The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [107]
Somebody else was heading towards him too, unfortunately. A frost giant, and he was much closer than I was. He was equipped with a kind of scythe. It had a reach of at least three metres, and the comma-shaped blade was as long as my arm. I loosed off a couple of rounds at him, but I was going full tilt and my aim was off. Chopsticks wasn't even aware that the bastard was looming over him. He kept on crawling, using elbows and clawed hands, every inch of his progress a hideous, agonised effort. He was half-paralysed, I guessed, his legs useless, some kind of spinal injury, and the doorway was broad and inviting, a promise of sanctuary, of safety...
And then the frost giant with the scythe took a powerful sideways swipe at him and sliced him clean in two at the waist.
"No!" I hit the frost giant running, slamming into him shoulder first. As he went down I double-tapped him in the face with the Glock, point blank range. Hollow-point Parabellum rounds; his brains hit the ground before the rest of him did.
I whirled and sprang to Chopsticks's side, but there were to be no groaned last words from him, no brave smile for his comrade-in-arms. The scythe had left him instantly, utterly, uncompromisingly dead.
I rose shakily. Took stock.
Frost giants were closing in on the other four, who were still in their pairs. Bullets picked off the frosties one by one, but as each fell another lunged in to take his place. We hadn't brought heaps of ammo with us. The guns had been meant for security and show. Nobody had reckoned on needing them for a full-scale ding-dong. I saw Baz toss his Minimi aside, having used up both the magazines he'd had on him. Out came his sidearm, a Browning BDM semiauto. Its clip held fifteen rounds, but after that was empty there'd be no more.
From the way Backdoor was conserving shots with his SA80, I guessed he was running low too.
And more frost giants were piling in from elsewhere. Civilians, unarmoured, were getting in on the act, picking up any handy object and bringing it to the fray.
It was hopeless. Only one thing we could do.
"Fall back!" I called out. "We can't hold position. Fall back!"
The lads heard me and understood, and I jabbed an arm behind me in the direction of the square's south-east corner, which is where we'd been headed before everything went tits up, and I supplied covering fire to allow first Baz and Paddy, then Cy and Backdoor to retreat to the exit there, and they in turned covered me while I joined them.
We scarpered out of the market square down a narrow passageway, with frost giants pursuing us in a howling, irate mob. Shots over our shoulders gave them something to think about but didn't deter them much. We weren't aiming, and mostly all we did was blow a chunk out of the side of someone's house or turn a windowpane into something you'd put in your gin and tonic.
We zigzagged left and right through a maze of side-streets and alleys. I'd no idea if this was the route we'd come in by, although I was 99% sure it wasn't. Our principal objective was putting distance between us and our pursuers. Beyond that, if we were lucky enough to find our way to the main gate or even just the perimeter wall, that would be a bonus.
"Anybody got a clue what happened back there?" Baz yelled. "Who the bloody fook started firing and why?"
"Save it," I told him. "We can post-mortem later. First let's make sure there's no more mortem to be post."
We rounded a corner and, would you believe it, ran headlong into another bunch of frost giant guards. This lot, four in all, had obviously been alerted by the gunfire that something untoward was up and were rushing to help. We despatched them in pretty short