Armory

CHAPTER 10: THE ARMORY

The garage lasted seven minutes. Max was standing on the second floor with the raid spread out around him across the oil-stained concrete, watching David walk between the wounded and feeling, for the first time all day, something close to rest, when the hound came over the wall. It did not use the ramp. It came out of the street at a dead run, an elite with orange fangs and iron plates along its spine, and leaped straight up the outside of the building, caught the chest-high concrete barrier of the first level with its forepaws, and hauled itself over in a single scrabbling heave. Then it was inside, among the skeletons Max had spread thin along the open sides, and two more were already coming over the barrier behind it.

"Breach!" Sarah screamed from the edge, and the word went through the raid threads like a current. The skeletons along the first level turned and closed on the elites, but they had been spread out to cover a perimeter that had no walls, and the hounds hit them where they were thinnest. One skeleton went over the barrier backward with an elite's jaws locked on its skull and shattered on the street below. Max dropped down the ramp with the bodyguard champion at his shoulder and sent two more champions from the ramp heads to the breach, and for ninety seconds the first floor of the garage was a slaughterhouse of iron fangs and breaking bone. The elites died. Behind them, two more came over the wall on the far side of the building, and a pack of twenty regular hounds came up the ramp the champions had just left.

They killed all of it in the end, but it took eleven skeletons and a long gash down the outside of Marcus's thigh, and when it was over Max stood in the middle of the first floor and looked at the open sides of the garage with a feeling like cold water in his stomach. Every one of those gaps between the pillars was a door. Every chest-high barrier on every level was a door. He had looked at this building through a raid planner's eyes and seen ramps and choke points and space, and he had not looked at what a hound saw, which was a building made almost entirely of holes. "It's a sieve," he said. "I picked a sieve."

"We picked it," Reyes said. "I picked it first." Marcus, sitting on the hood of a burned-out car while David closed his thigh, shook his head slowly. "Ramps are choke points if the enemy uses the ramps," the sergeant said. "These ones climb."

Elena was looking out over the barrier at the street below, where the pack's dead lay in a scatter along the curb, and her face was pale. "We can't hold this," she said. "Not with Wave 3 bringing more elites than Wave 2. They'll come over every wall at once."

It was Bev who saved them. She had been sitting on the curb of the second level with Luis asleep against her shoulder again, listening, and she lifted her head and said, almost absently, "There's an armory." Everyone turned.

"National Guard armory," she said. "Four blocks east, up the hill. I drove a field trip there every spring for nineteen years; they had a little museum on the first floor, uniforms in glass cases and an old jeep. Big brick thing, built like a castle." She frowned, remembering. "The back of it's built right into the hill. You can't get behind it at all; the kids used to complain they couldn't see the other side."

Max felt the shape of it fall into place in his head before she had finished. "How many floors?" he asked. "Three," Bev said. "The drill hall on the bottom, offices on top of that, and a roof with a little tower on it. And there's a big balcony on the front of the second floor where the officers used to stand and watch the soldiers march." She looked at him.

"The front door's the problem. It's a garage door, really, for trucks, twice as tall as a man and wide enough to drive a tank through. Even back then it was rusted half open. The kids loved it. It looked like a mouth."

* * *

They moved at 10:02. The square went down the garage ramp and east along the avenue in the formation that had brought them across the plaza, skeletons in a hollow wall around twenty-two living people, champions at the corners, and the invisible aura rolling out ahead of them so that the scattered hounds in the street flattened their ears and slunk away before the bone line reached them. The hill rose steeply after the second block. The streets narrowed, the towers gave way to older buildings of brick and stone, and then, at the top of a long rise, the armory came into view.

Bev had undersold it. It squatted on the hillside like a fortress somebody had forgotten to finish, three stories of dark red brick gone black with a century of soot, with crenellations along the roofline and a squat square tower at one corner where a flagpole stood empty against the gray sky. The walls on either side ran straight back into the hill and disappeared into it, so that the whole building seemed to have grown out of the slope rather than been built against it. There were windows, but they were narrow and set high, slits more than windows, twelve feet off the ground at the lowest. And in the center of the front wall, exactly as Bev had said, was the door.

It was enormous, an iron vehicle door twice the height of a man and wide enough for a truck, and it hung rusted half open in its tracks with its lower edge buckled outward like a broken jaw. Max walked up to it with Marcus and put his hand on the iron. It did not move.

Marcus set his shoulder against it, and the Iron Bastion's evolved strength strained against the rust until the veins stood out on his neck, and it still did not move. "That's not closing," the sergeant said, stepping back. "Not without a crane." Max looked at the black mouth of the doorway and the dark hall beyond it. "Then we don't close it," he said. "We hold it."

Inside, the drill hall was a single cavern of brick and old varnished wood, a hundred and fifty feet long, with iron trusses holding up a roof three stories above. The museum Bev remembered was a wreck: glass cases smashed, mannequins in rotten uniforms lying on the floor, the old jeep up on blocks with its tires gone. Along the walls stood long rows of steel weapon racks, every one of them stripped bare, as though the System had looked at this place and decided that whatever had been kept here did not belong in a tutorial. Max said nothing about the racks, but he saw Reyes stop in front of them and stand there for a long moment, and when he walked away his face was closed.

The stairs at the back of the hall led up to the second floor, a warren of offices and old barracks rooms with iron cots still bolted to the walls, and at the front of it a pair of tall doors stood open onto the balcony. Max walked out onto it and stood at the stone balustrade. It ran almost the whole width of the building, fifteen feet wide and twenty feet above the street, directly over the great door, and from it he could see straight down the hill to the avenue and the plaza beyond. "Elena," he said. She came out beside him and looked down, and then she looked at him, and for the first time since the plaza she smiled without any strain in it at all. "Oh," she said softly. "Oh, I can work with this."

From the roof and its little tower, Sarah could see half the sector, and she came down to report with something almost like satisfaction. The hill fell away on three sides and the brick walls were sheer; nothing without wings was coming over them. Across the narrow street from the great door there was an empty lot where a building had once stood, a square of cracked concrete and weeds bounded by a broken chain-link fence. Max looked at the lot for a long time. He was not thinking about defending it. He was thinking about what the hounds would leave in front of his door when they died, and how many of them there would be by nightfall.

* * *

The first assault on the armory came at 10:38, and it came straight up the hill at the door. It was the remnants of Wave 2 drawn by the scent of the raid's passage, a hundred and eighty-odd hounds and sixteen elites, and they came the only way the hill and the brick walls allowed them to come, up the street and into the mouth of the door. Max met them there with everything he had. Two champions stood in the doorway itself, shoulder to shoulder, filling it from side to side, and behind them the skeletons stood in ranks across the drill hall floor, and on the balcony above Elena raised her staff over the street.

She burned them as they came up the hill. Ember Rain fell in a white-hot curtain across the whole width of the street, and the front of the pack caught fire and kept running, burning hounds slamming into the champions at the door with their fur alight and their eyes boiling. From twenty feet up she could see everything and nothing could reach her, and she cast and cast again with the Hexweave rings glowing white along her sleeves, until the street in front of the armory was a channel of fire with the hounds running through it. "I love this balcony," she said to nobody, crunching a shard. "I want to be buried on this balcony."

The champions held the door, and everything that got past them died in the drill hall among the skeletons, and the elites came last and hardest, iron plates screaming against the champions' bone. One of them got its jaws around a champion's leg and tore it out at the knee, and the champion went down on one knee in the doorway and kept swinging. Marcus stepped into the gap beside it with his shield and his spear, and the Iron Bastion and the kneeling champion held the door together while Sarah and Jackson killed the elites one at a time as they came through. Max felt the class bar roll over in the middle of it and spent his points without looking:

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| SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL UP ACHIEVED |

| CLASS PROGRESSION: DREAD MARSHAL (LEVEL 16 -> LEVEL 17) |

| ATTRIBUTES GRANTED: +9 INT, +9 WIS, +5 CON, +4 VIT |

| UNALLOCATED STAT POINTS EARNED: +9 |

| RECOVERY EFFECT: HEALTH AND MANA FULLY RESTORED |

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| MINION CAPACITY: 114 -> 120 |

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The refill went into the wounded champion first. He let it fall, and raised it again from five fresh elite carcasses lying in the doorway for two hundred and fifty points, and the new one came up whole and unhurt and furious, and the doorway was full again. Then six more skeletons to fill the new slots, standing up out of the dead right where they lay in front of the door. When the last elite died at 10:54 there were a hundred and ninety-six dead hounds piled in front of the armory, and the mound in the doorway was so tall that the champions were standing on it.

David got his piece from the last elite. It came up out of the corpse heap as a soft purple glow and drifted past Marcus and past Max, across the whole drill hall, to the foot of the stairs where David knelt over a woman from Okonkwo's party with a gash in her side. He did not see it until it was hovering in front of his face. He reached out and took it without looking away from her wound, and it became a pale hide hood shaped like a hound's head with bone toggles at the throat, and he stared at it, and then at the window, and then put it on with hands that had stopped shaking hours ago and began to shake again:

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| ELITE ITEM ACQUIRED: IRON-FANG PACKMENDER HOOD [1/6] |

| RANK: G | QUALITY: ELITE | ARCHETYPE: HEALER |

| STATS: +5 WIS, +3 VIT |

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"About damn time," Jackson said, and for once nobody laughed, because David was crying a little and trying to pretend he was not. He finished closing the woman's side first. Then he sat back on his heels with the hood on his head and his gold warmth spreading a little further across the drill hall than it had before, and he said, very quietly, "Thank you," and nobody was sure whether he meant it for the System or for the dead hound or for them.

* * *

The mound was the problem, and everyone could see it. A hundred and ninety-six hounds lay heaped in front of the door, six and seven deep in the doorway itself and spilling down the street in a long, steaming slope of fur and iron plate. The champions had fought the last ten minutes of the assault standing on top of it. "Next wave, that's a ramp," Marcus said, staring at it. "They come up it and over the champions' heads the way the alpha came over the dumpsters." Bev, standing behind him, added something more practical. "And if anybody else is out there looking for us," she said, "they can't get in the door."

Max raised what he could. He had six empty slots after the losses at the door, and he raised six skeletons out of the mound where the corpses lay, and they stood up out of the black sludge and went straight back to work. That left a hundred and ninety. "Everybody that doesn't have a weapon in their hand, rest," he said. "The bones do this." He sent sixty skeletons out of the drill hall in a long line, and they began to take the mound apart, two to a carcass, lifting six-hundred-pound hounds by the legs and carrying them down the hill and across the narrow street to the empty lot as steadily and as tirelessly as ants carrying leaves.

It took them forty minutes. The pile in the lot grew as the pile in front of the door shrank, a hill of red fur and black iron behind the broken chain-link, and the stench came off it in waves that made Priya walk to the far end of the drill hall and vomit. When the last carcass was across the street, Elena stood at the balcony's stone rail and raised her staff, and the Pyromancer's fire went down into the lot like something poured out of a furnace. The pile went up all at once. Fat spat and crackled, iron plates glowed red and then white, and a column of greasy black smoke climbed into the gray sky above the hill, thick and straight and visible, Max knew, from every corner of the sector.

"Well," Reyes said, watching it rise. "Everybody knows where we are now." Max had been thinking the same thing, and he did not know yet whether it was a mistake. "Survivors will see it," he said. "Everyone who's been hiding in a pharmacy will see that smoke and know somebody's still fighting."

Sarah, leaning against the balcony doors, added the thing he had not said. "So will everything else," she said. Okonkwo, who had been quiet since the freezer, looked at the column for a long time and then said, in his slow, heavy voice, "Then they will come to the door. That is what we wanted."

The first of them came at 11:12. Five people walked up the hill out of the smoke-haze with their hands in the air and their weapons hanging from their belts, two men and three women in torn office clothes, the leader carrying a bent golf club and a Shadow Stalker's daggers. They stopped at the bottom of the street and stared up at the armory, at the skeletons standing in ranks behind the door and the champions in the doorway and the man in the hound's-skin mantle on the balcony above, and Max saw them almost turn and run. Then Bev walked out of the door in her bloody cardigan with her club over her shoulder and waved them up the hill like a crossing guard. They came.

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| RAID UPDATE: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 |

| PARTY 5 JOINED: HALVERSEN (5/6) |

| RAID MEMBERS: 27 / 150 | PARTIES: 5 / 25 |

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With the lot burning across the street and the doorway clear, Max finally turned to the thing he had been thinking about since he first saw the mound. He stood in the street in front of the great door and looked at it the way he used to look at a dungeon map, and he saw it: not a line in a doorway, but a horseshoe out here in the street, a U of barricade curving out from the armory's front wall with its open end facing down the hill. Every hound that came up the street would come into the U and be hit from three sides at once. The dead would pile up out here, in the open, where the skeletons could carry them away, and the door behind the curve would stay clear for anyone running toward it. And from the balcony, Elena could see straight down into the whole thing.

He laid it out for them in the drill hall in five minutes, scratching the shape on the floor with the tip of the Crude Bone Dagger, and nobody argued. The skeletons went back out into the street and began to build. They dragged the burned-out jeep out of the museum and the wrecked cars from up and down the hill, rolled them into place on their sides, and packed the gaps between them with rubble and broken brick and the stripped steel racks from the drill hall. By 11:24 the U was half built, a curving wall of iron and stone chest-high to a man running out from either side of the door, and the skeletons were still dragging cars up the hill when the sky above the plaza turned red.

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| NAME: MAX WILLIS | RACE: HUMAN (F-RANK) | CLASS: DREAD MARSHAL (F) |

| LEVEL: 17 (5,268/25,624 XP) | RACE LEVEL: 15 (6,912/11,389 XP) |

| RAID: SECTOR 77 RAID GROUP 1 (LEADER) | 27 MEMBERS | 5 PARTIES |

| HP: 990/990 | MP: 1,472/1,840 (1,288 AVAILABLE | 184 RESERVED) |

| STR: 39 | AGI: 41 | VIT: 99 | CON: 106 | INT: 187 | WIS: 168 | PER: 53 |

| GEAR: PACKMASTER MANTLE, GRIPS [2/6] | (2) PACK HUNGER ACTIVE |

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| SKILL: [AURA OF DREAD] | +30% SPEED | 10% OF MAX MP RESERVED |

| PASSIVE: [LEGION'S MANTLE] | SKELETONS 6 YDS (50%) | CHAMPIONS 9 YDS |

| SKILL: [DREAD CHAMPION] | 250 MP | 6 / 6 ACTIVE |

| MINIONS: 96 SKELETONS + 6 CHAMPIONS (120 / 120 SLOTS) |

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| SECTOR 77 STATUS UPDATE: 11:25 AM |

| WAVE 2 HOUNDS REMAINING: 214 / 3,500 |

| INDUCTEES REMAINING: 887 / 2,500 |

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| WARNING: WAVE 3 COMMENCES IN 00:05:00 |

| WAVE 3 SIZE: 4,500 G-RANK IRON-FANG HOUNDS | ELITE VARIANTS INCREASED |

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Max climbed the stairs to the balcony and stood at the stone rail with the bodyguard champion at his shoulder and the hound's-skin mantle heavy on his back. Below him the U lay half finished across the street, iron and stone and burned-out cars curving out from his door, with skeletons still dragging the last of the wreckage into place and champions standing at the open ends where the barricade was not yet finished. Across the street the pyre still burned, a column of black smoke rising into a sky that was turning the color of a wound. Elena came out beside him with her staff and a fistful of shards, and David behind her with his new hood, and down in the doorway Marcus set his shield. "Five minutes," Marcus called up. "Finish the wall," Max said, and every skeleton he had went faster.