Grey shook the dead hand from his wrist and then dove to the ground as another pterosaur swooped low to try to decapitate him. He flattened out in the mud as the thing passed only inches above him. His Lazarus pistol was five feet away, lying on the wet ground as rain pounded on it. He wormed his way toward it, snatched it up, rolled over onto his back, and brought it up, all the time praying that water and mud would not do to it what they would to an ordinary pistol. The pterosaur swung around and dove at him again, and Grey fired, praying he wouldn’t blow his own hand off.
Little red lights made the garnets pulse with light as the pistol bucked in his hand.
The pteranodon exploded above him, showering him with bloody debris.
He rolled sideways and got to his knees, spitting gore from his mouth.
Around him the fight was going badly. Only a dozen of his people were still fighting, and the last five of the pterosaurs were swirling and swooping. The animals were learning from the deaths of their fellows; they watched for the raise of barrels, then they wheeled in the air to avoid the shots.
“Defensive circle!” cried Grey, rising and firing at one of them. He missed as the monster tilted to let the storm wind shove it out of the way of the shot.
The people were too mad with fear to listen. Grey slammed the Bowie knife into its sheath and got to his feet, firing again and clipping a wing. Then he was among the survivors, yelling at them and shoving them toward the barricade.
“Huddle up! Guns out. Don’t let them get behind you. Protect the man to your right. No, damn it, your other right. That’s it. Fire. Fire.”
Two of the pterosaurs fell as the men, now in a circle, fired at Grey’s direction. The animals still darted out of the way, but Grey saw a way to use that. He waited for the volley to fire and then aimed his shot to the natural escape angle and as a pteranodon veered to avoid the bullets Grey destroyed it with the Lazarus handgun.
Again.
And again.
As each monster fell, the people at the barricade became more confident. Their aim improved, although some still shot wild and too soon. The next monster fell to a hail of bullets, and the last one, realizing that it was alone, attempted to fly between two buildings, but that was a mistake. Everyone fired.
Every bullet hit it and tore it to rags.
The men burst into cheers.
But Grey looked around. There had been twenty-seven fighters with him at the barricade, and now there were eleven.
Sixteen dead.
The cheers of the survivors died away as this truth sank like poison into their stomachs.
This was not a victory. It was a slaughter.
And all they had so far fought were Deray’s monster pets. The army, the machines, the metal giant, and the undead still waited.
As Grey stared over the wall and across the Icarus Bridge he felt his heart sink.
We’re all going to die here, he thought. And he believed it, too.
A voice — screaming his name — tore through the air, and he whirled and ran.
Chapter Eighty-One
The cry had come from Jenny. Terror and desperation mixed in equal parts.
Grey raced down the street toward the far end of town; back to the place where he had first met her. The well.
He saw her there. She was backing away from the well. Two of the townspeople lay sprawled and bloody in the rain, their bodies strangely swollen and discolored. Both corpses had deep punctures on their faces. Jenny had the Lazarus pistol in her hand, held out straight as she fired at something that came crawling over the edge. The thing was long and low, and as it moved the lightning flashed on each of its black, chitinous segments. A thousand hairy legs carried it up and over the lip of the well. Antennae whipped back and forth and a hundred tiny eyes gleamed like specks of polished coal. It was a centipede. Thirty feet long if it was an inch, and it flowed out of the depths and moved toward Jenny.
On the ground between it and Jenny were two more of its kind, their bodies blasted to fragments, steam rising as rain struck the exposed guts. Their pincers glistened with a purple venom. Another giant insect emerged from the well. And another.
“Grey!” screamed Jenny as she fired. Instead of a deafening blast, there was a hollow click. She cursed and squeezed the trigger again and again; each time yielded nothing but that empty and impotent noise. Then on her fourth pull the weapon fired. But it was already too late. The centipede was nearly upon her. Grey fired as he ran. Not a perfect shot, but it scored, and the insect was buffeted sideways as a yard-long section of its side erupted in flame. The blast threw Jenny backward, and Grey caught her with his free arm, steadying her.
“The damn gun doesn’t work!” she snapped, squeezing the trigger again and getting only the empty click.
“Stay back,” he warned, and pulled her clear as the injured centipede lashed at her. There was a barb on its tail as long and sharp as a pirate’s cutlass. Grey crouched and steadied his gun for a careful shot and blew the monster’s head off. It flopped backward, but immediately the other two crawled over it. Grey fired again and this time Jenny’s gun fired, too. One of the creatures was killed outright, its head and first ten segments bursting into balls of blue fire. The second was mortally wounded and staggered off, half its legs crippled and many of its segments ruptured. Grey holstered his pistol, grabbed the heavy wooden bucket from beside the well, and swung it up and over and down onto the monster’s head. The bucket shattered, but the impact smashed the centipede’s head to bits of shell and green blood.
He turned to Jenny. “Are you okay?”
She looked past him and shuddered. “God, are those things bugs?”
“Looks and I saw their little brothers yesterday,” said Grey, nodding. “These are even bigger.”
“Are they undead, like the dinosaurs?”
“No. I think Deray used some hocus-pocus to drive them up here.”
She shuddered. “This is what’s living down in those caves?”
“This and worse,” he answered, but was immediately sorry he said it. Her face, already pale, fell into sickness.
“We can’t fight this,” she said in a hushed whisper. “We can’t win.”
It was too close to what Grey had thought after the fight with the pterosaurs. It was probably true, but focusing on that would almost certainly guarantee their defeat. Believing in the possibility of victory, however unlikely, was the only way to keep despair from overwhelming them all.
“They’re ugly bastards and they’re scary,” he said, “but they’re alive and that means they can die like anything else.”
“They die when your gun shoots,” she snapped. “Mine keeps jamming.”
“Take my Colt,” he said, reaching for the gunbelt that was crossed under the Lazarus pistol belt. However Jenny shook her head.
“Maybe Doctor Saint can fix mine. In the meantime I’ll get my shotgun. I trust that.”
She ran off before he could say another word. Once again she seemed to have shifted inside her skin. The dreamy-eyed woman he’d made love to last night was not evident. This morning she had been thoughtful and enigmatic, now she was the fiery farm woman again.
Grey peered over the edge of the well and saw nothing but shadows down there. No other monsters came climbing out of the water, but that was hardly reassuring. Who knew how many more of them Deray had to send. A party of armed men was hurrying down the street, drawn to the commotion but too late to be of immediate use. When they saw the dead insects they slowed and then stopped to gape.