“Fucking die already,” I shout, echoing Halley’s sentiment from a few minutes ago.
Behind me, some of Sergeant Fallon’s squad join in with their own weapons, the low booming reports from the M-80s making the dust jump on the concrete floor. The Lanky wails and pulls its head back, away from the gunfire. Then it lurches forward and rams its cranial shield into the hallway opening again. There’s a tortured groaning sound from overhead, and an avalanche of debris crashes down between us and the Lanky. I cover my head as the hallway turns completely dark.
“Holy hell,” Sergeant Fallon says into the squad channel with a cough. “That thing is pissed. Go augmented, people.”
I turn on the vision augmentation of my helmet visor, and the interior of the hallway comes into view again in the ghostly green-and-amber glow of night vision.
I switch frequencies on my comms suite and toggle into the drop ship’s support channel.
“Halley, do you read?”
“Barely,” she sends back. Even with my suit’s power cranked up all the way, the connection is horrible, too much ferroconcrete filling the space between us.
“We are on the ground floor,” I tell Halley. “The Lanky brought half the floor down on us. He’s hurt badly, but he’s still moving around in the atrium somewhere. If he gets out of there again, you’ll need to finish him off.”
“Second Squad is engaging the other Lanky three blocks down from where you are,” Halley replies. “I’m flying fire support. Stand by.”
I hear the staccato of cannon fire in the background of the transmission. A few seconds later, Halley’s voice returns.
“I have almost nothing left in the guns. Hold that Lanky in the atrium and finish him off. That one’s all on you. Don’t let him get away. These guys can do a ton of damage out here among the civvies.”
“No shit.” I cough out some dust. “We’ll do what we can.”
I toggle back into the squad channel.
“They’re tussling with the other Lanky three blocks away,” I tell Sergeant Fallon. “We’re on our own with this one. Can’t let him get out of here and into the streets.”
“Let’s go, then,” Sergeant Fallon says, and comes over to help me to my feet. “Gotta find a way around this rubble.”
On the other side of the rubble pile, in the direction of the atrium, the small-arms fire has started again, the irregular cacophony of gunshots from dozens of different weapons. The civvies are shooting at the Lanky again from the safety of the upper-level concourses, but if we can’t bring it down with our guns, they might as well be pissing on it from above.
I pick my M-80 rifle up, eject the bases of the empty shells from the barrels, and load the chambers with two fresh rounds. Then I follow Sergeant Fallon and the rest of the squad down the dark corridor, away from the wall of concrete debris that’s blocking our way back to the atrium.
Whatever the Lanky did knocked out the power in this part of the building. We rely on our augmented vision to traverse the hallways. Sergeant Fallon and her squad seem to be very familiar with the layout of a fifth-gen residence tower, because they never stop and check for directions as we make our way back to the atrium through unblocked corridors.
The atrium is still noisy with the sound of sporadic gunfire. The Lanky is nowhere in sight from my vantage point of the hallway, but there are chunks of concrete raining down onto the atrium floor from above.
“He’s up on the wall,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Didn’t know the bastards could climb.”
“Me, neither,” I reply.
“Five left, five right,” she says, and points to the covered space beyond the hallway entrance, where we will still be sheltered by the second-floor overhang.
I dash out of the hallway and to the nearest cover, a hip-high set of planters holding artificial flowers that have a thick frosting of concrete dust on them. Behind a nearby column, there’s a pair of armed civilians. They have weapons pointed toward the atrium. One of the civilians sees me and recoils a little in surprise. For a moment, it looks like he’s thinking about swinging his rifle toward me, but then he holds up his hand and points across the atrium.
“He’s out there on the wall,” he shouts. I dash over to their position and skid to a stop on my knees.
“You’re fleet,” he says.
“I am,” I confirm. “Followed the Lanky in. Brought some friends.”
Both civilians are dressed in olive-drab fatigues that look like they’re straight from an old history show on the Networks. They have rank insignia on their collars, the old pre-reform United States ranks we used before the services got unified four years ago. One of the civvies wears the three chevrons of a sergeant. The other wears the single chevron of a private. Their guns are a mismatched pair of antique cartridge rifles—a hundred-year-old M4 that has most of the finish worn off its metal parts, and a scoped rifle with a handle for manual bolt operation.
“Friends,” he says, and eyes the nearby HD troopers. “That kind usually ain’t friendly around here.”
“You got more people here?”
“One more fire team, up on the tenth-floor balcony. About twenty volunteers. No big guns, though. We called in for reinforcements, but they’ll be awhile yet.”
“Who are you with?” I ask.
“Lazarus Brigade,” he says.
“What the fuck is that?”
“We are the militia,” he replies, as if the answer is self-evident. “Ask those guys there. We do the job they ought to have done all these years.”
“Stop socializing over there, Andrew,” Sergeant Fallon says on the squad channel. “We have work to do. Get me eyeballs on that alien son of a bitch.”
Two of the troopers dash out to where the overhang ends and peer upward. Instantly, our TacLink feeds update with a three-dimensional representation of the Lanky, hanging on to the wall of the atrium ten floors above us. The rest of the squad follow, and we hurry out into the open, dodging rubble and falling debris.
“Not so much fun now, is it,” I say when I spot the Lanky with my own eyes. It’s crawling—or rather trying to crawl—up the inner wall of the atrium, using the overhangs of the concourse levels as hand-and footholds. But its size and mass work against it. We watch as the Lanky claws for purchase and breaks loose big shoals of concrete, which fall to the atrium in front of us with dull crashes. There’s concerted rifle fire coming from one of the higher concourses—probably the militia squad—and sporadic, random gunfire from the other balconies. The Lanky is slow and sluggish, and there are many holes and scorch marks on its hide.
“MARS launchers,” Sergeant Fallon orders. “Shoot him down, and for fuck’s sake, stay way clear. Fucker’s gonna make a splash when he hits the ground. On my mark.”
She cranks up the amplification on her suit’s PA system and shouts into the hundred-story void above us.
“Cease fire, cease fire. We are shooting rockets. Step back from the atrium. Fire in the hole!”
The civilian gunfire ebbs. Sergeant Fallon jabs an arm upward at the Lanky.