Anthem's Fall (44 page)

There was no screaming or shouting among the moving crowd, save a few individuals. It was not as his imagination or as Hollywood would have pictured such a rush. There was only the panting and huffing of running. The majority were simply too preoccupied with pushing forward to shout out.

Then Sam stumbled and nearly tripped as the pavement beneath him lurched. Pinging sounds came from above. He steadied his feet and looked skyward to see a thick steel cable of the suspension bridge sailing through the open air, snapped free from its heavy load. The visible horizon of Brooklyn’s skyline shifted to a forty-five degree angle with the bridge underneath him. His orientation in space became jarred. Something hard hit him in the left hip. Sam heard a deep popping noise, and he looked down with incomprehension at the rear bumper of a Honda that had slid due to the sudden incline of the bridge. It had crushed his pelvis and pinned his lower half against the side of a Volvo. There was no pain. He heard a crumbling of pavement—or perhaps it was the pulverized bones in his legs—and a deep sound of yielding iron.

At once he was thrown upside down, his world moving in slow motion. He was falling. Sam tumbled and spun through open space, and his vision rotated between grayish swells and white-capped crests to the crystal blue sky. As he fell closer and closer to the unwelcoming water, his mind could not, would not, comprehend what would happen upon impact.

Plooosh
.

Cold. Dark. Hell was not blistering and fiery; it was this. The icy river clutched at his helpless body, pulling him deeper, swallowing his life and extinguishing the fire in his heart. Countless watery and gurgling screams—his own one of them—filled his ears like dreadful whale calls in the blackness.

Then there was nothing.

…

Vengelis had specifically told them no theatrics, so Darien flew north up the span of the eastern river loosening cables and ripping out load bearing rivets on the several bridges. He turned and watched each monumental bridge waver and buckle before unceremoniously collapsing with a mighty splash into the river to an orchestra of shrieks—both man and steel. The span of choppy water steadily narrowed as he made his way north, and as he knocked out several smaller bridges, Darien soon recognized the conspicuous form of the Lord General flying above the rooftops to his west. With a last glance down the now unobstructed, albeit trouncing waterway, Darien veered up to meet his fellow Imperial First Class.

“All set?” Hoff called as he came into earshot.

“Yeah,” Darien said. “Should we head back to Vengelis?”

“Please,” Hoff glared at him contemptuously as they came to a halt, “I’m sure he won’t have difficulty handling himself, and if he does all he has to do is call for us on the remotes. I spent way too much time stuffed in that goddamn
Harbinger I
. I’m enjoying the open air.”

Hoff brushed some crumbled cement from his shoulder and soared past him, and Darien hastened alongside. “For the life of me I don’t understand what we’re doing.”

The Lord General said nothing, but looked back and forth across the enormous now secluded city that sat imperial and proud under a crown of navy skies. A colorful park blotted in autumn hues spread out before them, its colorful stands of trees and paths enclosed on all sides by dense buildings. On its south end, the park gave way to the tremendous skyscrapers in the center of the city. Yet below the impressive spires and broad impassive facades, the teeming avenues and streets were seething with anarchy. The sounds of the felled bridges had carried like a herald of carnage across the rooftops. There was an enormous exodus northward, and countless heads and shoulders of the rushing stampede hid the very asphalt of the streets and sidewalks. It appeared as though the denizens of New York believed their city to be next on the list of destruction, and a riot seemingly five million strong was permeating through the city, a blood curdling mutiny upon civilization.

In the crowding blocks and intersections, anything that could be picked up was being lugged and heaved through glass panes of storefronts. Men and women were running out of retail shops with armfuls of electronics boxes and lumpy heaps of new clothing. On other street corners, people were congregating and shouting at regiments of police officers armed with broad plastic shields. The rioters were flinging debris at the organized lines of pushing police. The paltry riot squads were overtly fighting a losing battle. Despite the faint pops of rubber bullet rounds and the whooshing hisses of cloudy tear gas, they were incapable of pacifying the sheer scale of havoc that was growing exponentially around them.

“What are they doing?” Darien asked.

“Their system is breaking down. They’re panicking,” Hoff said as he ran the back of his hand over his nose. A wafting smell of pungent tear gas had lifted in the breeze and rose to greet them, proving only a mere annoyance against their resoluteness.

“When the Felixes attacked, we fought them to the last man—to the last child. Now we’re attacking these people and they seem to only want to fight each other.” Darien was watching the revolution below in wonder.

“Our race was founded on discipline. Theirs . . .” The Lord General watched a group of men overtake an armored police officer and begin to beat him to the pavement, kicking and beating at his outstretched arms. “Who can say?”

Darien began to grow ill at ease, sickened, as of one watching livestock in a butcher house struggling desperate and dumb against the sudden awareness of the inescapability of their plight.

“A house of cards,” Hoff muttered, marveling at the conflicting panorama of tranquil skyline and surging street level. “Just a tap and its innards of nothingness show.”

Darien nodded silently.

Hoff then descended, soaring southward down the avenue east of the park. His skyward swoop went unnoticed by most of the bobbing heads of the migration. A few upturned eyes saw his flight and proceeded to trip over their feet and fall in their momentary bewilderment, instantly vanishing underneath the thundering of feet. Hoff came down and landed powerfully in the center of the pushing mob, looking impossibly enormous between two abandoned cars. The men and women closest to him drew back in disbelief, causing the subsequent runners to trip over them and fall. Beside Hoff, a dozen or so beautiful horses were harnessed to ornate carriages. The horses began to rear and buck as they saw Hoff and felt the raw hysteria of the crowd. Frothing at the mouth, their hooves clapped against the pavement and they dashed in every direction, several of the carriages overturning and knocking the poor beasts to their sides as they screeched and neighed.

The Lord General’s face was stoic as he looked down into the sea of horrified souls. The people were no different than the horses. They knew. The faces of the men and women illustrated their comprehension. In some instinctual way they understood he was not one of them; this nine-foot-tall giant had something to do with the destruction. The people in the front recoiled and backed away from him on all fours. Yet still the pack pushed them forward, pushing them toward the Lord General of the Imperial Army.

From overhead, Darien saw there were thousands of people pushing up the avenue toward them. The men and women in the front continued to flop and claw about, hoarsely screaming for everyone to get back. But the mob was incapable of comprehension, and foot by foot they were pushed yelling in horror toward Hoff. The rhythmic thumping of helicopters descended from above, the pilots and cameramen all stricken with terror. The camera lens was locked on the growing hysteria in the streets. It was locked on Hoff.

One of the terrible giants was in New York.

Darien was watching Hoff’s callousness with growing unease from far above when something suddenly caught his eye. An object seemed to blaze for a moment across the clear sky with impossible speed. He looked west, but whatever it had been was already gone. Darien glared uncertainly, scanning the sky and squinting between the rooftops and towers. After a pause he slowly withdrew his attention back to watch the Lord General in the avenue below.

Hoff leaned over and picked up a red Jeep that sat idling beside him. The owner had left it running, and the radio was still playing music, though it was impossible to hear against the riotous surroundings. He held the car over the ground as though it weighed nothing at all, the steel frame wrenching under the unusual weight displacement of his grip. Hoff spun in place to gather momentum, firmly grasping the undercarriage, and released the car. The car shot out of his hands as a projectile going straight into the crowd. It careened and bounced high into the air, plowing a grisly path through the densely packed men, women, and children. There was nowhere to move, nowhere to duck or get out of the way. Finally the barely recognizable car came to a stop outside a torn-down pizza shop awning. The mangled hood spurted blue crackling fire, and with a whoosh of air the gasoline tank caught fire, burping flames onto the trapped bystanders.

The sadistic interior of his soul reared its hideous face, and Hoff smiled at the slaughter. He leaned down to pick up another car to bowl through the crowd. The mob now had its priorities straight, and there was a distance between its ranks and the mysterious giant. The people in the front row were trembling and gasping as though the very sight of what they had just witnessed had knocked the wind out of them. They held out their hands, pleading and crying out for him to not kill them,
please
not to kill them. Hoff regarded their display with scorn. He picked up another larger car and began spinning in place to throw strike two.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!!

At first it was unclear what had happened. The street—the entire city—rattled as though a meteor struck the pavement between Hoff and the mortified crowd. The impact was deafening, and a shockwave of cloudy debris kicked up, obscuring the chaos of the street in dust. The intersection fell into a still silence, all uncertain what had just occurred.

“What the hell?” Hoff whispered as the dust slowly settled back to the ground. He let the car he was holding fall with a jangle to his feet, the windows shattering.

A young man was standing in front of the motionless mob. The avenue was cracked in a wide crater around the mysterious young man’s feet. Hoff blinked several times at the strikingly familiar sight. He was looking at one of his own. It was a Primus of obvious Royal descent clad in flawless Imperial First Class armor that glinted in the sunlight. A long threadbare crimson cloak shifted slowly in the cool breeze behind the strange young man, and underneath the shadow of the cloak’s hood, a pair of sharp eyes bore into him with cold fury. The Lord General stared at the face of a ghost, an apparition of an unspeakable event long forgotten. Darien silently descended, landing beside Hoff and examining their mysterious guest, who was decked in Imperial First Class armor, uncertainly. Hoff and Darien embraced an undimmed vision of the grandeur of Sejero champions of old, befitting the very depictions on Sejeroreich’s War Hall. The newcomer’s expression was murderous, and his fists were clenched as he smoldered with rage.

A phantom. An exile. As ever before, Gravitas Nerol stood alone.

The people on the street sensed the sudden uncertainty, perhaps even fear, in the monstrous faces of the mammoth god-destructors. The enmity between the lone young man and the two giants was palpable, the power of their standoff emitting an electric charge. Men and women, complete strangers, looked from one another to the pair of giants to the surreal young man with feeble misunderstanding. Then, one by one, they began to move behind the cloaked man that had descended from the sky, or was it from the heavens? Just as they could perceive the danger of the giants, they knew—somehow, someway, in some visceral sense they could tell: this one was on their side.

This god was here to protect them, and for the first time in history, humans rallied helplessly behind a higher being—they rallied behind the last son of house Nerol.

F
or a long moment it seemed as though time stood still as the intense standoff persisted. From the bewildered bystanders to Gravitas to the two giants, all characters seemed unwilling to break the profuse silence. In their immoral clamor, the depraved hyenas had awoken the sleeping lion, and now he stood before them. At the head of countless scared faces, Gravitas Nerol waited for the two Imperial First Class soldiers to break the hush.

The two giants looked back at him, standing shoulder to shoulder, each with an equally mystified expression. The mangled Jeep that had been thrown was crackling and sizzling on the sidewalk, emitting an acrid stench of melting plastic and upholstery. In the corner of his vision Gravitas was aware of a helicopter thumping over the trees of the park and recording every second of the standoff, the sound of its presence barely perceptible over the roar of the panicking masses in the streets and avenues.

At last the slightly larger of the two behemoths stepped forward, his leg the girth of a tree trunk. Gravitas could see from the insignias on his armor that he was high ranking, not an average grunt of the Imperial First Class ranks.

“Do you remember me?” the giant soldier asked, his voice baritone and harsh.

Gravitas looked at him with repulsion. Over the years he had almost willed himself to believe the soldiers of the Imperial Army were not as monstrous as his memory would have him believe. He let out a frustrated and pained sigh, and for the first time in many years he spoke his native tongue.

“Yes. I recognize you, General Hoff.” Gravitas spoke slowly, and drew his gaze to the other, younger, giant. “I don’t know you.”

The closer soldier nodded his grotesquely thick neck and placed a hand against his broad chest. “It’s Lord General Hoff, now. This is Royal Guard Krell Darien. I must say I was not expecting to see you again . . . Nerol.”

To this, the other warrior, Darien, looked from Gravitas back to Hoff with an incredulous expression. “
This
is the Nerol warrior?
How
?”