CHAPTER 22
THE LIGHT OF HELL
The Pacific fog did not merely surround Fort Ross; it invaded the fortress like a living thing, dense and suffocating.
A man could not see a hand’s breadth in front of his eyes.
The Russian soldiers’ torches looked like small useless points of yellow, swallowed by the grey whiteness.
The silence of the night was shattered by the most terrifying sound the three of them had ever heard: the frantic, dry, metallic scrape of thousands of claws climbing the pine-log walls.
Nero went up the wooden steps of the main tower to where Commander Volkov was trying to hold the line of defence.
The hunter shoved the mount of the rotating reaper against the parapet and set his feet in the frozen mud.
He took hold of the bronze crank, but his glacial blue eyes were aiming into pure emptiness.
Firing blind into the fog meant wasting the little lead Gideon had managed to cast.
Suddenly heavy steps rang on the stairs. Gideon appeared out of nowhere, coming up the ramp at a bound. He was covered in soot, his goggles crooked on his forehead and a maniacal grin on his grimy face.
“I’ve just made a thing!” the inventor shouted, gasping.
“What is it, Gideon?” Nero asked, without taking his eyes off the white darkness.
“Look!”
Gideon held up a bizarre contraption: the long brass cylinder of a naval spyglass, modified with an iron breech and a thick fuse coming out of the base.
With shaking hands he struck a match on his own trousers, lit the fuse, and aimed the improvised tube straight up at the sky.
BANG! A crack of compacted powder rang out and a small projectile crossed the fog on its way up.
Seconds later Gideon’s experimental phosphorus bomb exploded in the sky.
A white chemical light, unbearably brilliant, poured down from above, tearing the fog apart and lighting the outer perimeter of Fort Ross as though it were noon.
Looking down, Gideon’s stomach turned over.
The inventor let out a strained curse, his voice failing in the middle of the yard: “Son of a bitch…”
There were not ten of them, and not twenty.
Hundreds of Hidebehinds stood outside the walls.
It was a grey, skeletal, crawling mass of disproportionate bodies, climbing over one another like a human anthill risen out of hell.
Their long jaws were wide open and their yellow eyes shone in the artificial light.
The sudden burst of phosphorus blinded the creatures.
They let out shrill shrieks of pain and agony, covering their faces with those colossal claws and falling back en masse behind the redwood trunks, trying to find any shadow at all to hide from that divine brightness.
“What are you waiting for, you idiots?” Gideon bellowed at the Russian soldiers, pointing at the exposed horde. “Open fire!” The soldiers’ Berdan rifles began spitting flame in a desperate volley. But in the main tower, the rotating reaper stayed silent.
Nero stood motionless. That man, who had crossed deserts, faced armies and killed dozens without blinking, was frozen.
His blue eyes were staring at that monstrosity in bulk.
He had seen everything in his life, but this broke any human logic.
Nero had gone into a trance, paralyzed by the weight of the supernatural absurdity.
SLAP! Elena landed a violent blow on the back of Nero’s neck, sending the hunter’s hat flying off into the mud.
“Wake up, Nero!” the vaquera shouted in his ear, drawing her own revolver with her other hand. “Turn that damned crank!”
The blow snapped Nero’s mind back into reality. The trance broke. His eyes came into focus again and, with a guttural roar of pure hatred, he drove his right hand onto the bronze crank of the reaper and began turning it with all his strength.
The roar of the rotating gun swallowed the sound of the wind.
Two hundred rounds a minute of heavy lead began reaping the horde at the base of the wall.
The bodies of the Hidebehinds were torn apart by Gideon’s mechanical storm, their black and boiling blood spraying against the timbers of the fort.
Up above, Gideon moved fast. He saw the effect of the light and changed his strategy: instead of firing at the sky, he began aiming the spyglass launcher directly at the beasts in the forest. Every phosphorus round created a barrier of fire and blinding light on the soaked ground, sending whole blocks of monsters back in panic, driving them straight into the line of Nero’s gun.
The ground shook. The smell of burning flesh and powder was absolute. The Russians were shouting hurrahs, Nero kept turning the crank without stopping, and the Hidebehinds were being decimated. It looked as though engineering and brute force were going to win the night…
But then a dry metallic snap came from Gideon’s launcher.
The brass tube had warped with the heat of the phosphorus.
At the same moment a sudden and frightening silence came from the rear gates of Fort Ross.
The mimicked whistle was no longer coming from the forest ahead.
It was coming from inside the main house.
The creatures had not merely been trying to climb the walls; they had used the frontal attack as a distraction in order to do the thing they did best: slip in behind, where nobody was looking.
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