Winterfall

by John Conroe

  So we fought on, separately and together. Knowing that Omega had closed the gate from the other side let us know for sure that an end would come to the waves of armored giants.

  The first inkling that the Fairie team had arrived was right in an middle of an outbreak of eight monsters. They came out of the jungle in a single line. As only Tanya and I could really fight them one on one (Arkady was still recovering from his wounds and Senka kept herself in reserve), we had relied on the fire trenches and the massed military firepower to herd them our way. This time, they failed to be herded. The ones on the ends just jumped the trenches and raced up onto the armored vehicles, killing soldiers like mice. One actually jumped into the open top of a tank and the screams of the men inside ripped through the night. Behind us, I could hear more choppers landing or circling but my attention was split between the monster I fought and the ones breaching our lines.

  That’s when a pulse of light so bright it was like a comet burned across from behind me and hit the tank killer as it raised itself up out of the commander’s cupola. Instant, overwhelming fire melted the killer right where it was, burning so hot it also slagged the whole top of the tank, which exploded right after. Five more streaks of light lit the night, each hitting an alien like a guided missile. In every case, the alien went up in tower of white hot flame. The aliens that Tanya and I fought both suddenly just blasted off their feet, flying back twenty yards each. Twin comets jetted from behind and exploded them into balls of incineration like the others. The flames from the zombies and the burning tank lit the field to almost daylight levels.

  I looked at my vampire, then we both turned to look behind us. A wild-eyed Declan was striding across the muddy field, Stacia and Mack following him closely while Ashley Moore, her father, Jetta, their dog, and two females I didn’t recognize all watched from a freshly landed helicopter.

  “What the hell did you guys do to my computer,” Declan demanded, another ball of fire forming on his hand. Then it sputtered out and his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell like a timbering tree right onto his face.

  “About time,” Stacia said, looking concerned and relieved. She scooped him up and looked at us for a second. “Anymore of those big fuckers?”

  We both turned to our witch support team. Isabelle and her partner were frozen, eyes open so wide, they almost glowed white in the firelight. “Well?” Stacia asked them, impatient.

  “Ah, not yet,” the other witch, whose name was Leah, said.

  “Okay then. Where I can put him to rest? He’s about completely burnt out, going through magic withdrawal and panicking over Omega,” Stacia said.

  “Burned out? He just nuked every monster in sight!” I said.

  “No, he just fought a running battle with the Queen of Winter and about a hundred and fifty men and ogres, then went toe-to-toe with both queens and a dragon, opened three portals through reality, and then nuked your problem,” Mack said.

  “You have some stories to tell,” I stated.

  “So, it would seem, do you,” Stacia said. “Got a cot somewhere?” she asked, hefting the unconscious witch in her arms for emphasis.

  Five minutes later we were in our field tent, which was thankfully quite large because it was suddenly very crowded.

  The group from Fairie were all there, as well as almost all of our group, Senka, a big group of the witches, Lydia, Nika, Deckert, and an almost-healed Arkady. Declan was sacked out, dead to the world on an army cot about ten feet from where we sat. That was the farthest distance Stacia would allow him to be from her while he was defenseless.

  “So that’s about it,” Mack said, wrapping up a retelling of their time off-planet.

  “He claimed a territory on Fairie?” Lydia asked.

  “He had to. Without the power boost the land fed him, he wouldn’t have been able to stand up the queens and a full-grown dragon at once,” Stacia said.

  “He beat them?” Tanya asked.

  “Mopped the floor with them,” Jetta said.

  “Group effort, as the team kept the elves and their pets off him, but yeah, he beat the shit outta them,” Ian said.

  “That, ah, new fire spell was impressive,” I said. The witches stopped breathing and leaned forward.

  “He just came up with it after the dragon breathed on us. I think what you saw was the last of the energy he harvested from that,” Stacia said.

  “He got all that power from just being on the planet?” Ryanne asked.

  “Fairie is saturated with magic. He said it was like being drunk continuously. I expect he’ll have some withdrawal issues, but he’ll feel better here. It left him sleepless and made him almost manic the whole time we were there. And no, you all can’t go there to play in the magic. The queens forbade witches hundreds of years ago, and he got in on a technicality. They won’t go for it a second time. You’d all be killed on sight,” Stacia said.

  “But it’s so not fair. He’s already so powerful and then he got even more so,” Tami said.

  “While he was there. Back here, he’s the same as he was before he left,” Stacia said.

  “You’re kidding?” Tami said. “He just used a spell I’ve never even heard of to blow those monsters all to shit!”

  “If he learned new stuff, it was because he was improvising on the fly. You know… like he does in Wytch War all the time. The power was left over from surviving the death strike of a twenty-ton dragon the size of a tractor trailer. He spent it. You want to trot over to Fairie, then open yourself a cross-dimensional portal, hop over, fight a dragon, and come on back. We’ll wait here,” Stacia said. “Been there, watched that, don’t intend to do it again.”

  “You mentioned portals… you said he opened them?” Isabelle asked, still shy but obviously unwilling to let it slide.

  “Yup. He had to in order to get Mack and Jetta back. Some of the elves taught him,” Ashley said. “It wasn’t easy and it took enormous amounts of magic, but if we survive this zombie thing you all got going on, maybe he’ll teach you. Hell, he should probably be an instructor at Arcane anyway.”

  I looked at Tanya and felt like face palming. I hate when I miss really obvious shit. She nodded, then turned back to the group. It was a thought for much later.

  “Speaking of which, what the hell is going on?” Mack asked.

  Lydia ran through a surprisingly concise summary of the alien assault, even pulling up some videos on her tablet to show them just what we’d been facing.

  The strange little girl who had come back from Fairie with them started to pull on Jetta’s shirt, speaking in a strange language, parts of which sounded almost familiar.

  “Slower, Aylin. I don’t understand,” Jetta said. “Our interpreter is out of commission.”

  “She’s asking about seeds, I think,” Senka said. “At least that’s what I think. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard old English, and it seems to be mixed with some dialect of Scottish Gaelic.”

  “Oh! These seeds?” Jetta asked, pulling a Ziploc baggie from her pocket and handing it to the girl, Aylin.

  It looked like a bunch of chia seeds, little black specks. The girl shook the baggie and pointed at the video, which a moment ago had startled her badly when the tablet started playing. Her flailing hand touched the screen and it went to the home screen, leaving her even more frustrated.

  Jetta calmed her with a couple of pats and a few words I couldn’t understand, then took Lydia’s tablet and backed the video up by touch. Aylin started pointing and speaking as the pictures changed and Jetta froze the spot.

  It was a closeup of a black-armored monster. Aylin pointed at the screen, then shook the baggie.

  “She says it is the same as the blades?” Senka suggested, frowning at her own translation.

  “The Black Frost blades?” Stacia asked.

  Aylin started nodding. Then turned to Senka and started speaking, deliberately slowing her speech.

  “She says the creatures are related to these Black Frost blades. Says the s
eeds will kill them,” Senka said.

  “My advice is to listen to anything she says. She has a magical gift with herbs, plants, and biology. She and her mother escaped from Queen Morrigan’s labs. She had firsthand knowledge of the Black Frost organism and killed a living piece of it that was stuck in Dec’s arm. She used those seeds,” Stacia said, pointing at the baggie.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  The girl, Aylin, might not understand our words but she got the gist of our body language just fine. She shook the seeds and looked around, her eyes lighting on a Nalgene water bottle. Picking it up and shaking it, she got frustrated with the top. Jetta, who was obviously the most familiar with the girl, stepped over and showed her how to unscrew the lid. A moment was lost as Aylin marveled over the simple container, then she dumped the water out on the ground. She said a word and looked around at us expectantly.

  “She’s looking for strong water,” Senka said. “I’m thinking liquor.”

  “On it,” Lydia said, disappearing with a pop of displaced air. Aylin’s eyes got wide and she looked in a panic at her mother, who was suddenly covered in spots. Jetta patted her hand and reassured her. Lydia was back twenty seconds later, a big yellowish pot in her little hands. “Baijiu,” she said. “Like Chinese vodka. Some of the troops had it hidden away, but I noticed them drinking it the other night.”

  Jetta led Aylin over to the tiny vampire and when Lydia handed her the big jug, Aylin almost dropped it as the weight hit her hands. She gave Lydia another bug-eyed look even as Jetta caught and steadied it. Taking the lid off, she sniffed, grimaced, and nodded. Holding the empty water bottle, she waved at Jetta to pour. When the bottle was half full, she pulled it away. Then she sat down on the ground and began to count seeds into the bottle. When she got to eight, she considered the mixture, nodded to herself, and screwed the lid back on, tickled as hell with the cap.

  Then she shook it up vigorously before turning and throwing it to me, speaking as she did.

  “She says the strong water will pull out the essence of the seed faster than water. A splash on each creature should be plenty,” Senka translated.

  “A splash? Just spill our cocktails on those things and it will do what? Poison them?” Lydia asked.

  “It melted the Black Frost blade right down into liquid,” Stacia said. “Thing was trying to cut Declan’s arm off from inside him. She used those seeds and her own saliva to save him,” Stacia said, waving a hand at the bandage on her sleeping boyfriend’s arm. “Chewed them up, spit the whole mess onto his wound, and the damned blade just turned into black tar.”

  “I guess we give it a try,” I said, hefting the water bottle in my hand.

  “You’ll have your chance in like three or four minutes,” Leah the witch said, holding a charmed pendulum over her palm. “You’ve got five inbound.”

  Chapter 29

  China, Earth

  Mack stood back from the action, his rifle propped on a gun rack, waiting for the monsters to appear. Tanya made them all put their long guns down, explaining that they were worse than useless against the alien zombie things, as the bullets just bounced off them and ricocheted around, endangering everyone else.

  Chris stood by himself, maybe twenty or thirty yards from the jungle. Tanya was fifteen feet behind him. She had both swords out, but Chris just stood with the water bottle in one hand, posture alert but relaxed. Like he was waiting for a pizza to be delivered.

  Then the jungle burst apart and something tall and massive shot out of the greenery. Chris disappeared, moving so fast that Mack’s eyes couldn’t keep up with him. The giant slammed to a halt like it hit a concrete wall, stopped cold by the God Hammer’s outstretched left hand, then screeched a completely out of place high-pitched squeal when Chris splashed it with seed liquor. Two more black missiles rocketed out of the forest but Chris slapped a wet hand on the head of one, while Tanya attacked the other.

  The first monster was shuddering and shaking in place and then it just began to melt down, black oily liquid running down its body to pool in the dirt.

  Two more came racing out but this time both Chris and his vampire bride had wet their hands with the Fairie plant fluid.

  Forty seconds later, the final zombie puddled out on the ground. Chris looked at Tanya and then at the rest of them, his amazement easily visible across the wide kill zone.

  “It must cause a cascading chain reaction,” the vampire Lydia had introduced as Doctor Singh said, head tilted in fascination. “Total degradation of the nano organisms.”

  “How many seeds do we have left, and how do we get more?” Chris asked.

  “The CDC field lab is working with Chinese national scientists to isolate the active ingredient. Aylin and her mother are germinating a dozen seeds to get seedlings started so we can grow our own. That leaves exactly sixteen seeds for us to make more zombie killer,” Lydia said. “Plus what you have left.”

  “Which, if we’re careful, can kill a lot of zombies. You just need a wet hand. A cloth would be even better,” Tanya said. “We need to get this into the hands of everyone around the perimeter.”

  “Any more on radar?” Chris asked Leah, who was manning her detection pendulum.

  “There are four, but they’re moving away. Headed north,” Leah said.

  “They likely heard these others screeching,” Tanya said. “They’ll try to break out through the fire.”

  The Chinese Air Force had kept up the firebombing to the north of the village while deep bomb craters, filled with flaming oil on the west and east, had blocked their exits, leaving the southern path as the only viable route to the city and a vulnerable, infectable population. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the monsters viewed those barriers as more desirable than the highly effective Quisp plant solution.

  “Get all the witches up and ready,” Tanya said. “We’ll spread them on the eastern and western sides while the vampires move north from here. We’ll drive them into the bombing zone or burn them up in the craters.”

  “She really does love to exploit a weakness,” Chris said in an aside to Mack.

  “I’ll coordinate with the Air Force controllers. We can’t have any lapses in the napalm runs,” Lydia said.

  “You want to help the witches?” Chris asked Mack. “Nika and Stacia have Declan under watch, but from what you all said, I think he’ll sleep right through it. Unless you have any ideas about Omega?”

  Mack felt the eyes of pretty much everyone focus in on him. The witches on duty were new and didn’t know him all that well, and only a few of the vampires were familiar from his short stays at Demidova tower. So he was reluctant to open his mouth but couldn’t see a way out of saying what he knew he had to say.

  “I think someone should track down Caeco’s whereabouts and probably get her on a plane,” Mack said.

  Absolute silence greeted his words. It lasted seven heartbeats, then Lydia spoke. “What’s going through that diabolical mind of yours?” she asked.

  “Caeco has actual, viable nanites in her blood. Dec was infected with a few once and I think it helped him with the whole machine connection he has. It might help him connect with Omega when he wakes up,” Mack said, totally aware he was letting some of Declan’s cats out of their bags.

  “You are a font of information,” Lydia said, looking thoughtful. “What else?”

  “He may need some of the witches to help him,” Mack said. “He’s coming down off a Fairie power high and I know things take a lot more power here on Earth. A circle might help him bridge whatever is happening with Omega.”