“Who are you?” Sarah asked. Her voice was airy, and her tone politely curious.
“Your father sent us,” Leo said.
Before he could say anything else Sarah launched herself at him, scrabbling for his sidearm. Her eyes blazed, and she bared her teeth in a horrible rictus that wiped away any beauty she had left. It was a look that said she belonged here, in spirit if not in body. Frost holstered his pistol, and in the same motion drew a small stun gun. The girl was wet, and she went down like a sandbag.
“Christ almighty,” Leo grunted, re-adjusting his pistol. “Frost, carry the girl. Carmichael, take point. CB, back him up. Band Aid, you’re rear guard.”
“What about me?” the other girl asked. Her accent was hard to place, but it probably had roots south of the equator in Africa.
“Run,” Frost said, snugging a pair of restraints around Sarah’s wrists and ankles.
They ran. The sea boiled and writhed as the keening creatures gave chase. White caps pounded like breakers, and the putrid denizens of the deep rode those waves like war horses. Bipedal eels slithered up the pylons, lashing at the runners’ legs and snapping at their faces. Men with the faces and fingers of toads leaped onto the bridge, only to be torn to pieces by steel-jacketed hornets. More came, and more after them, with hoary skin and hard shells, with eyes on stalks and with earless, wall-eyed heads.
Carmichael howled and stumbled, his shotgun rending a swimming shadow into chum. He kept firing, but he stopped running. There was a long, spiral spine jammed straight through his left thigh. CB ran past, clearing the way with short, three-round bursts. Frost followed, nostrils flaring as he carried Sarah and emptied his pistol into anything that got too close. Hernandez knelt, and Leo covered them.
“We’ve got to get a tourniquet on this,” Hernandez said.
“Just go!” Carmichael snarled, reloading. His fingers shook, and his lips were going a light shade of blue. “We won’t make it if you slow down any more. Go!”
Leo clapped Hernandez on the shoulder, and sent him on. When the medic was running, Leo hung an extra grenade on Carmichael’s belt. “Don’t let them take you.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
Leo nodded, and ran. The steady thunder of Carmichael’s pump gun rolled almost until they rest of the squad reached the beach head. Four seconds after the heavy gun stopped firing, a fireball went up behind them. The bright light in the darkness tore stone from the bridge and splintered shrapnel from the nearest support pillars. The school parted around the blast, darting away from the explosion with instinctive fear. That hesitation bought the pursued enough time to make the stairs.
They climbed into the sky, and in less than a minute were again lost in the fog. The thick cloud blotted out the sight of the horde, but it also distorted the things’ howls and wails. They sounded closer, then farther away, eventually reduced to noise on the wind. The squad slowed, climbing by feel as they focused before and behind. Nothing came at them from below, and nothing descended on them from above. An adrenaline-fueled eternity later CB pushed the iron gate wide and the others ran back onto solid ground. As soon as everyone had cleared the threshold Leo slammed the gate closed and rammed the stock of his weapon against the latch until he’d deformed it into a meaningless hunk of immobile slag.
“Status?” Leo snapped, turning to the others.
“The girl’s out cold, but breathing steady,” Hernandez said, crouching over Sarah. He withdrew a pre-loaded injector and pressed it against her bare shoulder. “Basic sedative ought to keep her out. If it doesn’t I doubt she’ll be able to do more than drool.”
“She’s your responsibility now,” Leo said. “CB, Frost, sweep the church. We’re going out the way we came in, and I want to be sure one of those fucking things didn’t sneak up here ahead of us.”
Frost reloaded his pistol, and vanished through the door right after CB. Leo turned to the other girl who was hugging herself and shivering in the damp. Leo shrugged off his jacket and handed it to her.
“You got a name?” He asked.
“Dikeledi,” she said, slipping into the jacket and buttoning it quickly.
“Dikeledi, you’ve got two choices,” he said. “You walk off now and go your own way, or you come with us. You come with us, I’ll do my best to get you out of here, but you do what you’re told when you’re told to do it until we’re clear, you get me?”
“I understand,” she said. She kissed the palm of her hand, and pressed her fingers to Leo’s forehead. “Thank you.”
A low, sharp whistle sounded from the doorway, and Frost was gesturing them into the church. Hernandez lifted Sarah in a fireman’s carry, grunting as he headed toward the church. Leo followed, Dikeledi on his heels. Leo jerked his sidearm and offered it to the girl.
“You know how to use one of these?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said, taking the weapon.
“Safety’s off, and there’s one in the pipe,” he told her. “You see one of those things, kill it.”
The church was just how they’d left it. Leo slammed the door, shot the bolt, and kept moving. Hernandez was handing Sarah over to Frost, and the girl’s head was lolling. There was blood on her lips, but not very much. CB had his scanner out, and at Leo’s look shook his head.
“Dead air,” he said.
“Don’t jinx yourself,” Hernandez said, taking a deep breath and reloading.
“CB, take point,” Leo said. “Frost, you and Dikeledi are with me. Hernandez, keep an eye on the back trail, but don’t get lost.”
“We leap-frogging again boss?” Frost asked.
Leo shook his head then cracked his neck. “We hit the door and don’t stop moving until we’re pedal to the metal. Due east, fire at will but do not stop to engage.”
They nodded, and took their places. CB set his feet, and took several, deep breaths. He gripped the knob for a long moment, and listened. Without a word CB rushed the darkness, and the others charged into the blackness.
The town was alive. Shadows swarmed out of the ocean below, slithering through gutters and darting across buckled roads. The nightmare mass rolled in like a flood tide, suggestions of shapes and bodies of two separate worlds mingled into a hideous whole. The creatures raised their heads like hounds sniffing the air, or dragged themselves along the ground to taste the man scent. They called out in garbled, incomprehensible voices, and made ear-piercing shrieks as they swept closer. The pursuers moved slowly, but there were a lot of them and they were gaining.
All at once, everything went silent. The shambling foot beats ceased, and the dread chorus stopped. No doors slammed, no shutters creaked, and even the endless drone of the ocean seemed to fade away. The squad stopped, chests heaving as they tried to look everywhere at once. Their ears strained at nothing, and their eyes scrabbled at the fog, desperate to see what they couldn’t hear.
“Boss?” Frost panted.
“Quiet,” Leo said.
Frost sucked in a breath, but before he could say anything CB started shooting. He ran into the fog, howling loud enough to be heard over the quick, staccato bursts of his weapon. Bullets smashed glass, and thudded into brick and steel. The others ducked, eyes darting back and forth. Nothing came at them. CB kept firing, moving further and further into the fog until first his footsteps, and then his shots vanished.
“Go,” Leo said, and they ran for the trees.
Their retreat was a graceless, disorganized run through the underbrush. Roots snatched at their feet. Low-hanging branches rasped at their sleeves and across their faces, but the forest was just a forest. Beneath the wet, low-hanging limbs the shadows were nothing but patches of darkness. The fog stayed silent, and they didn’t look back.