by Aaron Crash
Corpses wheeled to see what was reducing so many of their ranks to pulpy bone only to have their faces removed, their skulls pulverized, and their bodies turned into decayed Swiss cheese, oozing muck.
“Vampire with a minigun!” Blaze yelled out happily. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
The other starcycle was behind her, being towed with a length of cable. Trina leapt back onto the second bike and shot through the cable. Then she fired into the zombie horde, keeping them back.
Free, the first starcycle shot into the barn, and Blaze grabbed it. He leapt onto the seat and used the fusion cannon to open a path. The corpses in front of the ball of star fire disintegrated from the heat and energy. Nearby zombies burst into flames.
Blaze kept the pathway clear with the bike’s plasma guns as Ling and Patsy climbed on.
Elle used both of her katanas to keep the zombies off her, but when Trina got close enough, the Onyx witch hopped on board but not before scooping up a couple of heads for their teeth. There was no sign of the cat. Yeah, Blaze wasn’t surprised. Damn thing seemed to be able to teleport.
They’d won the first round, but for every zombie they reduced to burning garbage, a hundred were there to take its place. Their guns would eventually run out of power and they’d be overrun.
Blaze saw the construction equipment by the road at the end of the driveway.
“We make for the crane truck, that big pinche puta over there.”
Elle rose and consumed more of the Onyx energy, widening their narrow way through the ocean of dead people. Then she used that energy to throw out bat guano mixed with eggshells. Balls of fire the size of car tires exploded into the zombies, flinging arms, bones, legs, and heads, adding to the growing conflagration that the rain was having a hard time putting out. Fifty of the old dead, skeletons in rotted clothes, were hit the hardest and acted as kindling.
Trina didn’t let up with the minigun, and Blaze used his starcycle’s guns to clear a path through the horde. They jetted across the surface, leaving a burning, bloody wake behind them. They made it to the end of the driveway and then to the crane truck. It was beast of a machine, used to carry around pipes, machinery, and other heavy equipment. It had a main cab for the driver and passengers at the front as well as a crane operator cage in the back. Both would offer protection from the dead. Best of all, instead of tires, it had treads like a tank, and those treads were as tall as Blaze. Any zombie that wanted to get on would have to jump, and Blaze and his crew would be ready for them. Most would be crushed by the treads.
Blaze pulled his starcycle up next to the cab. Ling and Patsy clambered off and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Ling, get her started,” Blaze ordered.
Too bad the starcycles had been damaged and they couldn’t fly up and over everything. Blaze might be able to fix the vertical thrusters at some point, but that would take a bit. Their horizonal thrusters were operational, so that was good. The bikes were expensive, and he didn’t want to leave them behind.
More of the walking dead shambled toward him.
The crane was lowered enough so Blaze could reach it. The starcycle had a back loop of metal, and he took the hook on the crane and threaded it into the loop. Elle pulled up on her bike. He took a cable out of the storage compartment and attached her starcycle to the crane as well.
Elle and Trina ran to the crane operator’s cage. Trina got on top, ready with the plasma minigun. Elle got in and worked the levers to haul the starcycles high into the air while Blaze stood back, watching the bikes rise out of the reach of the dead.
The big engines of the crane truck roared to life. Blaze hurried over and reached in the window. “Ling, can I borrow your plasma bow?”
The Meelah handed him the bow. Blaze didn’t want to use any of their precious hydrogen shells. He climbed on top of the cab, stood on top of it, and looked down the sights of the bow. When he put his hand where the string would’ve been on a normal bow, he felt the resistance of a simulated energy field. He pulled it back, and an arrow of plasma energy appeared above his thumb on the handle. When he got a zombie head in his sights, he released the “string,” and a plasma bolt blew off the skull, leaving only a neck stalk behind.
“Ling’s weapons make no sense,” Blaze muttered. “Pinche plasma bow is slow and fusion nunchakus are downright dangerous. Oh well.”
Trina opened fire and mowed down the zombies that had staggered up to claw at the metal bands of the treads.
Elle left the cage, scooped up a skull, and cracked teeth out of a jawbone. She scrambled up the side of the cage to help Trina. She’d reload with a consume spell, and then she could use Onyx missiles to keep the zombies off the crane truck.
Blaze threw the bow to Patsy in the cab. “Uh, that’s okay, I’m going to use the plasma guns on the starcycles to blow away more zombies. Ling, hate to say it, but yer shit is whack.”
Ling sighed. “Bill was right in saying you should curse less. It’s hard enough understanding your words without the constant scatological references.”
Blaze chuckled, took three big steps, and leapt off the cab and caught hold of the back of one starcycle. Both dangled from the crane’s hook.
He climbed up on the seat, the nanotech took over, and he fired up the blue-fire engines. It would give him some control over where he pointed the plasma guns. Hitting the triggers, he slammed plasma through zombies. He fired into one undead dude until only a length of smoked vertebrae was left. A dozen skeletons fell from his blasts, and then he gunned down another dozen.
The crane truck started crawling through the zombie horde and Blaze realized that the starcycle was probably overkill. He turned off the engines to watch the treads crush every single corpse in front of them. The wheels soon were painted with gore. Bits of skin, hair, brain, and rotted organs covered the metal.
Blaze laughed. From a pocket, he grabbed a Romeo y Julieta corona. He used his fusion ax to light it, then sat back to watch Ling roll over the dead in front of them. The big crane kept the rain off him and left his cigar unharmed. Behind him, Trina and Elle kept the zombies from getting onto the machine from the back.
Blaze triggered comms and blew out sweet cigar smoke. “Hey, Ling, good news. We’re almost to the edge of the zombie sea.”
“Not good or bad news, I think, Gunny. I’m happily driving this very big machine. I feel very powerful. And the zombies aren’t going to be able to get to us. Why wasn’t there more road construction equipment in your horror movies of the past? This seems like a very effective tool.”
“Script didn’t call for it,” Blaze said. “We’re just lucky I guess.”
“Not that lucky,” Elle broke in. “Those ghosts are coming back, and I only have one more dispel Onyx bag.”
“Oh, Hermana, you’re raining on my parade,” Blaze said.
“And I can smell your cigar. It stinks.”
The last of the shambling corpses fell before the churning gory treads, and the crane truck trundled onward toward the town of Know Return.
In the center of the gravel road the little girl in the yellow dress looked at her hands, a church, index fingers for a steeple and thumbs for the doors. She disappeared as they approached.
“Elle,” Blaze said, “can you find Granny? You’re right, we don’t have much time. I just saw our little girl ghost.”
A pining little voice meowed near his ear. He opened one of the starcycle’s storage compartments to see Raziel, wet and miserable. She continued to meow. “Sorry, darling,” Blaze said. “No one is very happy on this planet. Except for Ling.”
Raziel dashed out of the small space, scrambled over Blaze, and leapt down to the cab. It was quite a drop, but the cat seemed just fine as it raced inside to sit next to Ling.
“Raziel is back with us!” the Meelah said happily. “Though she doesn’t seem to like Patsy.”
The girl said something, but Blaze couldn’t hear what it was. Why didn’t the cat like the blonde? Blaze took it as an omen.
Something was off with the chica. He’d have to keep an eye on her.
As they moved down the road, the landscape was deserted—no people, no cars, no planes, no kids playing in the jungle gyms and rusted swing sets behind farmhouses. Of course, every house they passed had shadowy figures in the windows, little kids out in the rain, who were obviously dead, and other haunted house distractions.
Haunted planet, yeah, sure, whatever.
So far, the ghosts hadn’t approached them. Ghosts were tricky, with a logic that defied reason. Zombies were simple. He had a brain and they wanted to eat it. At least the slow ones did. Fast zombies chewed on whatever living thing they could find—brains, entrails, gerbils, rhinoceroses, didn’t matter.
Elle and Trina had retreated to the crane cage to get out of the rain. Blaze was fine up under the crane, keeping watch.
Elle finally came on comms with bad news. “Blaze, I can’t find anything. It’s the amount of interference. This place, it’s like hell on a planet, and this pinche puta Chthonic is playing at being Satan. It’s fucked, and I can’t see shit.”
“You kiss your mama with that mouth?” Blaze asked.
“Back when we had a mama, I didn’t cuss. After she died, Granny taught me every swear word she ever knew when I was ten. Then she had me say a thousand Hail Mary’s because though I didn’t say them in front of her, I knew ’em.” A pause. “And yes, a thousand. That’s not hyperbole. She was and probably still is a crazy fucking bitch.”
“And we have to find her.” Blaze sighed. “Let’s keep on going into town. We can then make a right and head for the air force base and hook Patsy up with her folks. Maybe get them to stay around until we can find Granny. Blaze out.”
The gunny sat pondering under the crane, on top of the starcycle, nanotech holding him upright while he kept his feet on the handlebars. He ignited heaters in his armor and he was kept warm and toasty despite the chill. Though it was rainy and cold, the countryside was pretty.
It was Midwest American farmland in autumn. Big round bales wrapped in plastic dotted the muddy landscape. Like hay burritos, the round bales would provide a rich alfalfa/hay/grass mix for the horses and cattle of the ranchers. Cornstalks had been compressed into squares and left around without a plastic covering. The cornstalks weren’t very nutritional, so it wasn’t worth protecting them. The empty calories, however, would keep the bellies of livestock full during the lean winter months ahead. On a normal planet. On Hutchinson Prime? All life would end that night. Hard to feed cattle when you ain’t got a sun.
Weird, but looking around, there were pools of viscous fluid, like ponds, but the liquid inside wasn’t water. It looked like spilled oil, the way the light made it shimmer and gleam. The odd lakes dotted the countryside.
The actual town of Know Return lay far in the distance. They hadn’t reached the housing complexes nor the suburbs. They’d have to go through the trailer parks first. RVs, trailers, mobile homes, all huddled under leafless cottonwood trees. Everything that wasn’t muddy was gray, and everything not gray was the color of congealed blood, rusty. Blaze had grown up in a place like this, in a motorhome Arlo would park here and there. Blaze never did get much schooling, but he would go around trying to find other kids to play with and protect. He’d figured he’d never have close friends, not with Arlo and his lifestyle of drinking, hunting demons, and pissing people off. So Blaze would find the kids being picked on, then slap the bullies around until they made better life choices.
He might impress a girl or two, but then Arlo would move them to the next town, searching for pockets of Onyx energy and the ghouls they attracted. Blaze would hang with the dorks until then, proud that he could do some good in this messed-up universe. And the scrawny kids were always so grateful, and most of the time, nice as hell.
Blaze had to smile at himself. Here he was, twenty years later, still fighting bullies and making sure the weak and the wounded were taken care of. He smoked the corona slow, so it took an hour, but still no sign of ghosts. Time was ticking. It was four in the afternoon. Eight hours until Hutchinson Prime’s apocalypse.
The crane truck was slow, but no way were they going to abandon such a perfect weapon against the walking dead. The zombies were following them. Sure they were. Chthonic was powering them, Blaze could feel it. The archduke had brought them together and then sent them after Blaze and his family’s blood and brains.
If Chthonic was anything like Xerxes, he wanted Blaze and his family dead and Granny destroyed to keep the Onyx Gate open. Before Xerxes had merged with Lizzie to become his ship’s computer, the archduke of necrotechnology had told them all of hell was in an uproar. Blaze and his crew were destined to close the Onyx Gate on March 16, 2696, thirty years after it had been opened when the 0n1x singularity exploded, killing Papa Ramirez and making Blaze’s and Elle’s mother a single parent.
Granny knew where the Onyx Gate would be on March 16, or so Xerxes had said when he went into his villainous monologue. Overconfidence! Helping heroes since nineteen hundred and whatever.
The yellow-dress ghost girl appeared again in the distance, making her church, but she wasn’t alone. A darkness covered the planet, for a moment the twilight turned into night, and thunder rumbled overhead.
A fork of lightning reached to stab the earth. In that flash of light, a line of shadowy figures appeared. The ghosts were mostly male, from young boys wearing baseball caps and ragged jeans to crooked oldsters with twisted backs leaning on rotted canes. The men not only blocked the highway but extended into the fields.
“Gunny, do you see the ghosts?” Ling asked.
Another flash of lightning revealed that the row of spectral men wasn’t facing toward them. The ghosts were all clustered around a little crappy roadhouse with a flickering neon sign that at least had all the letters working. It was called the Dew Drop Inn, and it was as redneck as it was blue collar. The parking lot was pitted asphalt, empty except for a Terran Chevy truck on blocks and a Chevy Camaro from the last century, the first with the next generation of blue-fire engines. The dive bar’s roof looked like it would fall apart in fifteen seconds if the rain didn’t stop.
Inside, though, a warm light buttered up the windows, and in the air, Blaze could’ve sworn he heard old-timey country-western music twanging away.
The yellow-dress girl stared up at Blaze, hands at her sides for once. The rest of the ghosts faced the Dew Drop Inn, and not just on the east side, where the crane truck crawled down the highway. In a perfect circle, maybe a hundred yards in diameter, the ghosts stood in a perfect line.
Blaze felt it right away.
But Elle was quicker on comms. “Granny is in that bar, Blaze. Holy crap, Granny is in there, and for the life of me, I can’t face her. You’re going to have to do it.”
And that put a two-step into the gunnery sergeant’s pulse.
THIRTEEN_
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“Go through the ghosts,” Blaze said. “We’re up so high, there’s no danger of us getting touched. And those ghosts aren’t much interested in us anyway. Even if they were, once we get on the other side of Granny’s shield, we’ll be safe from everything Onyx related.”
But not from Granny herself, Blaze thought. The last time Blaze saw her, he’d been six years old, on Chiang Mai Prime, in the Huaxia quadrant. The Clickers had invaded, killed his mom, and orphaned forever little Ramon Ramirez and his sister, Elle. Granny had smacked him when he’d talked back to her. At first, he thought he got the better part of the deal by going off with Arlo. That was when Arlo had pretended to be Human and not a drunk rattlesnake that didn’t believe in anyone or anything except Wild Turkey liquor, whores, and the hunt.
Elle’s stories, in some ways, were worse. In her more lucid moments, Granny had been loving. But then she’d lock Elle up in a closet for two days for breaking a dish or forgetting an irregular verb in Onyx speak.
Ling drove through the bodies of the men marking the perimeter of Granny’s shield. The weird da
rkness moved away, and it was back to being a perpetual rainy twilight.
“Lower me down,” Blaze said. Either Trina or Elle complied. When he got close enough, he jumped down into the gravel. Ax on his hip, shotgun across his shoulder, he walked through the drizzle to the door of the Dew Drop Inn.
“Be careful,” Elle warned.
“Do you want us to join you?” Ling asked.
“We can,” Trina added. “I’m not afraid of the big bad wolf. Didn’t he dress up as a grandmother?”
Yeah, and that was Granny: a wolf dressed up as a grandmother but then she didn’t look like a grandmother either. Nope, by all accounts, Granny had misnamed herself.
“Let me run some recon. If I need you, I’ll call you on comms.” Blaze pushed open the door and stepped into a heated bar that smelled of piss and stale beer. Cigarette smoke had perfumed the place for a hundred years, and you could smell every cancerous decade. And from the back end, the grease of the grill added a distinctive bacon-y odor.
Light glittered off bottles behind a scored bar, smooth from drunks telling stories. The green of the pool tables gleamed like a field of emeralds under lights near the back. An old music box machine took up space between booths on the side wall. The dance floor was dusty. The music machine plinked out some ancient ditty about mamas and truck drivers. Real classical music.
Only one puta was in the place, and that was a woman sitting at the bar, behind a wall of Modelo Negras, empties on the left and full ones on the right. In the middle like the Taj Mahal was a half-gallon of label-less brown whiskey. She threw back a shooter. Next to a dozen shot glasses lay a green salad, full of colorful vegetables.
From behind, she looked like a sex machine, hips and ass and legs that had enough meat on them you could lick them for days. Her skin was a polished brown in the bad light, and her hair was the white of a snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains. A storm that killed.