by Aaron Crash
He sprinted back into the living room and poured the rock salt around the sofa. Raziel stretched and continued to purr in his sister’s lap.
At least Elle and Trina were safe now. Blaze triggered his armor and the nanotech raced back into the gauntlet on his left hand. Dressed only in his woodland cammies, he was wet and cold, but a big fireplace sat on the wall. When in doubt, make a fire, or so Arlo had said. It was one of his secrets to survival. He said a fire gave a person purpose and company.
His armor did have a heating system, but he wanted to take a break from walking around covered in nanotech. A fire would dry him out and let his skin breathe.
But they had to recon the house. “Ling, since you aren’t afraid of ghosts, you want to check out the house? Take the salt. You see anything, throw it. I’ll start a fire.”
Ling deactivated his armor, leaving him dressed in his ivory-colored tunic. His clothes were also made from nanofiber and could harden into armor though it couldn’t become a spacesuit. It wasn’t as technologically advanced as the gauntlets. “Yes, Gunny, I’ll secure the house from the specters. I find it ironic that the two species who live the longest, Human and Clicker, have the most trouble with death. Meelah lives end so fast, and yet we embrace the end. Interesting.” He had his nunchakus and his plasma bow, but he also took the bag of salt.
Blaze walked over, lit tinder with his fusion ax, and soon got a fire going. The heat and warmth felt so nice and seemed to drive the shadows back. The house was quiet for a minute as Ling went from room to room. Blaze realized the fire irons were just that, iron. There was a shovel, a poker, and a brush, all made from iron. He grabbed the poker and walked to the front windows. Drawing back the curtains, he expected to see a graveyard of ghouls standing in the front lawn, but all he saw was wet yellowed grass, the gravel driveway, and the road construction equipment.
A light gleamed in the barn for a minute, the dancing flame of a lantern, but a second glance showed him only damp darkness. Was someone in the barn? Probably not. Only more phantoms, but how could that be? The level of paranormal activity was off the charts.
However, the only ghost they’d actually seen was the little girl in the yellow dress, so maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed. He remembered her hand gestures, the hands together, her fingers laced against her palms, her thumbs together. Cracking open her thumbs, she had gazed down on her wiggling fingers. What did it mean?
Ling returned. “There is nothing living in the house except for us. The ghosts tried to scare me with skeletons and rotting faces and little human-shaped dolls mimicking infants, baby dolls, I think you call them. Much was said. Lots of moaning and groaning. But nothing that really surprised me.”
Another shriek of terror and pain from the barn. It sounded like a woman being skinned alive. His first instinct was to run out there and save her. But with what they’d seen so far on the planet, it would only turn out to be a spectral trick. No, things were fundamentally bad on Hutchinson Prime.
Ling shook his head. “Well, that doesn’t sound very good. It does sound very Human and alive. I’m almost convinced. Almost.”
“Yeah.” Blaze sighed. “I hate not knowing what’s real and what’s not. Anything try to touch you?”
“Not a thing.” Ling walked over and took the iron shovel in his three fingers. “I think they are waiting for something, or that’s the impression I get.”
Blaze sighed. “We need to wake up Elle. Not sure how we can. And I have no idea why Trina is out, though I’m glad she is. Something is off with her. A normal vampire wouldn’t need to guzzle down blood the day after she got two gallons out of an IPC douchebag.”
“I find it amazing that we have less than twelve hours to find a single woman on a planet the size of Earth that is overrun with Onyx energy in a way we’ve not seen before. We have no idea what we are facing or where to begin. This is every intriguing. The odds are against us. Also, we have no way off the planet if the Lizzie Borden has been destroyed. At midnight tonight, the stars will collide, destroying the entire system. Worst-case scenario. Best case, Hutchinson Prime becomes a solid ice cube because there will no longer be any sunlight. Very suspenseful!”
“You forgot a couple things,” Blaze said. “For one, Cali might get tired of eating dragons and come looking for us and we’re down to our last spears. Plus, there’s an Etrusca ruin coming and it should arrive here around that time. No telling what that means, but it definitely adds to the mystery.”
Ling actually clapped. “Yes! It does!”
Blaze growled. “Crazy pinche Meelah. Ling, man, you are just too happy.”
More screams from the barn, maybe a plea for help, followed by sobbing. Then, of course, nothing but the rain.
Blaze knew he needed to go out and check on that shit for real. But most likely, he’d swing open the big red doors and nothing but hay would be inside.
Raziel let out a yowl. She arched her back and every hair on her body stood on end. Blaze had never seen a cat so freaked out.
That was when the barn door opened.
And hell walked out.
TEN_
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It was a pregnant woman, at first, beautiful and round. She was dressed in a maternity dress and walked barefoot through the mud. She wasn’t a ghost—no, her blonde hair darkened and clung to her head as she walked toward them.
But something about her was off. Even from distance, Blaze could feel it, and Raziel’s yellow eyes were rolling around in her skull.
The woman paused, her dress drenched, and she looked up at the house. She had sharp features—a sharp chin, a sharp nose, high, prominent cheekbones. Long waves of auburn hair fell to her shoulders. She was beautiful…until she started to change.
Her hair tumbled off her head in clumps, and her features began to blur in the rain.
Blaze looked closer. They weren’t blurring. Her healthy pink skin was graying and slipping off her skull. A flap of her cheek tumbled down onto her chest. One eye was completely exposed, a round ball of white on her cheek, until it shriveled into a raisin then fell to the ground.
The blue dress covering her frayed. The stitching came loose from one shoulder and a breast was exposed before the garment decayed to nothing, and more flesh rotted as they watched.
The woman walked toward them even as she lost the flesh from her toes and her finger meat blew off like autumn leaves. She stopped at the steps up to the porch, out in the rain. Most of her muscle and skin was gone.
A grinning skull—teeth and nose notches and hollow round eyes—was left. The brain inside had turned black and liquid. It oozed out of her ear and eye holes.
She put both hands on her belly, which was still intact for the time being, pale in the dim light. Everything else was bloody bone. It spoke. “Behold your fate and the fate of all the universe. I know you, Ramon Ramirez, and your little sister, Elle, too. Ling as well. You three are alive. Trina, though, she is dead. Death. Decay. Rot. Agony is for my sister. Rot is who I am. You have come for Granny. You have come to find the location of the Onyx Gate.”
Blaze glanced at his sister unconscious on the couch. He wished she was awake to deal with the pinche thing out there in the front yard. He grabbed Ugly Betty, made sure he had a fresh hydrogen shell, then slung the shotgun over his shoulder. “Stay here, Ling.”
The girl ghost in the yellow dress was in the dining room, playing her game with her fingers, muttering silently to herself. She caught him looking and walked into the kitchen and out of sight. Damn ghosts. As long as Ling and the rest of them stayed within the circle of salt they were safe.
Blaze took his shotgun and moseyed out the door and onto the steps. “You must be Chthonic.”
“You say that I am,” the skeleton said. It reached its skeletal fingers into its belly and retrieved a fetus dripping with the remnants of his skin and gooey with amniotic fluid. The skeleton gripped the fetus and lifted it out to Blaze. The round belly, the placenta, the thing’s
uterus, it all splashed down past the thigh bones of the thing and decayed into a gray muck in seconds.
The fetus lost its skin, muscles, and organs, until it was just bone. The woman skeleton held the baby by the spokes of its vertebra. The fetus skeleton then said, “You say that I am.”
“Where’s Granny?” Blaze asked.
“Did you truly destroy Xerxes?” the skeletal fetus asked. “I find that hard to understand. You, alive, fighting something so powerful as the necrotechnological archduke of hell. My brother. Dead. I like the idea of Xerxes dead. Death is a righteous state. Death is forever. Death is immortality and changelessness. Death is purity.”
Blaze seated his shotgun on his shoulder and placed his sights on the nightmare before him. “So I’m guessing you either don’t know where Granny is, or you do know, and you won’t tell me, or you do know, and you’ll need help from us to get to her because she’s crazy. From what Elle said, Granny is as crazy as she is tough.”
“Do you fear death, demon hunter?’ the skeleton asked.
“There’re worse things. For example, light beer and cherry-flavored cigars. Granny, where is she?”
“So much death on this planet. Doomed to die. The star above us is dead and yet it lives to devour the yellow sun. The dragons nesting there, put there by my father millennia ago, brought to life by Onyx, drawn to me in their perfection. Beautiful, really, beautiful and hungry. For death always hungers.”
The house came alive, the drapes sliding back and forth, the shutters opening and closing, the barn doors slamming shut, and a wailing howl rose to a thunderous cry.
“Fuck this!” Blaze pulled the trigger and blew the skeleton into flaming pieces of bone. At least Xerxes kept things interesting. His brother was trying to bore him to death.
But Blaze wasn’t sure that what he’d just destroyed was Chthonic. Not by a long shot.
Something moved in Blaze’s peripheral vision. An old man hurtled toward Blaze, fingers outstretched. The old man was screaming like everything and everyone else around him. The yard had filled with spectral figures of all ages, shapes, and sizes, all Human. Farmers, road workers, townspeople, cops, firemen, teachers, elementary school students: all were pale, ephemeral, and all were howling. Must’ve been hundreds if not thousands of ghosts there. They flew toward him on only the fringes of feet, indistinct, lost in the wind and rain.
Blaze ducked the old man and dashed back into the house. The staircase was full of people. A fat old woman with black pits for eyes stood next to a little boy with a baseball and a bloody mitt. His face kept changing, the nose slipping around, the eyes moving to the mouth, lips in the center of his forehead. A teenage girl floated next to him. She didn’t have hands or feet, only long hair and a butchered torso. All ghosts. All screaming.
Blaze leapt into the ring of salt around the sofa.
The ghosts attacked, swirling around them, flying, flashing, shrieking. It all became a blur, and only faces would flash by, or a hand, or a body, some clothed, some naked. Faster and faster they spun.
A woman lurched forward, and the salt repulsed her in a flash of white light.
The stink of the specters was awful. In the middle of the hurricane of ghosts, it smelled like the sewer under a graveyard where the rot of corpses had seeped into the excrement that festered in rusty, moldy pipes.
Another hand reached forward. Something dripped from it—a gray-green fluid.
Ectoplasm. It speckled the salt at first but there were so many ghosts, even the speckles added up. The ghosts were focusing their dribbles on the salt near Ling.
Blaze had never seen such a maelstrom of spiritual power, all desperate to get to them, all frothing with the thirsty vengeance of the dead.
The ectoplasm covered the salt.
Blaze reached for the extra bag of salt to restore the barrier, but it was too late.
A middle-aged man in overalls shot out a pudgy pale hand and touched Ling. Ling blinked. Then he drew his lips back from his teeth in a snarl.
Blaze had never heard him make that kind of sound. The gunny flung salt onto the floor to cover the ectoplasm. He then threw a handful into Elle’s face. “Elle, you have to wake up! Ling got touched.”
“Touch!” Ling caterwauled. “Touch me. They awakened me. Chthonic! Chthonic! Chthonic!”
More ectoplasm dripped down onto the salt. It wasn’t going to be long. Raziel was spitting, beside herself with fear, every claw extended.
Blaze knew his only shot was to go fist to fist with the Meelah. While Ling frothed, his eyes rolling in his skull, the gunny whisked both of the nunchakus away from the Shaolin sloth and cast them into the swirling ghosts around them. Ling went for his bow, but Blaze punched him in the face. Ling staggered back.
“Humans.” Ling laughed, but not in a nice way. “Humans. Violent. Greedy. Lustful. Silly. I know your kind, and your kind is ridiculous. I must strip away your humanity and get to your Meelah within. You are Meelah deep down. I will skin you and show you.”
Ling leapt toward him and Blaze grabbed him and tossed him back onto the couch. The Shaolin landed on Elle and Trina. One of his paws smacked Elle in the face, and her eyes blinked open.
The ghost boy baseball player dove into the circle. The perimeter had been breached. Blaze scattered more salt from the bag and lumped it onto the ectoplasm to restore the circle of protection. Only the ghost boy got through.
Elle shoved Ling off her. The crazed Meelah spun and clawed her face. “You think you’re a witch, but underneath your skin and magic, you are a Meelah, a child of the universe. I will show you!”
Blaze dove forward and pulled Ling away and used the Meelah as shield to stop the ghost boy. The kid pushed the baseball into Ling’s chest, and Ling screamed anew. Blaze tossed the last of the salt into the kid’s face, which finally stuck in a grimace. The ghost froze there for a second, a scream stuck to his face.
The Meelah roundhoused a kick into Blaze, driving him back toward the edge of the salt. The gunny caught himself before it was too late. He feinted with his right, then drove his left fist into Ling’s face, hoping to knock him out.
Ling, though, was a kung fu master. He blocked the blow and punched out his own claws, but Blaze deflected them just in time. Ling tried to kick him, but Blaze turned his body and then clocked Ling again.
“It is so very Human of you to resist what is best for you.” Ling grinned, spitting out blood.
The phantom baseball boy swiped his glove at Blaze. The gunny dodged it, but took a Meelah foot to his face. Blood spurted from his nose.
At the same time, Elle cast a few teeth onto the floor and growled out Onyx speak. The ghost boy was sucked into her eyes, and then from a pouch on her bandolier, she pulled out a red silk bag embroidered with black script—Onyx runes, no doubt. Inside would be a combination of congealed pig lard and blessed gunpowder. It was a dispel Onyx spell.
The Onyx witch stood, face bleeding from Ling’s scratches, and slammed the bag onto the floor. The explosion of dark crimson energy hit like an atomic bomb. It blew every ghost out of the house. What was left was ruined, the wallpaper ripped to shreds, gooey with ectoplasm, every stick of furniture cracked, and the fire had been reduced to smoking black logs. All the windows were shattered. Even the porch had been demolished and the ground outside charred. The ceiling creaked and cracked. The large amount of supernatural energy had weakened the structure.
A bathtub came falling through the floor and exploded into porcelain shrapnel. A toilet followed, gushing water and filth.
The dispel Onyx magic hadn’t cured Ling. The Shaolin sloth battered Blaze back, kicking, punching, whirling, leaping. Blaze blocked most of the blows, but a crushing fist to his diaphragm knocked the wind out of him.
His lungs spasmed, and he was sweating, but he couldn’t stop or give in to the temptation to panic. The Meelah knocked away Blaze’s ax and shotgun, leaving him weaponless. A final flying kick might’ve ended the gunny, but instead he caught ahold of Lin
g and tossed him against the wall.
The Meelah landed on his feet and pushed himself off to come flying at Blaze. The gunny punched Ling onto the floor.
“Elle, you’ve got to exorcise Ling. He got tagged by a ghost. And he’s all pissed about it.”
“Trying!” Elle called from behind him. “But the ghosts will be back. And more are coming. Millions, Blaze, if not billions, if not trillions!”
Ling swept up a nunchaku and triggered it. Blaze dodged the spitting, glowing twelve inches of fusion, then bent and seized Ling’s other nunchaku. Gripping the handle, he ignited his own fusion emitter on the length of chain.
The nunchaku was a deadly, dangerous weapon, and it required complete and total control. One wrong swing and Blaze could give himself a lobotomy or cauterize his intestines closed.
Blaze crossed beams with Ling, knocking away the fusion with his own fusion, then stepping back. It was all defensive for Blaze, while Ling wanted nothing more than to skin Blaze with his weapon to show him his inner Meelah, which of course didn’t exist. Blaze was all man, through and through.
The gunny didn’t bother with armor. Ling’s nunchaku would sizzle right through it. Ling whirled his weapon around his body, making Blaze guess when the attack would come. The Meelah went low to cut through Blaze’s knees. Blaze smacked away the glowing light as the two lengths of fusion came together in a crackling, spitting light show.
Blaze backed away to give himself some space. That’s when a bed came smashing through the ceiling, the headboard cracking and sending spikes of wood at Ling. The Meelah knocked them away but ignited the wood. The flaming pieces of bed hit the drapes, and the old material went up in fire.
Smoke billowed through the house. Ling didn’t stop. He leapt onto the bed, swinging his nunchaku, and Blaze was able to knock it away. The Meelah left himself open for a second, and Blaze stomped on his leg, hoping to break a bone. He’d gotten lucky with the Shaolin sloth so far. But it was only a matter of time before Ling’s speed and fury overwhelmed him.