Crysis: Legion (24 page)

I start running. The farther uptown the higher the ground: I wade the occasional stretch but when my feet hit solid ground they burn city blocks like firewood. The topography’s been radicalized up here: Buildings lean into one another, flat streets shaken into corduroy, whole blocks just kind of
pushed back
and piled up against the terrain behind. Madison Square Park is a steaming swamp—the tops of cabs and SUVs rise above the water like sunroofed boulders. One of the Staten Island ferries is jammed up at a crazy-ass angle against the buildings on the northern perimeter; I never realized before how huge those things are. You gotta wonder how many buildings
that
bad boy took out on its way uptown.

I keep moving as north as the terrain will let me. Delta Six fades in and out at the whim of whatever obstacles happen to be fucking with the freq at any given moment. Bad news from Central; something’s going on there and it’s not going well, but I can’t tell any more than that. Some kind of running battle seems to be moving east, and the news from that quarter is no cause for joy, either. But I still take heart because hey, at least the battle’s still
on
, right? They haven’t been squashed like bugs yet; at least some of them are still kicking after being in the thick of it for half an hour or more, and I’m thinking that’s no small accomplishment. I know what these guys are up against.

Thought I did, anyway.

Something’s making the ground shake, just a little. I see it more than feel it: ripples in puddles, like a stone’s been dropped when no stone has. My reflection shivering in some miracle windowpane
that hasn’t shattered yet. Aftershocks, I think. I’m moving too fast to feel anything through my boots, so I stop for a few moments to get a sense of the seismo. Nothing. The ground’s rock-solid under my feet—which is, now that I think of it, even weirder.

Bompf
.

Now that I
did
feel, just barely: a single pulse through the asphalt. A short sharp shock; not like any seismic rebound
I’ve
ever felt, and I pulled the Ring of Fire tour for a solid year. This felt more like an impact tremor.

An impact of steel against glass.

Delta Six isn’t talking. Or at least I’m not hearing them. I hope it’s just another radio shadow, but I pick up the pace anyway. GPS leads me up Fifth, around a corner, and smack-fucking-dab into a dead end.

Can’t really blame the system for not knowing a building had collapsed across the alley. The realtime updates haven’t refreshed since the wave—it takes a lot to swamp the GoogleSat servers but I’m guessing a sudden massive rewrite of the whole lower mainland’s geography might do it—and even plain old GPS gets iffy with all these leaning towers blocking out the sky. Nav’s been falling back on OLR and inertia for hours now, to take up the slack. But there it is: a pile of rubble that used to be an office tower, right between me and where I have to be.

The building it’s fallen against is still standing, though. There’s a loading dock off to one side that I don’t even have to force my way into; any one of a thousand shocks has blown the door off its rollers and halfway into the street. I’m up on the dock with a single bound.

A glassy
ping
.

Even louder, this time. And not an impact tremor, not the usual kind. If I was underwater I’d compare it to high-freq sonar,
you know, like those tests that drove all the whales crazy a few years back. I’m not underwater, and air isn’t
nearly
dense enough to conduct a p-wave that intense anyway, but still: Whatever’s making that noise sounds like a submarine on steroids.

Or maybe like some kind of one-eyed monstrosity striding across the bottom of a flood zone.

I’m in the loading bay. I’m in the shipping manager’s office; just like the one I worked in back during my school days except the Golden Showers centerfold is full-motion 3-D now (the whole damn building’s dark but that golden girl keeps glowing and spreading her legs every time you walk past, and she’ll probably be doing it for the Ceph a year from now if those flatcells are as good as everyone says). I’m in some kind of dark hallway, a tunnel; maybe I hear the scuttling of little tick feet but nothing jumps out at me. Three lefts, two rights, one wrong turn into the ladies’ room and there’s an emergency exit sign shining in my eyes like a beacon of blood-red hope. I should be three blocks from the action, four at the outside. I kick out the door.

And wouldn’t you know it, the action has come to me.

You know that poem.
Give me your tired, your poor. Your homeless, your wretched refuse. Give me your junkies, your yuppies, your headbangers, your white-collar tapeworms, your priests and your pedophiles
.

Yeah, I may be taking a few liberties. But there they all are, a whole fucking avalanche of humanity, pouring around the corner from the Avenue of the Americas. A lot of them are bleeding—from the ears, the nose, some of them are even bleeding from the
eyes
. Almost all of them are screaming. And you know what my first reaction is?

Relief.

None of them are infected, you see. They’re scared out of
their fucking minds, every last one of them is injured in one way or another—but behind the blood and the noise they all look
human
. No lumpy potato sacks full of tumors, no eye sockets jam-packed with squirming hamburger, no crazy-ass religious ecstasy or hallelujahs for the corruption of the flesh. The spore hasn’t got this far yet. These are just regular run-of-the-mill victims of war, scared to death and probably dead inside the hour, but next to what I’ve seen today this is
nothing
. I can deal with this. I’m
glad
to deal with this. This panicked endless mob washes around me, running, staggering, falling, and it’s all so familiar it’s almost like being
home
.

And then that
sound
hits again, that Crystal-Godzilla sonar, and even inside the suit I go deaf in the aftermath. People are still screaming, I can still see their mouths making the right shapes, but all I can hear is this weird low-pressure
trough
in the soundscape, this kind of dull roar sucking up every other sound in the wake of that single earsplitting
PING
.

A little girl’s eyes explode right in front of me. She can’t be more than eight. She doesn’t even stop running; she’s past me and gone in a gory New York second and I don’t even turn around because what kind of sick fuck would go out of his way to watch a blind girl get trampled to death?

This wicked little part of me that never seemed to exist before today, this curious little psycho that doesn’t feel and can’t stop thinking, wonders why just this one little girl and no one else. Figures it must be the size of the head, the diameter of the eyeball in relation to the wavelength or something. Harmonic resonance. But it also figures that pulse is gonna be taking out more than little girls at close range. I’m betting anybody within fifty meters is lying in the street with their skulls blown apart.

A Bulldog comes screeching around the corner on two wheels, the grunt on the roof gun hanging on for dear life and firing back at something farther up the avenue. He can’t keep it
up; the vehicle crashes back down on all fours and he goes flying. The driver does his best to keep from collateraling the crowd but the Bulldog still manages to sideswipe half a dozen civilians on its way into the jewelry store across the street.

Something stalks into view around the corner. It stands eight meters tall if it’s an inch.

I’ve seen it before. But this is the first time I’ve
seen
it.

Three legs, double-jointed things with clawed metal feet; just one of those
talons
is almost as big as a man. The carapace is a cross between a cockroach and a B-2; a wedge, a great fucking arrowhead with cannons sticking out the front end like fangs.

Doesn’t use those big guns, though. Not at first. It
crouches
and this, this
column
rises out of its back: a red glowing cylinder, vertically segmented, like a space heater the size of a gazebo. It rises slowly, almost lazily. Think of someone pulling back on a crossbow before releasing the string.

PING
.

Every window with so much as a splinter in the frame explodes. Cars and storefronts shriek for blocks in every direction. A blizzard of glass rains down on the street, dust and daggers and great jagged sheets; it skewers the living and the dead, takes off hands and limbs neat as a laser. It seems like hours before all that slicing and dicing tapers off; the towers of Sixth Avenue still have a
lot
of windows. By the time it’s over the living have fled; the dead are dismembered; and I’m the only one left in between.

The monster twists on those giant tripod legs and bends down to look at me.

It’s a smart motherfucker. It sees through my best tricks. I wrap myself in my cloak of invisibility and somehow it knows just where to fire. I hide behind pillars and billboards and it lobs some kind
of plasma grenade into its blind spots, coolly flushes its quarry instead of stomping down streets and alleyways in hot pursuit.

It turns into a game of tag. I can take maybe a hit or two from that acoustic death ray without bursting like a grape—we share common ancestry, this pinger and I, and maybe we’re a little bit immune to each other’s venom—but I’m pretty sure that three blasts would lay me out and a fourth would kill me, assuming this monster didn’t just decide to squash me flat with one of those big clawed feet instead. And nothing I’ve got up my sleeve seems to do more than scratch the paint on its hood ornament. So I lob a sticky mine and fade back around the corner before I even see if I scored. I drop a proximity mine and dive through a manhole while three floors of office crumble to dust on the other side of the street. I start to see patterns: The pinger has a habit of strafing the air with high-frequency click bursts, especially when it can’t see me.

It’s
echolocating
. No wonder the damn cloak doesn’t work.

It’s not cat-and-mouse: it’s saber-toothed-tiger-and-mouse, it’s T.-fucking-rex-and-mouse. And that dinosaur may have me outgunned a hundred times over, and it may be able to beat my ass on the straightaway, but it’s a big fucking ship and those things turn
slowly
. It’s got cannons that even CELL would trade half its annual profit margin for, but it can only fire them
forward
. I can’t outrun the monster but I can outmaneuver it, dip and weave and jump from ground to rooftop and back again. It would have slaughtered me a dozen times if I hadn’t gotten out of the way a split second before it let loose.

And all the time I’m bobbing and dodging and running between its legs, I’m scratching the paint on the hood ornament. After a while the hood ornament falls off.

I start scratching other parts.

Now some of the other mice start poking their heads up, make the most of the diversion. The pinger charges down the street with its sights fixed firmly on my retreating ass, and a line
of flechettes hemstitches across its flank from the carpet store across the street. Some brazen glorious asshole with nothing to save his balls but standard-issue camo and a pair of mirrorshades jumps down from the second floor and gives this felching tripod the
finger
, I shit you not, and takes off around the corner. The pinger takes the bait and chases that beautiful bastard onto the biggest spread of proximity mines you ever saw outside an Israeli payback party.

You know what happens when all those scratches finally strip paint down to the primer? You start scratching the
metal
.

It’s a running battle, man, it’s a long fucking battle, all of us mice against one big metal dinosaur, and it may be death by a thousand cuts but it’s the JAW that finally brings it down. A single rocket, right under the carapace where the legs plug in. It
blooms
, Roger, like a flower opening in the morning, it blooms into this great ball of crimson electricity like someone red-shifted the northern lights. The pinger
groans
, it staggers; it starts to fall, puts out one leg to brace itself and the leg just snaps clean off. That big metal mother goes down like a mountain sliding into the sea.

Delta Six love me to death. I’m the guy who scored the winning touchdown. They slap my back. They like my moves. They say they could really use me back at Central. They call me
suit guy
, and we shoot some well-deserved shit at those fucking Pentagon brass:
Hey, lucky for us the flood wiped the Ceph off the board, yeah, things could be
really
nasty if
those
mofos were still around
.

And then we hear something.

I don’t know quite how to describe it. A kind of breathy sound, a
hooting
sound, drifting over the rooftops and down through skyscraper canyons. It seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, an icy, undead whisper. I tell myself that all the hairs on my forearms have not just stood up.

Everyone falls silent as hunted rabbits.

“Dear God,” someone whispers when the sound has stopped. “What
is
that?”

The CO steps in before that shit can spread: “Stop standing there with your dicks in your hands, people! Sweep for survivors! Fifteen minutes, tops! Then we go find out what’s making that noise, and kick its ass!”

It’s gotta be a joke, of course. But the delivery’s so deadpan you’d never know it.