The barn was just a pile of wood now, and most of the stuff buried beneath must have been extremely flammable, because it went up fast. Zombies who hadn’t gotten their heads smashed were still struggling to get free. Arms poked through the debris but the fire was spreading fast. All those buried zombies would get burned to a crisp. We had to move away because the heat was becoming too intense.
Boone got on the radio. “What is your status, Alabama?”
Milo responded. “Watch out for zombies. Their boss is a lich. Earl is fighting him. We don’t know where they are. We’ve recovered the hostage and are falling back.”
“Gregorius, ready the SMAW. Milo, we’re headed your way. Come in, overwatch.”
“This is Shannon.”
“If you see a werewolf, do not shoot the werewolf. I repeat. Do not shoot the werewolf.”
“Don’t worry. We already know about him. Make sure you warn the new guy though.”
Milo keyed his radio. “Boone, the lich is Phipps.”
“I didn’t catch that. Say again.”
“Colonel Buford Phipps.”
“Oh shit. Not that asshole! Everybody prepare to fall back. Hit the lich with the biggest guns you’ve got and retreat toward the vehicles.”
Boone was clearly scared, which didn’t happen very often.
“Milo, who is Phipps?” Trip asked.
“A total freaking whackadoodle jerkface. I’m talking eugenics, mad-science nutball stuff before he discovered necromancy.”
“Is he powerful?”
“Crazy powerful. This is why we shouldn’t go on rescue missions without doing our homework.” Then Milo pointed. “There’s Earl!”
I turned my flashlight that way just as our werewolf boss got hurled across a field. Phipps must hit like a truck because Earl was airborne for fifty feet before he hit the ground and rolled through the weeds. He lay there, a great hairy mass, breathing hard, and bleeding from several deep lacerations. Werewolves regenerate crazy fast, and Earl made a regular werewolf look like a wimp, but as he started to get up, he wobbled, then sank back down into the grass. Even the king of the werewolves needed some time to heal.
“That’s bad,” Holly said, because anything that could kick the ass of Earl Harbinger, could eat us mere mortals for breakfast.
The lich came out of the forest. His slender form didn’t look that physically dangerous, but there was a frightening energy building in the air. Phipps wasn’t walking. He was levitating a few feet off the ground, and he slowly began rising higher in the air. The plants around us wilted and crumbled to dust as he sucked the life force out of them to power his magic.
We opened fire. Dozens of bullets smacked into the hovering form, but they seemed to zip right through with little effect. A rifle bullet shattered one of Phipp’s arm bones, tearing the thin limb right off. Only instead of falling, the arm seemed to hover for a moment before suctioning back into place.
Phipps gave us an almost dismissive gesture, and my entire team got knocked off our feet by a wave of telekinetic energy. I crashed into a fence. Milo ended up in an old horse trough. Sonya ran away.
“Hunters!” Phipps voice was loud enough now that it could be heard even above the crackling flames of the barn. “I despise Hunters. I only wanted to be left alone, to continue my study of unnatural philosophy in peace. I was at the cusp of ridding mankind of its impurities when that cur Sherman burned my first laboratory. And every time I have tried to rebuild since, you damnable Shacklefords have been nipping at my heels. When will you subhuman filth learn to let me be?”
I struggled to my feet and launched a grenade at the lich, but he merely floated to the side as the 40mm projectile zipped past. My grenade exploded out in a field.
Phipps looked down at his burning barn. “You’ve destroyed all the subjects of my anatomical study! Do you have any idea how long it takes to collect this many cadavers without being detected? I’ll have to find a new home and start over. Oh, you will pay dearly for this trespass.” He was twenty feet in the air now, and violent winds were whipping through the farm. Then the skull snapped toward the road as Phipps sensed a new danger. “You cowards even brought reinforcements.”
I turned to see what had gotten the lich’s attention. There were a bunch of headlights racing down the dirt road directly toward us.
“Lizard folk,” the lich muttered, clearly disgusted. “So the Hunters have allied themselves with the Lacertian Cult. I should have known you inferior types would eventually commingle with reptiles.”
The reptoids and their followers were the opposite of allies, and if the lich didn’t kill us, they certainly would . . . But for once I was really thankful that gnomes were a bunch of loudmouth reprobates, because if they hadn’t blabbed to the reptoids, we wouldn’t have gotten this great distraction. Everybody on my team used the opportunity to get up and run like hell.
Buford Phipps pointed both of his hands at the road, bony fingers splayed wide, and started chanting. The ground began to shake so much that I lost my footing and fell on my face. The earthquake increased in intensity. The smaller buildings collapsed. Fissures were torn in the Earth. Real magic is some scary shit.
The cultists were inbound fast. The maniacs hung guns out their windows and started blasting, only the growing earthquake was bouncing the vehicles around so much that they weren’t in danger of hitting anything. The lead car suddenly slewed sideways, and the next one in line clipped it. The convoy came to a sudden, dusty halt. Cultists bailed out. Among them were the hulking, shrouded figures of actual reptoids, and there was so many that this had to be the entire Atlanta cell.
The lich clapped his hands.
A terrible magic was unleashed. The ground rippled and came alive. It was almost as if the soil became liquid, and the entire field along the side of the road rose into a wave, rolling and growing, racing toward the vehicles. The cultists screamed as it crashed over them. Cars flipped. Bodies were crushed. Then the wave broke. Tons of rock and soil fell, burying them instantly.
As the dust cleared, fifty yards of road was just gone. Other than one pair of headlights sticking straight up out of the dirt, it was as if the reptoids had never been there at all.
Milo hadn’t been kidding about crazy powerful. We needed to take Phipps out fast or his magic was going to smoke us all. I looked toward the car Sonya had stolen from Bonnie. The interrogation we’d overheard had made it sound like Sonya had brought the Ward with her, so it was probably in that car. If I could reach it, I might be able to power it up just long enough to obliterate Phipps.
The insanely dangerous lich turned his attention back toward MHI. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes . . . ” He began floating in my direction. “I was about to twist the blood from your bodies like wringing out a sponge.”
As the other Hunters started shooting at the lich again, I got up and ran for the Hyundai.
Sonya was already there, messing with something in the front seat of the car. At first I thought she was trying to drive away, but then I realized she was struggling with some object inside a plastic grocery bag. It was the Ward.
“Turn it on!” I shouted.
“I’m trying to figure out how.” She got out of the car holding a black rock about the size of a softball. The Ward that MHI had used before had a strange mystical code imprinted on it, where bits of the rock would actually become pliable to be moved into shape. Align the right code and it would activate. This one had to be something like that as it seemed to come to life in Sonya’s hands. “I think I’ve got it.”
The Ward flared with a blinding white light.
When I blinked myself back to reality, all of the windows on Bonnie’s car had been blown out. Sonya was lying on the ground. For a second, I thought that she must have activated it, but then I heard Phipp’s insane cackling. The lich was still alive. It hadn’t worked.
Sonya bolted upright, gasping for breath. I ran to her. She still had the rock in her hand, only now it had turned a bright angry red co
lor, so she’d done something.
“Let me see it.” I tried to take the stone from her but she wouldn’t let go.
“It’s stuck,” she said in disbelief.
I was so much bigger and in such a rush that I hoisted her to her feet and she still wouldn’t let go.
“No! I mean it’s stuck to me!” She turned her hand upside down and shook it, but it was like the Ward was glued to her palm. “Get it off.”
“Hold still.” I grabbed her wrist and turned it so that I could see the Ward better. It was smaller than MHI’s old one, the designs on it were a little different, and it was clearly stuck to Sonya’s hand. Not stuck. Fused. Like welded to her skin.
“Uh . . . ”
“What the hell, man?” Sonya demanded. “The dead guy’s looking right at us. Make it go, Opie.”
“Working on it.” I touched the markings on the stone, but they seemed stuck in place now. I tried to force them to move, but they were totally frozen. “How do you jam a rock?”
The lich was ignoring all the bullets smacking into it and floating our way. “How dare you bring such dangerous alchemy into my presence?” He made a dismissive gesture. A gust of hurricane-force wind smacked into me. I planted my feet and managed to hold onto Sonya for a couple of seconds before she was torn away and I got tossed over the hood of the car.
“Curious. It appears there has been an unexpected interaction between Newton’s natural science and the spirit mongrel. Bring the device to me, child.”
Sonya tried to run, but Phipps clenched one bony fist, and she was instantly frozen in place. The look stuck on her face was one of absolute terror as she began to float up toward the lich. Phipp’s licked his nonexistent lips with his jerky tongue. Not only could a skull look hungry, it could also look greedy.
“A fascinating development. Perhaps this new discovery will make up for tonight’s inconvenience.”
Boone’s voice was in my ear. “Everybody duck and cover.”
The other team had taken advantage of the lich’s distraction. I realized what they were doing, but I also knew that the results would probably kill Sonya too. Without hesitation I sprang up, sprinted forward, and tackled her. We both hit the ground hard.
Then Buford Phipps exploded.
Chapter 13
When I say that the lich exploded, I’m not talking a little explosion, like I could get from Abomination’s grenade launcher. Oh no. I’m talking a big-ass literal fireball, with a deafening roar and a shockwave that bent the air around it and made me eat dirt.
“That was a direct hit, Gregorius,” Boone said over the radio.
“You know I love me some thermobaric warheads, Jay.”
I lay there, ears ringing, coughing, really thankful that Gregorius had used a round that relied on heat and pressure in the biggest gun we’d brought tonight, as opposed to a warhead with a bunch of shrapnel, because I’d be dead. Instead, I probably only had brain damage. But a lich was a terrifyingly capable foe, so even hitting Phipps with a bunker buster was no guarantee that he was finished. I rolled off Sonya and looked in the direction the lich had been levitating, but there was no sign of him.
“Are you alive?”
“Yeah. Quit shouting in my ear.” Sonya glanced around, obviously stunned. The blast had flattened several of the outbuildings. A few more fires had started and the barn was a mighty blaze by this point. Boone’s guys must have set the farmhouse on fire too, because it was burning. There were brain-shot zombie corpses scattered everywhere. “You MHI guys really don’t mess around.”
“Are you injured?”
“Just this stupid thing stuck to my hand.” She shook the Ward but it wouldn’t fall off.
“Okay, stay down while we finish this son of a bitch.” I got up, checked Abomination to make sure it was ready, and stumbled in the general direction I thought the monster would’ve ended up.
Since we’d gotten separated when the lich had given us that telekinetic bitch slap I looked around for my team. The spot where Earl had been was empty. He’d run off, which was good, because even though he had far more self-control than most werewolves while transformed, he was still a werewolf and would need to stay away from people until he changed back. I spotted Milo and Trip already up and moving, searching the charred area for the lich. I couldn’t see Holly though. I keyed my radio. “Come in Holly, status?”
“I’m fine, Z. I’ll catch up in a minute.”
Boone’s team had moved up on the barn and began searching the ground with their flashlights. Gregorius was there with the gigantic SMAW launcher over one shoulder, grinning. Which was a pretty common expression among Hunters whenever we had the opportunity to set off a truly glorious explosion.
“Got one of his arms here,” Mundy shouted. “It’s still crawling.”
“Hurry and throw it in the fire,” Boone ordered.
Mundy picked up the lich’s arm with a look of distaste. That was understandable since the fingers were frantically grasping. He tossed it on the bonfire. A moment later Sherlock found a leg, and Hertzfeldt found a pelvis stuck beneath the tractor. Apparently, there were some limits on how far apart Phipp’s severed bits could end up and still pull themselves back together. A thermobaric warhead gets the job done.
“Put the parts in different woodpiles and burn them all,” Boone directed his team.
I joined Boone. “You think that’ll work?”
“Probably. Even really tough supernatural bodies can only take so much physical punishment. The real problem with liches is that they pluck their heart out and leave it in a magic jar that their spirits retreat back to when their bodies get destroyed.” Then he noticed a rib stuck in the dirt near his boot and bent over to pick it up. “Where’s the girl?”
I’d been kind of distracted. “I left her back at the car.”
Boone looked at me like I was stupid. “The one who has already run away from you a couple times?” He grabbed his radio. “Anybody got eyes on the shapeshifter?”
“Way ahead of you guys.” I turned around to see Holly and Sonya walking toward us. Holly looked smug, while Sonya looked guilty. Holly had her carbine casually pointed at Sonya’s legs, and her gun handling was good enough that the angle certainly wasn’t on accident. “Our little shapeshifter here was about to make a run for it.”
“I was not.”
“Uh-huh . . . ” Holly said. “I bet you were getting in the car to drive for help, right?”
Boone scowled at me and shook his head. “Moron.”
I felt like such a sucker. I turned toward Sonya. “I can’t believe you stole that nice woman’s Hyundai.”
“I was going to return it. It got kinda trashed though.”
I sighed. A promise was a promise, so it looked like I was buying Bonnie a new car. “Let me see the Ward.”
Sonya held out her hand and showed us the stolen treasure. “Yeah, about that . . . ” She turned her hand over, spread her fingers wide and then shook it hard, but the Ward still wouldn’t let go. “Since I’ve got all you occult experts here, is it supposed to do that?”
I signaled for Milo. “Hey. Magic rock check.”
Milo came over from where he’d been gathering lich parts to take a look. He tossed Phipp’s jawbone in the nearest fire. Then he approached Sonya and politely said, “May I?”
“Knock yourself out.” She held the stone out to him. “I touched it before and it didn’t do anything, but when I tried to turn it on it got all weird and bright for a second, and now it’s glued to me or something.”
Milo squinted through his glasses. “Huh . . . Part of it actually disappears into your palm. It’s got to be fused with her bones.”
“What?” Sonya sounded really worried.
“Does it hurt?” Milo asked.
“No.”
“Cool . . . Sorry. I imagine that’s kind of horrifying, but it’s also kind of amazing what those inventors came up with back in the old days.” Milo ran one gloved hand across the numbers visible a
cross the top of the Ward. They seemed to quiver with a life of their own, but just like when I tried, they wouldn’t move to a different setting. “Yep. This is the real deal alright. A little more compact than our old one, and that one never bonded itself with anyone’s flesh as far as I know. Nifty.”
“That is not nifty. Make it come off.”
“I don’t know how.” Milo reluctantly let go of the Ward. “Sorry. We’ll have to research that.”
Boone cut in. “This chick and her pet rock sound like an Alabama team problem. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make sure this lich is really dead and then try to figure out how many reptoids got buried. This PUFF check is going to kick ass.”
“But the lich killed the reptoids, not us,” Trip pointed out.
“The MCB doesn’t need to know that.”
After Boone left it was just those of us who’d been in the barn clustered together. Milo stopped examining the Ward long enough to ask, “You guys okay? Anybody bitten?”
Everybody checked. We were professional Monster Hunters. There wouldn’t be any of that “hide the bite until you suddenly turn on your friends” nonsense with us. If a Hunter got zombie-bit, then it was time to take Old Yeller behind the barn, or go out in a suicidal blaze of glory, depending on that Hunter’s last wishes. There was no cure for a zombie bite . . . Well, except for me once, but to be fair, I’d been trying for the blaze of glory way out at the time.
We all trusted each other. As everyone said they were fine, we all believed them. However, none of us trusted Sonya.
“I didn’t get bitten.” She was filthy, covered in dust and cobwebs, but didn’t appear to be bleeding. “I don’t know if that would work on me anyway.”
“Bummer. I was hoping for an excuse to shoot you,” said Holly.
“Who are you anyway, lady?” Sonya snapped. “Have we met before, or are you just this bitchy to everybody younger and prettier than you?”
“Oh, look at that, the shape-shifting skank wants to catch an ass beating.”
“No. I just want this thing off of me, so I can sell it and get paid. I stole it first, fair and square.”
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