Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,57

the rest of the group before they got to the front.

It’s easier to move faster with fewer people.

We left the cemetery behind and kept heading east, toward the shores of Lake Michigan. There were more people fleeing now, screams and shouts and hushed, forced whispers. River Shoulders strode openly down the street, carrying the unconscious young woman in one arm and Ramirez in the other. I jogged along, and Listens-to-Wind shook himself into the shape of a rangy old hound and loped easily along beside me.

At the junction of Montrose and Hazel, there was a large group of police officers waving people past them and instructing them to head west at their best speed. There was a little pub there that had a courtyard that had only one entrance, where customers could park their cars. Several cars had been pushed across that entrance as an improvised barricade, and police officers with assault rifles stood at the barricade, looking nervously out into the darkness.

Behind them was a triage area, where several EMTs were working frantically in battlefield conditions to save lives. There were maybe a dozen people back there. Several looked like refugees who had fallen or been hit by some kind of debris. But three of them were Einherjaren—trust me, they stand out like a biker at the Vatican—and they were clearly the worst off.

It was well lit enough by a large fire in a steel barrel and dozens of flares that you could see the walls around the courtyard all the way up to the roof. Three officers had positioned themselves to watch the roof at the head of each wall.

There were bloodstains up there. Something had evidently tried to come over it and been fought back. The light was a problem, really, in this situation. Standing in it meant that you had to stay in it, or else work blind in the dark while your eyes slowly adjusted. Of course, without the light the EMTs couldn’t do their work. It’s an imperfect world.

The gunfire was closer and heavier now. I could make out individual shots. And hear screams. Screams on a battlefield aren’t like the ones you hear on TV. They’re high-pitched, falsetto shrieks and choked, gasping exhalations. Not all of them could have been human, but from where I was standing, they all sounded pretty much the same.

I stopped before we walked into the radius of the light around the defensive position and said, “River, maybe instead of walking up to all the nice frightened officers holding assault rifles, you should let me take the girl over there.”

“Huh,” the Sasquatch said. “Well. I did lose my glasses. Might be simpler.”

I took the girl from him, carrying her in both arms. The old hound paced along lightly at my side, moving with the spring of a much younger creature. I walked forward into the light, holding the girl, and said, “Hey! CPD! I need to get this girl some help!”

Rifles swung to cover me, and I prayed that the officers had decent trigger discipline. I’d have hated to get accidentally shot.

“Don’t move!” shouted several cops at the barricades. I didn’t.

“Keep moving west, sir!” shouted several others at the same time.

“Which is it, guys?” I called back to them. “I can’t not move and go west.”

There was a commotion at the barricade. One of the officers stepped back, and a dark, scowling face under a tight cut of silver hair peered out at me. “Dresden?” he called. “That you?”

“Rawlins!” I said.

The old detective had spent a lot of time in Special Investigations. We’d worked together before. He was a burly man with a particularly expressive face and his knuckles were lumpy with ancient scars. He carried a shotgun like it was an additional limb, and I trusted him.

“What the hell, man?” I called. “I thought you retired.”

He grimaced and nodded toward the sound of gunfire. “Two more weeks.”

I nodded toward the girl. “I need to drop her off with someone. I got stuff to do. Can I come in?”

“Depends, man. What was the name you knew me by the first time we met?”

“An Authority Figure,” I replied.

“Good enough for me,” he said. He nodded to the officers on the barricade. “Let him in.”

I carried the girl across the street and through a narrow gap in the cars that I had to turn sideways to navigate. Rawlins met me inside and led me back to the triage area.

It took me a second to realize that practically every cop there was