CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Band turned toward the dredges of the Kingdom of Kentucky, all but Matthew.
He had eyes only for Queen Ada, minus an arm, ready to snatch the unconscious Clara out of his arms.
Jade rushed to his side. “I'll hold her while you...” she couldn't finish it. She knew he would kill the woman. It defied explanation, really. Jade knew that the zombie was already dead but... she needed to die, Jade could tell.
Jade could feel the tenor of what she'd been.
Evil. She'd been evil.
Matthew did not know exactly what the young female Traveler said but, getting the gist of it, he went toward Queen Ada with intent.
Caleb knew the flavor of it.
If the dead techs had been here they'd have been able to name it for what it was.
Death Intent.
Kinda funny really. DI for the dead.
Sweet.
Caleb turned his attention on the Zondorae brothers.
Gary and Joe couldn't smell the foulness of the corpses for the vomit that covered their lab smocks.
It was raw corpse or vomit... but the puke was closer to their noses.
Besides, corpse-boy was approaching. They could feel the dead that held them tense with his nearness.
“Hi guys!” Caleb said almost cheerfully.
They scowled. Could it get any worse? Their expressions said.
Caleb smiled, correctly interpreting their thoughts.
“Oh yeah, it's gonna get exciting for you chumps.” His eyes darkened; in the low light of the tunnel they looked almost black.
The corpses tightened their hold, reacting to Caleb's emotional framework.
One gave a long lick of Gary's ear, the smell of the decaying tongue causing the scream he had held in check to escape his mouth in a wail that pierced the silence.
It was the catalyst for the panic which began to sweep the tunnel.
Clara awoke in the arms of the exotic creature that looked like she had Red Men blood in her veins, her eyes a rich emerald green.
“You're safe,” Jade lied smoothly. Saying the thing that would give Clara comfort.
But Jade didn't know the woman Clara was. What she'd done and lived through.
Clara straightened and saw Matthew hacking at Queen Ada, dead flesh flinging itself like gruesome and bloodless rain around them.
Apparently, the dead did not bleed.
She stood, her heartbeat pumping and jumping in the hollow of her throat. Clara tore the dirk out of her borrowed clothing, holding it smoothly for the first time.
With confidence.
With intent.
Jade felt the shift of the young queen's emotions and tried to stop her. The Empath in her understood there would be more than just murder. The future held what you'd done forever in your mind, prisoner to images put there by choices.
Clara saw the young woman's hand encircle her wrist to stop her from the task at hand.
She was not privy to Clara's past.
But Clara was. She would stop this.
Forever.
Queen Ada laughed out of a mouth with loosened teeth as the huge one of the Band took pieces of her flesh with his small knife. It mattered not, she felt no pain, only pressure.
She ignored his assault. Instead, she focused on her wayward daughter who was no longer princess but queen.
That would need changing.
Let her come, Ada thought, as Clara approached in her ridiculous boy's attire, a small dirk clutched in her hand.
Ada reached for Clara as Matthew turned and saw the woman who held his heart approach the dead queen who would stop at nothing to bring Clara harm.
In death as in life, a singular focus pulsed in Ada's befuddled brain.
Clara's murder.
Matthew moved to swing and was caught in the mob as they pushed forward, the bellowing scream from the Traveler igniting the flame of their panic instantly. Matthew was shoved to the side with three of the Band as a river of people flowed between him and Clara.
Matthew caught a glimpse of the waterfall of Clara's red hair as the queen's hand burrowed into it with a torque that brought them close enough to kiss.
“No!” Matthew yelled, his terror at Ada's nearness and the strength she possessed for harm causing even the crowd to pause at the tone in his bellowed alert.
Caleb swung around and saw the fragile queen's hair in a locked hold by his deranged zombie queen and felt the fine hairs on his arms rise.
“Hold them,” he told the zombies that had the Zondorae brothers prisoner. Their rotting arms fastened more surely than the tightest of bindings.
Clara felt her scalp burn like lye poured upon it and gritted her teeth together. She had never desired anything in her life more than what she did at this moment.
Queen Ada hissed in her face, the breath of her mouth without adequate comparison in its foulness. “I will be queen. Not your whore of a mother or her simpleton spawn,” she ground out, a tooth dropping out of her mouth, rolling down the front of Clara's tunic to fall at their feet.
Clara's eyes widened as she saw both Clarence and Charles running to get to her from behind Ada. She felt the press of the crowd and their panic between her and the Band.
Clara brought up her arm in a twisting lunge, narrowly missing herself as she did and severed Ada's good arm. The dead flesh gave way to the sharpness of the metal, the hand which gripped Clara's hair, shaken off and falling to the ground to join the tooth that lay there.
Ada whipped her head forward into Clara's and brained her, using her head as an effective weapon. Clara stumbled back into the people behind her as the corpse that had been her mother plowed forward into Clara, the remaining teeth in full view.
Her mouth open and ready to chew and maim.
Clara her target.
Clara would not be cowed, though the circumstance was at once dire and gruesome. She used the wall of flesh behind her and sprung forward, leaping onto Ada, who toppled under her momentum, without one arm and only the stump of the other to right herself, she found she could not.
Queen Ada lurched her neck forward as a bird looking for a worm from its parent, and tried to sink her teeth into Clara's hand. Clara slapped Ada's face as she had abused Clara a hundred times in life.
The flesh fell away with a wet splatter on the dirt of the tunnel floor and Clara felt her gorge rise as Ada sat up underneath Clara's straddle and went toward her neck to tear out the fragile artery that beat there.
Matthew pushed the crowd away as Caleb met him beside Clara where she sat atop Queen Ada.
Matthew did not wait to see what the boy would do, or how Clara might respond to the armless dead. He took his long sword into both his hands and swung it smoothly on top of her skull, splitting it open like an egg balanced atop a pestle.
The brains slid out and littered the floor around them.
Every zombie's attention strayed from their master to what lay before them.
“Oh shit!” Jonesy yelled, seeing brains and zombies. Even for Caleb things were getting out of hand.
John jogged over to Caleb. “Okay, I'm thinking right now is a great time to close the Pathway!” John said, looking around frantically at the tense zombies, the people from another sphere swarming around and the dumbass scientists that had started it all.
Caleb watched Matthew take Clara in his arms, a welt on her forehead like a purplish-red plum growing as he watched.
Matthew had saved Queen Clara. Now it was time for him and his friends to save this world that the people of his had begun screwing up in the first place.
He turned to Jonesy and said, “Time to cork the Pathway, pal.”
“Now we're talkin'!” Jonesy said, stabbing the air with his fist.
“Hey!” Gary Zondorae yelled.
Caleb turned to face him, the people of the other sphere running down the tunnel in the opposite direction. Many cast worried glances at the dead that tracked their movements with unnerving
intensity.
“You disrupt that Pathway and we can't return. You can't return,” he said in his all-knowing voice.
“Nah, we got a one way ticket back to our world, dipshit,” Tiff said in her subtle way, smacking gum.
Caleb shook his head.
Randi walked up and the Zondorae brothers blanched. “You're the Dimensional, Merranda Chen.”
She nodded, raising her hand. “Yeah. Bad for you dudes, great for us.”
“You wouldn't leave us... we can't... be here. It would upset the order of things.”
Caleb scowled. “You don't give two shits and an fuck about order. You were just fine playing God with this world until you were caught.”
The brothers stared at Caleb. So did the zombies.
John came to stand beside Caleb, Matthew and Clara and the rest of the Band behind them. “You loosed the fragment on these people, many of which were from our world. I think they can absorb you two just fine. As a matter of fact, on the Outside, you'll fit right in,” John said, the Medieval speech slipping underneath the weight of his anger at the scientists.
“What says he?” Clara asked Daniel.
Daniel frowned. “They will leave the two Travelers here... to their own devices in the Outside. Without their modern accouterments they will be as the fragment.”
Clara smiled. “It is a just end for such as them.”
“Aye,” Rowenna agreed, Bracus' arm coming around her shoulders.
Caleb met the eyes of the zombies that held the pair. “Take them outside... to where you lay at rest.”
The brothers fought and bucked, their arms punching flesh that didn't bruise or bleed.
The zombies tore them out into the cold of Outside, the bitterness of their choices stealing inside their consciousness with inevitable progression.
Joe threw caution to the wind, frantic. “You can't leave us, they'll kill Parker, they'll build another Pathway.”
Caleb turned eyes to Joe which frightened him in their singular intensity, leveled at him. “Parker can take care of himself. This interference will stop. And we're the future of the world. Not you... not the ones that started all this for control and power. Nothing good could've come of this.”
“That you don't see it is all the more reason for leaving you here,” John said.
“You're gettin' flushed like turds!” Jonesy said with glee.
Sophie gave a giggle and Caleb turned to Jonesy. “Ya think you can rein it in long enough to disable the Pathway?”
Jonesy dipped his head sheepishly and walked over to the spot in the tunnel where the scientists had been spewed out. The invisible portal was above their heads.
“Wait, young Traveler,” Clara said, her small hand inside Matthew's.
Caleb turned.
“It is a Pathway of distance.”
Caleb nodded. “And time, Queen Clara.”
He let that sink in as her hand covered her mouth. “If it exists, they may tamper with our history, altering things while we remain unaware.”
Caleb didn't get it totally but he didn't live through his mom's Nazi verbiage for nothing. He understood. Their shortcut would be gone, but so would the access route of others bent on exploitation. It was the only protection he and his friends could offer.
“It is our recompense for the transgressions of the people of our world against yours,” John said, climbing on board the speech train again.
“Let them, Clara. For it is the only way to guarantee a future without Guardians... Travelers...” Daniel said and Matthew finished for him, “Evil Ones.”
Caleb's eyes shifted to Matthew's.
“Evil Ones?”
Matthew and the rest of the Band nodded gravely.
Caleb agreed, liking that name the best. He turned his attention to Jonesy.
“Come on, Jones, let's bust this thing.”
Jonesy smiled and was met by Alex, who hefted him up on top of his shoulders. He looked down at John.
“It's Pulse, right?”
“Yes, you should be able to disable it by overloading its function on this end.”
“What about our end? What if other guys try to get through?” Bry asked.
Tiff shrugged. “I'm thinking it's like the Jewelry Solution.”
Archer raised a brow.
She popped a bubble and made a fluttering motion with both her hands like dandelion seed floating away on the breeze. “It just went away when we traveled.”
The teens got quiet.
Caleb palmed his chin even as the scientists were wailing in the graveyard outside.
Finally he looked into Jonesy's eyes, determined. “Not our problem, do it.”
Jonesy nodded and slammed a fist into the air.
The lights of the sphere tunnel sputtered.
Then died.
The blackness of the tunnel was absolute.
Chaos erupted and engulfed the people within.
****
Clara was scooped up by Matthew and carried to somewhere she could not see, the utter inky blackness unhindered by light pollution of any kind.
She heard a young female Traveler scream, “Jonesy!”
Caleb closed his eyes, the dark a comfort, and called the dead to him.
Surround me, his mind commanded.
They came, all but the ones who held the corrupters of others.
Caleb put his arms around Jade, folding her into the protection of his body, and the greater protection of the dead that surrounded the teens.
The Band felt and saw the dead encircle the boy, their senses acute enough to intuit the intentions of the damned.
The Band had not heard the command but had felt the summons of it.
Alex searched around in a blind panic for Randi. He heard her scream for Jonesy, who he held on his shoulders.
“Jones!” he growled out from underneath him.
“I know, muscle-head, calm your tits, I got this!”
“Get it faster!” he yelled, the thrum of his words vibrating into Jonesy's body.
The tunnel lights sputtered to life, finally catching, the steam escaping in a burst of moist heat at the base.
Jonesy looked around, a circle of fifty zombies with their backs to Caleb and the gang standing vigil around them.
John stood head and shoulders above everyone inside the circle. His gaze locked with Jonesy. “Did you do it?”
“Hell yeah, Terran. Did you think I was having a party up here on beefy boy or what?”
John sighed and Jonesy frowned as Alex set him down onto the ground.
Bracus came forward to engage the young Traveler and the zombies' eyes glittered like dark crystals in faces gone slack with death.
With orders of protection.
Bracus paused, remembering the strength of the dead prince.
Caleb saw him come and felt his intent slip into the zombies. They parted like water behind a dam and Bracus strode into the midst of the dead.
Caleb had never seen such balls in his life.
He instantly liked this guy.
“We need to seal this sphere from its neighbor.”
Caleb frowned and asked why.
Bracus told him. After ten minutes or so of listening Caleb said, “Their sphere will fail. We can't fix anything else. We've gotta go home, to our world.”
Bracus frowned while Daniel translated.
Jonesy came forward, his clothes filthy and torn, a grin of pure accomplishment permanently etched there. “I can fix that up too.”
John cocked a brow.
Jonesy outlined the plan while the Band and Clara listened to John's translation, Daniel filling in where John's words were lost in the gaps of language.
The Band straightened as Clara, the other sphere-dwellers and the teens made their way to the mouth of the sphere, the sentry long-dead.
Clara's body clenched in a tight knot when she saw what had occurred in her sphere when it sat unprotected, assaulted by their supposed ally.
She was livid, h
er body shaking with it.
Jade came forward. “I can help.”
“How?” Daniel asked the small girl with hair the color of raven's wings, eyes like the brightest leaves of a summer tree.
She told him.
Clara escorted Jade as she touched every dwelling while the zombies clogged the entrance to the sphere.
No one would dare exit through the wall of dead flesh.
When each person who was not rightfully in the Kingdom of Ohio was identified, the Band escorted them to the zombie guard.
Many of whom had guarded this very sphere in life.
Some resisted, and were summarily dealt with. Their screams of mercy went unheeded as the blood and destruction of their deeds lay claim to every surface of the sphere.
Clara hardened her heart to their justifications.
They murdered her people.
She was different woman. Clara was queen and she would protect her people and what she cared about with her very life.
She had.
Clara would again.
*
The zombies dragged the people of the Kingdom of Kentucky behind them without expression, the heel marks of their shoes making grooves in the dirt as they flailed to escape.
For there was no escape.
When they passed the portal of the great door that led Outside and walked underneath the defunct Pathway Clara turned to the young Traveler, her gaze briefly touching on the two Travelers who lay at the feet of the zombies Outside, their screams devolving into exhaustion.
“Let it be here,” she said.
Bracus came forward and asked, “The barrier, Queen Clara?”
She nodded, once.
Jonesy stepped forward and with a quick look at Caleb said, “This experimental crap's getting old.”
“Stop complaining, ya whiner. You're the one that offered,” Tiff said, shrugging.
“In theory...” John began.
“Can it, Terran, ya putz.” Jonesy pushed his hand into the soft side of the sphere tunnel. Sweat sprang out in droplets on his forehead, beading on his upper lip. And like a curtain drawn, he pulled his hand away... and the material of the sphere came with it.
Clara gasped as she saw the fabric of the sphere wall clutched like so much warm taffy in the dark hand of the Traveler who could manipulate all things electromagnetic, she had been informed.
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