Chapter Fifty-Eight - Crackshot Cowboy

“A silent movement began over the turn of the century. It fought back against the increasingly extreme nature of religious belief.

The movement suffered from one glaring flaw though. It assumed that the religious cared about the tenets of their own religion when acting.

Nothing could be further from the truth.”

--Atheists Anonymous, 2029

***

“You guys had better be ready,” I shouted. “Shit’s about to hit the fan!”

Shit wasn’t so much about to hit the fan as it was about to grab the fan, drag it into an alley, then beat it black and blue.

Or something like that. I wasn’t an expert on analogies and honestly, my mind was on other things.

I moved up to the front of the line and looked out across the no-alien’s-land between us and the incoming wave. It was a decently sized field, but it wasn’t nearly as big as I would have wished. A model three could really scramble when they wanted to. It would take one... maybe ten seconds to cross the space at a dead sprint. Plenty of time for a single one to be gunned down, but what if there were hundreds of them.

My grip tightened on my Bullcat. Behind me, the mortars clunked as shells were loaded into them. The militiamen and PMCs were breathing harder, as if they’d already started running around even though nothing had happened yet. I heard leather creaking around handles and the clinking of loose ammo in boxes as they were repositioned for easier access. A few soldiers pulled their mags out and checked them before resetting.

“Safeties off!” someone called from behind me.

The not-yet-a-battlefield became surprisingly silent.

A ping from my augs almost made me jump out of my skin. “Fuck,” I muttered as I checked who was calling. Gomorrah. “Hey?”

“Cat. I was thinking we should keep in contact. This might not be easy,” she said.

“Alright, makes sense. Want to bring our local farm boy in on the call? He seems a nice enough sort. New though. Might be good to keep an eye out on him.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Gomorrah agreed.

I nodded. “Myalis, think you can find his aug number? Or can you ping right off of his AI?”

I think I can manage that much. One moment... and adding him to the call.

“Um, hello?” Jimothy’s voice asked over the line.

“Hey,” I said. “Jimothy, Gomorrah the pyromaniacal nun. Gomorrah, Jimothy the cowboy with a big rifle and a thing for cute girls with attitude.”

“Hello,” Gomorrah said. “It’s a pleasure. We’re going to stay in contact with each other, in case we need assistance. I’d love to speak some more, but I think our time is running short.”

“That’s alright. Pleasure to meet you too, Miss Gomorrah. You just holler if there’s anything at all I can do for you. Not that I suspect you’ll be the one needing help here.”

I grinned. It was nice when everyone was getting along so well. Maybe all the world needed to put aside their differences was the threat of impending and immediate doom. Not that that had worked well before.

I was about to try and make some small-talk when I caught motion in the corner of my eye. Something was moving into the no-alien’s-zone, but from our side. Something big.

Way off on the other side of Gomorrah’s section of the defences, a large machine thumped into the divide. It was taller than a semi-trailer from front to rear, and nearly as bulky. A huge four-legged machine made of white plates over a core of armoured steel. The machine stomped into the middle of the gap, then stood there, huge and imposing.

My head whipped around as a second, this one black, moved into the gap further down.

The horse’s sides opened up and barrels poked out of the gaps. It was a mobile gun platform, of sorts.

“Is that one of Jolly Monarchs?” I asked.

“The map says so,” Gomorrah said. “They’re his Rook drones.”

“Fucking hell,” I muttered. “How much does one of those cost?”

“More than either of us can afford right now,” Gomorrah said.

I shook my head. Maybe things weren’t going to go that poorly after all.

I heard a sharp intake of breath over the coms. “I see one. Big, ugly bastard, coming in from above,” Jimothy says. I turned to the front and squinted into the sky. There’s a big flock coming, but at the centre of it is one big motherfucker whose wingspan dwarfs all the others.

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“Got a shot?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” he says.

A loud crack sounds. A faint grey blur is left painted across the air. It meets the head of what was probably a model eleven and splatters it. The huge flying alien flips through the air before crashing onto the roof of a distant building.

“Nice shot,” I said. “Maybe we should name you the Crackshot Cowboy.”

“Crackshot Cowboy,” he repeats. “Yeah, I like that. Going to need to live up to it, but I think I can manage that.”

“I think the time for chatter’s just about over,” Gomorrah says. The dust of the incoming wave is growing closer. I can feel a faint rumble beneath my feet. The men and women around me, those that are so inclined, start to pray. It’s a faint murmur in the background. These are the same people that repelled a wave earlier today, I imagine that the cowards have been weeded out already.

Then, between one blink and the next, the wave crests over the wall of debris.

I froze. Not for a long time, but for a moment I was almost entirely overwhelmed.

There were so many of them. They came pouring over the edge like an angry tsunami of plant flesh and teeth and claws. Stones and cement were rammed aside as bigger aliens shoved their way over, the smaller aliens slipping around their legs and over their backs. The air filled with more and more flyers, darting ahead of the wave on a straight path to our barricades.

And then some poor alien fuck stepped on one of my mines.

Aliens were flung into the air in shredded hunks of meat. Mortars thumped, and a half-second later detonated over the barricade sending clouds of zipping shrapnel down onto the hoard.

“Fire!” someone ordered.

The air filled with the roaring scream of a thousand guns. Muzzleflashes lit up the gap ahead of us with a constant yellow-white strobe, each flash marking the death of another alien.

The wave turned into a deadly tumble, bodies flopping over each other on the down-slope of the debris barrier. Still, they kept coming.

I brought my gun up and started to fire too. I wasn’t even aiming. It didn’t matter. Sure, there was a few dozen metres between us and the aliens, but there was so many of the fucks that it was impossible to miss.

Acid rained down on their ranks. Bigger artillery pieces boomed behind us. Tanks fired salvos of high-explosive shells into the alien’s ranks.

I flinched as something’s leg splattered against the side of my head, blown clean across the area.

Gomorrah joined the carnage with a wave of fire to counter the wave of flesh rushing at her. Even with my armour I could feel the warmth as a long blue line of liquid fire screamed over to the aliens and started to melt them.

It wasn’t enough.

They kept coming. Teeth and claws and angry eyes but never, never any sounds. Lasers lanced out from somewhere behind the line, swatting model ones out of the air so that they crashed around us as smoking corpses.

I saw the first casualty on our side of the wall.

Some PMC woman ran to one of the machine gun nests with a big box of ammo. A piece of some alien flipped through the air. A forelimb. Its clawed arm brained her in the side of the head and she went down, just like that.

“Fuck this,” I said. “Myalis, I need something to kill lots of shit, really fast.”

Before Myalis could reply I flinched down and half-hid behind one of the cement walls as debris was tossed into the air ahead. A big lumbering fuck stumbled through the new gap, then it started to run across the empty space, faster than anything that had come before.

Everyone in the area turned their focus to the monster. No matter how tough it might have been, there was only so much it could do against the amount of armour-penetrating rounds being flung at it.

That moment of distraction though was all the wave needed to get over the barrier in droves. Now they were spreading out, slipping behind cover and rushing out, we couldn’t just focus on those on the very top of the wall anymore.

“Oh shit,” I muttered.