5.4: Deadly Violence

Delilah, still shrieking in rage and fear, struggled to get out of the net but did not succeed before the Quarrymen converged on their fallen prey. "Bad men! Bad men! You let us go now!" she shouted even as they quickly looped stout chains around her from shoulders to knees, completely pinning her arms and wings and hobbling her as well.

The lieutenant directed two of his men to wrap chains around the unconscious Malibu as well before he could come to, and they scrambled to do so, uncaring of his broken wing. One of them pointed out as they set the huge lock in place, "Sir, the colors on these gargoyles don't match the descriptions we were given!"

"Then we've found a new nest of them!" The lieutenant retorted. "But we'll make damn sure they won't spread any further!" He scowled up at the roof that Claw and Dana had landed on. "We'll need to summon the hovercycle squad before we deal with their leader, and the traitor bitch with him; it's too risky to climb back up there and deal with them without covering fire. But we've already got two of these monsters captured, and ready to face justice at the general assembly! Someone go get the vans, and--"

His words were cut off by a screeching roar of rage, as Brentwood dove to his siblings' defense.

Brentwood did the web-winged gargoyle version of a strafing run; he leveled out to a flat streak across the alley, doing forty miles an hour at only five feet off the ground, slashing with outstretched claws at face after face alongside his path. Men screamed and staggered back with their hoods slashed to ribbons and bloody gashes carved in the faces underneath; one of them turned his head enough that he lost both his hood and his right ear, the cartilage ripped clean off the skull.

Brentwood wheeled and came about for a second pass, and by the end of that run there was no one left standing; all the Quarrymen had dropped to the deck, either screaming and clutching at their blood-soaked hoods or just cowering with their hands wrapped around their heads. But Delilah had also fallen down, knocked over by a Quarryman trying to dodge Brentwood's claws. Wrapped in heavy chains, she wriggled and flopped on the pavement like a fish out of water, trying desperately to get to her feet.

Brentwood came back to land next to Delilah, and began searching for the way to unfasten her chains. "Where lock?" he hissed to her as he rolled her this way and that, searching with increasing haste. Finally, he spotted the lock, fastened at the small of her back, and hopped over her to get better leverage for breaking it.

Just as he gripped the lock in his taloned hands, Delilah shrieked, "Brentwood, run! They coming!" Not that Brentwood needed the warning; he could hear the curses and snarls of the men getting to their feet, and the crackle of Quarryhammers being charged. But he spared them only a quick, frantic glance before yanking hard on the lock of ultra-tough tempered steel. Delilah was egg-carrying; he had to save her!

Just as he broke the lock, it finally occurred to Brentwood to simply pick Delilah up and run with her on foot, out of the alley to somewhere that they could hide long enough to remove the chains. Web-winged gargoyles generally run on all fours, but Brentwood managed to heave Delilah into his arms, and started running with her even as the Quarrymen began pounding after them.

He ran as fast as he could while carrying her, but he was unused to it and awkward, and he hadn't gone more than a dozen steps when the lead Quarryman chasing them stepped on his tail. The sudden yank threw him even more off balance; he and Delilah squawked together as he fell to the ground and she tumbled out of his arms, hitting the ground a few feet in front of him. He tried to scramble back to his feet, reaching for her… just as the first electrified hammerblow fell on his back. With a howl of pain, he collapsed back onto the pavement, unconscious.

Delilah had rolled away and was still struggling to get to her feet, but simply couldn't get the leverage to do so while she was bound with chains. But then she received unexpected help, help she certainly wouldn't have wanted; she was yanked up by her hair and the lead from her chains, by the Quarrymen's leader. After wrenching her to her feet, the lieutenant shouted "No chains for that one; we'll kill it here and now!" as he pointed at Brentwood with a hand that was bloody from the slash wound on his face. And with shouts of rage and exultation, his men lifted their energized hammers high, and began using them on Brentwood.

"Brentwood!" Delilah shrieked in fear and sympathetic agony, as she watched them rain hammerblow after crackling hammerblow on the unconscious gargoyle. "Stop, please stop!"

But there was no stopping these Quarrymen. They were consumed by mob madness, the same sort of temporary insanity that causes needless death when peaceful group protests become riots, as well as their hatred of gargoyles. Ordinary thought had been replaced by mindless, violent action, and they only stopped when Brentwood's charred and bloodied skin suddenly changed to dark gray, his flesh to stone, that broke apart and crumbled to gravel and dust before their eyes.

Delilah had never seen a gargoyle turn to stone at night and crumble before, but she instinctively knew what it meant. Brentwood, her brother, was dead.

"BRENTWOOD! BRENTWOOD!" she howled, her hybrid eyes blazing yellow-orange with rage and grief. The Quarrymen only laughed, an ugly sound, as they triumphantly raised their hammers high. They had done it, they had killed a monster!

Their lieutenant, still holding the lead to Delilah's chains, laughed as well as he shouted, "Good work, Quarrymen! But we're not finished yet; there's more to deal with!" as he meaningfully yanked on her chain. Delilah turned to look at him, her eyes still blazing…

These Quarrymen had failed to take three important facts into account earlier, when capturing Delilah, but it wasn't entirely their fault, since they had no way of knowing about the first two. These facts are:

1. Delilah had been taught virtually everything she knew about fighting and warfare by Thailog, her former master, who had created and programmed her to be his 'perfect mate.'

2. Unlike most gargoyles, Thailog was actually quite fond of guns and similar weaponry, and it had pleased him to show Delilah how to handle a few of them.

3. Gargoyle tails are highly prehensile.

Even as the lieutenant gloated, Delilah's tail snaked up to his hip and snatched the Glock 9mm automatic out of its holster, and the tip threaded itself through the trigger. He had just started to realize that something was wrong when the pistol was tucked under his chin and triggered, blowing his brains out through the top of his head.

The gun had a full 15-bullet clip in it, and Delilah used up every last bullet as she held her tail up in front of her and fired, screaming incoherently, at the clustered Quarrymen as they stood there and gaped at her, at first too stunned to even move. Rage and grief spoiled her aim, and it was quite frankly difficult to shoot from the tail, but they were only a few feet away in plain sight, and nearly every shot hit flesh if not dead on target. Four of the five who had killed Brentwood died on the spot, and the fifth one was sprawled unconscious and bleeding as she continued firing, clicking the trigger even when there were no bullets left, shouting in between sobs, "Die! Crumble! Die in dust! For Brentwood! Crumble!"

The seventh and eighth Quarrymen, the ones who'd been standing guard over the unconscious Malibu, had instinctively turned and ran once they'd realized what was happening. One of them, who must have won track records in high school, was out of sight even before Delilah ran out of bullets. But the other one, slower-moving, was still barely within hearing range when he realized that the clip had run out. He shouted for his former companion to come back, the monster was out of bullets, but the other one either didn't hear him or didn't believe him and kept going. So he came back alone, warily advancing.

The Quarryman couldn't help flinching when Delilah saw him and turned the gun on him, but when no more bullets came out he gave her a vicious smile through the slash Brentwood had made in his hood and kept slowly walking. "All out of ammo, huh? Well ain't that a crying shame," he taunted her. "That's the problem with guns, see; they run out of ammo. But this doesn't," as he picked up the Quarryhammer he'd dropped earlier. With a vicious twist of the handle, he charged it up, and the business end crackled and faintly glowed blue with electricity.

Delilah threw the gun at him as hard as she could with her tail, but he was far enough away to have time to dodge. "Ah-ah-ah! You're not going to get rid of me that easily. See, you've just shot a whole bunch of my buddies, and--"

"They kill my brother!" she shouted at him, even as she retreated backwards as fast as she could while still hobbled by the chains.

"They killed a monster!" he shouted back. "You spawn of Satan are all monsters, and I'm going to send you back to your master!"

Delilah supposed the thought should have been comforting, to know that she was shortly going to rejoin her beloved master Thailog, but it wasn't, as she kept backing away. She had an egg inside her, Thailog's egg, and she wanted so much for it to hatch into a baby gargoyle for her to love and cuddle, but she couldn't do that if he killed her and the egg with her. She didn't want to lose the egg; she didn't want to die…

He was close enough now to see the raw terror and pleading in her eyes, but it only made him smile nastily through the slash in his hood as he advanced further, raising his hammer high...

Students of physics and electronics will already know that a capacitor is an electronic component that can store and release electrical charges, up to a certain point. If an electrical charge is sent into the capacitor at a higher voltage than it can handle, the capacitor will burn out, and occasionally, under an excessively high charge, even blow apart.

The circuitry inside Quarryhammers makes them the equivalent to very, very large capacitors, designed to store a lot of electrical energy and to release it upon contact. And they were charged to full capacity before leaving the Quarrymen's headquarters. Unlike those hammers that had beaten Brentwood to death, this one had not yet released any of its charge and was still full up.

Therefore, when a bolt of a few thousand volts' worth of pure electricity hit the Quarryhammer from above, it overloaded and blew apart in a most spectacular fashion.

Delilah screamed in surprise, fear and pain, blinded by the light of the explosion, as some of the shrapnel from the Quarryhammer hit her. A piece grazed her scalp, another one bounced off her chains, and a third tore a hole in her wing near the strut, while the sudden intense heat that accompanied the explosion baked the skin of her face into a first-degree burn. But the Quarryman fared far worse, his hands turning to hamburger even as a large piece of shrapnel tore through his hood and embedded itself in his brain. He was dead before he hit the concrete.

To be continued…