Then the world turned white. A blinding flash crisped blue around the edges, a breathless instant before the noise crashed across them. A massive wind scoured its way across the open cellar door. A backblast punched through the hole in the ceiling and slammed Kafari against the wall. Pain erupted like a volcano. She was still conscious, able to think and feel, and fleetingly wished she couldn’t. Everything hurt, everywhere, nerves screaming at the abuse.
She reoriented herself gradually. The stench of burnt flesh, thick smoke, and the crisped-wood smell of a housefire left her groggy on the stone floor. She coughed, jarring bruises the whole length of her body. The afterglare of that last big salvo faded, leaving the battered basement to reappear, ghostlike, as her vision recovered. Hearing took longer, but the deep tremors still shaking the bedrock gradually resolved into the sound of massive explosions from somewhere nearby.
She finally turned her head, creaking in every joint, and peered at the damage. There were bodies everywhere. Ugly, nasty black ones, covered with hair and weapons and alien blood. The stairway resembled tattered lace, with more holes than chewed-up wood. One whole side sagged where energy weapons had bitten through the supports. More frightening was the state of the ceiling. It had fractured along the lines of stress where the first Yavac had stepped on the house. The whole back half of the ceiling had broken and now sagged dangerously, creaking and groaning as the plascrete settled lower. Dust rained down in ominous spatters as the ceiling dropped a fraction of an inch every couple of heartbeats.
“We have to get out,” she shouted, trying to find the others.
President Lendan was still behind her, covered with dirt and sour sweat, bleeding down one arm.
“What?” he shouted back.
“We have to get out!” She pointed to the broken, settling slab of plascrete. “That won’t hold much longer!”
He nodded, face grey with terror and pain.
Hank lay under the sink, as cold and silent as the stone walls. His body was riddled with nearly as many holes as the staircase. She steeled herself against the flood of grief and sick terror trying to break loose and filled her pockets with spare ammo. She picked up three rifles in a matching caliber, then gingerly tested the steps. Dinny Ghamal and his mother stood at the base of the stairs, waiting for her assessment. On her way up, Dinny handed her a big knife. As she moved cautiously, step by step, Kafari used it ruthlessly, stabbing any black and hairy thing that twitched or tried to move. Burnt hair and the stink of blood set her coughing again.
As she neared the top, Kafari felt the whole stairway creak and shudder. “Keep your weight on the inside,” she called down to the others. “The outside supports are gone. You’d better come up one at a time or this whole thing is going to come down.”
She reached the top and peered cautiously over the lip, into what should have been the kitchen. There was no house above her. It was gone, scoured away by that last, white-bright blast. It looked like somebody had used a sharp knife, slicing right across the ground. Even the topsoil was gone, leaving only the blistered bones of the bedrock.
How in hell did we survive that? And what in hell was that?
The view toward Maze Gap was a landscape littered with smoking wreckage. Yavacs — and pieces of Yavacs — sent black clouds billowing into the sky. The Aminah Bridge was simply gone, as though it had never existed. The access ramps on either side of the Klameth River had melted. Wrecked cars and farm equipment had been partly melted, as well. Debris from farmhouses and other buildings lay scattered like straw. Far worse were the dead bodies. Deng infantry corpses she could look at fairly steadily, but the slaughtered livestock left her feeling sick and she couldn’t bear to let her gaze linger on the human bodies lying crumpled in the fields or jammed into the broiled wreckage of cars and farm trucks.
She swung her gaze the other way and caught her breath.
The Bolo was literally the only thing she could see. Its guns moved so fast, she couldn’t even follow the blur. Alien fighters appeared over the sandstone clifftops and exploded midflight, as fast as they popped into view. The Bolo was shooting at something on the ground, too. The thunder of its guns shook her bones. A hellish glow of light — blue, vivid red, streaks of yellow and actinic purple — blazed like balefires through the smoke. Its treads churned the fields to muck and tore the highway to shreds.
A lightweight Yavac darted for cover in Hulda Gorge and lost three of its legs before reaching safety. A blur of light the color of hell’s underbelly lanced out from the Bolo. The Yavac blew apart. Debris scattered, some of it right toward Kafari. She ducked, only to hear Abe Lendan shout up a warning.
“The whole ceiling’s coming down!”
She scrambled up, threw herself prone on the ground, and prayed — hard — that nobody up here noticed them. The president landed beside her, clutching two rifles. Aisha Ghamal and her son lunged clear of the collapsing cellar. The ground behind Kafari’s toes was crumbling, sliding away and dropping sharply downward. She slithered forward on her belly, not wanting to go down with it.
Then she narrowed her eyes, trying to see through the murk, half blinded by criss-crossed, unnatural flares of light. The landmarks she knew were obscured, but she caught fleeting glimpses of the river, a bend in the high canyon walls, the lay of the crushed road. If she was right, Alligator Deep wasn’t too far away. Unfortunately, there was a whole lot of death flying around loose, in that direction.
“We can’t make Alligator Deep! Is there any closer shelter?” she shouted into Aisha’s ear.
“Head for the cheese room!” She was pointing toward a long, low dairy barn that was — semi-miraculously — still standing. “There’s a good-sized cellar under the barn, where we age the cheese.”
Kafari nodded, then reached down deep for just a little more courage. Enough to stand up and run the hundred meters between her fragile self and shelter. Then she was on her feet and running. Her breath sobbed in her lungs. It was hard to breathe. The ground heaved and shook underfoot, jarred by the titans fighting to possess it. She had never felt so small and frail and vulnerable in her life.
Then she reached the barn, ducked around the corner, and skidded to a halt beside an ominously open door. She snatched Abe Lendan back before he could plunge through the open doorway. Signaling for silence, Kafari slid onto her belly, holding one rifle at the ready, finger on the trigger. She eased one eye around the corner, literally at ground level.
She saw legs.
Lots of them.
A few even ended in hooves. The hooves weren’t on the ground, however. They were parallel to it, dangling obscenely and starting to stiffen as rigor mortis set in. The rest of the legs were spindly, hideous things with joints in the wrong places. It was too dark in there to see just how many Deng infantry had sheltered in the Ghamals’ dairy barn. Even one would’ve been too many.
Got any bright ideas? she asked herself.
Then she spotted the answer. An unholy, evil grin twitched at her swollen lips. It was fiendish. Diabolical. She could hardly wait to see the results. Kafari tugged at Aisha’s arm, pointed to the row of white-painted boxes lined up no more than three meters from the barn wall, situated between the dairy barn and a whole orchard of Terran fruit trees.