Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

The air rained blood-spattered sand and truck parts. What had to be someone’s hand slapped dully against the windshield, a watch strapped to the wrist and the tattered dun camouflage remnants of a uniform around it. Ahmed stared, momentarily speechless. He made a warding motion toward the severed forearm on the hood. The chopper screamed overhead, heading north toward Syrene. A raging tornado of sand erupted from the ground ahead of it and bent its dark funnel—Simoon. The chopper turned sharply to avoid her vortex, but the rotors were caught in the swirling winds, flinging the craft down like an abandoned toy. They saw the flash as it exploded on the ground, then a second later came the shrieking howl of the crash.

Smoke poured from the wreckage ahead of them. Through the haze, Michael could see figures moving over the sand, rushing toward the dam. “No further! I go back now!” Ahmed’s mouth was opened wide, but Michael could barely hear him through the roaring in his ears.

“No further,” Michael agreed. Crawling from the rear compartment, he ripped bills from his wallet and tossed them to Ahmed. “Thanks, man. That was definitely over and above,” he said. “Go find your wife and kids and get the hell outa here. Salam alekum .”

“Peace to you” sounded like a stupid thing to say, in context, but it was the only Arabic salutation he knew. Ahmed nodded furiously. He put the taxi into reverse, gears grinding, and fishtailed backward until the car was pointing south. The arm slid from the hood, smearing a line of blood over the rust-flecked paint. Ahmed, with a blare of his horn, spat sand from under the wheels, scattering running soldiers of the Living Gods as he fled.

Michael faced south. You wanted to come here. You wanted to come because Kate was here . The smoke made him cough and cover his mouth and nose with a hand. The sand was bitterly hot through the soles of his sneakers. He could barely see through the haze of dust and smoke. Armed jokers were running past him. He joined them, jogging past the fuming wreckage and trying not to look at the carnage inside the twisted steel.

A battle between armies, he discovered quickly, was no clean, discrete thing, but a whirl of individual scenes which made little sense.

… Michael ran through the smoke toward the dam and the sounds of struggle, slipping near the smoldering hulk of a bus, on its side at the western end of the dam . There was the loud tink of a bullet striking metal not two inches from his head, and his shaved scalp was peppered with hot flecks of steel. He threw himself facedown onto the sand as a line of metallic craters dimpled the sheet metal where he’d just been. He felt warm blood running down one of his arms, and he realized he’d opened a long, deep slice in his middle left arm on a sharp corner of the wrecked vehicle. The pain hit him then, and he rolled on his side, clutching at the wound.

He stopped. Someone was staring at him from alongside the bus, no more than four inches away from his face: Masud, the Joker Plague fan. His eyes were wide in his hairless skull and his mouth was open in a soundless scream, his temple a gory red crater. Gray brain matter and blood were sliding thickly down the bus just above him. Masud’s earbuds had fallen from his earholes, the white cord trailing back to the pocket of his uniform, and Michael could hear Joker Plague’s music playing shrill and thin. Michael’s stomach lurched, unbidden, and he vomited loudly and explosively. His stomach still knotted, he ran again …

… he was on the dam itself, still running and trying to find any familiar faces in the chaos. Through the smoke, he saw Rustbelt as he came around another cluster of overturned vehicles barricading the roadway . Three soldiers in the uniform of the caliphate were firing at the ace from point-blank range, and Michael could hear a metallic ting-wheep , as bullets bounced from Rustbelt’s body and ricocheted away. Rustbelt, shouting, reached out to touch the nearest weapon. The barrel crumpled to red dust. Rusty was bleeding as badly as Michael. His right shoulder displayed a sickening red crater; he might be immune to bullets, but something had punched through his natural armor. Michael saw the soldiers backpedaling as they continued to fire at Rusty, retreating and clustering together. The weaponless man reached for a canvas belt bandoliered around his shoulder and fumbled with a grenade there.

Michael crouched; the roadway was broken, and he snatched up a two-foot hunk of concrete curbing with his lower hands, and flipped it to his upper set of arms. Grunting, he heaved it overhead with all his considerable strength toward the soldiers. They went down hard as Michael dove for the ground, trying vainly to cover his head with all six arms. The gunfire stopped. When he glanced up, Rusty was looking down at him, nodding his riveted head and clutching at his wounded shoulder. “Thanks, fella. That would’ve been a bad deal.” Michael sat up: The grenade had rolled away from the crushed soldier’s hand, the pin still attached. He could see it on the pavement, not two feet away …

… people were running westward past Michael and Rustbelt, all of them jokers, some of them with weapons clutched in their hands, many of them bloodied and injured . “What’s going on?” Michael shouted, catching one on them in his hands, but the man replied in fast, frightened Arabic, pushing at Michael’s arms to get away. “Djinn,” was the only word Michael caught. Rustbelt shrugged and pointed northward over the edge of the dam. There, maybe a mile down the river, Michael could see a large island. Bright girders glowed as a bridge between the island and the town of Syrene on the west bank, with the black dots of hundreds of people hurrying across the improvised span. Then smoke obscured the scene again. “Hardhat. Good fella.” Rustbelt grunted and started walking eastward, and Michael followed behind him.

… it seemed like he’d been running along this road forever, dodging around the roadblocks and ducking behind any cover he could find whenever he heard gunfire . He’d lost Rusty during one of those moments. Craters erupted in the edge of the roadway as an automatic weapon fired, and Michael flung himself behind a stack of burning tires. “You never hear the one that hits you,” he muttered to himself. He thought he’d heard that somewhere. He was close to the middle of the dam, the arrow-straight roadway stretching out in front of him. A hundred yards ahead of him there was another roadblock, this one piled high with the burning, motionless hulk of a caliphate tank perched atop the rubble, stretching entirely across the two-lane road. To the north, there was an eighty-foot sheer drop to the Nile; to the south there was water, only a few feet below the stone retaining wall.

And on this side of the improvised roadblock: Kate.

She wore a hodgepodge uniform: The helmet of a WWII German soldier, a bulky Kevlar vest over her T-shirt, camouflage pants tucked into heavy boots. Several joker soldiers were gathered around her. Ana, similarly attired, was with them, as was Rusty, Lohengrin clad in his shining ghost steel, and Holy Roller. Ahead of them all, prowling from side to side of the road, was Sekhmet, glowing brightly even in the sunlight. The huge lioness’s fur was spattered with blood, her claws were snagged with tatters of cloth and raw meat, and smoke coiled from her mouth as she roared defiance.

Michael wondered what Sekhmet was growling at. He wondered at the shuddering of the roadway under his feet. The answer to both came immediately. The Righteous Djinn loomed up behind the barricade—a scowling giant who looked to be three stories tall, a nightmare with black tendrils of smoke curling about him. Fear struck Michael at the sight, a mindless, unreasoning fear that stole the air from his lungs and clamped hands around his throat, a fear that sent his bowels grumbling and bile burning in his stomach, a fear that made his muscles quiver. He shouted with alarm, the cry lost because it was echoed by them all. All but a few of the joker soldiers dropped their weapons and fled past Michael as he gaped up at the Djinn.