David gagged while he retrieved his bolts and wiped off the black monster goo from them. What in the hell was he in for next?
He had to ask.
Something even bigger and uglier loped around the corner of the building. It was seven feet tall with huge dangling arms, its body covered in some kind of tough hide or carapace, with gray-green patches of hair or barbs. The huge head and maw were a terrifying mass of horns and teeth, with two mismated eyes.
It dragged the bloody, headless corpse of a college girl still wearing a pink bathrobe. The monster ripped an arm off the body and gnashed into the flesh. Then it spotted David.
Damnation.
It dropped its meat, roared, and charged at him.
David shot it right in the chest with his crossbow.
The towering thing broke the bolt off like a stinging insect and kept coming.
Screw this.
David ran for his life.
The lumbering thing only chased him a short distance before turning back. David had covered a little distance by then. He knew the area well near Angela and 23 from walking, biking, and driving back and forth to school. He dodged in among the other apartment buildings–through Clover Village and around Ivy Court.
Finally he crouched down out of sight in the cold darkness and the growing twilight and shuddered, trying to catch his breath.
In the distance, all over town, fires and more screaming raged, along with the sounds of breaking glass.
How many of these murderous things were out there on the loose? Where did they come from? None of it made any sense.
He dug his phone out of his backpack with shaking hands. Dead. It wouldn’t even power up.
Then he noticed something else. Power was still out everywhere. No lights. No cars or trucks moved on any of the streets. No police or sirens, ambulances, or even fire trucks.
Something else very strange.
No gunshots. Very weird. With these monsters attacking the city at random, there ought to be pockets of gunfire all over the place.
But there wasn’t–in the most heavily armed nation on Earth.
Then he heard feet pounding, people running.
People of all ages ran here and there in breathless panic. He watched from where he hid.
Some of the monsters roared and cackled, attacking the routed humans, cutting some down, dragging others away as captives. Screaming and shrieking erupted everywhere.
The heavy stench of the invaders wafted on the cold, light April winds.
David spotted a man in his thirties running from one of the monsters hot on his heels. Both of them stepped into a puddle of strange shimmering water. It was strange because when they stepped into it, the water flashed bright with a weird, yellow-green energy.
Both the man and the monster shrieked and turned to dust.
Dust that scattered and faded on the wind.
David gawked, shot to his feet, and struggled to stop shaking. What had he just witnessed? It didn’t make any sense, but he just watched it happen.
He ran. Note to self: get the hell out of there and don’t step in any glowing water.
What he needed was some kind of plan. Whatever these things were, they weren’t going to take him down. He needed to get somewhere safe–away from all of this craziness.
He slung his crossbow behind him and secured it with a metal clasp on the sling strap. He drew his longsword and picked his way among the buildings, moving away from the sounds of the spreading terror. He crouched down and quickly ran across open areas.
A larger version of the first two creatures, man-high, suddenly charged at him from some brush. Without thinking, David cut it down with a wide, sweeping arc of his long, sharp blade. It fell back in two pieces.
David kept moving. He darted down Twyckenham, then Angela. He spotted the basketball arena in the distance, but tall shadows like weird trees obscured what should have been the football stadium complex. Half of the campus appeared to be missing, replaced by dark trees. More insanity.
He made it across the street and ducked behind the hotel.
After a mile he made it past Notre Dame Avenue and the Eddy Street Commons, heading west towards 933. The latter was one of the main drags through South Bend, what some of the locals still called Michigan or 31 from back in the day.
He jogged left on St. Louis, skirting any sounds of trouble. He came around a dark brick brownstone near Hill Street.
A middle-aged guy in a winter coat and black slippers aimed a shotgun at him point-blank and pulled the trigger. David jumped. Oh, hell.
The trigger only clicked.
The man paled.
“Gun’s don’t work!” he stammered. “How do we protect ourselves?”
David hefted his sword. “The old-fashioned way. Get a club, an ax, make a spear. These things can bleed and die. I’ve killed a couple of the bastards, already. Good luck, Mister.”
He kept running. The guy called after him to come back, but the sounds of chaos and fighting still seemed to rage on David’s heels.
He didn’t know what to do. But just running scared was going to get old, and fast. He needed to get somewhere. Find someone he knew.
He had a couple of good friends on the northwest side. Mason Tyler and Mace’s girlfriend, Tori. Dirk and Belinda Blackwood, from the local MHS, medieval reenactment group. They’d help him.
He jogged past Lawrence, still making for 933. Monster stink was very heavy on the wind.
More screams, very close, down Stanfield Street. A woman and some kids by the sound.
He had to do something.
Even as he went forward, three kids rushed past him in terror, still in their pajamas. The youngest about eight.
“Get to a house,” he told them. “Bang on the door. Get in and hide!”
The woman around the corner still shouted, her tone both angry and scared. But her words were...strange. They didn’t make sense.
Some kind of weird language.
David poked his head around low.
Four of the monsters circled an odd young woman with her back to him.
Three of the smaller creatures had hatchets. The other larger one a jagged sword. Bastards.
But the girl was really something. She wore medieval garb of high quality.
Midnight blue wool robes, the long skirt split down the middle for walking or riding. Ornate embroidery. Long athletic legs in hosen matched the rest of her.
She squared off against the creatures, wielding a carved wooden staff banded with metal.
She moved as if she knew how to use it.
They snarled at her in some other weird language.
She spat back something. It sounded like a curse.
David smiled.
One of the smaller things charged in from her left.
She spun and shouted a quick spurt of weird words. She thrust her staff at the thing, as if she actually expected something was supposed to happen. For an instant, both of them hesitated.
The creature snarled and grinned.
She spun the end around and jabbed it hard into the monster’s face. It grunted and dropped.
David rushed in as the other three closed with her. She caught another one in the groin before they yanked her staff away and tossed it aside.
He cleaved one monster head open with his sword stroke, bashed the other with the pommel.
The leader backed away, trying to hold his sword to the girl’s neck as they struggled. Her jet black hair drooped down over her glorious face. Luscious red lips parted, breathing hard–pretty porcelain skin.
The lead monster snarled at him.
David ignored it and chopped the brute clutching its groin in the face, before it could snatch up the knife it reached for.
Then he faced off again with the leader.
The leader tried to back away, and moved to cut the girl’s throat.
David grinned and advanced, sweeping his sword down. He cleanly severed the monster’s arm holding the sword. It
flopped to the ground, the hand still around the pommel. Another precise cut took off the other arm.
The young woman dropped to her hands and knees and whirled out of the way. Smart girl.
The leader stumbled and turned around. David smote him to the ground with one stroke.
Applause broke out from the window of a nearby house.
Four drunken street punks laughed and cheered, watching the whole fight from their safe vantage point. David felt his anger well up.
“Why didn’t you come help us!” he yelled.
The girl scrambled to retrieve her staff.
The punks just laughed and slammed the windows shut. David made sure that all of the creatures were dead.
By then the odd girl was already hoofing it down Stanfield and then left down Howard. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
David ran after her, wiping the weird black blood off his sword onto a rag. They passed Niles Avenue, where Howard turned into Northshore. He didn’t know her name–nor had he completely seen her face.
“Hey! Hey you...Miss!” What in the heck could he call her? Hot girl in wizard garb? That’s exactly what she looked like–a cute D&D wizard.
She glanced back and then squared off with him just as she had with the monsters, staff ready to fight, brilliant violet eyes blazing.
Whoa.
David took in a breath when he caught a glance of her stunning face. His knees buckled slightly. Huge violet eyes, ivory skin, a soft upturned nose. Her red lips spread over set white teeth. Even ready for a fight she looked amazing.
“Shosta dere!” she commanded. “Coma nasa klisser.” She wore a dark blue gem on her forehead on a silver circlet–but the gemstone was clearly cracked.
David sheathed his longsword and held up both hands empty as a token of non-violence. They kept walking, slowly. She maintained the distance between them, eyeing him suspiciously.
She seemed very intrigued by his weapons.
“I don’t want to fight you. I just want to talk,” he told her.
“Jaessa dakko?”
“Uh, yeah. What you said.”
She halted and leaned wearily on her staff, glaring at him with narrowed violet eyes.
By the Powers themselves–this girl was so hot, it was a wonder she didn’t burst into flames right before his eyes.
Okay, time for a break. Definitely. David sat down on the same side as her, giving her space, by the curb of Northshore and Leeper Streets. He put his shaking hands together. He was still very freaked out. His heart still pumped from the brief fight, and chasing after the pretty wizard girl with the strange language.
The sky lightened in the east.
Strange. He looked around them and listened. The attacks sounded as if they had stopped. He didn’t see or smell any more monsters. But fires still burned, and people yelled and shouted in the distance all around town.
“Dey dasna laggo daz zahn,” she said. She touched the cracked gem on her forehead and frowned.
Did that damn gemstone suddenly flash and fizzle in a strange way?
Then David suddenly figured out what she was trying to say. “They don’t like the sun?” he repeated.
She nodded.
Every time she spoke, her speech got closer to something he could understand. How in the heck was she managing that? He knew a little bit of several languages, but was fluent in none, including Latin and Japanese, the latter from his Kendo days.
Wizard girl was definitely not from the Midwest.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I aza Jerriel,” she said. “Asha yoo?”
“David.”
“Daeved.”
Close enough. “Where are you from, Jerriel?”
She looked around and then back at him with those killer violet eyes.
“Natta yoor vorld.”
4
Mason instinctively pulled the triggers on his Spillers even as the monsters bore down upon them, lifting weapons to overwhelm and slaughter the three humans.
His guns had been in the lake water. He winced and fully expected to hear dead clicks, right before they all died.
Instead–the entire world went blinding, white-hot directly in front of them.
In that instant, his Spillers went off and the resulting explosions were catastrophic. They stupefied and shocked everyone present, including the charging horde of monsters.
When the nova of light faded and Mason’s scorched vision returned…the pack of monsters that had been about to annihilate them was gone–almost completely vaporized. Right along with two wide, fan-shaped swaths of the new dark forest.
If Mason had been stupefied before, he was flabbergasted now.
Burning monster feet, crude shoes, and charred bones in scorched boots and leg wraps peppered the ground where the horde had been, directly in front of smoldering, glowing orange stumps left behind at the same level–about a foot or less off the ground–in the wake of the two blasts. The upper parts of the severed trees fell back and crashed down.
Mason, Blondie, and Howard just stood there staring with their slack, dry mouths drooping wide open like a trio of deranged imbeciles.
“What the hell was that?” Howard stammered in fear.
“What did you just do?” Blondie asked him.
Mason stared and check his pistols, just as shocked as they were.
Two chambers had fired.
“I don’t have a clue,” Mason told them, still shaking. “But if more of those things come around…I’ve got five shots left in each cylinder.”
Blondie pointed at the Spillers. “What are those devices?”
“Watch where you point those damn things,” Howard whined. “They’re dangerous.”
Mason shook his head in disbelief and examined both revolvers more closely. “This doesn’t make any sense. After being in the water, they shouldn’t have worked at all. Not like that, at least.”
“You can say that again,” Howard said. “Nobody else can get their guns to work, and yours work like something crazy.”
Mason just shook his head.
“Do you have any more of those devices, and can you show us how to use them?” Blondie asked. “If there are more of those creatures around, we might need them.”
Mason nodded and led them back to his blankets and gear to the right, near the lake edge. “I’ve got a whole box of guns and gear. We’ll load up and try them out.”
“Get me one of those cannons, too,” Howard said.
While Mason sat down, and carefully loaded each of his weapons, Howard and Blondie raided another nearby house and garage. They brought back a little food to snack on and a two-wheeled cart to load their supplies in.
Once they were loaded up and, ready to move out, Mason gave them pistols and holsters, and set up an impromptu practice range in front of the same devastated area as the backdrop. He used various cans and bottles for targets.
After several attempts, they learned very quickly that none of Mason’s guns would go off for either Blondie or Howard. To them, all of the pistols were inert and useless.
But whenever Mason fired any of those same weapons–then stand the hell back out of the way. He unleashed a blast that vaporized anything directly in front of him.
Crazier still–even when he dry-fired the empty pistols–a spurt of destructive, red-orange energy of some kind shot out of the barrel and blasted precise holes in trees and buildings. It was a lesser effect, but at least his guns still worked, even with the chambers empty. That was a neat trick in itself. None of it made any damn sense.
“It’s you, Mace,” Howard said. “Something about you and them guns allows them to function in this crazy way. They won’t work for anyone else. How did this happen? Do you remember anything?”
Mason sat down and struggled to think.
He told them everything he could remember. He described waking up in the midst of the explosion and being flung into the glowing lake that had just appeared along with the weird forests.
He explained how he had nearly drowned, and about the strange lights all around in the glowing water that seemed to pass through him and his gun box.
“It’s all something more than just you and your guns,” Howard said at last. “That’s all just a little part of it. Take these trees, for instance. Anyone who lived on this street for the past year knows that these strange trees weren’t here before. And this lake. Something big has happened to change everything this much. That’s why nothing works. No planes, cars, phones, guns, electricity. All of the technology that our world relies on has suddenly stopped working.”
“I wouldn’t think anything like that could happen accidentally,” Blondie noted.
Mason sneered. “How would you know? You’ve got amnesia. You don’t know anything.”
Blondie turned around, waving his arms. “Howard’s right. Look around. Important changes have in fact occurred. The trees. This lake. The very lay of the land has been changed. Everything has changed. There’s no denying it. While you now possess some kind of sorcerous power.”
Mason clenched both of his fists in anger and frustration. “I don’t know what has happened, but it’s morning now, and the sun is up behind those spotty clouds. Those monsters don’t seem to be around any more.”
“Maybe they can’t stand the sunlight,” Howard suggested.
“Maybe they can’t,” Mason said. “But whatever it is, things are definitely quieting down. I’m still cold, and now I’m hungry and thirsty.” The small amount of food they had snacked on seemed to have gone right through him, and his throat was dry with thirst.
“You’re right,” Blondie said. “We can’t stay here until something worse happens to us. We need to find out what’s going on.”
“Right,” Mason said. “At the very least, we need to find some more food, and a safe place to stay tonight.” They made their way through the thick trees and forest, away from Allen Street, the lake, and toward what he thought was Portage Road and north toward Angela Boulevard.
The many fires had done heavy damage to that part of town. Scattered sparsely among the patches of forest, entire blocks of homes still smoldered or had been reduced to piles of smoking ruin, scorched down to their concrete foundations. The stench of smoke seemed to be everywhere.
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