The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol

by Darren Humphries

  The spirit was standing high up in the roof of the hall atop another tall scaffolding structure. I had thought, at age 12, that they had been put there to support the lights and sets of the production, but I could see now that they were holding up parts of the roof that could no longer support themselves. Inside the metal latticework stood a tall figure. It had the shape of a man; a very large and powerful man. He was illuminated by a green glow (remember what I said about evil and its colour preferences) that was coming from a cauldron precariously wedged in the scaffolding with him. In one hand, he carried a large club that was clearly fashioned from the branch of a tree because it still had some of the leaves attached.

  I probably could have shot him from where I was standing or brought down all of the scaffolding to leave him smashed and impaled on steel poles in the middle of the stage, but that wasn’t how I remembered it happening and so that isn’t what happened now. The door to the drama studio on the far side of the stage opened and a smallish boy stormed through it angrily. My hair was in disarray and I was drowned in a costume that would have been incredibly inappropriate to the task of herding sheep.

  I reacted immediately, throwing myself forward at ... well at myself. I knocked the kid aside just as the fur-clad feet of the spirit thumped onto the stage at the exact spot where both of me had just been. The younger me was knocked, winded, into a pile of old pieces of set decoration that these days would have been removed as a major fire hazard. The older me swung around, pulled my gun clumsily out of my coat pocket and fired. The figure of the spirit took the whole charge and grinned. The only sign that I had hit it at all were the smouldering patches of its red beard. He swung the club at me in a wide arc that would have knocked me clean out of my skin had it contacted, but whilst it was a powerful swing it was also a slow one and I was able to dance out of its way. The club impacted with the wall and left a sizeable patch of brickwork showing through the pulverised plaster.

  “I get to kill you twice,” the spirit, who was a full foot and half taller than I was and built from the same blueprint as American wrestlers, said with a great deal of satisfaction.

  “That’s nice for you. Killing me is the Christmas gift that just keeps on giving,” I told him and hurriedly tried to think of a course of action. Since my gun didn’t work, I had no weapons and very few options.

  Except maybe...

  I darted under his next swing and kicked him hard in the knee before leaping away again. He laughed at my ineffectuality and swung the club at me again. This time when I dodged, the club clanged into the scaffolding. For a moment, I thought that the whole lot was going to come down on us, but then it steadied. The spirit’s cauldron, however, was another matter. Jarred loose from its perch, it tipped with terrifying slowness to one side until the centre of gravity was no longer centered and gravity could do its job. The cauldron tumbled and landed upside down on the spirit’s head. I had been hoping that it might knock the creature out or at the very least distract or slow it down, but as soon as the head was encompassed, the green glow intensified and the cauldron sucked the figure bodily up into it. There was the faint sound of a scream. The cauldron then blinked out of existence with a small puff of foul-smelling smoke.

  “That was amazing!” a voice said from amongst the discarded sets. I (that is the younger I) was climbing out of the tangle of canvas and wood that I had knocked myself into. My eyes were wide and sparkling as only the eyes of a child who has seen wonders can be. “Who... I mean what... how...?”

  “All good questions. I work for an agency called U.N.D.E.A.D.,” I told my younger self, wishing that I had a hat that I could heroically adjust. “All those answers are there.”

  And with that unsatisfactory response I walked away from myself, knowing that I had just instilled a desire into a young boy that would not be sated until ... well until a few seconds ago, but a good few years later.

  “Wait!” I called after me, as I knew that I would (or had, take your pick). “You can’t just leave like that.”

  I recalled when this had happened to me the first time and how I had watched the stranger just walk away after making some cryptic remark. I recalled also that I had thought what a dick he was at the time. Still, I had heard what turned out to be me say what I had said and so I knew what my parting words had to be.

  “Watch me,” I told him, opened the maintenance door through which I had entered and stepped back out into ...

  ...the Director’s penthouse office atop the Victor Von Frankenstein Tower in Oxford.

  The global Operations Headquarters of the United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons has one of the most advanced intruder warning systems in the world and nobody can just walk in there without setting off a whole bank of alarms and triggering the automatic lockdown of the entire building no matter what kind of technology or magic they use.

  Just as I was recognising where it was that I had arrived, a whole bank of alarms burst into strident life and the window shields protecting the office from outside attack slid smoothly and impenetrably into place.

  “Oh that’s just great,” I said and swore.

  Penny Kilkenny, the Director’s personal assistant, leaped out from behind a large potted plant yelling and brandishing what appeared to be a stapler. When she realised who the intruder was, she abandoned her attack stance and placed her hands on her shapely hips, “What the heck are you doing here? I thought that you were at home helping with the whole eggnog crisis?”

  Her mocking tone aside, at least I now knew not only where I was, but when as well.

  “I’m having a bit of a crisis myself,” I told her, “and one that involves something a whole lot more dangerous than eggnog.”

  “Oh I don’t know, I can do quite a bit of damage after a couple of good eggnogs,” she pointed out.

  “So I’ve heard,” I shot back, unable to resist the banter even considering the situation. It wasn’t as though we were in any immediate danger...

  “What’s that?” Penny asked, looking past me toward the Director’s desk at the far end of the room. The view from the office at night was even more impressive than during the day, the lights of the city spreading out away from the large picture windows, or at least it would have been had the blast doors not been closed. I was fairly sure that she was instead referring to something else. Something else that I could now hear growling in a manner that suggested it wasn’t a small fluffy puppy.

  I turned slowly and the creature that was doing the growling was most definitely not a fluffy puppy. It also was most definitely not small. It was also not alone.

  “I would suggest that it’s a wild boar,” I told Penny having sized up the two creatures, a task that was made more difficult by the red alert lighting that had kicked in as soon as I had triggered the lockdown alarm, “and so is the other one.”

  “I wasn’t aware that they came in that size,” she said nervously, holding out the stapler in front of her. Exactly what she thought she was going to do with it I couldn’t guess.

  The two boars were huge. Each was approximately the same size as a VW Beetle (the old cute kind, not the bland streamlined new kind) and possessed a lot more in the way of tusks and bad attitude than their normal-sized counterparts. Their eyes were narrowed with animalistic hatred and shone with an unearthly green luminance that didn’t exactly make them look any friendlier. They were restrained by dark chains around their necks and their feet were scraping chunks out of the polished surface of the floor in their eagerness to break free.

  The current Director wasn’t going to be at all happy about that.

  “They don’t,” I confirmed, “at least not normally.”

  The other ends of the chains holding back the giant beasts were held in the slim hands of a tall woman who seemed to have no problem restraining several tonnes of maddened pig-beast. Then again, she also had no problem with floating three feet in the air. She was dressed in warm furs more suited to the Siberian steppes than a w
ell-heated Oxford office building. Her long hair flowed out behind her in a breeze that didn’t seem to exist anywhere else. One side of her face was beautiful with flawless skin and exotic features. The other side was misshapen and ugly, twisted into a distorted mask.

  “I don’t suppose that this is something that we can discuss like reasonable, erm, beings?” I asked the floating figure. I was open to being utterly astonished by a positive response. There really is a first time for everything.

  This wasn’t one of them.

  The disfigured woman released the chains and the boars were launched forward by the sudden loss of restraint.

  “Down!” I shoulder barged Penny out of the way and pulled the gun out of my pocket.

  I fired instinctively without really aiming, but the size of the nearest beast hurtling past us was such that it really would have been much harder to miss. The electric charge ran across the creature’s hide, sparking from coarse hair to coarse hair along its back and even arcing across to its companion. None of this had any appreciable effect at all.

  Penny had scrambled to her feet after I had pushed her out of the way and was running for the lift. Under lockdown, it should have been immobilised, but Penny was personal assistant to the Director and that meant that she had access to all kinds of override codes.

  “It might be quicker to take the stairs,” I suggested. The boars had halted their headlong rush and were turning around. Their bulk was such that the manoeuvre took them considerably longer to carry out than it would have taken their purely natural porcine relatives. The two-faced woman at the end of the room remained there, floating serenely with a smile on both sides of her face, though on one side it looked more like a grimace.

  “You want to give them the added momentum of going downhill?” Penny demanded reasonably.

  “No more than I want to be standing in front of closed doors when I’m hit by fourteen tonnes of enraged pig monster,” I countered, my eyes locked onto the killing machines that were wheeling around like two very heavy members of a flock of birds.

  The doors of the lift slid open at that point. Penny shot me a very smug look and stepped smartly inside. I quickly joined her, changing the settings on my sidearm as I did so. Penny hit the ground floor button as the boars began their charge once again. I levelled the gun and fired, all four remaining electrical charges streaming together out of the barrel in one continuous bolt. I hit one of the animals squarely in its snarling face and blue fire raged around the inside of its mouth, arcing from tooth to tusk and even crackling out of its snout. There was a strong smell of burning pork. The stricken boar’s stride faltered and it crashed to the floor, cracking the surface as it did. The other boar continued its run as though it hadn’t noticed its partner’s fate.

  The lift doors slid shut and we started to descend. Suddenly, there was a crunching impact and the surface of the doors bulged inward, despite being designed to withstand a direct hit by a medium size rocket grenade. Exactly why anyone would be firing a rocket grenade at the Director’s lift was a question the designer had not chosen to reveal the answer to. It was unlikely that a direct impact by oversized supernatural pig monster was high on the list of protective specifications with which he had been provided. The lift jerked and there was an ugly grating sound, but the mechanism forced its way past the bent and twisted metal and then resumed a smooth descent.

  “What was that?” Penny demanded, turning on me. “What did you do?”

  “Me?” I complained, hurt that she would assume that the wanton destruction of Agency property was my fault. Admittedly, it usually was, but it’s the principle of the thing. “Don’t go blaming me.”

  “You walk into Mrs F’s office and we’re suddenly attacked by grandeur-deluded pig monsters on a lead? Who else am I supposed to blame?” she asked archly and made a good point.

  “Whilst that is true,” I admitted reluctantly, “this one isn’t on me. I’m an innocent bystander caught up in events, not the perpetrator.”

  “Innocent?” she asked sceptically. “Do you even know how to spell that?”

  “Penny, I’m hurt,” I objected again.

  “Not as much as you should be, I’m guessing,” she replied. A brush with close and imminent death didn’t seem to have dampened her spirit.

  “Have I done something wrong?” I guessed from her attitude.

  “Think about it for a minute,” she suggested. “It’s more a case of what you didn’t do.”

  I thought about it, but nothing came to mind. It couldn’t be the whole toilet seat thing that women get so hung up about because Penny didn’t use the gents and she was no longer responsible for the return of mission equipment so she couldn’t be mad about my losing the Portal Energy Inverter on my time out in the field.

  Penny sighed in annoyance, “Do you really need a hint? I mean really? What is tomorrow?”

  “The first day of the rest of my life?” I offered, but I had realised my sin of omission immediately.

  “Jokes? Do you really think that’s the way to go?” she asked in a manner which suggested strongly that an alternative way to go ought to be sought at the earliest convenience.

  “I didn’t give you a Christmas present,” I presumed.

  “No present, no card, not even a cheery ‘Happy Christmas, Penny’ as we passed in the hallway,” she listed pointedly.

  “If we get out of this I know where I can get you some serious eggnog,” I offered.

  “Don’t do me any favours,” she refused immediately. “Oh no, wait, you don’t do me any favours.”

  The lift door opened as we arrived at ground level and I was able to escape out into the lobby, which was suitably decorated in understated fashion with a 40 foot Christmas tree festooned with lights that ran in complicated patterns through the branches. It had been explained to me that the patterns were carefully designed by Qoppa Branch to soothe and calm visitors with the optional extra of being able to be switched to a pattern that would instantly hypnotise anyone looking at them and send them into a state of deep sleep in case of festive rioting. U.N.D.E.A.D. acknowledged all the major religious holidays with some sort of decoration so there was rarely a day that the lobby was completely free of them, though public decency kept us away from displays that incorporated bleeding sheep’s heads and disembowelled pythons.

  During a lockdown, the lobby was one of the main rendezvous points, especially for those in the building who weren’t normally there or didn’t have duties to carry out under an emergency situation. This late on Christmas Eve, however, the only people in the building were those covering the various departments over the holiday and they were busy carrying out the emergency tasks that there was nobody else around to do. The lobby was empty except for Penny and me and a woman with a half-ruined face holding the chains of two giant attack boars whilst floating serenely a couple of feet above the carpet.

  “Didn’t you kill one of those?” Penny asked when she spotted them.

  “Apparently not,” I supposed.

  “Well that was remiss of you. What do we do now?”

  I had been thinking about that, as hard and as fast as I could and I had come up with only one line of action, “Run!”

  I sprinted across the lobby at an angle and I didn’t need to look back to know that Penny was right behind me. There was a pair of angry snorts followed by the crash of giant trotters against the lobby floor with the attendant cracking of expensive tiling.

  “ID card!” I shouted at Penny as we approached the door I was aiming for. I slowed down to allow her to pass me, extracting her ID from the lanyard around her neck as she did so. I was putting myself between her and the charging boars, though what exactly I intended to do if they reached either of us I didn’t know. ‘Get crushed horribly to death’ seemed the most probable answer.

  Penny waved her pass across the reader and the door popped open, allowing us to dash through it and slam it shut behind us. The walls shuddered under two immense impacts behind us, but held.
A large amount of dust was released from the ceiling and I made a mental note to discuss that with Property Services since someone clearly wasn’t using their cleaning spells properly.

  “We can’t just keep running,” Penny gasped, leaning against the doorway for a moment to compose herself. “We need a plan.”

  “I have one of those,” I told her. “Well, a destination at least.”

  “Care to share?” she enquired.

  “The armoury,” I revealed.

  “We’re going to need a bigger gun?” she asked with a grin.

  “Something like that,” I agreed and we took off down the corridor as though someone had cried havoc and let slip the pigs of war behind us.

  There are a good many secure locations within the Victor Von Frankenstein Tower. The cells below us with their indestructible inmates and Qoppa Branch’s testing rooms are the most dangerous and so the most heavily protected and reinforced, but the Armoury comes a close third. U.N.D.E.A.D. has its own infantry corps on standby in strategic locations around the world, but a direct assault on the headquarters building would have to be repelled in the first instance by the staff within it and so there is a large stock of frighteningly destructive weapons held within a specially-built vault to which only a select few have access. Quite apart from the immensely strong construction of the vault and the magical defences built into that construction, the armoury comes equipped with a failsafe protocol to prevent the weapons it contains from falling into the wrong hands … or tentacles … or whatever.

  Some people would consider my hands to be the wrong ones, but desperate times and desperate measures and all that.

  Penny and I wound our way through the twisting corridors until we came to the armoury’s side entrance. Penny used her ID and submitted to the retinal, DNA and aura scans that were needed to ensure that she was Penny Kilkenny before the door popped open and we were able to slip inside.