Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

And then I heard several phoont sounds.

Grenades began to fall.

Some of them went right on by and over. Trying to land a grenade inside the sheltered area of the footbridge was a damned tricky shot. But the enemy did what the enemy always does, and showed up with more skill than they had any right to possess.

I shoved Butters against one of the walls, pressed my lower back against his chest, and melded the shield’s edges against the wall behind us.

Half a dozen grenades went off in the space of maybe fifteen seconds, and the world was just one enormous crunching sound after another.

“Down,” I growled as they stopped falling, and I lowered my shield. We dropped to hands and knees, below the level of the bridge’s walls, and I started crawling forward faster than I would have believed humanly possible. Butters followed.

Evidently, they figured dozens of grenades had done the job, because we didn’t take any more fire—until we rounded a corner and found ourselves face-to-face with fifty turtlenecks in full tactical gear.

“Forzare!” I shouted, and unleashed a broad stroke of pure kinetic force. I hit them harder than I’d meant to. The first three ranks of them went flying back like they’d been on wires, and collided with the men behind them. The impact brought instant massive confusion.

“Butters!” I shouted. “Kill the bridge!”

And I charged, slamming my right hand forward, screaming, “Forzare!” with every stride, knocking the turtlenecks around like ninepins.

“Harry!” Butters screamed.

“Kill the bridge, dammit!” I shouted back.

I heard the Sword of Faith come alight in his hands, and a glance over my shoulder showed him hacking through the bridge at his feet as if it had been made of so many soap bubbles.

I spun back to the enemy, brought my shield up—and stood tall.

“You!” I said, relishing the moment. “Shall not! Pass!”

They replied with a hail of automatic weapons fire. The impacts against my shield all but blinded me.

And a freaking Fomor sorcerer popped out from behind a veil that had concealed him from me and lobbed a viscous-looking ball of quasi-liquid at me.

I’d been burned once before, hah hah, by assuming my shield would be ready to stop whatever came at me. I ducked and skittered forward and to one side, and the blob hit the bridge where I’d been standing.

Whatever that stuff was, the xenomorphs’ blood had nothing on it. It started chewing at the concrete and the steel itself, bubbling and hissing as those substances were dissolved, and a hideous stench filled the air.

The Fomor smiled his froggy smile at me and tossed another, to my other side. I dodged again, but I had less space to do it in—I did not want to walk in one of those puddles. Whatever that vitriol was, it would probably devour my feet in seconds.

And then one of the turtlenecks lobbed a grenade high, aiming for it to come down behind my shield.

A flicker of will and a muttered word, and I batted the grenade out of the air and back down among the turtlenecks.

There was a fine amount of screaming and confusion as it went off, and I checked over my shoulder.

Butters had hacked through the bridge, but the thing hadn’t fallen yet. He dashed twenty feet back and started chopping again, to drop that entire length out of the bridge.

I held my shield and my ground as the turtlenecks recovered, way too swiftly to be acceptable, and poured it on again. The Fomor sorcerer had vanished. Those creeps didn’t like to expose themselves to danger when they could whip their minions forward into it instead.

“Harry!” Butters shouted.

I started backpedaling, my shield bracelet beginning to overheat from use now, dribbling green-gold sparks everywhere.

I made it back to Butters and he slashed down with Fidelacchius one final time, before both of us rushed back, around the curve of the bridge, and out of line of sight with the turtlenecks. There was an enormous groaning sound, then a rumbling crash and a scream of ripping concrete and twisting metal.

And now that we were out of the line of fire, the volunteers on the bridge started hammering away at the turtlenecks. Yeah, those guys were professionals, but they weren’t bulletproof. I saw several go down before they started returning fire and . . .

I felt phantom rounds hit my chest, my head.

Eleven hundred and seventy-nine.

I fought not to throw up. There wouldn’t have been much to come up anyway.

The clicks rose to a sound like heavy canvas tearing, and the Fomor army came rushing forward in a storm of shrieks, wails, and screams.

With the bridge out, their only option was to cross Columbus on foot—and they went bounding and leaping forward, jumping off the higher ground and down into the underpass without hesitation.

And nothing happened.

“What?” I demanded. “Where is Sanya?”

“Beats me,” Butters said, panting. He was covered in concrete dust.

The enemy massed on the far side of Columbus and then rushed forward, toward us. They crossed the first traffic lane without being fired upon. They reached the median of the divided road while more of their numbers piled into the underpass, a wave of flesh and steel and weaponry.

They crossed the median and the first lane of traffic.

And Sanya bellowed, “NOW!”

Eight hundred men and women of Chicago popped up from behind the wall overlooking the sunken drive and opened fire with shotguns from a range of as little as thirty feet.

The slaughter was indescribable.

Shotguns are not precision weapons. But at thirty feet, and in the hands of an amateur, they don’t have to be. The volunteers’ fire swept the enemy’s front ranks like a broom, killing and maiming without prejudice or mercy. The sound of it was a roar like I’d never heard before, with too many individual blasts to distinguish any one round going off, a deadly martial thunderstorm.

The volunteers fired until their weapons ran empty, and if they’d killed fewer than a thousand of the enemy, it was only by a couple.

The enemy howled in their dismay and tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. Some tried to run up or down the street, but Sanya had positioned people all along the ground overlooking the sunken road, firing from defilade, and they enfiladed the ever-loving hell out of the Fomor army. Volunteers screamed their fury and defiance at the enemy. The volume of fire was so heavy that it magically turned a couple of stalled cars the enemy tried to take cover behind into Swiss cheese.

Blood ran down the street in small rivers. The air grew thick with the iron stench of it.

The enemy wasn’t done. They took up positions of their own, across the sunken road, behind just as much wall as my volunteers had. Then it became a gunfight. At that range, the professional weaponry of the turtlenecks wasn’t substantially better than the volunteers’ shotguns. Arguably, the shotguns were a better weapon for the shooting-gallery scenario, since they needn’t be aimed as carefully or as long. But that only made it something like a fair fight.