Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

spilled everywhere, and the air was full of screams.
    Outside, in the rain, Grendels smashed their way through the wall repairs and barricades, and poured through the wall in an unstoppable flood. Men and women ran screaming everywhere, but the Grendels ran faster. Owen Deathstalker swung his sword double-handed, and sometimes the edge would cut through the crimson armor, and sometimes it wouldn’t. The sheer strength of his blows was enough to send the Grendels staggering backward, but he couldn’t hurt them. Hazel d’Ark fought at his side, darting and dodging in the space available on the catwalk, searching for weak spots, thrusting the point of her sword into exposed joints and twisting it, and all to no avail. Like Owen, her strength was enough to keep the Grendels at bay, but that was all. Owen tried knocking the Grendels off the catwalk with sweeping blows of his arm, but even the long drop to the hard ground below didn’t seem to bother them.
    And step by step Owen and Hazel were driven back, while their merely human fellow defenders died around them, and they could do nothing to save them. Soon the catwalk was littered with the dead and the dying, and slick with rivers of blood that dripped from the edges of the catwalk in another endless rain. And still more Grendels came swarming over and through the wall. “Fall back! Fall back!” yelled Colonel William Hand, down in the compound. “Fall back to the inner redoubt, and let the booby-traps do their work!” The surviving lepers on the catwalk turned and ran, crowding down the narrow stairways, the Grendels falling on those at the back. Owen and Hazel continued to retreat slowly, trying to buy the lepers near them some time. A Grendel ducked under the arc of Owen’s blade and went for his throat. Owen lashed out instinctively, and his fist smashed through the heart-shaped head, splintering the armor. The Grendel convulsed as Owen seized a handful of its brains and ripped them out of its skull.
    The creature spun helplessly in place, until its fellows pulled it down and trampled it underfoot. “Nice touch,” said Hazel, just a little breathlessly.
    “Yeah,” said Owen. “Think I broke my bloody hand.”
    “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re cut off from the stairs.”
    “Then we’ll just have to jump.”
    “The fall will kill us!”
    “We’re not that lucky. Jump!”
    They beat aside the nearest Grendels, avoided the snapping jaws, ran to the edge of the catwalk, and threw themselves out into the air. It was a long way down, and for a few wonderful moments it was almost like flying. And then they hit the ground hard, driving the breath from their lungs. Up above them, the catwalk was completely overrun.
    Owen forced himself back onto his feet through sheer willpower, and grabbed Hazel by the shoulder, pulling her up. There were people and Grendels running everywhere. A steel smile lunged for Hazel’s throat. She grabbed the Grendel with both hands, whipped it up over her head, and threw it into the nearest concentration of Grendels. They went down in a pile of thrashing limbs. Owen and Hazel ran for the inner redoubt, the hall-sized communications center set up as the only practical place to retreat to if the outer defenses were breached. Lepers ran with them, dodging or leaping over the hidden traps and pitfalls. Grendels raced after them. They fell into the spike-bottomed pits, flattened the spikes, rose unharmed, and leapt right out again. Weight-driven spikes and sword blades leapt out of hiding, only to glance harmlessly away. The improvised land mines erupted all across the compound in sudden spurts of smoke and flames, throwing Grendels into the air and even damaging a few. But there were always more, always more.
    An army of death, created to be unstoppable.
    The defenders streamed into the last redoubt, packing it full. There were steel shutters on the windows and heavy bolts on the doors. Owen and Hazel took up a position before the great hall, and went head to head with the first Grendels to arrive, trying to occupy the attention of as many aliens as they could, to buy the arriving lepers a few more moments of precious time. Bonnie Bedlam was there too, with Midnight Blue. Bonnie laughed in sheer exuberance as the Grendels swarmed around her, glorying in a battle that tested her as never before. She swung her sword with all her strength, beating Grendels to the ground and cracking open their armor. She was bleeding constantly