!” Angkor cried out as he threw the back door open and rolled out. A spidery limb shot out from around the side of the car on my side, stabbing at anything within reach. Talya screamed, fumbling for the door, and I followed her with Binah tucked under one arm as it banged on the window and then broke it in with a shower of broken glass.

“You have to shift!” I yelled at her, pulling my knife. It felt too small for this fight.

“I can’t!” She yelled back. “I can’t, I’ll lose control again!”

The scorpion creature was bumping the car up and down as it struggled to free itself. Down the gravel driveway, a Morphorde like a giant bacteriophage – a virus that looked like a bizarre crystal moon lander – was being savaged by five raccoons. A dying fox was impaled on its stamping needle legs, but the DOG was stumbling with the jerkiness of the walking dead. Bursts of automatic gun fire rang out from behind the back of the club. Whoever was back there had assault rifles.

“Josie is in there,” I said. “They’ll take her back and they’ll kill her. Do what you were born to do.”

Talya’s eyes hardened, and she held the machete out to me without a word. I took it, and she undressed carelessly, throwing her clothing to the ground. Her skin was still bloody as she stepped out of her borrowed jeans, her eyes on the car as the huge Morphorde finally heaved it up and flipped it off. Her eyes focused, intent and predatory, and she took off at a run towards it with a high-pitched shout, tearing and distending into her Ka on her way across.

“Come on!” Angkor grabbed my arm, and pulled me off as the prehistoric lion and unnatural demon collided with a roar. I glimpsed Talya hanging from its back, raking bones and chitin from its belly as it thrashed and collapsed onto the road.

We ran across the street, past the smoking club, and emerged into the chaos of battle. Dead animals and people were scattered across the yard, some of them mutated beyond hope or sanity. Motorcycles and cars were trashed. The clubhouse was whole, but the entire yard was given over to combat. There were a dozen mutated Weeders and ten men with rifles battling six of the Tigers. A bear was grappling on the ground with a DOG all too like the one that had killed Vassily, an amorphous mass of giggling mouths and snapping jaws. Jenner’s tiger was taking cover from the heavy fire; Zane’s cougar and three wolves were cornering another one of the scorpions, snapping at its legs as it reared and stabbed at them with scythe-like claws. Of the child, there was no sign.

Angkor and I drew our pistols and split without speaking. I rolled behind one of the upended Lincolns, sighted down, and popped a round that took one of the advancing gunmen in the back of the head. He spiraled to the ground, and the others around him scattered, drawing fire from the windows. Three of them fell, mowed down, and their corpses began to bubble and twitch on the soil.

“Shit.” That was where the DOGs were coming from. Every single one of them were DOG-bitten carriers.

The other gunmen carried on as if they didn’t notice their fallen comrades, even as Doberman sized cockroaches peeled themselves out of the remains of the corpses and began to tear at them, shoving unnaturally rotted flesh into their maws. I almost reflexively shot one of them, and only remembered just in time. Instead, I holstered Wardbreaker, poured honey over the machete blade, and charged into the fray.

The nearest bug pivoted towards me as I ran at it, throwing its legs up like an angry spider as I closed in and chopped down, breaking it apart like a coconut. The honey clung, and the creature screamed as its carapace cracked and its innards burned. The others whirled and ran at me, their exoskeletons grinding as they scuttled forwards. I backpedaled, keeping an eye on the ground. If I fell and they swarmed me, I was dead.

The tiger broke out of her cover during a lull in the gunfire, barreling out with a roar that vibrated through the blade in my hand. Jenner smashed into one of the men as he reloaded, seizing him in a paw and hurling him to the ground to crush his face. And then she threw him at me.

I stumbled back around the car as the body landed in the cluster of bugs, who scattered, and then reformed around the new corpse. One of them wormed its way under the chassis and struck at my leg before I realized what was happening. Jenner fell on the rest, tearing them apart with teeth and claw, while I kicked and chopped down at the gnashing mandibles that had shredded my pantsleg and the skin beneath. I drove the machete down through its carapace and twisted, and it squealed, purple-black ichor bubbling up and frothing around the sticky blade. I glanced over to see Angkor fighting three of the things with the ax, his face a mask of grim focus as he smacked one back, cleaved the head of the next, and then got hit square in the leg by a glob of acidic slime that set his clothes to smoking.

Angkor limped back, reaching down into his pocket to clutch at his injury as I ran forward to help him, dodging under the lines of fire as bullets spanged and zinged across the increasingly decrepit cars we were using for cover.

“Na Vazeal!” He cried the words out like a command, and slashed his hand out towards the pair of bugs as they gathered around him and lifted their hooked claws to pull him down. I was almost there when both of them burst into green flames, wailing in agony, and fell back to thrash on the ground as huge growths erupted from their carapaces, sending insectoid limbs and pieces of chitin tumbling to the ground. Angkor stumbled back, exhausted.

His yelling had caught the attention of two men with guns. We were close enough to the house that I could see them properly for the first time. They weren’t battle-hardened Mafioso: they were neatly dressed, slacks-and-collar shirt guys with Mormon hair, and they were fumbling on their safeties and reloads. There was something not right about their expressions. The impression I had was of people trapped inside human-shaped prisons, banging on the walls while their bodies locked, loaded, and advanced on our position.

I caught Angkor’s wrist on the way past and dragged him down behind a stack of tires as a burst punctured the air. They made dull sounds as they hit the tires well above our heads. The gunman was shooting high: further evidence for lack of training.

“These guys don’t know what they’re doing,” I said, gulping air between words. Men with my build aren’t made for running. “They’re expendables. They don’t know how to use those guns properly.”

“Someone wants them to get shot.” Angkor grimaced, pulling his melted clothing away from his leg. “The Deacon. Fucking hell… get the honey out and pour it over this. I’ll cover us.”

I complied without question, unscrewing the lid while Angkor bent around the stack and fired three precise shots. He ducked back just before I poured. The honey hissed on contact, and Angkor gnashed his teeth, his face turning purple with the effort not to scream.

A flicker of movement caught my eye, and I looked back to see more of the bacteriophages skittering down the gravel pathway. They were dividing as they ran, feeding off the dead animals – Weeders, I realized. The dead were small animals, some of them bristling with StainedGlass, some of them merely dead. Each one of bacteriophage’s legs was a feeding tube: They liquefied the corpses and sucked their innards into their weird crystalline bodies on their way into the lot. Each time they fed, every bullet that hit them, they split into more creatures.

My heart froze in my chest at the sight of them. The dead animals were the souls of those Weeders. Every one that the Morphorde consumed was gone. They would never incarnate again. My fear reached a brief crescendo at the realization of what I was seeing, and then abruptly faded as my ears filled with a blurry whine. The haze of battlefield dissociation fell over my senses like a shroud. There was a point where the cocktail of hormones and overstimulation made sound and fear irrelevant. All I had to do was survive before those things got us, got me, and ate my body and soul.

The remaining Twin Tigers shapeshifters roared and snarled as they fought on. From the street, I heard a woman’s high-pitched scream, louder than any HuMan throat could produce. It raised the skin on the back of my neck.

“Talya,” I said. “She’s being overrun.”

“Fucking Morphorde. They just keep coming.” Angkor rapidly dropped his empty clip, slammed a new one into the pistol, and looked alongside at me. “We need to get out of here. I agreed to help them out: I didn’t agree to have my fucking Axon turned into a Slimfast smoothie by Phitophages.”

“There is a child who is going to die if they get into that house,” I said.

Angkor paled. “You got the Weeder kids back?”

“One of them. Come on.” I risked a look, and then gathered myself into a crouch. “We’ll go around!”

There was another long, blood-curdling scream, closer this time. It echoed like a claxon off the walls. I broke cover, scrabbling on hands and feet from the stack of tires to the car, just before the entire contents of Noah’s Ark charged down the driveway. An elk, bugling the ear-splitting war cry I’d heard from the street. Horses, wolves, wolverines, with a full-grown black rhinoceros in the lead.

The rhino bellowed like a train as he charged the scuttling horde of phitophages with a double horn longer than my arm. Macrofauna streamed in behind him, snarling, barking and shrieking their rage and fury. Weasels tore into the nearest cockroach, shredding it with teeth and claws; the horse thundered past the car to smash into the phitophages, while a mixed pack of barking dogs, howling wolves, coyotes and hyenas dodged around the yard and set on the remaining gunmen. Talya’s lion brought up the rear, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, one cheek grotesquely swollen with venom. If she noticed, it didn’t show: the instinct to hunt Morphorde overrode everything else, and she fell on the crowd of phitophages with a deep-bellied roar, slapping them away from her chest as they tried to swarm her and the horse.

Some of the phages staggered around the ends of the car. I charged the nearest with a shout, hacking at it with the machete. The blade bounced off its surface like I’d hit a block of diamond, and I had to dive as it began to buck and kick, spinning crazily on its path towards me.

Angkor sprung past me as I tried to run backwards, burying the ax into the glittering body of the giant virus as it reared to stab down with its legs. He pulled it free, and the head and haft dripped honey as he ducked down underneath as it let out a shrill whistle and staggered to one side. I jammed the machete into the open, smoking wound. Chittering, it collapsed to the ground and shattered.

“Get away from it!” Angkor yelled. “Don’t get any of it in your eyes!”

I shielded my face as the crystalline pieces of the phitophage exploded. Without looking to see what was going on, I did the only sensible thing. I covered my eyes, nose and mouth, and ran like hell.