Authors: Steven Alan Montano
Black Scars (35 page)
Cross pulled himself up, winced at his bruised arm and neck, and looked around.
The front panel was smashed. Arcane circuitry sparked and burned. Ekko pulled herself away from the console; a jagged piece of steel stuck out of her left arm. Kane, bruised and bloodied, pulled her away from the cockpit. Ekko yanked the metal out of her arm without a second thought. Cross watched the wound seal up, like sand falling into a hole.
“
Ramsey?” Cross called out, but there was no answer, because Ramsey was dead.
Ramsey?” Cross called out, but there was no answer, because Ramsey was dead.
His small body had been crushed between two plates of steel that had folded in and collapsed where the warship impacted the ground. One hand protruded out of the ruined metal. Cross saw bits of crimson cloth and dark stains of blood.
“
Shit!” he shouted.
Shit!” he shouted.
They heard gunfire seconds later, the scream of warship engines overhead, and the deep-throated screech of Razorwings. Cross sensed bodies moving outside, guns and claws and saw-blades. They smelled the charnel stench of a mass grave.
They snatched up weapons. Cross pressed a panel to open the rear hatch, which slowly groaned upwards. They heard growls just outside of the smashed viewport at the fore end of the ship, as well as whirring blades and sickening wet slurps.
The rear door took an eternity to open. Cross gauged their weapons. He had his HK, a machete, and the vampire triple-barrel. The M16 was dry, but Kane had the Remington, two short swords, and an axe. Ekko had an MP4A and her claws.
It would have to do.
They heard growls. The moment that the door opened high enough for them to squeeze through, they ran.
A small horde of undead came at them from around the front of the warship. The ground looked clear around the aft end and to the port side, but Cross knew that they had only moments before they’d be overrun.
The dead pushed at them from the starboard side. There were armored vampires and razor-fanged gray zombies encrusted in salt and ice, taloned war wights with pale blank eyes and horrible mouths of saber-like teeth. Cross saw undead monstrosities that oozed phosphorescent slime and dripped dark waste from the pores in their decaying hides. Expanding clouds of flesh and tentacles filled the air, pulsating beaks and hungry innards. Dozens of lifeless eyes looked at the three humans, hungry, angry. The dead soldiers filed forward with shocking speed.
Cross, Kane and Ekko ran. The undead were right on their heels.
They fired back behind them as they fled. Bullets flew into the lifeless mob. Shotgun blasts and automatic fire tore through the wall of the dead. The vampire weapon strained Cross’ forearms and fingers with its rapidly spinning shotgun barrels.
Their feet moved sluggishly, as if stuck. The air felt frigid and slow.
Ahead stood more of the ice city, cold and pale and empty. Undead ran through and over the warship behind them. They fell from the top of the vessel like flesh rain and landed clumsily on the blasted ice.
The ground was slippery and uneven. Centuries of rock hard rime covered mounds of gravel and cobblestone, so even in those areas where the ice had melted the ground was still difficult to cross.
Cross fired into the undead mob. Bullets lanced around him on the ground. Black blades soared through the air in high arcs and buried themselves in the ice just inches away from Kane's feet. A whirling sphere of flesh leapt at Ekko as she reloaded, but she tore it to shreds with her razorine claws. Her face was bestial and inhuman.
They ran.
Adrenaline pumped through Cross' body. The Ebon Cities ground forces were right behind them.
The wreckage of the Coffin was just a few hundred yards off the bow of their downed ship. The M2 sat just north of the Coffin, near a ruined building made of ice and stone. Crylos’ vehicle was also under attack by the same horde of undead foot soldiers that continued to pour out of the Coffin.
Flares fired into the smoking sky. They saw Black's Bloodhawk engage the last vampire warship, and more Razorwings.
Ravenous undead flew at them as they ran. Whirling saws locked to maimed zombie appendages rang with the song of grinding steel. Bone needles hammered the ground. Cross sent his spirit out in a wave of dark wind that threw the needles aside before he brought her back around. He twisted and honed her form until she was a pencil-thin blade, a vorpal lance that rent the zombie front-runners in half.
The mass of undead was less than fifty yards behind them. Kane and Ekko made for the ruined building, the same as Crylos and his surviving men. Cross saw Southern Claw soldiers cut down by whirling bone blades and enveloped in folds of living skin the size of bloody carpets.
He couldn't hear anything beyond the catastrophe of bullets and explosions and screams. Burning meat scent filled his nostrils and throat.
The undead were right on top of them. Cross fired the triple barrel with mad determination. Kane dropped the empty shotgun and hacked through necrotic bodies with his swords. Ekko's oversized and utterly inhuman claws sparkled like diamond ice as she hacked and slashed through ranks of bladed zombies, wights and whip-bearing phantoms.
Blood flew onto their faces and chests. Cross didn't remember dropping the triple-barrel, but it was gone, and he hacked away at the enemy with his machete instead. Heads and arms cracked beneath the destructive energies that his spirit encased him in.
Still they came.
Thunderous blasts tore through the air to the north. The Flak 38 rolled into view. Three bloodied soldiers found a spot just past the ruins, positioned the cannon, and blasted into the undead ranks. Metal thunder broke the air. Shells the size of carrots pummeled dead flesh and tore Ebon Cities’ soldiers to pieces. The Flak 38 bought just enough time for Kane to pull Ekko back. Cross cleared enough space for them to run by firing a phalanx of flaming coals into the undead, which set their flesh alight.
Still they came.
Relentless, and without end.
The M2 was overrun. Half of Crylos' men were brought down with bone and blade. Most of the rest engaged in close combat with an overwhelming horde.
The Razorwing dropped a vampire swordsman out of the sky like it was a white flesh missile. The vampire slashed through the Flak 38 crew in seconds, and the lone soldier who got away was snatched up by the Razorwing’s claws and torn in half.
Cross called his spirit, pulled her to within centimeters of his skin. He felt her, tasted her, sticky and burning, like sweet acid on his tongue. Rage filled him, power fueled by the same controlled and murderous force that made him win fight after fight back in Krul, power that boiled his blood and made his eyes smoke when he thought of Dillon, who would never again see his sister or her son.
That power curled inside of him and froze, an icy core, a glacial shield around his heart, growing, building, freezing. And there, nestled right beside it, in some far removed and distant aspect of his mind, was a shard of light and life, a powerful and ancient slice of arcane matter, a derelict fragment of an older creature from an older time. Cross saw it, felt it.
Used it.
He is on the mountain, looking on as the blaze of cold fire races toward him. The frost is so powerful it freezes his skin.
He watches Snow and Graves and Dillon and everyone else he ever cared about crystallize and shatter like glass figurines.
Behind him, beyond the pale doorway, are Ekko and Black. Their bodies are alight in coronas of white fire, and their eyes burn like vacant suns.
They are the inheritors of Lucan's primal spirit. They are the keepers of the light that burned inside him, a light that has burned for centuries, and that will go on burning for centuries to come, regardless of what happens now.
But right now that light has a purpose to fulfill, and while it will not allow itself to be used for just any reason, it will grant them, those three, its new avatars, some small measure of its strength so that they can defeat their enemies.
It does this not out of compassion, but as a token of good faith: one service, for another.
Cross roared, and the sky flew apart.
Shards of light exploded out of his body. He didn't need to see Black and Ekko to know they’d had been taken by the same nova glare, that their bodies were held in sunbeam prisons. Their consciousness melted together, fused into a common purpose.
There will be a price
. It was no voice, but an understanding held between them. An acknowledgement.
. It was no voice, but an understanding held between them. An acknowledgement.
There will be a price.
There always is.
Raw soul matter exploded out of Cross like he was the heart of a star. It expanded and curled along the ground, reached into every crack and crevice, into every fold of dead skin and raw socket, into every hollow bone and dangling bit of sinew. Necrotic energy recoiled before the agonized cry of primordial spirits, a collective of the damned that screamed out of Cross’ bleeding eyes and hands like they were rolling liquid flame.
The undead exploded. Pale animated bodies and jagged skeletal weapons, razor vapors and icy claws, maggot hearts and grave dust, soiled black fire and cursed souls: all of it immolated within the onslaught of primal spirit matter like paper put to the flame.
White detonations rang up and down the field as dead bodies erupted in blasts of cold fire. The explosions carried on through the small horde in a chain reaction. Angry white light leapt from one body to the next.
In the sky above, the vampires in the final warship and those mounted on the last Razorwing were also affected by the light. The dead flesh tore from their rotted bones and evaporated like melting snow.
The light caught the burning fuel in the Coffin and ignited it. The resulting explosion peeled into the sky with a deafening blast. The ground shook. Everything sucked in towards Cross like a vortex.
When it was done, every last Ebon Cities fighter was gone. Nothing was left of them but ash.
Cross stood in a daze. His eyes burned and his skin peeled from the cold. His arms and legs trembled, and after a moment his strength left him completely, and Kane caught him as he fell to his knees. His throat felt like a chimney.
The last vampire warship crashed to the ground just a few hundred yards away. Shrapnel and gouts of caustic flame filled the frozen wind with the smell of burnt metal.
And as abruptly as the battle had began, it was over. The icy world settled into near silence.
The last Bloodhawk landed a few minutes later, having lost three men. The Bloodhawk that carried Ankharra had been shot down, but her magic helped most of those onboard survive the crash.
All told, over forty of Crylos' seventy-five men were dead.
They all stood in silence for a time. They watched bloody patches of fog fall and melt the icy ground beneath them. Smoke of different colors competed for control of the sky. Torn and exploded remains were everywhere, and soon they were covered in drifts of smoking ash. The air smelled like long-burned meat.
Ekko stumbled over to Cross and Kane. Black and Cole joined them. The side of Black's face was bloody from where, Cross later learned, Harker’s head had exploded when a bone grenade went off inside the ship.
Cross stared off into the pale and frozen sky. The ghosts of centuries passed through him. He felt soiled, and very old. He had become a conduit for Death.
And I'll have to do it again
,
before this night is done. That was what they really taught me in Krul, whether they knew it or not. How to kill…and kill again.
,
before this night is done. That was what they really taught me in Krul, whether they knew it or not. How to kill…and kill again.
Quietly, the survivors of First and Second Platoon, Claw Company, gathered what resources and men they had left. Their task was not get finished.
They still had to find the Woman in the Ice.
TWENTY
ICE
The Southern Claw base camp became a makeshift medical bivouac. Thankfully, only a few of those who’d been injured were in serious condition. The death toll, however, was high, and already there were mutterings that it was all too much for them to take on, that they barely had enough men left to secure the area, let alone dedicate more to a thorough search of what promised to be a sizable underground complex.
Cross quelled their concerns as best he could.
“
I don't need many of your men.”
I don't need many of your men.”
He, Black, Cole, Crylos and Ankharra stood away from the camp, at the top of a low rise that offered a good view of the frozen city. Thirty square blocks
–
nearly a quarter of the city
–
had been reduced to icy ruin in the battle. Dark steam and churning drifts of yellow-orange fog still clung to the area. Even at a distance, it was easy to smell the smolder of artillery and scorched bodies. Drifts of ash covered the ground like grey snow.
–
nearly a quarter of the city
–
had been reduced to icy ruin in the battle. Dark steam and churning drifts of yellow-orange fog still clung to the area. Even at a distance, it was easy to smell the smolder of artillery and scorched bodies. Drifts of ash covered the ground like grey snow.
“
How many?” Crylos asked.
How many?” Crylos asked.
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