George lead Gladys
out of the office with a determined, if resigned, swagger. When they were clear of the major’s office and headed to the landing lines, George spoke again. “If you get me killed, I want you to feel very, very guilty about it.”
“Stop it,” Gladys said with a laugh.
“The tragic death of the royal guard. Think of the stories … and the guilt.”
“And what if you let
me
die?”
“Oh,” George said, “then I will take a long overdue vacation. I believe you may have frightened the major with that glare of yours.”
Gladys punched him in the arm.
A few minutes later they stood at the edge of the warship. The inferno of the old base had died down, but something still blazed in the heart of the pit.
“It’s weird,” Gladys said. “If you look to the east, it’s like any other city.”
“Do not get comfortable with that thought. Those are the thoughts that lower your guard and get you killed. Though I would enjoy a vacation …” George pulled two sets of Wheels off the rack beside them and handed one to Gladys.
“You have everything you need?” she asked as she took the belayer from him.
He patted himself down. “Armor, blades,” he said, pulling his tight-fitting cloak back to reveal the rows of throwing knives tucked around his waist. George gestured at his thighs and said, “Guns, ammunition, yes.”
Gladys patted the cargo belt at her waist. “I got snacks too, just in case.”
George nodded and frowned slightly. “I suppose you are more prepared than I, Princess.”
Gladys slapped her belayer onto the rope and leapt over the side of the warship. She cursed when she realized just how high they were. The trip down took fifteen seconds. Even with the belayer slowing her descent, Gladys knew that was a long, long fall.
She slipped the belayer off and into one of the pouches on her side. George landed beside her a moment later. The belayer vanished from his hand, only to be replaced with the wavy blade of a dagger.
“What is that?” Gladys asked.
“The vibrations?”
She nodded.
“The underground is likely settling still. I would not be surprised if the area experiences a great deal of earthquakes over the coming weeks.”
Gladys hadn’t considered that. They were going to be around and inside buildings set upon a shaking mountain. Maybe George’s hesitation wasn’t so misplaced after all. Gladys strode forward, leading George diagonally away from the smoking ruin of the old base.
He stayed right beside her, the dagger concealed just beneath his cloak. “Stay behind the buildings here. The refugee camp should be a straight line down this street and a little south.”
“How do you know that?”
George smiled. “I am a nosy man, Gladys. Sometimes that provides a wealth of information, and sometimes a wealth of trouble.”
Gladys pondered that as they walked in the shadows of the old brick buildings. Something roared above them, like a thousand angry bees. Her gaze snapped over her shoulder and watched the conical flames spitting from the base of one of the gun pods.
“Chaingun,” George said. “At least the major listened to reason. We should not need to worry about getting blown apart by cannon fire.”
“Right, we only have to worry about getting cut in half by a chaingun.”
George let out a humorless laugh and stepped around a fire pit dug into the ground. He stepped out ahead of Gladys when voices echoed down the narrow alley that led to the street.
“I’m telling you, the three of us can take out that entire force. Those fools are disorganized and unfit to fight. Imagine the rewards the Butcher will lay at our feet if we remove the last of the resistance in Dauschen!”
The man’s excited whispers had betrayed him. George’s dagger was joined by a throwing knife in his opposite hand.
Gladys wrapped her fingers around two of the jagged throwing knives at her waist. They were terrible weapons, shaped and cut to inflict as much damage as possible in a single strike, a hallmark of the warriors from Midstream. Here she followed George.
Killing soldiers was something Gladys was intimately familiar with. Before her parents died, they’d changed the traditions of the Midstream survivors. Where their culture had been pacifist for a century, they learned to defend themselves, and kill when necessary, within a single generation.
George struck with the dagger first, slashing through vocal cords and arteries in one vicious slice. He pulled the man backwards by his coat so his comrades wouldn’t see him fall.
Killing in the shadows was better. You couldn’t see the blood. Gladys had killed her first man at nine years old. She flicked her arm forward, snapping the throwing knife through the air. The impact had enough force to crack the soldier’s skull, and he went down like he’d been dropped from one of the nearby roofs.
Gladys didn’t know what number he was. She wondered sometimes, but fighting the warlord’s armies in the deserts made it easy to forget. In the end, she supposed it didn’t matter. She dragged a second blade across the soldier’s throat. Threat eliminated, Gladys retrieved her knives.
George allowed himself to make a sound with the last soldier. A deep, primal grunt as he twisted the man’s neck until it snapped. The soldier had to be dead with his neck at such a severe angle, but George slit the man’s throat to remove any possible error.
“Nicely done, Princess.”
Gladys nodded as she re-sheathed her blades. “Should we hide the bodies?”
George shook his head. “Let them be found. They will assume the danger is nearby, as men are wont to do.”
Gladys didn’t question him. She’d known the royal guard long enough to realize he knew much more than she did when it came to war. Still, it was an odd thing to turn the next corner, only to nod and smile at passersby. Those people had no idea of what Gladys and George had done. It’s why Gladys was not one to make fast friends. She was always alert, always suspicious, except with Alice.
At the next street, they slipped back into the shadowed alleys behind the old brick homes. Every sound drew a sharp look from George and a sharp blade in either of their hands. Despite the tremors in the earth and larger creatures scuttling through the night, there were no more soldiers between them and the small sea of white tents. Gladys almost longed for another encounter. It was the waiting, and the terrible suspense within, that could fray one’s nerves to nothing.
Screams went up from within the tent city. George and Gladys exchanged looks and then ran into the neat rows of giant tents. One of the tents fluttered in the wind, shredded and bloodied and filled with things that may once have been men.
“Carrion Worms!” George yelled as he sheathed his dagger and unholstered two guns. He tossed one to Gladys, and she caught it mid-flight by the grip.
The white, maggoty flesh of the nearest monster reared up at the scent of fresh meat. The bright blue-and-orange rings around its segments meant it was a venomous worm, one of the few creatures that made Gladys’s skin crawl. She raised the pistol and shivered when the thing’s face split into three wide, triangular masses of flesh and teeth.
“Go for the eyes!” she said, though she knew she didn’t need to tell George a thing.
The nearest worm lunged and George shouted, narrowly avoiding a strip of venom-laced teeth. The worms didn’t growl so much as they roared. As silent as the awful things could be, they were loud as hell in an open fight.
Gladys took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, lining up her sights as best she could in the dim light. She slowly squeezed the trigger as the dying sun glinted on the Carrion Worm’s eyes, and the first shot found its home.
The worm reared back and released a horrific squeal. Gladys heard George’s gun fire, and the squeal seemed to intensify a hundredfold. Two of the limbs that formed that wretched mouth flopped down, dragging the earth. The entire body stilled.
Gladys had fought enough Carrion Worms to know what it was doing. The worms played dead when wounded.
“Behind you!” a voice shouted from somewhere beyond George, on the other side of the worm.
Another tent collapsed when two Carrion Worms burst through the fabric, jaws wide and trained on George. The wounded worm struck, lashing out with its last functioning appendage.
“George!” Gladys screamed.
The guard was calm, cold. He threw himself into the dirt in the ruins of the first tent. The newcomers sailed past, smashing into the first worm and crushing its wounded head into the earth.
Gladys aimed and fired. One of the worms went down, limp and dying. It was a lucky shot, and she knew it, but she didn’t have a shot on the worm closing in on George.
“Shoot it!”
She couldn’t understand why he hadn’t fired, and then she caught a glimpse of him trying to pry something out of the gun’s action. Dread crawled up from her toes to her head. George’s gun was jammed.
Gladys unloaded the remaining rounds into the back of the Carrion Worm. It curled one of its mouth parts toward her, enough to curve a pitch black eye in her direction, and then its attention returned to George.
George cursed as one of the tent’s ropes caught his ankle, and he went down hard. He threw two knives at the worm, and one managed to clip an eye. It wasn’t nearly enough to chase the creature away. The worm rose up for a killing blow, spreading its mouth wide. Its venom glistened in the dying, burning sun—venom that would melt flesh and bone alike.
Gladys charged the worm. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she had to try.
There was a boom like a cannon shot, and the worm’s head exploded into gory ribbons.
George stripped out of his cloak as he scrambled to his feet. Drops of venom had reached him and were already dissolving the fabric in gouts of hissing smoke.
Gladys ran around the other worms, tripping through the felled tent to get to George faster. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, and the knot of terror she’d been suppressing unwound itself in her gut.
“What are you two doing here?”
Gladys looked toward the voice. He was an average man, with an average face, and an average build. He was forgettable in every way, which made Gladys’s hackles rise. “Who are you?”
“Peace, Princess. He’s one of Archibald’s.”
“Bold claim in Dauschen right now, but you’re not wrong.”
“I am the Royal Guard of Midstream, and this—”
“Is Princess Gladys,” the man finished. He studied them both for a moment and then nodded. “I’m Cage, captain in the resistance here. Come with me. It’s not safe for us, much less a princess.”
George released a humorless laugh. “It is safer for the princess than it is for most men. Of that, I am quite sure.”
Cage glanced back at Gladys. She slid her cloak back, revealing the rows of throwing knives across her waist.
“We’re glad to have you,” Cage said. “Things are worse than you know.”
T
he walls fell
all around him, and Jacob screamed. He ran from the mass of glowing red eyes that streamed out of the darkness and devoured the streets around him. He saw his mom and dad overrun and taken by the horde of Red Death.
Charles! They needed the bike, and so it was. The cobblestones rattled the frame as he and Charles rocketed through the bloody streets of Ancora. The eyes rose up ahead of them. There was no way through.
“Stop!” he cried. Charles turned to look at him, his face purple and swollen. Jacob screamed when the old tinker opened his mouth and his jaw unhinged, revealing an infinite blackness filled with glowing eyes.
Jacob fell from the bike and crashed into the cobblestones. Alice, he could still get to Alice. It wasn’t much farther up the hill, but he couldn’t catch his breath. If he slowed at all, they’d be on him. He’d be dead, and Alice would be gone.
Something sounded in the distance, someone yelled his name. Jacob’s gaze shot to the side when a metallic voice filled the shadows. His hand reached beneath the soft feathers at his back, wrapping around a blade before he struck out at the darkness, screaming. The blade slammed into something hard and sank far enough that he couldn’t budge it.
A shadow moved, and the metallic voice grew louder.
“Jacob! It’s me!”
He lunged at the sound. They wouldn’t hurt Alice. He wouldn’t let them. Something caught him in the ribs. Fiery pain lanced through his side and he hit the floor. A warm weight dropped on top of him a moment later and screamed.
“Stop!”
The voice …
“Jacob, stop!”
“Alice?”
The shadows receded as he came back to his senses, caught between the horror of the dream and the horror of who he’d just attacked. “Gods, Alice! Are you okay?” He started pawing at the white shift she wore. It looked gray in the lantern light, but he didn’t see any blood.
“I’m okay,” she said as she pushed herself away and flopped onto his bunk. “Gods, you scared me.”
He stared at her and then back down at his trembling hands. “Bad dream.”
She reached out and squeezed his hand. They stayed there for a minute while Jacob’s tremors gradually calmed.
He rocketed to his feet when someone began barking over the horn. Jacob managed to crack his forehead on a low-hanging pipe and stub his toe at the same time. He groaned and held his throbbing head. Drakkar’s insistence on raising a drink to Charles the night before seemed like a bad idea now. Alice let out a small laugh. He turned to watch her on his bunk. She wore a sideways, bleary-eyed smile.
What was left of her good humor died when the voice continued over the horn. It was Mary.
“I repeat, Ballern’s destroyers are already closing in on Bollwerk. Archibald has ordered us to leave for Dauschen, but I’ll be damned if we don’t strike first. Get dressed. Get to the cabin. Now.”
Alice rolled out of the bunk. She dropped to her feet beside Jacob, which was about the time he realized she was wearing nothing but that white shift.
“You’re uh …” Jacob started, unsure of what to say.
“Not decent?” Alice said as she turned around. “Are you just going to stare, or are we going to get to the cabin?”