I perched atop the hotel like the star of a Christmas tree. My talons wrapped themselves around the pointed tip of the rooftop. I watched over the courtyard, my lenses set to the farthest possible calibration as my sight stretched through the open gate and wide, paved street.
The sun beat straight down on us, our sights unobscured by its scorching rays. There was a soft tension in the air, a quiet anxiety in the wind. Every man held his breath.
The setup had been careful. The men had organized themselves behind each window in squads of two. One would fire as the other reloaded. Squad weapons and machine guns poked out of the lateral buildings; they would tenderize their foes from the flank.
The buildings at the mouth of the courtyard had been cleared of all soldiers and packed tightly with explosives. When William and his horde fully gathered, I would detonate the C4 — hopefully killing William and trapping his hounds in a leaden hailstorm.
The soldiers had all finished gearing up. They wore modern-looking plate carriers and vests. However, many also wore ramshackle armor that wouldn't look out of place in the Middle Ages. Forearms were reinforced with plate, torsos were wrapped in chainmail.
They wielded the rugged weaponry employed during the Long Silence: variants of Kalashnikovs mostly. Some also carried crude melee tools: homemade spears, machetes, and trench clubs.
One in particular even carried an ornate Japanese katana. His skinny build and trembling hands made the weapon look utterly out of place.
Some of the soldiers wielded a rare type of firearm I would have assumed inoperable in this ruinous age: sleek, long barrels attached to angular receivers. Magnetic coils ran up the weapons' spines. A cable connected each one to a power pack the wielder wore. This was gauze weaponry.
Each shot would take the sort of electricity that could power an apartment for a year — all to send small tungsten projectiles at a fraction of the speed of light.
I counted four total.
Steven sipped a mug of coffee. His eyes narrowed as he gazed into the open road. He had requested an M4, and I had provided it. Kiara stood by him. She had forgone a rifle in favor of her shotgun. Only now she had filled it with hollow-point slugs in place of buckshot.
Roland took his last drag from a spent cigarette before he tossed the filter into the air and split it down the middle with a falchion. He watched the cinders spread before he sheathed his blade. He held a smaller, revolver-like variant of the gauze rifles. Each cylinder contained both the battery and the projectile, totaling six shots.
Idris scratched away the skin where his mask met his face. He mumbled and tapped his staff impatiently. It seemed as if he was the only one itching for a fight.
We heard it before we saw it: the sound of hooves trotting against the ground. A single, boar-like beast sprinted through the gate and into the courtyard.
It seemed to realize its mistake as the barrels of over fifty rifles snapped toward it.
A single shot rang out and struck it in the forehead. It stumbled back for a moment before collapsing.
Then, two pairs of footsteps — four — nay, sixteen — then an uncountable cacophony. The first wave began to rush through. Animalistic bodies galloped and dashed through the road and into our killbox.
The riflemen in the central building took aim and unleashed measured bursts of firepower. The fastest of the beasts were killed instantly; each one received a lethal dose of projectiles.
The ones behind them did not falter. Bullets struck their limbs and torsos; they didn't slow. The rest of the riflemen opened fire. The plaza was filled with an incessant staccato of annihilation.
One of the beasts was hit almost twenty times. Its guts spilled, one of its arms was blasted off. Chunks of brain matter dripped through a grotesque wound in its skull. It had closed the gap between itself and the nearest building to a few meters before it abruptly collapsed and skidded across the floor, face down. It left a red streak across the ground like a madman's paintbrush.
Another dozen beasts were scythed down. More spilled through the gate. They were utterly inured to pain and fear. They were no more resistant to harm than any animal. However, they would keep fighting, unbothered by their wounds, till they dropped dead.
The influx of new foes only accelerated. The beasts clambered over the bodies of their fallen. They slowly bought themselves inches of terrain with each death they received.
Soon enough, they began to gain on us. More of them began to break through the center of the plaza and approach the open doors and windows. Roland took note; he blew a whistle, and the plaza was filled with the rapturous roar of machine-gun fire.
The lateral buildings lit up with muzzle flashes. Round after round of .50-cal ammunition cracked into the unguarded flesh of our foes. Each shot that landed filled the air with a bloody mist.
A bullet tore through the sides of one of the beasts and lodged itself in the neck of another. A particularly spiteful machine gunner swiveled his weapon back and forth. The unaimed stream pulverized thirty of William's horde before he had to reload.
The beasts began to charge at the lateral buildings. However, they were running straight into their own demise. A blubbery, pig-like beast almost reached one of the doorways. The machine gunner within panicked and whiffed his shots until the pig was less than half a foot away.
A shot from one of the riflemen staggered it. The machine gunner used the opening to adjust his aim and blow a crater through its skull.
This continued for about thirty seconds before an unexpected problem arose. The carcasses of the fallen began to pile up like sandbags. They shielded the beasts from the brunt of the rifle fire and softened the blow of the heavy weaponry. Our foe had cover.
They climbed up the wall of corpses and leaped. They landed mere meters from us. My algorithms had never encountered such a problem before; they had never met a foe who had zero regard for strategy, survival, or reason.
My mind rushed to find a solution. Thousands of variables flashed before me as panicked screams poked out from under the sound of gunfire.
Before I could find a solution, the first man fell.
A lion-esque beast had taken a full magazine of rifle fire across its body. Then it crashed through an open window and pounced onto a rifleman. He cried out, tried to struggle from under it. But he grew abruptly silent as his head vanished into its maw. Its jaw clamped shut, and its throat bulged. The soldier hit the floor headless.
Before it could gloat in triumph, the edge of a katana bit into its nape. The skinny soldier's eyes filled with shock as the beast's own filled with panic. The lion bled a small stream from its neck. That stream turned into a furious river as the soldier withdrew his blade.
It fell to its knees, and the soldier began to hack away at it — long after it had already been killed.
Roland blew his whistle a second time. The soldiers wielding the advanced gauze rifles suddenly stepped up and perched their weapons on the window frames. They waited for a fresh wave of beasts to land; they waited for their foe to reach a few feet of them; they waited until their claws flashed and their fangs snapped — and only then did they pull their triggers.
A low, rumbling wave of sound, so unlike a gunshot, washed across the battlefield. The first gauze rifle had fired.
It had hit one of the beasts point-blank and erased its foe's upper body. The legs that supported the beast fell away as they had nothing left to support. A thin green, ionized trail formed behind the shot. Charged particles slowly flickered like snowflakes.
A cone of death had extended past the weapon's barrel. Corpses had been turned into shrapnel. A cone of gore formed before the wielder. The shot had punched through the wall of bodies. For a moment, a spherical gap as tall as a man formed in the wall of carcasses before the bodies fell like rubble. The beasts behind it were surely shredded.
The other gauze weapons replied in exaltation. They crashed through whatever was unfortunate enough to stand before them and ripped into the beast's makeshift cover. They fired salvo after salvo. The enemy, as close as they had been, now seemed like a distant memory as the gauze blasts ripped through them. The corpse wall was reduced to slurry, along with those behind it.
They began firing down the road, mindful to avoid the explosive-packed buildings. The horde had thinned utterly within the plaza. The sheer power of the relativistic tungsten flechettes kept the enemy from ever being able to gather.
Then they stopped shooting. Their weapons steamed, the magnetic coils glowed a ghastly orange. Small lights on their weapons flashed red. The soldiers remained calm; the cooling phase had begun. The enemy had been pushed back more than enough for the other weapons to pick up the slack.
"Enough." A gentle voice declared. The command had so much weight that the world itself seemed to still. The beasts stopped their advance. Gunfire ceased abruptly. Even my calculations faltered.
William stood, clad in his black wings, face twisted in disgust.