A New York Nightmare!

by Barry Hutchison

  That did it. The six remaining skeletons – not counting the one still trying in vain to choke Smithy – divided themselves up, three each, between Denzel and Weinberg. Then, with a rattle of ancient bones and a roar of supernatural rage, they attacked.

  Weinberg fired off another shot that splattered a skeleton into lumpy jelly, but she couldn’t turn in time to take aim again. Bony fingers grabbed for her weapon, as sharp, angular knees and elbows pinned her against the deck.

  Denzel, to his own immense surprise, was actually faring better. He swung out with the Boomzooka at knee-height, and one of the skeletons lost both legs from the thigh bone down.

  Another lunged at him, but Denzel thrust the end of the bazooka up at it. Metal met skull with a deeply satisfying ker-ack.

  Denzel tried to stand, but the boat was tilting even further now. As he looked up at the stern – or, as he knew it, “the back bit” – Denzel was hit by a strong feeling of déjà vu. This all seemed terribly familiar somehow, like he’d lived through it before.

  Had he been thinking more rationally, he would have realised he was simply remembering the final half-hour of the film Titanic, but right now, logical thought was the last thing on his mind.

  Weinberg flicked up a leg, driving a powerful kick into the side of a skeleton’s head. The skull snapped off, bounced across the deck, then rolled over the edge and into the mist below.

  “You’re just not taking the hint, are you?” Smithy said to the skeleton, who was, despite everything, still trying to choke him. Its grin was still fixed on its face, but there was frustration in the hollows of its eyes now.

  Rather than change its tactics, though, it had doubled down and was trying to squeeze harder. Smithy’s head grew a little larger, like an inflating balloon, but otherwise he suffered no real ill effects.

  Denzel’s Boomzooka landed a glancing blow on another skeleton’s hip. It wobbled slightly, but then found its balance and dived on him, its teeth gnashing hungrily, its fingers creeping through his hair.

  “Get off!” he hissed, pushing back against the thing. It was too strong though; its grip too powerful. Despite being nothing but bones – and ghost bones, at that – it was too heavy for him to be able to throw it off.

  Weinberg was wrestling with the last of the three skeletons that had attacked her too. She jammed both thumbs into its eye sockets but it had no effect. Instead, she caught hold of its bottom jaw, placed her other hand flat on its forehead and heaved.

  The jawbone snapped. The skeleton tried to pull back but Weinberg grabbed its skull and twisted until it popped loose. With a grunt of effort, she lobbed the skull backwards over her head, where it was quickly lost to the swirling fog.

  Denzel punched the other skeleton right where its nose would have been, if it still had one. Pain ignited in his knuckles as they smashed against the hard skull, and Denzel spent the next few seconds muttering, “Ow, ow, ow!” while trying, very hard, not to die.

  The skeleton’s hands moved to Denzel’s throat. Unlike Smithy, Denzel relied quite heavily on his windpipe, so when the creature’s weight pressed down on it, he kicked and struggled and—

  KASPLOOSH.

  The skeleton dissolved in a gush of ecto-gloop. The goo hung in the air in a vague skeleton shape for a half-second or so, then fell in a downpour on Denzel, just as he opened his mouth to gasp for air.

  “Ugh! Ew! I’ve got ghost in my mouth!” he spluttered.

  Weinberg stood supporting herself on the starboard rail, a glowing blue smoke curling from the barrel of the Thingamajig.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, then she turned and, with a single blast, obliterated the final skeleton.

  “Thanks for that,” said Smithy. “I thought he was never going to stop.”

  He turned, just as Denzel looked up.

  “Oh, my God!” Denzel spluttered. “Smithy! Your head!”

  “What about it?” asked Smithy. He reached a hand up and found his cheek. It would have been difficult to miss. His head had swollen to four times its normal size. It teetered unsteadily atop a neck that was roughly as thick as a broom handle. “Ooh, boy. Yeah. That’s large. That is large.”

  He placed both hands over his ears and squeezed. His forehead and nose both bulged outwards.

  “No, that’s made it worse, if anything,” he muttered.

  The radio on Denzel’s belt squawked. “Denzel?” said Martinez. “What’s going on? Over.”

  Denzel unhooked the radio and thumbed the button. “Long story. There’s a Viking and a big octopus. Did you fix the spike?”

  He released the button and waited.

  “You need to say ‘over’,” Weinberg reminded him, but before Denzel could say anything, three of the groaning chains snapped and the longship jerked backwards. Denzel and Weinberg were tossed into the air.

  When they hit the deck again, the walkie-talkie was knocked from Denzel’s grasp. It slid away from him down the deck, picking up speed as it hurtled towards the edge.

  “I got it, I got it!” said Smithy. He staggered towards the radio, only for his enormous head to throw him off balance. He bent, trying to grab for the walkie-talkie, but his forehead hit the railing with a hollow clonk and the device slid off the deck and down into the fog below. “No, wait, I tell a lie.”

  The four remaining chains didn’t break, but they went suddenly slack, as if the octopus, or Kraken, or whatever it was, had managed to pull itself free.

  The longship rocked violently but then settled on to an even keel. Denzel quickly got to his feet and scooped the worst of the ecto-slime off his face. He could still taste it at the back of his throat. It reminded him of stagnant water and old socks. With, weirdly enough, a not-unpleasant pepperminty aftertaste.

  Weinberg was already up front, leaning on the railing, her rifle sweeping the fog below. Smithy stood beside her, repeatedly slapping himself in the face as he tried to batter his head back into shape. It was now the size of a watermelon, but with the shape and texture of a cabbage. Still, it was a step in the right direction.

  “See anything?” Denzel asked.

  Weinberg shook her head. “No visuals, and no scanners on this thing,” she said. “If I had to guess, I’d say your Viking friend probably didn’t make it. Which leaves us with a problem.”

  One of the dangling chains rattled, then swung violently across the deck, forcing Denzel and Weinberg to jump. Smithy didn’t bother, and the chain passed harmlessly through his ankles before snagging on a railing.

  The boat shuddered as the chain went tight again. Denzel grabbed for the mast, trying to get a hold of something before the boat tipped, but there was less pull on the chain this time and the ship remained level.

  Either what was attached to the chain wasn’t as heavy as before … or it was moving upwards.

  Denzel felt his stomach do a little flip as the tip of an enormous octopus limb appeared out of the fog. It rose a metre or two into the air, twisted limply, then flopped down on to the deck.

  Where it had previously been attached to the rest of the tentacle, it was now just a relatively small piece with a ragged edge where it had been sliced off.

  The chain rattled again, and a bruised and battered Ragnarok heaved himself on to the deck. His leather jerkin was badly torn and a patch of his blond beard was now missing. One of the horns on his helmet had been snapped off, and there was a slick of ectoplasmic slime across his bare chest.

  He no longer had his axe, but his grin was still there, wider than ever. “And that, my friends, is how you kill a Kraken!”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Smithy.

  Rok looked across the deck. He stopped when he spotted the scattered bones.

  “Where is my crew?” he demanded. His eyes narrowed behind the slits of his helmet’s visor. Denzel was relieved Rok no longer appeared to have his axe, although there was always the possibility he’d just pull it out of thin air again. “What did you do to them?”

  “Hello!” called Smithy.
“Yoohoo. Anyone listening?”

  “Odin’s beard! What happened to his head?” Rok gasped.

  Smithy hammered his forehead a few times, trying to beat it back into shape. One of his ears doubled in size.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. He pointed to the tip of the tentacle, twitching on the deck. “I was just saying, that’s not how you kill a Kraken.”

  “Pah! Your words are nonsense, large-headed boy!” Rok snorted. “How would you possibly know that?”

  “Well, mainly,” said Smithy, “because it’s not dead.”

  Rok, Denzel and Weinberg all turned just as another tentacle finished rising into view behind the ship. The Viking’s jaw dropped. He reached out a hand, but this time no axe appeared in it.

  “Och,” he muttered. “That is most disappointing.”

  “Stand aside,” Weinberg said. She twisted a dial on the side of the Thingamajig, then opened fire. The beam that emerged was a pure, blinding white. Even though he was more than a metre behind Weinberg, the glow from the gun jabbed right at the back of Denzel’s eyeballs. He forced himself to keep watching though, as the beam struck the octopus, right on one of its suction cups.

  The limb thrashed. The Kraken screeched. And then, with a pop that rattled the windows of the buildings below, the beast disintegrated into vapour.

  Weinberg turned back to Ragnarok and rested the Thingamajig on her hip. “Now, that,” she said, “is how you kill a Kraken.”

  Rok’s jaw dropped. “You destroyed it. You destroyed the great beast!”

  “Well, technically I didn’t destroy it. It’s Spectral Energy; energy can’t be destroyed, just transformed. But it’ll take it a few hundred years to pull its atoms back together, by which point it’ll be contained.” Weinberg adjusted the controls of the Thingamajig. “And so will you, blondie.”

  Before she had a chance to take aim at him, Rok caught the Thingamajig and yanked it from Weinberg’s hand. “Fascinating,” he said, turning the device over and over. “’Tis a weapon of the gods themselves.”

  Weinberg dived at Rok, but the Viking turned and dodged without looking up, then tripped her as she passed. She slid across the deck and stopped next to Smithy and Denzel. They both helped her up, then held her back before she could launch herself at the Viking again. He had the Thingamajig trained on her, the weapon looking cartoonishly small in his shovel-like hands.

  “I always wondered what I would do once the Kraken was bested. I have hunted that monster in life and death. It was my purpose. My mission. My reason to be.” Rok took a step towards them. “And now it is done, and I am adrift. For the first time in a long, long time, I am purposeless.”

  He took another step closer. “So now I need a new purpose. A new mission. And I have decided what that mission will be.”

  “That was quick,” said Denzel, nervously eyeing the Thingamajig. “It might be best not to rush into anything.”

  “I am going to do what we Vikings were born to do.”

  “Start a small farming community?” Smithy guessed. “Brilliant idea. High-five.”

  Smithy held his hand up but Ragnarok ignored him and took one final step closer to Weinberg. His eyes blazed beneath his helmet’s visor. “Conquer.” He gestured around him at the handful of buildings that rose above the fog. “Your village – this ‘New York’ of yours – now belongs to me.”

  Weinberg shook her head. “Not going to happen,” she warned. “Like I said, New York is my jurisdiction and I do not take kindly to Spectral invasions. You are going down.”

  “Ha!” Ragnarok boomed. “Such spirit! And also, such an appropriate turn of phrase. Going down.”

  His foot raised, then hit Weinberg in the chest like a battering ram. She flew backwards, slamming into Denzel as he scrambled to catch her. They both hit the railing together. The hazy sky overhead was suddenly, briefly, below them, then gravity had them in its clutches and they both fell, screaming, into the fog.

  Denzel plunged through the fog, flapping his arms as he tried desperately – and, ultimately, unsuccessfully – to fly. It was not the first time he’d fallen from such a ridiculous height in the last half-hour, but at least last time he’d been attached to a rope. This time he was attached to nothing at all, which meant he would soon be attached to the ground in such a way that he could only be removed with a shovel and a high-pressure hose.

  “Hold on, Denzel!”

  Smithy’s voice came in short bursts through the sound of the wind whistling past. Denzel opened his eyes – which he hadn’t actually realised he’d closed – to see his friend hurtling towards him from above.

  Weinberg was directly below him, facing the ground, just out of reach. She had screamed for the first second or so, but was now silent. Either she was trying to come up with a clever escape plan, or had resigned herself to the upcoming splat.

  Smithy dropped past Denzel and matched speed with Weinberg. “Got you!” he said, grabbing for their arms. Once he had them, he gritted his teeth and flew upwards.

  Or, rather, he tried to. The rate of descent fell, but not by much, and not enough to prevent the upcoming impact. They were still going to hit the ground. They were still going to die. At best, there’d be less mess to clean up, but otherwise Smithy’s rescue plan wasn’t proving very effective.

  “Smithy!” Denzel cried. He met Smithy’s gaze and knew, in that moment, that there was nothing his friend could do. There was nothing anyone could do. They were falling, and they weren’t going to stop until they hit the ground.

  They stopped, just before they hit the ground. It was quite a sudden stop, but much less sudden than it could have been.

  Weinberg and Denzel looked at each other hanging in the air. Smithy was still holding on to them, but it was clear he wasn’t the one holding them up. He released his grip and they all just continued floating there, several metres above a row of abandoned cars.

  “Smithy, did you do this?” Denzel asked.

  Smithy shook his head. “No. I mean, I don’t think so. I mean, not that I noticed. Why, did you?”

  “Probably not,” said Denzel.

  Weinberg looked over her shoulder to check the drone pack, but it was completely dead. Besides, even if it had been working, that wouldn’t have explained how Denzel had stopped and was now suspended by nothing but empty space.

  “Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely better than I was expecting the next three seconds to go,” said Denzel. He ran in the air, but didn’t go anywhere. “But how do we get down?”

  “Well now,” called a voice from somewhere just above them in the fog. The outline of someone with a fluttering cape grew larger through the green haze. “Perhaps I can help with that.”

  “Superman!” cried Smithy. “Hooray, we’re saved!”

  “Uh, no,” said Martinez, emerging from the fog. Flickering lights surrounded his feet and danced around his fingertips. “Just me. Sorry to disappoint.”

  Weinberg smiled. “Not a disappointment at all, partner.”

  “Good to see you in one piece, Weinberg,” said Martinez. He glanced away. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

  “You’re here now,” said Denzel. “And that’s what counts.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Smithy. “We won’t even talk about what a coward you were earlier.”

  Martinez nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You know, refusing to come outside and everything.”

  “Right.”

  “And wanting to run away.”

  “Yes, thank you, Smithy. That’s very kind of you not to mention any of that stuff,” Martinez said, doing his best to smile. “I really appreciate that.”

  With a wave of his hand, he gently lowered Denzel and Weinberg to the ground. The fog was even thicker down at street level. They could just make out the shapes of a couple of yellow cabs through the green haze, and the only sounds were the echo of their own voices bouncing back at them.

  “So what’s the situation?” asked Weinberg.

  �
��You mean besides ‘Wah, there are ghosts everywhere’?” said Martinez. He gestured into the fog. “This stuff seems to have awoken the city’s dormant supernatural entities. We thought they were gone, but I think they’ve just been … sleeping, somehow. Without any Spectral Energy to power them up they’ve been in hibernation mode, but now this stuff has taken them out of it and they’re wide awake.”

  “Like Sea-Monkeys,” said Smithy. When everyone frowned at him at the same time, he continued. “You know, those little prehistoric egg things that are all dried up, but when you pour water on them, boom. Sea-Monkeys.”

  He crossed his arms and took on an expression of annoyance. “Although, I should say, they don’t actually turn into monkeys at any point. Personally, I think that should be made much clearer on the box.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Martinez. “Like Sea-Monkeys, I guess.”

  A flailing white shape emerged from the fog right beside Denzel. Martinez muttered something and waved a finger. The ghost was immediately encased in a film of ice and fell to the ground with a thunk.

  “Nicely done,” said Weinberg.

  Martinez bit his lip and smiled. From the way his fingers had trembled, it was obvious he was still terrified. Like Weinberg had said, though, he’d stepped up when it counted.

  “What about the spike?” Denzel asked. “Any luck?”

  “I told you, that thing’s been broken for decades,” said Weinberg.

  Martinez raised his eyebrows and rocked back on his heels. His smile widened in a way that made him look quite smug.

  “You didn’t!” said Weinberg.

  “Just needed an Oberon touch,” Martinez said. “You were right, Denzel.”

  “Great!” cheered Denzel. “Then we can just switch it on, it’ll suck him up and job done. We can all go back to eating pizza and playing Battleface.”

  “Battlefist,” said Martinez, Smithy and Weinberg at the same time.

  “That too,” said Denzel. He grinned hopefully. “That’s right, isn’t it? That’s all we need to do?”