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Chapter 36
The Big Macho
“This ain’t looking so good, Sarge,” said Hudson as he surveyed the developing battle below them.The tide of demons trying to breach the Papoose Lake gap defenses had grown into a storm surge that was threatening to drown the defenders of Hill Tango. Their lead regiments had been shredded by the lethal walking barrage artillery box that the flanking redoubts were laying down, but now the demons had regrouped and decided to eliminate the artillery before proceeding.
They’d chosen Hill Tango as the target of their heaviest assault.
Around the human defenders on the barren, rocky hilltop, the darkness of night was rent by both magical discharges from the demons and the jagged, bright muzzle flashes of the remorseless artillery.
“No, in fact it’s looking somewhat south of very unpleasant at the moment,” Aston agreed.
A man in dust-covered fatigues and carrying an M16 at port arms ran up out of the darkness.
“Demons, Sarge. A bunch of them, maybe a dozen. Big ones with wings — they’ve broken through the southern revetments,” said the man between gulps of air.
“Lend a hand, would you Hudson?” Aston shouted above the sound of the artillery. “Take a few men with you.”
“Got it covered,” said Hudson, dashing off to take charge of the situation.
“I could use that bloody grav cannon right about now, Mr. Pike,” said Aston under his breath.
* * *
Techs and engineers and physicists scattered like windblown leaves as chaos erupted in their midst.
At least it seemed like chaos to anyone who didn’t know Erin Delacey, who didn’t know the keen discipline and relentlessly perfected skills that had combined to make her into one of the finest Slayers who had ever lived — in any Reality.
The telescoping steel fighting baton she kept holstered at her back was in her hand a fraction of an instant after her pleasantries with the doppelganger were concluded, and she wasted no time in taking the offensive. She swept the baton in a lethal semicircle toward the doppelganger’s head, the angular momentum at her wrist conserving itself outward toward the tip and translating into a blow that could easily crush a man’s skull.
The creature shouldn’t have been able to evade it but it sprang away faster than even the Vampire Slayer’s reflexes could track it, leaping a good ten yards across the lab. It landed in a slight crouch and faced Erin again.
“Oh. Shit,” she said under her breath. This was going to be a tough one.
The sentry that had been knocked to the floor moments before managed to get his wind back enough to recover his weapon. He rose to one knee and brought the pistol up smoothly into a Weaver stance. The changeling was on him before he could fire a shot, and the man slumped to the floor, his neck broken.
Think fast, Erin. You’re not going to beat him in a standup fight, thought the Slayer, her mind racing for a way out of the jam she was in.
The changeling looked at her and smiled.
This is NOT a run-of-the-mill changeling, Erin thought. Her eyes darted to a pendant that had come free of his fatigue jacket during the course of the fight. It was a symbol. One she recognized.
She could see him tense for the next attack and she said quickly, “You’re a Chaos Knight.”
The changeling stopped short.
“You know of us?” he asked.
“A few years ago, five Mohra Demons tried to kill me. They failed — so a Chaos Knight was sent to finish what they couldn’t. He wore that same symbol,” she said.
“If you had faced one of my order, you would not be alive, Slayer,” said the doppelganger.
“We shall see,” said Erin. “What do they call you, Knight? I’d like to know the name to put on the plaque when I mount your head over my fireplace.”
The doppelganger sneered. “I am T’Quon auf-Karad, Chaos Knight of the Order of Murata, slayer of Slayers …”
Erin held up a hand. “Okay, I get the point. I don’t need the whole resume.”
“No more talking, human,” snarled T’Quon.
“Aren’t you even curious about how it is that I defeated the other one? The weakness I discovered in you Chaos Knights? ’Cause it’s a real doozy,” said Erin, her eyes wandering for a fraction of a second to Xandra, who was moving into position behind the Knight.
“Amuse me,” invited T’Quon contemptuously.
“Well, the weakness of Chaos Knights is that they are all painfully stupid,” she said innocently as Xandra neatly decapitated the creature from behind with the Slayer’s sword.
The body of the doppelganger dropped heavily to the floor. The head landed a foot away and rolled underneath a nearby workbench.
“Yuck. I have to say that this profession involves way too many decapitations, Erin,” said Xandra. Looking at the head with distaste and holding the sword like it was a snake about to bite.
Erin took the sword from her and said with a smirk, “As job skills go, it’s not one I put on employment applications a whole lot.”
A motion at the corner of her vision caught her attention. He gaze went to the severed head beneath the worktable.
The head was moving.
Even as she and Xandra and several horrified engineers watched, the thing sprouted eight crab-like legs and skittered out from under the table like some sort of grotesque, giant spider.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” said Xandra as she watched the ambulatory head.
Erin was a split second too slow in reacting and the creature managed to scuttle beyond the arc of her rushed sword swing.
It made a bee-line for a round opening near the base of the wall and promptly disappeared through it.
“Where does that go?” Erin demanded from one of the still dumbstruck technicians. She pointed toward the opening with her sword.
The tech took a moment to think coherently again and said, “To a four foot diameter conduit that contains the graviton accelerator guide tube. We use the conduit to inspect the tube for vacuum leaks and to maintain the superconducting electromagnetic accelerator elements.”
Erin frowned at the opening. “Sheesh, could you have made the damn thing any smaller?”
The tech shook his head. “That was the biggest automated borer we had. To make it larger would have required a lot more time — time we didn’t have.”
Erin sighed asked, “What kind of damage can it do in there?”
“If it’s here to sabotage the cannon, all it has to do is damage the graviton injectors. It’s a fairly delicate mechanism.”
The Slayer said a choice profanity under her breath and shrugged out of her fatigue jacket. She unsheathed her combat knife and moved over to a workbench where she picked up a spool of nylon twine.
As she began to bind the knife onto the end of a four foot section of three-quarter inch pipe, she said, “Guess I’m going to have to go get it out of there, then.”
“Are you nuts?” asked Xandra. “There’s barely enough room for you to crawl in there. You’ll be a sitting duck!”
Erin tied off the twine and hefted the pipe with the knife at the end of it.
“I’ll be a sitting duck with a spear, actually,” she said.
“You are nuts!” said Xandra.
Erin winked at her and headed for the conduit. “Yeah, but I’m the good kind of nuts.”
* * *
Even as she was emerging from the wormhole from Hell Two Six Alpha, Mac shouted, “Jenny! Recalculate the wormhole coordinates. Two hundred twenty yards on a bearing of thirty degrees off the current wormhole axis, elevation plus one hundred point six meters, time index plus thirty seconds from our crossover back here.”
“I’m on it,” said Jenny, immediately setting to work on the new coordinates.
Mac surveyed the others as they came through the event horizon after her.
There was a cold gleam in her eyes as she said, “Okay gang. Safeties off. On crossover, fire at your discretion. This ain’t no tea party. Let’s show those boys on the other side what Hell is all about.”
* * *
Buffy Two Six Alpha looked with resignation from the demons advancing below to the vast schools of bloated, scavenging Phages that were bearing down on them. She felt the determination of moments ago ebb along with the magic that coursed through her. She looked down at the empty submachine gun in her hand and tossed it to the ground. Deep down, she knew that it was time, finally, to stop fighting and do something much, much more important with these last few moments of life.
She crossed to her daughter, looked deeply into the green eyes that looked so much like her own, that held the same fire of youth and defiance that her own must have held once, and she felt suddenly very sad. No fear or anger anymore, just a deep, horrible sadness.
She pulled the girl into a tight embrace and said, “I am so sorry, ’Lise. God forgive me, I am so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
Buffy felt her daughter return the embrace and she smiled through her tears.
“It’s okay. I’m still glad you’re my mom. I love you,” said Elisa hoarsely.
Buffy sniffed and looked up to say something to the others when, for an instant, time and space seemed to distort like a balloon being twisted, and something extremely strange happened in the valley below.
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” said Spike, looking down into the ravine from the crest.
The others joined him.
Where the valley and its plague of demons had been moments before was now a hemispherical bowl about two hundred yards across and a hundred yards deep, cut as smoothly out of the ground as if a giant billiard ball had been pressed into the earth and removed.
The leading ranks of the demons, the ones who were already on the ridge, were still alive, and so were those much farther away at the perimeter of the crater, but the rest were gone. The demons advancing up the slope had begun to scatter and flee pell-mell, their cohesion broken and morale routed by the sudden turn of events.
“Can this trip possibly get any more strange and incomprehensible?” asked Xander of the universe in general.
“Well, yeah, actually,” said Buffy, scrubbing tears from her eyes and smiling as a pinpoint of silver light formed in the air several yards away. The point expanded into a whirlpool of cold light.
A moment later, Buffy Three Echo Foxtrot stepped from the vortex, submachine gun in hand and sword across her back.
“Somebody here call for a cab?” she asked. She ran her half-blind gaze over the assemblage and asked, “Where’s Buffy Two Six Alpha?”
“That’d be me, actually,” said Buffy.
“I don’t have time for your games, Lillith,” said Echo Fox as she was joined by Mac, Cordy, Faith and Willow stepping through the wormhole. Buffy was pretty certain that Cordy and Willow were “her” Cordy and Willow.
“No games. We’re both sort of sharing a room right now,” said Buffy.
Echo Fox raised an eyebrow and looked at Angel. A haunted look crossed her face momentarily, then it disappeared behind a mask of toughness and resolve.
“Is she being on the level, Angel?” asked Echo Fox.
“As far as I can tell, yeah,” he said.
“It’s really kind of complicated,” said Buffy.
“It always is with us,” said Echo Fox
“Time to go,” said Mac.
Buffy found the statement difficult to argue with.
Just then the ground in front of the wormhole erupted in a geyser of rock and earth with something dark and malignant at its core. The displaced earth hung in space, gathering itself into a miniature tempest around the thing in its center, forcing the group to shield their eyes against the swirling debris.
“Going somewhere, girl?” asked a deep voice that grated and resonated like boulders being ground together in floodwaters.
Buffy Two Six Alpha forced herself to look past the flying earth into the thing at the cyclone’s heart. She reached outward with the senses of Slayer and Elder Power combined, and her mind recoiled at what it found.
Cade!
* * *
Hudson arrived to a scene of chaos and was just in time to see a seven-foot tall flyer take a man’s head off with a razor sharp, scythe-like protrusion on its forearm.
“Hey, flyboy! Come get some!” he yelled at it.
The thing turned, hissing, its demonic features glistening with blood and saliva. The red eyes burned like coals in the darkness.
Hudson’s 12-gauge settled onto its target even as the creature strode toward him on its long, backwards-bending legs.
The shotgun erupted with a flash and a constellation of bright, brief embers of burning powder, an infinitesimal pyrotechnic addition to the colossal artillery barrage still taking place behind him. The silver and cold iron pellets tore through the creature’s chest, blowing a hole clean through the torso, obliterating the central nervous system, and sending the creature collapsing in a heap.
His peripheral vision caught a second flyer swooping in low out of the darkness toward him, and he pivoted smoothly. The shotgun bucked against his shoulder and the flyer spun crazily into the ground, hissing and shrieking, its right wing shattered. It didn’t last long as the men with him finished it off with their battle rifles.
“Everybody form the Hell up on me and let’s slap these punks!” he yelled at the faltering troops on the ridge during a lull in the bombardment.
Something strode out of the night with burning, blood red eyes and Hudson snarled as it came for him. The thing was a type of zombie he’d seen before, fast and intelligent, worked over with necromantic alterations until it was a ruthlessly efficient killing machine.
It bore down on him with vicious, single-minded purpose, closing the gap of darkness.
The zombie slid to a halt as it realized its mistake, staring down the dark barrel of the shotgun, held one-handed at arm’s length by Hudson. A strange, quiet heartbeat passed as soldier and monster stood frozen in stark relief in silver moonlight against the dark ridge.
“Hail to the king, baby,” said Hudson, and the zombie’s head vanished.
“That’s gotta hurt,” he added, turning to the others. “Come on, you pussies! Let’s kick some ass!”
Some wall of fear broke down in the nearly routed troops. They’d seen they could win. They now knew their enemy could die.
And in the chaos and the dark, the humans began to stem the demon tide on Hill Tango.