A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twelve, Pt. 3
The old slaughterhouse sat three miles northwest of the Asher farmstead proper, itself five miles northwest from Squatter City, itself eight miles northeast of Sung-ho’s house—as the crow flew, at least. As the car drove, the path somewhat longer, it took Zoe and Sung-ho just under forty-five minutes to make the trip. They parked in the afternoon sun a mile north of the abattoir and approached from there on foot.
Wilderness erupted all around them. Tucked away northwest of the highway and far removed from populated civilization, nobody bothered to maintain the foliage growing between the slaughterhouse and the proper wilds. Angled deciduous trunks and conifer needles spiked the earth, and tangles of bush and brush garlanded the ground. Winter whited all of it, burying the pine greens and dusting over the rest of the naked branches. Tall, dead grass poked up from the snow and bent back down to it again.
They found an old hiking trail near the potholed backroad they’d parked on and followed it half the distance to the slaughterhouse, their boots crunching ice with every step. From there, they trudged through ankle- and sometimes shin-deep snow until they saw it.
Little remained of the old Asher slaughterhouse. Time and the elements had pulled the perimeter fence apart, strangling boards of wood and rusted steel with fingers of brush and foliage.
Descending the gentle slope toward the abattoir, they pulled ventilated facemasks over their noses and mouths. The masks filtered air, reducing the potential effectiveness of any biological or gas-based attacks, including those of a mystical nature; they also minimized whatever stench might still linger in that ancient derelict of death. The masks counterbalanced the sense-enhancing invocations they’d undertaken that morning. Still, climbing over the wreck of the perimeter fence, Zoe noticed a faint senescent scent sticking around her uvula.
Most of the animal guiding rails were gone, leaving only spans of white between the different herding and slaughtering structures, all of which sagged and rubbled, demolished by a decade of untended Maine winters. They approached slow and low, eyes wide and sweeping, invocation-enhanced, ears prickling, invocation- and miltech earbud-enhanced. The helmets shielding the rear and top of Zoe’s head swamped with humidity, hot sweat bristling on the back of her neck as they crunched through the cold.
“No movement,” Sung-ho said.
“Let’s advance there,” Zoe gestured to the half-splintered building farthest from them. “Clear our way to the interior.”
Sung-ho bobbed his head. “Advance.”
Slow-and-low, they moved along the wreck of the perimeter toward the far corner. The wind pushed something steel and rusted, a metal groan echoed out from the structure. Zoe’s sixth-sense pulsed a steady stream of adrenaline through her veins. A threat lurked nearby, waiting.
Somewhere.
“Hold.” Sung-ho grabbed her arm.
“What?”
“Hold,” he repeated, almost inaudible. He squinted, scanning the wreck ahead. Muffled through his mask, he sniffed. He unholstered his sidearm. Zoe’s skin crawled with sixth-sense instinct. She unholstered her pistol, too.
“It’s too bright out here, I can’t see inside,” he muttered.
“Let’s advance. We’re in the open, here.”
“No. Wait.”
“Why?”
(you’ll smell it first you smell it first you)
“Just…” Sung-ho trailed off.
Something stirred in the shadows of the half-collapsed building ahead. A sheet of white dusted free as a mutated silhouette huffed and shrugged itself up from the ground. Slowly, Sung-ho let go of Zoe’s arm. Zoe’s thumb levered the safety off; she kept the barrel pointed groundward. The construct, whatever it was, hoofed at the dirt and snorted. It shuffled in the dimness, hidden less by the dark than by the contrasting brightness glaring off the snow.
“We should have requisitioned bigger guns,” Zoe whispered.
“Too late, now,” Sung-ho replied. “But…yes.”
Armory requisitions processed quickly for active-assignment agents, Zoe just hadn’t filed one. There’d been too much else going on.
“Are you guys alright out there?” Jill’s voice whispered through the miltech earbuds.
Zoe pressed the helmet mechanism to transmit her mic. “Shh.”
Jill shushed.
“Change course?” Zoe suggested.
Sung-ho raised his eyebrows.
From their position crouched in brush-cover, both of them could see only a yawning, dangerous span of property between themselves and the slaughterhouse proper. Little protection existed if the monsters started multiplying. Worse, assuming the Summoner expected some kind of attack or raid, he could easily watch their approach across the open space.
“Fair enough,” she muttered.
“I should have mentioned,” Sung-ho whispered, “I took one of my spare mags out of my kit so I could fit a grenade, instead.”
“You brought a grenade?”
He shrugged.
The monster hoofed the ground and snorted, again. Its unclear mass edged closer to the light. Zoe estimated it at six feet tall, eight feet long, two-men-wide, front- and top-heavy. When it neared the edge of its shelter, it sniffed. The sound echoed. Zoe frowned. How?
But when it nosed into the sun, the answer became obvious. It hadn’t been an echo. It had been a dozen different snouts scenting not-quite-simultaneously.
An unclear number of boar and swine corpses made up the creature’s face, piled up and speared together, outfitted with rebar tusks. A steel skeleton supported their heft, itself armed with four jabbing cattle prod arms. Below, a grinding mass of cow legs steered the beast. It reeked. Magic had given it muscle and flesh but not enough. Already, strips of skin hung loose from the thing, and some of the carcasses composing its body bloated with gas. The more lively ones gnawed and gnashed at the air hungrily.
“Okay,” Zoe said, “let’s use a grenade.”
Reaching into her own kit, a ‘tactical’ fanny pack, she withdrew a thin, one-inch by quarter-inch sheet of plywood scrawled on every millimeter with calligraphy.
During the late morning’s casting session, Zoe had used invocation to enhance her and Sung-ho’s natural stamina, endurance, speed, and reflexes. Sung-ho handled basic defensive wards, reducing velocity of incoming attacks, minimizing impact forces, and giving them a slightly-blurry look to anyone or anything that saw them.
Lastly, the three of them had worked together on a final invocation, a powerful and deep spell that took the three of them working in tandem an hour to cast. When Zoe snapped the thin piece of wood, she and Sung-ho would temporarily increase the metabolic efficiency and response rate of every muscle in their bodies, as well as the rate at which their synapses and neural networks could process incoming information.
In laymen terms, it made them about 13% faster than they already were. It still didn’t make them Olympians.
“Save it.” Sung-ho put his hand on her hand and she dropped the piece of wood back inside her kit. “In case things get worse from here.”
“He can’t have had time to build more than one of…that huge fucking thing.”
“But he’s had plenty of time to build one big thing and many, many smaller ones.”
The monster huffed again, stepping into the light. It scented the air and searched with its half-gone, rot-melting eyes for a source.
“Now or never,” Zoe whispered.
Sung-ho took a bright cylinder from his kit and grabbed a pin at the top.
“What kind of—”
“Thermite.”
“How—”
“From work.”
Zoe had more questions but the beast noticed them, then, and its centipedal swarm of cow legs stampeded their way.
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