Ascendance by John Birmingham Page B

bags emblazoned with a logo he didn’t recognise. The other owner was anonymous. Possibly dead. Karen had snapped the chains securing both bikes to a rack outside a 7-Eleven, pulling the steel links apart like taffy.
    ‘Someone might need those,’ said Dave, strangely troubled by the theft. Some bastard had stolen his son’s bike once. It left a bad feeling.
    ‘Someone does need them,’ she said. ‘Us.’
    She passed him the courier bike and threw a heavy motorcycle boot over the other one, looking more than a little incongruous in her torn and gore-stiffened leathers. But then he looked kind of weird pedalling away in his black combat coveralls.
    ‘Put your hammer in there,’ she said, pointing at the heavy canvas courier bags.
    He passed Lucille’s long wooden shaft through a couple of loops on one of the bags. They were probably for document tubes, but worked just as well for enchanted war hammers.
    ‘About ten minutes ago two full war bands hit an apartment building. Better part of a cohort, with two Threshrendum that we know of. Witnesses reported a couple of big toad-like daemons squatting in the foyer, eating the doorman. There are Sliveen up high somewhere, firing down on the approaches.’
    Dave steadied himself on the bike as he stood on the pedal to get going. It’d been twenty years since he’d last ridden one.
    After a moment or two of wobbling and almost knocking over a whole family, immobilised in their flight toward whatever safety beckoned them on the west side of the island, he settled into the once familiar rhythms of rising and falling pedals. But it wasn’t just familiar; it felt natural, the bike a part of him. He was soon moving at speed, catching up to the accelerating figure of the Russian spy, trying not to focus too closely on the shape of her ass. She was psychic after all and . . .
    ‘Eyes on the road, douche bag,’ she said in a loud, hard voice.
    Dave swore under his breath and concentrated on not crashing into anyone or staring at her derriere. He found he could even enjoy the ride, knowing he’d never been this fast or agile as a teenager. As the frozen city swept by in a blur he decided he could ride as well as Lance Armstrong, well enough to win the Tour de France, unless they blood tested him for magic nanobots or midi-chlorians or whatever.
    They shot back up 5th Avenue, weaving a path through the stationary river of traffic, before cutting east up 46th. Karen briefed him in during moments when they didn’t have to concentrate so much on avoiding the thousands of obstacles that lay between them and their goal.
    ‘These ones employed a different attack profile,’ she yelled back over her shoulder as they swept around the corner and onto Park Avenue. She reminded him of one of the SEALs, the way she talked. The double carriageway and divided traffic streams offered an easier passage here. Dave pulled level with her at the start of the 50s, where a whole block was clear. It was inexplicable, until they came upon a Fangr carcass, shot down on the median strip. Dave cast about quickly, looking for its leash holder, but found nothing.
    ‘The Hunn and Fangr smashed their way into this place,’ Karen said, keeping her eyes on the road, dodging around the tail of a yellow cab. ‘All the other attacks, all of the ones I saw through that Threshrend we put down, they were out in the open, for everyone to see. Maximum horror, maximum chaos. But these ones hit the apartment block and most of what happened then happened out of sight. At first anyway.’
    ‘Then what?’ Dave asked as they slowed to negotiate the cross-town traffic at the next block.
    ‘Then they started throwing people out of the windows. Or bits and pieces of them anyway . . . Kids,’ she added, and he could hear a tightness in her voice. The first sign of weakness or at least of human frailty he’d seen from her.
    She pulled up at a particularly thick traffic snarl and Dave thought she was about to dismount