The Bone Puppets: A Hard SciFi Zombie Soldier Story

by Doug McGovern

  “My wisdom is not of this world, son of dust. Neither is his,” the Prophet whispered. “The Witchdoctor will test you in every way that you can be tested. If you understand the Heavens and their guidance, you will prevail in your pursuit. That is why you must go for it. You must go to the bottom of the Bone Well. You must retrieve the Kilimanjaro Sacrament. Bring up the artifact that scraped the heavens, from the teeth that gnash the throng of Hell.” Ezekiel gathered the lightning to his core. He stood, allowing it to well through his fingertips, making his palms shoot out bursts of white ether.

  Elias had fallen to his knees. He forgot how to form speech for an instance. Ezekiel smiled. It was the first time that he had lips to do so. Now with teeth, and a face made whole by the power of celestial forces, he looked young and kind. Someone that Elias would have been drawn to in another life.

  “You face a foe that’s power is beyond the full capacity of understanding. Should you live for a million years, son of dust, your mind will never be able to reach his vast knowledge of the alchemy between Spirit and Earth,” said Ezekiel. “Yet even in his ultimate control of the forces of clay and fire, he is not deity. There is power in the Universe to triumph over chaos. For the furthest depth of darkness, there is light to dispel it.” He took a deep breath. The lighting clung to his skin like a thousand fireflies walked over him. Elias held his breath.

  “How can you know that for sure? Look how your life ended when you stood up to the Crescent’s opposition. How can there be any goodness left in this desolate place to match the doctrine of evil the Witchdoctor founded with his study?” Elias shook his head. For so long now, he had questioned his purpose. How could anything good come from pursuing the Witchdoctor’s secrets if he had brought this disorder to the Earth?

  Ezekiel nodded. He raised his hands slowly. In the light of his ether, the face of the Earth grew dark. The stars appeared, along with all the planets, in the air just above them.

  Perhaps it was a vision. Elias lost his breath. For the first time, he saw the worlds beyond this evil place he’d been confined to all these years.

  Ezekiel stood in a silent vigil for a long moment. He gave Elias the time he needed to take in the Cosmos. The stars showered all around them. Some shot like missiles to the shaky ground where they stood, exploding about their heels. Ezekiel let the impact roll over him. His ether consumed it all, causing his fire to burn a greater white.

  “Learn this lesson now while you can, child of the Earth. Darkness exists to catalyze the light. One must exist so that the other might. Nothing is lost in the wake of its power. To understand damnation is to find the highway to Atonement!” Ezekiel ignited all the darkness. The vision passed away. They were in the heart of Africa once again.

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  Chapter 17

  Ezekiel’s power had carved out the path. The lightning lit the way with soft white flames that the elephants didn’t fear to walk on. It was so bright and hot that it singed the bone-dust from their backs. Elias felt the heat crackling in marrow that became like wax. Some of it sprayed back on him, sticking to the small carriage seat. It stung his sting like a thousand hornets, but it was a good pain because of what it meant. They were on the road to the Bone Well now for certain.

  “This is the second of the Witchdoctor’s signs. The pillar of his great road. He built it here and filled it with the poison of hatred.” Ezekiel looked up. His eyes went wide.

  Elias felt his blood go cold. Time stood still, cut off by a low wailing how that cut across the plane.

  “What is that?” Elias paused.

  Ezekiel turned to face his young friend. His jaw had constricted. There was the great pain of departure in his eyes.

  “They are the servants of the Witchdoctor. The Author of Sedition has called them forth to punish the voice of truth….And I am the voice of truth.” Ezekiel looked back at Elias.

  Elias froze. He had been in a state of primitive confusion since he’d come here. Only Ezekiel had offered him any peace. Now it seemed as if that peace was coming to an end.

  Ezekiel took Elias by his wrists. Elias had walked the road of loss enough times in his day to know when a new goodbye was near.

  “They are coming for me. His power is wed with the power of the Kingdoms now. The Bone Puppets will come first. My power can hold them for a time. Long enough for you to defeat the first onslaught. The two of us, we will not defeat them a second time…” Ezekiel nodded.

  Elias shook his head.

  “What you said…When you told me you would sacrifice your life if you could…Are you making good on that claim now, Ezekiel?” Elias felt like the desert floor would swallow him.

  The old prophet lowered his eyes. Grimly, he let the guard of righteous power down. His face was revealed for the mask of rottenness it had become in death.

  “Young man, you must understand. I died for what I believed in once before…I have no life to lose now, but a debt that I must pay. My power is not mine. It came to me from high above. One day you will understand, when it is your own…” Ezekiel transformed his face again to living flesh.

  Elias felt on the verge of tears again. Ezekiel smiled and cupped his face in his hands.

  “No, child…You must not let sorrow overcome your spirit. A son of the dust you are, as too was I. Your days are only a shadow and your time is slipping like sand through the glass. Live while you can! Let my power pass to you now…Let me surrender it to the sky so that it can fall upon you as rain.” Ezekiel pressed a hand to Elias’s face. Now at last, he let his heavenly power fill his eyes. They burned with white lightning as if he had two small stars in his eye sockets.

  “Come, my son. Let us finish this.” Ezekiel bowed and motioned with prayerful hands again.

  Elias didn’t know what to think. He didn’t have the time. Hyenas howled from the deep again.

  Elias stood up and adjusted his weapons in his belt. His wound throbbed in the fire-seasoned air. In this moment, he would not be sitting down. He gathered up the reigns of the elephant sled, ready to charge into the fray.

  A chainsaw symphony sang over the earth as a first wave Puppets came riding in on the backs of Hyenas that slobbered blood and acid into the wind. The chainsaw song came from the Puppet’s arms which had been replaced by chain-linked blades that moved up and down the husk of arm bone where muscle, tendon, and vein had once been.

  Elias felt his heart skipping beats. Time seemed to slow down. Elias realized eventually that real time literally had been altered. The leader of the saw-arm puppets was holding a trident over his head that was pulsating EMP currents in 12 massive rings. That device was altering the path of travel of time and the electron composition of space.

  Elias checked the reigns. He coaxed the elephants to storm out at a full gallop. The elephants tossed their head, screaming with war trumpets. The hyenas shrieked, blinded and cowering under the light of Ezekiel’s eyes as he climbed onto the carriage’s railing an put his hands out like he was a masthead.

  A massive crow came sailing through the air. His talons were grounded with this high-voltage charged space alloy. The electrical charge of the Puppet’s trident was sucked to it. The crow drew his power from the monster and the tormented aura it exuded. Dark power gathered and set the creature’s eyes ablaze with dark fire. Elias felt the warmth slip through his blood like his skin was a sieve. This crow was the ambassador of the Witchdoctor’s unholy power.

  The Puppet’s jaws flapped as they gained ground spinning their free chainsaw action arms around in tight but awkward baseball bat arcs at the agile bird. The crow screamed and moved back and forth hovering, floating like a drone coasting to touchdown. He landed dead center of the Puppet’s head and sank his feet into either of his temples. With a soft croak, the bird swung down and drilled his beak dead center of the Puppet’s forehead.

  A perfect bull’s eye of rotting blood appeared in the Puppet’s forehead. It went limp, instantly discharged. The crow screamed, and looked up. His beak dripped with t
he rotten blood and had grown teeth. His eyes had transformed becoming white and black and bloodshot all at once like human eyes. His face seemed to grow and shrink as he took on the look of rotten humanity himself.

  They’d both be cornered and dead in minute’s fraction. Elias knew he was going to have to improvise his sparse arsenal.

  He smiled. He had a knife anyway.

  “Okay, man. You’re gonna have to pop it into cruise control for a minute. Elvis is about to jump the plane!” Elias sprung from the end of the carriage.

  “What? Remember what we talked about! You aren’t to take any unnecessary risks with your mission!” Ezekiel couldn’t turn around to see what he was doing. He was forced to look straight ahead, into the eye of the coming storm.

  “Oh, I remember. Still, if there’s even a slight chance I can save you…I don’t see that as an unnecessary risk!” Elias checked the elephants again. They were moving now at top speed. He poised himself, standing side by side Ezekiel ready to jump into the moving current of the smoke laden air.

  Elias slipped into the air current, pulling his knife from his belt. He threw it into the center of one the saw arm Puppets forehead. It felt still, saw an arm hanging limp, but still active. Elias landed on the front of the hyena’s shoulders. He plucked the knife free of the skull with a quick jerk and brought it up to deflect the limp chain arm just as it flopped back over toward him. He felt bile rising in his throat at this close call.

  Pushing slowly up with the knife, Elias saw now what powered the chainsaw. There were a gas-powered engine, miniature alternator and battery pack implanted in the center of the Puppet’s armpit.

  Elias pushed the arm up and reached his free hand under. Thankfully, he knew that the Bone Puppets’ bodies were brittle. If he could get close enough to break them. He stuck his thumb into the rotten tissue and plucked the energy pack free. Reaching up, he clawed with a cat’s swiping at the rotten tissue and tendon until he’d formed a knife hole under the Puppet’s putrid arm. Then he shoved his fist in and jerked from the inside out quickly, snapping a good piece of meat and inward shoulder bone off. It now looked like he was holding a club upside down.

  He kicked the rest of the corpse off the bucking hyena. Inching forward, he swung the chainsaw arm around, letting the battery-powered mini-engine dangle in the air.

  He couldn’t turn himself around, so he decided to ride the hyena backward. He swung in semi-circles as far as his wounded body would allow, bringing the chainsaw arm through the heads of as many Puppets as were close enough for him to reach.

  There was a sudden sound. A rattling on the ground like pebbles stirred up by the march of a massive stampede. Elias’s looked up. The Puppets were becoming gyroscopic, heads and arms and legs on thighs rotating like the pivots of a drill bit and making a similar sound. Their insides ruptured, sending wet guts still intact rolling up from the contusions of the small explosions. They poured out on the hyenas, acidic and burning straight through the shoulders and backsides of the unfortunate carnivores.

  Hyenas were shrieking, dying where they stood, collapsing head over heels and throwing their riders. Bone Puppets landed on their knees, short circuiting. Electric sparks shot from their teeth in crescent shapes. These crescents circled their faces at first rapidly and then slower until they faded out and the bodies sank rag doll limp into the sand.

  Elias threw down his chainsaw arm club and slowly inched himself around on the frenetic hyena’s back. He gasped as he saw his elephants being electrocuted. They tore away thrashing. The carriage was ripped out from under Ezekiel. He stood midair, hovering in the shape of a crucifix.

  Elias grabbed the hyena he was sitting on by its main. He froze in place, staring as Ezekiel called the Man-Faced Crow to his side. His eyes were blazing now like laser pointers, making burning trenches through the ground.

  “No…No, don’t!” Elias wasn’t above begging. He was about to lose the first mentor he’d ever had. How could he keep from protesting? He was still only human after all.

  Ezekiel cupped his hands, looking up toward heaven.

  “I name you the heir of Eternal power. Go now, son of dust. Understand the virtue of benevolence and find the root of evil. Be wise and be strong. Conquer your kingdoms.” Ezekiel burst into flame. He screamed from pain as from his toes, up his ankles, coursing up his legs and resting at his throat a white fire climbed him.

  Thunder roared and lighting bubbled up from every corner of the tormented plain. Elias screamed his mentor’s name like a mantra. Here now his faith was taken up from him in a cloud of fire, in a pillar of smoke.

  Elias put out his hands. Like the sun, Ezekiel ignited and ruptured. A white hole opened between Eternity and the damnation that took hold of this cruel earth. In an instant of flame, gone without ashes, Ezekiel disappeared from Elias’s sight.

  Elias was thrown the air by sudden seismologic tremors shooting through the ground in hairline fractures like a crack in a porcelain doll’s face. He landed on hands, chin and knees at the edge of a white paved circle.

  He landed beside a massive well that resembled a great furnace save that it was filled with brackish liquid and not ashes. Elias rolled over on his back, hands covering his face.

  In the wake of Ezekiel’s fire, elephants, hyenas and Puppets alike were sucked into the cavity he had ignited. With a shriek they burned. They were swallowed up in cyclones. The earth was a bowl scraped bare. Elias collapsed into the dust, watching the light intensify. It was the last thing he knew as he passed into blackness.

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  Chapter 18

  Elias woke up, hands dangling in burning liquid. He gasped and scrambled away from the edge. For a long moment, he knelt on hands and knees, remembering the woeful sight of the damned reflections he’d seen there.

  For a moment, Elias paused there on the verge of horrified screams. He wanted to shriek and wail and curse for the memory of his mentor, but that was not the answer. There was no air or sound left in his lungs that could voice the grief he felt for this loss and all things he had lost. Nor could any amount of panic ever truly contrast that infinite peace he had known, if only for a moment.

  There on the stony rim of the well stood a small dark figure wrapped in a black fabric cloak and turban.

  He turned around. The turban’s face had been pulled open to reveal that he was a child, probably no older than twelve. His clothes were primitive body armor made somewhat after the early millennial era of body armor, but also woven with African tribal beadwork, especially up his colorful sandals. He was wearing an old pair of Levi jeans. The smirk on his face unnerved Elias with its mischief and knowing.

  The massive crow sailed through the air in a crescent arch. The boy held up a hand that was wrapped in a gauntlet he’d made from a hollowed piece of Humvee’s driveshaft. The bird lit down on it. The boy stroked the bird’s head. Darkness burned in his gaze.

  “Who are you?” Elias felt his fists tighten. He would have attacked the boy by now if he had been himself. He had lost himself now and didn’t know if anything he’d experienced on the highway of Sedition was even real.

  The boy tilted his head to the side, chuckling darkly.

  “Wickedness seeks a sign, you know? A monkey’s greed holds his hand to a trap, okay? Ah, but you don’t know what you are seeking after. You are not sure if it is God or fame or family. Higher powers or faith. It troubles you to have no idea. So I have come, at the behest of both heaven and hell…” The small boy inched closer. Elias inched away from him.

  “What are you?” Elias’s voice dropped an octave. He didn’t know why he bothered to ask such a silly question. He knew. The boy was some kind of spirit.

  “Do you think that I’m a devil, young boss? Mm, do you think that you can run away and hide somewhere? Evil and benevolence all will find you in their own time. You cannot hide from pain or petty things in life. You cannot hide from love or good either when it wants to have you. You’re making a mistake with the way you think, ok
ay? It will want you too, you know?” The boy spirit paused. He dropped to his knees, stirring the dust with his finger.

  “You…you are a strange little creature that much I’m pretty clear on. What do you want from me?” Elias sat up and spat dust and blood and spit. He groaned. His wounds were broken open anew. He was a fool if he thought he’d make it up out of this place alive. There was no coming up from here.

  “I cannot want anything for you, young boss…I am only a shadow. A spirit of no nation! I have come because I was summoned. The spirit of evil, the Witchdoctor’s eyes, they called to me from the bones that are in the grave, okay? But the sun called out to me as well, with the crying of a cheetah who has lost her son. I came. I obey. Because I am a spirit and I have no choice…” The boy paused. He grinned showing all of his bright white teeth.

  “So, you’ve come to test me, huh? Ezekiel wants me to finish the job. His rebellion, my mother’s rebellion and Yim’s reconnaissance all cross paths in the end. For this well conceals the stolen sacrament which was the source of all the Final Prophet’s power. I’m not an idiot, in case nobody up there in the celestial places told you. I will be well acquainted with my enemy if I’m to divine from his dark well. I will understand more than Yim will ever understand by finding the Hollow, should I go down.” Elias smirked. He was a step ahead of the rebellion he had sprung from. Something about this gave him a sort of thrill.

  “You should go down…Only then will you know.” The spirit nodded to the well.

  Elias looked from the spirit and back to the well. His insides were burning. From sorrow and hatred, that paralyzed him. From an actual wound that made him scarcely able to move. Yet, in the end, it was curiosity that burned brightest in Elias Walklate’s body and mind. He must go with his mentor’s blessing. He must seize true power for himself.

  Elias crept to the edge of the water and touched his face. He flinched as a thousand rotting faces rose to meet him. Their hands lifted like shaking dead lilies into the air. With the siren song of damned mermaids, they called to him. They caressed his cheeks with all manner of fondness.