“Careful,” she said. “We have to run.” She slid the ferrules off either end of her knobby old cane. She pulled blades out of both ends and locked them in place by slipping the slotted ferrules back on and inserting locking pins. She spun the double-bladed weapon like a quarterstaff.
I shoved six speed loaders into my pockets for the pepperbox while Foster grabbed his helmet out of the backpack. He fastened a thin chinstrap on, nodded, and drew his sword. There was a narrow path of concrete ahead of us. Zola led as we jumped and dodged and ran through broken concrete and dirt, down that collapsing strip until our legs began to burn. Foster followed just above our heads. Parts of the horde were almost free. Their hands grew ever closer as we finally reached an intact portion of the road. I had to push to keep up with Zola.
“Where are we going?” I yelled.
“Four blocks down Zeigler and over West Maple to North Main and Buzz’s General Store.”
“What’s there?”
“A place to make a stand,” she huffed.
“Fuck.”
Foster laughed and sped up. “I’ll scout ahead a bit.”
I nodded and watched the roiling dirt around me as I ran. A house cracked and half of it shifted into a sinkhole. A jagged line ripped it apart. The sound of splintering glass and the continual rumble of thunder filled the air.
“One foot in front of the other,” Zola said. “Keep moving. Caught in the open, we die.”
Two blocks disappeared behind us before the ground stopped shaking. The air thickened with the stench of roadkill left out in the sun for two weeks. I stumbled like I’d hit a wall, making an effort to control my gag reflex. I suddenly forgot about the smell as we came up to West Maple Street and rounded the corner.
“Horde!” Foster screamed as he careened into view.
They were everywhere. Only a few limped or dragged their half-decayed bodies. The rest were disturbingly mobile. A half circle, four or five deep in most places, wrapped around the block. They closed on us to the sound of faint groans and shuffling feet. A quick glance backward showed me just as many dead in pursuit.
“Why are so many of them whole?” I said between breaths. They were able to totter along at a slow but ground-devouring pace.
Zola didn’t answer or stop to talk. Her staff swung in an arc and split two decaying heads at eye level.
Foster landed on the ground beside her and took a step forward. For the second time in my life I watched him grow into a colossus on a warpath. His claymore flashed up in a two-handed diagonal strike from left to right. Bits and pieces and torsos collapsed into groaning piles on the ground. The dismembered bodies still grabbed for us, clawing their way forward.
“Take out the heads, Foster!” I extended my arm and pulled the solo trigger on the pepperbox. Burning gunpowder and a crack of thunder joined the stench of decay. Skull and brains sprayed out from my target. Foster’s next strike cleaved horizontally through three heads with a grisly crunch. Zola took down two more before her staff lodged between the ribs of another zombie.
“Get back!” she said as she took an aggressive stance in front of us. The instant Foster and I were three steps away she took a deep breath, pushed her right arm forward, and screamed “Modus Ignatto!”
I felt the tingle of power brush my senses a second before a spiraling torrent of orange and yellow fire melted everything in its path. Bodies went up like tinder as dirt and grass sizzled with the heat. The entire scene was bathed in an eerie orange glow. I, for one, didn’t need anything more eerie than a town full of zombies. Zola’s arm shook as she held the incantation. Moments later she sagged and blew out a breath of air as the flames dissipated.
The fire died to reveal a narrow path through the wall of zombies.
“Run!” Foster said. He grabbed Zola’s staff and tore it out of a still-moving corpse. “Zola,” he said as he threw her the staff and pushed toward the gap. She caught it without a second glance, spun, and dispatched another zombie with a shaky overhand strike as she moved forward.
I followed them with five quick shots from the pepperbox, sending three more zombies to the ground. I snapped the barrel down, shook the shells out, and used my first speed loader. We were through the line a moment later as more and more dead filled the streets behind us.
As soon as we’d pushed through the thickest part of the horde, it was easier to move fast. The churned-up surface of the earth evened out again. A few dead dotted the street between us and North Main. We turned south onto the street and slowed to a jog.
“We must be passing outside the spell’s range,” Zola said as she leaned heavily on her staff.
“Good?” I said.
“It doesn’t mean the zombies can’t follow us,” Zola said between deep breaths.
“But they shouldn’t pop out of the ground at our feet,” Foster said.
The zombies were behind us. I turned and blew a hole through the nearest one out of sheer frustration. As the gore settled and the zombie collapsed, I noticed shallow earthworks across the street, framed by distant trees.
“Zola, is the fort right there?”
She smiled and let out a breathless laugh. “Yes, yes it is.”
“I didn’t expect to be back here so soon,” I muttered.
Zola jerked on the worn metal handle on the storefront. “Locked.”
“Move,” Foster said. A flash of light sprang from his sword and swept across the lock. I heard the loud thunk of a deadbolt turning. He pulled the door open and ushered Zola inside.
“I need to get me one of those,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” Foster said. “I’m sure you wouldn’t cause any trouble with a lock charm.”
I widened my eyes and blinked. “Who, me? Of course not.”
“Shut the door,” Zola said. Her tone was harsh, but I could see a hint of a smile on her face.
“Is the glass enough to stop them?” I said.
She nodded. “As long as none of them are vampiric, it should hold.”
“We’d already know if any of them were,” Foster said.
I threw the deadbolt, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. Zola was already walking down the aisle furthest to the right, when I took a step away from the door and looked around Buzz’s General Store. It was a small, clean shop with everything you’d expect in a general store: food, beer, junk, and lottery tickets. I headed to the junk food and staked out a Moon Pie.
Foster shrank to his normal size in a flash and landed near the register at the front of the store. “Moon Pie, Damian?”
I grinned through a mouthful of chocolate and marshmallow. “All it’s missing is moonshine.”
“There’s a gas station on the way home, sells good ’shine,” Zola said as she sat two large jugs of chemicals on the counter beside Foster. “I’m glad to see the zombies haven’t affected your appetite.”
I shrugged and took another bite. The door rattled and my gaze swung back to the front of the store. I flinched and cursed. Men, women, and children pulsed and surged against the glass. A slithering, groaning mass of rotten flesh, they left trails like slugs as they moved.
I frowned and looked at my Moon Pie. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered as I tossed it in the trash. “How are we getting out of here again?”
“We need to move as soon as the bulk of the horde is here,” Zola said. “If they are all here, we can escape them all at once.” She patted the jugs. “And make a backup plan.”
“Isn’t there a back door?” I said. “We could just run now.”
Foster snorted. “Yeah, why don’t you go check that out?” He met Zola’s gaze for a moment and his wings drooped. “Take your gun, too. I don’t want to listen to Zola bitching about you getting smeared across the floor because I told you to check the back door.”
Zola shook her head and sighed as I disappeared down another aisle.
I walked past the “Employees Only” sign and could see the back door at the opposite end of a narrow storage area. I drew the p
epperbox as I passed a row of snow shovels and a shelf of broken merchandise marked “Returns.” Sneaking out the back door seemed like a good idea until I undid the latch and started to peek outside. A gray hand shot through the gap and performed a rotting bitch-slap across my right cheek. I could feel goo dripping down my face as I grunted and kicked the zombie back into the wall of dead behind it. Two shots boomed out of the pepperbox and blasted the zombie’s glazed eyes into oblivion.
I cursed and slammed the door. It bounced off another slimy hand snaking through the opening. I screamed and rammed the door with my shoulder. The arm snapped off and fell to the floor with a wet smack. The door clicked and I fumbled with the deadbolt until it slid home. I wiped the crud off my face as a muffled, ringing silence rolled over the back room again. I could hear Foster and Zola laughing as the ringing in my ears started to fade. “Yeah, laugh it up.” I grimaced at the arm on the floor, glad to see it wasn’t running around on its own like they do in the movies. Maybe it needed the nervous system to function, or its owner’s aura. I shook my head and left the back room.
“Well, the back door’s not a good idea,” I said as I came to the counter with the register.
Zola grinned and tied an oily rag to the top of one of the jugs on the counter.
“What’s in those?” I asked.
“Acid in the big ones and oil,” she said as she shook a bottle of opened motor oil, “in these.”
Foster lurched through the air with a roll of aluminum foil. “Got it!” he said between gasps.
“Good. Damian, grab some screws, bolts, nuts, anything we can use for shrapnel.”
“Shrapnel?” I said.
“Yes, Ah want this to look like vandals. Ah don’t want more of a mess for the Watchers than we already have.”
“Can’t you just burn us a way out?”
Zola shook her head. “Ah’m already exhausted and Ah don’t mean to pass out in the middle of a horde. Plus we already melted a stretch of road. Maybe they’ll blame one oddity on a gas main, but two of the same? Or more? And what would the police think when they found smelted glass and metal with no source of ignition?”
“Um, meteorite?”
Foster snorted. “Zola’s right. Let’s just make the damn bomb.”
“Do you think the walking corpses will be explained away?” I said.
Zola sighed. “No, but they won’t be walking by the time anyone finds them. The entire town’s been murdered and raised. I doubt a curse that strong will last more than a day.”
“Besides, once Zola pumps these full of power, there won’t be many left anyway,” Foster said as he patted the soon-to-be bombs.
I glanced out the front windows at the writhing mass of zombies and hoped, really hoped, Foster was right. “We could wait them out, until the curse is gone.”
“No, we can’t,” Zola said. She started unwrapping a roll of duct tape.
“Why?”
She looked up and met my eyes. “You remember the souls at the fort?”
I nodded.
“They attract things and, with this curse active, the ley lines will be so much bait to some very nasty fish.”
Foster landed on my shoulder. “D, we don’t want to be here if something dormant wakes up and decides to follow the bait.”
“When you put it like that.” I blew out a breath and glanced at the windows again, still choked with a shallow sea of the dead. “How long have they been dead?”
Zola’s face fell a bit. “It’s been a while. I think the curse was made to restore some muscle and skin, and most of the zombies still look months rotten. They’ve been dead for years.”
“How’s that even possible?” I said as I shook my head in disbelief.
“It’s possible,” Foster said. “The Unseelie Court would have the power to hide it.” His hand flexed on the hilt of his sword as he paced around Zola’s handiwork.
“Alright, so what could’ve taken out the entire town without someone getting away or making a phone call, or someone’s relatives coming to check on them, or something?”
Zola paused as she tied a rag to the second canister. Her eyes narrowed and gleamed from her wrinkled skin. “Ah pray, Damian, we do not find out.” She yanked on the rag and nodded.
“You could dismantle all the zombies with your necromancy,” Foster said.
Zola laughed and shook her head as she finished tying the rag. “We can’t. Ah don’t care how good a necromancer is, they’d lose their damned mind taking on a horde.
“We’re going to need something to direct the explosion,” Foster said.
“Yes, there are some bags of concrete at the other end of the store.” She looked up at me and said, “Drag them to the front and set them up in a short u-pattern.
I was surprised to find a section of the general store dedicated to construction materials. Wood and air compressors were on the wall behind Buzz’s stock of eighty-pound ready-mix concrete bags. I picked one up, turned around, and promptly dropped the bag on the floor.
“Oh, sweet Benelli,” I whispered. I didn’t even think about it, just kicked the glass out of the display case full of shotguns. I had my hand around the sleek, black twelve-gauge semi-automatic when Foster appeared at my side, sword drawn and seven feet tall. I jumped and jerked my head back.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
“What?”
“I thought something was trying to kill you with all that hullaballoo.”
“Hullaballoo?” I said with a burst of laughter. I shook my head and held up the shotgun.
“Not going to do you much good with a trigger lock.”
“Thankfully I have a good friend who can pop locks with a wave of his sword.”
Foster rolled his eyes and popped the lock off a second later. I laid the shotgun and eight boxes of ammo on the front counter beside Zola. She shook her head and smiled as I returned to the pile of concrete bags.
By the time I lugged a pallet’s worth of concrete to the front of the store, I was sweating. A lot. I wiped the perspiration out of my eyes and stole a bottle of water from Buzz’s cooler. I checked the date: expired a year ago. I shrugged and drank it. It tasted a bit like plastic.
“Think it’s okay to drink water that expired a year ago?” I smacked my lips and frowned. “Nasty.”
“You just ate a Moon Pie that expired two years ago,” Foster said.
“Yes, well, I thought it was a bit crunchy.”
After my short break, I built a small half circle out of unopened concrete bags around the front doors. It was layered and curved up just a little, like the side of an igloo. We laid the jugs and shrapnel into the curve of the small structure. Zola taped a heavy load of nails to the front of each jug, in addition to the other debris already mounted to both of them.
“You really think that’s going to keep the shrapnel going in the right direction?” I said.
“We’ll see,” Zola said. “Ah would still call a shield when the bombs go off.”
I nodded and grimaced.
“Ready, Foster?” she said.
“Yes,” The fairy said as he stood behind her with two rolled-up cones of aluminum foil.
Zola slung the shotgun over her shoulder and took one of the cone-shaped lengths before unscrewing the top of both of the large jugs. “Damian, get ready to light the fire.”
I picked up the skull lighter Zola had found by the register. She nodded to Foster, who dropped his cone into the jug of acid as she did the same. Zola screwed the caps back onto the jugs and hurried behind the counter.
I bent over and held the lighter out. “Sorry Buzz,” I whispered as I lit the rags. I ran to the register and vaulted over the counter.
“When Ah tell you, raise your shield around us all.”
I nodded. Foster shrank and settled on my shoulder.
Zola whispered something and I felt a surge of power spread out around us. She’d never taught me the spell she was using now. She said it was too dangerous, and after
my teenage experiments with fireworks and ley lines, she may have had a point. Zola nodded once.
“Impadda!” I yelled the incantation, for no particular reason, and the shield snapped up around us. Zola’s spell pulled the edges of the shield into a full half sphere as the incantations flickered and sparked together near the ground.
She nodded again and I felt another surge of power. This surge was familiar, and as I focused my Sight, I could see her siphoning power from a ley line. The line crossed through the bombs and I heard Foster gasp as the surge pulsed into the jugs. I wanted to keep my Sight up and watch the rush of power, but that wouldn’t happen without dropping the shield. A second after letting my Sight fade, I was very glad I opted for leaving the shield up.
The bombs shouldn’t have done too much damage on their own, maybe broken the glass and taken out a few zombies, but Zola slammed power into the fire and the jugs. The flames grew as the reaction in the jugs accelerated. The whole assembly detonated with a roar like cannon fire, one jug immediately after the next, sending flames and shrapnel in every direction.
The bulk of the shrapnel screamed through the doors and tore apart the thickest part of the horde. The closest bodies blew apart before the fireball swallowed their undead comrades. Our view was obscured when the flames swelled and briefly filled the entire entryway. Bits of superheated metal and a drizzle of burning oil pinged off the shield.
The smoke cleared and we could see the carnage outside.
It was still going to be a fight to get out, but Zola’s bombs had made a hell of a dent for us.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Foster said with a laugh. He grew into a colossus again as he drew his sword and leapt over the counter. The blade came down as a zombie stumbled into the store. Its head split like a ripe melon. Foster’s sword cleaved deep, down through the zombie’s rib cage. As the strike slowed, Foster turned the sword, stepped to the side, and whipped the blade out of the crumpling body. He continued the motion like a golf swing, bringing the sword up through the crotch of another attacker. The follow through was nothing like golf. Brains and greenish brown rot exploded from the zombie’s eye sockets as the sword split its skull. Foster whirled away from the gore and his sword cut through three more zombie heads.
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