Gallo craned her head around to watch. Behind her and just a few feet away from a stunned Kenner, a stern-looking woman—the only female she had seen in Tyndareus’s employ—drew a pistol and started firing, shouting curses in a language that Gallo did not recognize. The shooting and the swearing were silenced by the swipe of a paw. Gallo saw a puff of red, as pieces of the woman flew in different directions. Kenner dove aside at the last instant, narrowly avoiding the same fate.
As the creature thundered past, smashing gunmen aside with its paws and spearing them on its antlers, Kenner raised his head and looked back at Gallo.
No, not at me, she realized. Behind me. What he wants is on the other side of that wall.
He stooped, picked something from the ground—a gun?—and then he was running toward her. She started to backpedal out of his way, but then realized, almost too late, that she had misread his intention. There was something else behind her…someone else.
“Fi! Get away!” She tried to put herself between Kenner and Fiona, but he anticipated the move, stiff-arming her out of the way. She stumbled back, flailing in vain for something to arrest her fall, and she landed painfully on her backside.
Kenner seized Fiona by the wrist and dragged her toward the wall.
Into the wall.
They vanished without even a ripple.
Gallo leapt to her feet, and without a moment’s hesitation, she followed.
52
As the monstrous bear-elk hybrid bulldozed a swath of devastation through the midst of Tyndareus’s forces, Lazarus pulled Pierce and Carter out of the way.
At first, it appeared the creature was going to win the battle for them. Its thick hide might not have been bulletproof, but the rounds failed to penetrate deep enough to do any real damage. It was like trying to bring down an elephant with a BB gun. And while the animal might not have understood the connection between the projectiles impacting against its body and the loud flashing things in the hands of the men scattered across the ravine, the noise was driving it into a frenzy.
The battle was so one-sided that Pierce found himself hoping that one of the gunmen might get off a lucky shot and strike some vital organ or at the very least, wound a leg to slow it down. He didn’t feel any sympathy for the men, but he knew that to reach Gallo and Fiona, they would have to get past the battle’s victor.
Rohn was trying to organize the men, directing their fire and orchestrating their inevitable retreat, but the creature pushed them toward the bubbling cauldron that Lazarus’s explosives had opened. There was no escape for the men, and no way to stand against the guardian of the Underworld’s gates. One by one, the men threw down their rifles and tried to scramble up the ravine’s steep sides, but the creature’s rage was fixed on them now. There was no escaping it.
Then, a lone figure, taller than any of the men, but still dwarfed by the creature, advanced and took up a position directly in front of it. Tyndareus in his TALOS suit appeared to be challenging the bear-elk to one-on-one combat.
Powered armor or not, Pierce expected the outcome to be the same. The creature would swat the old man aside like the insect he was. The suit might survive, but Tyndareus would be pulverized inside it like an egg in a tumble dryer.
But Tyndareus had a trick up his sleeve, or rather, on it. The right arm of the TALOS suit came up and pointed at the beast. Pierce glimpsed something mounted to the forearm plates, like an extra piece of armor.
There was a loud, hollow sound, deeper but not quite as loud as the report of a rifle, and then Pierce was face down on the scorched ground next to Carter, with Lazarus covering both of them.
Another explosion blasted through the ravine, but the shock wave that socked Pierce in the gut felt more like the Primacord detonations that had felled the trees in the Amazon—firecrackers instead of dynamite.
Even before the last echoes of the blast died away, a new sound filled the air: a tortured, braying howl. The smell of burnt hair and cooking meat briefly overpowered the stink of sulfur. Pierce raised his head and saw the massive shape of the bear-elk writhing on the floor of the ravine. Pierce could not tell how serious the injury was. The creature might have been in its death throes, or it might merely have gotten a nasty shock.
“Forty mike-mike grenade launcher,” Lazarus muttered. “HE rounds. I wonder why the old man was holding back?”
Tyndareus stood his ground, hand still extended, ready to fire again, but the creature abruptly righted itself, and with astonishing swiftness for something so enormous, it bolted for the stone wall and the safety of the Underworld. It ran at the seemingly solid obstacle, as if aware that there would be no resistance, and disappeared into the stone. If not for the carnage littering the ravine floor, the whole episode would have seemed like a bizarre night terror.