Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  Andy grabbed Kerri and kicked a wheezer off Tim and snatched Nate from a one-on-three skirmish, ordering retreat.

  “To the walls! Quick!”

  They clustered into the hole, Andy shoving the others first as she looked back at the melee in the center of the room. The last sight she ever caught of Dunia Deboën was a terrified black eye trapped in the middle of a nest of slashing, friendly-firing gray limbs, her voice muffled under the dozen creatures fighting for a bite of her flesh.

  “You…” her little voice gasped. “It won’t end like this! I swear, Andy Rodriguez, this has just begun!”

  Andy slithered into the passageway after the others and tried not to listen to the bone-snapping sounds coming from the attic.

  —

  They emerged into the room with the oxygen tanks on the second floor, surprising a single stray creature that faced them and threw the proverbial massacre-promising hiss.

  Andy and Nate backswung their firearms like hockey sticks before Kerri mentioned, “It’s okay to shoot now.”

  The wheezer grunted a question mark as both flipped the weapons in their hands. The next second, two-thirds of its obliterated body were flying through the broken window in convenient snack-sized chunks for vultures.

  Andy led the way through the hole to the next room and down the trapdoor slide. This allowed her to blast away two wheezers that were crawling up the ramp.

  They landed softly onto the pile of coal and spine-dangling bodies in the basement.

  ANDY: To the mines! We’re going under the lake!

  —

  Buried alive under a living mass of sleazy, cold-skinned, frenzy-feeding hellspawn, suffocating under the corrupted air out of their dripping mouths, Dunia lay squirming on the floor, one leg and a torn, bleeding arm defending her vital organs while her other hand, lost amid the pandemonium, scurried blindly among webbed feet and dead bodies in the viscous dark, desperate for a last resource.

  And then a brave fingertip reported back to the brain: the touch of ivory.

  The scouting hand clutched the pommel of her cutlass and Dunia summoned from her heart, her gut, the house, the isle, and the unnameable powers the final burst of strength necessary to bring the sword home, slashing through every minion in the way. The pile exploded from its core, catapulting mauled, severed, intestine-kiting wheezers through the air as Dunia rose with an ecstatic, life-bearing scream, her sword swaying at lightning speed and splitting the very atoms of oxygen in front of her.

  The ridiculously high number of wheezers still able for combat watched mutely and then shrieked in senseless, suicidal joy as Dunia knelt down to yank the pickax from her foot with an appetizing crunch of ground bones, raised her head, eyes devoid of pupils and glowing white, and snarled.

  The handles of the pickax and the sword gasped in pain under her grip while she said through a psychotic shark smile: “Come and get it.”

  —

  Andy and Kerri and Nate and Tim had stampeded through the lower basement and dove through the hatch to the mines when, as they were reaching the lower end of the winding staircase and facing the tunnel to the Allen stairs, Kerri, carrying the only working flashlight, noticed the relatively improved lighting of the cavern.

  And once facing the stairs, she needed only to formally peek down the crevice to find out the reason: what the last time had been a far, picturesque stream of red magma glowing at the bottom of the rift had grown into a river of yellow lava, flowing at whitewater speed not ninety feet below the lower ledge of the crack.

  Tim leaned over the edge, saw the fire, unintentionally trod on the first blazing metal step, and yelped.

  “Whoever is down there, I think Dunia really pissed him off,” Kerri said.

  The stair bridge, temperature aside, looked just like they had left it: no rails, no second-to-top step, quivering, clattering, dying of old age.

  “You two first, over the sides,” Andy instructed.

  Nate took a deep sulfurous breath and placed his foot on the top step. Every bolt in the structure moaned for euthanasia as he transferred his weight. The thin sheet of iron under his feet and the beams supporting it were the only things separating him from a dip into the three-thousand-degree caldera. The idea that lingering up there for too long might roast him alive prompted him to leap across the gap onto the third step, and then hurry down the middle ones and skip over the last five. Kerri followed his steps, to the letter.

  Andy lifted the dog in the air, careful to avoid putting pressure on the green-checkered bandages. Sixty-two pounds.

  Tim whimpered increasingly on every other step that Andy leaped on, but fell silent as she just jumped off the middle of the stairs, too scared to even vocalize his impressions for the second it took them to land on solid rock.

  “Nice!” Nate said admiringly while Kerri hurried to take the dog into her arms.

  As another token of appreciation, a tiny nutcracker noise announced the secession of a large slab of volcanic rock from right under Andy’s feet. Andy leaped from the falling rock and grabbed the ledge, but her fingers slipped in the dust. Gravity claimed her full weight just as Nate miraculously clasped his hand around her outstretched forearm and Kerri dove to catch Nate’s leg and Tim ran to grab Kerri’s foot.

  At the other end of that line, Andy hung a few meters above evaporation, sweat sizzling down her back as she looked up and Nate gave her back a smile.

  “We’re not splitting up, are we?”

  —

  A plethora of besieging Thtaggoalites gathered in the attic and clogged the stairway, eyelessly and brainlessly listening to Dunia Deboën in the center of the floor wasting perfectly good lines on them.

  “Come on, you ungrateful bastards! I freed you from hell, I can send you back!”

  A wheezer finally replied with a multipurpose, nuance-rich shriek as it ran forward to meet her, leading the final charge.

  The foremost one was neatly dodged, a single clean slash through the throat; then followed numbers two and three, who shared a single Zorro cut, but Dunia noticed with surprise that even as the dead piled up, the high morale among the fiends did dwindle not but rather thrived, and soon the eyeless screaming things weren’t coming forth in ones or twos but bumrushing the barricades and climbing over bodies too, and Dunia’s strikes became much wider, splashing black gore right and left, tornadoing on a single foot, her saber ever bringing death, severing arms and legs and necks in whirling, dazzling pirouettes, and stabbing one only to get her pickax stuck inside its chest—she had to use him as a shield to bump her way out of the press, all this while slashing through more wheezers not expecting to be next, prancing impishly on their corpses toward higher ground ahead, leather boot heels squeezing brains out of the skulls of mangled wrecks—and wheezers welcome it and shriek in glee to join the slaughterfest—forcing Dunia to dive into a jungle of claws out to gut her alive and she’s fallen, yet still she just lobs off their legs and they fall to their knees and she rises again and keeps slashing away, and they keep coming roaring clambering piling up, smothering her, reaching her, scratching her, making her bleed, and she knows it, she feels it, lungs wolfing down oxygen, heart pumping at drill speed, muscles overdosing, brain ordering a dash to the left, stab to the right, kick to the stomach, elbow at four o’clock, comeback through the jugular, triple gut combo ahead bonus 10K for style, slice the neck, bash the head, nail the hand, twist inside, eviscerate decapitate mutilate amputate cut it hack it stab it kill it die motherfucker die motherfucker die die die die die die die—

  —

  The two-way radio on Nate’s belt was beeping.

  “Al!” Nate shouted into the microphone, breath rasping its way through the vocal cords as they all sprinted along the tunnels below the lake. “Al, do you hear me?”

  Andy paced down to take the radio from him, pushed him forward. “Cap! We’re underground and heading back to Sentinel Hill! Do you copy, over?”

  The radio cracked, but Captain Al’s voice still p
ushed some words between the noise: “…Andy…and clear…on our way, over.”

  “Cap, the isle is infested! Dunia Deboën is there—she’s the necromancer! Repeat, don’t go to the house! Over!”

  “…understood…worry…bringing a ship…soon, over.”

  “Al, you’re breaking up! Did you just say you’re bringing a boat, over?”

  The last message came loud and clear:

  “No. I said a ship. Over and out.”

  —

  Dunia rolled down from the last mountain of corpses, sinking the pickax into something that gasped, and she found herself unable to take it back. She was beyond extenuation. Beyond ecstasy. Beyond death. But she kept moving.

  The penultimate monster still clambered on top of her, missing four out of six limbs, digging its nails into her right arm, snapping its teeth at her turned cheek. She kicked it aside; it bounced back. She ordered her arm to swing the sword at him, and the arm came up empty-handed. The saber was lost.

  The torn monster shrieked, tongue whipping her face, while her hand felt through the corpsescape for anything not viscous. She touched wood.

  The air, despite the insane smell of quick-rotting viscera, still felt cool and zingy with oxygen, tense like a gas explosion waiting to happen. But it was unavoidable: she had to use a firearm.

  She breathed in the last feast of oxygen before death and injected it into her right arm, then clutched Uncle Emmet’s shotgun, brought it home, and rammed the barrel into the creature’s mouth. Deep down into its gullet where oxygen is unknown.

  The definitively ultimate wheezer charged at her at that exact moment, and she rounded on it, a legless hellroach dangling off the point of her gun. The muffled blast liquefied both targets at the same time and sprayed them to the far end of the battlefield, loose chunks of monstermatter pluffing into the gore pool.

  Dunia staggered to find a spot of flat wooden floor between the many strata of dead wheezers, panting, waiting for someone else in the room to dispute her point.

  Nothing did.

  She breathed, dropping the shotgun and sweeping six ounces of blood off her gracious white face.

  “And not a single spark was produced.”

  She pulled her cigarette box from her pocket, chose a lollipop and put it in her mouth. The cherry taste of victory.

  And then she turned at the sudden roaring noise coming from the round window.

  USAF veteran Captain Al Urich cordially saluted her, a close-lipped smile on his face, from the right seat of an airborne UH-1C Iroquois helicopter gunship, while with his left hand he popped open the lid of the fire button and thumbed it down.

  An AIM-9 Sidewinder missile flashed to life and launched from the chopper, screaming on its brief trajectory to the mathematical center of the circular window.

  DUNIA: (Mostly annoyed.) Oh, fuck off.

  The missile crashed through the glass and into her chest, exploding on contact with the opposite wall.

  And thus Deboën Mansion and all of its contents were vaporized from the Western Hemisphere.

  —

  The station under Sentinel Hill was still lit from the previous visit, just as the detectives had left it, down to the far echoes of wheezing laughter as they rushed in—one of them incidentally falling to the floor after tripping on the rails.

  “Nate, come on!” Andy puffed, picking him up. “Just a little more!” Her own arms could barely help him.

  Nate peeped into the adit, caught the wink of one white dot of daylight glowing at the very far end, like a minor star in an obscure constellation.

  “I can’t do it,” he puffed. “Please. Let’s take a mine cart.”

  “The carts are too slow, Nate, it’s quicker to run!”

  “Not necessarily,” Kerri mentioned. Andy saw her kneeling by one of the six-feet-tall oxygen tanks, still loaded onto one of the carts, reading the specs on the side. “Quick, push this onto these rails.”

  Tim ran behind them, desperate to help as the three pushed a heavy cart along the rails, aiming it toward the adit, until they felt the almost unnoticeable slope was starting to take over. Then Kerri lifted the dog up and dropped him inside.

  The whole party clambered on board, struggling for the scarce foot space the oxygen tank left. It rested at the rear of the cart, with Nate and Kerri and Andy and even Tim forced to lean on it and against themselves, Andy caught somewhat off guard by surprisingly happy orange hair on her face.

  “We’re riding a mine cart,” she realized.

  “Even better,” Kerri said, reaching for a rifle. “I give you the Lake Creature Rocket Wagon.”

  “Uh…I don’t remember that move.”

  “I know,” Kerri said, suddenly pulling her by the waist and hugging her tight. “I just invented it.”

  And then, as the first wheezers poured from the drift into the station, Kerri shot the nozzle off the oxygen tank.

  As first experiments go, it didn’t turn out bad, even if not completely according to Kerri’s calculations. Some aspects exceeded expectations, some didn’t. The opening wasn’t spectacular, though the sound was deafening from the very start. And even the combined weight of all four passengers on the tank did not prevent it from rattling like a caged mad robot, threatening to rocket off or blow them all up well before the cart wheels reacted to the jet force. But when they finally did, much to Kerri’s teeth-gritting satisfaction, the car went in record time from 0 to 5 mph, and on to 20, and on to 80, and on to roller-coaster-on-Mars velocity, with Tim as the ecstasied figurehead at the prow, wind baring his eyeballs and gums and threatening to rip his flapping tongue off, and the humans’ voices rivaling the roar of the gas-belching rocket in a continuous scream while they zoomed through the concrete tunnel, approaching the bewildered light of day.

  The cart flew out of the adit mouth, far over the debris slope at the end, hurling the passengers out to free-fall ouching and whoaing and F-word-yelling all the way into the Zoinx River. The freezing water straight from the Cascades was the last but not least of the shocks the ride offered.

  Kerri was the first to swim up and locate the rest of the team’s heads bobbing up, coughing water, paddling to the rocks.

  “Everyone okay?” she polled, aware of how stupid the question was. “This way”—she pointed—“we gotta get back to the lake!”

  It was Nate who, as they were climbing back up the slope, dripping icicles, first noticed the trees around.

  “I don’t hear any birds.”

  The sky was blank. The world looked like an unfinished oil painting—every rock and reed on the dilapidated banks of the Zoinx neatly detailed, the trees sketched lifeless against an empty canvas. There was no sun nor clouds nor space.

  The party ran, or let gravity pull them downriver along the shore, legs slowly awakening from the cold into the agonizing weariness of the last twenty-four hours. Andy viewed the sharp line of the horizon against the white sky and feared they would reach it and simply meet the void beyond the rim of the paper.

  What they reached instead was the vast mirror surface of Sleepy Lake, and the fogged-out hills on the other side, and black smoke.

  The kids caught sight of the majestic pyre burning where Deboën Mansion used to be, just as the helicopter gunship flew into view.

  Captain Al greeted them through the two-way radio. “Morning, detectives. Over.”

  “Cap!” Nate responded above the deafening cheering of the girls and Tim, in celebration of the one violent deed that they had not been involved in. “Al, I love you, man! You’re my hero! Over!”

  “Thank you, thank you,” the captain said, and Nate was able to spot him among the crew by his grandiose saluting as the helicopter veered their way. “Let us find a landing spot so I can congratulate you in person, over.”