The Last Temptation of Dave by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

14

“I thought all the roads were jammed with refugees,” Dave said, not knowing what else to say as they left behind the edge of the settlement in the late afternoon light. The westering sun picked out hundreds of solar panels, throwing a star field of sunbursts back at them. And then the burbs were gone, cut off as if by a guillotine, and they rolled through pastureland and tilled fields blemished here and there by small patches of forest.

Heath was on his phone, scrolling through texts and e-mails. He’d just spent a tense ten minutes trying to explain to General De Brito that they now had to defend themselves against undead members of the local populace who might come looking for a bite to eat. For a small mercy they hadn’t seen any more on the road, but Dave thought he spotted one on a low hill. When he craned his head to look up out the window, he could see the contrails of jets high above them. Lower down, helicopters swept over those patches of forest or circled what he assumed were entrenched positions of the national guard and De Brito’s army units. Once or twice he caught sight of thirty or forty men in camouflage gear digging holes into a slope and wondered how much use they would be when ten thousand daemons came thundering up on them. As they approached their destination—“Five minutes out,” Zach announced—he saw the first evidence of real defensive positions. Or what he thought of as real defensive positions: Bradley fighting vehicles ranged in a long, shallow half-moon behind maybe a hundred men frantically preparing fighting pits and setting up mortars and heavy machine guns. He looked to the other side of the highway and saw a similar arrangement, all the guns pointing toward the Djinn.

The light was leaking out of the day.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“No,” Heath said. “These are just light-blocking forces. The stuff they had available to throw into the breach. We’re here to buy some time for De Brito to get his big dogs in place…If they’re needed,” he added.

A few clouds were drifting in from the west, scattered and scrappy but throwing shadows over the gently rolling plains, making it just a little bit less dangerous for Hunn and Fangr and Djinn and Gnarrl and Sumateem and whatever to go about their business. Dave wondered what the Djinn called their own Fangr leashes, the “leashed” daemon slaves that every Hunn warrior learned to control.

Thinking about it, he was pretty sure they just called them Fangr, too.

Through the gathering gloom a collection of Hummers, five-ton trucks, and Nebraska State Patrol cars appeared around a long, looping bend in the road. Hidden by a low hill, they apparently marked the forward line. Zach slowed the Humvee to a stop.

“Hey! Wait,” Dave said. “Sammy’s a he?”

—

A tall soldier in a helmet and body armor walked up to the driver’s window as Dave looked at more men working away at positions on the hill he’d just driven around.

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