Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,97

yet. He dashed twenty feet back and started chopping again, to drop that entire length out of the bridge.

I held my shield and my ground as the turtlenecks recovered, way too swiftly to be acceptable, and poured it on again. The Fomor sorcerer had vanished. Those creeps didn’t like to expose themselves to danger when they could whip their minions forward into it instead.

“Harry!” Butters shouted.

I started backpedaling, my shield bracelet beginning to overheat from use now, dribbling green-gold sparks everywhere.

I made it back to Butters and he slashed down with Fidelacchius one final time, before both of us rushed back, around the curve of the bridge, and out of line of sight with the turtlenecks. There was an enormous groaning sound, then a rumbling crash and a scream of ripping concrete and twisting metal.

And now that we were out of the line of fire, the volunteers on the bridge started hammering away at the turtlenecks. Yeah, those guys were professionals, but they weren’t bulletproof. I saw several go down before they started returning fire and . . .

I felt phantom rounds hit my chest, my head.

Eleven hundred and seventy-nine.

I fought not to throw up. There wouldn’t have been much to come up anyway.

The clicks rose to a sound like heavy canvas tearing, and the Fomor army came rushing forward in a storm of shrieks, wails, and screams.

With the bridge out, their only option was to cross Columbus on foot—and they went bounding and leaping forward, jumping off the higher ground and down into the underpass without hesitation.

And nothing happened.

“What?” I demanded. “Where is Sanya?”

“Beats me,” Butters said, panting. He was covered in concrete dust.

The enemy massed on the far side of Columbus and then rushed forward, toward us. They crossed the first traffic lane without being fired upon. They reached the median of the divided road while more of their numbers piled into the underpass, a wave of flesh and steel and weaponry.

They crossed the median and the first lane of traffic.

And Sanya bellowed, “NOW!”

Eight hundred men and women of Chicago popped up from behind the wall overlooking the sunken drive and opened fire with shotguns from a range of as little as thirty feet.

The slaughter was indescribable.

Shotguns are not precision weapons. But at thirty feet, and in the hands of an amateur, they don’t have to be. The volunteers’ fire swept the enemy’s front ranks like a broom, killing and maiming without prejudice or mercy. The sound of it was a roar like I’d never heard before, with too many individual blasts to distinguish any one round going off, a deadly martial thunderstorm.

The volunteers fired until their weapons ran empty, and if they’d killed fewer than a thousand of the enemy, it was only by a couple.

The enemy howled in their dismay and tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. Some tried to run up or down the street, but Sanya had positioned people all along the ground overlooking the sunken road, firing from defilade, and they enfiladed the ever-loving hell out of the Fomor army. Volunteers screamed their fury and defiance at the enemy. The volume of fire was so heavy that it magically turned a couple of stalled cars the enemy tried to take cover behind into Swiss cheese.

Blood ran down the street in small rivers. The air grew thick with the iron stench of it.

The enemy wasn’t done. They took up positions of their own, across the sunken road, behind just as much wall as my volunteers had. Then it became a gunfight. At that range, the professional weaponry of the turtlenecks wasn’t substantially better than the volunteers’ shotguns. Arguably, the shotguns were a better weapon for the shooting-gallery scenario, since they needn’t be aimed as carefully or as long. But that only made it something like a fair fight.

Men and women who had followed me died.

I felt them dying. There were very few instant deaths. Even the people shot in the head had time to thrash and scream for a handful of seconds before the end. Some of them were so close I could hear them pleading for mercy. But Death plays no favorites and makes no exceptions.

Eleven hundred and fourteen.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, shoving away the phantom sensory input to the best of my ability. I’d lost seventy-three volunteers, while the enemy dead numbered in the hundreds.

We were winning.

Granted, we weren’t going to get any more effective surprise attacks. From here on out, we’d have to work for all of them.