End Day

“‘Ville’?” the woman said. “It’s Greenwich Village. Who the hell are you? And where in hell did you come from?”

“Look at this place, Ryan,” Mildred said. “They must have just passed through here. They have to be close.”

He stared down at a broken, framed photo on the floor. A woman in fatigues and a boonie hat was standing behind the corpse of an immense wild boar—at least five hundred pounds, he guessed. She had a bloody spear in one hand and a bloody combat knife in the other and was smiling through her camo face paint.

It was the same woman who was holding them at blasterpoint.

“Who is ‘they’?” the woman demanded. “Do you mean the bastards who wrecked my apartment?”

“The bastards we’re chasing,” Ryan said, his power of speech recovered. “Which way did they go?”

Before she could answer, a whooping, rhythmic siren erupted from outside.

Figuring that if the woman was really going to open fire on them, she would have already done so, Ryan rushed to the bank of windows, and the others followed.

As Mildred looked down on the street she said, “Well, that makes a nice change.”

The enforcers’ elephantine wedding tackle was no longer on display; they had put on pants. Even so, the width and heft of their bodies was unmistakable as were the blocky shapes of their heads inside tight purple hoods. And they were still barefoot.

The lone siren quickly became a deafening chorus. The enforcers rampaged along the sidewalk below, breaking into the small wags jammed end to end—strangely enough, the row of wags looked almost new. The muties rammed their fists through driver windows, ripped the doors from their hinges and tossed them over their shoulders. The wags sagged heavily to one side when enforcers jumped in and began tearing wires from under dashboards, presumably trying to start the engines without keys.

Magus was nowhere in sight.

The woman with the big blaster joined them at the window. “I am definitely losing it,” she said, her weapon now pointed at the floor. “Those things aren’t human.”

A doorway across the street burst open, and a tall man in a robe ran down the stairs. He crossed the street, carrying a yard of polished wooden club, fat at one end, a knurled knob at the other. With the club cocked over his shoulder, he yelled over the din of alarms for an enforcer to get away from his shiny personal wag. Snapping the driver’s door free of the hinge, the creature spun at the waist, flinging it sideways like a gigantic buzz saw. It struck bathrobe man amidships and nearly cut him in two. The impact left him sprawled facedown on the pavement, in the middle of a spreading puddle of gore.

Try as they might, the enforcers couldn’t seem to get the commandeered wags running. In frustration, holes were punched through the roofs, steering wheels snapped off and windshields kicked out onto hoods.

“Is it just me,” Doc said, “or does this all seem a bit chaotic for old Steel Eyes? It hardly reflects the usual high level of advanced planning...” The old man was confused by what he saw outside.

“The clockwork man likes things to go like clockwork,” Ryan agreed.

“Mebbe his brain’s stripped a gear?” J.B. said, without tearing his eyes from the escalating destruction below, wondering how all of the wags had survived looting and scavenging, where the gas had come from.

“Ryan, if we don’t get Magus now...” Krysty said.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Keep the incendies ready. We’re going to have to get in close to maximize the effect.”

As they moved for the door, the woman once more raised her blaster. “Who are you?”

“No time for introductions,” Ryan told her. “Shoot us in the back if you want, but we’re going after them.”

Jak led them out the apartment door and down the marble stairs.

“Toss the grens inside the wags if you can,” Ryan said as they crouched in the foyer. “Locate Magus.”

They burst through the building’s front door two abreast, but had descended only the first few steps when autofire rattled from the far side of the street. A rain of bullets spanged the concrete treads and wrought-iron railings and crashed through the glass in the entry behind them.

With hard cover more than thirty feet out of reach, Ryan had no choice. He turned and pushed the others back through the doorway. Otherwise they were going to be cut to pieces.

Inside the foyer, Mildred said, “Enforcers were doing the shooting, I saw them.”

“That’s a new wrinkle,” J.B. said. “They never touched blasters on the island.”

“They were firing AKS-74Us one-handed,” Mildred continued, “waving them around like garden hoses.”

More high-velocity slugs zipped through the door’s broken glass, cutting tracks down the wall plaster and knocking chips out of the staircase.

“Why are they using blasters now?” Ricky said. “We can’t chill them with bullets. Why do they need blasters?”

“To make us keep our distance and hold our fire,” Ryan said. “Magus is part human and can be hurt with bullets. Did anyone see the bastard?”

Heads shook no.

Another sustained burst of autofire raked the building’s entrance, forcing them to press their backs against the wall. The opposition’s ammo supply seemed endless.

“They’re going to get away, Ryan,” Krysty said after the shooting stopped. “Gaia, they’re all going to get away.”

* * *

AFTER THE SCRUFFY strangers trooped out, Veronica stood amid the ruins of her living room, unable to take her eyes off the gray cloud and the dark, ovoid shape lurking behind it.

If it was real, she reasoned, then everything that had just happened was real.

With the Eagle raised to fire, she looked inside the chamber, saw that it was empty. She gingerly touched the edge of the doorway with a fingertip and got a powerful static shock that made her jerk back her hand. There was actually a little flash and an audible crackle.

It was not a dream.

The creatures outside were real. Mr. Crawford’s body in the street was real. Eye-patch man and the others weren’t lifted from some low-budget ’80s John Carpenter film—they were real, too.

Automatic gunfire clattered in the street. What with that and all the car alarms going off at once, it sounded like video clips of Beirut. Then bullets smashed through her street-facing windows, angling up and digging ugly holes in the plaster overhead. The original 1850s ceiling medallion took the worst of it.

As if she wasn’t pissed enough.

“Hosers!” she shouted.

Avoiding the broken glass underfoot, she ran back into her bedroom. From the closet, she pulled out a pair of running shoes and slipped them on. Then she took the cross-draw, leather chest holster from its hook on the wall behind her clothes, inserted the Desert Eagle and strapped it across her suit jacket. Its twin pouches held 8-round magazines of .44 Magnum bullets.

The weight of the fully loaded harness felt good.

A DIY curriculum of advanced combat and weapons training had not only helped her keep her job, it had taught her that, unlike the authors she wet-nursed and contrary to her own expectations—and the expectations of those who thought they knew her—she was absolutely fearless. It turned out danger flipped her secret switch. Where others feared to tread, Veronica Currant jumped in with both feet.

Born to raise hell and take scalps.

And now, out of the blue, she had been given the chance to fight monsters. Not monsters in lamentable purple prose. Not in a mindless video game. But in the flesh. It felt as if her whole life had been leading up to this moment.

The cats were still hiding wide-eyed under the bed and wouldn’t come when she called and made kissing sounds. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.