by James Beamon
The door barely moved to the beating from outside, but the two windows weren’t as stout. The left one broke first, accompanied by someone’s head emerging through it.
Savashbahar was next to that window, her back against the wall. She thrust out with her dagger, catching the man in his throat with the quickness of a prison shanking. Nobody else’s head came through.
Ruki Provos cranked his diskbow taut, rolled over to that same window and let a diskblade go into the crowd. He moved out of sight again and cranked his diskbow up.
“So, what do we do now?” Ruki asked.
“You’re doing it,” Melvin said. “Mike, I need you and your team to hold the cult back while we go into the cave and stop the Death Null. Think you can handle it?”
The right window shattered. Whoever’s hand it was that broke the window lost it as Runt came down with his Z-weapon.
“Shit, you see my squad,” Mike said. “We got this. What about you? Think you can handle the Thriller video waiting for you up there?”
“Hell yeah,” Mel said. “I’m still mad about getting my face slammed into a barrel. I can’t wait to take it out on those corpses.”
“Go. Take a dump on Death Null then write ‘Melvin Morrow wuz here’ in it with your sword.”
“See you when I get back.”
With a nod, Melvin directed his friends to grab swords and the three of them were out the back door. Mike watched his brother disappear into the mouth of the cave.
I better see you when you get back, Mike thought.
An excited tapping on his shoulder brought him back to the guardhouse. Ruki Provos was pointing at a window.
“What kind of madness did you drag me into this time?!” he asked, his voice panicked.
Sticking their heads and arms in the window were two guys. One was a guard Mike had fried and the other was the dude Savashbahar had stabbed in the throat. Both of them were unblinking, glassy-eyed... very much dead.
Mike pulled his club.
“If you wanted better security, you would’ve paid for it, Ruki. Strap in for a siege.”
Chapter 30
Death Null
Melvin was Zhufira. His blade danced.
He let out all his frustration. Anger at Mike, angst at Rich, and his body and the jumble of emotions, the conflicting confusions, wants and desires. There was no need to translate it here. His bastard sword understood all. It did the talking.
Just a few feet into the cave they met a pair of zombies. Melvin whirled between them and they were down in pieces before Rich and Jason could get in a sword swipe of their own.
Deeper in the tunnel, guided by Jason’s bones and shown the way with Rich’s fire-filled hand, they met another half dozen undead. Melvin wasn’t sure if Jason and Rich were able to help this time. All he knew was he took off two heads in one stroke, cut off countless arms that reached with futile earnest to grasp him, and danced with his blade until he was in the center of a ring of severed parts.
It felt good, being Zhufira. Not just for a second, not just for short moments of uncontrolled anger, but as a standing vehicle for his aggression. She didn’t keep anger and pain bottled up like Melvin. She was catharsis.
Well into the cavern now, the tunnels began to branch out in many different directions. Some ramped up, others down, and more went left and right. Melvin looked at Jason.
“We’ve got a problem,” Jason said. “The feeling, the Death Null’s presence, it’s all around me.”
“Maybe putting a bone in water will help,” Melvin said. “There are too many passages to guess at this.”
Keeping his magefire burning in one hand, Rich dropped the sword and conjured a water bowl that he held in his free hand. They all looked by flickering firelight at the suspended finger bone. It whirled in a circle ceaselessly, a magnet caught up in its own Bermuda Triangle.
Melvin felt the zombie before he heard the footstep shuffle up behind him. He whirled and his blade flowed like wind. Three passes, like an upward slanted Z, and the zombie was left with in as many parts: head, torso and a pair of disconnected legs. Jason ran over and cut arms so the torso section wouldn’t crawl around.
Melvin looked at Jason.
“The ‘always left’ approach to maze traversing?”
Jason nodded.
They got started.
MIKE SAT IN HIS CHAIR, worried. Melvin and his friends had disappeared into the cave hours ago. His instincts told him to go in there after him. But combat survival training told him it was suicide to ignore your base when it’s being overrun.
If nothing else, the cult built sound defenses. This guardhouse was definitely made to keep people from breaching. The door was iron, hinged on the inside. The windows were small, making it difficult for a person to crawl inside. Mike turned difficult to damn near impossible by tossing the beds and wedging the bed frames against the windows. Now nothing got through the windows except arms begging to get chopped off.
But no structure is impenetrable, and the will of the cult was making a way.
Close to an hour now, chipped rock fragments had been flying into the entryway. The cultists were taking axe picks or shovels or something and attacking the walls around the iron door frame. They worked both sides, now the trails were nearly quarter way up the door. Mike could see the fading light of day streaming through the carved lines.
Eventually, sometime well into the night, the door would fall inward. Then it’d be the four of them against total bedlam.
Waiting was hard. Well, not for Runt, he was power napping on a tossed mattress. Guess a lack of bed frame and an angry horde outside the walls didn’t phase a half-weagr. He was a good dude to have with you in the foxhole.
Ruki came over to sit beside Mike. His initial panic from seeing the walking dead had subsided a couple of hours ago. At first, looking at a dismembered torso crawl around on its hands had turned him into a suburban housewife watching a mouse scamper across the linoleum. Luckily, Savashbahar was the man of their house, coming to the Ruki’s screaming rescue and carving the torso up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Even now, Ruki gave an occasional eye to the undead chunks.
“So,” Ruki started, “uh, when you say that’s your brother, um, do you mean some sort of warrior-brother-in-arms kind of brother?”
“I mean brother.”
“I see,” Ruki said, grimacing as he nodded. “Um, how long has your brother been your brother?”
“Why you wanna know?”
“Well, your brother is a woman. And exceedingly comely.”
“Mel’s been my brother long enough for me to club you brain dead over,” he said. “That answer the question?”
Ruki nodded. “Yes, clears that matter up,” he said. “At least until I find a quality helmet.”
Mike looked at the spray of some more rock chips shooting from around the door. He looked back toward the massive hole of the cave.
What the hell, Melvin? Where you at?
MELVIN WAS TIRED. THE “all lefts” approach was time-consuming. Chopping down zombies only added to the fatigue.
Fortunately, not too many remained. The big, roving zombie bands seemed to be all gone. Now they encountered a random one or two in the tunnels. It was a good thing too, as his romp through the tunnels as Zhufira had ended hours ago.
Rage, no matter how therapeutic, wasn’t something indefinitely sustainable. Luckily, the three of them proved more than capable of rendering a zombie. Unlike the undead residents of Fort Law, these zombies were weaponless. Most of them seemed more eager to announce one day left rather than lunge out and attack.
“I wonder how Mike’s doing?” Melvin asked. He led the way through this newest tunnel, guided by the light of a torch made from a stick, swaths of zombie shirt, and Rich’s magefire.
“Hopefully, better than we are,” Jason answered. “This maze sucks.”
He was right about that. Twice now “all lefts” had returned them to where they started, where the tunne
ls branched and their direction finding failed. Jason had the good sense to use coagulated zombie blood to mark the spot with an “X” on the wall. They even had to stop for rest and food, eating jerked meat and sharing silence. At least it had been silent until the roaming zombie had come upon them to remind them there was one day left. It felt like they had been down here all their lives.
“Look at it this way,” Rich said, fatigue wearing heavy on his face. “We’ve been down here so long that we’re bound to find it soon.”
A few footsteps later and the tunnel opened up. Melvin could no longer see the sides or ceiling. He was about to bear left until his torchlight illuminated the one wall until a light in the midst of the cavern made him stop.
Darkness pervaded everything, and the light seemed more of a silhouette. Just a thin line of white in the pitch black, showing the outline of a giant man-shaped creature. Two all white eyes of light looked out at him.
The Death Null.
They made their way to it without difficulty. There was no more zombie resistance. Melvin got close enough for the torchlight to illuminate its all black body. Still, the Death Null did nothing but look at them.
“Well...” Jason said, trailing off as if he was expecting the Death Null to roar or something. “... lack of endgame boss fight aside, guess it’s time for you to do your thing, Rich.”
Rich swallowed. “Ok, here goes.”
“Wait,” Melvin said. He looked at the others. “Does this feel right to you?”
“All the way,” Jason said. “It’s a death creature. It makes zombies.”
“Yeah, but still,” Melvin said. “Something’s off. I mean, it’s just sitting there. It’s not trying to kill us, run, nothing.”
“You killed all its zombies,” Rich said. “Makes sense to me.”
“Yeah,” Jason added. “I think you’re just girling out again. It’s not a lost puppy, it’s a zombie factory. Stop empathizing with it.”
“Look at it, you idiots,” Melvin said. “It can lash out at us but it doesn’t. It can punch out of here like it did at Fort Law but it stays put. Outside of controlling things that were dead anyway, what truly evil thing has it done?”
The Death Null’s mouth opened, a white light cutting through a sea of black. “One... day...” was all it said.
“See?” Jason asked. “What about the countdown? It’s probably got all its evil planned for tomorrow. We can’t risk it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Melvin said. “I mean, at Fort Law it could have killed us but it just wanted us to free it. And once it got its freedom, it came here, where it wasn’t bothering anybody. The death cultists were the ones that came to it, feeding it bodies. It wasn’t like the Death Null was rampaging through cities, creating a corpse army.”
Jason nodded. “Girly sensibilities or not, you’ve got a point there.”
“All I’m saying is if it wanted wanton destruction or a zombie nation, it could’ve had that a long time ago,” Melvin said.
A flash of red pierced the cavern. Melvin’s eyes followed the light to the source. Rich’s ring glowed with a stabbing brilliance. Then the ring shattered.
Suddenly, the air rushed together and the blue and white blinding light of a portal swirled into existence. Melvin had to shield his eyes from the light. Once it died, his eyes adjusted to see a man in black.
Druze.
“Rich, I can’t believe I had to come here to urge this matter,” Druze said. “Cast the spell. Cage this fiend.”
“Dude, what gives?” Rich asked. “You told me that ring was supposed to mitigate cost. You had me wearing your portable portal?”
“It was a portal and scry,” Druze said. “You think I’d trust a matter so important to a bunch of pendulum rejects?”
Druze walked over to Rich and put a hand on his shoulder. “I followed your progress every step of the way, Rich, waiting to jump in and take over in the event you failed. But you haven’t failed. Don’t fail now. Cast the spell.”
Rich looked at Druze’s hand, then stepped away, out of his reach. “I don’t appreciate being lied to. And I’m with Melvin on this. She—I mean, he’s—had a great nose for keeping us out of trouble so far. If you want to cast Life Something Chain, go for it. I’m not.”
Druze’s look of friendly earnest disappeared. Rage took over his features. He spoke and his robes lashed out.
MIKE SAT UNEASILY IN an off-balanced chair that he had placed outside of the guardhouse. The legs were on uneven ground where the slope of the cave hill was just starting. He looked back into the building, at a doorway that was almost totally chipped away.
The cult’s hours of labor at the door had given Mike and his team time to set up secondary defenses. Furniture framed the guardhouse exit and ran up the sides of the hill toward the cave mouth. Broken glass littered the ground around the furniture and extra swords and spears were entrenched in the ground at strategically deadly angles.
What he wanted was a bottleneck. With this setup, attackers had to take the hill one, two at a time tops. He hoped it was enough.
He made peace with Melvin’s fate. If he wasn’t dead in there, Mike couldn’t do squat to help him now. He had his own survival to worry about. A broke-down pitched battle was moments away.
He turned in his chair. Savashbahar was a little further uphill, sitting on the ground. Her head was down, apparently focused on sharpening her dagger. He went over to her.
“Hey,” he said.
She said nothing. The high-pitched twang of her knife scraping against the sharpening stone set the mood in the atmosphere.
“Look, Savvy, I can’t change how I got here and what that makes me. After we get out of this mess, if you want to blaze a trail as far away from me as you can, I’ll understand. I just want you to know that you good people and I always got your back.”
The knife stopped scraping against the stone. She looked up from her dagger, her face displaying utter disbelief.
“Stupid megrym,” she said. “The dogs of war claw at the door, and you talk of sentiments? Does my feeling toward you matter more than final battle preparation?”
“Damn,” Mike said, scratching his head, “I mean, when you put it that way...”
Savashbahar went back to sharpening her dagger. Mike turned to go, but she started speaking over the scrape of the knife.
“When I was a maiden, I made the choice to seek the way of Hexenarii. It was a choice forbidden to women by my clan. That choice made me outcast. But I was still the same woman, the same Savashbahar that was loved by all before my skin was marked. What kind of person would I be to spurn you for being something you had no choice in?”
She looked up from her task. A smile played on her lips.
“If I wanted nothing to do with you, I would not be here,” she said. “Still, you need to learn where your words belong. If you speak of sentiment now, does it mean we’ve prepared as much as possible?”
Mike with a broad grin. He looked back at the iron door, which shuddered as the rock chips at the top of the frame flew. “Savvy, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
“CAST THE SPELL!” DRUZE yelled. His robes shot out again, knocking Rich down. The blackness of the robe made it impossible to see.
Rich saw that blackness wrap around Melvin and Jason and toss them into the walls.
“Why?” Rich asked. “Why do you want me to cast it when you can cast it yourself?”
Rich stood up and called illusion fire into existence around him. The light flickered through the cavern, illuminating the farthest reaches along with the enraged mage before him. He wasn’t about to be sneak attacked again by hard to see robes.
“Life Ending Chain,” Druze said. “The spell you worked so hard to translate is called Life Ending Chain. And I’m not casting it because I know how it works. After all, I was right here when Kaftar used it.”
Rich couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Life Ending Chain. He had no doubt it worked as advertised. And
the name Druze dropped—
“Kaftar?” Rich asked. “He was the first Hierophant. That had to be—”
“Five hundred years ago,” Druze filled in. “And back then, it took a lot to convince Kaftar to cast it. I had to make him believe this thing was the biggest threat imaginable. And then I had to convince him the death defying power of the monster would negate the spell cost.”
“Only it didn’t,” Rich guessed.
Druze smirked. “It did, if you count his lifeless corpse rising up and saying ‘free me’ over and over until I incinerated him on the spot.”
Druze called netherfire into existence. His hands glowed with the brilliant blue of it. Rich had seen the process for creating netherfire; he remembered marveling at the insane intricacy of it. Druze was showing off, giving Rich a display of the power he wielded.
“You must know, there’s no escape for you here,” Druze said. “But there’s hope for your pitiful friends. All it takes from you is a single spell. Cast it.”
“Hey, asshole!” a shout came from behind Druze.
Rich turned to see Melvin with his sword out, looking fierce. Zhufira fierce.
In another corner of the cave, Jason was nocking an arrowing.
“You messed with the wrong pendulum rejects,” Melvin said. He charged at Druze, yelling the same battle cry he had ages ago during akhta.
“Ildasleen!”
MIKE AND RUKI PROVOS had turned the first two waves of angry humans into the crispy undead thanks to the lightning gloves. Now it was Fort Law all over again. Mike and Runt stood side by side, facing the unending undead horde rushing through the bottleneck.
These things were hard to put down, so the best option was to send them over the side of the hill. It would take them forever to get back around, if they could even make the return trip.
Unlike Fort Law, the undead had half a town of breathing accomplices helping them out. While the undead rushed to get up the hill to get to the cave, the ones still alive hung in the back, trying to destroy the barricades and open the bottleneck.