No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,119

was not the best of times, and I didn’t have a tripod to brace it with for the final shot. I gritted, “Hoo-ah,” through my teeth this time, sat up, and fired a second time before I let myself think about it.

I blew a leg off the closest golem. It would have to do. The remaining two hesitated and I seized the opportunity to snag more grenades from my pack. Only two frags left, but three flash-bangs as well. I detonated them close enough to myself to provide cover while I crept away, an Army crawl that banged my ribs against the ground but meant not having to get to my feet again. I had dust in my teeth. Even the Mojave hadn’t ground itself into me as much as this mountainside was doing.

I covered forty yards before the smoke cleared. Then I rolled on my back and stared at the sky, taking deep cleansing breaths. I couldn’t manage another frag unless the golems got close enough to throw one at them, and I didn’t want to let them get that close. I put the frags on my belt anyway, just in case, then quietly drew my pistol. They had eyes. Eyes were normally vulnerable. I just had to be steady enough to make the shot. I breathed, and listened, and when the cracking footsteps came clear, I rolled to my feet a second time, sighted, and fired.

The first volley was perfect. I caught one of them in the eye. Its head exploded into puffs of dust. The other one turned its face away. All the way away, so the back of its head faced me. The third one, the one I’d blown the leg off, was still down. I thanked God for small favors and got the second-to-last frag out. I knew how far I could throw it, uninjured. I figured I could manage half that distance with my ribs on fire, then knocked another three yards off to be safe. It put the detonation range dangerously close, but I couldn’t risk the launcher again. Another hit like that and I’d be unconscious. And I hadn’t even laid eyes on the big show yet.

That didn’t bear thinking about. I watched the golem stumble over uneven ground, edging toward me with its head still on backward. They really did use their eyes, unlikely as it seemed. I flung the frag, collapsed to the ground, and tried to breathe around shooting pain while I waited for the explosion. Noise and smoke billowed after eight seconds, but it took another minute and a half to get back to my feet. The golem didn’t make it to me in that time, so I knew I’d done it some damage.

Quite a lot, it turned out, though it wasn’t dead yet. It was like the robot in that old sci-fi movie, pulling itself along by one arm and its grinning jaw. I didn’t have an industrial metal crusher handy, so I just shot it in the eye. It died. I didn’t dare sag to the earth beside it, because there had to be a creator-demon around here somewhere, and I didn’t think I could get to my feet if I went down again. So I just waited. The air cooled off as the sun started sliding into the west. I could still smell boiled fish, and the frothing lake down below gave me something to focus on while I waited. Demons did not beget golem protectors just to run away while somebody went through the golems with a bunch of hand grenades.

Although now that I thought about it, that seemed like a very smart thing for a demon to do. I wondered if I’d been had. I slumped to sitting and awkwardly searched my bag for some snack bars and the rest of my water. I put the water on a rock while I ate, which hurt more than I thought it would. Light refracted in a bubble rising from the bottom of the water jug, and then in another.

By the time I realized the water was in fact boiling, Asag was just about on top of me.

I unloaded a clip into him, naturally. Sparks pinged off him where the bullets hit, and he rolled back, but I hadn’t done any real damage. One for the notebooks: silver didn’t stop demons any more than it specifically stopped anything else. I had, though, been counting on the bullets be as reliable as always, and they weren’t.