She blew through his defenses as though his arms were made of tissue paper, hammering him with blow after blow. Norton gritted his teeth, but kept putting his forearms up to protect his head and torso from the potentially lethal hits.
That softened the strikes, but didn’t stop them. He felt a rib crack, a distinctive pain like a knife driving right through his body. He hissed, trying to block the pain, but there were limits to what he could accomplish while under direct attack, even with his considerable talents.
Norton roared, filthy words rolling off his tongue. He barely had any idea what he was saying, but it made him feel better, and he stepped into the attack and swung back as hard as he could.
She just sneered at him, taking the hit evenly across the face, and then looking him in his black eyes.
“Too little. Too late.”
“Oh shit,” Norton swore, recognizing the shift in her stance as she went into motion.
The fist rocked his head to one side, and the follow-up keeled him over as all the air rushed out of his lungs. He never even saw the knee coming up to meet his face before the whole world became a rush of wind, pain, and blackness.
Hawk Masters slammed the buttstock of his AA-12 into a frozen body that was blocking his way, sending shards of ice and gore to the ground at his feet as he brought the weapon back to his shoulder and opened up.
That little girl scares me.
He emptied the last of his slugs into the attacking horde, aiming past the ones closest to him to get the most out of his last few really decent long-range munitions. His backup didn’t fail him, however, and the creatures closest to him went down hard in a hail of double-aught buckshot that mangled their faces.
He let the drum fall, and it clattered off the cement floor as he reached for a replacement. There was only buckshot left, but it was better than nothing.
Masters was reloading when a blur of motion from above caught his attention. He glanced up in time to see a body slam into the railing of the catwalk. He recognized Norton almost instantly, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as he prepared to watch his friend fall the more than thirty feet to the cement below.
Somehow, miraculously, Norton had managed to hook his arms over the railing, however. Now he was hanging there by the arms, head slumped into his chest. Honestly, Masters didn’t know if his friend was dead or alive, but that didn’t change what he had to do.
“Eddie!” he called, getting the master chief’s attention. When Rankin looked over, Masters just nodded up. “Look.”
The tough-as-nails SEAL did as he was asked, and instantly paled to match Masters’s own pasty complexion. “Holy sh—! Is that Alex?”
“Yeah, and I need a way up there,” Masters growled.
“You want to try taking on something that can kick Alex’s ass?” Eddie asked, incredulous. “Are you out of your idiot mind?”
“ ‘Want’ is a strong word, Eddie’ ” Masters said. “ ‘Need’ might be more accurate.”
“Need all you want, the damned stairs are clogged with these bastards,” Eddie roared over the report of his M4, “so unless you can jump like Alex, you ain’t getting up there.”
Masters growled in frustration, his eyes locked on the flood of inhumanity they were just barely holding at bay. The unstable undead had now reached the point of tripping over their own fallen comrades, and since they clearly had a hard enough time stumbling around on even ground, it was proving to be a major stumbling block for them.
Pun not intended.
That said, there were still too many of the damned things in the room, and they were clogging up every path he could take to the stairs. Alex was still slumped there, hanging off the walkway, but Masters didn’t see any way he could get to him from where he was. The stairwells were literally clogged with the shambling creatures that were attacking them.
“Stop thinking like you’re some kind of superhero, Hawk!” Eddie shouted at him. “You and I both know there’s no way you’re getting up those stairs.”
Masters didn’t bother replying, even though every permutation he could think of was coming back with exactly the same numbers his friend was trying to hammer home. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try, however.
“Yo! Goth girl!” he called over the noise, gaining the attention and the ire of the woman in question.
She glared at him for a moment before speaking, her voice shockingly soft considering that he was able to hear every syllable she uttered.
“The name,” she said clearly and distinctly, “is Hannah.”
He ignored the chill her tone sent down his spine and nodded toward the closest stairwell. “I need some of that ice voodoo you do.”
She scowled at him again, but looked over in the direction he’d indicated. “Fine. I can only freeze a couple, though.”
“Not them,” he shook his head. “Can you do the stairs?”
“The…,” she trailed off, eyes shifting slightly before she nodded and smiled. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
“Do it,” he ordered.
“What are you going to do?” she demanded as she brought her fingers up to her forehead.
He shrugged with a bit of a silly grin as he tensed to move. “I’m going to play superhero.”
Hannah shook her head, but focused on the target as Masters broke into a sprint for the stairwell.
“Freeze,” she intoned, gesturing out and sending a pulse out ahead of her.
Mist and ice swirled through the air, narrowly missing Masters as he sprinted toward the stairs and the inhuman mass that waited for him there. The bolt struck the metal of the catwalk stairwell, instantly dropping the temperature well below freezing. As it froze, moisture wicked out of the air and condensed onto the metal, transforming instantly into ice.
The vampires weren’t the most stable creatures under the best of circumstances, and when the surface under their feet decided to become slick, it took very little for the first to topple and turn into a domino that began to bring down every other being around it.
Masters hit the writhing mass at a full sprint, leaping over the first few and planting a foot into the chest of one of the figures, using it as a jumping-off point. He made it halfway up the stairwell before a clawing hand got a grip on his ankle and he pitched forward.
He managed to grab the handrail as he kicked off the arm and kept climbing. Some of the bodies were riper than others, and Masters desperately tried to ignore the squelching sounds his boots were making, to say nothing of the smell.
The report of Eddie’s M4 was accompanied by the whine of a bullet passing much too close for comfort, but the meaty slap of its impact was followed up by one less hand clawing at him, so he resolutely tried to forget that his friend was trying to pick off enemy combatants within two feet of his position.
God, I hope he’s a better shot now than he was back in BUD/S.
With the top of the stairs in sight, Masters banished all other thoughts from his mind, putting everything he had into one last surge to get to the top.
He knew that there was a whole lot worse waiting for him once he got there, after all.
The Coast Guard helo orbited the town from a little over a thousand feet, all eyes on the bird looking out over the sleepy-looking burg with varying degrees of nervous energy.
Captain Andrews could feel a cold chill originating inside her gut, something she’d never experienced before.…She knew that she was right on the edge of panic, and there weren’t even any enemies within sight. But what she couldn’t see and what she knew to be there were two very different things.