When Ross arrived, every screen in the control room displayed the video feed from a single concealed camera at NORAD. The chest-high footage showed a rippling mass of Hell's soldiers at the bottom of the ramp to the entrance, and something moving through them that they shrank away from like a school of fish evading a predator. Ross would have bet any amount of money that it was The Slayer.
Variously-sized chunks of flesh and bone exploded skyward.
Yup, definitely The Slayer.
Oppenheim turned to Darren. "Mr. Wright, suit up, or whatever it is drone pilots do. Catherine is going to get you a satellite link to a drone from Peterson Air Force Base, and you're going to fly it over to NORAD and get a closer look at this … battle."
"Slaughterfest," Darren corrected. Oppenheim stared at him without emotion until Darren said, "Yes, sir."
The director turned to the person who called herself the High-Tech Tech – which she thought was very witty – and said, "Jessie, take Martin down to the hangar. Sandeep's special project is being attached to the underside of Garcia's helicopter. They're vastly different kinds of technology. Make them talk to each other."
"Yes, sir."
"Yes, sir."
"Vera. Philips. Stand by to decipher the symbols on those Hell portals they're jumping out of. If we can figure out what 'code' they're using, maybe we can trace them back to the source."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm on it, pumpkin," said Vera. She carefully lowered herself into her special chair.
"Friedmann."
"Yes, sir?"
"You … take notes, I suppose."
Ross couldn't really argue with that. He was sort of a fifth wheel around here unless you needed a puzzle put together.
Oppenheim fell silent, crossing his arms and tapping his chin thoughtfully.
A top-down helicopter view of The Slayer's battles usually resembled a bloody pinwheel. Observing him from ground level was something else entirely.
The mass of demons between him and the camera disintegrated when he scythed through them with a curved log. No, wait. Not a log; a horn. He'd ripped the horn off a Baron of Hell and was killing the others with it. The blood and gore vaporizing from the grooves in his armor made it look like smoke was leaking out of it from a fire within. That impression was reinforced by the reflection of flames across his visor as he turned away from the camera.
Ross grabbed an empty console and began making notations on his copy of the video.
The Slayer tossed the horn aside, grabbed a Prowler from behind and ripped out its spine like deboning a fish. A Possessed Soldier turned its back to him, likely thinking it would circle around. The Slayer demolished its armored head with one swipe of his hand, exploding the whole thing like a watermelon hit with a baseball bat. An Arachnotron slowly lumbered up behind him and was rewarded for that bravery by getting its own forelimb torn off, stabbed through its eye and twisted until it hit brain.
"Well, that's one way to do it," Vera remarked.
Squinting, Ross said, "The weird part is that he's not killing the Summoners. It's like he wants more demons to come."
The Slayer was fighting in the middle of a large concrete slab designed for helicopter landings. Surrounding the space was a ring of destroyed military vehicles, outside of which were rotating pentagrams of red-orange energy. This kind of portal could only handle one entity at a time, and seemed to operate more passively than the larger ones: a sidewalk instead of a freeway. A demon would hop out of one, take a few swipes at The Slayer, and jump back to safety. If it stayed too long and started getting winded, a Summoner would teleport it back to one of the portals; a tacit order to retreat. The Summoners themselves were having difficulty staying airborne and would trade off with a new one about every minute and a half.
"They figured it out," Ross said.
"Pardon?" asked Oppenheim, no longer lost in thought.
"They created a workaround for the oxygen problem. For large land animals like ourselves, a group of cells in the carotid artery acts as an oxygen sensor. The organism experiences pain-like distress if oxygen levels drop rapidly. Demons don't really feel pain, so they also don't notice when they're running out of oxygen." He gestured at the screen. "NORAD is almost twice as high as Denver. When they come through a portal, they're going from an oxygen-rich environment to an oxygen-poor one without time to acclimate in between. The demons don't realize they're dying until they lose muscle control, so their masters have told them to return immediately if they don't get a good hit in."
"Like pearl divers coming up for air before they swim down again," said Oppenheim.
"Exactly."
Ross called up the stopwatch feature on his console and started it when a Dread Knight popped out of a portal at The Slayer's seven o'clock position.
The tall demon loped up to him and drew back a plasma blade in preparation for a slash. The Slayer brought both fists around in "haymaker" swings that met in the middle. The Knight's head disappeared so completely that the creature appeared to have simply been deleted from the neck up.
"Nice," Darren said as he looked up from the drone programs he was booting up on his console.
Ross halted the stopwatch. "I'll have to try again until I get a demon who isn't immediately killed."
"Good luck with that," Oppenheim said with a tinge of satisfaction.
They watched for several more minutes in silence. There was no sound from the footage.
"How long ago did he run out of bullets?" Ross asked at last.
"Hasn't used any," Darren answered.
"Wait, what? He's been killing them all by hand deliberately?"
"Yep."
"How long's he been here?"
"More than an hour. We got the recording and the live feed about twenty minutes ago."
"Chainsaw? Arm blade?"
"Nope. Just his bare hands. Well, his armored hands, but you get my meaning."
"Wow." Ross gazed at The Slayer in awe. "Does he even need guns, then?"
"Debatable."
"I think he uses weapons because he can kill demons from range," Catherine suggested, most of her attention focused on the nearly-there satellite connection to Peterson.
"And the harpoon looks fun," Jessie said as she and Martin returned.
"And the harpoon looks fun," Catherine agreed.
"Why is he here at all, though?" Philips wondered. "It doesn't exactly look like a rescue mission." He waved Martin over to where he and Vera sat.
"Could be it's the only major infestation of demons left on the High Plains," Ross guessed. "He's destroyed all the Super Gore Nests from here to Mexico."
"I'm not that good with Slayer body language," Darren said, "but he seems real pissed about something. He's gone through …" He scrolled through his notes on the right side of his video feed. "More than a thousand before this surge, which we'll tally up after he's done. And he's getting faster. He averaged twelve per minute at first. Now he's up to twenty-one."
"Private Hao," Oppenheim called to the door guard.
"Yes, sir?"
The director twirled his finger, indicating everyone in the room. "Upgrade Ross's people to Red Diamond clearance."
"Yes, sir." Hao pulled out a data pad and began tapping.
The Slayer grabbed an Imp by its shoulder and thigh and ripped it in half at the waist. The wriggling of the demon was almost disturbing.
"What about the big ones? Pinkies and Hell Knights?"
"Pinkies get their throat slit with one of their own fangs. Hell Knights – here comes one now."
The Slayer booted the Hell Knight square in the pelvis with such force that it separated the bottom half of its body from the top. The torso hung in mid-air for a split second, the spine dangling like a bunch of grapes.
Ross stood up in surprise.
"Did he just kill a Heavy by kicking it in the crotch?"
"Yup."
The Slayer knocked a Gargoyle to the ground and stomped its head into paste.
"Drone is online," Catherine reported. "All yours, Darren."
"Camo?"
"Naturally."
"Fantastic." Darren limbered up his fingers and set his right hand on the control pad. "Could you get another uplinked to the satellite? Jessie can handle the second interface."
Catherine looked skeptical. "You're going to drive two drones at the same time?"
"Baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet."
Jessie rolled her large blue eyes. "Darren, don't be cereal dust."
"Boo," Darren said, shaking his head. "Low-effort."
"Yeah, you need to get new material," Ross said. "I give that a two out of ten. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel there, Jessie."
"You can do better," Philips told her encouragingly.
She braced her fists on her hips. "You guys are giving me scores now?"
"It's a ten star rating scale. 'Toe jam' gets a one; 'syphilitic koala' is a ten."
"Pfft. You guys wouldn't know a good insult if it walked up and introduced itself."
"Well, I'm definitely not getting any introductions from you, Jess."
She dismissed him with a flap of her hand, but Ross could see the wheels turning inside her head already.
Darren went blissfully quiet as he got a feel for the Peterson drone. While Catherine and Jessie arranged a second one, his hand above the rounded sensor pad moved like a cross between a pianist and someone stretching taffy. He had the machine doing barrel rolls by the time Catherine and Jessie got its partner online. Jessie arranged the second sensor pad the way he liked it and slipped it under his left hand, then changed his display to a split screen. He hummed a wordless thank-you and immediately had the two drones speeding the nine miles to NORAD.
Ten minutes later they huddled in little groups around the displays as Darren's drones rose up on an aerial view of The Slayer's "slaughterfest".
"Hey, look, a Hell Razer." Jessie pointed. "Haven't seen one of those in a while."
Before the creature could even get its weapon fired up, the Slayer had slapped it to the ground, grabbed its left foot, broke the knee as he turned it 180°, and smashed the Hell Razer's heel into its own face.
"Ooooh!" Darren wrinkled his nose in sympathy. "That's brutal."
"Why are they even trying?" Vera wondered. "They're wasting so many troops."
"Right?" Jessie said. "They haven't so much as scratched his armor."
"Look." Darren tilted one of the drones up toward the entrance to NORAD.
The demons were tearing Cheyenne Mountain apart, rock by rock. All the trees and topsoil were gone, replaced with a shoulder-to-shoulder writhing mass of demons pawing at cracks in the granite before retreating through one of the dozens of portals to get some air. Chunks of rock had been pried out of the stone and rolled down the ramps to form boulder fields where the parking lots used to be. They were literally digging their way under North American Aerospace Defense.
"My God. Why do they want to destroy NORAD so badly?" Ross wondered.
"President Georgiou and Prime Minister Makwa are there, plus nine out of the ten five-star generals," Oppenheim said. "All military operations for Canada, Greenland and the United States are coordinated from NORAD. If they destroy it, they destroy nearly all of our military leadership. What we have left of the armed forces would fall into chaos, even the sections assigned to the Armored Response Coalition. It's actually quite a shrewd move. I'd like to meet the general or generals responsible. And shoot them in the head."
The demons were persistent, but NORAD was a stubborn opponent. Cheyenne Mountain's immense bulk could shrug off most threats, and the sprawling military complex was buried half a mile back from the entrance and clad in twenty-five feet of chromium-tungsten alloy all the way around. The demons were determined to excavate NORAD from its protective mountain, but from the look of things that was going to take years.
Ross frowned. Beginning a years-long project meant the demons didn't plan on going anywhere for quite some time. 'What was I expecting?' he asked himself. 'That they'd give up on the people at higher elevations? That they'd leave the mountain cities alone? That they'd be scared off by the mere presence of The Slayer? No, they've just decided to pace themselves. Jump out of a portal, do some damage, jump back in before they collapse from oxygen deprivation. The Slayer can only be in one place at a time, and as far as we know their troops are endless.'
He took a seat again, having gone from pride and admiration to a mild depression in a few short seconds.
Gradually he realized Vera and Philips were giggling to each other at her console. Martin was grinning from ear to ear. Philips helped Vera up to carry their data slate to Darren.
Vera asked, "Darren, how good are you with the control arms on the drones?"
"Miss Vera, I could pluck your eyebrows with these bad boys." He made one of the drones hold its little pincers up in front of the camera.
"Fabulous. We'd like you to use a piece of that burnt branch like a charcoal stick and change a few of the symbols on the ground underneath the nearest portal."
Chuckling softly, Philips hustled to Catherine's workstation and whispered to her.
"Oh, that's easy," she responded. "No damage to that satellite at all. Too far out."
Ross went to look at what Darren was drawing. Martin came over to stand around looking smug.
"Very carefully, sweetheart," Vera coached Darren. "The portal will simply implode if we paint too far outside the lines … aaand, there."
The portal pulsed brighter for a moment. A demon leapt through it. Another jumped in. Then another. Nothing came back to take their places.
"Got it!" Catherine cheered herself. "Video feed incoming."
"And?" Vera asked. Her faded blue eyes were brighter than usual.
Philips was clutching his stomach and doing the soundless laugh that came over him when something struck him as truly funny.
Oppenheim went to look. The frown on the director's face lightened to something almost like happiness.
"Vera," he said, "you're a goddamned genius."
"What? Where are you sending them?" Darren asked.
She smiled with childlike joy. "Europa."
"I don't think Europe needs any more demons."
"No, no, sweetheart: Europa. The moon of Jupiter."
Darren admired her beaming face before speaking.
"Marry me, Vera."
"Been there, done that: no thank you." She patted his cheek.
Ross eagerly left the NORAD feed and went to Catherine's workstation.
Jessie looked up from a pile of machinery, her hands full of split wires and diodes. "What? What is it?" She couldn't see Catherine's screen from her angle.
Jupiter's rust-and-sand colors were beautiful in the view from Europa Automated Relay Station. A few black specks shrank away from the camera, pulled toward the planet by their momentum and the gas giant's immense gravity. Ross squinted. Another body drifted past the camera, this one still wriggling. It was a Hell Knight, scrabbling uselessly at the vacuum of space.
"Philips and Vera figured out how to link a portal to Europa's coordinates instead of its original starting point," he told Jessie with a grin. "Adios, muchachos."
"You're recording it, right?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Good, because I want to watch it later with popcorn and soda."
"Uh, guys?" Darren called their attention back to the video from NORAD.
A full cohort of Hell Knights, Barons and Pinkies had organized themselves and were advancing down the ramp toward him.
Vera started to say, "Oh, n-"
The Slayer threw a shipping container at them.
"-ever mind."
The container crushed the first rank and continued up the ramp like a giant gory rolling pin, mashing the demons into the consistency of chunky pasta sauce.
"Ugh," said Philips. "I think I'll skip the spaghetti and meatballs today."
When it finally lost momentum, the top of the container popped open and spilled a full load of rebar.
Ross figured that was about sixty thousand pounds of steel. The Slayer had lifted more than thirty tons over his head and thrown it fifty feet, with enough momentum to keep it rolling an additional twenty uphill. That was the equivalent of bench-pressing the ARC's three heaviest mega-mechs all at the same time. He was unstoppable.
The smile slid off Ross's face by degrees.
Unstoppable.
He couldn't be stopped.
Nothing and no one could prevent him from doing whatever he wanted.
What did they really know about this man? How mentally and emotionally stable was he? Was he even a soldier, or a supercharged serial killer who had been given a socially acceptable target?
The Slayer punched the right leg off of a Baron, bringing it down to his height, and destroyed its head with a single blow of his fist.
Ross swallowed to clear his dry throat.
A Mecha Zombie tried to wind up for a blast of its arm cannon. The Slayer dashed to it with a short burst of his built-in jetpack, seized both of its arms and pulled on them while he pushed the torso with his foot. The arms stayed. The body went flying backward in pieces.
The Slayer never spoke, never smiled, rarely made eye contact, and didn't interact with people unless he wanted a lift in the helicopter or materials for the Slipgate. Over the past few months Ross had gotten the impression that he didn't particularly care for humans as a species. The people of Earth had no reason to believe he wouldn't use his strength against them. They had simply assumed that because he wasn't a demon, he was on their side.
Even Barons of Hell could be stopped with enough firepower. Imps could be crushed by tank treads. Gargoyles were extremely flammable. A sniper round through the center mass could pop a Cacodemon like a ripe tomato.
The Slayer, however, was bulletproof, crushproof, fireproof and appeared to have functionally limitless strength. He could decide to kill everyone in Denver and there would be nothing they could do about it except run. Run … from a guy who clocked a two-minute mile. Right.
No one could hold him accountable, either. No security agent, police force, or army on Earth could arrest him if he killed you. There would be zero consequences for your murder. He might as well have stepped on a bug.
If this man had one bad day where he lost his temper for a few minutes, they could all die.
Today, The Slayer was having a bad day.
As Ross looked around the room, he saw each person slowly coming to the same realization.
Martin was the first to speak. "Oh. … Shit."
