Fomor ambush

I closed my eyes and pictured the city at Millennium Park. There was a lot of flat, open space, good for an old-school battlefield. There weren’t a lot of places where you could have troops with rifles dig in, especially not in the vision-killing haze of dust and smoke. But Columbus Drive was a sunken road that divided Millennium Park from Daley Park, a natural obstacle that any troops coming in from the lake would have to overcome. Enough guns there would pile bodies in windrows.
I looked back at the men and women following me. If I put them there, they’d inflict the most damage on the enemy—for a while, anyway. Then they’d probably be overrun and slaughtered.
The question was whether or not that was still the right thing to do. The people marching behind me weren’t children. They knew death was in the air. And if the enemy overcame us, the city was doomed. All of it.
But, hell, I wasn’t even sure the people who were following me were actually doing it entirely of their own free will. The power of the Winter mantle and Mab’s preparations could well be influencing their emotions to the degree that it wouldn’t exactly be fair to call their willingness to fight a choice.
I knew how Mab would have called it. She had a battle to win.
Whereas I had people to protect.
“Sanya,” I said.
“Da?”
“When we get to the park, I want you to take charge of these folks. The enemy will be coming in from the east and northeast. I want you to find a position where you can . . . What’s the word where you get to shoot at them just fine, and they can’t shoot back at you too good?”
The Russian smiled thinly. “I think you are trying to say ‘defilade.’”
“Yeah. That. Defilade the crap out of them.”
“No. We want to be in defilade. What you want to happen to them is to put them in enfilade.”
“Whatever, you know what I’m after. Put them where they can do the most damage and take the least in reply.”
“Visibility this low, might not be possible.”
“Then guess,” I said, exasperated. “I’m kind of counting on the Big Guy making things work out so that you’re in the right place at the right time. Figure if I put these people with you, they’ll be there, too.” I looked back at the bleak, frightened, determined faces following me. “If God is going to be on anyone’s side today, I want Him to be on theirs.”

Battle ground Chapter 17, Page 166-167


Grimalkin, I thought. I need an accurate assessment of enemy position and numbers.
The Elder malk’s reply came buzzing through my head in his creepy, creepy voice. They are legion. Between five and seven thousand. They march west through the park.
Holy crap.
There was no way for about eight hundred amateurs with shotguns to fight that and win.
Unless . . .
“Dammit,” I said. “They’re coming right at us. We have to beat them to Columbus. It’s a double-wide separated roadway, and it’s at ground level, maybe fifteen feet lower than the park. There’s a pedestrian bridge across. The bridge is higher than the park and it will give them a firing position down onto our people, as well as an easy way across Columbus—otherwise, they’ll have to climb straight walls under heavy fire.”
“Destroy bridge?” Sanya asked.
“And hold the line for as long as we can, do all the damage we can,” I said.
Sanya took a deep breath and then looked at the volunteers. “Da,” he said quietly. “Then we must move quickly.”
“Yeah,” I said. Then we jogged out in front of the volunteers, and I called, “Follow me!”
And we took off at a trot across the Great Lawn, our northern flank shielded by the defensive positions at the pavilion, with stealthy little monsters moving in a screen in front of us, serving as my eyes.
What I had not considered was that eight hundred people running together make a thunder of their own. As we ran, I heard the alien clicking sounds stop—and then resurge in a furious, faster tempo.
Hah. They hadn’t been expecting something like this. And now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t want to run into eight hundred angry people with shotguns on an average Chicago evening, either.
The retaining wall on this side of Columbus came into sight, and I poured it on, aiming for the pedestrian bridge. Sanya started screaming orders to his officers, hard to hear over the sound of that many people moving.

Battle Ground Chapter 25, Page 224-225


The footbridge isn’t just a simple, straightforward bridge over an underpass. It’s this enormous, gleaming, serpentine thing that winds like a river, made out of concrete and gleaming polished steel. It’s solid. Like, really solid. And the only place it could reasonably be taken down was over Columbus itself, where it thinned out to normal bridge proportions.
I drew up to a halt at the mouth of the bridge and turned to Sanya. “Deploy our people in two ranks. One along the side of the bridge and the other along the wall over Columbus.”
“And you?”
“Those trees are blocking our line of fire. I gotta take them out, then go out on the bridge to take it down,” I said. “Be right back.”

Battle Ground Chapter 25, Page 226


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. But we were doing it.
We were holding them off.
Until the Titan appeared.

Battle Ground Chapter 25, Page 230-232