Ascendance (19 page)

19

D
ave had thought, as they’d raced toward 530 Park Avenue, that the city had taken the first hits from the Horde and walked through the blows. Absorbed them. He’d thought New York was counter-punching, getting its people off the streets and its fighters on to them. He realised now that he had been wrong. Or something had changed.

‘Fucking Compton,’ he said.

Karen didn’t bother asking what he meant.

They simply ran. They didn’t warp because using the weird temporal distortion was draining and Dave was going to have to learn to call on it sparingly.

They still ran faster than any human being had ever run, or ever would. Any normal human being, at least. No stitch built up in Dave’s chest as he sucked down air for the furnace inside. No pain shot up through the soles of his feet to his ankles and shins. A light sheen broke out on his forehead but otherwise they may well have been going for a slow walk to a favourite bar.
Five blocks down Park, heading toward the meet-up with Heath, he was surprised to find his idle speculation on their speed resolving into a series of simple equations that hung, suspended in his conscious memory of high school and college math classes. It was the same effect he’d experienced in New Orleans, when calculating the speed and trajectory of his attack on the Sliveen atop the church steeple. He didn’t even ask the question, not really, but the answer presented itself. They were moving at seventy-six miles per hour, he discovered. As fast as cheetahs.

He wished he’d taken Zach’s advice and found the time to measure exactly what he was capable of doing. His abilities seemed to be changing, evolving, but from what and into what remained a mystery.

They sprinted downtown, mostly sticking to the raised garden beds that divided Park Avenue. These formed a natural conduit through the dense, tangled traffic that jammed up the streets and the crowds thronging the sidewalks and spilling out onto the road, making the traffic snarl even more chaotic.

‘This is worse than before,’ he shouted at Karen.

‘It’s Compt’n,’ she said with the pronounced inflection on the name, biting down on the second syllable, holding it deep in her throat and squeezing the ‘n’ sound out through her nose. A characteristic of the Olde Tongue as it was spoken in the demesne of the Horde.

Whatever that asshole had done, it had turned millions of people out of their homes and into the streets. This was not the frightened but relatively organised rush to safety of the hour after sunset, when the first attacks had begun. This was anarchy, an unholy free-for-all akin to NOLA after Katrina.

The MetLife building loomed ahead of them, ten blocks downtown, squatting across the avenue. Fires throughout Manhattan filled the streets with a thin screen of smoke, fuelled by a dozen larger columns in the distance, each spawning a separate re-enactment of 9/11. Under happier circumstances the crowds might have put him in mind of New Year’s Eve, or a giant street party, but the heaving masses had no unity or even basic coherence. Wide-eyed, flushed with panic, they surged and boiled and seethed. Businessmen argued with cab drivers who consulted their smart phones and radios. Mothers battered their way through with strollers laden with supplies, beneath which you might see the head of a screaming child. Towed along in their wake, sometimes dragged by the arm, were the boys and girls too old to ride. Through it all, the entrepreneurial spirit of the Big Apple burned, with vendors selling food, water, weapons and offers of transport to safety. One guy even had T-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with the ‘Battle of the Apple’. Most featured an anime-style Hunn holding an apple, taking a bite and spurting bloody spray across the white fabric. Dave wondered how he’d had them made up so fast, and what sort of idiot would spend time doing that when he should be running for his fucking life.

Someone who needed the money, part of him thought. Or someone who thought ahead.

The lights of a dozen police and fire vehicles strobed, their sirens screaming, amplified authoritarian voices ordering people to clear the way.

It was all for naught.

The roar was so painfully loud to Dave’s augmented sense of hearing that it made his head swim and he almost tripped and fell.

Ahead of him, Karen sprinted like a parkour adept, occasionally leaping from the raised garden beds to land on the roof of a car or a cab when her immediate passage was blocked by knots of people clambering over the median strip. Dave followed her lead, launching himself onto the roof of a bus at one point, landing with enough force to dent the panelling with a dull boom and rock the heavy vehicle on its tyres. He was dimly aware of muted screams and cries of terror coming from within. Probably passengers terrified a monster of some sort had just landed on the roof and was about to peel it open and start scooping them out like fat sardines. He ran along the roof and leaped over a chasm the length of two town cars to crash down on the ass-end of another MTA bus. He landed hard and blew out the rear window with a loud bang. The physics of this was all wrong, he thought. Speed, mass, acceleration, deceleration, all wrong – and then he barked a single sharp laugh. Of course it was all wrong.

Where the fuck you been, Super Dave? What part of this is right?

He jumped from only halfway along the top of this platform to avoid ploughing into a tree when he landed.

He’d made up some ground on Karen. She was finding forward momentum hard to maintain through the increasingly impenetrable densities of the crowd.

Dave heard his own name called out many times, sometimes by folks holding cell phones up to catch a picture of him.

‘We might have to get off Park,’ he shouted as they pounded up a relatively clear length of the median strip. The monster corpse he’d seen hours ago, while racing in the other direction, was still acting as a potent talisman, clearing a space around it.

‘Won’t need to,’ Karen shouted back.

He followed her gaze forward and almost stumbled again. Something was happening ahead. Something awful and vast. He could not say what, but he could see the pressure wave that travelled through the tightly packed masses. They convulsed with it, visibly flowing away from the older building in front of the MetLife, although Dave was certain that ‘flowing’ was too gentle a word for whatever was happening five or six blocks ahead of them. He knew that hundreds of people would be dying up there, crushed and trampled underfoot. The howling uproar reached them half a second later, a wall of sound, as tens of thousands of voices cried out in shock and fear. Dave almost groaned at the sudden pain of it, as though someone had jammed chopsticks in his ears.

Then it was gone, muted as though he’d turned on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Good ones, like he used to wear to watch the game when his boys were noisy toddlers. Karen said nothing. She didn’t have to. She was in his head again. Doing something to shield him from the noise. She didn’t look back, didn’t ask permission or forgiveness. She hurtled onwards, less sure of her course through the bedlam, occasionally using her speed and strength to shoulder aside anyone who got in her way.

‘Try to orb,’ she called back over her shoulder without turning around. ‘We have to get up there. Something big is happening.’ A man in a suit with one arm torn at the shoulder flew bodily through the air as she elbowed him out of her way.

Dave braced himself for the trauma of failure and pain if there should be a Threshrend nearby, but there was none, and instantly they passed from the insensate madness of the riot and into near perfect stillness. The man Karen had sent flying was arrested in midair, his face an absurd caricature of surprise. Whatever Karen had been doing to protect Hooper from the ear-shredding volume, she stopped, and Dave immediately noted that the mysterious dreamland of warp was not as quiet as usual. The low background rumble was louder.

They stopped sprinting. Whatever the Horde was up to, it would not be able to advance its cause as long as Dave maintained the warp field. He unwrapped the last of the cheese from the penthouse and broke off a hunk for Karen.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘The noise was putting the zap on my head.’

‘I know.’ She took the offered food. ‘You’re going to have to learn to control that.’

‘Yeah. Sure. I’ll get to that in my downtime. So what the fuck’s happening up there?’

Karen turned back toward the two buildings that sat across Park Avenue, the ugly modernist tower of the MetLife dwarfing the old world charm of the Helmsley Building in front of it. Karen angled her head a little to the side as though she might be able to see around it.

‘I’m not sure, but I think the problem might be in Grand Central.’

They started to move again, and Dave was struck by the unpleasant image of forcing a path through a human jungle. The heat was ferocious, coming off so many bodies, so closely pressed in on each other, running wild on what was already a warm evening. The stench was worse, bad enough to make eating the last of the cheese difficult. Dave forced it down anyway. They would need all of their reserves of energy.

‘Why Grand Central?’ he asked.

‘Tactics,’ she said. ‘I think having delivered the shock and awe, they’ll target transport and communications nodes now. I think this Compt’n thing means to collapse the city, Hooper. And if it works here he’ll do the same everywhere. If it works here it’ll be
easier
everywhere else.’

They were forced to thread their way through the traffic for half a block. The leading edge of the human pressure wave had reached this far up and further compacted the crowds. After finding their path blocked, Karen climbed on to the bonnet of a taxi and from there they made better progress, only returning to the median strip or the avenue proper when it proved impossible to jump from one platform to another. Sometimes the crowds had flowed right over the top of the traffic. Sometimes the energy of so many people all moving in one direction had served to tip over a vehicle. Dave couldn’t look at their faces. They seemed more animal than human. He did marvel at the spectacle of a minibus wreathed in unmoving flames when he first saw it. The fire looked like an especially brilliant hologram, but the heat coming off the flames was real, as was the horror of the people trapped inside.

‘We have to save them,’ he said, more as a reflex.

Karen didn’t even bother with a second glance.

‘We can’t. The fire will burn us just as surely as them. Maybe we’d live. But we’d be hours recovering, and a lot more people would die. It’s a war, Hooper. Get used to it.’

He might have argued with her, even as recently as a few hours earlier. Now he turned away and tried not to think about it. When he popped the bubble those people would die screaming and there was no way to save them without losing many more.

*

A Threshrend reached out and touched them in front of the Helmsley Building, throwing them back out of warp. The stampede had mostly cleared the ground at the intersection of Park and E46th Street. Mostly. The steady, straight line progress of Park Avenue disappeared into a viaduct in the base of the Helmsley and hundreds of bodies lay scattered there. Many still moved and twitched in their death throes. Many more were completely still. Some had been trampled to a bloody gruel. A child tottered about, screaming for her parents. An old man hugged himself and rocked back and forth over the body of somebody who hadn’t survived the terrified rout.

Karen dived to the left as soon as they fell out of warp. Dave dodged in the other direction, half blinded for a few seconds by the pixelated smear of his migraine aura. He swore as he tripped and rolled. The headache was already huge and pressing against his skull. It took a few seconds to clear after he popped the warp bubble. He cringed and made himself as small as possible against the side of a delivery van, waiting for the rain of Drakon-stone-tipped war shots and iron bolts.

None came.

‘We’re clear,’ Karen yelled from her cover, crouched down low beneath the chassis of a garbage truck.

Dave looked back up the avenue. The wide, double carriageway was still packed with crowds of terrified, fleeing New Yorkers. Road and foot traffic had merged entirely, creating a perfectly solid gridlock of stationary metal and heaving humanity. The crowd roar was still enormous, but this far removed from the worst of it he was not pained by the volume. Paradoxically, things looked much worse here, where he could see individual bodies and the ruins of burning vehicles.

He pushed himself up and followed Karin Varatchevsky into the dark stone maw of the twin tunnels running under the Helmsley Building. She had drawn her katana and pistol and advanced cautiously into the pooling shadows, no more handicapped by the dark than he was.

‘Is this a good idea?’ Dave asked. ‘I’m no expert, but isn’t this a great place for an ambush? Cut us off in here? Without warp?’

‘It’s an excellent spot for an ambush, Hooper. I commend your steep learning curve. But there are no
monstrs
here. I would sense them.’

‘Like you did with that last Thresher you totally didn’t sense back at the apartment?’

She ignored him.

The way she said ‘monstrs’, he definitely heard the original Russian in her voice. Hundreds of corpses lay in a thick carpet on the roadway that ran under the Helmsley, all of them trampled.

No.

Not all of them.

A few he saw had been cut down by edged weapons. Some were feathered with arrakh-mi bolts. The ground around those bodies was clear.

‘The Horde was here,’ Karen said. ‘Not long ago either. The Threshrend is somewhere close, however . . .’

She trailed off as if feeling for something more.

Dave stopped and knelt by one of the victims of the daemonum warriors. A man in casual office clothes, now soaked in blood and gore from the slash that had opened up his torso. A single dart protruded from one of his shoulders and Dave figured he’d been hit a short distance away and had then run until he was caught and cut down. Or rather, Urgon Htoth ur Hunn surmised as much, for he was the more knowledgeable in such matters. It was likewise Urgon who recognised the dart as not being of Sliveen origin. He wasn’t even a voice in Dave’s head. Not like Lucille. But he was there. Always.