Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  My reserve supply of patience was at absolute zero at this point. When that happens, my mouth doesn’t always obey the rules of decorum.

  “No, you listen to me, stupid,” I said. “We’re on our way to you. To surrender. In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a riot going on and people are killing each other all over the place. We’ve got Jolly and this civilian lady…”

  “Mickey,” Mickey said next to me, trying to listen in on the conversation.

  “…Mickey,” I added, “and we’re going to get them to you in the most secure location you’ve got. At that point, we’ll surrender, and when this is all over, you can huff and puff and throw us back in our cells.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. I knew what he was thinking. He knew that I was right, he knew that I was giving him what he wanted, but he was trying to think of a way to show his dominance over the conversation and make it sound like he was in control.

  “You cannot stay in the infirmary,” he finally said. “It’s not secure. The cameras show inmates moving in groups all around you.”

  No shit, almost slipped out of my mouth, but Dread was there, and he laid a hand on my shoulder. He didn’t need to say a word. I knew what he was thinking.

  You’ve got to let him win, Cass. You’ve got to swallow your pride, put up with his nonsense, and let him win so that you can get on with your life.

  God damn Dread. Always so reasonable. Always so right. It made me crazy sometimes.

  “Okay, then, we’ll come to you,” I said, fully aware that I was now repeating myself. That look from Dread said it all… I had to let Peck think that it was all his idea.

  “Yes. Yes, you will come to the hub. You and all the others. Bring the civilian and Jolly with you, and make sure of their safety. That other inmate with you as well, the one you have handcuffed. Then, you will all surrender yourselves immediately into my custody. And I assure you, inmate… there will be disciplinary action.”

  I rolled my eyes, mostly to let Dread know how much crap I was eating for his benefit. “Okay, Warden. We’ll do it your way. We need a path to get there, so if you can check your cameras and tell us a way that’s clear, that’d be a big help.”

  He sounded a little more satisfied. “Yes. Yes, stand by. We will contact you once we see a clear path on the monitors.”

  The line clicked off, and I hung up the phone and shot a look at Dread. “See how nice I can be?”

  “So nice.”

  “I really hate that guy.”

  “You really hate everybody.”

  I punched him on his big stupid arm. “I really hate you right now.”

  He smiled that big shit-eating grin he gets when he knows he’s got me, and I wanted to punch him on the arm about a hundred more times, but that idiot gangbanger with the broken collarbone had to speak up and ruin the moment.

  “Yo, man, you can’t leave me here like this,” he said. “My arm’s broke.”

  Jolly started to squat down next to where the gangbanger was sitting on the floor, and Lysette grabbed his arm to stop him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I was… going to fix his shoulder,” Jolly said.

  “No, you’re not,” Lysette said.

  “I can’t leave him here like this.”

  “He tried to kill us.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s an asshole, but that doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole, too.”

  “Charlie,” the gangbanger on the floor said. “My name is Charlie. You can’t leave me like this, please.”

  An opportunity had just arisen, and I stood next to Jolly and said, “Hang on a second.”

  Jolly looked at me like he thought I was about to murder a puppy, and I gave him a big wink to let him know it was all going to turn out happiness and buttercups. But this Charlie character didn’t need to know that.

  “Aw, come on, lady, please, this really hurts…” Charlie said.

  I held up a hand to stop him. “We’ll help you out, Charlie. Sure. But what are you going to do for us?”

  He looked around, confused. “I don’t… I don’t have anything…”

  “Information, Charlie. That’s what I want.”

  “I don’t know nothin’.”

  He let out a scream as Lysette grabbed him by the broken collarbone and gave it a squeeze. Jeez, Lys, I thought, we don’t have to ramp it up like that. But, you can’t break ranks in front of someone when you’re in the midst of interrogating them, so I didn’t try to stop her, either.

  “A riot this big doesn’t start out of nothing,” I said. “This isn’t just a couple of knuckleheads who managed to grab a guard and hole up in some corner of the block. This is widespread and coordinated. Not to mention the death magic.”

  “I didn’t do it! What are you messing with me for? Do I look like I was the one to plan out something like this?”

  “Someone did.”

  Lysette gave him another squeeze, and he yelped and said, “Fly, man. Fly.”

  “What?”

  “Not what… who,” Jolly said. “Fly is an inmate. I don’t know his real name. Clarence Something, I think. He’s a street mage. A real low-life thug. Used to work as muscle on the street for some unsavory types… but he’s strictly small time.”

  “Not no more,” Charlie said. “Rumor had it, he hooked up with someone on the outside. Someone serious. She found some way in here, showed him all kinds of shit, like how to do that death magic, and told him…”

  “She?” I said, thinking back to the dark woman who had confronted Lysette and I back in the cell block. “Who’s she?”

  “I don’t know her name. Really,” he said quickly, with a look at Lysette. “Really I don’t. They never mentioned her name.”

  “Who never mentioned her name?”

  “Fly, I told you, Fly. He started spreading the word around, saying that something big was coming. Trying to get people to join in. He called it Resurrection Day… you know, like we would all be reborn or something? Get a second chance when we all escaped? Most of us thought it was all just talk. Fly was always running his mouth. But then this all started and once people saw what he could do… we knew it was on.”

  “How come I never heard about any of this?” I asked.

  “Or me?” Dread said.

  Charlie let out a little snort. “You two’s cops. Everybody knows you two is cops. And Jolly… man, everybody in this prison knows you nothing but a Boy Scout. You ain’t gonna want in on any of this.”

  “Damn straight,” Jolly said. “I don’t want anything to do with death magic. Or with all this violence…”

  Jolly let out a shout of terror and fell backwards as something heavy flew across the room and landed on top of Charlie. It was one of the gangbangers Lysette had killed, back from the dead with black talons on his hands.

  We’d all been so intent on Charlie and anything he might be able to tell us, that none of us had noticed one of the bodies had twitched itself back to life as a ghoul. In a flash, it was on top of Charlie, tearing at his throat with those terrible claws. Charlie tried to fight it off, but with his hands cuffed and a broken collarbone, pretty much all he could do was scream and spray blood everywhere out of a torn out throat.

  “Get back!” Dread shouted, leaping in once he’d recovered from the shock and surprise.

  I drew my pistol, but he was already on top of the ghoul, hauling it off Charlie and pinning it to the wall with one arm. He didn’t give the ghoul a chance to fight back; he smashed it in the head over and over again with the baton until it finally stopped moving and dropped to the floor.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked him.

  He didn’t have a chance to answer. Across the room, the other body jerked to its feet spasmodically. Dread called out to Lysette and tossed her the baton, which she plucked out of the air easily before going on the attack. She spun in a tight circle and kicked low, knocking the legs out from under the ghoul.

  “The head!” Dread said
.

  I could’ve jumped in and simply shot the ghoul and ended it right there, but the thing is, Dread and Lysette were working together, and I needed to let them work together. We needed to be a team, not random strangers going in different directions, and a minute ago, these two were comparing the sizes of their metaphorical dicks. If we were all going to get out of this alive, they needed to be backing each other up, not staring each other down. So, I let it play out.

  Lysette didn’t need to be told twice. She was on top of the ghoul immediately, before it could recover; it may not have even been fully animated in the first place, that’s how fast she moved. Two hits with the baton, and the ghoul stopped moving.

  “What the hell!” Mickey said. She was crouched down in a corner, curled up in a ball with her hands over her head, as if she could hide there in plain sight somehow. “Where…”

  “The ones we killed. Brought back. Like the guard in our meeting room,” Dread said, breathing heavily from exertion. “Lysette, keep that weapon. I’ll use the other baton that this gangbanger brought in with him.”

  Lysette gave him a nod and went back to studying the ghoul she’d brained. I knew from our past conversations that her experience with Users was limited, and I could tell that the ghouls made her nervous. She’d been able to pounce on this one before it was able to make a move, but she had to be wondering how things might have gone if the contest had been more even.

  Charlie was history. No big shock there. The ghoul had ripped his throat out before any of us had known what was happening.

  “Why did it kill him? Charlie?” Mickey asked. “Why not one of the rest of us? Why did it go for him?”

  “Good question,” Dread said.

  “Shut him up, maybe?” Jolly said. “He was talking. Being a narc in this place can get you killed pretty quickly.”

  “I think that’s right,” I said. “It could’ve jumped on any one of us. Tactically, it would’ve been smarter to take out me, since I have the gun, or Dread or Lys, and then kill the others if they could. Inflict more casualties that way.”

  “But it targeted the guy who was giving out information,” Dread said. “Cass, that means…”

  “That means that not only can they be created remotely, but they can be directed remotely as well,” I finished for him.

  Lysette looked up at me from the ghoul she’d been studying. “You didn’t know that they could do this?”

  “We don’t know much about death magic,” I said. “It’s Schedule One; no one’s allowed to even do research on it. The Wreck Squads had some files on what death magic can do, but anything we know is only second-hand or even third-hand reports of witnesses who have bumped into it somewhere.”

  Everyone in the room got quiet. I couldn’t have this. Fear of the unknown can create a paralysis of thought and action; you start to second guess every move so much that you end up making no move at all. In a violent situation, not moving means you get killed.

  Lysette was a great white shark swimming amongst us little fishes, but she’d never seen anything like this before. Jolly and Mickey… they were so far out of their depth, that the risk of one or both of them freezing up was practically a certainty. And then there was Dread and I. We’d seen some crazy shit in our time, but I couldn’t forget the reality of our being Vive Jobs.

  Revival Tech likes to pretend that they’re making progress with those they bring back from the dead, but every Vive Job goes insane sooner or later. Every one. And while I’d been distracted from thinking about that eventuality… earlier by training with Lysette, and more recently by fighting for my life… I couldn’t ignore the fact that sooner or later my mind and Dread’s mind were going to crack. This kind of pressure might be just the thing that pushed us over the edge.

  “What are we going to do?” Mickey asked. Her voice was a whisper.

  It was a bad sign, a symptom of that very paralysis that I was worried about. Like I said, I couldn’t have it. I couldn’t have the team freeze up. Like it or not, that’s what we were now… a team, my team, and I had to get my team moving.

  “Hey, lighten up, boys and girls,” I said loudly, forcing my face to crack a wise-ass grin. “We’ve been doing fine so far. Today’s a peachy day for learning experiences, so let’s get our shit together and get moving.”

  Dread picked up my vibe and gave me a nod. “Orders?”

  “We’re moving out. If whoever is creating the ghouls can control them remotely, they may be able to see or hear through them remotely. That means the enemy knows our position. This place is compromised, so we need to be someplace else.”

  “But the hub hasn’t called back to tell us which way is safe,” Mickey said.

  “Yeah, well, forget the warden,” I said. “He’s halfway to useless anyway. We don’t need him. We’ll rescue ourselves. Right?”

  I didn’t really believe my own pep talk, but there wasn’t any choice in the matter and I needed to reassure my people that this was going to work out. If we started arguing or second-guessing each other, we were done.

  The best bet was to take the most direct route to the hub. The less distance we had to travel, the less likely something could go wrong.

  Dread had his baton, and I had my pistol. Lysette collected both makeshift shivs that the gangbangers had brought with them, adding them to the baton Dread had tossed to her. She kept the baton in her right hand and a shiv in her left, moving her arms through some basic Kali stick-and-knife fighting moves so she could experiment with the balance of her new weapons.

  “I’ll take that other shiv,” Jolly said, then shrugged when Lysette ignored him and simply tucked the second shiv into her waistband without a word. “Or, you know, you hold on to it. That’s cool. I’ll just, um, I’ll just use my fists, like a man does, right?”

  “You do that,” Lysette said.

  That was better. They were shaking out of their paralysis and focusing on the job at hand. I started to feel a lot better about our chances as I led us out the door.

  Of course, everything went to hell immediately. We exited the infirmary and headed towards the hub, only to find about twenty inmates piling up a barricade made up of broken metal bunk beds and any other heavy debris they could find.

  This wasn’t looking good. We were vastly outnumbered, and even if we could take all of these guys in a fight, we’d still have to deal with removing their barricade before we could get to the hub, and the noise of all of that would draw more inmates and more trouble.

  Still, it didn’t look like there was going to be much choice in the matter. The inmates all stopped what they were doing, staring at us, moving to face us, hands gripping shivs or pipes or other improvised weapons. I tightened my grip on my pistol. I could see out of the corner of my eye that Dread was tensing his body for a charge and Lysette was getting ready to do her violence thing as well.

  And then, out of nowhere, little Mickey stepped around me and said loudly to the inmates, “Are you with her?”

  There was an immediate pause in their movements. One of the inmates in the blue uniform of a User looked Mickey over and said, “Yeah. Are you?”

  “What do you think we’re doing here?” she said back to him.

  He stared at her for a long second. Just when I thought that whatever Mickey was up to wasn’t going to work out and that we were going to have to fight it out anyway, the User looked over at Jolly and said, “Jolly? You too? You’re in on this? Didn’t expect that.”

  “Hunh?” Jolly said, then, catching a look from Mickey, added, “Um, yeah, man, yeah. You know. Got to go with the flow, right?”

  The User was still looking us all over when another of the inmates said to him, “We’re all done here. Nobody’s coming in or out this way. Not sure why she wants…”

  “You don’t need to know why,” the User interrupted him. “She says barricade the exit to the hub, we barricade the exit to the hub. That’s it.”

  He looked over the barricade, nodding in satisfaction, and his
work crew began to shuffle off and move towards the far end of the cell block. He waited until they had all sifted through our ranks and then gestured towards the end of the cell block.

  “Come on,” he said. “Fly wants everybody out in the yard. She’s going to be there.”

  “Great,” Mickey nodded. “Great.”

  She nudged Dread and gestured for us all to follow, and really, there didn’t seem to be much choice in the matter. We all fell into step with the inmates, lingering behind a bit so that we could keep together, but not falling back so far behind as to arouse suspicion.

  I had to give the kid credit. That could’ve ended in disaster; now, Mickey had bought us all a little time.

  “What was that?” I asked her, keeping my voice low enough that the other inmates couldn’t hear us as we passed through the otherwise empty cell block. “A Mentalist Trick?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Something one of the other inmates said to me and Dread. He asked us, ‘Are you with her?’ So I figured, hey, we all look like inmates… I mean, well, you guys do… so maybe with these guys, I could pretend that we were all on the same side, like I did before with that other guy. It looks like it worked. Not bad, right?”

  “Not bad,” I said. “Except, of course, now we have to follow these guys straight into the middle of where all the other hundreds of rioting inmates are going to be gathered together. Not to mention Fly and this mysterious death mage who’s running the whole show.”

  Her smile faded fast. “Oh. Oh… shit. Shit.”

  Yeah. That about summed it up.

  ***

  The yard was shaped vaguely like a baseball field, with the narrow end by the central hub of the prison and what would be the outfield by the outer wall. Normally, the number of inmates in the yard was kept to a sparse, manageable level that the guards could easily keep an eye on. Now, Cass and the rest of the group found themselves caught in a teeming, swirling mass of khaki and blue uniforms, a sea of inmates clustered in small groups, some of them holding improvised weapons and even a few with captured firearms.

  “Dread,” Cass said, looking toward a nearby inmate holding a pump action shotgun. Dread caught her look and nodded. If anything went wrong, he’d go for the guy with the shotgun first.