2. The City Is Sealed

The City Is Sealed

On a stretch of grassland in the western outskirts, a small convoy lay scattered and overturned.

They must have been fleeing. Then something had ended their attempt to escape the affected area.

The lead truck had been struck from above. A huge hole had been blown through its roof, most of the chassis torn apart. The wheels and part of the engine block still held together, but they were blackened by smoke and half melted.

The car behind it had been crushed by the same blast. Its front end had twisted into a knot of metal, and the entire vehicle was burned out. The camper in the middle had survived the explosion, only to be riddled with fist-sized holes until it looked like a nightmare honeycomb.

By contrast, the school bus at the rear was almost intact. The only damage was that every window had been blown out, while the seat belts and seats had been sliced to ribbons, as if a squad of lunatics had spent hours hacking at them.

As I flew along the city’s boundary, this was far from the first destroyed convoy I found. It was not even the hundredth.

The evidence kept accumulating. Some organized force had been systematically wiping out every attempt to flee the affected zone, and every attempt from the outside to investigate.

In other words, the city had been quarantined.

I did not clench my fists. I did not smash a crater in the sidewalk out of rage. There would have been no point.

The stench of burned plastic and rubber, the sharp reek of gasoline, and the more natural smells of ash, scorched shrubs, and baked earth still hung in the air. But the wreckage no longer smoked. It was not even warm. Fog had condensed into beads of water across the twisted metal.

Every sign said these vehicles had been here for days.

Several hours earlier, I had begun flying around the city’s perimeter. I had thought Chi Li and Cheng Rui might not have wanted to follow the open road from the university to the suburbs. It offered no cover at all, and there were probably too many monsters. They might have taken a detour.

I found no trace of my friends. Nothing suggested that my guess had been correct.

Just as I was about to return to the highway, I stumbled across the burned-out remains of these escape vehicles.

Two hours later, after nearly circling the entire city, I was angry at the obvious, organized slaughter and baffled by the total absence of human remains.

The beating of wings high above me in the fog interrupted my thoughts.

Little devils.

I prepared myself for the fireballs that were sure to come.

This was not my first accidental encounter with a flying formation of little devils in the outskirts. Experience had taught me that it was easier to let them approach than to chase them through the fog once they scattered.

The wingbeats grew louder, and louder still. The differences between the speed, size, and sound of the incoming flyers told me they were getting close.

Not close enough to see.

Three giant metal darts suddenly came screaming down from the sky. Then they exploded like grenades, and I was kicked out of the air as if a giant’s boot had struck me.

Aside from making my eardrums ache, the three explosions hurt far less than the time I had hit the mutant plant monster like a meteor. Most of the black metal fragments were stopped by my suit. Only two dart-shaped tips punched through on impact, and the explosions drove them deeper.

One lodged a few inches above my right knee. The other wedged itself between two of my lower ribs. I hissed through my teeth as I pulled them out, especially the second one.

I did not have time to breathe.

Another rush of wingbeats came from above. More metal spikes fired down.

Even without seeing them, I could feel them cutting fast through the air. Now that I knew what to expect, I dodged.

These new enemies were not little devils. Taking their attacks head-on the way I did with little devils until they got close would, at best, fail. At worst, it would leave me full of holes.

So aerial combat it was.

As it turned out, finding this target was much easier than finding little devils. The turbulence from its flight churned the fog for dozens of yards around it, and though it was the size of a small fighter plane, it was nowhere near as fast as one.

While it tried to bombard me with more darts, my newly improved perception let me catch several glimpses of its outline. At first it made me think of a World War II aircraft.

Then I got close enough for reality to overturn that impression entirely.

The enormous bird was, in a manner of speaking, somewhat like an eagle.

If an eagle had a forty-foot wingspan, and if its feathers were made of a smooth black substance somewhere between cast iron and obsidian.

Its legs were longer and more crooked, almost lizard-like, and its talons were longer than my forearm. Its head was serpentine, with eyes on either side glowing like coals. Its beak, black as night, was two feet long and sharper than a sword.

As I watched, several of its feathers shot free faster than arrows. I dodged, barely, and the feathers drove into the ground below before exploding. Molten metal hissed from the gaps where the feathers had torn away. Seconds later, new feathers formed in their place.

Whoever made these things must have copied them straight from the pets of Ares in Greek mythology, then decided the result needed to be more terrifying.

Unlike almost every monster I had fought before, striking this bird did not feel like hitting flesh. It was hard, unyielding, and heavy as a wall of iron. Even with my strength, moving it was not easy.

The bird let out a furious scream, far too loud, when we collided in midair. Then it counterattacked with beak and talons. Both proved fully capable of slashing deep through my Super Suit.

We tumbled through the air. I kept punching, smashing its feathers apart, but they grew back almost as quickly as I broke them.

It was weaker than me, but that damned beak kept going for my head. As the painful cut it carved over my left ear proved, it was still dangerous.

At the same time, its talons raked my abdomen over and over like a cat gone berserk because someone had stepped on its tail. The attacks were frantic, vicious, and dangerous.

We slammed into the ground hard enough to gouge out a crater. The bird’s right wing bent at what I wanted to call an unnatural angle, except that nothing about this monster had ever been natural.

Especially when it did not cry out in protest. Instead, it breathed a dense, rolling stream of fire at me.

Being wrapped in magical flame was unpleasant. And no matter how many times I punched the damned thing, it would not stop breathing fire.

I had had enough of its nonsense. I grabbed its head and twisted.

It might have been strong. It might have been bigger than me and nearly as tough. But it did not have arms to stop me, and its neck was its most vulnerable part.

After a token struggle, its neck broke.

Then every metal feather on its body exploded at once.

At the last instant, I turned away, which kept my face and chest from being turned into a sieve. It did not do much against the explosion itself. I was hurled through the air, punched through two buildings, and crushed a jeep into a twisted metal ball.

For the next several minutes, I lay there cursing while I pulled iron darts out of my butt and back.