Ashley slowed the sand-foil and we fell back with the rest of ASSFOR-2. The first group roared straight toward the horizon with its sparks of white light that looked kind of like Christmas lights twinkling. They held the butts of their long 3XDs against their thighs, the barrels sticking up in the air at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Hold until they’re engaged,” I heard Op Nine say in my ear.
We came to a stop. Op Nine was right beside me, the visor on his helmet flipped up so I could see his face in the glow of the demon-fire.
“Where’s mine?” I asked, nodding at the 3XD in his hand. “What’s it shoot anyway—holy water?”
“Something far more powerful, I hope,” he said. Then out of nowhere he added, “It has begun.”
He flipped his visor down. I looked toward the orange glow and now there was red tracer fire from the group ahead arching into it, and when it touched the fire, a black tear or hole appeared, lingered for a few seconds, then closed back up. I didn’t get a long look, though, because we leaped forward suddenly and my head snapped back. The needle jumped to 130 after we executed a hard left. Racing toward the battle, I could see over Ashley’s shoulder that the orange glow came to a sort of point on the southern edge.
The orange had deepened to red when Abby Smith started yelling something over the speaker and we skidded to a stop. About thirty yards ahead I could see a sand-foil lying on its side and closer, crawling toward us, one of the OIPEP agents, clutching the 3XD in his right hand.
Ashley grabbed a satchel embossed with a red X, ripped off her helmet, and ran to the crawling man.
“Ashley!” Abigail called. “There isn’t time!”
He had taken off his helmet. It was Carl, the biggest agent, the tough guy who talked on the plane about blowing Mike away. He was crying and slobbering and cursing, his face caked with wet sand. He cried out when Ashley touched him on the shoulder, cringing like a dog that’s used to being beaten. As we got closer, I could see Carl had no eyes. There were just empty sockets where his eyes used to be.
Ashley realized it at the same time, I think, because she recoiled suddenly with a startled gasp.
“I do not, don’t, won’t—they come, they come, THEY COME!” he bellowed at her. He rolled himself into a ball and brought his hands to his face. When I first got a load of those empty sockets, I thought the demons must have torn out his eyes. But, as Carl clawed frantically into the spaces where his eyes used to be, the truth hit me: Carl had ripped them out.
Beside me, Op Nine said softly, “You see now why I warned you never to look into their eyes.”
21
Op Nine grabbed the first-aid kit from Ashley’s hand and pulled out a shiny instrument. It was the same thing Ashley had used on me in the helicopter.
“What are you doing?” Ashley asked.
“Sedating him,” he answered. “Otherwise, he may literally tear himself to pieces.”
He jabbed the needle into Carl’s arm. In two seconds he rolled onto his back, out cold. Op Nine handed the kit to Ashley.
“Dress the wounds, quickly,” he told her. He scooped the 3XD out of the sand and held it toward me.
I hesitated for a second, then took it from him. The rifle was lighter than I expected. It weighed about the same as a broom.
Op Nine kneeled beside Carl, pulled the sash of cartridges from his body, and handed it to me.
“Remember, Kropp, the ammunition is limited.”
That’s okay, I thought, so am I.
I threw the cartridge belt over one shoulder and slung the 3XD over my back. I trudged back to the sand-foil, dragging my aching right foot in the sand. Ashley trotted back after a minute, carrying the first-aid kit under her arm and pulling off bloody surgical gloves as she ran.
Op Nine took the point now, as we raced southwest.
His voice sounded tinny and distant over the speaker in my helmet: “If another operative flees the engagement, we do not stop.”
It looked like the engagement was winding down. When it first began, the tracer fire lighting up the sky had looked like the cl**ax of a Fourth of July fireworks show. Now the firing was sporadic and the black holes punched through the searing lights appeared less frequently. Either ASSFOR-1 was running out of ammunition or it was running out of personnel.
I blinked rapidly behind my visor, because the lights in the sky now reflected off the sand, like the battle was taking place over a vast lake.
Suddenly a ball of light separated itself from the main firestorm and came barreling toward us. We were going about 130 miles per hour; this thing came toward us at three times that speed.
“Engage, engage, engage!” a frantic voice screamed over the speaker. The agents brought the sand-foils skidding to a stop, angling them into a circle. They jumped off, fell to one knee inside the circle, and swung their 3XDs toward the sky.
I plopped down next to Ashley, swinging my rifle upward too, but feeling a little ridiculous, to tell the truth. I’d been to a carnival or two where you fire at the little plastic cutouts of ducks as they slowly roll along the track. I never knocked down a single duck. But maybe saving my own skin from being fried by demon-fire would focus my aim better than winning the kooky stuffed monkey with the disproportionately big head.
“On my mark . . .” Op Nine said.
I rested the pad of my index finger on the cool metal of the trigger. Sweat trickled down my forehead and burned my eyes, but I couldn’t wipe it off because of the helmet, and I wasn’t about to take my helmet off. The memory of Carl writhing in the sand was still fresh in my mind.
“Mark!” Op Nine shouted.
“Fire, fire, fire at will!” someone else screamed.
The 3XDs erupted all around me and the night lit up in a fury of red. My finger jerked on the trigger, which slammed the weapon hard into my shoulder as it recoiled, nearly knocking me onto my butt. I didn’t aim, really—it was kind of a frantic repeat of my duck hunting at the carnival—but just jerked the barrel this way and that, firing randomly at any movement above me. Waves of furnace-level heat rolled down from the sky.
I could see them now, and the sight nearly made me throw down my gun and run in pure panic.
Thousands of demons—maybe tens of thousands— careened above us, diving, swooping, stalling briefly, then zipping away faster than you can blink, glimmering forms of men in flowing robes. They rode beasts with wings sparking with golden fire, the wings at least ten feet from tip to tip, with yawning mouths stuffed with fangs, hanging open as if frozen in midscream. I saw lions and tigers and bears and other beasts that I knew I should recognize. They reminded me of roadkill: you knew they lived once, but now they were twisted and smashed into distorted versions of what they once were.