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F-whoooosh f-whoooosh f-whooosh spat the rocket rifle.
The vehicle shop erupted into orange flame, the roof rising and spinning into the air like a Harryhausen flying saucer.
A Bear exploded out of the darkness, driving a shattered tent pole through one of the Reapers as it aimed. It was Chieftain, the most experienced of Gamecock's Bears. He hoisted the convulsing creature as though raising a tar-dripping flag. Another Reaper, suddenly and unaccountably headless, took a few wayward steps before crashing on its side. Alessa Duvalier rose and ran a few steps and dropped again, her oversized coat looking like a forgotten rag blown from a laundry line as it covered her, lying in the culvert next to one of the macadamized camp utility roads.
Ahn-Kha stormed up from the stables, one arm full of shotguns, the other wrapped in bandoliers. He handed out weapons and ammunition to any hands willing to take them.
The grass-pounding beat of a helicopter sounded, suddenly overwhelming the gunfire with its air-cutting anger.
Three helicopters, a fat one in the center flanked by two smaller maintaining a jostling, zigzagging formation like a queen bee in the air with two suitors, thundered up from the south.
Ahn-Kha picked up a smooth landscaping stone the size of a softball. Running forward, he made a swooping overhand throw.
A picture flashed in Valentine's mind-probably one of the old volumes in Father Max's library where he whiled away the long Minnesota winters after his parents died-of a cricket bowler. Ahn-Kha echoed the motion.
The stone, hurled with such force it described an almost straight-line trajectory, struck the windscreen of the big central helicopter. Valentine saw it strike sparks as it passed through and impacted the pilot and his instrumentation.
The helicopter went nose-down, and the big rotors threw up high-flying divots of earth as the craft nose-tipped in.
The other two craft, unsure of what had brought down the big one, pulled high, both banking right and just missing each other's blades.
Three monstrous forms-at first Valentine thought they were an exotic creature like a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros-jumped out, apparently unhurt by the crash.
They were hulking, a third again as big as a typically oversized Grog. Ahn-Kha, drawn up to his full height, would come up to the shoulder line of the beasts, leaning out over their pier-sized forelimbs like gorillas.
Valentine had never seen anything like them. Pale-skinned, like the Reapers.
He rushed forward with his axe, Ahn-Kha falling in behind.
One of the men Ahn-Kha had armed with a shotgun fired right into one of the giant Grog's faces. It turned away, threw out an arm and punched the man into red-topped mush.
Another was crushed beneath a stomping foot the size of a wheelbarrow.
Ford and Chevy, the core of Valentine's old heavy-weapons group, each carried a vehicular machine gun in a harness. They held their guns high so as not to hit any of their allied, and scattered bursts at the monsters. Valentine saw bullets strike, tearing out chunks of hide, but the beasts showed no more sign of feeling it than the armored car Valentine had shot some weeks before.
Valentine froze. The giant Grogs had yellow eyes with slit pupils.
One opened a cavernous mouth as though to bellow in his face. Instead, a stabbing, barbed tongue the size of a harpoon shot toward Valentine's chest.
He ducked under both tongue and chin, swung the axe with every iota of strength he could summon. The blade buried itself deep in the beast's neck. It let out a startled cry and reared, dragging the axe handle out of Valentine's hands.
Its tongue was limp and flopping. Valentine must have severed some nerve, or the trunk of the tongue itself.
Weaponless, Valentine froze. The creature stepped forward and put a wide foot on its own tongue. It crashed down, threatening to bury Valentine, but a powerful arm hauled him back.
Ahn-Kha blasted another of the beasts in the eye with his shotgun, wielding it with the quick ease of an experienced gunfighter with a pistol.
"We must run, my David. Explosives are needed!" Ahn-Kha said.
The creature Valentine had struck in the neck fell dead at last.
One of the Grog-reapers had picked up a tent pole and swung it this way and that, knocking soldiers about like a man killing rats with a club.
It was Bee who finally turned them back. She rushed forward with a white tank resembling a field soup pot in one hand and a burning rag on a stick in the other.
She hurled the tank, tearing the valve free with her toe. Valentine heard it hissing as it flew. She followed it with the brand, then threw herself on her face.
"Good thinking, Bee," Valentine said.
