“Will it actually kill undead like they say?”
“I think we’re good!” Ray shouted.
“Just enjoy the show.” Earl grinned.
* * *
For the next twenty minutes I watched undead pop like firecrackers.
Shamblers kept on coming. When they crossed the invisible border they just exploded. Other shamblers would see that happen, but they were too stupid to process the danger and they’d just blunder on until it was their turn to explode too.
The smarter undead, like ghouls and wights, they’d see one explode, and then the rest would hold back. Waiting. Every now and then those would start screeching, like they were whipped into a frenzy, and they’d rush forward to die. A quick check on the radio confirmed that the frenzies coincided with the drill moving forward, deeper into the body of the mava. It was driving them to attack us.
We were killing so many undead that, even if we failed to eradicate the larval Old One, the city would be quieter just from the lack of corpses to animate.
But the mava was getting desperate. We got a panicked radio call from Frandsen. His readings suggested that there was a lot of activity beneath us, as in possibly dozens of kifo worms digging their way toward us.
“Problem is we don’t know if the ward stone will kill the pseudopods.” Ray IV had joined us at the edge of the roof to watch the fireworks display. “It destroys undead, but when we’ve seen it used on typical servants of the Old Ones, it just hurts and drives them off.”
“I’ve got a feeling these will be so motivated they’ll push through the pain,” I said.
Then we got another call from the police.
“Bad news, cher.” Juliette said. “We don’t know what to make of it, but figured I’d warn you. One of them worms broke into the morgue. Doc Wohlrab said it grabbed all the corpses right off the hooks. He said he could see the bodies getting sucked into the ground like they were going down a straw. Then the worm just disappeared. Then a minute later got a call from a patrol car said the same thing, only the worm came up through the road and gobbled up a bunch of shambers that were headed your way.”
“Thanks for that, SIU,” Earl said. “Any idea what that means?”
“Maybe it’s eating them for energy,” Ray IV said. “The kifo must be able to sense the necromantic energy and it’s reaching out to them…or something. That sounds weird as hell.”
“I have no idea what it’s doing. And that scares me.” It was time for me to get back to the rig.
* * *
You could hear the Ma Deuce open up overhead. And here I was holding a freaking fire hose.
“Quad two,” Franklin radioed. “Fast movers on the south flanking roof incoming. I’ve got at least ten bodies on this worm.”
It hadn’t taken long for us to figure out why the mava had suddenly started absorbing every dead body it could get its grubby pseudopods on. Regular undead blew up when they tried to cross the ward stone’s boundaries. Kifo worms began to burn, but it took a while for them to break apart. But wrap a body in kifo slime, attach it to the worm with a nasty tentacle like an umbilical cord, and that zombie suddenly had staying power.
Not to mention they were suddenly a whole lot faster, stronger, and they could come flying at you like a yo-yo on the end of a string.
Kifo worms had started erupting through the asphalt all around our warehouse. They hadn’t made it through our heavily reinforced floor yet, but it felt like a constant low-level earthquake in here, and there were cracks appearing.
There was a massive thundering against the walls at that moment and one section of what I’d thought was impregnable precast concrete disintegrated as another kifo worm broke through.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, turning and opening up with holy water.
As the water hit, the worm was covered in burning foam, but slime-coated undead launched themselves at us.
An NOFD firefighter was lifted into the air, screaming. A slime-covered wight tried to grab one of the exorcists and recoiled as he lifted his cross and shouted in Latin. More worms were breaking through the walls and squirting undead at us. They were freaking everywhere. They were all attacking at once.
No wonder the Chinese lost five thousand men.
But they didn’t have a fire truck full of holy water.
I let the hose blast, playing the nozzle back and forth across one long wall of the warehouse. The spray would only reach so far so I started working my way down the wall, blasting worm after hideous worm. Like napalm, it stuck, causing a reaction that was even nastier than their normal. Chunks of the worms were burning off from the foam. Ghostly blobs of dissolving flesh were everywhere.
But it wasn’t enough. More were still breaking through. We were getting hit from so many places at once that I couldn’t keep up with all the warnings on my radio.
The real problem was the NOFD guys. One team of them had gotten a hose into action and were attacking the worms. The rest were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to find a way to escape. And there wasn’t one, because we were inside a building that we’d turned into a sealed bunker.
While some of us were spraying the worms, other Hunters were shooting. Only the corpses covered in slimy tentacles were extra hard to kill. You could head-shoot a zombie all day and do nothing, since it was now basically the mava’s puppet.
“Screw the walls! We need to back up to the drill.” Sam was still on the hose behind me. “That’s what we need to protect.”
“These things will figure out we’ve got people on the roof. Want to bet they can’t punch through?”
“Earl will handle it! Only chance we’ve got to kill this thing is the drill.” He began backing up. “We protect the drill and the drillers!”
“Roger,” I said, backing up with him.
A kifo worm came in from off-vector and I couldn’t get the hose around fast enough. Then a stream of fire hit it.
“Holy water ain’t the only thing they’re afraid of!” Milo shouted as the kifo worm backed away, covered in napalm. The thrashing tossed burning jellied gasoline everywhere. I had to spray the stuff that caught. We had a lot of flammables in the building.
“Boss,” Sam said, keying his radio. “Get the firemen to pull their trucks toward the drill rig.”
“On it,” Ray III radioed back. “Bullets ain’t doing shit. All MHI on the ground floor. Grab hoses as teams. Fight these things with holy water! Milo, that means you. Quit spraying fire all over the place!”
The old man had been badly burned in Seattle, ruining half his face and one of his hands. He’d had a lot less liking for flamethrowers since then. And we had a more or less continuous stream of holy water as long as the pumps kept running. The various priests and assembled clergy were now in the tanks of holy water, blessing them and covering each other with the power of God as the kifo worms approached.
The worms, though, had a hard time getting to them. Being burned by the power of God and Isaac Newton, they didn’t have as much structural integrity and could only lift so far in the air. They were mostly crawling along the ground. And the entire area around the tanks was, at this point, covered in holy foam. Not to mention it probably had a “bad” radius, from their POV, that went out a ways.
“You!” Sam yelled as one of the firefighters ran past. “Get in the tank! It’s holy water! They can’t get you there!”
The guy, of course, totally ignored him and ran straight past one of the worms. A pseudopod flicked out and wrapped him up.
“Shit,” Sam snarled.
I was playing the hose back and forth trying to keep them off of us, off the drillers, off the rig. It wasn’t working.
Other teams were running hoses too. As a kifo approached, I found myself covered in foam.
“Watch where you’re pointing that!”
“They won’t touch you if you’re covered,” the Boss yelled from behind us. “Spray everybody who’s not in the tanks!”
Well, most of the NOFD had e
ither gotten in the tanks or were dead. Some of the drillers had been taken as well. That left…
I turned around and sprayed the old man and Milo right in the face.
“You’re welcome,” I yelled, then my feet slid out from under me.
It was both horrific and humorous. The foam was slippery as hell and it was getting everywhere. The kifo worms were starting to withdraw from the walls because it was everywhere. They couldn’t lift themselves out of it and it was eating away at their blasphemous tissues, burning them with holy essence.
What was happening outside the warehouse was, arguably, worse than what was happening inside. New Orleans had been collecting more and more undead over the years, drawn by the field effect of the larval Old One. We’d killed them as fast as we found them, but it turned out there were lots of things we’d never known were in the New Orleans area. Those are not dead which sleeping lie and many of them had been gathering awaiting the arrival of their dark master.
Now they were all surfacing, shielded in slime, tethered to a baby dark god, and attacking the warehouse.
At a certain point it gets down to statistics. When MCB finally showed up, along with the National Guard, the Army, and every single other group that had somewhat been read in on the supernatural or could be trusted to keep their mouths shut, a count was made of everything that was now “fully” dead in the area of the warehouse. In many cases that involved counting limbs, dividing by four, and rounding up.
Undead were flooding in from all over the region and ignoring anything to get to the warehouse. Ghouls were running full tilt down I-10, wights were being hit by cars, getting back up and running away. Then there were all the rest. We didn’t get too many vamps, and the ones we did were young, so apparently the mava didn’t have the strength to enslave the strong willed. Yet. Keep in mind it was basically a baby.
They didn’t all turn up at once or we’d never have stood a chance. But the firefight outside while we were fighting the kifo worms was getting pretty intense.
The truly fun part was that it wasn’t just human undead. Try slime-covered zombified cats for size. They might have been road kill. They might have been previously buried pets. We never checked. And bats. And raccoons, possums. Dogs. Dog zombies!
What we hadn’t noticed while we’d been spraying worms, was that we were getting fucking overrun.
We went from water, to fire, to guns and grenades. When they closed to hand-to-hand range, Mo No Ken slid out of its sheath. I quickly discovered that if I slashed through the tentacles shielding the undead, the ward stone would take care of the rest. I got hit with a lot of fragments and goo from exploding shamblers.
As they got closer, Sam had switched to bashing things with his 203 until he broke the plastic stock off over a wight’s head. Looking around, he picked up Al Gordon’s abandoned .45-70 lever action rifle and started in with that.
“This thing rocks,” he said, crushing the skull of a ghoul dog.
“Yeah,” I said, taking off a shambler’s head. “As a gun it makes a great club!”
Milo’s flamethrower was out. I picked up the quiescent fire hose. Then I noticed there was no pressure. “I need holy water!”
“One of them must have figured out how it worked,” the Boss shouted. “Pump’s dead.”
We were in dire straights, deep shit, and doomed. The interior of the warehouse was ankle-deep flooded with once holy water, mava juice, the foam that resulted when they mixed, blood, guts, limbs and assorted body parts, floating kifo chunks, and sinking brass.
At the beginning of this memoir, I already wrote about those last few moments. Again, it sucked. I was about to go tell Saint Pete hello like I’d promised that weird exorcist I would. Oh yeah, and him…I keep my promises, won’t write about how I saw him take down a kifo worm with nothing but a sword, but to reiterate: don’t mess with a mystical holy warrior.
That’s when a flaming portal opened in the floor, the Fey showed up, and everything got even weirder.
The Wild Hunt was terrible to behold. Armed with spears crackling with purple energy they were lightly armored and their Fey visages could be seen with the naked eye. Under the sodium lights of the warehouse, they were even worse to see than the other times I’d had to deal with them. They were massive, seven feet tall, gut-wrenchingly horrible to look at, their armor in all the colors of the rainbow. Their multilegged mounts were more like narrow beetles or spiders than real horses.
The Hunt tore into the undead with fury. Their spears tore into the mass of undead, blasting them with fairie fire. The blasts were more powerful than the 40mm rounds we’d been using. Zombies were blown apart. The dying kifo worms virtually disintegrated.
They slammed into the mass of undead, slaughtering them mercilessly and pressing them back to holes in the walls.
Suddenly a series of blasts came in on our position and I hit the deck as undead were blasted into constituent particles around me. My ears were ringing and I could barely see.
When I looked up, it was at one being I’d hoped to never see again in my life: Queen Keerla Rathiain Penelo Shalana.
A few years back I’d bound her and her court in a Harper’s Challenge and then by a very in-depth and complicated contract. Fey had very long memories and they did not like to be bound.
“Truce?” I said from the foam-covered floor.
“Why do you think I’m here, you idiot?” she said, holding her hand out. Thank God she was in glamour in her usual business suit. Because there is ugly, and then there is “Fey-ugly.”
From the look on the remaining half of Boss Shackleford’s face, he wasn’t sure to throw the grenade in his good hand at the Fey or not. They were scary as all get-out, but they hadn’t attacked us, and the drill rig was once again clear of undead. “Friendlies?”
“Yes, sir! Hopefully. These are the ones I…met in Seattle.”
“Very well then.” He got on his radio. “Hey, Earl, if you see some weird Fey goings-on, don’t shoot at them. They’re Hand’s acquaintances from Seattle.”
“Okay,” I said, struggling to get off the slippery floor. The Queen did not offer her hand. “Now I know I’m hallucinating. This is a dream as I’m dying, right?”
“I am here to keep an Old One from gaining a foothold in a world I occasionally happen to enjoy. I have other things to do than bandy words with an idiot,” she said. “I’ll leave that to my equally idiotic daughter.”
And she vanished.
“Still hallucinating?” I said as Shallala strolled up to me. Thankfully, she was also in human form, with bib overalls with really big hair. She was wearing rubber Wellingtons which were faintly steaming from the touch of the holy foam on the floor.
“Grody. Any way you could like quit pointing that thing at me?” the fairy princess asked Father Ferguson, who was keeping his cross extended between them. “The White God is, like, totally judgy and bossy.”
Father Ferguson lowered his cross slightly and looked at me. “Friends of yours?” he asked, with “that” tone. The “if you have friends like these we need to talk” tone.
“Sort of?” I said carefully. “Shallala…Uh, hi? Thought you were leaving the planet?”
“I called Mom after you left and, like, told her I totally needed to leave,” Shallala said. “But she said, like, hell no or whatever, I was all, like ‘bound’ or something, so she, like, called up our court’s Wild Hunt.”
It wasn’t a battle. It was a massacre. I realized then why the MCB was so terrified of Fey. I’d never really gotten it until that moment. My only previous experience was with binding them. Doing that made them seem weak. They’re anything but.
Shallala might be a dingbat with a short attention span but she was a scary dingbat.
CHAPTER 23
I was up on the hammered battlements of the warehouse surveying the damage. The battle was over. The streets were littered with corpses and body parts—most of them scorched beyond recognition. MHI had expended ammunition by the ton. It wa
s going to be a bitch to clean up.
It was apparent when the mava finally bit the dust. Kifo worms were getting fewer and fewer but they were still trying to nose in hours later. Then one by one they just collapsed and turned into foul-smelling mush. The mud was coming up clean. Relatively clean. There was still tons of dead larval Old One down there, but now we were rinsing it out like a cyst. The evil bombardment was gone. The goo was just goo. The sun was rising on a new and improved, Old-One-free New Orleans.
Queen Shalana suddenly appeared before me.
The other Hunters on the roof didn’t even seem to notice. They were too tired. And she looked normal. The scary Fey had long since disappeared. Only a few of us humans had interacted with them at all.
“I’d apologize for arriving so late to the battle but I do not apologize to humans.”
“Better late than never,” I said. “Despite our somewhat hostile history, may I ask why?”
“The Old Ones are as much a threat to us as humans. We were battling them before you apes first began chiseling your history onto stone tablets. Kill an Old One and the whole universe rejoices. It is always better to kill them while they are larvae. When my daughter told me of your warning, I summoned the Hunt. Then I had to ask for permission to intervene.”
“Permission?”
“I have known your king for many years,” Shalana said, smiling. “Since he was a mere actor in pictures. He was good. I like his films. Better than the trash they make these days.”
She looked up, and a moment later I heard the sound of helicopters.
“His minions, on the other hand, were less than thrilled by their orders. I must go. There may be issues when they arrive. Their pet monster hates our kind and vice versa. By the way, according to my new agreement with your king, our previous contract has been nullified. My daughter’s court is free to leave Seattle.”
“I’m sure they will miss her.”
She turned and looked at me with vertically pupilled purple eyes. “I hope we never encounter each other again, Bard, because unless it is for such a cause, be assured I will rip your soul from your body and torture it for a thousand years.”
Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints Page 27