The wind had picked up when they stepped outside, throwing a cold gust into Virdon's face. The sky was a churning mass of black clouds racing across the sky, hiding and revealing the sun in rapid succession.
The plaza reflected the pale, flickering light, but despite the unreal, nightmarish scenery, Virdon was acutely aware that this was real, one of them was gone, and his mind shied away from asking what was happening to Zana now, if she was even still alive—
He shook his head, trying to chase away those thoughts, and reached for Apache's rope. They would find her in time. They had to, not because of Galen's threats, but because anything else was unacceptable.
Burke came jogging back from his quick scout, still gripping the empty, useless gun that Galen had dropped. Perhaps he hoped to get his hands on some ammunition later.
"Found something, let's go," Burke gasped and stepped between the horses. "Get on Apache, Al, and take Tala's rope - once we have Zana, we gotta run real quick!" He handed the gun to Virdon and helped him onto the horse's back, then bent down to remove the fetters.
Virdon checked the saddlebags behind him and tried not to feel like the useless cripple that he was. Pete was right about having to flee on horseback, and Virdon knew that despite his bad leg, he was the best rider in their group, and would probably be the only one capable of keeping their horses in check, while Pete and Galen...
"What did you find?" he ground out while they hurried down the wide walkway. He saw Pete purse his lips and hesitate.
"Trail of blood," Burke muttered after a moment. "Hey, we're all bleeding, okay?" he added quickly. "Doesn't have to mean anything, an' it's at least something we can follow!" He pointed.
It was a broad, if thin, smear of blood, marring the otherwise pristine whiteness of the road, and Virdon felt the bile rise in his throat. These things had dragged her over the stones, and the smear was uniform, there were no interruptions, which meant Zana hadn't struggled, hadn't moved...
She was unconscious, he told himself, not dead. Not dead...
Nobody spoke. It didn't take any special scouting skills to follow the trail, and Virdon kept his gaze more on the edges of the visible area they were traversing than on the ground, scanning the facades, the intersections, the shadows under the... floating streets, all the nooks and niches. He fully expected another attack; maybe the trail was a trap, and Zana was bait, and they were unarmed, save for Galen's rod, and Pete's grenades, and their knives.
Burke stopped abruptly. "There." He pointed to another building, a massive block that reached into the sky with, Virdon estimated, several hundred floors, the top levels dissolving in the black clouds overhead. The trail of blood led to another hole at ground level, but this one hadn't been forced open; it looked like the gate to a subterranean parking garage. Yet another underground nest.
"Seems the things that attacked you were from another 'hood," Burke mused. "Took her back to their own lair." He rubbed his hand over his mouth, thinking.
"Does that mean, that... that every building has a, a colony?" Galen asked. His face mirrored Virdon's thoughts: Would they have to fight their way out of this nightmare against waves and waves of these creatures, each building spewing forth a new force?
That would be impossible. They'd never make it out alive. The rod was dangling from Galen's arm as if it was suddenly too heavy for him. Galen wasn't used to fighting; he hadn't held anything more deadly than a pen for most of his life. Virdon silently cursed his leg. Galen shouldn't be the one to go in there with Burke, he should, he knew how to do this...
Burke drew a deep breath. "I dunno," he admitted. "Let's hope not. C'mon, we can't lose more time. You an' I, Galen - we'll go in, grab her, get out, an' get away as quickly as possible. Al." He turned and stepped to Apache's shoulder. "Here." He dug into the pouch that was tied to his belt and handed him three grenades. "Use 'em wisely." He hesitated, as if he was searching for words, then just patted Virdon's leg before he turned away and busied himself with Tala's saddlebags.
When he returned to Galen's side, he was carrying their torches. "I was thinking that these things aren't used to bright light, what with those huge eyes. So we'll blind them, an' then we'll kill them." He lit the torches while speaking, then strode towards the dark hole where Zana's bloody trail had vanished. "Once we have Zana, I'll throw some more of my babies into that hole, keep 'em busy - I think the blast is fucking with their internal navigation or something, at least they were pretty aimless after I bombed them in the other building."
Galen caught up to him after a moment of stunned surprise. "That's... that's your plan?"
Burke shot him a sideways glance. "Yeah. You got a better one?"
The ape didn't answer, just gripped his rod harder and followed him. As far as desperate plans went, it wasn't a bad one; Virdon would've used the same strategy.
... if he had been fit to fight. Instead, he was damned to linger outside, like a preschooler waiting for his parents to pick him up.
He hoped and prayed that they'd all come back out. He didn't dare to imagine them coming back without Zana.
Or none of them coming back out.
If they didn't come back, he'd go after them. Go in with his three grenades and either get them out, or die in there, torn to pieces by mankind's last sins.
His hip pinged, and Virdon absently pocketed the grenade and rubbed his hand over the scar. Realistically, there was no chance he'd heroically bust out his team, armed with nothing but three grenades and his righteousness. He was... he was a cripple.
Time to face the ugly truth. Bit late, sure.
His leg might heal. Some time in the future, if they survived this day. Or it might not. But even if it healed, it would probably never be back to a hundred percent. He'd probably retain a limp. And chronic pain. He was, and would be for a long time, a liability to the team, slowing them down, unable to pull his weight in a fight.
He swallowed heavily, humiliation hot in his chest. That little tantrum he had thrown earlier - that was what had brought them all here. His insistence that he could wander off alone, crippled and unarmed, and poke around in ruins that every wild creature of the zone was avoiding by a wide margin.
I'm such a damn idiot.
He stowed away the other two grenades and clumsily slid down from Apache's back. Both horses were in bad shape, bleeding and trembling, and on the verge of bolting, and their earlier fight had slipped the saddlebags out of place. Maybe he couldn't join the others in the fight, but he could at least get their horses back in shape.
He took off Apache's load and surveyed the horse's injuries. Most of them seemed to be only superficial - cuts from sharp claws, and bite marks, and most of the back had been shielded by the saddlebags. He let his hands slide across the gelding's belly and breathed a relieved sigh when he didn't find any bite marks there.
He put the saddlebags back on the horse - this time, balanced out - and repeated his inspection with Tala. Galen's stitches had held; he was becoming quite a decent surgeon. The rest of her injuries matched those of Apache: none too deep or dangerous, but the sum of them could weaken them both. Already they were in dire need of water. And there was also the risk of infection.
Virdon raked a hand through his hair with a heavy sigh and glanced towards the entrance. Still no sign of them.
They might not come back. His insistence on digging for some undefined piece of miracle technology had endangered not only Zana's life, but also Pete's, and Galen's... maybe not just endangered, but cost their lives.
He had to give his hands something to do. Virdon quickly scanned his surroundings - nothing moved, nothing made a sound, only the wind was howling around the corners; in the distance, the metal spires of the massive domes were moaning in a deep bass, like a choir of damned souls. He dug into Galen's saddlebag until he found the chamomile tincture and the jar with powdered yarrow, and began to clean the horses' wounds.
It wasn't the right kind of work; it was too mechanical, giving his mind the freedom to roam, and to lead him inevitably back to that fight an hour or so ago. All of Pete's and Galen's arguments had been sound, and he had known it at the time, he just hadn't... he hadn't been able to ignore the possibility, the promise...
What if it was an empty promise? He rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes and carefully dabbed more chamomile on Tala's whithers.
Pete might have been right. Maybe there was nothing to find in these old cities but death. Death for himself was something he had slowly stopped dreading; it would at least be an end to the pain, and though he'd never actively seek it out, he wasn't overly concerned about avoiding it anymore. But the others... He owed it to the apes, who had been protecting them both, to not endanger their lives for his selfish desire.
So did that mean he had to give up on Chris... on Sally? There had to be another solution, a way out-
A muffled boom shook him out of his dejected reverie. The horses jerked their heads, and began to shift nervously, ready to bolt. Virdon hastily stuffed the jar and bottle back into the canvas bag and tried to calm down Apache so that he could climb onto his back again. When Pete and the apes came back, he had to be ready. "Whoa, whoa, good boy." He finally managed to maneuver the horse parallel to a railing - probably a railing - that allowed him to remount. He turned him back towards the entrance, Tala's rope in one hand, a grenade in the other.
Dust billowed out of the entrance, and then a figure stumbled out of the cloud, and Virdon's heart constricted painfully for a moment - only one? - Galen, moving strangely clumsy. He was carrying something... someone...
Zana.
Virdon didn't dare to feel relieved - if Galen was carrying her, she had to be unconscious, and she had been bleeding, and maybe... but he didn't allow himself to finish that thought.
And then Burke was stumbling out into the open, too, turning back a last time to hurl another grenade - and a string of curses, probably - and Virdon threw Tala's ropes to Galen and urged Apache forward to grab his friend.
Behind Burke, the shuddering building was spewing forth a mass of white creatures, all gaping maws full of hunger and teeth, an army sprung from hell itself.
The thing with torches was that they didn't give you a directed beam of light, but shone in all directions, including your eyes. Even if you didn't burn your own eyebrows, you were still blinding yourself, instead of the little pests hiding in the shadows.
Burke held his torch higher and tried to get the scope of the place, but outside their circle of light lay only a fathomless darkness - no walls, no ceiling. For the sake of this mission - and his sanity - he assumed this place had been something like a parking garage. At least that's what the entrance had looked like. Of course, it could also just be a wrong association his brain made, looking for a familiar pattern to identify this place.
Galen was beside him, torch in one hand, rod in the other, tense and silent. Burke could smell the blood that was coating his fur, which meant that the critters could smell it, too, if the torchlight wasn't enough to alert them to their presence. He hoped that they wouldn't react by dragging Zana deeper into their lair while sending a platoon their way to delay them, or kill them off. Swarm intelligence wasn't sufficient to think up strategies like that, right?
He banished those thoughts and lowered the torch again to follow Zana's trail towards the back of the deck. There were footprints in the blood, vaguely human, but much smaller.
She shouldn't have been losing so much blood at that point anymore.
He didn't mention that to Galen, just quickened his steps.
The first attack came from above, aimed for his face.
He batted the thing away with his torch before he even registered something was coming his way. The torch left a flaming trail in the darkness, and the afterglow blinded his vision with a neon-green smear over his retinas. He was effectively blind, the torch was just a weapon now, like the knife in his right hand, fire and steel.
Burke stabbed into the black air and felt the blade penetrate a too-thin skull. He hadn't even heard that one move, it was just instinct, sensing the thing's presence.
Suddenly he and Galen were moving inside a curtain of hissing and rattling sounds, coming at them from all directions at once, as menacing as it was disorienting. Galen's rod was singing in the darkness, and their torches cut crackling arcs of gold through it, spitting sparks where they collided with the attacking creatures.
And then Galen was screaming and screaming, and in the torchlight, Burke saw that the things were hanging on his back like a clump of huge, white ants, scrabbling for his neck. He whirled around and plunged his knife into the writhing cluster, sliced it through the bodies, warm fluid gushing over his hands, and told himself it's blood, just fucking blood, 'cause everything else would've been just too damn disgusting, and then he burned the last critter off before it could gnaw through Galen's jugular.
Galen gagged, whether from disgust or because the things had held him in a chokehold, Burke couldn't tell. He cut his torch through the black air in a wide half-circle, batting on its path against two or three bodies hidden in the darkness, and followed the motion with his whole body until he felt Galen's drenched robe against his back.
They were taking care now to keep guarding each other this way, standing back to back, stabbing and slashing with their torches, and their weapons, inching their way across the deck. Burke was dimly aware that at their current speed, their chances of finding Zana before these things had dragged her to the deepest level of their lair were dwindling dramatically, but there was nothing he could do. There were simply too many of them, surrounding them, attacking relentlessly, totally unfazed by the fate of their fellow creeps.
Finally, Galen had to light a new torch on the old one, and out of whatever intuition threw the glowing stump towards the back of the hall. It painted a red arc into the black void, and then it fell...
... fell deeper than the ground they were standing on. If Galen hadn't thrown the stump, they'd both have toppled from that invisible edge.
Something ignited with a hiss, and a golden-red glow bloomed in the darkness below.
Against the backlight, Burke thought he had glimpsed something. Small shapes were writhing in the flames, burning to crispy mutant lizards, he hoped - but among them on that platform was another shape, bigger than the mutants, lying motionless on the ground. She was covered in something that looked like spun sugar.
The same spun sugar that had caught fire as easily as tinder, and whose heat Burke could feel breathing against his face now. The creatures on the ground level doubled their efforts, attacking faster now, more viciously than before. He jerked his head back; teeth snapped shut not even an inch away from his face.
"D'you see her down there?" He had to make sure Galen would know what he'd be talking about in a second.
The ape just growled. Burke took it as a yes. "Need to reach her before the fire does! Ignore those critters, run!"
The mutants were leaping out of the flickering darkness now, and writhing under his feet, making him stumble and curse, but he just kicked and batted them away, ignoring the bites and slashes, and there was Zana-
Zana.
"You carry her, I'll cover you!" He'd never be able to jump up the six feet from down there, with Zana in his arms, but Galen was an ape - inhumanly strong, and, right now, not completely sane.
Galen hesitated for a tiny moment, then stuck the rod under his belt, and jumped down to scoop her into his arms. Zana didn't move, not even moan; her head was lolling back in Galen's arms when he leaped up again. She looked-
Not now. Later.
Burke hastily stuck the hilt of his knife between his teeth, activated one of his last grenades, hurled it beyond the fire, and spun around to race after Galen. Under normal circumstances, an ape could easily outrace a human, but not on two feet, let alone while carrying his mate. Burke was at Galen's side in a moment, plunging his knife into yet another critter that was scrabbling up the ape's back.
They reached the exit, and Burke stopped to throw another two grenades into the darkness. They were his last ones. He just hoped they would do enough damage in there.
A deep boom, and then a cloud of dust billowed out, so he had hopefully hit something crumbleable. "I hope the sky just fell on your ugly heads, you fucking abominations!"
When he turned around, Galen had maneuvered himself onto Tala's back, holding a still unconscious - had to be unconscious, had to be... holding Zana in his arms. Al was waving at him to get the fuck out of here.
Brilliant idea, Al, just a bit late...
Burke sprinted down the drive and let Virdon drag him up on Apache's back. The horses fell into a gallop before he was even sitting right, and he grabbed Virdon's waist harder than intended. He doubted they could stop the horses now to scoop him up again, if he fell off.
Riding a horse was exactly as uncomfortable as he remembered it. He turned his head to see if anything was coming after them, and cursed. "Gimme one of your grenades, Al!" Pale shapes, their contours blurring into the white of the pavement, were leaping after them. Still too many of the damn fuckers left.
"In my belt pouch," Virdon shouted without turning his head. Burke fumbled around for a bit, then chucked the grenade towards their pursuers. In the light of day, dark as it was, they really looked as if one of Hasslein's grandkids had cross-bred humans with lizards, and then thrown in some ant DNA because the result still wasn't fucked-up enough for their taste.
Why they would breed these things in the first place was anyone's guess. Maybe someone had just accidentally spilled some test tubes... At least they weren't grenade-proof. And they were still bleeding red, which was something he shouldn't feel so grateful about, but did.
But if any of these buildings housed another colony, their little pony express was doomed. Burke turned away from the sight and peered over Virdon's shoulder; there wasn't anything he could do about the lizard-men coming after them now, anyway.
Before them, Tala was visibly limping, but sheer terror was spurring the mare into a hard gallop, and Apache was stretching himself, catching up with her, and the creatures finally fell back. Still, Virdon was urging on his horse, and Galen was doing the same; neither of them dared to stop until they were well into the pines and bramble thickets surrounding the city. They were still on cursed ground, and by now, Burke couldn't help but agree that it was cursed, but at least they were no longer in reach of that mutated hive that infested this shell of a city.
They didn't look human, but they sure as hell were human creations. More fuel for Galen's already low opinion of us.
Right now, though, Galen had more urgent concerns. The horses had slowed down on their own, too exhausted to keep up their mad speed, and had finally stopped at one of the little creeks crossing these woods. The ape slid down from Tala's back, Zana still in his arms, and gently laid her down into the moss at the water's edge.
Burke slipped clumsily from Apache's back, too, glad to touch the ground with his own two feet again, and made a step towards them, but stopped at Galen's glare.
And Zana still wasn't moving.