The Apocalypse Ocean by Tobias S. Buckell, Pablo Defendini Read Free Book Online Page A

driver swearing. “They’ve got spikes on the road!”
    And then the wheels exploded. The whole wagon shook and rattled on bare rims and slid to the side. It tilted and slumped into one of the gutters. Bodies shoved hard up against Tiago, he grunted and shoved back.
    He couldn’t see ahead, but the bars let him see the building they’d smashed into on one side and the open street on the other. Behind them three Runners loped up the street. With their grotesquely long, muscular legs and thin frames they could run faster than the wagon.
    They pulled out pistols and walked up to the front of the wagon. “Stay inside,” they ordered. “We’re not after you.”
    A shadow dropped down from the top of one of the nearby buildings and struck the sidewalk with a crunch. Pulverized cobblestone leapt into the air, and Nashara stood up from a crouch and walked across the street to the wagon.
    “Holy fuck,” said a grizzled old man staggering drunkenly down the street his eyes wide.
    Nashara ripped the back door of the wagon off, shattering the lock.
    “Tiago, June, come on.”
    Tiago shoved June in front of him. “Follow her, and shut up,” he said.
    June looked around the wagon, hesitated, then thought better of it and awkwardly clambered his way out of the tilted wagon.
    Tiago jumped to the ground behind him. Yeah, it had only been a few minutes … but it was nice to be free again.
    Five Ox-men swept in from the front of the wagon. They’d laid the spikes and disabled it. Now they surrounded Tiago, Nashara, and June.
    A flare shot up into the air. It had been fired just a few blocks away, Tiago realized as he followed Nashara back up along the street. “So you’ve got June,” he said. “Is that it?”
    “Well, back at the …”
    Nashara spun around.
    Tiago glanced back where she looked off into the dark. The Ox-men around him were looking in the direction of the flare, down an alley. Into the same darkness.
    Something moved.
    “Fire!” Came a yell.
    Up on the roof a shoulder-launched missile streaked downwards, over Tiago’s head, and into the alley.
    It exploded. The fireball roiled and blinded Tiago, and the heat rushed toward them.
    As his vision recovered and the crackle and pop of rifle fire from snipers on the roof opened up he saw what they’d seen.
    The Doaq.
    The seven-foot-tall, hooded figure moved with unnatural quickness. Tiago caught a glimpse, in the flicker of a gas lamp, of two large, catlike eyes under the cowl and a slit-like nose.
    But it was the mouth that he noticed most. It yawned, the jaw dislocating and stretching like a snake’s: a two-foot gaping chasm of darkness.
    The Doaq whipped across the street, slamming into a nearby Ox-man. The jaw dropped even lower and the Doaq rose taller, somehow, and then the gaping maw descended on the Ox-man who was firing rounds and rounds of bullets from a large machine gun at it.
    Hundreds of pounds of rippling, Nesaru-engineered brute strength disappeared and the Doaq turned to face Tiago again.
    “That looks like a damn wormhole in its mouth,” Nashara said, awe in her voice. Then she grabbed her side and stumbled. “And it’s generating an EMP field … powerful enough it’s messing with me.”
    Tiago was looking everywhere for somewhere to run. But there were Ox-men everywhere. And everything was happening so damn quickly.
    Did he grab June?
    Or stay close to Nashara for protection?
    But she was looking surprised, which meant she wasn’t as powerful as the Doaq. 
    The Doaq flowed forward, the robe rippling in the slight wind. The massive jaw gaped wider and wider as it got closer. It seemed all maw to Tiago, mesmerized by the black nothingness opening up, propelled by the creature’s feet.
    “Tiago! Run!” Nashara pulled out a large shotgun, and the deafening discharge filled the tiny stone canyon of street and houses. The Doaq twitched to face the incoming shot and swallowed it all without any change in its approach.
    “Take June,”