“This one is pure,” the creature gurgled. “The one Mother told us about.”
An assembled acknowledgement of “Mother” rose up from the beasts, almost reverently so. The hell?
“She will want him,” it continued. “We will bring him.”
“The fuck you will!” I shouted from my place on the ladder.
Every single one of the creatures swiveled their heads in my direction, some of them a good one hundred and eighty degrees - talk about creepy. All at once, a dozen pairs of soulless, lantern-like eyes bored into me.
“We still want this place,” one of the others said. “We want all of them.”
The creature who’d sniffed Ed opened his mouth wide in the most gruesome of grins. “Yes. We will have all we want and more.”
That didn’t sound promising.
I could see Ed’s mind working a mile a minute, looking for some way to slip past his captors, but it was a short-lived effort. Almost as if sensing what he was going to try, Sniffy turned back toward my roommate and head-butted him, knocking him clean out. Another of the walking rock piles tossed him over its shoulder and the two made their way back to the tunnel entrance.
“Fuck this shit,” I growled. “There’s no way we’re letting...”
“Uh, Bill,” Sally said from above me. “You may want to pay attention to the big picture.”
“What are you...?” The words died in my throat. Two of the creatures were leaving, but the rest now swarmed in our direction.
Well, this had gone to hell quickly. And the day had started out so nicely too.
Panic at the Strip Club
I was loath to abandon my friend, but Sally had a point. He was alive for some reason, but these monsters didn’t seem to have a similar fate in mind for the rest of us.
Muttering several unkind words under my breath, I scrambled up the ladder after her, making it to the opening a split second before the creatures plowed into it. The only good part was that they might be vaguely humanoid in appearance, but the Jahabich were as heavy as their rocky appearance suggested. Each of them weighed in at close to half a ton, if I had to guesstimate based on the pummeling I’d just taken. There was also their lack of digits with which to grasp...
Oh yeah, they were shape-shifters too. Well, fuck that shit.
“Thinking the same thing I am?” I asked Sally as I pulled myself up through the trapdoor.
“Way ahead of you,” she replied.
As a duo of wizards squeezed in with us, shooting straight down - cauterizing at least one of the beasts into place - Sally and I each grabbed one side of the heavy ladder and ripped it from its moorings. It tumbled down into the subbasement, clattering as it landed on a few of the monsters below.
“How do you like that, assholes?” she spat before addressing one of the assembled Magi. “Feel free to take some target practice.”
“My pleasure,” a middle-aged man, dressed in far more normal attire than the last mage, said.
He and two others crowded around the open portal while Sally turned to the rest and started barking out orders. “Get Steve in here. I want him to assemble a rescue...”
“Um...I think you’d better look at this,” the mage said, backing up from the subbasement entrance.
“What are you...oh fuck me,” Sally growled. “You have got to be kidding.”
“What?” I pushed my way back in to see. The Jahabich couldn’t fly - or so we hoped - and they weren’t particularly suited to climbing ladders. However, they could make one fucking awesome inhuman pyramid.
Using the ones at the bottom who’d been fused solid as a base, the others climbed up, forming tiers upon which yet more stood. It didn’t take a genius to realize they’d easily make it up to our level with that tactic.
Sally shoved me to the side and grabbed hold of the trapdoor. It was heavily armored against unwanted entrance, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough should several of the creatures start pounding the shit out of it.
The look on her face said she suspected as much, but she slammed it shut with a heavy clang nevertheless, sliding an inch-thick deadbolt into place.
“What do we do?” I asked.
She addressed the crowd rather than me. “We gather every fucking vampire and wizard in the neighborhood and defend this place for as long as we can. Get ready; they’re coming.”
* * *
At first, we thought we had them contained. Though the creatures were able to reach the trapdoor in short order, it was a chokepoint. We’d set up a staggered defense around it - mage next to vampire. As the creatures pounded through, the mages would blast the fuck out of them. For any that managed to make it past that, it was the vamps’ job to knock them back.
In the past few months, Sally had made it a point to stockpile anything that even remotely resembled a weapon. Guns, at least anything short of a bazooka, were mostly useless against the Jahabich, but where firearms failed, the garden department of Home Depot stood tall. Hammers, hatchets, pickaxes, and the like were the flavor of the day - as well as goggles all around. Flying chips of granite in the eye were painful as all fuck.
For an hour and a half, we managed to hold the line, but then I realized that the ones we’d blasted into statues numbered greater than the amount who’d originally burst through. They were still coming, and with the gate wide open, they could keep doing so. Who the hell knew how many of those things lived beneath the city? There could have been a couple dozen or it could have been an entire army.
Worse, our mages were starting to get tired. Wizards and witches were dangerous as all hell, but they were like double-barreled shotguns. They could do a lot of damage up front, but had limited ammo. Once they were out, they were basically just humans who liked to chant in Pig Latin and run around naked under the harvest moon.
Sally had sent runners to ask for more backup. Although one could almost be fooled into thinking the streets of Vegas were almost normal during daylight hours, all of that changed after dark. The casinos rapidly became something akin to city-states once the sun went down. The various bosses ran them almost like kings, keeping them locked up tight and providing protection for the people under them - continually trying to fortify their defenses. God only knew what would happen once food began to run out.
Regarding those defenses, though, as it turns out, Vegas was also home to a sizable portion of Magi. Back before things had turned to shit, they’d naturally gravitated here as a place that was almost a Mecca of sorts for stage magicians - the perfect cover for a true practitioner. Over the years, some had become more ingrained in the system, augmenting the technological security systems some of the casinos used to catch cheats. Some card counters were damn clever, but I had to imagine the surprise on their faces when they were caught, never suspecting magic behind the scenes.
In the past month, Sally had been working hard to forge some mutual defense agreements. Some of the Magi were already on board with us, knowing that those fucking rock monsters were rapidly replacing roaches as this urban sprawl’s number one pest. In other cases, the casino...oh, fuck it; let’s be realistic here...the mob bosses would loan us out their magic users for our patrols. In return, we’d provide some vampire muscle for various jobs - some simple and others, I had little doubt, less savory.
The problem was, no backup came this day. Hell, most of Sally’s messengers hadn’t even returned. The few who did spoke of some grim shit indeed. Further down on the Strip, Mandolay Bay and the Mirage were both burning. Over at the MGM Grand, they were firing on everyone approaching - friend or foe - and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
The tidbits of news we got back all pointed to the same thing: the Jahabich had hit in force at multiple locations. We’d gotten complacent, thinking they were no better than a random monster encounter in D&D, when in reality they’d just been probing our defenses and waiting for the right moment.
As for why now was that time, I had no idea, nor was I given a chance to think it over. A few of the huma
n refugees in the club happened to overhear what was going on and, before Sally could do anything, panic had broken out.
I’m no hero, but before running like a pussy, I try to form a plan. Doesn’t always work out, but I at least try. Not so with others. Word spread like wildfire while the rest of us were still trying to keep those monsters from getting a foothold upstairs. The next thing we knew, Kara came running in to let us know a group of about thirty humans had rushed the doors from the inside and gone screaming off into the night.
Fucking idiots.
Between the Jahabich, the trigger-happy paranoia in the streets, and the nearby desert, there were a whole lot of ways for a person to meet a bad end if they ran off half-cocked. Hell, that didn’t even count any other nasties that might be lurking nearby. Our ancient enemies, the Sasquatches, were mostly forest dwellers, but a brief trip to Mongolia about a year back had taught me they had no problem with desert terrain either.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t fight this battle on two fronts and hope to win. Sally may have become a bit more user-friendly in the past few months, but that didn’t mean she’d become soft. The only bleeding hearts in her nature were literal ones from those who pissed her off. Without hesitation, she ordered Steve and Kara to secure all ground-level exits. Anybody who approached who wasn’t either a mage or coven member would receive exactly one warning shot before being turned into human - or otherwise - Swiss cheese.
I didn’t like what she was doing but found myself unwilling to argue against it. Not too long ago, she’d read me the riot act, telling me that shit was about to get real and I needed to either man up or destiny would run me down. Little by little, I was beginning to see what she’d meant. I’d always favored neutral-good characters in my game campaigns, but I had a feeling that before everything was said and done, I’d find myself dallying with darker deeds.
Regardless of any of that bullshit, the Jahabich kept coming. Each time they made it up, they smashed at the stone around the trapdoor, widening it. More and more of them began to push against our defenses as our wizard friends started to blow their loads.
And then it just stopped.
One moment, I was trying to pry a pickaxe out of a rock monster eye socket in a desperate bid to counter another trying to flank me, and the next, a sound like some giant clearing its throat came from below. One by one, the Jahabich stopped to listen before opening their own mouths to repeat the noise until it became a massive chorus. I’d like to say I kept pounding away at the fuckers, using the distraction to my advantage, but nearly all of us backed up a step, wondering what the hell was happening. I can’t speak for the others, but I’ve seen enough Final Fantasy battles to expect an enemy to pull a brand spanking new surprise attack out of their ass at any moment. For all I knew, we were about to be hit with some freaky rock monster sonic death beam attack.
Instead, almost as one, they stopped making the sound and disengaged. There was no retreat, no sense of urgency. They just turned and left as if they’d suddenly grown bored.
Sally returned to us in time to see the last of them falling to the subbasement floor and walking away.
“Did we win?”
“I have no fucking idea,” I replied.
One of the mages, having had a moment to catch her breath, stepped up to us and fired a burst of magical energy through the hole in the floor. It didn’t have a lot of juice behind it, but it was enough to strike one of the beasts in the side, fusing its right arm to its body. It didn’t even turn to acknowledge us. It just kept shambling along until it entered the tunnel leading away from Pandora’s Box.
Within minutes, they were gone, almost as if they’d never been there - minus the smashed gate, the rampant destruction, and the multiple burnt Jahabich still standing around like particularly gruesome lawn jockeys.
Gone was the body of the wizard they’d killed, along with any sign of my roommate.
I couldn’t do much to help the mage, but I very much intended to remedy that last problem.
Damage Control
A short while later, I surveyed the fallout. It wasn’t pretty. In addition to the wizard who’d been overrun, we’d lost two vampires during the assault and a third mage was gravely injured, his survival looking unlikely.
I caught up with Sally, who was in a discussion with Steve near the main stage. I relayed to her this information.
“So that’s nine more,” she said, no doubt adding the members of our lost patrol to the total.
“Not going to tell me ten?” I asked, surprised. This was the part in most war movies where the commander gave the “He’s gone, you need to accept that” speech.
“Not until I see a body...oh, don’t look at me that way. It’s just common sense. Those things could have stomped him into a greasy smear, but instead, they ran off with him like they were the Trojans stealing Helen.”
“I hope they lube up first because otherwise...ouch,” I muttered.
Sally smiled, but Steve just glared at me. That one was all business. My utterly charming personality was lost entirely on him.
“I need...”
She held up a hand to stop me. “What you need to do is wait until I can assemble a search party to go with you.”
“But...”
“But, I don’t need your ass lost in the fucking sewers of Vegas,” she snapped. “Besides, I might have a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Something I’ve been toying around with in the back of my head, but you need to be patient. We’re still calculating our losses.”
I gritted my teeth at that, but knew deep down that she was right. “How bad?”
Sally nodded at Steve. He lifted a clipboard that he’d been holding and glanced at it. “At least three more vampire runners didn’t return. Also, by last count, we’ve found sixteen fresh human bodies scattered about in the immediate area alone.”
“Ours?”
“Hard to tell.”
Oh, shit. That didn’t sound promising.
“Put together an exsanguination party,” Sally ordered him. “Bag up any that are still fresh and in relatively one piece.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I said. “What are you gonna do, squeeze them like oranges?”
Sally’s eyes flashed black. “Could you say that maybe a little louder? I don’t think everyone in the fucking city heard you.” She quickly glanced around, but thankfully, most of the remaining humans were either huddled with their friends and loved ones or scurrying about helping with the cleanup effort.
“Waste not, want not,” Steve said dispassionately.
“You drowned kittens as a child, didn’t you?”
“Knock it off,” she said to me. “We don’t have time for this shit. We got hit with our fucking pants down and lost a lot of resources as a result. We’ll do what we need to. Is that clear?”
I was tempted to click my heels together and throw my right arm up in a Nazi salute, but I refrained. I could tell from the sound of her voice that she was stressed, and a stressed Sally tended to be a dangerous Sally...and not just to her enemies. Instead, I simply nodded.
“Good. What’s it look like downstairs?”
I would have loved to lie and claim that the second those monsters took off, I was in hot pursuit - chasing after them until they lost me in the maze of tunnels beneath the city. In truth, it was several minutes before any of us dared venture down into the subbasement, long after the sound of the retreating creatures was lost to even my vampire hearing. When we finally did...let’s just say we were a jumpy bunch.
It didn’t help that the Jahabich we’d beaten were still standing in place. Though logic dictated they were fused into solid lumps of rock, they still looked like they could come back to life at any moment and wallop us good. Twice while trying to secure the ladder back up, I’d almost dropped it, certain I’d seen movement out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t need to know that part, though. “At least a dozen statues.”
“Any talker
s?” The tone of her voice implied that she knew the answer. In the past, we’d attempted to take some of them as prisoners - cauterizing everything but their gruesome mugs. It had been a complete waste of effort. The things could seemingly off themselves at will, quite literally. One moment you’d be looking into those creepy orange eyes and the next, the lights would go out. You’d be stuck with just an overly ugly lump of rock. Apparently, these creatures weren’t big on the whole name, rank, and serial number spiel.
The big question was whether they were capable of coming back to life at a later time - like the second you turned your back. Nobody knew the answer to that one, so we’d taken an approach that ensured we’d be better safe than sorry. “Nope,” I replied. “And they won’t be yapping anytime soon, unless someone heads downstairs with a lot of glue.”
She nodded, a tight grin forming on her face. It wasn’t much, but knowing that we’d taken down some of them offered a small bit of comfort.
I turned and left so they could continue figuring shit out. I had no doubt Sally would summon me soon to go over her ideas for a rescue mission. In the meantime, I tried to be as patient as possible.
Believe me, it wasn’t easy by any sense of the imagination. I had to keep reminding myself that the situation was currently out of my hands. If Ed was alive, it was for a purpose. We needed to figure out what that purpose was and how we could twist it to our advantage so as to extract him. If he was dead, well, no amount of running off half-assed into the sewers would change that.
It was that last part that especially haunted me. Although I tried to busy myself, every second that passed felt like an eternity.
* * *
“Jesus Christ!”
“I take it you approve?” Sally asked, a dangerous grin upon her face.
Maybe an hour had gone by, perhaps two, since I’d left to help the others clean up the mess in the basement. Sadly, it was pretty much a lost cause until we could get an acetylene torch - and someone who knew how to use it - down there. Though they’d left quickly, the Jahabich hadn’t done so stupidly. They’d taken enough time to smash the shit out of the gate on their way out. The heavy metal barrier was now little better than an oversized pile of scrap. We’d need to secure things from up above for now or run the constant risk of another ambush.
The Tome of Bill (Book 6): Half A Prayer Page 9