Stone Cold Bastards

by Jake Bible

  “That is so badass when you do that,” Nissa said.

  “I know,” Tessa replied. She racked it again and a cartridge flew from the breach.

  “Too much,” Nissa said. “You ruined it.”

  “Dammit,” Tessa responded as she bent to retrieve the shotgun shell. Her hand was an inch too short. “Move to the left, will ya? I can’t reach it.”

  She paused in mid-reach as the cathedral shook from a massive impact at the front doors. There was a groan of wood and all of the Gs turned to stare through the nave to the torchlit gallery beyond.

  “We should not have felt that,” Antoine said.

  “Nope,” Nissa said. “That ain’t good.”

  “Nope,” Tessa agreed, forgetting all about the fallen shotgun shell.

  Antoine spun about and helped Artus upright. The gargoyle was shaky and could barely stand, especially since he wasn’t carved to stand, but he managed a smile and patted Antoine’s arm.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now, gather the wards, find the other Gs, and leave. Run. Find a new sanctuary. This cathedral is done for.”

  “Done for?” Nissa laughed. The faeries cocked a hip and grinned. They both displayed the weapons they were loaded down with. “With us around? Nah, we ain’t even close to done for.”

  They marched out of the courtyard toward the front doors, dropping ammunition in their wake like deadly breadcrumbs.

  “Will you be all right here?” Antoine asked. “I should go help.”

  “I will be fine,” Artus said.

  “You sure?” Antoine pressed.

  “I am sure,” Artus said and patted him again. “Go. Fight. Do what you feel you must.”

  Antoine nodded then hurried off to follow the faeries. The wards were still huddled in fear and Antoine glared at them as he went by.

  “Do something to help yourselves,” he snapped. “Go get more ammunition and weapons from the armory.”

  None of them moved.

  “Now,” Antoine yelled.

  A few yelped in fear, but a couple actually got up and ran from the nave toward the basement stairs. Antoine hoped they were doing as he asked and not merely looking for a better place to cower.

  He reached the archway to the gallery and looked up. The two capitals who had just been cheering him on were silent and still at the tops of the columns, the magic so low they couldn’t even give him a sarcastic sneer.

  Antoine had never seen that happen before. That more than anything drove a spike of fear deep into his stone guts.

  The cathedral shook again and the front doors quivered in their frames.

  Xue and Morty were at the doors with Nissa and Tessa. They looked back as Antoine approached.

  “This went to hell fast,” Antoine said.

  “It always does,” Xue replied.

  Another impact, more shaking of the doors.

  “Uh, where is Deek and Geffe?” Antoine asked. “Scythia?”

  “I don’t know,” Morty said. “I just managed to knock the gravel loose from my brain. I don’t know where those Gs are.”

  “Geffe is out there,” Xue said. “Down by the gates. I do not know Scythia’s or Deek’s location.”

  5

  “YOU MAY COME out,” Artus said. “Deek? I know you are still here.”

  Deek slowly moved from the shadows in the corner of the courtyard. His flute was held in a limp grip, his small hooves stumbling and steps weak as he stared at the dead that were strewn everywhere.

  “I . . .” he began to say, but couldn’t finish and shook his head.

  “I know,” Artus said. “Not all Gs were made to handle such violence.”

  Deek nodded, his stone eyes still staring at the corpses of the wards he was supposed to have helped protect.

  “Can I . . . ? How can I help now?” Deek asked.

  “Show the wards respect,” Artus said. “Gather them together, cross their arms, and give them a proper goodbye.”

  Deek nodded and got to work as the siege raged outside. The sound of the possessed horde seeped in through every crack and gap in the cathedral’s stone walls. It was like an angry whisper that could not be placed and seemed to come from everywhere at the same time.

  When he was done positioning the bodies into a line, arms crossed over chests, Deek plucked his flute from his belt and played.

  “That is nice,” Artus said and closed his eyes.

  Deek was so busy playing, trying to make up for his earlier cowardice with a song of magic and power he hoped would give the dead wards some peace in their journey to the afterlife, if there was one, that he didn’t notice how Artus’s stone body became truly still, another corpse to be added to the list.

  Deek played on.

  6

  GEFFE WAS NOT having fun.

  He’d started to run back into the cathedral when he and Jack had felt the sanctuary’s protective magic kick in. Hard to miss when the ground shook and a bolt of power shot up through stone legs and into stone guts.

  But then things went sour.

  Geffe barely made it halfway to the steps when explosions in the sky caught his attention. Then there was a strange G flying toward the sanctuary grounds, followed by what looked like Morty. More explosions, the strange G fell, Morty fell, a flash of light so intense that Geffe thought his stone eyes would be seared forever, and Hannah running from the cathedral chased by some guy who obviously had murder on his mind.

  His first instinct was to go help Hannah. But that was wiped away as Jack screamed. If Geffe had had blood in his body, it would have run cold at the sound of Jack’s screams.

  Slowly, because God knew he didn’t want to, Geffe turned to look back down at the gates. The possessed had swarmed them and were chipping away at Jack with crowbars, screwdrivers, tire irons, and whatever else they had on hand. A couple of the demon-filled vessels took potshots with their pistols, but the ricochets kept hitting others, so they were shouted at and told to knock it off.

  Jack screamed and screamed.

  “Dammit,” Geffe said as he ran back to the gates.

  They fell as he reached them, Jack’s voice breaking off in mid-scream. Geffe slid to a halt and was going to turn to run away again, but he was overwhelmed by the first wave of possessed, his small half-donkey, half-human form trampled into the dirt and grass.

  He was stone, so being trampled wasn’t exactly a worry.

  The worry began when he was lifted out of the dirt, held up by hundreds of possessed hands, and passed backward across the sea of vessels until he was outside the sanctuary grounds. He was taunted, threatened, told he would die the worst deaths imaginable; but surprisingly, he was not harmed. Even though the possessed had more than enough weapons of obsidian to get the job done.

  They didn’t harm him. The sea of possessed continued to flow, and Geffe eventually found refuge when he was thrown to the island of the rotten bar.

  “Geffe, yes?” a possessed man asked. “Valac.”

  Geffe lay on the top of the bar. The surface was covered in so many sticky, anonymous liquids, that when he shifted his body, the movement squelched loud enough to be heard over the roaring enthusiasm of the possessed horde.

  “It’s disgusting, I know,” Valac said. The man he possessed was missing his right eye, but Valac winked with that lid anyway. When Geffe shivered, he asked, “Cold?”

  “What do you want?” Geffe growled.

  “Not a lot anymore,” Valac said as he lifted a glass of brown liquor, drained it, then fished a bottle out from under the bar and refilled the glass. He pointed the newly filled glass at the horde. “I only have one last task to finish and my time up here is over. I get to return home and let others deal with running things on Earth.”

  “You want to go back to Hell?�
�� Geffe asked. “Why?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Valac replied. “It’s where I’m from. Unlike many of the demons who possess these pitiful bodies of flesh and bone, I was never human. I fell from above then grew up below. That is where I belong.”

  “Fallen angel,” Geffe scoffed. “How many times have I heard that line?”

  Valac shrugged and sipped his drink. His eyes darted to the chaos that was consuming the sanctuary grounds.

  “Why protect them?” Valac asked and waved his hand. “Yes, I know that the magic, which created you, compels you to protect all that seek safety within your sanctuary, but why?”

  “Buddy, I am going to assume that’s a rhetorical-type question,” Geffe replied. “Why do what you do? Because that’s who we are.”

  “No, I disagree,” Valac said. “My work accomplishes something. I am here to build a new world and give my kind their rightful place on Earth. You and yours? Fighting for nothing. That’s the simple truth. Humanity is over, the species is dead. They can never rebuild, they can never achieve more than a tenuous grip on memories of what the world was like. And like those memories, the last humans not owned by my kind will fade away. Gone forever.”

  “Maybe,” Geffe said. “But what happens to the human race ain’t exactly my area of expertise. All I know is some folks asked for sanctuary and we gave it to them. We protect them because that is what we do.”

  “But when they are gone?” Valac asked. “When this sanctuary is gone?” He chuckled and finished his drink. “More so than it already is. What then? What will you and your stone brothers and sisters do then?”

  “We protect the cathedral as we have since this all began,” Geffe said.

  “Your cathedral will not be left to protect,” Valac said. “You know that. I know that. I am more than certain even the inanimate stones that the building is made from know that. It’s the obvious conclusion.”

  “Nothing is obvious in this world,” a voice said from the tree line.

  Valac didn’t look back right away. He refilled his glass and chuckled some more, sipping slowly. Then he set his glass down, turned and leaned his back against the bar, arms crossed.

  “You are a hard one to kill,” Valac said. “Hell knows we have tried.”

  “How is your friend Haborym?” Tom asked as he emerged from the trees. “Found his way back up here yet?”

  “Haborym is around somewhere,” Valac said. “He always is.”

  “Well I’ll be dipped in cow manure,” Geffe said as he regarded the huge grotesque. “Ain’t you something to behold.”

  Tom was a mess. His left wing was sheared off completely, along with his left arm from the elbow down. Jagged hunks of obsidian clung to the stump like flecks of necrotic flesh. His face was scorch-marked and he had several divots in his stone helmet. One of his swords was snapped in half, but still sheathed in what was left of the scabbard.

  He looked at Geffe and nodded.

  “I came here with your friend Morty,” Tom said.

  “Of course,” Valac said, interrupting before Geffe could respond. “You and Mordecai make a lovely couple.”

  He downed his drink and smacked his lips then pushed off from the bar and walked toward Tom.

  “The last Stonecutter died,” Valac said.

  “No, she is not dead,” Tom replied.

  “She was when they took her inside,” Valac said. “The demon forced from her body gave me a heads-up, as the humans like to say. Told me the girl was dead.”

  “She is not dead,” Tom repeated. “I would know. I would feel it. I do not.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong,” Valac said, still walking toward Tom. “Maybe you only believe you would feel it. Maybe the magic that made you lies and you will feel nothing at all when her death comes.”

  Tom grinned, his black teeth shining in the dim light of the torches that dotted the area. “When her death comes?” Tom said. “See. You know she lives still.”

  Valac smiled and held out his hands, palms up. “You got me. Caught in my own trap of half-truths.”

  His hands moved to the small of his back and were suddenly gripping two shards of obsidian. His smile widened.

  “I was not sent to find you, but you are a rare treasure,” Valac said. “A rogue grotesque not tied to a building.”

  “I am tied to her,” Tom said. “She is the sanctuary I must protect.”

  “I wish you luck with that,” Valac said and moved in fast.

  He got two swipes of the black glass at Tom’s midsection before his hands were sent falling into the dirt. Tom flicked his blade clean then slid it back into its scabbard. Blood squirted out from Valac’s nubs, covering Tom from face to waist, yet the demon didn’t make a sound. No grunt, no cries of pain, no protest.

  He only smiled.

  “There is only one way out of all of this for her,” Valac said. “You know that. I can see it in your eyes. The struggle, the agony, the weight of the knowledge.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Geffe.

  “Watch this one, donkey man,” Valac said. “When the time comes he will turn on all of you, even though he knows what must be done is the only way to—”

  Valac stopped speaking as Tom’s shattered arm was shoved through his chest and out his back, the possessed body’s heart impaled upon the jagged end. A last sigh escaped Valac’s lips, the smile still there as the body fell to the ground to join its severed hands.

  “Holy wow,” Geffe said. “You don’t mess around.”

  “Tom,” Tom said.

  “What?” Geffe asked.

  “Tom is my name,” Tom said.

  “Oh, good to know,” Geffe said. “I’m Geffe. Pleased to meet ya.”

  “You will show me where they took Desiree,” Tom said.

  “Sorry, partner, but I haven’t a clue who you’re jabbering about,” Geffe said. “Is that the girl Valac said was dead?”

  “She’s not dead,” Tom said.

  “Yep, you said that before,” Geffe replied.

  “Take me to her,” Tom said.

  Geffe stood on the bar, wiping some of the yuck from his butt and legs, then put a hand over his eyes like he was shielding them from the sun. Even though it was night.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure you’re seeing what I’m seeing,” Geffe said. “I’d love to take you to this dead girl.”

  “She’s not dead,” Tom growled.

  “Right, okay, calm down,” Geffe said. “But have you noticed what’s between us and the cathedral? Only a couple of thousand obstacles.”

  “They are nothing,” Tom said and pulled his blade back out. “They will be nothing. Follow me.”

  Tom walked past the bar and straight for the collapsed gates. Geffe’s donkey jaw dropped.

  “Follow you? Are you crazy?” Geffe called.

  Then Tom began to slice and slash his way into the sea of possessed.

  “Fair enough,” Geffe said and jumped down from the bar. “I can deal with crazy.”

  He dove into the fight with Tom and they were both quickly consumed by the horde, the only signs of their passage the screams of pain and the occasional geyser of blood shooting up into the air.

  7

  HIGHLANDER WORKED fast. He shouted orders with such confidence that no one dared defy him as he held out his hand for surgical instruments, took them, and did all he could to keep the young girl alive.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Elisa said as she turned her head from the girl’s wound that gaped at her while Highlander applied clamps to hold back torn flesh in order to get to the blood vessels that needed immediate attention. A small amount of blood spurted from the girl’s body and onto her shirt. “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna puke.”

  “Do not puke,” Highlander snapped. “Ho
ld this!”

  He turned a pair of forceps toward her. To her credit, Elisa took them and held them still as Highlander worked.

  Across the infirmary, Olivia finished applying bandages to Hannah’s injuries. The older woman only stared past the G’s shoulder, looking at some point in the far, far distance that was not in that room.

  “She’s in shock,” Olivia said and looked back over her shoulder. “Fetch me a blanket.”

  Kimmy, Brian, Rider, and Joanie huddled together in the corner of the infirmary, their eyes flitting back and forth between Olivia and Hannah, Highlander and Elisa.

  “Now,” Olivia shouted. Joanie jumped, then scurried across the room to a set of shelves and the stacked blankets sitting on top.

  “Quiet,” Highlander said with a hiss.

  “Sorry,” Olivia said as Joanie handed her the blanket. Olivia wrapped it about the older woman’s shoulders and tried to smile. The smile faltered. “This will help.”

  Hannah blinked a few times then looked Olivia in the eyes. “Nothing will help anymore,” Hannah said. “We let them in. It’s all over.”

  “We didn’t know,” Brian protested from the corner. “We didn’t know.”

  “Your ignorance is our death,” Hannah said.

  “Stop talking like that,” Olivia said. “Choosing to be weak is stupid.”

  “I am not choosing to—” Hannah began.

  “Shut up! Now,” Highlander shouted at them. “I need to concentrate. Everyone shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  The room quieted down and all that could be heard was Highlander’s stressed and strained breathing and the click and clatter of stainless steel medical tools being tossed onto a tray set by his left elbow.

  Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen went by before Highlander sighed and stepped back from the girl. “That’s all I can do,” Highlander said. “I’ve never performed surgery like that before. Not on people. Cats and dogs. A six-foot python once. But never a person.”