“His heartbeat is slowing.” Leon said, scratching his head. “Didn’t think I’d be spending one of these on fresh blood so soon.”
The circus performer moved to a solid oaken chest with a black band of metal encircling it joined in an ankh-shaped lock gilded over in gold, sitting in a dusty corner of the 20x20 square room. He slipped a heavy brass key from the collar of his white undershirt and inserted it into the lock, biting his lip as he weighed the cost-benefit ratio of their situation in his head. Flipping open the heavy lid of the box, his withdrawal of a corked vial of glowing green liquid that looked like it had the texture of honey but the viscosity of water was met with protest from one of the six marksmen naval specialists sharing the room with him.
“What are you doing, wasting a health potion on the new meat who just washed up here? He’s probably the damn reason the shades showed up before the Eclipse in the first place!” a frantic-looking sniper with crow’s feet strewn prematurely about his silvery eyes said in an unsteady, anxious tone to Leon.
“I’m making a wager.” Leon said before uncorking the bottle with his teeth. “Get me a funnel, Connie. No one asked your opinion on the matter.”
The guard held his tongue after a pointed look of resentment at Leon, then retrieved a red plastic funnel as ordered. Leon practically had to pry it out of the soldier’s hand.
“The kid’s rough around the edges, but he’s got some sharp combat instincts. Besides, I want to know how he turned up here in Tide Town without knowing how he did it, and what the deal with his funky tattoos is still. I’m not about to lose someone so valuable to answering our longstanding questions over something so dumb and random. Besides, as a soldier, your duty is to protect everyone in Tide Town, not pass blame on someone for getting tailed by the enemy.” Leon lectured Connie as he positioned the funnel.
The plastic made little clicking noises against Richie’s parted teeth. The boy’s eyes had fallen closed, and he felt like he was sinking into the deepest kind of sleep. His body felt heavier and heavier, and it was as though he were sinking through the floor, through the layers of physical reality, deep into an abyss greater than the universe and older than time. The origin and return destination of all life. He was melding into the great sea beyond that was death. That’s what Richie felt like, and contrary to his expectations, it was a welcome, peaceful feeling, as the wordless sweet nothings the shade who had pacified him had been before his frightful encounter with the imposter pretending to be his mother. He felt cradled, cozy and secure in the embrace and lullaby of a matronly force that promised an end to all pain and difficulties. His body tingled all over for what felt like minutes, then all sensation and attachment to his body began to dissipate and dissolve. They were losing him quickly, his organic body sent into shock by the trauma inflicted on his true body; his astral body.
Leon tipped the vial’s contents down the open maw of the funnel, and watched the almost minty-smelling liquid cascade and swirl down into the boy’s gullet. With his other hand, Leon had inclined Richie’s head slightly, to ease the potion down his throat without dry-drowning him. Richie heard the echo of the elixir falling down his throat like one might hear water falling down an open shaft cave, trickling from one rocky ledge to another in a broken plunge down into the yawning depths. His fading spirit felt coolness, then a sensation of burning heat, like peppermint soap on sensitive skin, seep into his heart like rain into a thirsty potted plant.
All at once, Richie crashed back into reality. His eyes shot wide open as his heart lurched back into a healthy beats-per-minute rate, and his upper body catapulted upright like one suddenly woken from a vivid nightmare. He shrieked a little, sensation and life flooding back into his limbs as his open wounds on his shoulder, back, and hand all began to tingle and slowly squeeze themselves closed.
“Holy shit!” Richie jerked about, springing to his feet and his eyes darting around warily. “Who, what, when, where, why and how?!?”
“Welcome back to the world of the living.” Leon pat Richie’s mended shoulder. “Enjoy your nap?”
Richie took in his surroundings, saw that they were in a room composed of dark, almost burnt-colored wood panels, all lit with that same all-illuminating white lantern light, though significantly fainter to avert strain on the eyes. Surmising that they were in the Sniper Tower, Richie found that what he originally took for narrow slots for sniper rifles or cannons to pass through were actually much wider, more open windows. He had been correct in guessing that there were fixed heavy arms mounted in front of those windows though, looking like some kind of collapsible tank barrels on swivels. They almost reminded Richie of the kind of stationary squirt cannons one might fire at raft riders passing under the bridge of the rapids ride he’d imagined earlier. Tide Town seemed to strike Richie as being like one gigantic water park the longer he stayed here.
Looking under where he was still standing, Richie saw that his feet straddled a heavy trapdoor with a latch that was solidly locked with a heavy iron bolt. He could still hear the distant rush of the receding waters that had lifted himself and Leon to this room like an elevator. He and Leon weren’t alone - there were six other people in the room with them, each near one of the four windows. They didn’t strike Richie as looking very unusual in particular, at least not in comparison to the theatrical-looking Leon.
There was a slender black girl with long hair sketching an illustration unseen on a pad of long white sheets, her rifle laying over her lap beneath the board. She was next to a man with a buzzcut and a gaze inclined toward the floor, as if staring downward into space, his back pressed against the solid frame of the open window. At least he was smart enough not to leave his back totally exposed to whatever the hell was outside, it seemed. Across from them, at the window to Richie’s back, the anxious-looking man who had begrudged Richie’s unknowing consumption of the healing potion was sneering. When Richie noticed him, the sight of his prematurely greyed, receding hairline struck out at him more than the hostile look, which he hardly noticed. It looked like the man’s features had been worn out by constant, enduring stress under which he was finally beginning to crack, having not yet climbed out of his second decade of life.
To the walls left and right of Richie were a withdrawn, mousy-looking girl with ginger hair, a pale complexion, and abundant freckles, nervously picking at her skin beneath her rolled up sweater sleeves, and a heavyset, muscular man with dirty blond hair and piercing blue eyes who had his arms crossed. Both arms looked thick as an elephant’s trunk, and the man in general was built like a brick shithouse, as Richie would put it. There was a moody, choleric look about his harshly-carved, sharp features, though one that didn’t strike Richie as outwardly projected toward his companions as the greying man’s had.
An attic door and unfolding ladder dropped down from the rafters, which Richie could see lead up to some kind of tight quarters that must be set within the triangular roof of the tower itself. He caught a glimpse of what looked like an electric generator built into the wall before it was obscured by the man descending from the attic, a gangly sort of guy buried under baggy wool clothing and topped with a beanie. Richie noticed large coke-bottle glasses adorning his hazel eyes as he turned to address Leon and inform him that the breakers were fixed.
All totaled, there were now eight people in this room, counting Richie himself. He suddenly felt very cramped, and hot under his clothes and in his own skin, even against the frigid draft of the night sky they were open to on all four sides. He felt equal parts restless and fidgety. Did he drink something?
Richie turned to Leon. “What did you pour down my throat?”
“A special healing solution made from a kelp that grows native to Tide Town’s waters. Might not settle well, but take a look at your palm.” Leon nodded.
Richie looked at the hand he had partially pierced on the exposed nail of the marina’s rafters, and was mystified to see the skin swirling closed and fading to little more than an angry-looking red pinprick.
“That’s amazing!” he gawked, astonished.
“How do you feel?” Leon asked him, stretching out his neck and cracking his knuckles as he placed the folded coil of his whip back on his sash.
“Better. Much better.” Richie patted himself wherever he had suffered open wounds, and felt only mended, smoothed-over skin.
However, the bite marks he had yet to remember on the paled flesh of his stomach had yet to fade.
“And these guys are?” Richie asked, panning around the room at the collection of volunteer soldiers who were giving him looks that varied from mild curiosity, to the ‘I just bit a lemon’ glare of the man with the crow’s feet.
“Marksmen. After all, what’s a sniper tower without snipers?” Leon said. “Introductions will have to be quick while there’s a break between waves. You’ve sort of met Connie, the man mad-dogging you right now.”
Richie looked over the man once more, and nodded. “Noted.”
Leon gestured one by one to the others. “The beatnik who smells like cloves is Nuchi. He’s a compulsive hoarder.” he said of the man in the beanie who had come down from the attic.
“Was that fuckin’ necessary to mention, Lee?” Nuchi asked Leon with narrowed eyes.
“No, but it did amuse me.” Leon said, deadpan.
Nuchi casually flipped him off.
“That’s Jenny,” Leon pointed to the ginger girl, who Richie slowly realized had even brighter red hair than he did. “She dropped into Tide Town unexpectedly, like us.”
One by one, Leon acquainted Richie with each of the snipers, pausing awkwardly at the man with the buzzcut, and transparently stalling for time.
“It’s Clark, you prick.” the shaved man said, offended glare amusingly at odds with the green turtleneck collar hugging his neck.
“Look, survive your first week, maybe I’ll remember your name.” Leon said, eyes closed as he scratched the back of his head.
“What did you mean by drop-in?” Richie asked.
“That’s the thing. We came mostly by one of two ways, the refugees gathered here in Tide Town, Kokumo and myself among them.” Leon said. “Generally, fleeing the encroaching threat of shade invasion, as our homes disintegrated into darkness around us. A few managed to find the train. As far as any of us can tell, it really found them, but more on that later. Most everyone else fell through the Void and had the dumb luck to survive the trip mostly unscathed.”
“What the hell is the Void?” Richie asked.
“Exactly what it sounds like, more or less.” Leon said. “Look, we don’t have time to cover more than the basics, just keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle until the ride has come to a complete stop, ok?” Leon asked.
Richie shrugged. “Go on.”
“Like I was saying, most of us came by either of the main options, but you don’t seem to fit the pattern. If you didn’t fall through the Void, or get salvaged by the train, then I can only assume you moved through the Backyards.” Leon said.
Richie looked stricken.
“You seem surprised. Yes, for some reason or another, that’s the analogy most people come to when trying to assign a name to that dimension. It’s something like a blurry place or series of connections linking alternate worlds, but its exact nature and purpose are anyone’s guess. The Void is like a Backyards exclusive to shades, or the few who fall through it unscathed.” Leon said.
“So why couldn’t that have been the case with me?” Richie asked.
“Because you said you weren’t conscious when you arrived here, and it takes an act of supreme willpower and focus not to dissipate into the Void and cease to exist. We had to claw our way to the window we could see at the edge of the bottomless darkness. That vista was Tide Town. As for the Backyards, everyone here who found their way through it did so while lucid, if dazed or aimlessly wandering. What I’m saying is that in any of the three known options to get here, you don’t fit the common criteria for having to be conscious and autonomous to cross the dimensional borders. That makes you a person of scientific interest to Kokumo and I, and anyone else who’s still trying to figure out how worlds can vanish and if they can still be restored. Get the big picture?”
Richie held his chin a few moments, looking downward. “I think I get the gist of it.”
“The shades will strike the tower soon,” Leon said. “Isn’t there anything you can remember about arriving in this world? What was it you said when I first questioned you, before our duel?”
Richie frowned, irritated. “We’ve been over this, my dragons-”
Richie’s eyes popped wide open, and he looked down at his naked arms and torso, remembering that he had temporarily discarded his draconic runes to stall the faux-cultist shade at their back. He also remembered that they seemed sentient, or something close to mimicking it, and endowed with a singular will of their own. If the man in the cobalt cloak was telling the truth, those runes had been motivated to seek the Backyards and the worlds they linked to in the first place because they had caught the scent trail of their creator.
“Maybe I wasn’t awake, but what if something I was attached to was, and made that decision for me when we were all falling through darkness together?” Richie asked.
“It’s possible, I guess. Unprecedented, but possible.” Leon said.
Richie turned to the others in the room. “What about the rest of you guys? You all had something in common between your experiences coming here, right? What was it like for you?”
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Alicia, the black girl who had been sketching what Richie later saw were various hyper-realistic illustrations of horses, was the first to volunteer.
“I was daydreaming in the library and got turned around walking through the rows of bookshelves. I felt kind of confused, but it didn’t feel scary really, so I just went with the flow. Instead of patterned aisles, the shelves started to form narrowing tunnels and twisting passageways. A bookcase fell at some point and scattered a bunch of loose pages that looked like they were torn out of their bindings whole. They were everywhere, covered my vision entirely. When they cleared, I was in the garden area outside the library, I thought. But it was different. Little details here and there weren’t how I remembered them. I don’t remember much after crossing a bridge going over the creek though. Sorry I can’t tell you more.” she explained.
“Nuchi, wasn’t that something like what you told me the other day? About losing your way in the stacks of junk piled to the ceiling in your pad?” Clark asked the beatnik.
“Something like that.” Nuchi nodded. “Same feeling of wandering around on a whim for no real reason, getting disoriented, and just letting my legs carry me on blind intuition. But it didn’t feel like my own intuition, not entirely. More like being conscious of something that was predetermined by a higher power of some kind.”
“Like what, God?” Richie asked. “Sounds like someone playing a board game in that case, and us being the pieces.”
The rest looked at Richie curiously. He realized the cause of their confusion, and hastened to elaborate. “If I really did pass through the Backyards unconsciously to get here, it wasn’t my first time. Hell, I don’t think it was even my second. The city I ran to before I got caught up in all this has an abandoned piece of property, an apartment complex of some kind that got covered up by greenery. I took a nasty fall and limped my way there to sleep it off, and that’s when I saw an impossible hole in the fence. I didn’t think of it as a garden or a backyard at the time, because it was more like a tunnel made of super-dense vines. My tattoos first started becoming active when that entrance… that wandering corridor, I guess… showed itself to me. I think, anyway. I don’t remember anything besides going in. Might have seen an animal, but I can’t quite picture it.”
Jenny, who revealed dark circles of insomnia under her eyes when she tilted her head up to look at Richie, visibly thought over her words carefully before contributing to the conversation. “I didn’t use the Backyards, like you guys. I fell here from the Void, same as Leon. At the time, a fire had broken out in my town, and the shades used the panic and desperation to materialize. I tried escaping on my own terms with a bottle of sleeping pills, hoping to at least preserve my soul.”
“Or even not burn to death.” Clark added without being corrected.
Jenny nodded, giving a sad smile.
“That darkness that closed around me should have been the end, but I remember thinking that if I was going to the next world, things should have felt peaceful. They were anything but.” Jenny grabbed her shoulders and shivered, hugging herself even as she accidentally started pulling gouges in her own skin. “I wish I could forget what that emptiness felt like, and the things I saw there.”
Richie gulped. He thought he felt the air grow colder.
He was correct.
“Look alive, guys, second wave is coming. Check out the action outside our windows.” Leon alerted them all.
Richie moved to the nearest window to himself and stuck his head out like a dog on a car ride, obliviously pushing aside and nearly knocking Connie over, eliciting an angry “Hey!”
A pair of shades in the burning district Richie had been bitten near had adapted their bodies into the likeness of classical gargoyles, like the kinds statues were made of and perched on church and cathedral ledges to ward off demons. The irony was not lost on Richie, who recoiled his innards in revulsion at the sight of their bat-like leathery wings, dangling limbs ending in hooked talons, and square-jawed, brutish faces with glowing red eyes that looked like hot coals. The wings fluttered in place, holding them skybound outside the cracked or broken windows of a few shacks. Thankfully, when the gargoyle shades began mindlessly launching explosive fire spheres the size of bowling balls from their fanged gullets, the houses had already been evacuated.
Looking out over the bay and the docks from each of the four windows, rapidly sprinting from corner to corner to gauge the topography and design of Tide Town altogether, Richie saw that there were several more evacuation zones leading to those big iron bulkheads that fell closed behind the rope-rigged ferries on their fixed sail paths. Each, like the first Richie had seen, rose up a diagonally inclined channel that linked the surface-level Tide Town to an artificial bay enclosed on all sides by huge walls that looked like levees, towering high over the actual ocean on what Richie now saw were enormous barnacle-encrusted pillars that were equivalent to support columns. The secondary bays, each resembling a miniature Tide Town enclosed by that bird-netting like mesh, rose what seemed to be close to a thousand feet above sea level.
Beside the long docks floating in rows of four on the water beyond the Sniper Tower, Richie saw dark purple shadow cast over the strip of sea between the corner of the tower and the outer edge of the nearest floating bay to it. Turning his gaze upward, Richie’s jaw fell open in awe at the sight of the sky swirling in a thunderous maelstrom of lightning-streaked clouds and dark plasma. The sky was sinking into itself in the shape of a sunken or inverted tornado, or eddie, and things were dropping out of that hole in the sky. At first they looked like black specks, and then gradually larger ones began to fall, and Richie saw that they were all kinds of shades that had taken different forms. The entire population of a zoo looked like it was painted stygian black, some with white skull-like exoskeleton plating, and raining out of the gaping wound in the heavens. Shadow lions, tigers, bears, crocodiles, rhinos, elephants, hippos, wolves, giraffes - all manner of dark inversions of exotic wildlife were plummeting down.
They should have been endangered by the tremendous fall, but wherever they landed on the docks, atop shack roofs or pilings, or in the bay, they merely flattened into actual shadows at or just before impact, then retook their original shapes and spread out about the grounds, joining the hoards of their previous batch of invaders.
“There’s so many…” Richie gaped.
“I think, one way or another, when you passed between worlds while unconscious, you made a kind of temporary link the shades could trace. They shouldn’t have been able to take physical form outside of what I think you described as a scary near-death state, getting clobbered by that lep-” Leon began.
Richie glared daggers at him, silently warning him not to speak a word of the incident with O’Gravy in front of these strangers.
“Anyway,” Leon scratched the back of his head, “Like with Jenny, the despair and fear generated by being in a state between life and death, if you happened to be close enough to a thin spot over the Void, might have been strong enough for the shades to leech off of and use to drag you into the Void.”
“But if my dragon runes brought me through the other place, the Backyards, that shouldn’t be an issue, right?” Richie asked.
“Unless you took a small piece of that darkness with you.” Leon muttered cryptically. “Never mind, we can speculate later. The shades are coming with renewed numbers, be prepared to fight.”
“What makes you think they’ll attack this tower?” Richie asked.
“Because we’re going to chum the waters, that’s what.” Leon smirked.
He snapped his fingers, and Nuchi, Alicia, and Connie retrieved buckets from beside the various chests and supply boxes Richie noticed were pushed to the walls and corners of the sniper room. The buckets had screw-top lids that were discarded, revealing a transparent liquid sloshing inside, filled slightly below the brim, just enough to not spill over when jarred. Each marksman grabbed a bucket and moved to three of the four walls, hefting them over the edge and dumping their contents into the bay.
“Pure concentrated cortisol, the stress hormone involved in processes like experiencing fear that are kicked off in your brain.” Leon preemptively explained to Richie, knowing the kid was bound to ask anyway.
“Why do you have gallons of hormones just lying around in buckets?” Richie asked. “And what good’s dumping it into the sea going to do?”
Leon walked to the window most directly facing the sea’s horizon, and the thunderous downpour of animalistic shades, and leaned over the sil, propping himself up by a planted elbow.
“Brewed at the same synthesis lab where those kelp potions are created, in downtown Tide Town. Shades are drawn to negative emotions, especially fear. Think of this as being like pumping our area full of delicious smells that will bring them scrambling at the foot of the tower, eager to get to a feast that doesn’t exist. Our priority isn’t to kill as many as we can, but to keep them from attacking civilians. If we keep them here till their manifestation time is up, we win. If the tower or us fall and the town burns, we lose. Simple enough, right?” Leon asked Richie.
Richie gazed solemnly out over the sea’s horizon where the animalistic variants of shades poured endlessly like apocalyptic rain, his jaw set and his eyes carved into a mixed look of existential dread and scathing contempt. Suddenly, he felt his gaze rocket through the window, out of the tower and beyond, into the nooks and crannies of the twisting downtown piers and shack alleyways. His disembodied vision, or astral projection or whatever it was, was tinted with a transparent filter of vivid azure blue. In that moment, Richie knew that he was seeing through the eyes of his dragons. Their perspective fell on an open square framed by more shops and upper decks, with a decorative stone fountain in its center. It was layered in ascending, smaller overflowing pools of water, and topped with a masterfully-carved cherubic angel playing a trumpet, little eagle-like wings pressed together at his back below the shoulders. The top of the fountain’s water cycle was a trickle flowing from the end of that instrument.
A dark outline straddled the fountain from behind, then passed through the structure altogether, phasing through solid material as though it or the fountain were an insubstantial illusion. Richie saw that it was a cloaked figure, but whether the cloak was the cobalt blue of the man in the apartment complex, or just midnight black like the shades themselves had mostly been, Richie couldn’t tell due to the blue filter of his rune-vision. What he did see all too clearly though was that those booted feet passed through the pool at the bottom of the fountain, making little ripples. Then, pulsating outward from the epicenter of those ripples, the water began to roll over black as pitch, as though it were being alchemically transmuted from the exact place the figure had stepped with the transformation radiating outward. Richie watched the water’s conversion spread in that growing radius, till at last the rolling edge of that dark curtain of liquid reached the rim of the fountain’s basin. From there, the successive tiers of fountain water above spread that liquid infection, until the spout of water falling from the angel’s trumpet too was that same sickly black.
Richie knew on sight that the substance the fountain water had become was the same so-called Elixir of Life that the leprechaun had sought and absorbed in the sewers before undergoing that rapid demonic transformation. It was the liquid that reeked of death. It’s what Richie pictured the River Styx might have been composed of.
Then, Richie was himself again, and his psychic connection with his detached dragons had been severed. The sight of that liquid darkness shocked the recently repressed memory of the bite he had taken out of him via shade back into the surface of his consciousness, and Richie felt his fists ball up with anger, jaws grinding his teeth almost to the point of fracture again. Everything flashed through his mind again - the way the waves of fire had separated him from Leon, the way the dock he was on seemed to become totally distinct from Tide Town and stretch on forever, and most of all the way the despicable monster had exploited the form of Richie’s mother to lure him into a deadly embrace.
That was unacceptable and unforgivable. The outrage Richie had felt of being falsely jailed and abused by the cops for a crime he didn’t commit, of being kicked in the gutters and spat on all his young life was nothing compared to the white-hot fury he felt envelop every fibre of his being right then and there. He felt the sharp stabbing, grinding pain of the bite in his torso all over again, and looked down over his flat, slightly-chiseled stomach to see the angry red marks of that shark-like jaw outline still stamped there like a humiliating brand. One hand clutched at the skin there, feeling as if to confirm that it was real, and that he had been suckerpunched in such a gutless fashion.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” Leon asked him, rotating the chamber of a six-shooter with an especially long barrel he had retrieved from one of the oak cabinets.
The others had assumed their marksmen stances at the windows, armed with variations of sniper rifles except for the keen-eyed German man, who was equipped only with an old Luger. Apparently, his eyes did not merely appear hawk-like, but could physically sight the targets others needed magnified scopes to even reach.
Richie only partially snapped out of his enraptured sense of rage to look toward Leon and shake his head stiffly. As Leon armed the younger boy with a magnum and explained that the two of them would be guarding the tower at close range should the shades advance beyond the preferred sniper range, or else man the mounted guns against dense clusters of shades as needed, Richie felt himself ask more questions the same way he might hear himself speak in a dream; detached, vague, vaporal. He was beginning to dissociate from reality again, but this time there was no rabbit hole to escape down.
“What are the shades?” was the only relevant question Richie remembered asking - and having answered - afterward.
“The soulless. The Void made flesh and blood. Some think they embody the grudge of things that failed to fully exist. The resentful unborn.” Leon said, and Richie could somehow tell from the circus performer’s expression that his skin was crawling too, and that even the veterans of Tide Town who might have seen a hundred incursions from the shapeshifting abominations or more never truly got used to it.
“Good.” Richie snarled without realizing the aggression in his tone. “Then I won’t have to feel guilt for slaughtering them.”
Leon hesitated a moment, stricken by Richie’s choice of words. He wouldn’t put his finger on it till later, but in the quiet hours of his reclusive free time, he would hear himself think - That’s a troubling answer. If they were ensouled, would you hesitate to do what’s necessary to stop them from consuming the innocent?
Leon didn’t spend time on it now though, and only gave a command to retrieve their regularly-issued Soma tablets now or never to his men. Richie, lacking a pill jar on his person for having been newly - and temporarily - recruited by circumstance, was offered a small blue pill by Leon.
“You think now’s the best time to start tripping balls?” Richie asked the man skeptically.
Leon shook his head. “You misunderstand. These are anti-shade drugs manufactured at the lab to counteract the emotion drain effect those monsters have on you up close. You remember how quickly you lost energy and willpower when you were staying still, surrounded by them? There isn’t a lot of pacing space up here, and with the numbers coming toward us, it’s going to feel more than a little depressing in here. Any euphoric high you would get from these tablets is going to be balanced out by the waves of despair radiating out of those freaks of nature, I guarantee you.”
Richie considered the small tablet sitting there in Leon’s upturned palm, hearing the dry swallows of the other recruits around them taking the drugs the way biohazard specialists may inoculate themselves against horrific diseases as a matter of standard procedure. Tempting though it was, he shook his head all the same.
“I’ll pass.” Richie said. “I want to keep my edge.” he said, looking back toward the darkened sky of continually-falling spawns of the Void. “I’m afraid my anger will die down.”
Richie’s gaze darkened as he cocked the magnum, holding it ready with the muscle memory expertise of a career soldier despite his complete inexperience with firearms of any kind. His pupils were narrowed to quivering pinpricks that looked to Leon almost too small to be part of actual human eyes.
“I’m extremely pissed off right now.” Richie growled in a low, gravelly voice that seemed too deep for his seventeen year old body and boyish face. “And I want to take it out on these sacks of shit till I pass out.”
Leon felt nervous sweat break out on his brow looking at Richie, for a few seconds feeling like he was standing next to a shade that had assumed the boy’s form, then said no more. He turned his back to Richie’s, either man facing the windows at north and south.
The thunderous uproar of trumpeting elephants, shrieking jaguars, and calling whales were gradually subsumed by a piercing wail like an air-raid siren, one that Richie couldn’t tell (and didn’t care) if it was a delayed evacuation signal from Tide Town itself, or a mimicry created by the army of shades to further instill dread and terror in its populace. Then the thunderclaps of lightning struck again, signaling the sudden acceleration of the winds like a starting gun kicking off a footrace. All at once, heavy rain and sleet began to fall from the clouded skies along with the shades, and then even the animal shrieks of the beasts the damnable things were impersonating seemed to meld together and be overtaken by the folkloric music of grander, more supernatural terrors. The haunting screams of wendigos, the beckoning cries of banshees, and the giggling of the darkened woodland fey floated up and echoed all around the tower.
Peering outside, Richie saw the first wave of aggressors - wild cats painted black, and more simians like those in the marina running alongside them, crashed against the outer tower wall.
The assault on the Sniper Tower had begun.