Chapter 73 – Ape-out

  “Contact front!” shouted Besson. The full auto staccato of his otherworld machine gun echoed off the canyon walls as multiple shrieking cries rose from the canyon. “Multiple hostiles, non-human, primitive weapons.”

  Apparently, whatever had won the fight in the slot canyon had stuck around. Cole refreshed his target marking and poured as much of the ability’s charge as he could into it, surprising himself when he managed to drain more than half of a charge. Several outlines began to appear in the dust and steam below—muted, as though his skill had trouble getting a hold of them. The silhouettes were vaguely humanoid—but more primal and moving like apes on four limbs. He lined up his scope and fired. The silhouette under his crosshairs bucked, jerking to the side, scrabbling, and then continuing. Tough bastard.

  They started to emerge from the canyon as Besson and Roxy gave ground to draw them out, and they were some sort of baboon-like creature, if baboons were seven feet tall and carried weapons. They had the same dusty-red color as the stone of the canyon, and it shimmered in a way that made them hard to track, even with his enhanced Acuity.

  A ray of fire split the night as it blasted out of the canyon, carving a swath of rock from the side of the canyon wall over Roxy and Besson. Seven feet tall, carried weapons, and used magic?! This was total bullshit. Roxy tilted her shield up to deflect the debris, while Nutmeg took the legs out from under one of the apes as it tried to shove a stone-tipped spear into their shield maiden’s gut. Besson continued firing his machine gun and cut the ape down. But more were coming.

  Cole sighted into the dust, looking for the silhouette of their spellcaster— finally finding one dim glow out of the pack that wasn’t charging in and fired at it. It jerked, then began dodging side-to-side as it screamed. Cole fired again, and this time his bullets cracked against a wall of crimson energy, burning bright in the dust. Two follow-up shots had the same effect. He swore. “Spellcaster is shielding himself,” he said. “But I’ve got his attention.”

  Maybe too much attention. The shield was apparently one-way, because a pair of massive arrows almost as long as he was tall shot up from out of the murky canyon. One cracked off the rocks just below him, almost as loud as a gunshot, and the other whistled by inches above the top of his helmet. Nona ducked down beside him. He kept firing, trying to keep the rest of the apes from joining the ones at the front line.

  “I couldn’t even see anything!” said Nona. “What are you shooting at?”

  “Stay down,” said Cole. Her pistol caliber carbine wouldn’t be very effective at this range anyway. 9mm lost too much energy over the first hundred meters compared to his 7.62. and her muzzle velocity was further stunted by the carbine’s suppressed barrel bringing the rounds below the speed of sound. He continued firing and burned more of his charges keeping the IFF active. He didn’t want to leave himself without an exit by using everything and not leaving enough for a Meteoric Leap. But he might not have a choice.

  Below, Roxy was holding her own, deflecting savage blows from stone axes and responding with spirit shells generating in her shotgun. Besson’s belt had run dry, and he’d switched to his own axe and buckler, weapon blurring as he hacked at the huge apes. Cole switched his aim to a pair of the massive creatures scrabbling in the gravel, one of which had leapt up and started crawling across the wall of the canyon to get behind Roxy. He fired multiple times, trying to ignore the massive arrows flying past him. Several bladed bullets struck the cliff-crawler, slicing through its muscled back and neck. It fell from the wall, hands wrapped around its throat.

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  “Thanks Cole,” called Roxy as she blew out the chest of one of the apes.

  “No prob—”

  WhhhhHHZZZZ

  CRACK

  Cole saw stars as one of the massive arrows grazed his helmet.

  “Cole’s hit!” called Howie.

  “Mm okay,” he mumbled. Fucking apes and their fucking bows. He pushed back from the ridge to get his bearings. His head pounded from the impact and the surge of adrenaline had sent his heart into overdrive.

  “Shit, Cole, they’re climbing up! Below you! Six—no, eight! Artillery on the way.”

  With the arrow hit giving him double vision, Cole was treated to two Howies firing ephemeral ammo from a 20mm cannon. The rounds started to impact the cliff face below him, rumbling the rock underneath his belly. He heard several shrieking creatures as they fell back into the canyon and a blast of chilly mist roiled up from the rounds. But there was no way Howie had gotten them all. He pushed to his knees. “Nona, get ready,” he said. Not willing to risk looking over the edge and exposing himself to the archers, he took position and tried to get his eyes to focus. He dropped the magnification on his scope to nil and flipped his safety to full-auto. Across the canyon, Howie’s fire cut off as the apes climbed high enough that he could no longer shoot without risking friendly collateral damage.

  The first of the apes reached the top, thick hands the size of dinner plates gripping the edge of the cliff to haul the snarling creature up. Cole put half a dozen rounds into it before it could get its footing and then switched to another. Behind him, the rapid pff-pff-pff of Nona’s subsonic carbine rattled, and another ape erupted in blood from the bladed rounds as she fired through her entire magazine without letting up on the trigger. The fire discipline lecture could wait until after they survived.

  One of the apes managed to pull itself all the way up and leapt forward before Cole shot it twice in the ribs. But even that wasn’t enough to stop this one, it only shortened its aim as it smashed the ground with both fists, cracking the stone beneath. He shot it point blank in the head. The heavy 7.62 round shattered its skull and sprayed grey matter over its red fur. But his bolt also locked open on an empty drum mag and another ape was pulling itself up with a wooden war paddle the size of his leg. The paddle was studded with razor-sharp volcanic glass shards, making a ragged cutting edge. He glanced back at Nona, who was struggling to seat a new magazine with shaking hands, her eyes as wide as searchlights.

  Swallowing, he dropped his rifle to its sling and pulled his spear from his belt. He drove in forward, slashing the spearpoint at the hand the ape was using to anchor itself. But it got one of its feet up and over the cliff, giving it a new anchor, and it swatted away Cole’s spear, losing a thick finger in the process. It screamed and swung its axe overhead, and then in a sideways arc. Its long arms carved a whistling path through the air in a strike that would have disemboweled Cole if he waited an instant longer to dart back.

  The ape surged forward, and the back-swing scraped across Cole’s plate carrier, slicing through his weapon sling and dropping his rifle to the ground. The ape was putting everything it had into each swing but putting itself off balance with the wild ferocity. Cole lunged forward as it tried to regain its balance, feinting his spear up at its face and then at its ribs when it flinched back.

  “Ready!” Nona called.

  Cole jumped back again, and as the ape raised the axe overhead in both hands, to slice him in half from skull to groin, Nona burned through another thirty rounds. Serrated bullets shredded the front of the ape. It collapsed back, twitching and writhing on the ground—quickly going still and starting to ablate.

  “Cliff is clear!” called Howie.

  “They’re starting to pull back,” said Roxy.

  Cole grabbed his rifle off the ground and slotted a new mag before crawling back up to the ridge and looking down over the canyon. His mark was fading, but he could still just make out the murky silhouettes withdrawing at high speed through the far end of the canyon, and damn those monsters were quick. The monkey mage and half a dozen other survivors bounded away through the steam and up the sheer cliff at the far end of the canyon, breaking line of sight and disappearing over a rise.

  He pushed back from the edge and climbed to his feet again.

  “Regroup at the mouth of the canyon. Let’s see what’s down there that those assholes were so interested in.”