Malachai Page 17

  This enemy never planned to hit Ogru-Kuche with a single team from a single location. That would be suicide. The third team was a drop in the ocean. Now they would strike the building with all their power. They probably had thousands of troops stashed right here in Central City.

  Another cry snapped him out of his trance. He whipped around to see figures swarming into the yard. The explosives booming everywhere didn’t stop them. He couldn’t follow them all fast enough to see what defenses they used, but they weren’t human—at least, not the way he thought they were.

  A continuous din burst from every window and door, but he couldn’t lash out fast enough to stop them overrunning the building. They would invade Ogru-Kuche in seconds.

  He pivoted around the other way. He would take out as many of them as he could. That was the best he could do, but when he faced the street, a rocket soared straight at him. It collided with his head and thumped into his forehead.

  His head whipped back. His neck cracked and he blinked the stars out of his eyes. The next instant, a million tiny biting flies closed him in darkness. They squirmed and crawled and bit and pinched all over his hide.

  He shook his head to get them off, but they stuck to him. He pried his eyes open just long enough to see tiny black specks writhing and burrowing all over his scales. He couldn’t get them off no matter what he did.

  He felt himself succumbing to panic. He twisted his neck around and unleashed his flaming breath on his own skin. It seared his scales and flooded him with agony, but it didn’t touch those things. He sensed them pulling him to the ground. He fought to keep his balance, but the next thing he knew, the world vanished and he knew only pain and the brutal void.

  21

  Down in the war room, Isabelle shrank away from the walls thudding with one concussion after another. She bumped into the table and jumped, but she had nowhere else to retreat.

  The big double doors that seemed so solid a few minutes before shook on their hinges. The floor vibrated and terrible rumbles groaned through Ogru-Kuche.

  Isabelle shuddered, but she couldn’t do anything but wait. She shifted her AK-47 to her other hand and wiped her sweaty palm against her jeans. She wished like anything she could fight. Anything would be better than this dreadful waiting.

  Across the room, Riley and Victor stood in a huddle with Coop and Nolan Slaughter. They gestured with their hands and Victor nodded. What were they telling him? Were they talking against Malachai? Were they planning to do something to him for standing up to Victor the way he did?

  While Isabelle watched, Riley said something to Victor, nodded, and broke away from the group. She approached Isabelle and her eyes lit up with recognition. “Hey, there. Are you okay?”

  Isabelle handed her gun to her other hand and wiped that one, too. No matter what she did, she couldn’t stop herself from sweating. “I wish we could get on with it. I don’t like not knowing what’s going on upstairs.”

  Riley cast a glance over her shoulder toward the door. When she did, Isabelle saw the same nervous agitation holding her friend tight and tense. “They’ll be down here any second, from the sound of things.”

  Isabelle puffed out her breath. “How do you do it? How do you stay so calm knowing….?” She couldn’t finish.

  Riley burst into hysterical giggles. “Calm! Is that what you think I am?”

  Isabelle brushed her palm across her forehead. “I don’t think I can do this. I wish I was up there fighting with…..” She couldn’t even say his name. She couldn’t think about him facing death up there while she huddled down here defended by half a dozen people.

  Riley pivoted around to stand next to her. She took a position next to Isabelle’s shoulder and leaned against the table. She copied Isabelle’s position and made it look like Isabelle rested against the table on purpose.

  Riley pointed her chin toward Victor. “He’ll be all right up there. You don’t need to worry about him.”

  Isabelle trembled all the way down to her guts. The torturous agony of not knowing what was happening upstairs robbed her of all her strength. “How can you be sure? What if…..?” She gulped hard. “What if he’s getting hurt or killed up there?”

  Riley dropped her voice to a whisper. “If he is, he’s dying or getting hurt doing what he loves. He’s doing what he has to do. I learned that a long time ago.”

  Isabelle opened her mouth, but when she looked at her friend, she couldn’t voice her worst fears. Riley didn’t explain how she knew about Isabelle and Malachai. In a way, Isabelle didn’t need to understand how Riley knew. Maybe Riley just picked it up on the airwaves. Maybe being New Breed gave her superhuman intuition. How should Isabelle know anything about the New Breed?

  She just didn’t care anymore who found out. Riley was bound to find out one way or the other. Isabelle was only happy she didn’t have to explain it.

  Riley slipped her arm around Isabelle’s shoulder. “He’ll be all right. You’ll see. We all will be.”

  At that moment, a particularly devastating blow struck the double doors. Instead of shaking, they flew open and a Felicia Robinson darted in. She rushed screaming into the war room and ran full tilt into Victor.

  He spun around and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Hold up there, girl! What’s going on? Where’s the fire?”

  “They’re inside the building!” She shrieked trying to yank out of his grasp. She whipped one way and then the other staring all around her with wild, unseeing eyes.

  Victor’s visage darkened in a mask of black fury. He shook her by the arms and bit his words behind locked teeth. “How did they get in? How did the military guys get past our troops?”

  “They aren’t military!” she screeched. “They’re mutants! They’re using magic! They pulled down Malachai! He’s out there right now and all of ‘em are inside the building! They overran our people! They’re going room by room and floor by floor. There’s no one standing between them and….”

  Isabelle’s blood ran cold. Malachai was outside right now. Every instinct told her to go to him, to fight her way through any danger to help him, but at that moment, a force like a freight train blasted down the stairs. It rushed through the doors into the war room.

  Victor spun around and the thing hit him in all its power. It knocked him clean off his feet. He shot off the ground flying backward. The ethereal intruder bowled Felicia aside. At the same moment, Colonel Weeks whirled around to face…. whatever it was.

  Riley lunged off the table roaring at the top of her lungs. In a fraction of a second, she and Victor and Colonel Weeks all transformed at the same time. Isabelle couldn’t follow the change tearing through them all at once.

  In the blink of an eye, they leaped off the ground and three massive dragons pounced toward the stairs. Under their spiked wings, Isabelle caught a glimpse of all the monsters of her nightmares thundering down the stairs charging for the room.

  Coop and Nolan Slaughter barged into Isabelle’s line of sight and blocked her view of the battle. Coop rushed her bellowing in her face. “Fall back! Get the fuck out of here! You heard The Man! Get back now!”

  Isabelle didn’t think twice. Those words acted on her very will. Those words came from Malachai. He ordered her to defend herself, not to throw her life away on a fight she couldn’t win.

  She wheeled around and snatched her AK off the table. Its weight felt unimaginably good in her hands. She darted around the table heading for another exit leading to the armory. She already dove for it when Coop pushed her from behind.

  A thunderous din made her look over her shoulder, but she couldn’t understand the evidence of her own senses. Monsters more hideous than any horror film crawled all over those dragons. The giant reptiles filled the whole war room with their leathery wings and shook the walls with their enraged shrieks.

  The next instant, Coop grabbed her elbow. He propelled her toward the stairs and she dropped down into the armory. The concrete room had only one entrance and one exit. Isabelle’s hea
rt stuck in her throat. They couldn’t get out. They had to make their stand right here. If they fell, they would never make it out of here.

  Coop spun around. Nolan rushed one of the open cabinets. He got out a box of ammo and started cramming the bullets into an empty clip. He took down one gun after another loading them as fast as he could. A tattoo of a cobra rippled on his bare forearm with every clench of his fist.

  Coop went very still and quiet facing the doorway the party just passed through. He narrowed his eyes at nothing. Isabelle swallowed hard. She never expected to be here, fighting for her life against a force more powerful than all the New Breed of Anarock.

  How could she hope to survive when all these shifters and magicians couldn’t hold off those men? Felicia said they weren’t military. They were something else. They had some power the New Breed couldn’t combat, so what hope did she have?

  She was nothing special. She was just human. Now she understood how truly pathetic that was. Humanity was an anachronism of history. These New Breed possessed all the evolutionary advantage and who knew what other species and superspecies were running around loose in this world?

  The US military shot themselves in the foot with that toxic spill. Now they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. They created the New Breed and God only knew what other monstrosities. These new groups would put humanity in the ground and take over the Earth. That was obvious to the simplest mind.

  The building shuddered to its foundation. She gripped her AK, but now she realized what Malachai had been trying to tell her. When the shit hit the fan, an AK-47 would do exactly nothing. Bullets meant nothing to these people.

  A sickening groan wrenched the building. Nolan froze in his frantic hurry to load as many guns as he could lay his hands on. The snake on his arm stopped slithering and quivering. Coop never moved. He never took his eyes off that door. His very stillness gave Isabelle the shivers.

  Just then, a high-pitched scream ripped through the building. A rush of wind blew down the stairs. The next instant, a cloud of whizzing, buzzing insects flashed into the armory. It swept Coop’s long hair back from his face. It surrounded him in a smudge of movement, but Isabelle couldn’t make out individual particles. Whatever it was made a solid whining blur of energy spinning all around him.

  He waved his arms for a second. The next minute, he erupted out of his skin. A massive body rippling with muscle broke the young man apart and a huge bear reared onto its hind legs. It roared at those things, but he couldn’t hit them swinging his great paws.

  He screamed once and the cloud closed around him. For a second, Isabelle couldn’t make out his shaggy body in the darkness. Nolan dropped his gun and lunged for his brother. He bellowed out loud and shifted flying through the air. He dove straight into the black vapor and…. vanished.

  Isabelle clamped her fingers around her AK. Her chest hurt holding back her breath, but when she swung up her weapon to fire, those things detached themselves from the brothers and rocketed into the armory.

  In half a second, they packed the room to bursting. She spun one way and then the other, but she couldn’t see anything to fight. What were they? They bounced off her cheeks and hands, but she still couldn’t see insects or whatever they were. They winked and blinked like a thousand tiny pinpricks.

  Millions upon millions of them flooded the chamber. The pressure drove her insane, but she couldn’t fight them. She couldn’t do anything but suffer the maddening sharp ticks of them hitting her.

  The screaming drone in her ears threatened to destroy her. She wanted to scratch them off her cheeks, to shriek at them to leave her alone, but she dared not open her mouth. She didn’t want them getting inside her.

  Her hands flew to her ears to block out that horrible noise. She shut her eyes against death, but at that moment, a cataclysmic concussion hit her in the middle. It blasted the air out of her lungs and hurled her backward. She smashed into something solid and unforgiving. Her head slapped into the surface and she lost consciousness, but only for an instant.

  The black veil descended over her brain, but a second later, she drifted to the surface. She emerged into a sea of pain that almost obliterated her will to live. Her head hurt. Her whole body hurt, but the pain itself forced her to come back to life.

  She dragged her eyes open and blinked the dust out of her sight. She didn’t understand what she was seeing. For a second, she thought she might be on the moon or somewhere…somewhere flat and devastated and barren.

  Then she saw a few buildings in the distance. Very slowly, too slowly, her brain registered they were the building surrounding Ogru-Kuche—but she wasn’t in Ogru-Kuche, not anymore.

  Broken walls jutted their jagged corners to the smoky sky. Rubble and twisted steel littered the ground on all sides. Her body hurt when she tried to breathe, but she couldn’t stay here.

  She hauled her heavy limbs out from under piles of debris. Gravel and pieces of splintered rock fell off her jeans when she braced her legs to stand up. Fragments of walls teetered and toppled with every breath of wind.

  She stumbled a few steps tripping over mangled bars. Her numb consciousness didn’t want to recognize pieces of the metal cabinets from the armory. They gave her the only clue that she didn’t just transport to some other planet. She was in Ogru-Kuche—what was left of it.

  She staggered a short distance and came to the sloping banks of a crater blasted in the Earth. Stripes of colored clay revealed where the pavement used to be. One small remnant of the stairs began near her head and ended a few feet farther up.

  She gulped down rising panic. She had to get out of here. She had to find out if anyone was left alive or if she was all alone. Even then, she could expect the military to come back at her—if in fact it was the military who attacked the building.

  She grabbed the lowest stair. Her feet slipped in the crumbly soil hauling herself up. She put her knee on the stair and it sagged under her weight, but what choice did she have? She scrambled higher. One difficult inch at a time, she pawed her way out of that hole.

  She flopped on her stomach and stared. Across what was left of the yard, she spotted four people. They weren’t the military men who attacked her in the parking lot. They didn’t look dangerous at all, but their actions told a different story.

  Two young women and what looked like a young boy faced a pile of those black, squirming dots. A wizened old man stood off to one side. A disgusting smile twisted his mouth.

  The four strangers held their hands open at their sides. A charge of energy sparked in the air. Isabelle never doubted for a second that they were the ones controlling those creatures—whatever they were.

  The things scurried and squirmed all over some large object on the ground. It heaved up and she spotted a shine of brown scales buried in the black mass. The next instant, the brown submerged and Isabelle caught a glimpse of green. She didn’t see anything more, but that green was definitely scales of a different color.

  A flash of comprehension pierced her being. That pile was far too big to be Malachai in his dragon form. They were in there. They were all in there. Riley. Victor. Coop. Nolan. They were all in there and those weird people were trying to kill them.

  They weren’t trying. They were killing them. They were killing them all. Isabelle’s heart clenched. No way. No fucking way. She wouldn’t let it happen—not while she was standing by.

  Her hands flew around her back and her fingers tightened around her gun. She didn’t think twice. She swung it up and fired. The first bullet exploded across the yard and hit that little old man square in the forehead.

  Instinct took over. For a brief instant, she was on the shooting range back at the Naval Academy. She jerked sideways and pulled the trigger. The little boy whipped backward. His arm flew out of position.

  The two young women snapped around to gape at Isabelle and she saw their eyes for the first time. They didn’t look any different from any human women, but they weren’t human. Isabelle looked straight
through the surface to the world underneath. She saw at one glance they were far from human.

  One of them flung a hand toward her, but Isabelle dropped into a world of silence and thoughtless suspension. Nothing mattered. Nothing touched her. Nothing existed beyond the tiny metal sight at the end of her pistol barrel.

  She fired…once…. twice. The first woman wavered. Isabelle rounded on her. She marched across the yard bracing to her core against this affront. Ogru-Kuche. Anarock. Those words echoed to the end of her life. These people took her in. They gave her a home. They gave her a family. They gave her the love of her life. No one was going to take that away from her. No fucking way.

  She fired again…. She fired a dozen times, again and again. She counted down the bullets in her magazine. Nine. Ten. Eleven. The first woman flipped back and Isabelle’s twelfth bullet punched through her teeth. It ripped out the back of her head. She fell so slowly Isabelle could hear the seconds ticking away.

  She rounded on the second woman. She had three bullets left, but she didn’t need them. She only needed one. She leveled down her weapon. She covered the woman’s left eye with her sight and squeezed.

  For one eternal moment, deadly silence enveloped the two women in a halo of peace and certainty. They both knew what would happen and it did. Isabelle fired. The minute the bullet left her gun, she lowered it to her side. She wouldn’t need it anymore. She did her job. Now she just had to watch and let her destiny unfold.

  The woman tottered on her heels. She and Isabelle stared each other down across miles of asphalt. Smoke and steam and dust wafted across Isabelle’s vision. They enveloped the woman in a mystical haze.

  The next instant, the woman crumpled. She folded at the knees and hit the dirt. Her body slapped sideways and her arms and legs came to rest. All those buzzing, whining specks shot off the pile. They formed a cloud in the air. The next minute, they disappeared as though they were never there.