Ascendance by John Birmingham Page A

are more of them, all over the city,’ she said.
    ‘LA too,’ the kid put in. ‘See?’
    He pointed at an old TV, suspended from the yellowed ceiling tiles in a rear corner of the shop. Dave had to turn all the way around in the booth to check out the boxy antique. The screen was a distorted wash of faded blues and greens. The sound was down and it was hard to make out what was happening, but the news ticker scrolling across the bottom was legible. ‘Zombies in LA,’ it screamed.
    Dave frowned. He’d just come in from the west coast this morning, although it felt like days ago. There’d been no monsters out there when he left. Just Boylan, his lawyer. Now it looked like they had a Tümorum infection. Or maybe just a Revenant Master working his mojo – if they were lucky. Dave shook his head, and went back to wolfing down fistfuls of hot meat and melted cheese. Nothing he could do about it from here. He’d told Heath and the army guys how to handle that shit.
    ‘You have cheese on your chin,’ said Karen, handing him a napkin. ‘Wipe it off.’
    ‘Yes, Mom,’ he said, but did as she told him anyway.
    He’d already washed his hands in the little sink behind the counter, but his black coveralls were stiff with daemon gore. It didn’t bother him as much as it should. And not as much as his cheesy dribbles seemed to gross her out.
    ‘I know where some of them are,’ she said between rapidly chewing and swallowing. ‘The war bands. I saw them when I was hooked up to the Threshrend. We can’t fight them all. We should take the really bad ones the cops can’t handle.’
    ‘I don’t reckon they can handle any of them,’ said Dave, still hurrying through his meal. ‘Not until they get some heavy backup. Chadderton and his partner. Delillo. They strike you as having that shit locked down before?’
    Karen’s tea, poured from a samovar, arrived in a tall, ornate glass. She took care to keep her sword well away from the teenage Turk, or Armenian, or whatever he was. Wouldn’t do to have the boy touch the thing and come apart on them.
    Dave stood, draining a mug of thick, black, sweetened coffee. He gathered up another handful of fried meat. Felt the need to be moving.
    ‘That big toad-looking freak,’ he said. ‘The thresh.’
    ‘Threshrend,’ she corrected him, drinking her tea, but not rushing to follow him. ‘Thresh are just nestlings. Threshrend are fully grown, come into their power.’
    ‘Yeah. The psychic ones. That’s how you know where the others are?’
    ‘Something like that,’ she said, sipping at the tea again, making no move to leave or even stand. ‘It’s good,’ she said, raising the glass and smiling sweetly at the older Turk as he fired up more meat for them. For a moment Dave could see just how deeply she’d inhabited the character she played. Karen Warat. All-American girl. Not a treacherous Russian spy or human killing machine.
    ‘We should get moving,’ he said.
    ‘Almost. I need to hydrate properly. You should too. It’s important and we need to think about how we take these things down. The most powerful Threshrend, they can get into our heads. That why we couldn’t orb before. That thing was stopping us.’
    ‘By orb, you mean warp, right? Be the Flash?’
    ‘Yeah, if you want. Anyway, just so you know, we won’t always be able to run rings around them at . . . warp speed. Not if they have a Threshrend to run signals interference on us.’
    Karen stood then, and they gathered their weapons. He started to ask her about the empath daemons but she was already talking to the Armenian again. The man beamed at her, his eyes lighting up. They exchanged something that felt like a formal greeting or ritual of some sort, tossing the word ‘Inshallah’ between them a few times. The boy gave them a plastic container, filled to the brim with cheesesteak, the lid held on with thick rubber bands.
    ‘Thanks,’ said Dave. ‘And, er, inch . . . allah, or you know,