by Azalea Ellis
I heard the gunshots first, coming from a few blocks to the north. There were crazed screams from Pestilence’s minions and a cacophony of noise from the world-bending effects of Skills being brought to bear on them.
A few of the landmines we’d planted exploded. I winced, knowing some people wouldn’t be walking away from that.
I didn’t sense Pestilence among the horde. All of them had heartbeats and seemed to be made of flesh. Where was he?
I spun around, as bugs flowed up from the gutters and out from the walls of the abandoned buildings around us. They rushed together, climbing atop each others’ bodies till they formed a mound, and then a humanoid body.
Chapter 44
And when this dust falls to the urn, in that state I came, return.
— Henry Vaughan
My heart pounded and chemicals rushed into my bloodstream till I felt light-headed. I released a haze of Chaos threaded with branching tendrils, letting it hang around my body as an immediately ready shield or weapon. I forced my breathing to slow. I was ready for this. I was. “Zed, Sam, kids, go protect the ritual circle,” I ordered. “The rest of us will hold off Pestilence.”
The four of them ran, and Jacky, Torliam, Adam and I grouped together, with Birch growling continuously at my feet.
The facade of Chanelle’s body smiled at us.
A soldier stationed in one of the nearby buildings braced his gun on the windowsill and shot Pestilence.
His body rippled and splashed with the spray of bullets, bugs bursting and showering down around him. His leg buckled, but before gravity could act on him, the bugs had already rematerialized to fill in the hole and stabilize the appendage.
At a gesture of his fingers, and the soldier fell back from the window, dead.
Jacky was growing already, and would quickly surpass Torliam and me in size if she continued. A product of the fear, no doubt.
I understood. My own hands trembled, and my armored scales were flexed and angled toward Pestilence to better protect against attack.
His head turned to watch as the others ran ahead. “The girl looks smaller than I remember, and…” he counted on his fingers. “How are there still nine of you?” His eyes tracked to the lance tucked between my armband and the scaled skin of my forearm. “So you had a backup. That was clever of him. But obviously not clever enough, because you were too stupid to just give up.”
I’d created a replica of the lance out of heated metal, using Chaos to shape it. It was good for nothing but ornamentation, but I hoped it might hide the truth of exactly how we’d survived. I didn’t want him getting too wary too early. I took a deep breath and mocked him back, like we’d planned. If anyone was to draw special ire while we were distracting him, it should be me, because I had the best chance of surviving his retaliation. “I think we’re a bit cleverer than you counted on. Or maybe you’re just weaker, because we’re not dead, are we?”
He grinned and pointed brightly to his own face. “One of you is!”
“Fuck you!” Jacky said, spitting towards him.
Pestilence twitched an eyebrow, then made a motion toward her with his fingers.
We all tensed, but rather than an attempt at infection, he was apparently directing his already-infected minions. A body ‘popped’ into place beside her, dagger already swinging for her lower back.
Jacky twirled, her gauntleted hand smashing into the side of her attacker’s head and slamming him to the ground with a caved-in skull. The knife never even had a chance of making contact.
A group of Remnants popped out from around the corner where they’d been gathering, standing between Pestilence and the Shortcut anchor. We attacked at the same time.
A woman pointed and said a word I didn’t recognize, neither Estreyan nor English.
Pestilence’s body quartered as if someone had sliced him straight through in the shape of an ‘X’. He was rebuilding even as his bugs sloughed away.
Adam released a flock of darting birds that he’d prepared ahead of time. They dive-bombed Pestilence, and the explosives inside their stomachs—specifically created with his blood as the ink while he focused on doing as much damage to Pestilence as possible—exploded.
Bugs went flying in all directions, their pulverized pieces raining down through the air.
Half Pestilence’s body turned into goo from one of the Estreyan warrior’s Skills, and I reached out with a wave of misty Chaos, disintegrating the top layer of the street and everything around Pestilence for a good five feet, including his body.
He didn’t bother to fight back or continue to withstand our attacks. Instead, he reformed half a block down, in the direction of the Shortcut anchor. He smiled, and called back, “Really? Did you learn nothing the last time?” His voice still made me twitch, when I heard it coming from the visage of my friend. He turned his back to us and started to walk away.
I nodded sharply.
Torliam’s power rushed forth to create a huge glowing wall across the street in front of Pestilence. “We will not let you pass. You have destroyed enough.”
Behind us, the mass of infected Pestilence had brought with him swarmed up the street, falling to attacks from the surrounding buildings as they came, but unconcerned for their own safety.
Torliam released another wall of power, this one slamming down from above and crushing half the horde into the ground.
Adam shot an ink prison toward Pestilence. It grew into a bubble and chomped closed around him, cutting right through his arm, which had been outstretched toward Torliam’s barrier and too far away from the rest of his body.
Many of the infected he’d brought were human and slavering with the meningolycanosis. Despite the extra strength the disease afforded them, they wouldn’t stand a chance against us. But others retaliated with Skills, or pushed back against Torliam’s crushing force with sheer strength.
I dodged as one of their hands extended toward me like the snapping tongue of a frog. I severed it with my claws as it passed.
Birch let out a burst of wind all around us, and the half-rotting minions fell backward.
That was one of Pestilence’s weaknesses. Sure, he could create endless minions and turn your allies against you, but the mind control went along with a certain level of physical degradation, a little less control over the Skills. Not anything like a shambling zombie, but just enough that it could make the difference between getting your head chopped off and being able to duck, as both Torliam and I did when a ball of red fire appeared above our heads and exploded.
Torliam shot a lance of power at the perpetrator, and she went down and didn’t rise again. Not all of our enemies would receive the relatively humane treatment of Jacky’s poison. After all, if we lived through this, Sam would be able to heal her opponents.
The group of Remnants ran past us, holding off the horde as best they could so we could focus on Pestilence, who was still inside the ink prison.
It imploded into a sphere of spikes, and Pestilence once again fell apart. He reformed on the far end of Torliam’s barrier, turned to wave at us, and then ran away, forcing us to sprint after him before he caught up with the rest of the team.
His body was destroyed by several attacks along the way, from the people meant to hold him off from the anchor. He ignored most of them, but when someone was particularly effective, he stopped to point, subsuming them with his disease and overriding their will.
Those people burst into the streets to fight us, slowing us down. Others, once allies, turned on them to keep them from harming us and sabotaging our chances against Pestilence. I reminded myself that they had volunteered for this, knowing the risks.
We caught up to him without much effort, but when I lashed out with Chaos, Pestilence fell apart with a teasing smirk before my attack even reached him.
I looked around, but his body didn’t reform. “He’s going for the anchor!” I snapped, already sprinting ahead. My claws dug into the cracked pavement of the street as I hurtled forward, s
creaming at myself mentally. The others were there, and without me, there was no way they could stand up to the Sickness on their own.
The elaborate tower came into view, surrounded by glowing crystals that my teammates spread over the ground like a thick layer of gravel. The majority of the arcane circle carved into the pavement was still visible, but the most important parts near the center had thus been obscured.
Pestilence’s body reformed even as I ran toward them.
I screamed out a warning. “Zed, behind you!”
It was too late. Pestilence’s hand coalesced already around the back of my brother’s neck, fingers seeming to sink into his skin as the bugs lost their shape from the pressure of his grip.
Zed’s eyes went wide, and he gurgled as his veins blackened, crawling up the skin of his cheeks.
Pestilence drew his hand back down, and my brother crumpled.
“Now!” I snapped. I stopped, still a hundred feet or so out from Pestilence, but well inside the circle, as were the other members of the team.
A quarantine bubbled snapped to life around us, thick enough to distort sight through it, and buzzing audibly with power.
As Pestilence looked around in mild surprise at the barrier sphere that had appeared around us all, less than a hundred meters or so across and all the stronger for it, he stepped away from Zed, who twitched futilely on the ground.
I could feel the faintest hint of my brother’s panic and horror, like an echo in the back of my mind.
Zed stood up, but the motion was jerky, his skin pale and beaded with sweat.
I stepped forward, with Jacky and Torliam at my back, while Sam ran to the edges of the barrier, downing the few infected Estreyans that had managed to keep up with us and get trapped inside with their controller.
Outside, Pestilence’s minions attacked the barrier with flashing Skills and fancy moves if they had them, or tossed themselves bodily against it and were thrown back if they didn’t.
The people we’d stationed in the city converged on us as well, knocking out everyone they could in the hopes that the unconscious would be able to last long enough for us to kill Pestilence.
“And now I guess you’re trapped in here with us. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure to kill you quickly.” The words felt inane coming out of my mouth, but I made sure to put as much real hatred into them as I could. The barrier had been specifically created to keep him from simply abandoning his current body and reforming himself outside it. If he wanted out, he would have to do it the hard way.
“Trapped?” he repeated, his tone almost sing-song. He shook his head. “On the contrary, if we were trapped, it would be you who were stuck in here with me. But I’m not trapped at all.”
Zed sprang toward me, and I ran to meet him, as Pestilence’s body shot toward the edge of the barrier, faster than he’d ever displayed the capacity to move before. As fast as Jacky sometimes moved when she pushed her Struggle Skill to the max, combined with her ability to manipulate gravity upon her own body.
I dodged a few of my brother’s bullets, their trajectories easily projected with his slow and jerky movements and even worse aim. He was obviously meant to be a distraction as Pestilence escaped, but I didn’t mind. I wasn’t fast enough to stop Pestilence anyway.
Jacky sprinted forward, using both her Skills to chase after Pestilence.
He stopped at the edge of the barrier, looked back to me with a broad grin and a twinkle to those light blue eyes, and pressed his hand against the buzzing wall. He didn’t seem concerned about Jacky tackling him at all.
As the first bug began to coalesce from the nothingness of the air outside the bubble, I sidestepped Zed’s lunge and grabbed him around the back of the neck, like Pestilence had just done.
The subtle buzzing that had been brushing against my senses, power waiting to be triggered into action, snapped.
There was a single moment of weightlessness, and then we were falling. Me, my team, and Pestilence. Along with a huge half-sphere of concrete and dirt, and every other thing that had been inside the barrier bubble when the hidden teleportation circle was activated by Pestilence trying to leave.
The mist from the cloud around us was almost chokingly thick, but it quickly cleared as we fell back down toward the ground. The gigantic chunk of falling earth and asphalt let out a booming, multi-tiered crunch as it collided with the Other Place version of itself.
I collapsed with the impact, more than a little rattled. I was careful to cushion Zed’s landing since, with his physical control impaired by the Sickness, he might not be able to do it himself. I lay there, my clawed hand pressing into my brother’s neck. I squeezed, just until the tips of my claws broke the surface of the skin.
He let out a half-growl, half-shriek, like an animal, and scrabbled at me, trying to get a grip on the gun he’d dropped when we landed.
I forced my fear for Zed to transform into rejection. “No.” My voice reverberated and strength streamed from me like water from a sieve. The black veins receded from his skin, and he let out a shuddering sigh of relief, then looked up and closed the gigantic rip in the sky above us.
Our teleportation into the sky, along with half the parking lot, had cleared a huge section of the artificially thick clouds. Clouds which Birch, Torliam, and an Estreyan with hydrokinesis had created to hide the gigantic opening to the Other Place.
Pestilence threw Jacky off, but she’d already done her job, clinging to him and enforcing gravity to make sure he didn’t somehow manage to escape our little trap by literally floating away or something.
I pushed to my feet and hauled Zed with me.
Pestilence looked around at the frigid, grey world, for the first time showing real surprise on his smug facsimile of a face. His eyes landed on Zed, whole and healthy again, and widened further. “What have you done?”
I pulled the fake lance out of its sheath and crumbled it in my hand, like he’d once done. I didn’t bother to reply further, darting toward him. I wreathed my clawed hand in Chaos and swung for his blonde, pigtailed head.
Pestilence didn’t seem overly concerned, till he started to fall apart to avoid my blow. Instead of disintegrating and reforming somewhere else, he shifted and stumbled as if he’d lost his balance or tripped over the air, half-crumbling.
Chapter 45
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
— Walt Whitman
Whatever Pestilence had been expecting, failure to discorporate wasn’t it. But even as my fist swung through the air, something about him changed. He turned, fist meeting my own clawed hand in an inhuman blur of speed. The force was enough to snap my arm backward and shatter something internally, and it blew my whole body away as if I’d just punched an airburst bomb.
Adam and Torliam both encased him in shields to keep him from coming after me, and Sam darted to my side. The crunching in my shoulder as it fitted back together sounded like a concrete mixer without the background noise of the city to drown it out.
Pestilence blurred into action within the shields, his fist smashing into first Adam’s, and then Torliam’s with a speed and force that sounded like a jackhammer. He was free in less than thirty seconds.
Torliam threw a spear of power into his chest, and it gouged a hole right through it. But that hole quickly refilled with bugs, and Pestilence didn’t seem overly bothered, or in fact, injured at all.
He turned toward me, batting away Zed’s physics-bending bullets. They had been Blaine’s, and I knew the man would approve of their use against Pestilence. Of course, I’m sure he would have been happier if any of them would have actually connected. “I commend you for your cunning,” Pestilence said.
Adam gave a quick signal via a Window, and we all closed our eyes for the half second it took him to call a lightning bolt. It struck directly through Pestilence’s body, bursting the thing apart like a watermelon hit by…well, a lightning bolt.
/>
There was something painfully off about the space that remained, without the bugs to fill it, but I couldn’t actually see or sense anything there until the bugs wiggled back to fill his humanoid form. “You’ve cut me off from my source of power,” he called, projecting his voice like an announcer at a circus. “But I know this place must be weakening you already. My reserves are large. Do you think it was smart, to trap yourselves in here with me?”
None of us responded. We weren’t here to talk, or gloat over our perfect plan while accidentally giving him hints to use against us. We were here to kill him. And because of our deal with the Other Place whale, we had time to do that, at least until it had run out of crystals to feed off.
Jacky rocketed by, but Pestilence barely even flinched as her fist took a chunk out of his torso. Her attack should have done more damage, but, apparently, he was putting more power into keeping his body together than he had before, out in the normal world.
“Is your plan to die here, and by doing so entrap me? Because…” he shook his head as if scolding a puppy who’d had an accident, “all I have to do is wait for this place to be discovered again by someone else, and I’ll be free. I literally have all the time in the world.”
Around us, the sediment that looked like ash swirled heavily, obscuring vision at longer distances and disintegrating as it touched us. It was like we stood in the center of a grey snow globe.
I lashed out with a grasping maw of Chaos that shot forward and engulfed him from every direction. I set it to burning, willing my power to do what it did best. Destroy.
It took a while for Pestilence to reform after that, and the rest of the team kept up the bombardment of attacks, keeping him from rebuilding enough of a body to move away from us. We got into a kind of rhythm, one attack after the other so there wasn’t space in between for a response.
Zed shot him, and could now hit him.
Gregor swung his new weapon, an extendable staff with blades that could protract and resheath themselves from its surface. He switched back and forth from Shadow to corporeality like a strobe light, the tip of his staff cutting through Pestilence so quickly the air sung with its passing.