I’ve got this. I’m right here! my mind shouted even as I pushed to my feet and launched myself at the pale, undead leader. My growl became a howling, primal declaration for all the world that they were hurting my master and I was going to hurt them, make them pay for it with all I had.
I leaped into the air and struck the lead knight like a bolt from the sky, turning his laughter into a terrified shriek as I tore at him again and I bore him back into the darkness with all I had. My howling mixed with his shrieking into a mournful serenade that only energized me further. My master had screamed, so this one would scream worse.
The knight slapped and punched at me, hands and feet flailing in vain attempts to dislodge me from atop him. My teeth sank into flesh and ripped chunks free — a finger — I shook my head, sending it flying in a trail of blood. Then another.
He screamed for his companions, begging for help, pure desperation.
I ripped at him again, tearing flesh from his arm, spitting it out, and going for more. The fear that had consumed me had been replaced by fury and focused determination. You. Don’t. Hurt. My master.
The knights around us moved then, rushing to assist him, and my master’s hand clamped around his pistol as he cocked it and aimed, then thunder exploded around us.
A whole line of Red Knights closest to my master shuddered and fell in heaps. Others spun, eyes seeking the threat, and then many of them died, too, bullets ripping into their faces, chests, arms, limbs.
More shrieks joined those of my target as I continued tearing at him.
My master joined the firing as a deep, leathery droning sound filled my ears — fuzzy at first, then becoming clearer: “Echo! Echo! Echo!”
And I smelled the scent now: Khalid, Lydia, Bunny, Top, Violin — our team had arrived. I knew then we could do it. We would kill them all. Destroy them as they’d tried to destroy us. I howled in welcome, then went back to tearing at my victim. Any dwindling trace of fear was gone now, replaced by hunger, instinct, an unquestioned focus on killing every target in reach.
Then our team joined the fight, filling the cavern with echoing bullets, the smell of sweat, powder, adrenaline, and knights’ blood. More dead. More dying. Rotted dead flesh. Bodies. I looked over to see my master pulling free of the crate, shooting back, fighting alongside me.
I was right where I belonged.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is an author and Hugo Award — nominated editor of adult and children’s speculative fiction. His debut novel, The Worker Prince, received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club’s Year’s Best Science Fiction Releases of 2011. His short stories have appeared in magazines, in anthologies, and online and include entries in The X-Files, Predator, Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International, and Decipher’s WARS, among others. As book editor for Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta’s WordFire Press, he has edited books by such luminaries as Alan Dean Foster, Tracy Hickman, Frank Herbert, Mike Resnick, Jean Rabe, and more. He was also the first editor on Andy Weir’s bestseller The Martian. His anthologies as editor include Shattered Shields with co-editor Jennifer Brozek, Mission: Tomorrow, Galactic Games, and Little Green Men — Attack! and Monster Hunter Files with Larry Correia (all for Baen); Infinite Stars and Predator: If It Bleeds (for Titan Books); Beyond the Sun, and Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera for a New Age. Find him on Twitter @BryanThomasS or via his website at www.bryanthomasschmidt.net.
After years of working in fantasy game design and Web development, G. P. Charles traded in computer programming for fiction writing and escaped the nightmare of missing semicolons and infinite loops. Now, instead of daydreaming about throwing the computer out the window, G.P. finds every day an exciting adventure. When not writing, downtime is spent at home on the farm, raising horses, chickens, and two boys who are too intelligent for their own good but a constant source of joy. To learn more, check out www.gpcharles.com.
NO GUNS AT THE BAR
BY AARON ROSENBERG
“On my mark,” Bradley “Top” Sims declared over the comms. He stood to one side of the front door, pistol out and at the ready. Beside him, Lydia “Warbride” Ruiz nodded, her own gun also out.
“This is Bunny, copy that,” Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit acknowledged. He and Montana “Stretch” Parker were stationed by the back door, while the team sniper, Sam “Ronin” Imura, covered them from the neighboring rooftop. Ronin checked in as well, and Top nodded.
“Echo Team, let’s do this,” he called out. “Go!”
With that he aimed a heavy kick at the front door, splintering the flimsy lock and sending the cheap wooden barricade smashing inward with a cloud of sawdust that filled the air around them. On the house’s opposite end, Bunny did the same. The four team members barreled into the small dwelling, scanning the rooms they’d entered but finding nobody.
“Clear!” Top shouted. Bunny responded with the same, and both pairs moved on to the next rooms. In under a minute they’d covered the entire one-story building and found it empty.
“Well,” Bunny commented as they regrouped in the living room, “that was a bust. And not the kind we figured.”
Stretch rolled her eyes at the bad pun. Warbride snorted. Top just ignored it. “Cowboy, this is Top,” he called in. “Nothing here. Looks like a wash.”
“Roger that, Top,” their boss, Captain Joe “Cowboy” Ledger, replied. “Head on back in.”
“Copy that.” Top reholstered his pistol. “Pack it up,” he told his team, and they all nodded.
“Feels weird, not shooting anybody,” Bunny remarked as they all made for the front door. He brushed some sawdust from his sandy-blond hair, scattering it all around him.
Walking just ahead of him, Warbride swiveled around to eye him warily. “Don’t get any bright ideas,” she warned. “Friendly fire or not, you draw and I’ll put you down.”
“Would I do that?” Bunny asked, plastering what was probably supposed to be a wide-eyed look of innocence on his broad face. The two of them laughed as they exited the building. Top didn’t. The DMS had been in plenty of ugly scrapes, and he should have been relieved to have something turn out completely innocuous for a change.
Instead, it had him worried.
“Must have been bad intel,” Ledger commented. Echo Team had returned to the Pier, their DMS base, and Top had just been debriefed. “Not sure how I feel about that.”
Top nodded. He and Ledger had been working together for a while now — Ledger had been the original head of Echo Team, and Top and Bunny had both been in it with him since the beginning — and they often thought alike, so he knew his superior was feeling the same unease he was. The DMS didn’t always have all the details, and sometimes they missed stuff just like anybody else. But to be completely wrong like this? That’d never happened before.
“Tip was plausible,” Top remarked. And it had been. They’d heard that a terrorist cell had taken up residence in that nondescript little house on the outskirts of Dallas and had been working to fashion a bioweapon of some kind. And that they’d been close to activation. The DMS had dealt with plenty of bioweapons in the past and knew just how deadly those things could be, so they’d immediately jumped all over this. Only to find an empty house with no signs of activity at all, much less the marks of a terrorist group.