Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4)

by James A. Hunter

  “Let’s rock and roll, bitches,” I said.

  NINETEEN:

  Baron La-Croix

  A clumsy zombie with molting green skin crawled over another of its fellows, using the body below as a ladder, scrambling up, one bony hand stretching toward me. With a contemptuous flick of my wrist and a whisper of power, I sent unseen force ripping into the undead asshole. Its head exploding in a puff of dust and powdered bone as the remainder of its decaying body flipped through the air, smacking into a cluster of zombies hobbling forward on dead feet.

  I paid them no mind, instead focusing on the concrete wall before me. The earth vibrated with life. Trembled with potent, potential energy stored and waiting to be transformed into deadly, violent kinetic energy—all it needed was a little shove. I reached deep, pumping down strands of earthen-Vis and deathly-Nox, joining the dual forces together as I shaped the working according to my will.

  The wall before me responded, the concrete barrier transforming into a formidable defensive hedge, augmented with spear-shafts of rock, called up from the deep places below.

  Shanks of rock sprouted from the dusty street beyond, jutting up along the base of the wall, spearing and entangling any of the encroaching dead in a forest of razor-sharp protrusions. Earth shafts and javelins of black obsidian impaled eight or nine of the creatures, jabbing clean through torsos and legs, arms and necks. Piles of ropy gray gore—coiled intestines and other internal organs—spilled out from the fresher corpses, while the older zombies emitted great gray puffs of dust.

  They didn’t cry out, though. Didn’t moan or complain. They also didn’t stop, those undead shitheads.

  They worked without thought or emotion to free themselves from the spikes: A few wriggled backward, dislodging the rock shafts from their chests and bellies. Those who had suffered wounds to arms or legs continued on virtually unfazed, struggling and fighting until their limbs simply tore away—deadweight (ha, now there’s a pun for you) in the march for progress. Obviously, superficial wounds wouldn’t stop them, but it did slow them down, which was something I guess.

  Small victories, am I right?

  I thrust out both hands, palms up, and, with a howl, called up dual beams of flame, each as thick as my thigh. The conjured fire, hot as a blowtorch, carved through the crowds of undead, igniting clothing, melting skin like wax, and blackening the bones peeking through from beneath. I zigzagged the lances back and forth, drenching the first few rows of slowly marching monsters in a hungry heat that ravaged them mercilessly. Some faltered under the brutal assault, the blaze roasting their decrepit bodies until they could no longer stand, could no longer move or advance or function.

  But it wasn’t good enough. Not even close. The clumsy bastards were both too resilient and too numerous—an asstastic combo for me.

  For every body that collapsed, too damaged to continue the fight, two more took its place, stumbling forward, crawling over their fallen brothers and sisters, pressing in closer and closer. For the time being, the spiked defensive barrier was keeping them more or less at bay, but every second a few more slipped through, maneuvering past the deadly bedrock javelins, scrambling at the wall, all too eager to get rotten hands on me. What I had going for me was a stopgap measure at best.

  With a grunt and a heave of will I reached my senses deep into the ground, then with a jerk of my hands, I ripped up a stone that weighed as much as a small car from the bedrock of the street below. It came away with a grumbling groan of shifting earth. A hole bloomed in the roadway, swallowing a handful of dead, recalling them to the earth where they belonged as the huge, jagged boulder floated in the air, hovering like a massive stone drone. The army of dead was unimpressed. They merely changed course, flowing around the sizeable hole in the earth, then continued their plodding march, never a worry about the giant rock loitering above their heads.

  Time to fix that.

  I brought the rock crashing down with a thud and a squish—pieces of several hapless, undead goons splattered out in all directions like a water balloon hitting the pavement. Without a pause, the stone rose again, ten feet into the air, before careening down, obliterating two more zombies, ensuring they wouldn’t be getting up. Over and over the rock lifted and descended, squishing, crushing, smashing—I was like some morbid, booger-nosed kid stomping ants underfoot.

  The rock, despite its lack of finesse, grace, or pizazz, was a helluva weapon against the horde. Any zombie unfortunate enough to be splattered by the boulder-of-untimely-demise didn’t get back up. Didn’t even try. They were as down for the count as it came—which was only natural since you would need a shovel to scoop up what was left of them.

  Pro tip for you: a big, heavy rock definitely makes for a great zombie slaying weapon.

  Unfortunately, it was also one helluva metaphysical workout. The Vis, as awesome as it is, doesn’t come without a cost, and earth constructs are always exhausting, because physics do matter. Flame, for example, is pretty easy to work with because friction and heat are always plentiful in nature and take relatively minor personal energy to utilize. For shit’s sake, any Rube can start a fire with a long stick, some knowhow, and a pile of kindling or dryer lint. And once that sputtering flame is going, all you need is fuel to consume and a steady supply of oxygen to keep ’er going.

  Earth isn’t so easy.

  The rock was heavy as a school bus full of sumo wrestlers, and moving that much raw mass around had a proportionally greater cost than working with flame. There were tricks to make it easier—manipulating magnetic fields, say, or toying around with gravity—but mostly working with stone was just a lot of heavy, backbreaking effort, and I couldn’t possibly squish enough zombies to make a difference, not in the long run.

  Between burning and squishing, I’d eliminated maybe a fifth of Beauvoir’s forces. What I needed was something big. But anything big enough to kill the remaining seventy or eighty zombies would take just about everything I had left … a big gamble.

  The real question was not whether I’d take the risk—you never win big unless you go big, that’s what I say—but which construct I’d be willing to wager my life on.

  A small volcano might kill these sons of bitches, but not without wreaking total hell on the buildings and houses around us, which were likely filled with unlucky bystanders just trying to keep their heads down and firmly attached to their shoulders. I couldn’t kill a bunch of innocent Rubes, not if I wanted to live with myself. So, I needed something big and destructive, but focused. Narrow. And I needed it quick—

  The zombies were pushing in on every front and quickly enveloping and overwhelming my scant defensive wall.

  I glanced back, thinking retreat might be the best possible option at this point. Maybe I could climb onto Pierre-Francois’s roof and continue the war from there—blast the zombies into fetid meat sauce as they streamed over the wall and into the courtyard. Use the courtyard as a choke point and a killing field—

  Then, my shifting gaze landed on the mounds of bones and I had an idea.

  A risky idea, a gamble for sure, but better than standing around twiddling my thumbs.

  I conjured up a gale of hurricane force wind, turning this new construct not on the assembled zombies, but on the hundreds of skulls filling Pierre-Francois’s courtyard. In a heartbeat the yellowed bones rattled and rose, lifting up into the air, hovering above me like a cloud. A thousand skulls stared down on the approaching horde with empty eye sockets. Then, with a grimace, I conjured flame—maybe more flame than I’d ever summoned before—and suddenly each and every skull had a glowing, flickering ball of heat burning within like a personal inferno.

  The yellow-orange firelight, stained with wispy purple, turned those empty eye sockets into a thousand haunting candles.

  It was a spectacularly beautiful sight in its way, like peering at the birth of a universe or staring into the heart of an exploding sun. Even the mass of brainless zombies paused momentarily to watch, as though the brilliant light reached
down into whatever part of their human mind remained. Reminding them of a different, better time. When sunlight warmed living flesh, maybe. Or when they embraced a loved one in the calm of the night, stars the only onlookers.

  Even the drumming ceased.

  Those skulls hung for a spell longer before they began to spin in huge looping arcs, whirling and twirling around in a rush of wind: a howling cyclonic vortex spinning above me. Wind reached down and whipped at me from every side, pinning my clothes against my limbs and chest, pulling the breath from my lungs. As the death-tornado picked up speed and momentum, the flaming skulls flared ever brighter, the noxious purple light growing, swelling. It was the fresh oxygen rushing in through one eye socket and out through the other, creating hundreds of miniature furnaces fed by the laws of physics instead of by my waning power.

  Sweat broke out across my brow, my arms and legs began to wobble, and my lips curled from the strain of holding the enormous, ungainly construct in place. The working wasn’t especially difficult, at least in theory—it was a simple construct of fire, air, and will—but the magnitude of the flows was daunting; holding the whirling force in place was like trying to push a Mack truck uphill. A steep hill. A mountain, really. In the snow. With the brakes on.

  Thank God I didn’t need to hold it for much longer.

  I pumped more energy into the ginormous working, supercharging the bastard with every ounce of strength I had until my head felt like imploding. And still, I pumped in more. More and more until I couldn’t restrain the working, which had become a miniature force of nature—a wild, bloodthirsty tiger, held in check by a fraying piece of yarn.

  With a shout, I threw my hands out toward the heavens, and the whirlwind of flame and bone rocketed downward, hundreds of skulls launched into the midst of the zombie army—though, sadly, falling short of the Voodoo Daddy’s truck. The blackened skulls collided into meaty, shambling bodies and exploded on impact, each one burping out a huge swell of rolling flame, which set cloth on fire and charbroiled skin. But each skull was more than just a vessel for flame:

  The explosions not only spewed out blazing heat, they also shattered the army of skulls, spraying a hail of sharpened, fire-hardened bone fragments out in every direction like a frag grenade.

  Waves of bone-shrapnel cut through knees and tore through fleshy faces. Zombies fell by the score, their bodies devastated by the colossal blast. The creatures were torn apart, and pieces of body flew and flopped through the night, raining down gore-confetti.

  As all that amassed energy rushed out, I was left cold and hollow, my legs trembling beneath me, and I suddenly found myself light-headed and reeling on the tabletop. I tottered, swaying this way then that like a tree assailed by a hurricane, groping at the wall in front of me for support. For a time, I just stood there, shaky arms holding me upright as I stared out at the carnage. The sheer, impossible destruction.

  That’d been one helluva doozy, and I didn’t have much in the tank, but thankfully, almost unbelievably, it seemed like I might’ve actual won with that last Hail Mary pass.

  The Voodoo Daddy was still alive—I could see him scowling from the back of his pickup truck, surrounded by his child soldiers—and further out, near the truck, a few zombies still milled about. The vast majority of the horde, though, was down for the count. Bodies, and pieces of bodies, lay everywhere, scattered around like fallen leaves after a fierce storm. They didn’t move, didn’t twitch, showed no signs of the twisted power that had called them from the grave and animated them to crude life.

  “You have grown strong,” the Voodoo Daddy called out, his voice carrying easily over the unnatural stillness blanketing our little piece of Cité Soleil. “A most impressive display”—with a theatrical flourish, he waved toward the piles of dead—“but you be mistaken to think the dead die so easy as dat.” He shook his head, a grin stretching out his skeleton face paint into a ghostly grimace. “No. They don’t perish so easy as you think.” He snapped his fingers, and I felt a familiar cold rush of power flow from him. A dark, perverted unlife, which snaked out and seeped into the unmoving forms sprawled in the street.

  The drums resumed their pounding rhythm, though far more subdued than they’d been before.

  I just watched, dumbstruck, as nausea, born from exhaustion and overexertion, rampaged through me. No way could he call those things back, not after what I’d done to ’em. Even the undead had limits, right?

  But my stomach twisted as I felt that dark power stir something in the cold butchered corpses splayed out before me like cuts of meat at the butcher’s counter.

  Holy shit, I could feel that energy pulsing inside the mass of undead, could feel it like the slow, steady throb of a bass guitar, bum-bum-bum-bum, each throbbing pulse sending a surge of renewed energy and purpose into nerve-dead limbs, animating the corpses with superficial life. A thin ghost of purple power, like a tether, drifting from each zombie back to Pa Beauvoir. The shitheel Bokor burned with the light of a tiny purple sun.

  With what little power I had left in me, I reached my senses outward and felt those long lines of power binding the zombies to the Bokor, enslaving them to his will.

  This had to be the energy Pierre-Francois had mentioned back in his shop.

  Avizo.

  Feeling it up close and personal, it took me all of a second to identify the slick energy at work, the power of Voodoo, the power of the necromancer and the black-hearted Bokor. And I knew it.

  Nox, shitloads of it.

  For the barest moment, I almost thought I could dip myself into those strands of purple light, could pry the strings away, sever them from Beauvoir’s control. Then, as quickly as the sensation had come, it was gone. The steady bass guitar thrum vanished, taking the purple radiance with it, leaving darkness behind, a darkness broken only by the moon above and the flickering firelight of the burning bodies below.

  For a long beat things were still, but then the brutalized zombie army began to twitch and rustle, arms and legs moving in herky-jerky fashion as the dead slowly picked themselves up from the ground.

  TWENTY:

  Haitian Standoff

  It didn’t happen all at once, understand, but rather in a slow, sporadic wave. But, and this is key, it did happen. Not all the zombies gained their feet—some didn’t have feet to gain, not after my handiwork—but half of them did. ’Cause that’s what I needed, thirty or forty more zombies, and my gas gauge reading “E.”

  “Come now, Yancy Lazarus, we both know you aren’t gonna walk away from here. You’re spent—I can see it from here. And even if you kill all these”—Beauvoir gestured toward his considerable force—“there be plenty more dead in Haiti for me to summon. Always more dead.”

  I pulled my hand cannon and held it aloft, letting the greasy firelight reflect off the black gunmetal. “I seem to recall you spouting off some similar horseshit the last time we met. Right before I gave you that lovely parting gift.”

  He instinctively reached up, fingers tracing over the gaping hole in his face. “You will lose,” he said, his voice so sure, so full of victory there could be no doubt.

  “Could be I lose, noodledick, but I don’t particularly feel like giving up yet. Generally, I’m pretty shitty at quitting. I’ve been smoking since sixteen.”

  The man frowned, then nodded slowly, his top hat bobbing and swaying. “It would be a terrible shame if they”—he nodded toward the idling zombies—“kill you before I can even our tab, so maybe I can change your mind. There are, after all, many ways to win a fight, and I know ’em all. So, maybe we talk instead. Maybe I can persuade you. People, they say I’m very persuasive.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you deserve to win salesmen of the year award, douchebucket,” I called back. “Why don’t you amble your lanky ass over here and collect your prize—you’ve won yourself a matching set of missing eyes.”

  He laughed, then. A deep belly rumble of real joy, which made me more than a little uneasy. What the hell did he have up his sleeve?


  “We’ll see ’bout dat.” He winked at me and snapped his fingers once more. The zombies, swaying but otherwise still, broke into restless motion.

  Instead of swarming toward me, however, they formed two columns, with a wide path cutting up the middle, snaking toward the truck. Goofiest friggin’ battle formation I’d ever seen.

  I watched, eyes squinted, lips pursed as Beauvoir leaned over and whispered something to the child soldiers encircling him. After a moment, the kids nodded and crawled out of the truck bed—faces drawn, their hands now devoid of their too big AKs. One by one, they marched down the path between the zombies, hands empty, arms hanging limp and listlessly at their sides.

  There were six of ’em, all boys, none of ’em past the age of thirteen. They stopped at intervals of four or five feet; the closest one halted fifteen feet away.

  I nervously adjusted my sweaty palm on the pistol grip of my hand cannon. Seriously, though, what the holy-living hell is going on here?

  “I can see you are confused,” Beauvoir said, clapping his hands together. “So let me explain. These boys here, they serve me heart and soul. Each of them once had parents, parents who opposed me. Who opposed my Chimeres. Political dissidents. Freedom fighters. Journalists. Scholars. Government workers.” He waved lanky hands through the air as though to say, the why is not so important. “They spoke lies against me. They threatened my empire. So I found them, Yancy Lazarus. I found them in their homes late at night, tucked away behind stone walls, believing themselves protected. Safe. They were not safe. No one in Cité Soleil is safe, not from me.

  “My zombies, they came, tore down doors, flooded through windows. They dragged those treacherous families into the streets. While they were held down, I would come and pick one child”—he held up a long, skinny finger—“and I would give him a revolver. Then I would give him a choice. For each member of his family he was willing to kill, another would live. ‘Kill your father, shoot him in the head,’ I would say, ‘and your mother lives. Kill your brother and your sister lives. You choose who lives, who dies.’ If they refused”—he shrugged, uncaring—“well, then everyone died. Their families were torn apart one by one, and they were forced to watch. Very persuasive.”