Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 199: Chaos of War

Levin’s voice kept appearing in places where Levin was not.

He gave up trying to locate the source and focused on what he could control: keeping upright on the horse, not being pulled down into the current of running bodies. The men around him were past hearing individual commands. The witch — wherever she was standing — did not need to come close. She could project sound to any point on the battlefield, any voice she chose, from any direction that would serve her.

Charge. Charge. Forward. Loot the town.

The slogans coming from inside the militia’s own ranks were, in some ways, worse than the false orders. These men knew those voices. They couldn’t second-guess them without second-guessing their own comrades.

The two witches are not the same person, he worked out, watching the road ahead fill with his own people’s running backs. The one who killed Lehman went invisible afterward. The one running the column is speaking from concealment in the trees. No witch has two abilities. There are at least two of them in there.

He steadied his horse against the edge of the column and looked for anything he could use.

What he found instead was an answer to the central question he had been refusing to ask: what is happening up ahead?

The cannons fired. He heard the shells before he felt them — a sound like a door slamming in an empty house, multiplied, coming from low angles. Then the screams started. Not all of the screams were fear; some were the sounds bodies make when they encounter impacts they were not designed for.

The pills made the militia faster. They did not make the militia not-bodies.

The column was still running forward. It took him a moment to understand this — that the men ahead were dying and the men behind could not see it and were still charging into the sound — and then it made a terrible kind of sense. There was nothing left to command them with. They had been pointed at a target and given a reason to want it, and the mechanisms that would have let them reassess were presently occupied by a compound whose job was to suppress exactly that.

One thousand five hundred people, Levin thought, running toward twenty cannons.

He turned his horse into the trees.

Inside the bunker, Brian had heard the artillery open up before he saw anything through the slot.

White smoke rising from the far-left positions. Then the right. Then, as the enemy came around the bend in the road and into his lane of fire, Brian saw them for the first time at close range.

They ran like men who did not know what running normally felt like and were discovering it now — lunging, enormous strides, arms out for balance. Their eyes were wrong. He had been told this in the mobilization briefing but seeing it was different from being told it. Even at a hundred and fifty meters, through the narrow vertical slot, he could see the red.

“They’re fast,” someone behind him said.

“Captain said they would be. Keep loading.”

The first of them reached the purple markers on the road’s edge. Brian filled his lungs and called it.

“Fire at will!”

The bunker came alive. Twelve guns through twelve slots, the sound in the enclosed space enormous, the smell of powder immediate and acrid. Men fell in the first volley — not one or two, but groups of them, because the road concentrated the targets and a missed aim was a hit on someone behind. The ones who fell at the front slowed the ones behind them.

The ones on the pill did not stop. That was the part the briefing had prepared them for but that the body still had to learn. A man hit in the shoulder kept running. A man hit in the gut slowed and then — and then ran faster, the pain-suppression overriding the body’s shutdown signal, giving it another twenty meters of forward motion before the organ damage won.

“Spears!” someone shouted.

Brian pressed himself back from the slot. A shadow went over the bunker — a mass of it, dozens of spears launched together, the arcs intersecting as they fell. The impact on the bunker roof was like hail: crack, crack, crack. Several spears caught in the brick. None came through.

“Nothing got in,” Brian said. “Keep shooting.”

Then, below his sightline — movement. One of them had gotten close, within fifty meters, sprinting flat and low, and as Brian tracked him the man bent without slowing and threw his spear in a flat arc. Not overhead. Horizontal, at angle, through the slot.

Brian had already shouted down but his own voice was too slow. The spear came through the opening and hit Freckle in the chest with a sound like a fist on wood, and Freckle sat straight up for half a second before falling backward.

The man who threw it was on the ground before the spear stopped moving. Three different guns had found him in the same instant.

“Don’t move him,” Brian said, already crossing the bunker floor. “Freckle — can you hear me?”

“Captain.” Freckle’s voice was wet and small. “Am I going to die?”

The spear had entered below the sternum. Breathing was still happening — not freely, but happening. Not the lung. The shaft was in at an angle. Brian made the calculation Roland had taught them in culture class: do not remove an embedded object, you will create a hemorrhage. Leave it. Keep the patient still. Wait for Nana.

“You can feel the pain?” Brian asked.

“Yes.” Freckle’s face said this was a strange question.

“Then you’re not dying. Everyone here knows what Nana can do.” Brian put his hand flat on Freckle’s forehead. “You’re going to get to see her up close.”

Freckle managed a smile that was mostly grimace.

Brian went back to his slot, took the rifle the recruit was holding out to him, and resumed shooting. The bodies were beginning to pile at the road markers — not a metaphor, an actual physical obstacle that the pill-driven men behind had to step around or over, which slowed them, which gave the gunners more time per target. Every minute the assault continued, the arithmetic of attrition was completing itself without assistance.

The cannons switched to canister shot when the first runners cleared the three-hundred-meter mark, and after that the sound changed from individual reports to something more like continuous thunder, punctuated by screams that did not sound like they came from anything human.

The ones at the back finally stopped.

It happened the way all catastrophic failures happened — a threshold crossed somewhere in the middle of the column that Brian could not see from his position, but whose effects propagated backward and then forward through the crowd. One moment the road was full of people running toward him. The next, the road was full of people running away.

He watched them go, still shooting at targets of opportunity, and let himself exhale.

Freckle is alive, he thought. We’re all alive.

He kept the thought brief, the way soldiers learned to keep good thoughts — close, uncelebrated, held rather than voiced, because the battle was not yet finished and you did not spend what you might still need.

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