Horde

Onslaught

Three hours before dawn, we assembled on the shore as agreed. The boatmen met us and ferried us over in shifts. I ordered the men to sit quiet and wait; I wasn’t sure how good the enemy’s hearing was, and this attack didn’t start until I gave the signal. It took about an hour to get everyone safely across. On arrival, I counted and realized we were short a few men. Apparently they couldn’t live with their orders … and I understood.

“Is everyone ready?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Fade drew me aside. The men turned away—and I appreciated their discretion. We weren’t the only ones who had just-in-case good-byes to say, however. Around us, other people paired off: Morrow with Tegan, Tully and Spence, and a couple of men too. My heart hammered in my chest, so hard it hurt, and those moments of sweetness and safety up in the loft felt so far away. I went into his arms without asking if he wanted me there because I knew he did. His breath stirred my hair, and for a moment, I just listened to his heart beating.

“The odds still aren’t good,” I said softly.

I fought tears, as I had to be strong and brave at this moment, everything I didn’t feel. Fade loosened his arms enough so he could tip my face up to his, and I could’ve drowned in his eyes. “For us, they never were. Look where we found each other.”

He had a point; it was pretty awful down below. “I’ll never be sorry that we went Topside together. I’ll never be sorry about anything.”

Including what we did tonight. I left that part unsaid, but Fade knew. He always did. Back when Silk partnered us, he seemed to understand me better than I did myself, sensing what I wanted and things that would make me happy. I remembered how he’d comforted me with an arm around my shoulders, and that was the first step toward a world where he meant everything to me, and his touch was as much my home as any cottage could ever be.

“If this is the last time, let me say it so you never forget. I will always love you, Deuce. No matter where souls go, mine will be looking for you, solnyshko moyo.”

Those words tore me in two. “No. I want a promise instead. Promise you’ll fight like you never have, so when the dying stops, you’ll be on your feet looking for me here.”

“I swear,” he said.

But there were no guarantees. I knew that, even as I extracted the pledge. So I kissed him because if the end came for me in the form of fangs and claws, I wanted to die with the taste of him on my lips.

There should be a speech for a moment like this one, but it was chilly, and we were all ready to have the fight done. So I held out my hand to Fade, who put his sire’s lighter in it. I jammed the artifact in the ground, as Tegan had said, lit the wick, and then we all backed up. Sparks flew, then the thing shot straight up in the air in an orange arc, making a popping, whistling noise, then it exploded in a cascade of colors. For a few seconds, we all stared up in awe because none of us had ever seen anything like it.

“I’m counting,” Morrow said.

As he hit two hundred, an answering light rose on the other side, just high enough that we could see it. I took a deep breath, scared as I never had been. I didn’t believe that I was a Huntress anymore—and therefore, destined for a great and glorious death. If I died in battle, it would hurt as much as it did for anyone else, and there were so many things I’d never do. But courage wasn’t an absence of fear; it was fighting despite the knot in your stomach.

“That’s our cue. Good hunting, Company D.”

The men echoed it back to me; and in the faint, predawn light, I saw all of their fear, all the uncertainty. I had no remedy for it. Morrow took his scouts while Tully, Fade, and Spence rallied their soldiers. Thornton stuck close to Tegan, hanging back, and I was glad he meant to protect her. I wanted to grab Fade and beg him not to be too brave or too reckless. Instead, I led as I’d always done, by rushing the enemy with my knives drawn.

The camp was mostly asleep, though some of the Freaks were retching. I’d never seen them vomit before. It was disgusting, the way bile funneled to either side of their fangs. They hardly had a chance to raise the alarm before we were on them. Company D ran straight into the heart, and then stabbed it for good measure. Tactics that served us before worked again. The men were armed with all the liquor the pub owner was willing to spare without knowing why we needed it, and we lobbed ten firebombs into the horde. Rifles barked and I heard the smooth shing of Tully’s crossbow. In the confusion and snarling bodies, I lost sight of my lieutenants at once. The beasts were all around, so many that I couldn’t breathe, but they were sluggish and clumsy, as promised, which meant the Gulgur had kept their part of the bargain.

The air thickened with smoke, until it was hard to see who we were fighting. I stabbed one Freak, then another as it stumbled toward me. Another burst out of the miasma, but he wore a white strip of cloth around his arm, so I raised my blade in salute and we attacked the next enemy together. I hurt for him; it might be his sire or dam suffering beneath his claws but he didn’t falter.

My ears echoed with the screams and curses, snarls and cries of pain. There were corpses everywhere, gunshots cracking out, the coppery tang of blood heavy in the wind. I had no sense for how my side was doing, only the certainty that if I stopped fighting, I would die. The horde was huge, their numbers formidable, even with poisoned meat churning in their guts. Ten of them surrounded me, and beyond them, there were ten more and ten again, far past what the night and the smoldering reeds permitted me to see. Bodies splashed in the river nearby, fighting or fleeing, I couldn’t tell which.

The Uroch near me slashed a Freak that tried to lunge past him to get at me, and I finished his kill. These monsters were puzzled, unable to grasp why they were fighting their kin. I parried and sliced until my arms ached and the dead piled up around me. Still they came on as the dawn broke. It should’ve been an inspiring sight, sunlight on the water, but instead it only illuminated how long our odds were. The combined might of Company D, the Urochs, and the Gulgur didn’t seem to be enough. We’d killed so many, but as many of our soldiers lay injured and dying on the bloody battlefield, and they had a thousand more to throw at us.

Across the way, I heard Tully screaming at her men to regroup while rifle fire came slower and slower. The men were running low on ammo, I guessed, as I swiped sweat and blood from my brow, and fought on, focusing on my immediate danger. A Freak impaled the Uroch beside me, and I was too slow to save him. Blood bubbled from the young one’s mouth, then he fell, never having said a word, and I was alone in the middle of the horde.

I need Fade.

But my throat was parched and tired from the hours of fighting. Calling out was a waste of breath. Freaks surged as far as the eye could see, and they were exultant despite their weakness because they sensed how this fight ended. With a burst of renewed energy, I struggled on, powered by the memory of all the people I would never see again if I gave up. My shoulders burned, my arms twin columns of fire.

Another wave of the monsters rushed me, and I was engulfed, unable to see, just the snarling mass of claws and fangs lashing at me. With sheer determination, I brought up my knives, but willpower wasn’t enough. My body had limits, and I’d reached them. More of their strikes got through; it was just a matter of time until one of them got lucky and struck the killing blow. Heart, throat, thigh. One of those places, and I’m gone.

A Freak sank its teeth into my forearm, another scored my shoulder. With a move Stalker had taught me, I cut the first one’s throat, and spun low, slicing at their legs. If they can’t stand, they can’t fight as well. It also made me a smaller target. I sliced the veins in their legs and nearly puked at the rush of blood that caught me in the face.

How many more? Too many.

Three of them died at my feet, and I stared, unable to grasp what I was seeing. But Tegan had broken one of their skulls, Thornton accounted for the other, and the third, well, Gavin of Winterville stood with our banner in his hands, the flag flapping in the wind; he’d impaled the Freak with the pointy end. Before I could thank them, Thornton’s head snapped to the side and his neck gushed red. The veteran fell before I could react, and then there were eight more monsters on Tegan, the brat, and me. He jerked the banner from his victim and used it like a polearm, but the kid didn’t have the strength to do that for long. Tegan and I covered him as best we could, but I was so tired, and from her movements, her leg was paining her. A doctor shouldn’t fight on the battlefield, but there was no time for her to treat the wounded. One of our men screamed for mercy, and anguish flickered across her face because she couldn’t break from the battle and do her job.

I’m sorry, I tried to say, but I had no breath. The stitch in my side came from a complex blend of exertion and pain, both emotional and physical. I’d never fought in a conflict that had no end, but this felt as if there were nowhere to go and no conclusion except the grave. Tegan stumbled and I grabbed her; somehow we held on as Freaks shoved toward us. Gavin was so gallant, flapping the pennant as if its power alone could drive the monsters away.

Tegan knocked down a Freak and I stabbed it while Gavin impaled another. He was actually pretty good with that blasted banner. But there were too many.

“I’m not dying!” Gavin shouted. “I promised my mum!”

His defiance gave me the strength to kill one, then another. Tegan appeared to take heart as well, and we pushed past the pain, until we had a pile of bodies so tall before us that I could stand on them. And I did. I climbed the corpses and stumbled down the other side, through the smoky air. There was more fighting farther along the river.

I spotted knots of Uroch battling their brethren and the Gulgur slinging stones with leather straps from the fringes of the battle. When a Freak turned to give chase, the small folk darted away and were gone, and in that time, the monsters took more damage from behind. Exhausted, I paused to catch my breath while my two comrades did the same.

“Are we winning?” Tegan asked.

I shook my head. “Don’t know.”

Then hope appeared, incredibly, unbelievably. From the south and east, men came marching. I recognized Morgan at the head of one column, so I identified them as Soldier’s Pond men. I saw people I had met in Gaspard, Otterburn, and Lorraine; they had tired faces but they all wore identical expressions of determination. Most were poorly outfitted and equipped. They had no uniforms and some were armed with hoes and shovels, whatever they could grab quickly. Marlon Bean lifted a hand in greeting, as did Vince Howe.

John Kelley rode at the front of the lines and when he saw me, he called, “You started without us, Huntress. Do you mind if we take some of these Muties off your hands?”

“Don’t attack the Uroch or the Gulgur,” I yelled back. “They’re with us.”

Quickly Tegan called out the description of our allies, and Kelley looked astonished, but he acknowledged with a nod, relaying the instructions to their men. Nobody argued. There was too much movement for me to get any idea how many had come to join the fight or how many Freaks were left, but hope flickered deep within me.

Catching my second wind, I ran at the remaining Freaks with renewed fury. As I fought, I searched for Fade. Sometimes I thought I heard his voice calling out orders, but I couldn’t break off to search for him. I did see Spence, out of bullets and using his shooting iron to club the monsters in the head to stun them before he stabbed. He smiled at me, teeth white in his filthy face, and it heartened me to see that he’d made it this far. His men surrounded him, the twenty that were left … out of the fifty he had before, and their deaths hurt, but I couldn’t stop.

Not when we were so close.

In the melee I lost track of Tegan and Gavin. Then I saw the boy raise his banner high and jam it into a Freak Tegan had flattened for him. “That’s for Stalker.”

I didn’t know how he could be so sure, but I sliced my way toward them. When I looked at the dead thing on the ground, I recognized the scar cutting through its left eye. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, as it didn’t bring my friend back, but I nodded at the brat.

“Good work.”

Within minutes, the tenor of the battle changed. These weren’t soldiers, but they were brave men, and the rest of us fought as hard. It could have been an hour or five, but eventually the horde broke. The Freaks tried to run, but riflemen from Soldier’s Pond had been practicing for years for this day, and they cut them down.

On the enemy’s side, there were no survivors.