He knew what they were now. The grunts had nicknamed them Stalkers. Fast-moving, close-in killers. But these ones looked different. Devolved somehow, feral. Purer. It seemed they had lost their ability to think tactically, but now, if anything, they were faster, and hunting like a pack, albeit one with deeply suicidal tendencies.
Chino had a really stupid idea.
‘Hank, I need you to trust me and follow me!’ he shouted.
‘Where we going?’ Hank shouted back and then continued firing burst after burst.
‘Out the window. We’re going to jump to the building opposite, it’s really close,’ Chino lied. Hank didn’t answer.
Chino ran at one of the broken full-length windows. He fired the Majestic one-handed, as he ran, at the Stalker close to the window. The first shot missed. He had a moment to reflect on the stupidity of basically charging one of these things and fired the second shot when he was practically on top of the thing. The muzzle flash illuminated its alien countenance. It staggered back but didn’t go down, swung at Chino with its bone blade. The blade tore into Chino’s arm as he left the ground, turning him slightly in the air. His blood flew out of the wound in an arc, looking black in the moonlight.
He was in the air, jumping through the mist. He had no idea if there was a building nearby. He knew that many of the streets and alleys in Chinatown were narrow. He knew that many of the buildings were lower than the one he had jumped from and had flat roofs. And he knew that if there was no roof then the streets below him were submerged under ten feet of water. Falling through the air didn’t seem quite the calculated risk it had moments before, when he was about to get torn apart by the stalkers.
The roof hit him hard. He screamed as he went down on his already injured leg and collapsed onto the surface of the roof, losing more skin from his arms as he slid and tumbled across it.
He sat up and looked behind him. The building he’d just jumped from was obscured in the mist. It even distorted the constant staccato hammering of Hank’s MMG. All Chino could see was the muzzle flash from the Georgian’s weapon illuminating the mist from within whenever it fired.
‘C’mon man!’ Chino shouted, mostly to himself. ‘Jump, bitch!’
He had holstered his Majestic and was sliding a shell into his shotgun when the firing stopped. He heard Hank screaming. It was getting closer. Chino saw the ex-marine appear through the mist. He impacted at chest height against the edge of the building, spitting out blood. Chino reached for him. A Stalker appeared out of the mist right behind him, flying towards them.
Chino brought the shotgun up one-handed and fired the only round the weapon had in it. The recoil almost took his arm off. The blast caught the Stalker, spinning it in mid air. It hit the side of the building and bounced. Chino reached for Hank, who in turn was reaching for him. The second Stalker practically landed on Hank’s back. Chino let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the Majestic. The Stalker was repeatedly stabbing Hank with its blades, holding onto him with its strangely jointed legs. Hank let go of the building. Chino moved to the edge. He saw his buddy disappear into the mist below, the Stalker still savaging him. He didn’t even hear the splash.
Part of the building seemed to explode, throwing fragments into the air that tore into Chino’s exposed flesh on his arms and face. The heavy calibre tracers looked slow far away, but a trick of perception made them seem to accelerate the closer they got. More than one gun emplacement was targeting the roof he was on. Chino staggered to his feet and took off at a limping run, parts of the roof collapsing behind him.
‘Give me a break, you fuckers!’ Chino reached the other side of the roof and jumped.
The fire was daring the lesser gods to strike him down. They didn’t. He smeared the ash on his face, covering it. Making it grey. He would become one of the dead.
His prey hung from the partially destroyed false ceiling of the open plan office he’d found. He pushed the knife into exposed flesh and forced it down, trying to gut it like it was Earthly, though its kind had been here longer than humanity.
The blood wasn’t a different colour to his but it was thicker somehow, more viscous. He collected it in an oversized novelty NYC mug.
‘Sorry, brother,’ he told his prey. ‘I need to take your spirit so I can hunt.’
As he used the blood to make a horizontal line across the ash on his face, over his eyes, he saw them. The dead surrounded him. Those he’d seen die, those he’d killed, human, Ceph, it didn’t matter. Aztec and Jester stood at the fore. They said nothing, they just watched him.
‘There’s still shackles on the human spirit, brothers. Our enemy’s hiding in the same place it always has. Inside.’ They said nothing, watching him, judging him. Dane looked away first. ‘I’m waiting for the Sun King,’ he told them. He knew it wasn’t enough, though he’d seen the sky catch fire.
Chino reflected on the training that kept him fighting against inevitability.
He’d jumped, blindly, fallen about five storeys into water. The water had slowed him significantly but he’d still hit the street under it hard. Pain had shot through his already wounded leg and he’d all but kneed himself in the jaw.
He found a place to lie low but he could still hear the hooting and the clicking. There was movement in the water and movement through the surrounding buildings. They were still hunting him.
But they’re a pack, he told himself, packs are finite.
He had dried, stripped, cleaned and reloaded the Marshall shotgun and the Majestic revolver. Then, moving as stealthily as he could, he had gone looking for a place for his last stand.
What he’d found, tactically speaking, was a shit place for a last stand. It was surrounded on all sides by high buildings. Chino was hoping that the narrow street would shield him from the CELL gun emplacements.
He slid into the water quietly. I’m the alligator, he thought inanely, overcoming the urge to giggle brought on by tension. He did the breaststroke out to the submerged delivery van. Most of it was under the water. Only the roof showed over the surface. By using this at least I have a moat, he thought. The Stalkers would have to swim to him, or jump, he thought. During the New York incursion the Stalkers had had some kind of ranged weapon. He hadn’t seen these new ones use it yet. Either they’d run out of ammunition or this purer form preferred the blades. He was banking on that. If they could engage him at range he was screwed.
‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ Chino muttered to himself. He lit two road flares and held them up high. They illuminated the dark, narrow, Chinatown street with their phosphorescent, flickering, red glare.
Whatever happens tonight some other motherfuckers are dying with me, he thought.
He looked up, searching for the moon, and howled at the broken cityscape.
Then he waited, listened and watched.
He heard the clicking and the hooting first. Then the sound of water gently rippling against the side of the sunken delivery van. Then the sound of blades scraping against stone. He could see them now, dark shapes in the water. Dark shapes clinging to the side of buildings, moving towards him.
He dropped one of the road flares into the water. It spiralled down to the bottom, illuminating alien shapes moving sinuously towards the submerged delivery van.