The back of his head exploded and showered the priests behind him with red-blue and gray brains.
Top shouted, “They can bleed.”
Bunny yelled back. “Fuck ’em.”
The priests swarmed toward us, and as they did so they ran to put themselves between us and Mercer. Two of them swung their weapons in the air, and through the pall of smoke I saw that they were aiming at the drone, but Lizzie steered it sharply away.
Bunny and Top fell back a few steps to give the attackers a long run. It wasn’t because the priests were particularly hard to kill — they had no armor, no advanced weapons — but because there were so damn many of them. If we were all in the belly of a Black Hawk helicopter, hunkered down behind a minigun, then maybe this would be a quick fight. This was a different kind of fight. We had the best weapons and we had enough ammunition, but there was no guarantee at all that we had enough time to kill our way to Mercer and that damn book. Now the sheer number of people we needed to kill exceeded the time it would take to do that.
Which was bad enough. And then the spiders stopped chewing at the wall and attacked. The little ones moved like a black carpet across the ashy floor, swarming through and around the feet of the priests, climbing over the bodies that fell as Bunny fired blast after blast of his shotgun and Top burned through one magazine after another with his rifle.
I pivoted and fired over the carpet at the first of the big spiders, hitting it with three clean shots. Pieces of its carapace blew off and green muck vomited from the wounds, but the three heavy legs propelled it forward. It screeched, though; the sound was eerily like that of a child in pain. As it barreled toward me, I lowered my gun and aimed at the cluster of blazing eyes and fired again. Once, twice, three times, blowing those eyes apart but not stopping it. Not even slowing it. It was the fourth shot that hit something vital. The creature suddenly canted forward and collapsed, its momentum and weight sending it into a clumsy, broken tumble.
I tried to replay that last shot to identify exactly what I’d hit because two more of the brutes came at me. I backpedaled and fired until the slide locked back. The last bullet killed another and it fell clumsily as the third tripped over it. By the time the beast clambered back up, I had a new magazine swapped in and shot it from three feet away. Two bullets and it fell. Maybe the first killed it. I’ll never know.
More of them were coming and the pit was filled with the thunder of gunfire and the horrific cry of the monsters. I holstered my sidearm and swung the MP7 from my back, switched the selector switch to semi auto and began firing in short, controlled bursts. Top was still hosing the priests, but I needed more precision to kill the spiders. Four of them were circling the priests to try and get behind my guys. I whirled and fired.
The creatures died. The priests died.
And we kept losing ground because we were trying to use buckets to stop a tsunami.
“Cap’n,” huffed Top as he fired, pivoted, fired, “I can get Mercer from here. I have the grenade launcher. I can blow that asshole all the way into orbit.”
“No,” cried Lizzie. “Not while he’s holding the book. Not until I can see what he’s reading.”
I shot a spider in the head and needed two bursts to knock it down. “Lizzie,” I yelled, “how do we end this?”
The drone flew over my head and over the heads of the throng of priests. They swatted at it, but she kept it moving, dipping and swooping and dodging.
“Shit,” she hissed. “I can’t get a clear image.”
“Listen to me,” shouted Bunny. “There’s a green button on the lower left. It’s a Steadicam feature. Hit that and then hold the blue button to take high-speed high-def pics. Oh… shit—”
I saw him turned and kick a priest in the groin and then chop him across the face with the stock of his shotgun, then wheel right and fire three times at the men behind him. The shotgun was loaded with double-ought buckshot that tore ragged red holes and set priests screaming away as they clutched stumps of arms or tried to plug gaping wounds in their stomachs or chests. It was a dreadful thing, though, to see that most of them somehow managed to fight past the immediate reaction of pain and fear, and stagger forward again. Christ. Even knowing they were dying they kept attacking. I heard Top and Bunny both make sick sounds because it was immediately clear to all of us that wounding our enemies was not going to be enough. We had to kill them all. They were either fanatics or they were insane. Or both.
And killing requires a lot more precision — and often more ammunition — than wounding. It takes a fragment of each second to aim with precision, and we didn’t have that time to waste.
Nevertheless, Top roared, “Center mass, god damn it.”
“I am shooting center mass, Old Man,” complained Bunny. Then he saved the rest of his breath for fighting.
11
LIZZIE CORBETT KNELT in the ash at the edge of the pit, holding the drone controls in both hands. She followed Bunny’s instructions and fired the high-def camera over and over, playing with both optical and digital zoom functions. Images popped onto the screen and she froze one, discarded it because it was still too blurry; repeated the process. Again and again.
And then, on the tenth try, the image of the page popped up as clear and readable as if she held the book in her own hands.
She bent over it, eyes inches from the screen, lips moving as she worked. When doing translations, it helped her to mouth the words as she read them. It somehow made them more real.
The process of interpretation and translation was something that would normally take days or weeks, even for someone who knew the language and understood quite a bit about the culture. What confused the process was that the writing on the page was not all in a single language. There were blocks of text that were in Sumerian, but the style of the translation suggested that the translator was Akkadian. Other sections were in Latin and some short phrases, scribbled in the margins, were written in Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Hebrew. She fumbled her way through it, digging deep for the right words and meanings.
She stumbled through it, feeling the terrible burden of seconds burning off as Joe Ledger and his men fought for their lives down in the pit. The sounds of their battle rose with the smoke, though it was oddly distorted, as if their battle was a mile or more away.
Sergeant Brock leaned over the rim, coughing and using his hand to fan away the noxious fumes. He held a pistol in his other hand, and the other marines stood nearby, all of them looking as helpless and impotent as Lizzie felt.
“I can’t see a fucking thing,” complained Brock. “I mean… I should be able to, but I can’t.”
Lizzie hit a section of the text that suddenly jumped out at her. She yelled into the microphone. “Joe, Top… they’re trying to open a gate down there.”
“No shit,” growled Bunny’s voice. “It’s already half open.”
“Can you see what’s inside?”
“Red light,” said Top. “Can’t see more than that.”
“Listen to me,” she said urgently, “I thought that this was an attempt to invoke an ancient goddess, Uttu or Atlach-Nacha. But it’s not. Everything on that page is about numbers. It’s not a spell… it’s a series of mathematical formulae.”
“The fuck…?” said Bunny.
“I think I know what this might be, but I need to know what’s on the other side of the gateway. If it’s a cavern with glowing moss, then we have to handle it one way. If that’s all it is, then I think I know how to destroy the book. If it’s somewhere else, then we need to get the book and bring it up here. But I have to know one way or the other. We need to know. Can you get closer to the opening?”