by R A Baxter
“It was no accident!” Abby leaned in toward Jack, and he stared back with fear in his eyes. “Farley guided us into that mine to seal it off, then he claimed he felt sick and ran outside. Next thing I knew, I was dreaming, unconscious, and yet aware I was dying. I remembered subtle hints Farley had given us before the explosion and my soul writhed in agony. I felt the fabric between Materia and Essentia wrench apart and form a haunt. My ghost body entered Materia and found that soulless wretch sitting there admiring his work, a smirk on his bloody and burnt face. I refused to die. I still refuse. I won’t rest until I see his twisted rotting corpse!”
“Can’t you see what this is doing to you?” Katie’s eyes welled up. “Why can’t you let it go?”
Abby didn’t respond. The last few bison lumbered by and Abby started forward, leading the party onward to Silverton.
Jack galloped next to Katie. “I know this is hard for you. We just need to get away from this nightmare before we all go crazy.”
Katie nodded and rode on.
They’d ridden only a few hundred yards when Clara gasped and pointed at a black heap lying in the dirt, a yellow-shafted arrow protruding from its motionless body. Katie moved closer and realized it was a crow, and it wasn’t alone. Four others lay scattered in the yellow grass, each with a feathered arrow through its heart.
“That one’s moving!” Clara rode over to it.
Abby sped past Katie and halted her steed, then jumped down and wrapped her hands around the bird. She turned and rushed it over to Ezekiel. The Ghost Knight leader cradled the bird in his right arm and waited for it to roll on its side to face him. It opened its large black beak and a clear iridescent bubble emerged from its mouth. The bubble grew steadily until it reached the size of a beach ball. Katie pushed her steed closer and Jack and Clara crowded in with her.
A miniature scene appeared within the bubble, seen from a bird’s eye view. A large company of American soldiers marched with staff members and campers from Camp Farley. Travis, Ming, and Barbara each carried assault rifles and Derek and Tamera stood in the back, talking to each other. Katie couldn’t see Marina anywhere and hoped it was because her plan to go to Kalispell had worked.
She detected something else in the image, lurking in the shadows of trees. It hid behind a massive boulder, its long black legs barely visible, emerging from the undergrowth. Katie looked up and her stomach lurched when she realized she was looking at the same boulder the monster had been hiding behind in the crow’s message.
“Incoming!” The tusked knight spun his horse and pointed to a cluster of trees to their right. The other knights rallied at the cry and searched for the attackers.
Three missiles crashed through the treetops and exploded in the dirt in front of them. Gunfire sounded from five or six locations all around them. Katie became confused and disoriented. Scores of soldiers emerged from behind pine trees and bulky rocks, many falling on one knee and steadying their assault rifles at Ezekiel’s company.
Two camouflaged military vehicles appeared from nowhere, already in motion, swerving around the Ghost Knights. Travis, Ming, Barbara, Carl, and Tony hopped from the back of the vehicles and took positions in a row, leveling their M16 rifles at Katie, Clara, and Jack.
Derek and Damien climbed from the front of one of the transport trucks, and Tamara emerged from the other. They walked behind the soldiers, no weapons in their hands, and turned to face their captives. Damien frowned and glared at Jack. Gone was the syrupy smile that had always adorned his face before.
Two tanks rumbled into the clearing from the underbrush in three directions, and their main guns swiveled at the Ghost Knights. Two Blackhawk helicopters dived from behind the trees, chopping overhead.
Jack glared at Ming. Ming frowned and glanced back and forth at his rifle and at Jack, then he looked around at the soldiers. Katie could see the cogs in his head starting to question what was happening.
Jack seized the moment. “What are you doing, Ming? We’re friends. A few days ago you said you wanted to be a veterinarian. Now, you want to shoot us? Can’t you see that Media messed with your mind? This isn’t you.” Jack turned to Travis. “This isn’t any of you.”
Ming stared at his rifle, lifted it, and aimed it at Jack’s face, his arms shaking. Five seconds passed, and he let the gun drop from his hands and clatter in the dirt at his feet. He pressed his right hand against his head and winced. Barbara looked at him and flung her gun on the ground near Ming’s. She trembled and lifted her hands to the sides of her head.
Carl shook his head and snarled, then lowered his rifle and marched over to Ming. He gave him a shove. “Don’t listen to this imbecile. You and Barbara, go back with Derek!”
Ming nodded, turned around, and weaved his way through the battalion of soldiers back to Damien and Derek. Barbara followed him. Katie knew they weren’t obeying Carl. They just didn’t want to participate anymore.
Movement behind the boulder startled Katie and she gasped. The creature she’d partly seen in the crow’s bubble message emerged from a greenish haze. It descended a low craggy incline, four of its eight thin, spidery legs jabbing at the ground with each step, while four other appendages reached outward, their clawed ends snapping at the air. Two crab-like pedipalps reached forward at the ends of human arms.
The creature’s human hands became visible whenever its massive claws scraped together. Its barbed and segmented tail swayed back and forth over its serpentine back and two pouches lined both sides of its yellowish, snakelike underbelly, each harboring a curved scimitar. Atop the scorpion’s long segmented neck sat a face that would’ve frightened Katie in its normal human form.
It was the face of Francis Farley.
The intensity of Jack’s feelings muddled his thoughts. His vision blurred, and he felt faint. He saw no hope of surviving hundreds of readied M16 rifles; two sleek M1 Abrams tanks swiveling their main guns toward him; two Blackhawk helicopters hovering low, their machine guns and rocket launchers ready to fire; and a monstrous beast tossing divots of earth with every step, making its way through the troops—a monster with the face of another monster.
Jack turned to the Ghosts Knights and wondered why they weren’t reaching for their weapons. They had the power to uproot trees and toss them like matchsticks, to form massive boulders out of thin air, to create chasms in the earth that could swallow up everyone in this clearing. Yet they just sat on their dark steeds, their gloved hands resting in their laps.
At least the frog behaved according to expectations. It bounced around Jeb’s head and clung to his ears and beard, searching high and low for a pathway to safety. It finally stopped in front of Jeb’s face and clamped its wiry arms and legs around his head. “Shape an escape route for me, you nitwit! Guns make short work of frogs who walk and talk. We’re not particularly bulletproof, you know.”
Jeb’s muffled response was unintelligible until he succeeded, with much yanking, pinching, and shoving, to twist the frog’s body around to the left side of his head. “What in tarnation’s wrong with ye? I cain’t help ye with yer confarned belly in me face.”
A loud electronic resonance permeated the air and a foot-wide, bright orange beam of light struck the center of a sparsely-branched lodgepole pine twenty feet beyond Jeb. The top half of the tree swung back and dropped with a thud, toppled away from Jack, and flopped into the ground with a loud swoosh. Jack turned to the source of the light beam and found the creature with Farley’s face standing amid the troops and grinning. The glowing orange barb of his scorpion tail dimmed and went dark.
“Do I have your attention now?” Farley puffed out his segmented chest and danced two steps to the left and back again. “When you put as much work into a magnificent limn like this, you expect people to pay attention.”
“You’re just a murderer!” Katie clenched her teeth.
Farley’s shoulders lowered. “Is that what these ghost folks have been telling you? Don’t listen to them. Your sister’s been spreading lies
about me ever since she died. She assumes that just because I survived the explosion, I must have caused it. She was so obsessed with revenge, she taught herself how to link to me whenever I dreamed. I had to develop this scorpion limn just to keep her from dreaming about me. It wasn’t easy, either.”
“No one cares!” Katie gripped the reins of her horse so hard her knuckles whitened. “How dare you call her a liar! She saw you outside the mine after it blew. You were laughing. There isn’t a word low enough to describe what you are!”
“So, you’ve had words with your deluded sibling, I see. I was hoping she’d be here with you. I may have enough power to destroy her, now that I’m in a coma. But, since I can’t take care of her, I’ll have to settle for ridding my life of you and your foolish friends.”
Farley’s tail stiffened, and Jack squinted at the increasing orange glow. The female Ghost Knight next to Jack took her lance in hand and charged in front of him, aiming at the scorpion man. Abby and Ezekiel turned their heads toward her with speed that told of their intense disapproval.
“You cannot interfere with the rites of the Ghost Knights,” she said. “The Treaty of Phantasmagoria forbids it.”
Farley sneered. “That treaty also forbids ghosts from interfering with Intershroud business. You demolished my lab and forced the closure of my camp. The treaty is void.”
“What about Uncle Vance?” Clara rode up next to Katie. “He’s your boss. He wouldn’t approve of this.”
“Don’t think for a minute you won’t pay for hurting his daughter,” Jack said.
Farley gave a wry smile and Katie turned her gaze downward to evade the brightness increasing at the end of his barbed tail. “You seem to forget that the three of you are currently unconscious, trapped below tons of rubble in a mine that you blew up, Mr. Park. I’m only going to disperse your minds, so you’ll never have to be conscious of your hopeless situation.”
“Katie’s father isn’t dumb,” Jack said. “He’ll know you attacked us out of revenge.”
“Then I’ll have to make sure there’s no one around to inform him.” Orange light exploded from Farley’s tail, its electric resonance muffling screams from Katie and Clara.
Abby and the Ghost Knights reached for their lances. Jeb stretched his arms forward and a six-foot-wide boulder formed out of nowhere, hurtling through the air toward Farley and intercepting his light beam.
The scorpion man jumped sideways on his thin, agile legs, and the massive rock rumbled through the grass behind him before disappearing over a low hill.
The tusked knight motioned upward with his hands and the earth trembled. A bastion of thick stone arose from the earth in front of Jack and his companions, but it didn’t come fast enough. Farley’s light beam had dropped low when he dodged the boulder. It carved a long, deep rut in the ground heading toward Jack and Katie. Three soldiers in its path disappeared instantly on contact with the beam. Jack held tight to his horse’s reins and leaned back, the course hair of his steed’s mane flying up and smothering his face. The bucking animal grunted and hopped backward three steps on its hind legs. Jack winced at the hot breeze of the orange beam passing below his legs. His stomach clenched—the shaft of light had passed through the body of his mount.
He sunk through the liquefying flank of the animal, a sensation not unlike diving backwards into a bath of warm gelatin. He flinched at the sudden jolt of his backside slamming against sharp rocks. The horse’s torso sunk and disappeared within a rising black mist that dropped and flowed outward, then dispersed through the meadow grass. Jack turned and saw Katie horseless and squatting low on one knee amidst a similar fluid mass of blackness.
Jack stood, motioned for Katie to follow him, and darted behind the steeds of Abby and Ezekiel, holding his head low and using the black mist for cover. Katie started to push herself up, but froze, a grimace of pain on her face.
Clara swung from her steed, ducked down, and ran to her cousin and kneeled by her side. “You okay?” She reached out a hand and Katie grabbed it, nodding her head.
“It’s my back. I’ll be fine.”
Clara helped her up, then they ducked low and edged over to Jack.
“Tamera and Derek are both Shapers,” Jack said. “I saw them waving their arms around. They’re creating all these tanks and helicopters.” Jack grew anxious at remembering the tanks and he turned to look for them over the rampart. He breathed easy when he found one tank already flattened into a mass of mangled steel below a giant boulder near Farley. Another lay upside down, thirty feet away, sunken four feet into the earth with an eight-foot wide tree trunk planted into its underside. He grinned. The Ghost Knights had been busy while he was falling through his horse.
Beyond the upturned tank at the far side of the battlefield, Derek frantically waved his arms out to his sides and descended slowly into a trench with his companions. A sloped embankment arose in front of him. Tony, Carl, and Travis worked their way through the ranks of soldiers, darted up the ridge, and jumped, disappearing into the trench to join Ming, Barbara, Damien, Derek, and Tamera.
Farley stood, surrounded by his soldiers, and grinned at Katie. She stood paralyzed, her gaze riveted on Farley’s quivering, glowing scorpion tail.
A shadow flowed over the terrain, dancing through the grass and trees. Farley’s lopsided grin vanished, and he looked up, his eyes wide with terror. His barbed tail jolted upward and fired far above Katie’s head, the orange blast carving a long wavy line through the sky.
Gunfire sounded from everywhere, trees on all sides shaking with the masses of bullets. Every soldier emptied his magazine into the sky, then reloaded, walking backward with baby steps. Jack looked up over his shoulder and shivered. Hundreds of winged ape-men soared over the treetops or leaped from pine branch to pine branch. They grunted, whooped, and howled, their faces contorted with frenzied glee.
Dozens of imps dropped from the trees and sky, riddled with scores of bullet holes. Others dropped from the heavens in pieces, sliced in half by the merciless power of Farley’s light beam. A flying ape-man spiraled downward directly above Katie, throwing off sparks as it fell, exploding twelve feet above her without a sound. A cloud of black dust rained down on Katie, making her cough.
Most of the imps, however, glided onward, undeterred by the gunfire. Mobs of them crowded into each of the Blackhawk helicopters, overpowering the pilots and gunners. The aircrafts tilted, spun, and dived, crashing in loud, fiery explosions in the distant pines, setting them aflame.
Scores of soldiers turned to run away through the dusty haze. The imps showed no concern either for their victims’ or for their own lives. Throughout the field they dived from above, absorbing showers of bullets and plowing into the soldiers at lightning speed. Imp and soldier alike imploded in clouds of dust, leaving only shallow craters in their wake. Other imps snatched retreating soldiers by their arms or legs and hefted them over the treetops.
Twelve feet to Katie’s right, a soldier dropped his gun and screamed with such terror he made himself disappear. His attacker swooped past him empty-handed.
“They’re just being awoken,” Katie assured Clara. It gave her some comfort reminding herself that these poor people were just waking up. Only hers, Clara’s, and Jack’s lives were actually on the line.
Derek and Tamera remained visible above the far embankment. Katie figured they needed a clear view of the battleground in order to shape everything. Derek stretched his arms upward at a dark cloud that began forming above a crowd of imps to his left, near Damien. It solidified and took the long sleek form of an Apache attack helicopter, its cylindrical rocket launchers already firing at the throng of imps. A dozen creatures exploded in a thundering plume of flame. A score of airborne imps charged the helicopter and sent it flying into a tall tree where it tore itself into fiery pieces within the branches. The remaining imps on the ground turned toward Derek and charged.
Tamera stretched her arms out, then swung them back toward herself. The earthen embankment flatt
ened and reshaped into a solid white concrete buttress. She and Derek disappeared below a concrete box lid, and thin vertical slits opened along the length of the bunker wall. Rifles protruded from the slits and gunfire flashed with the blasts of their gun barrels. Approaching imps twitched with every bullet, but they still reached the bunker and climbed all over it. They hefted rocks and hurled them at the walls or slammed them down on the massive lid. Nothing could penetrate it.
Katie stood for a look above the stone bulwark but fell back under the pressure of Jack’s hands on her shoulders. An orange beam carved off the tops of the stones in front of her.
“That was close.” Jack peeked over the now heated rocks, ducked, and turned back to Katie and Clara. “I don’t see any soldiers left, but Farley’s still holding his own out there. The imps can’t get near him.”
Katie ventured another peek over the rampart, and Clara joined her. Electronic blasts echoed from Farley’s tail at random intervals, immersing the treetops in reflected orange brightness. Farley had secured gleaming blue scimitars from the fleshy pockets that ran along his segmented chest and he held the steel weapons in each of his six pincers. He danced in a circle, aiming his tail at anything that dared approach him. Imps hovered among the treetops all around him, snarling and growling, waiting for a chance to attack. Three imps charged him at once, but a single swipe from Farley’s tail disintegrated them in flashes of sparks and smoke.
Katie ducked down again. “Nothing’s getting past that tail of Farley’s.”
“We need to do something,” Jack said.
Clara’s eyes lit up. “Maybe we can distract him.” She eyed the dislodged top hatch of one of the demolished tanks lying on the floor of the trench near her feet. She yanked the metal door hatch from its hinges with a loud steel crunch.
“What are you going to do with that?” Katie smiled at Clara’s display of strength, so out of place from a teenage girl of such slight build.