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And then my hand reached for another grenade—and reached, and reached and reached, because we were out, damn it!
Even worse, we plowed into a garbage pile a second later that had completely blocked the street. The truck was tough; it made it through. But it caused an avalanche of soda cans, tumbled bricks, and charred roof tiles to hit the windshield, half of which lodged there, blocking Zheng’s view ahead.
“Clear it off! Clear it off!” he yelled, but his guys were too busy unloading on the ever-growing field of monstrosities behind us.
And on both sides of us, I realized, as the road was just wide enough to allow them to pull alongside. They were threatening to swamp us, taking machine gun bursts directly to the face, which did little more than give them a bad case of acne. Yet their hands crumpled the guns they grabbed as if they were made out of paper.
The only reason we weren’t already overrun were the two first-level masters, who were on opposite sides of the vehicle and raging like beasts. They were somehow keeping the sides clear all by themselves, allowing our firepower, for what it was worth, to be massed in back. Although how much longer that would last, I didn’t know, as Bertha was quickly being denuded.
“Damn it, I can’t see!” Zheng yelled, slinging us back and forth across the road, trying to dislodge the debris.
It didn’t work.
So, I hopped up onto the roof to do it myself.
“Get back in here!” Zhen yelled, spotting me.
“In a sec.”
I started throwing things off the windshield, what I could reach, then slid down to the hood to get the rest. That would have been easier if a rider hadn’t managed to find a way onto the top of the brick wall, riding along the narrow edge to target Zheng. So, I sent a wrecked TV at his head.
It bounced off without unseating him, despite the fact that I had not lobbed it. I had sent it with the force of desperation, and at major league baseball speed. It would have killed a human; at the very least, the bogie should have been knocked off the wall.
Instead, he jumped his damned motorcycle onto the hood, and sent a sword slashing down at me, which I caught in a lead pipe and twisted away. Which would have been great, if he hadn’t then used a gauntleted fist to punch a hole in the solid steel beside my head. And if he hadn’t immediately grown another sword.
And that was what it looked like: as if the new sword had just sprouted straight out of his body. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what, as I was too busy getting my feet up and kicking the bastard off me. Dhampirs are strong, especially when we’re about to get decapitated, so it actually worked.
He landed on his back against the windshield, but it sure didn’t look like I’d damaged him. Luckily, Zheng took car
e of that, reaching out of the window and ripping the creature’s damned head off. I fell back against the hood, feeling a surge of relief, until I noticed: the body didn’t fall away. Instead, it lunged for me again, which was—
Really fucking creepy, I thought, getting arms up, but not because I was currently wrestling with a headless body. But because something was poking up out of the armor’s neck hole. Something, I realized a moment later, that looked a lot like the top of one of their shiny helmets.
“Shit!” Zheng yelled, and yeah. That about summed it up. I kind of lost it at that point, something about seeing a creature regenerate a head doing something to my own that the sword hadn’t, and not something good. I started whaling on it, which unlike the bullets, did seem to have an effect.
But not enough of one.
A few seconds later, I was staring at a brand spanking new head, just like the sword, complete with an extra wide mouth full of teeth that started snapping at me like a dog.
I threw the creature back and screamed at it, in a cross between horror and disgust, and a sword came slashing through the air. But this time, it wasn’t aimed at me. The bastard’s second head went bouncing away into the night, and I looked up to see Louis-Cesare running along the top of the wall. He was hacking at the riders who were trying to flank us, and making it look like a ballet in the process.
“Show off,” I heard Zheng mutter.
“What are you doing over there?” I yelled at my hubby.
“I might ask the same of you!” And then I had company, because he’d just run out of wall.
We screeched around a corner, onto another street, and Louis-Cesare leapt to the roof of the truck, pulling me up after him. He had a one of the samurai’s swords in his hand, which he sent flying at another rider. It skewered him, and the force behind it must have been pretty impressive. Because this time, the guy went swerving into a third, taking them both out.
But it didn’t matter. There were so damned many. They must have been hit by a hell of a magic cloud to be able to regenerate like that. But if they could . . .
Then we didn’t have an army of hundreds after us. We had an army of thousands. And we couldn’t take them all.
That was evident by a single look at the back of the truck, which was getting boarded on all sides now. The new road was wider, allowing us to be flanked more easily, although Zheng’s guys were doing amazingly well—he had obviously brought his A-Team. But the best they could manage was hold their own.
And they wouldn’t be doing that for long, as we were almost out of ammo.
Bertha had a single necklace left, which somebody grabbed almost before I’d finished the thought. I should have been able to resupply everyone, having a damned arsenal with me, but most of my stash was magical and the rest had been taken by my team. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do when we ran out.
