The Baron knelt by the window, jerking a thumb out over the edge. “Let’s talk about strategy. CPUSA is still in the building, but the enforcers are clearing them out, right?”
“That’s right,” Schuler agreed.
“And there’s New York men outside. Lieutenant Decoin, correct?”
“Yes, but he’s with most of his forces, moving along 17th street. They’re aiming to retake the north entrance. What you’re hearing to the southwest are a few squads trying to secure the park before the National Guard moves in. CPUSA is facing a pincer.”
“You know all that?” the Baron asked.
“As much as anyone can. While I was fighting the Zombie, General Osman wished to make a phone call on a dead handset. Boss Tweed dispatched scouts after he dodged, and they reported in by radio. Our eyes are opening to the world around us.”
“So how many people will we have to carry us across the park?”
“Guaranteed? Only myself and your Zombie.” Schuler looked up at the ceiling. “The General will help after I report in though. The terms of the task will convince him, and once the soldiers see his support, they’ll follow my orders.”
The Baron didn’t share Schuler’s confidence, but he didn’t want to argue with their temporary, task-driven ally. “Will you do the talking?”
“Yes, but Baron, be at ease. I’m the Wizard of the East. Osman won’t deny me.” Schuler stood beside the Baron, back pressed to the bookcase. His glasses caught the light as he scanned the dark green hedgerows and spring green trees, gently shuffling in a cool breeze. “We’ll clear the path, cutting across the greens towards the Flagstaff.” He gestured to the copper-clad pole, holding a flaccid sheet of stars and stripes far above the surrounding park. “Focus on survival. Spare the lives of the Cat, for whatever purposes the gods desire.”
The Baron squinted up at the Diviner. “If the gods want to help me save the world, then why stop after crossing the park? Why not assign the task to give the Cat back to Denisov, if that’s the point of their intervention?”
“Excellent question,” the Zombie added.
Schuler looked down at the Baron, peering with a slightly slack expression—not for a lack of focus, but to let his thoughts flow freely. “Have you ever known the gods to tell a human-ready narrative? No?”
“No.”
“Yet you do know the gods intervene to punish temple-breakers, to bring justice to Falls, and so on.”
“Yes. They targeted me in Europe.”
“So consider that you are now, however briefly, a means to an end in a much grander scheme, but you’re not the point. Nothing you desire is the point. Not a single damn thing in this world is the entire point of their actions. Otherwise, we’d have figured it out by now.”
“That’s a disappointing answer,” the Baron said. “It’s accepting ignorance.”
“It is.” Schuler looked back out at the world, at the robin’s egg sky, at the dead men scattered along the paved footpaths, separating the green groves. “Only the Apostate knows, Baron. What matters today is that I’ll finish the gods’ task, and I’ll earn prestige in their eyes. What happens to the world is not my concern, nor that of the gods. If you desperately need an answer, I’d guess that you’re meant to die somewhere else, not in New York’s hands. I still think these are the last days of the Earth.”
“They better not be,” the Zombie said gravely. “The Pact is as serious as any atomic bomb, and I’d like to read more books.”
“Fair enough.” Schuler scanned the length of the ruined sedan outside the window. “Let’s get in cover behind the car. I’ll jump first. Zombie, second. Baron, third. Go quickly, and it’s unlikely they’ll shoot our mortal man. Ready?”
d’Holbach glanced at the CPUSA corpses around the door to the office, covered in bricks and red dust. “Do we want to dig up any of their guns?”
“I’ll grab something outside,” Schuler answered. “The Zombie has his fists.”
“He can throw me again,” the Zombie suggested.
“That I will.”
The Baron took a deep breath. If they were satisfied with their capacity for violence, then there truly was only one way forward. “I’m ready. On go?”
Schuler grunted.
The Zombie stepped up behind the Diviner. “Three, two, one, go!”
Schuler grabbed the windowsill and vaulted, throwing his feet over and out. The bottom story was on ground level, but the window was deep, as long as a brick and a limestone slab stacked together. Four shots rang out; two struck Schuler in motion, throwing splashes of blood across the limestone cladding of Tammany Hall. The Diviner landed on the glass shards with a crunch, then ducked down behind the car. Both wounds were already restored.
The Zombie vaulted next; another two shots rang out.
The Baron went right on his invincible heels, vaulting last. A final shot rang out, but scattered off the Zombie just in front of him, sending fragments of bullets into the stretch of sidewalk beside the car. The vehicle was parked facing the wrong direction for this side of the street, but that was to their benefit. The Baron landed, crunching glass, then jumped over the dead man in a suit, angling for the spot where the open driver’s side door would protect his body on the left. The Zombie slammed into the exterior on the right, placing himself between d’Holbach and Schuler.
At a glance, the sidewalk facing the park was empty but for a few more corpses. That made sense. Anyone posted up against the building was an easy target from shooters on all sides of the conflict. “What’s next?” the Baron hissed.
Schuler cleared his throat. “I wish to be heard by General Osman. General, please come to the west wall, right beneath the pediment. Cut a hole with the blade, but stay out of view, and ask Mr. Roach to be your spotter. We’ll talk once the wall is open.”
“You’re asking him to damage the Hall with a magic weapon?” The Baron tried to keep the astonishment out of his voice, but this moment was continuing to change faster than his expectations could keep up.
“I’m not asking the General,” Schuler answered. “I’m telling him what to do.”
In the back of his mind, the Baron had already known the masquerade was damaged. The occult was spilling over into the secular in ways that’d be remembered for decades. Hundreds of men would perish. Property damage would take months or even years to resolve. The police were already dismissed from New York’s streets, replaced by the National Guard.
In some sense, these were the first days of what might be a final battle, ending in nuclear warfare. Yet he anticipated the next few minutes with an itch of frustration.
The Green Dragon Crescent Blade was about to be fired out in the open. Anyone staring out of some window at the madness would soon see rainbows slashing the clear spring air. Fragments of jade would be found mixed with the park soil. Explaining any of this would be challenging. Conspiracies would form around the occult evidence, and secular history would be full of cracks. Like scar tissue, urban legends would eventually subsume the unreal elements, healing over the breaks, but until then, people would whisper stories about a strange, bloody day in the spring of 52.
The Zombie was laughing at his own thoughts, low and pleased. He glanced over at the Baron. “We’ll deliver you. Trust me.”
The Baron licked his lips. “Yes—”
A curved arc of violet light cut out of the second story beneath the pediment of Tammany Hall, the intent of a tremendous sculptor to chisel out a new hole. Then the spring air exploded green, as loud as artillery in the hills, and a few yards south, powder and limestone sand rained down onto the sidewalk, mixing with stone confetti of sparkling jade. Red light glowed briefly over the street, muted by the white sunshine.
The Baron whistled. “I wonder what the National Guard will say.”
The Zombie answered in a whiny, mocking tone: “I’m an American soldier, but I just shit my pants because a rainbow exploded in the sky.”
Schuler laughed. The Baron managed to control himself and only smiled.
A second arc of rainbow light, shaped like the letter V, soared towards the treetops in the park, followed by another green explosion, cutting loose all the brickwork and limestone of that second story wall. An angled segment tumbled outward, crashing down to the sidewalk and shattering. Dust briefly poured out of the hole in the face of the Hall, and in the park, all gunfire fell silent. Two artillery blasts had forced a momentary pause in their battle.
“Schuler!” called the voice of General Osman, reedy and distant over the breeze. “Are you out there? What madness have you asked me to do?”
“I am here!” Schuler yelled back. “With Baron and Zombie alike!”
“The Baron? Did you capture him?” Osman yelled.
“No, General! Do you have Mr. Roach spotting?”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Do you have Mr. Roach spotting?” Schuler repeated.
The tip of a Garand shoved out of the hole, waggling from side to side in an awkward wave. “I’m here!” Mr. Roach called. “The General is staying in cover!”
“Is there anything happening at Union Square West and East 15th?” Schuler yelled.
The Garand tip retreated a bit, turning forty-five degrees southwest, towards the same spot Schuler had pointed towards earlier. It was an intersection directly across the wooded body of the park, ending at a street about two-thirds of the length south from Tammany Hall. “The National Guard is setting up a checkpoint!” Mr. Roach answered.
“Then we have a new task from the gods!” Schuler yelled up to them. “Seven centuries of prestige for taking the Baron across Union Square Park to the National Guard checkpoint!”
“Dead or alive?” General Osman yelled.
“Alive! But I will kill all else, General, including the soldiers at that damned checkpoint! If the gods demand that we let the Baron go, then we will use the Zombie, we will collect our prize, and we will beat back the Guard! Would you assist us with artillery?”
There was a long pause. The Garand retreated briefly.
“Will he help?” the Baron asked.
The Zombie answered before Schuler could. “He will. More than he wants the Cat, he’d love to conquer and keep this territory out of Langley’s hands.”
Schuler gave a thumbs up. “Exactly, devils. Trust in his love for war.”
“We will cut them all down!” General Osman shouted. “Mr. Roach, call the angles! Schuler, take command, highlight muzzle fire, and make sure we receive that prestige! If the Boss complains, we’ll offer him the Hall itself as our prize! Now, boys, to war!”
“To war!” Schuler yelled.
“To war!” the Zombie shouted.
“To war,” the Baron muttered, peeking carefully through the car windows at the park, heading towards the Independence Flagstaff. There was a lot of open ground from the north end of the plaza to the outer stone wall and its stout hedge. Running across it would expose him to nearly twenty seconds of open gunfire.
It’d be better if they could move the car for cover, but the front wheels were missing.
But how were the rear wheels? He knelt, glancing past the curb and beneath the car. Both rear tires were inflated. No obvious damage. This was a 2-door sedan, seashell green. It might do the trick. “Zombie, do you recognize this vehicle?”
“This?” the Zombie asked, still crouching beside the Baron. “Chevy Deluxe Sedan, last year’s model. 2-speed automatic transmission. Yeah, I recognize it.”
“What’s the drive train? Front or rear?”
The Zombie paused for a moment. Then a huge grin broke out onto his face. “Rear wheel drive!”
“Lucky then. We can use it for moving cover.” In this condition, the car was difficult to drive forwards, but trivial to run backwards. With the engine gunned, they could drag the front bumper until the entire thing broke down. It’d protect them all the way across the barren north plaza until they could ram it into the stone barrier beneath the first line of hedges.
“An excellent idea,” Schuler judged. “Get in, devil. I’ll start the engine. Baron, we’ll run close behind and drive straight towards the Flagstaff.”
“Let’s do it,” the Baron agreed.
The Zombie skirted around his back, then hopped up into the driver’s seat. “Light it,” he called, quickly shutting the driver’s side door. “No windshield. If you have orders, shout ‘em.”
“Start,” Schuler commanded.
The car’s engine turned over and rumbled into life.
The Zombie laughed, tapping the accelerator while the car was in park. Twice, the engine roared. Then he depressed the brake, switched the automatic transmission into reverse, and grabbed the steering wheel with one hand. Someone shot a rifle through the back windshield, striking the Zombie in the shoulder. “Let’s roll!” he roared.
Then he yanked the wheel, tapped the gas, and backed away from the sidewalk in a sharp arc. Instantly, the bumper caught on the curb and snapped off with a bang of failing steel bolts, followed by the front end of the chassis scraping over asphalt with a blend of heavy rattles and metallic screeches, shearing off two showers of white-hot sparks from the friction. With a couple of quick yanks, he angled the rear to the southwest, facing directly towards the Flagstaff at the center of the park and East 15th street on the other side.
The car wouldn’t last long in this configuration, but with luck, they could reach the hedge before the engine compartment failed or the drive train broke.
The Baron and Schuler skittered around the vehicle, putting it between them and most possible enemy positions. The Diviner planted his hands on the hood; the Baron mimicked him, keeping low. Then Schuler yelled, “Go! I’ll limit your speed!”
The Zombie didn’t hammer the accelerator, but he gave it a generous press, and the car lurched into another metallic wail, immediately yanking it out of their hands.
“Ten!” Schuler wished, bursting up into a sprint, and the Baron joined him at a break neck run. That was ten miles per hour, pathetic for a car, but only slightly slower than a strong human sprint.
The Zombie jumped the far curb up onto the plaza, making a loud bang as the front hood slammed into the concrete lip. The Baron caught up to him on the flagstones, sprinting into the backspray of steel sparks until he could plant his hands on the rumbling vehicle and keep them there, lowering his head to stay in cover.
Schuler stayed back a few feet to spot targets in the middle of his own run. A rifle shot passed through him, striking Tammany Hall far behind him and knocking out a window. More bullets burst through the car, striking the steel and the Zombie himself. The Baron flinched, but there was nothing to do but keep running. Twenty feet out from the wall. Ten feet out.
“Release!” Schuler wished.
The limits on the sedan vanished, and the Zombie whooped as the engine lurched out of the Baron’s grasp, accelerating. A single heartbeat passed, and the Baron redoubled his efforts to keep up, knowing how this would end.
The sedan struck the outer wall and the hedge with a crash of stone, brush, and steel, like someone dropping the entire percussion section off a catwalk into an orchestra pit. The vehicle stopped dead, but the engine sputtered through three smokey coughs before releasing its pistons with a loud ping, like a hammer striking an anvil. The hood itself rattled over jumping engine parts, then fell silent. With a joyous cackle, the Zombie crawled up and over the dashboard, through the missing windshield, and onto the hood.
Schuler caught up, slamming his hands onto the car. “Ready, Zombie?”
“Do it!” the Zombie yelled, standing tall.
“Launch!” Schuler wished, and the same forces that’d once thrown the Zombie through a wall now catapulted him up into the air, ballistically flying along a shallow arc through the trees beyond the hedgewall. The invincible man tumbled over, peaked before two elms, and crashed through a bundle of tree boughs, scrabbling at the branches with his arms to right his body as he fell down to the shaded soil and landed awkwardly near the center of the grove. Boughs and leaves rained down around him, torn off the trees by his cannonball entrance.
Total distance, maybe twenty yards, a quarter of the distance to their destination, and more than enough to place him between multiple enemy positions. The Zombie stood, kicking off his other ruined shoe, and the first shots began to issue from around trunks, from the other hedgewall at the far end of the grove, and from beneath park benches. Disturbed leaves, fresh holes in his clothes, and puffs of blasted soil indicated a surprising volume of ricocheting bullets.
“Four seconds, CPUSA has bright muzzles,” Schuler wished, squatting beside the Baron. d’Holbach was breathing heavily, trying to recover after a sprint, so he couldn’t find the breath to voice the absurdity of that wish. It gave knowledge indirectly by changing an unknown number of bullets at multiple unknown locations for a significant period of time. The price should’ve been obscene, but maybe Schuler already knew where the enemy was. He could sense the world as the gods sensed it. Maybe this was cheap enough for a Diviner like him.
The next enemy shots taken in Union Square Park flashed like camera bulbs, unmistakably bright even against the noonday sun. Half-hearted shots at the Zombie were now fatal mistakes. Most gunfire stopped immediately, but it was too late.
The eagle-eyed Mr. Roach watched from afar.
“Loud,” Schuler wished. Immediately, his voice echoed like a bullhorn across the parkland: “New York soldiers! Shoot anyone who runs from those positions!”
The Baron glanced back at Tammany Hall, and he saw the first violet slice pass through the bricks and arc through open air like an arrow, brightening towards glorious cyan hues. He covered his ears; the end of the slash touched one of the CPUSA positions, huddled down on the other side of the grove behind a second hedgewall.
That one slash nearly reached the center of the park.
The enemy soldiers had seen what the Green Dragon Crescent Blade could do to the Hall, but Schuler’s orders had coerced them to stay in cover. Three men were crouched behind those bushes—the Baron could make them out, struggling to rise through the violet arc.
The slash exploded into green, annihilating the hedge, destroying half a foot of rock wall, and leaving three sets of human legs tumbling to the ground, while three dismembered torsos rolled backwards through an orange and red haze onto the pavement around the Flagstaff. A rain of jade scales signed their thunderous deaths.
Before anyone could process what had happened, General Osman had already thrown out another two violet slashes, sweeping out two more locations along the far hedge.
“Baron!” Schuler yelled, trying to be heard as further explosions of green decimated enemy positions. He pointed past the wrecked car, to the fresh cuts in the far hedgewall. “Do you see the Flagstaff base?”
It was impossible to miss the truck-sized granite pedestal, but in such chaos, Schuler was only being thorough. “I see it,” the Baron replied.
A momentary peace followed the last two artillery strikes. “We’ll run through the grove. I’ll lead the charge. New York’s men will rush the enemy positions. You’ll count to five, then follow, using the tree trunks as cover. Understand?”
The Baron absolutely understood what this meant. New York soldiers were about to charge, and though it’d win them a forward position and possibly the entire conflict, it’d cost lives. He was experienced enough at strategy to recognize this, and intelligent enough to know that he could no longer refuse the inevitable casualties.
He’d risked his own life many, many times over the last few days, pushing the boundaries beyond the point of foolishness. His principles had worked—barely—in an environment where words still shared space with bullets, but negotiations no longer had a role on this battlefield.
The Baron had to accept that men would die, and he’d have to kill some himself and accept the sacrifice of others. This was a microcosm of the war he’d hoped to prevent, but if he delivered the Cat to Denisov, it might end today, instead of spreading like a wildfire.
So d’Holbach girded himself, ignored the guilt, and agreed with what Schuler intended and what the Zombie surely wanted. “Start the charge. Five seconds, and I’ll run.”
The Diviner nodded. “Loud,” he wished. Then like a bullhorn, his voice echoed, signalling to both soldiers and enemies that the hour of battle was a hand: “New York! Center park, advance!” Then he stood, wishing again, “Flashes,” and he ran up onto the hood of the ruined car, strode across the roof, and jumped down to the soil of the grove.
Five seconds, starting now.
New York soldiers deployed on Schuler’s orders. Maybe they were simply that loyal, or maybe they feared the Diviner’s unnatural awareness. Maybe it was both. Squads of armed men materialized out of the shaded landscape, wriggling through hedges, leaping up from low spots in the grove’s topography, and unfolding from behind tree trunks into a broad, armed advance. All of them started shooting, suppressing enemy positions as they moved.
Three seconds.
Two bundles of CPUSA mercs were trapped in the middle of the trees, somewhere close to the Zombie. Both groups decided to shoot back at the New York advance. Their muzzle flashes were again brighter than the surrounding sunshine, alerting Mr. Roach.
New York reacted immediately. Most soldiers rushed to the temporary cover of tree trunks, pouring fire towards those concentrations of enemy forces. Four friendlies fell to their knees, grappling at fatal entry wounds. Two collapsed, instantly dead.
Time was up.
More slices of rainbow arced down through the groves themselves, and those CPUSA mercenaries scattered, screaming as green light cut down thirty years of tree growth and about half of their number in thunder-loud blasts of rainbow light. Then every other member of CPUSA jumped up and either fought earnestly or ran like hell, and there was no sense of order anymore.
The Baron followed directions, jumped up onto the car hood, and leapt over the ruined hedge onto the grove lawn, immediately sprinting towards the nearest unoccupied tree for cover.
Twenty yards out, the Zombie was running down a screaming man in a WW2 uniform, beating at his back with invincible fists. The third strike visibly crumpled the victim’s spine, and the Zombie tumbled over the fresh corpse before quickly scrambling to his feet.
The Baron sprinted for the next tree, head on a swivel. More camera flash shots. CPUSA no longer cared about positional advantage. They shot because the enemy was closing in, flanking them, gunning them down. It was a rout, a slaughter. Screaming men fell over, peppered with bullets until something vital was struck, silencing them.
Meister Schuler sprinted through the trunks at an impossible speed, wish-augmented. He pointed at one CPUSA man running for the back hedge with a Springfield M1903, and he shouted, “Here!” The bolt-action jumped back towards Schuler, breaking the merc’s wrist, and the Diviner caught up to the arc of the weapon, catching it cleanly by the stock while sliding to a stop in black boots, casting a plume of leaves and soil ahead of him.
He raised the rifle with one hand, operated the bolt with the other, and snapped it up to aim. No wishes were needed, not with his unreal awareness. He shot the gun’s owner in the back, operated the bolt, and snapped to the next target. Noting his stopped position, a merc unleashed a burst with an SMG, hitting him in the chest and neck, but the wounds closed while Schuler sniped his second target in the head. Another round blasted through the Diviner’s cheek, surely striking his brain while knocking his glasses askew. Nevertheless, Schuler only shuddered once, righted his glasses while operating the bolt a third time, and cleanly shot a man running past the base of the Flagstaff. The assailant with the SMG saw this and ran.
“Fuck!” the Baron cursed, awed at the unfair power of the Diviner.
“Baron!” Schuler yelled without looking back. “Advance!”
d’Holbach sprinted forward again, darting from trunk to trunk while Schuler killed two more men with the last two loaded rounds. The Springfield was empty.
Schuler roared, “Javelin!” With perfect form, he launched the rifle skyward, and with an absurd grace, it arced over and down, hitting a different CPUSA merc right at the edge of the grove and stabbing four inches of barrel into his lower back, knocking him clean over.
The Zombie was running for the same target. When he saw the merc fall, he jumped up and came down with both invincible feet onto the back of the fallen man’s neck. The miraculous result was a wet crush of obliterated meat and bone. The head rolled several feet, and the Zombie slipped in gore, laughing wildly, but he didn’t fall. He found the next target and sprinted after them, two bloodied hands extended to snuff another life with gruesome grappling.
The New York advance swept up behind the Baron, firing at fleeing targets. More rainbows of the Green Dragon Crescent blade stabbed into the park, slashing through standing structures and any CPUSA mercenaries who’d dared to stop and fight. d’Holbach had only one line of trees left ahead of him; he bolted up to the last one, staring at the nearest hole in the next hedge. Beyond it, scattered human legs introduced pools of blood leading to dead torsos. That’d been the first artillery strike from General Osman. It was an awful road to salvation.
Schuler and the Zombie both converged on the Flagstaff pedestal, individually pushing over the hedge. The Diviner had a pistol, barking and biting with unreal precision. The invincible man drove enemies away with a reputation for sheer brutality. Behind them trailed a shadow of safety, composed entirely of surviving New York soldiers. Maybe a quarter of them had fallen in the charge, hurried to the afterlife in service of the world’s largest cult. The rest moved as if none had died.
“Over the next hedge!” Schuler yelled. “Push the advantage! Don’t let them regroup!”
The Zombie grabbed the lip of the Flagstaff pedestal and climbed up onto it. He planted bloody footprints on its granite surface and wrapped a bloodied hand on the copper cladding of the flagpole. Peered towards their destination, he shouted, “CPUSA is engaging the National Guard! I repeat, CPUSA is engaging with secular forces!”
The sounds of gunfire rapidly rose at their destination. Another long arc of rainbow shot over the park, coming down close to the far end of the second grove. A green explosion shook all the leaves and boughs, making soldiers flinch in their advance.
“New York, keep moving!” Schuler yelled, boosting his volume with prestige.
The Baron ran past the fallen bodies, right up to the pedestal’s east face. He pressed himself against a bronze bas-relief of a naked woman and called up to the Zombie, “I’m here!”
The invincible man appeared at the edge above him, looking down. “Injuries?”
“None,” the Baron said hurriedly. “Am I good to move?”
“Yeah, I’ll cover you. Let’s run!”
The Baron ducked around the north end of the pedestal. The Zombie jumped down just ahead of him, providing a mobile shield. All around, New York cultists were running to the hedgeline, clambering up, and pushing forward. The Baron ran amongst them, squeezing between two hedge bushes and into the shade of this final grove.
At the intersection beyond—at the destination for Schuler’s task—the Baron could make out the National Guard checkpoint. Three jeeps were parked next to a flatbed truck full of equipment, and in front of those vehicles, six American soldiers were crouched behind sandbags, exchanging fire with the advancing occult. One of them had binoculars and was pointing at the violence in the park. Another was crouched, yelling into a radio handset at the back of the parked truck. Their weapons often paused—CPUSA mercs or New York soldiers repeatedly wished to break the Guard’s guns—but one of those six must be a cultist. After a moment, each Guard rifle returned to action as if it’d never been broken.
In effect, Langley’s secular hand was enforcing order with lethal force. They were treating Lower Manhattan like a warzone. What was Heckhaus’s excuse? What story was the media told? Was this a Cold War incident? Or were they labor riots incited by socialist or anarchist parties? The secular outcome would find its context tomorrow. Given the current tensions, blame would probably land squarely on remnants of the CPUSA, crushing them to dust.
Still, those vehicles had delivered very few soldiers to the checkpoint. It’d be trivial to overrun their position with Meister Schuler and the Zombie. Langley would lose this location, even if they had enough secular firepower to conquer the rest of the borough.
With every known threat accounted for, the Baron’s brain could finally dismiss the concerns of immediate survival. Well-practiced, he repeated the exercise that’d saved his life in the subway, and as he moved in the Zombie’s shadow, he scanned the environment for unknown threats.
On the south side of the coming intersection, Amalgamated Bank owned a five-story box of a building, fully stripped of all the decorative cast iron that’d once made it the prize of the jewelers, Tiffany & Co. Its tiny, slit-like windows were well-shadowed from the bright sunshine, allowing the Baron to look inside, but they were largely empty. The Baron could make out only a handful of shadowed faces, likely employees, called in on a Monday despite the violence. Now, they were witnesses to a terrifying fraction of the occult world.
On the north side of the intersection, there was a twelve-story office building, a grid of brick and steel holding up dozens upon dozens of tiny windows. That density offered a number of possible positions for spotters and gunmen, but the angle of reflection was poor from the Baron’s position, and most of its windows showed only a reflection of the midday sky.
He shaded his face with his hand and peered at the building anyways, focusing on the floors closer to the ground, just above and below the Dubois Uniforms sign that faced the park.
Later, he’d conclude that his body language triggered a response. On the fifth floor, in the windows just above the painted sign, a figure moved, pushing a dark, mounted machine closer to the glass, and before the Baron could recognize the hostility in that act, they destroyed the windows by unleashing an unmistakable wrath upon Union Square Park.
The M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun was the reaper’s typewriter, spelling out battlefield eulogies. Its .50 BMG cartridges were nearly as long as a dollar bill and produced five times the force of a Springfield .30-06 for a bullet five times as large. It boasted a rate of fire exceeding four hundred shots per minute and excellent accuracy up to a mile. To put it bluntly, the Browning was designed to shoot down airplanes, and it’d been repurposed for shredding enemy vehicles and mowing down combatants through dense cover.
When the Browning erupted, the Zombie was standing in the wrong place to properly shield the Baron. Its barrel swung down to fire through the trees. Branches blasted into pieces, deflecting rounds. Bullet impacts swept across the soil, traced over the Zombie, and reached the Baron before he finished reacting, long before the Zombie could help.
The Baron dove into his friend’s back while a round tore past his shoulder, just over the collarbone. The Zombie swept around in turn, protecting the shorter man with his body, arms spread wide and back hunched, but the gesture came too late. The Baron felt a twinge of nerves and slapped at the side of his neck, and he missed. The firing stopped.
“Broken!” Schuler yelled to the New Yorkers. “The gun is disabled! Get up! Move, now, now!”
The Zombie grabbed the Baron’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, mouth open. Eyes like platters. He mouthed words, forgetting to breathe, then took in a sharp breath and asked, “Friend?” That one word was strained under the weight of mortal terror. For a man with an invincible body and no inner life, fear for another was nevertheless unbearable.
d’Holbach felt waves of pain rocketing up and down his neck. The right side of his face was paralyzed. He felt a jet of blood from his carotid artery; then another splashing his palm as he clamped down on the wound. Each pulse drained him, made him dizzy. His legs shook him, and his visual field shrank. How much blood had he lost before he even felt it?
“Paul-Henri!” the Zombie shouted. When d’Holbach fell to his knees, the invincible man gripped his hand to keep him up. “Can you move?”
“They winged me,” the Baron said, trying to crack a joke, to cover up for the cold horrible feeling that was cramping down through him. His left eye was half closed. Only the right side of his mouth forced a smile. The bullet had barely clipped him, but it’d torn straight through a muscle, severing nerves and an artery. He was still losing blood, but he couldn’t feel the Cat. Wasn’t this fatal? Wasn’t this the road to death? “Am I dying?” he asked.
“You’ll live!” the Zombie yelled, desperate for anything other than inaction. “So stop holding onto this life and move! Before they fix the weapon, hurry up and move!”
The Baron understood. He took his hand off the wound, felt one more pulse of spurting blood—and the Cat seared through him like the dawn over a dazzling ice sheet. Fire burned up from his heart and through the artery, sealing it shut. He felt lines of fire cut through the muscles on his face and through the severed muscle of his neck. Invisible cords of force tied him together, and he willed them to move. Fire pulled his muscles, tickled his nerves. Like the puppeteer, he hooked the strings and commanded their dance, and the reins were his again.
He grasped the Zombie’s invincible hand with his own bloody fingers and felt himself lifted effortlessly off the ground and thrown forward. He stumbled deeper into the grove, seeing New York soldiers rushing alongside him while Schuler ran back towards him.
In the sky above, a rainbow arced out of Tammany Hall and swept across the park diagonally towards Dubois Uniforms, but it stopped short of the office building and exploded in thin air. Thunder echoed across the buildings without destruction.
“Did they miss?” the Baron asked Schuler.
“The General is out of range!” Schuler yelled, running over to meet them. “I’ll escort you! Heal you! Just keep moving!” He waved the Baron forwards, towards the checkpoint.
“Wait, wizard!” the Zombie barked, staring up at the Browning, poking its black barrel through the shattered window. “Launch me up there first! I want that damn gun!”
Author’s Note:
We’re closing in on the finale of this arc!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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