Leon was wounded. He didn't know how badly; hadn't even felt the moment of impact.
Stabbed in the back. Why had he let that flag-bearer live? He'd been running at the big general, the one who'd asked the Californians to surrender, and brushed right past his skinny assistant. Could have murdered the kid on the way, with a thrust of his machine gun stock to the kid's neck. But he'd recognized the kid, remembered his impression that the kid was terrified, and obviously in the first fight of his life. Decided to only bump him out of the way.
Big mistake.
Well, Leon had caved his face in for him, and the knife wound didn't hurt much, yet. He could punch the kid again for missing the heart. Leon might have been with Imogen by now, if the flagbearer had any better aim.
But no, he was still alive, and the battle still raged. By now, so many ziplines crossed the chasm that in practical terms, a bridge had formed – a bridge about a hundred feet wide, which now looked like a jungle gym in a kid's playcenter. It was covered in people, members of both armies, clambering to the other side. A few mid-air battles took place between combatants; they hung like garments on a clothesline, swaying wildly as they swung at each other with machetes, or drew their guns, or tried to saw through the line supporting their opponent.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, had gone into the mercury now. Watching them fall was ghastly.
Almost as ghastly as the fusion monsters that were starting to rise.
A fusion monster was created when a special type of cannonball, a matter-twister, exploded in the middle of a group of organisms, large or small. For a nanosecond, within the explosion radius, the laws of physics changed slightly; matter rearranged itself, formed new connections. Then, like a hot blade dipped in water, the matter resettled suddenly, solidifying the rearranged matter in its new form, which, unfortunately, often lived for several minutes.
The new beings were monstrosities that lived and died in agony. Their circulatory and respiratory systems didn't work well, so they thrashed around, gasping for air. Often they were controlled by more than one brain, even as many as fifty, in one nightmarish case – human and animal alike, all thrashing in terror, in horror at what they'd become, lumpy, naked, dozen-limbed ghouls. Some had their insides on the outside; some had their skeletons poking through; some were only a mass of limbs, because the heads of the component victims were beneath the skin, nestled in among the organs.
These beings, dying though they were (and they always died shortly; the longest recorded life of a fusion monster was three hours, and that had been composed of only a single human and horse), were often strong and dangerous, if only because of their size.
A matter-twisting ball, all purple, swirling energy, landed not twenty feet to his left, beside a group of Californians – including good old John – working to take down two blue-haired Mormons.
You never heard screams like those of people in the exposure radius of one of those purple balls. Even the poor bastards who fell into the mercury weren't as terrified; at least their deaths would be quick.
The ball swelled once, as if taking a deep breath, then blew, catching five victims; some, it only caught the back half of, since they'd been hurling themselves from it, and they howled as their legs bent in five dimensions, then groaned as they reformed.
The resulting mass was like a spider, with John as the body and five screaming, clawing, nearly-whole people for limbs – three humans, two Mormons. The thing writhed; one of the people-limbs thrashed back and forth quick as a whip, and the human head at the end of it splattered on the ground and spread brains like a squashed watermelon.
Leon ripped the blaster from the arms of a nearby soldier, grunting in pain as he did so. God, his chest, was the blade still in there?
The soldier tried to get his weapon back; Leon blew a hole in him, then, even as his enemy dropped, turned toward the fusion monster. He aimed at the center, the heart of the spider – at the roundish blob with John's gaping, bearded face pasted to the center, gnashing at its own tongue.
Fired once, twice, three times. The gun fired, not bullets, but lasers about an inch thick, and the holes it made cauterized instantly, which meant it wasn't great for killing a creature as big as this. In fact, Leon only seemed to be increasing the thing's agony, which was the last thing he wanted.
Would he ever stop causing pain?
At last, the thing collapsed, letting air out through its four visible mouths, and died. Good thing, too, as Leon's gun ran out of charge.
And still the battle raged.
The mercury river was choked with bodies and weapons. The lava spilled around the charred barrier, which acted as a kind of dam, and created a round pool, the better to catch casualties in.
The zipline-bridge across the Chasm had been reinforced with industrial netting and planks. People were running across it now, even taking horses.
Leon couldn't tell who was winning.
But it pleased him to see that, in spite of the show the Minutemen had made of the Mormons, they hadn't swept the field at all; the sides, it seemed to Leon, were evenly matched.
A terrible noise suddenly squawked across the field, loud as the explosions and screams.
It was electronically amplified, of course, and Leon was close to the source. It was that damn crater giant general, the one he'd failed to kill, the one whose assistant – who was, it seemed, still alive, strapped to his master's back, but bleeding from a face swollen and soft as a sponge – had given Leon the blade he still carried somewhere near his left lung.
The general was screeching some kind of bird-song into a super-powered electronic bullhorn. The sound terrified his horse, made it buck and whirl, but the general kept his seat. Leon couldn't imagine what the sound was for, until he saw that all the remaining Mormons – perhaps a hundred fifty, hundred twenty-five – paused in their respective fights and turned, facing the sound, and exchanged looks with each other.
It was some kind of code – a language the Mormons understood.
What were they going to do?
He saw the bright, angelic beings, most of whom had been separated and engaged in ground combat by the Californians, all begin to attempt to make their way toward the general, gliding in their bizarre, inhuman way, as if they were on invisible skis.
"Don't let them assemble!" he cried. "Stop them! Hold them back!"
Only a few people heard him in the commotion, but others had the same idea; hundreds of Californians swarmed the Mormons, dragging them backwards, shooting.
Some Mormons went down; some Californians, too concentrated to be safe, found themselves electrocuted, sprayed with bullets, or turned into fusion monsters.
Most of the groups scattered again, like ants from an exploded hill, and the Mormons made it to General Lloyd, gathered in a rough, round group, and extended their hands to each other.
Closed their eyes…
God, was another energy ball coming – a giant one, big enough to take out all California's weapons at once?
Leon ran towards the Mormons, as if there were something he could do to stop them, and was still running when a bluish, electric ring, thin as yarn and bright as a laser wire, formed around them. No sooner had it formed then it expanded, blasting its way across the entire battlefield, passing through every man and woman that stood at least four feet off the ground, including Leon.
He looked down at himself, expecting to be cut in half – to fall off his own legs, and lie staring up at them, bleeding from the gaping wound beneath his diaphragm. But he was fine.
Both armies were fine, though nearly all combatants paused long enough to check.
Leon thought that the attack, whatever it was meant to be, had failed.
Then his thoughts vanished – all but one.
He was consumed, absolutely overcome, with the desire to start walking.
As if dragged by a magnet, he turned, and headed in the direction his heart told him to go, without any question of why.
He found himself stalking, zombie-like, towards the Grand Chasm.
And saw the entire California army was walking with him. Like zombies, they trudged dutifully forward, and those who had been closest to the rim reached it.
And jumped in. By the tens, then the hundreds.
Leon drew nearer and nearer to the cliff edge. He could see the molten river at its bottom, the pool swelling over the dam of charred bodies. One by one, his companions were jumping in. He would follow them. Couldn't think of a reason not to.
But someone was trying to stop him. Was pulling at him, then in front of him, pushing.
Leon, focused on his destination, didn't see the person's face; only that it was a man, thin as licorice, dressed all in black.
The stranger ground his shoulder into Leon's chest, pushing Leon's insides into the blade lodged there, somewhere deep, between his heart and lung. The pain cleared his head. For a brief second, he was confused, confused and horrified – what was he doing? Sure, he wanted to die, but honorably, in battle. He didn't want to jump into boiling mercury. That was crazy!
As quickly as the thought had come, it left him, and he was struggling forward again, elbowing at the stranger so rudely trying to save his life. His movements were clumsy, though. He was injured, and all the self defense training he'd had instilled in him was gone along with his capacity for independent thought.
The man pulled Leon's helmet off. Yelled. Words Leon couldn't understand, though they sounded familiar. It was like being spoken to in a dream.
This guy wouldn't leave him alone. Now he was grabbing Leon's head, putting something on it, a band of metal, in place of the helmet.
It slid around Leon's ears – thin and cold and wiry. A piece of it lay straight across his forehead.
And suddenly he could think again.
He found himself staring at Anahuac Jack, who looked much worse for having been through a battle, and the pair of them stopped dead, not three feet from the Chasm edge.
Leon realized he was wearing the Odysseus helmet. That Jack must have been wearing it when the hypnotism wave hit, and it kept him from falling under the wave's power, the same way it had kept Leon from falling under the power of the Infinity Loop.
But the other Californians weren't so lucky. They were still jumping, or aiming to jump, in the thousands.
Cymbeline sat helpless, unable to do anything but watch as his troops, under the spell of the Mormons, turned themselves toward the Chasm and began walking into it, quiet and inexorable as zombies.
This was how his reign would end – worse than he could have dreamed. Not only a second defeat at the hands of the Minutemen, but a boiling, agonizing death for every one of his soldiers, brought about by the very Mormons he'd accused the Arizonans of making up.
As king, he rarely felt confident about his decisions; the one he made now, the decision to surrender, was the first one he'd been one hundred percent certain of in all the years of his reign.
He rose from his seat. One hand went to his crown, ready to toss it to the dirt; the other went to his throat, to activate his speaker and cry surrender, defeat, to submit to deposition, to offer himself and anything else the Arizonans wanted, as long as the slaughter would stop.
But in the tiny amount of time it took for him to stand up, he saw something amazing. It was that soldier with the bloody bandoliers again, the one who had led the first charge. Unbelievably, not dead, and also, not hypnotized.
He was climbing into the control deck of a matter-twister cannon, which had been left unmanned once the fighting stopped, and the Minutemen, off their guard, paused to watch in awe as their enemy began destroying themselves.
The soldier was accompanied by another man, who didn't wear a uniform of either side. This second man, the man in black, covered the first soldier once they were noticed. A pair of pistols hung from his hips, and he drew quick as lightning. And shot faster. The cannon turned, and fired three times.
Three matter-twisters. Right into the clutch of Mormons, the ones controlling California's armies.
The Mormons tried to scatter. A few, on the edges, made it out.
Most didn't.
The explosions, one after another, swelled over the robed, angelic people, suspending them for a moment in three expanding purple bubbles, one inside another, like Russian nesting dolls. There was the peculiar zwarp noise that accompanied a matter twisting, and then all that was left was a fusion monster, the largest Cymbeline had ever seen, a mountain of flesh and bony faces and powerful, clutching limbs.
There must have been a hundred bodies composing that fusion monster. It couldn't live long, and, indeed, it died within seconds.
At the same time, the Californian army stopped its death-march. Cymbeline's soldiers shook their heads, looked around, and turned back, a little shocked, but no more so than the suddenly horrified, demoralized, and confused Minutemen.
The Californians, furious and focused, turned, and so did the tide of the battle.