All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [243]
Eliot belted out three more chords, and that felt good.
The rusty iron of the bridge heated and twisted like taffy . . . stretched apart and fell into the chasm.
Mr. Welmann clamped a hand on Eliot’s arm over and pulled it away from the guitar.
“Let go,” Eliot told him, annoyed. “I got rid—”
But Mr. Welmann wasn’t even looking at Eliot; instead, he scanned the horizons. He lifted a finger indicating silence, and cocked his head, straining to hear.
“No,” Mr. Welmann whispered. “Listen.”
The sound was, at first, barely audible over the rumble of the distant volcanoes. Eliot heard one cry, then a shout of discovery, and then a combined wail of rage that spread over the land.
From the cliffs they’d traversed, the damned poured out of caves and crannies. Thousands and thousands of torches flared to life upon the slopes. And from every plateau and mesa, the shouts of not thousands—but tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of angry souls combined into a thunderous roar.
Eliot let the magnitude of his mistake sink in. He’d messed up in a big, big way.
“Nice,” Fiona muttered, shaking her head.
“What’d you want me to do?” he asked. “Let them get to us? Fight them all? Don’t you think that would’ve made a little noise, too?”
He started coughing, the air once again hot and reeking of metal. His hand drifted back to Lady Dawn’s strings, instinctively plunking the notes that cleared the atmosphere.
Fiona started to say something, but her mouth stayed open, gaping, as she stared past Eliot.
He turned and saw what had shut his sister up.
Where the bridge he’d just destroyed had been, a thin line appeared in the chasm. It was spiderweb fine, but it thickened and buds appeared that turned into chain links—then another line stretched next to it, and strands of metal wove between them.
Like the Gates of Perdition that had sealed after Fiona had cut into them, this bridge was growing back.
The damned across the chasm cheered and jeered.
“We can’t fight,” Mr. Welmann said. “No matter how strong you kids think you are, they’ll always be more of them to fight.” He nodded toward the other suspension bridge that led to the Blasted Lands. “We go that way. Fast.”
Without any argument, they raced for that bridge, their only escape.
A cluster of the working damned gathered at the bridge, all crowding to get on the thing and get away, too.
Robert sprinted ahead. He plowed into them, knocking six over with one blow, and clearing a path for him and the others to run ahead.
Eliot and Mr. Welmann jogged onto the bridge after him. Amanda was right after them. Fiona lingered, and came last.
And Eliot knew why.
As they tromped off the bridge and onto the next mesa, Fiona turned and severed the chains.
It fell into the lava.
If it was like the other bridge, though, it’d grow back. Destroying it would buy them only a minute or so.
The working damned here scattered, abandoning their rocks. Eliot jumped onto a boulder and looked around. Five bridges radiated off this plateau, connecting to others . . . only now, from every direction, the angry damned came. So many, he couldn’t count them. They flowed across the land. The only thing preventing the damned from quickly overwhelming them were the bridges—they let them across only a few at a time.
If Eliot and the others didn’t get out of here, they’d have no choice: they’d have to fight and fight—and against a few hundred . . . maybe even against the first thousand, they’d win.
But after an hour of battling, he and Fiona, Robert and Amanda would falter. They’d need food and water and sleep.
There was one way, though. One bridge clear for now. It led to another plateau, which in turn had a single bridge to the Plains of Ash.
“There’s a way out of lava fields,” Eliot told them, jumping down. “I can get us onto solid ground.”
Robert had his brass knuckles on one hand, held his Glock in the other. “How many are coming?” he asked.
“All of them,” Eliot replied.
“Just run,” Fiona told everyone. “There’s no time left to think this through.”
So Eliot