Wendigo Rising: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode Three) (Yancy Lazarus Series Book 3)

by James Hunter

  Despite how empty the place seemed, I felt eyes on my back. Some other presence was definitely here. I pulled my revolver and opened myself to the Vis, ready to fight whatever monstrous thing lurked here. Panic welled up in me a moment later. The Vis wasn’t there—the force undergirding creation and existence was simply gone. Completely.

  “Calm down,” a voice called. My voice to be precise. “And put that pistol away before you hurt someone.” I looked to a brick-fronted eatery off to the right. A figure stood in the doorway, bathed in weak light from a hanging lantern, a cigar in one hand and a stout glass full of scotch in the other. Cassius, the Undine—a creature of water and spirit, permanently bound to my mind, grafted into a piece of my soul. The very embodiment of my subconscious mind.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” I asked, my confusion intensifying as I restlessly scanned the street. This wasn’t right at all—I’d been fighting the Wendigo. He’d straddled me, his claws digging into my chest, ripping me open like a stuffed doll mauled by an unfriendly dog.

  Cassius sauntered over, lifting the cigar and taking a long draw as he walked. Once he was a few feet away, he bent over and set his glass of scotch down on the street with a soft clink. He moved cat-quick, his fist smashing into my jaw before I could get my guard up. The blow sent me staggering backward as a throb of pain radiated into my cheek.

  “The hell is wrong with you, asshole?” I rubbed at the suddenly tender spot, my fingers inspecting for damage.

  “That’s for accepting the Second Seal, you shithead,” he said, smoke billowing from his mouth and nose like an angry dragon. “You let something in here with me. Big, mean ol’ son of a bitch. It bolted the second you gave it sanctuary. Bastard ducked into the sewers”—he nodded toward a manhole cover set into the street—“but this thing is gonna mean big problems later on. It’s weak right now, probably I’ll be able to hunt it down and keep it in check for a while, but this friggin’ thing’s gonna come back to bite us in the ass, Yancy. Big time.”

  He picked up his glass from the asphalt, straightened, leaned back his head, and took a long slug, draining the glass. When he lowered his hand, the tumbler had already refilled itself. “But we don’t have time for that shit right now. ’Cause right now, we have even bigger trouble. Big, big, Godzilla-sized amounts of trouble.” He sighed, long and deep. “You’ll see what I mean in a moment. But we don’t have time for Q and A. Turn around,” he commanded, pulling the cigar from his lips and motioning for me to about-face.

  I turned, expecting to see more New Orleans. The street below faded almost immediately, transforming into dusty barren earth: a strip of land, maybe two hundred meters wide, chock-full of trenches, uneven berms of barren dirt, and endless spoils of razor-edged, constantan wire. On the other side of the warzone was a forest, a distorted replica of the Sacred Grove I’d just trekked through.

  The basic features of the grove were the same—the towering trees, the sprawling overhead bridges, the houses grown from vast tree boughs—but twisted, sick. Even from here, I could tell the trees were swollen and tender, like overripe fruit near to bursting. The leaves and foliage were wilted and sagging, while thick strands of purple moss ran from all the structures and grew from every branch.

  “That,” Cassius said, swaggering up to my side, “is a physical representation of Achak Kinslayer’s mind. Behind us is your own brain-scape, and that barren patch of dirt there”—he gestured toward the no-man’s-land—“is the battlefield. In a moment, Achak, and the thing living inside him, are gonna stomp on over here and try to obliterate us.”

  “The thing living inside him?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, “the thing living inside him. I already stole a sneak peek, but you’ll see for yourself in a minute.”

  “Why can’t I use my power?” I asked, changing tack.

  “Relax.” He extended the cigar to me and arched an eyebrow as if to say, Go on and take it already. After a moment I complied, grasping the edge and raising it to my lips, drawing in sweet, delicious nicotine. A ripple of calm drifted through my nervous system.

  “Like I said, we don’t have much time before the battle starts, so smoke that stogie, shut your trap, and open your ears.”

  I hesitated for a second, wrestling with the fear and anxiety building within me. Finally I nodded, taking another puff from the fat cigar; its orange tip flared a brilliant red.

  “You can’t touch the Vis here,” he said evenly, “because this place doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s a highly sophisticated construct which exists inside the tiara itself. It is a temporary, illusionary construct taking place both inside your mind and inside Achak’s mind. But you don’t need the Vis here.” He held one hand aloft, and a ball of yellow flame the size of a car tire erupted into life in a flash of heat and light before vanishing just as quickly. “This place is controlled entirely by the mind and will. The landscape is malleable, elastic. You can influence it and change it just by willing it to be different. But here’s the catch, Achak can manipulate it, too.”

  The ground trembled beneath me, shuddering like a 3.5 on the Richter scale. The sickly trees in Achak’s forest swayed and moved as something big pushed its way forward. I’d been expecting something that, more or less, resembled the creature I’d tangled with back on Earth, but the thing which shoved its way free of the forest wasn’t even close. Sixty feet tall, easy—that’s six with a zero—and at least twenty feet across at the shoulders with pasty flesh, weak and flabby, overflowing in loose folds from its arms and legs and gut. The creature resembled a vaguely human-shaped clump of white Play-Doh. The craft project of some particularly untalented child.

  Blobzilla.

  In its ginormous potbelly was a cage of sorts, and trapped within was a regal-looking Bigfoot with dark black hair, broad shoulders, and a noble bearing. His arms and legs were mired in the mucky, sludgy goo surrounding him, securing him snuggly in place.

  “Now that,” said Cassius, “is Achak.”

  “And the building-sized lump of clay?”

  “Yeah. That’d be a greater Guttur Belua—the demonic entity responsible for the Wendigo transformation. They’re bound together, though, obviously, the relationship is pretty one-sided.”

  The doughy creature tilted its massive head back and let out a roar that shook the ground and set my teeth on edge. Then it began to run, a great, shambling affair, each prodigious step carrying it thirty or forty feet, eating up the distance between us in a wink. I, in turn, did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I wheeled about, grabbed Cassius by the arm, and darted down the street.

  “We’re not gonna beat it by running away,” Cassius hollered as we sprinted.

  Another roar: the windows above me trembled in their frames, followed by the crash and crunch of a massive foot smashing into stone and brick. I didn’t even bother looking back, but instead hooked left, ducking down a narrow alley. As soon as we were out of sight, I pressed my back up against the wall, breathing hard.

  “How am I supposed to beat that friggin’ thing?” I asked. Another crash resounded through the air. Bricks crumbling, the tinkle of glass shattering, the shriek of twisting metal, the snap of breaking wood. Another building falling.

  “Well, you’re not gonna get it done with that kind of Negative-Nancy attitude,” Cassius said. He placed a hand on my shoulder and turned me around so we were face-to-face. “Time for a little hard truth. I’m not sure you can beat him. Not by yourself. But together, we might be able to manage it. You’re new to this world, but I’m not. This is my backyard, Yancy. If you put me in the driver’s seat, I can win this.”

  That gave me pause.

  Generally, allowing spiritual entities to hitch a ride—giving ’em access to your mind and soul—was a very big no-no. But, if you were foolish enough to let ’em in in the first place, the second rule was to never give up control, and that held even for benign and helpful entities like Cassius. To give up control to such
creatures was a damn good way to end up like Achak: trapped in the belly of some demonic nightmare, a prisoner in your own mind. My mind darted back to my brief foray as Old Man Winter—I’d almost lost myself, so I could relate.

  “You want to be in the driver’s seat,” I said. “But once this is over, what guarantee do I have that you’ll give up the reigns?”

  “No guarantee, except my word. But I swear, it’ll only be for a minute. I’ve got a plan, but it’ll take too damn long if I have to hold your hand the whole way.” He halted, his blues eyes searching my face. “You saved me once,” he said. “When I had nowhere else to turn, I turned to you and you saved me. Let me return the favor.” Another monstrous roar and another tumbling building, this one closer than the last. “Besides, what other choice do you have?”

  I was quiet for a time. Listening as the Guttur Belua rampaged through my brain, wondering what kind of long-term damage was being done as he smashed up my mental landscape. There was a buzzing growing inside my head, the deep throb of a terrible headache in the works. Yeah, that definitely couldn’t be good.

  “Okay,” I conceded at last. “But you’d better give me the keys back when you’re done.” I took a deep breath, and exhaled, blowing out my fear and doubt. “Cassius Aquinas, I, Yancy Lazarus, grant you rule over my mind, body, and soul.”

  As the words left my mouth, there was a whirl of movement around me. Azure light—shifting and melting from aqua-marine to a blue so deep it was nearly black—whisked me into the air in a vortex of force and power. Higher I spun, twirling like Dorothy caught in the tornado, my eyes searching the blue winds whipping at my face, tugging at my clothes, pulling at me from every which way, but failing to penetrate the murky depths surrounding me. I heard a tremendous growl, which had to be from the gelatinous Marshmallow-man, though the noise was muted by the roaring wind encircling me.

  Still, it sounded like the growl was one of surprise, maybe even fear.

  After a couple of long, disorienting moments, the spinning finally abated and my head stopped lurching long enough for me to get my bearings again. I was sitting inside of some sort of bizarre cockpit, which strangely resembled the interior of the Camino, though with a few alterations and upgrades. Same leather interior. Same dashboard and stereo system. Heck, I even had a rearview mirror, which appeared to be a computerized monitor, exposing my six.

  Instead of the plain-Jane windshield, however, there was a giant television screen, sixty inches across, displaying the New Orleans cityscape, stretched out far below me. And instead of a speedometer, there was a gauge reading “shield level” next to a computerized read out of a—I shit you not—giant Voltron-esque robot.

  The hulking demonic ball of Play-Doh stood fifty feet away, staring at me with empty eyes, which were now on my level.

  “Get the hell out of here,” I said, my voice filled with awe. “Cassius, am I in Voltron right now?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” a voice said over a comm system wired into the wall panels to either side of me. “You’re inside a sixty-foot, 1980s-inspired robot. Not the same at all, really. And it was either this or an X-Wing fighter—I know how much you love all that retro sci-fi bullshit—but since Blobzilla doesn’t have a convenient thermal exhaust port to blast, I thought the robot was the more versatile option. And, FYI, you’re the Boss again. I just needed control to wire your mind directly into my neural network. Now, you’re the brain, I’m the body.”

  I lifted my hands and flexed my fingers before curling them into tight fists. On the screen, a pair of gigantic blue steel arms raised into view, mimicking the motion perfectly.

  “This is badass squared—nay, cubed. I never should’ve doubted you.”

  “Damn straight,” he replied.

  “Crazy question here, but can you cue music?”

  “I’m an imaginary, sixty-foot-tall robot with an El Camino-style cockpit,” he said. “What the hell do you think?”

  “Since we’re in a 1980s mood,” I said, a smile stretching from ear to ear, “let’s throw on some Queen.”

  “Another One Bites the Dust?” he asked.

  “Read my mind,” I said with a nod. The great robot body followed my lead, tilting its noggin as Freddie Mercury’s raspy vocals filled the interior of the cockpit. John Deacon’s epic bass riff thudded through the cockpit, and I found myself naturally tapping out the backbeat. The robot rocked beneath me, jiggling in time to the bounce of my foot.

  So friggin’ cool. Usually my life is nothing but a giant pile of shit, nestled deep in a disgusting porta-John filled with more shit. But then something like this happens and I’m reminded that there are some badass side benefits to being a mage.

  The sludgy demon had stopped his advance. It regarded me with a mix of worry and trepidation. Slowly, it shuffled back, its colossal steps taking it toward the no-man’s-land at the edge of my brain-scape. “It’s ass-smitin’ time, you fat sack of goat turds,” I called out. Some internal mic picked up the sound and projected it through a set of external speakers, the sound booming in the air.

  I pumped my legs, sprinting forward, the robot swaying around me as I closed the distance in a flash. I threw my entire body into a huge haymaker. A Volkswagen-sized metal fist collided with the demon’s saggy face, caving in part of its misshapen and droopy head. The creature staggered and tripped, catching one foot on the edge of a demolished bar below and tipping over onto his side like Humpty-Dumpty. The seismic vibration from his ponderous fall broke every window in town and sent my robot legs to wobbling.

  The creature rolled back and up, his bulk flowing around another building as he somehow gained his feet in a surprising demonstration of agility and dexterity. I leapt forward, throwing a left jab with the force of a Scud missile—

  A rope of white fat, thicker than a telephone pole, shot out from its torso, deflecting and redirecting the blow as the creature delivered a brutal kick to my center. My robotic suit flew back ten or fifteen feet; a course of lights flashed in the cockpit while warning sirens blared, and my “shield level” gauge flared red.

  “Not sure if you realize this or not,” Cassius grunted through the speaker system, “but I am the robot, so that shit hurts, Boss-man.”

  “Check,” I called, already in hot pursuit of the blob, who was backpedaling for the safety of his forest home. “I’ll play better D.”

  I lashed out again, throwing a wicked uppercut with enough force to level a building—

  A gooey fist intercepted the strike, more strings of ropy fat flying out, enveloping my metallic fist and running up the length of my arm. The “right arm” sensor flashed on my gauge, blinking on and off as a siren cut through Queen’s epic performance. “Severe damage detected. Severe damage detected. Severe damage detected,” a computerized voice echoed.

  “That son of a bitch is gonna rip my arm off!” Cassius screamed. “I didn’t put you back in the driver’s seat, so you could drive us over a cliff! Do something, dammit!”

  A crunch and shriek of metal resounded from outside. More white flesh dug into the metal plating around my robotic limb, probing at the gears and wiring below. I dropped to a knee—a crater blooming in the asphalt beneath me—and scooped up an empty Toyota Tacoma in my left hand. I launched myself up, swinging the pickup into the side of Blobzilla’s head.

  There was a wet thwack on collision, followed by a small pop of airbags erupting, and the beast stumbled away, its death grip on my right arm vanishing in an instant, smoke billowing up into the sky. I held my arm up, inspecting for damage: The paint along the forearm section was gone, melted away. Pitted holes also dotted the metal underneath, corrosion marks. Apparently, Stay-Puft was acidic. Good to know.

  The creature edged back a step, more unsure than ever. The Guttur Belua was a nasty creature, no doubt, but clearly Cassius and I had taken it by surprise—a nice change of pace. I lunged, smashing the truck into the creature’s head again and again, globs of white exploding outward with every hit, raining do
wn on the street below. After four or five blows, all that remained of the Toyota was a small hunk of worthless, crumpled metal connected to a single axle, which swung precariously. I let the wreckage fall.

  Once more the creature shuffled back, seeking to escape the ass-stomping Cassius and I were laying down, eager to regain home field advantage.

  I pursued, pushing inside its guard, throwing a lightning-fast flurry of jabs and hooks to its torso, aiming to pulverize Achak and turn him into Bigfoot paste. The creature flailed, sludgy arms hammering down at my exposed back and head. The robotic suit lurched with every blow, swaying back and forth, but I stayed focused. To end this fight, I just needed to end Achak. The Guttur Belua seemed to recognize my strategy and changed course—pulling back and hunching down, offering up his misshapen face and thick shoulders, while simultaneously protecting the captive at his center.

  I danced away a step, then snatched up a slab of broken wall—compliments of Blobzilla’s earlier rampage—and whipped it down onto the creature’s dome. Brick and mortar exploded in a shower of dusty rubble and debris. I darted left, offering up a barrage of rib shots, before hooking right with a wicked hammer blow …

  Something walloped into my frame, jolting my neck forward and back, hurling me into the air as a cacophony of beeps and squeals issued from the display panels around me. Acrid smoke trickled into the air, scratching at my eyes and throat, making it hard to breathe. The airborne ride did, however, afford me a momentary view of the overhead sky—blood red and cloudless—before I crash-landed in a slew of bars and eateries further on down Bourbon Street.

  “What the hell just happened?” I called out as my metal suit finally skidded to a rough halt.