She took a deep breath, held it a moment, and then exhaled slowly. “I think so. They were in pieces, so it was hard to be sure.”
She waited for his reaction, her face expressionless. No, he decided suddenly, changing his mind, she wasn’t waiting for anything. She was in shock. She had seen something so terrible that she had been forced to lock down her emotions and retreat inside herself. It was taking everything she had just to stand there and talk to him in a composed way about what she had discovered.
“I’m sorry it had to be you,” he said, wishing she had listened to him about not going out alone. He gestured at her. “Did anything happen to you? Are you all right?”
She stared at him a moment, and then looked down at herself. “Oh, this. It’s nothing, Logan. I’m not hurt or anything. I just stayed long enough to bury them, to give them someplace to rest that wasn’t out in the open where they might be . . .”
She shuddered, shaking her head. “I didn’t have any real digging tools, and the ground was hard. It took me a while to get it done.”
“You did the right thing. It was brave of you to go out like that and then stay out.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t in any danger. Not really. See?” She lifted her mottled face as if to demonstrate.
“Better go get cleaned up and get some sleep,” he told her. “Wash off, change your clothes, have something to eat. The demon army is here, across the river. They’ll attack at sunrise.”
She didn’t move; she just stood there. “I’m tired of all this,” she said finally.
“We all are. We all want it to end.”
She bent down and set Rabbit on his feet next to her. The cat moved over at once and rubbed up against her legs, a small cry escaping. “You’re all right, toughie,” she said.
“Let’s not say anything to Fixit right away,” he told her. “Let’s give it a day, get past whatever’s going to happen tomorrow. He doesn’t need to hear about this until then.”
She smiled bleakly. “He doesn’t need to hear about this ever,” she said as she walked away. “I wish none of us did.”
She disappeared back into the darkness, Rabbit hopping at her heels.
THE ONCE-MEN ATTACKED JUST AFTER SUNRISE, just as Logan had known they would. They dispensed with preliminaries, eschewing any sort of effort at softening up the defenses with light-weapons fire or small cluster shells, and just threw themselves into the fray. They swept out of the fading shadow of the mountain range and through the glare of the morning sun in wave after wave of screaming, howling insanity. Some carried automatic weapons, but many had nothing more than rudimentary blades and lengths of pipe and wood. Weapons seemed of little consequence to them. Rational behavior was swept away by undisguised bloodlust. There was no coordination to the attack, no semblance of order or sophistication of battle tactics in evidence. It was primal and raw and bereft of anything but maddened determination.
Feeders followed in their wake, thousands strong, bounding across the terrain like wild animals.
The defenders did what Logan had ordered them to do. They crouched behind their protective barricades and watched. The first waves of attackers triggered the cluster mines and were blown apart. The second and third waves triggered the flamethrowers and were burned to ash. The next wave, struggling now just to get past the carnage that the first several had created, triggered the snap spikes. At the unmistakable sound of the spring traps releasing, the defenders opened fire on the attackers. Hundreds died in the five minutes or so that followed, bodies mounding up on the bridge floor in blood-soaked heaps, the whole of the bridge itself wreathed in smoke, the air rank with the smells of weapons fire and death.
The last of the attackers expended their lives under the withering crossfire of the entrenched defenders, and then as suddenly as the attack had begun it stopped. A deep silence settled over the bridge and the flats leading up to it from the south bluff, as if somehow all the attackers had been killed and the battle was over.
Logan knew better. Crouched down, moving quickly from position to position, he warned the defenders to be ready. “They’ll come again right away,” he told them. “When they do, trigger the flamethrowers first. That won’t stop them, but it will slow them. Fire into those who get past for as long as it takes them to reach the last of the snap spikes, then fall back to the redoubts.”
He could have ordered them to hold their positions, to keep the enemy from breaching the forward defenses. But he already knew that this would be impossible, that they wouldn’t last the day no matter what they did. He didn’t want them all killed when they were only delaying the inevitable. They would have to blow the bridge if they were to escape.