And then all of the Familiars were on them.
The quartet of transgenics fought hard, but it was clear that the Familiars’ numbers were just too great. The only plus — other than White — was that the cultists did not seem to be armed; they had gathered at Big Sky to party, not fight.
Logan was slugging it out, too, but he was weak and no match for Familiars.
Then, echoing up through the woods, came battle cries.
Dix had brought more than just fireworks from home.
A hundred transgenics stormed out of the forest and joined in the fray — Dix and Luke and so many strange, familiar faces. A few brandished weapons, but mostly it was just a wave of sheer mutant force, sweeping onto the wintry landscape.
She stepped in and helped Logan, who was battling the two Familiars who’d held him captive before, and her kicks to the throat and groin and every other dirty tactic that could actually get through to a Familiar were enough to put the two down, at least long enough for her to grab Logan by the hand again and look him in the eyes and say, “Run — Logan, go to the woods and wait!”
He shook his head and went for another of the Familiars. She loved him for wanting to stay and stand to fight at her side, but it was a decision as stupid as it was brave. Within seconds he was on his back on the ground, the Familiar looming over him, choking the life out of him.
She head-butted a tattooed face in front of her, the man’s nose exploding in a scarlet shower; he wobbled but did not fall, and it took an elbow in the throat to convince him to do so. She got behind the one strangling Logan, grabbed his head and gave it a good hard twist, snapping his neck. Before the dead weight could fall on him, Logan rolled out from under.
She knelt next to Logan, who was groggy, face red, from the near strangulation; a gunshot cracked the night and something hot erupted through her shoulder, knocking her back. She lay there, looking up at an enormous sky, seemingly filled with stars, but it was just Dix’s fireworks display continuing to go off. Turning her head to the right, she saw Logan reaching out to her — he was dazed, his eyes wide in horror — and their hands touched and she felt peaceful, happy, a quiet settling over, banishing the battlefield...
... but the sensation lasted only a moment, as White jumped on top of her, straddling her, pulling her up to him by her vest. In a way, he did her a favor, snapping her back to full consciousness and a world much bigger than just her and Logan; again she was cognizant of the sounds of fighting around her, the explosions in the sky... and Ames White’s tortured, demonic face inches from her own.
“Bostock may have killed Ray, 452,” he said, and he was smiling though there was pain in it — Familiar or not, he was a father who’d suffered the greatest loss — “but you caused it, didn’t you? Like every misfortune that’s been rained down on me in the last year and a half — you.”
He raised the barrel of his pistol toward her face to deliver the kill shot.
Lips peeled back over that terrible smile, he said, “My son won’t live to rule... but I will. Your death at my hands assures me of that immortality.”
She watched in seeming slow motion as his finger squeezed down on the trigger. She could almost see the bullet ready to ride the black tunnel from firing pin to her skull. In that instant a thousand thoughts coursed through her mind, all at once and yet each one clear, concise, easy to see.
The people who were important to her, the things that made her happy, what she would do with her life, her life with Logan Cale, if just somehow in the next second this bullet failed to blow her brains out...
Above the cacophony of the battle, she heard something primal and horrifying, and then a beast loomed above and behind Ames White...
Joshua.
The gun fell with a thunk next to her, and she heard the cry from White... Was it pain? He couldn’t feel physical pain... could he? Was it rage, or sorrow, or just some gargling horrible sound that a man might make, should a beast grab him by the skull...
... and yank.
She did know that White’s head disappeared from her view, and the weight of him lifted off her.
She was on her elbow, propping herself up, when she saw White — or anyway, White’s body — on the ground next to her, red pumping out of the pipelike opening of his neck, a wide geysering spigot where his head had been.
And when Max sat up, she saw where that head was now — six and a half feet above her, where Joshua held the detached cranium, by the hair, at eye level, staring into White’s lifeless face.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Joshua said, and his voice was strangely gentle, scolding the blood-dripping head, as if warning a child. “You shouldn’t have killed Annie.”
Annie... the ordinary Joshua had loved, and who loved him, a gentle blind girl who White had slain out of sheer meanness.
Joshua was staring at White’s head, as if waiting for an apology.
Then, when no apology came, a cry of anguish rose from deep within the leonine figure, and he swung his arm, like an airplane propeller, and cast the head into the dark night, where it landed with a distant plop.
Suddenly Joshua was leaning down over her, saying, “Sorry, Little Fella. Kinda lost my head.”
She just looked at him, wondering if he knew what he’d said. Then Joshua was pulling her up to her feet, and she inspected her wound — the shoulder was stiff, but the bullet seemed to have gone on through, and her transgenic body was already working at repairing itself. Rolling the shoulder a little, she said, “Gonna be all right.”
Joshua helped up Logan, too.
She quickly surveyed the battle — transgenics outnumbered Familiars now — looking for that silver-haired ghost, Matthias.
She spotted him, on the run, the long robe flowing behind him, the tippet flapping, as he headed up the stairs and back inside the asylum.
“Stay out here,” she told Logan and Joshua, “till the building’s secure... Alec! Mole! Follow me!”
Chapter eleven
The end
Max waded into the sea of robed Familiars. Behind her, in an impressive display of martial-arts prowess, Alec was handily dealing with a pair of the cultists. Mole was off to the one side, taking care of another of the armed three-man TAC patrols, blasting away at them mercilessly, and they fell like camouflaged bowling pins.
But soon the two warriors — in answer to her call — were at her back, as she plowed her way toward the steps to the front entry of the hospital.
The tide of the fight had turned decisively toward the transgenics. Those Familiars who weren’t already lying in broken heaps on the ground were taking flight, a few literally heading for the hills, others around the building, presumably for another way inside or perhaps to make it to the parking lot — and, in either case, the ragtag transgenics gave chase.
Once they were up the short flight of steps, Max, Mole, and Alec went inside unimpeded. For all the frenetic and violent activity outside, the asylum itself seemed deserted. Initially, they found themselves in what had once been a reception/waiting room area, with a double-door elevator, but no chairs lined the walls, and the nurse/receptionist window was vacant; otherwise, it was just a big empty slab room, cut through the middle by a long hallway.
Though voices could be heard, the cries of prisoners, these did not emanate from this floor — in fact, they sounded more like they were coming from the walls. The effect was ghostly, troubling, but this floor was clearly administrative, small tidy offices with computers and desks and chairs and files, as you might find in any institution of this type. The thought of the inhabitants of these neat offices being cultists with pagan facial markings, parading in flowing hooded robes, chanting ritual gibberish, seemed utterly absurd... or would have, if they hadn’t just pushed their way through a throng of them out on the battlefield that the asylum grounds had turned into.