A Maze of Glass, Chapter Thirteen, Pt. 1
The grenade exploded on descent, spraying napalm all over the charging beast. As gelatinous burn sizzled through enlivened corpses, Zoe and Sung-ho leapt from the overgrown brush. They stayed close to the mess of tangle and nettle, the gnarled twigs and reaching branches obscured by the snow. The monster kept coming, the livelier corpses composing its body squealing and cooking. The longer-dead ones merely huffed air through decomposed throats, the flame-bright ooze eating through skin to reveal gas and putrescence.
From their position on the other side of the foliage, Zoe and Sung-ho opened fire.
For the most part, Constructs died. Architectural damage that immobilized them worked fastest and best, but when uncountable cow legs served as the monster’s locomotion, disabling it seemed unlikely. Luckily, magic seemed to understand that anything existing could be made to not-exist through methods of force, and so even extremely mobile Constructs usually died after extreme enough applications of violence.
Some particularly powerful outliers, however, operated as functionally-unkillable, with no exterior feature to differentiate them from more mortal opponents. So when her first, fourteen-round, extended mag ejected from her sidearm, Zoe decided she didn’t have enough intel to continue an offensive. “Sung—”
Some of the cow legs and rebar-tusks tangled in the brush. The monster shook itself, burning and squealing and still shifting its weight back and forth, side-to-side, breaking free.
“Zo’,” Sung-ho interrupted, his hand again on her arm. “Zo’, look.”
Drips of napalm singed through winter-dry tangles. Cattle prods shocked the air. Pigs shrieked.
“Zo’! We gotta go!”
She’d been about to say the same thing. Turning away from the burning-alive beast charring the air, she saw more mutant figures shaking off snow, rising from the ground. Most looked small, two or three animals workshopped together, but others stood man-sized. Two of them looked like animated scarecrows, makeshift limbs jerking sharply forward.
In the field between them and the slaughterhouse, a dozen such monsters rose up, awake.
Zoe slapped in her first backup mag. She had three in her kit, plus a combat knife, which meant Sung-ho only had two.
“Run for it, break left,” Sung-ho said.
Pigs screamed and boars huffed. Pork-smoke and corpse-stink billowed the air. Brush snapped, hooves stomped.
“Go!”
They raced away from the monster, toward the slaughterhouse, through ankle-deep snow. Zoe estimated the span at thirty meters. Thirty open meters, through snow, across poor terrain. She darted around spikes of advancing nature and dodged remnants of steel fence. Something lunged at her from her glare-blind periphery and all she recognized was that it was not Sung-ho. She fired without learning more, four bullets into the center mass of the silhouette, kicking it to the ground—and she spun back toward the abattoir itself.
A gunshot blasted the snow a foot ahead of her. She broke left. A second shot patted somewhere behind her. Her thighs burned. “Shooter!” she shouted—or screamed—the difference no longer certain. “Dead ahead!”
“Here!” Sung-ho shout-screamed back.
She banked according to echolocation. Another shot blew through brush-cover ahead of her. Back behind her, the pigs grew quieter, and the groan of the monster’s mass snapping free of its tangles crescendo’d. A rifle-crack thundered. It didn’t hit her but she didn’t know anything else. She ran toward the smaller-arms fire ahead. She found Sung-ho crouched behind a pile of wrecked steel parts, reloading.
“Down to one spare,” he said, wiping sweat from his face. “This fucking helmet…”
The humidity slimed her, too. Her hair felt like a bundle of grease adhered to her skull. “He’s got sights…not sure where…”
“We can’t stay here forever.”
Crouching next to him, she squinted through bright white toward the next piece of cover. There wasn’t much. Another twelve meters ahead she saw the ramped entryway to the slaughterhouse, the alley they’d marched animals through to their deaths. “I think we have to make another rush, a sprint straight at it.”
Sung-ho squinted with her. “Goddammit.”
“I think now’s the time.”
Cow hooves kicked through snow.
“Now’s the time,” Sung-ho confirmed.
Unzipping her kit, she took out the thin piece of wood. She focused her willpower into the vessel and the myriad symbols inked into it pulsed a half-second’s glow. The muscles binding her shoulder blades to her spine bundled and tightened. She broke the chip in half. The spell pulsed through them so sharply that she couldn’t move for a second. Then everything slowed down.
“Run,” she said, already zipping the pack back up and grabbing her sidearm from the ground.
They didn’t pause for target assessment, they just ran. Something lunged at Zoe and she fired four rounds, shoved it away from her, and kept running. Another rifle-shot struck the ground ahead of them and they broke away from each other. Zoe slowed fractionally to give Sung-ho a lead. A bullet blew through the air in front of her and she renewed her pace.
The Summoner must have lost his line of sight, at that point. No further rifle-fire followed them.
But cow hooves did. They gained, accelerating into a stampede.
“Faster!” Zoe shouted.
Something lunged at Sung-ho with a cow’s head and stilt-legs, buzzsaw-armed. Sung-ho ducked the swinging blades and shouldered the construct aside. It stumbled and re-oriented but he’d already dawn sights. He opened fire and Zoe followed suit. They each put four bullets into the thing and it went down. Ahead, another grotesquery blocked them from the slaughterhouse entrance.
Without hesitation, they both turned their pistols toward it.
It lunged at them, a coiled-wire skeleton and eight wriggling limbs tipped with automatic carving tools. Garlands of meat and fused parts gave it a torso and joints. They aimed for the center mass of the thing, hoping the repeating combination of armor piercing and frangible rounds would shred it apart.
And they did, but not before the thing had reached Sung-ho and slashed ribbons out of his knife-resistant kevlar vest. A single blade notched a slender gap in the side of his helmet and several more carved fiber from his armor. Zoe didn’t see any blood. Before the monster could do more harm, it stumbled backward and fell to pieces.
“You okay?”
“Fine!” Sung-ho ran for the entrance, limping.
The cow hooves thundered—close, now. Too close.
She sprinted after Sung-ho. They hadn’t seen it through the snowglare, but a barricade of plywood shored the entryway. Pulling a loose corner wide, Sung-ho crouched and peered within. Zoe caught up and glanced behind them. The charred and still-bubbling monster-construct teetered toward them. It had lost some of its legs but didn’t seem to care. “In, in!”
Sung-ho rolled inside. Zoe followed.
Inside the dim-dark building, rows of steel fence guided them toward assembly-line machinery. Without scanning for more than their basic terrain, Zoe grabbed Sung-ho’s arm and hauled him with her. They rushed through the guideways. Behind them, the rebar-tusked and cattle-prod-armed monster crashed through the plywood.
It didn’t slow down.
Screaming, Zoe sprinted. Her legs ached, molten and collapsing. Still, she sprinted. Her shoulder clipped a gap in the steel fence and she let go of Sung-ho. She spun toward him but he gestured for her to keep moving. Blurry, behind him, the monster crashed through sections of fence and knocked over barricades, pursuing.
She sprinted.
She lost balance, bounced against a rusted piece of fence, rebounded from more steel on the opposite side, and swallowed ragged gut-filling gulps of air as the monster barreled through architecture like a bull through paper walls.
The monster killed itself trying to reach them feet before it reached them.
On all fours without remembering the fall, Zoe allowed her breathlessness to turn to laughter. As the massive construct tripped and speared itself to death, she scrambled away from it, cackling. It heaved one final whuff of reeking, rotten air and went limp. The cow legs came loose from the platform. Pulling herself up by fence-rungs, her panic-joy rush softened to erratic chuckles. One of the rebar tusks, machine-sharpened and grimed with blood and rust, pointed at her from a mere foot away.
“Keep moving,” Sung-ho panted, next to her. “Before the decay starts.”
They moved. The guidelanes narrowed to an assembly line killing floor. They followed it to an unlit intersection, their invocations making the boarded-up darkness visible. Mold, fungi, and dust plastered every surface. The abandoned slaughterhouse had already begun its transformation, fruiting a new environment through its dereliction, becoming the thing it would one day become.
(everything becomes something else eventually)
“Team B?” Zoe asked.
“At site four. I’m getting tired but…we’re okay,” Jill answered.
“Delta?”
“Uh, I’m fine,” Omar’s voice crackled back. “Just. Uh. This one doesn’t look like the others.”
She glanced over at Sung-ho. Sung-ho nodded.
“If it comes down to it, leave.”
“What?” he asked.
“We already went over this,” she hushed her voice as they approached an intersection. “If it comes down to it, leave. This isn’t your job.”
A long pause. She felt Omar thinking.
“We’re going quiet,” she said. “Over.”
The intersection split the structure into two wings. Ahead, the continued butcher’s alley led to faint outlines of maybe-lockers; to the right, scores of unused meathooks dangled from the ceiling, a wire-fenced window peered across bright white snow, and another left turn led…somewhere.
Toward the Summoner, in any case.
They conversed with gestures. They decided to split up, that Zoe would turn right and move through the span of meathooks, that she’d take the next intersection and find out where it led. Sung-ho would take the straight-ahead avenue, through a hundred forgotten years of dying animals to the lockers and whatever else waited beyond them. If more Constructs guarded the halls, they’d keep track of each other through echolocation, gunfire and radio chatter.
They split up.
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