Heartbreaker

by Quelli di ZEd

CHAPTER 9

  Shim turned to the door while trying to keep an eye on the dead bodies who had started approaching. Someway the street outside had filled of walking dead too, coming from the-gods-knew-where, they too in a quite advanced rotting state. Some had only a few flaps of flesh and clothes on their bones – to which only the power of necromancy allowed to stay together and walk as if there were still muscles and tendons allowing their movements.

  «You lead us in a trap!» he grunted to the woman.

  «Not intentionally, detective.»

  The tension of that moment made something click in him, in spite of that being completely out of place and time, and he couldn't help but reply, «Could you please stop calling me detective each time you talk to me?»

  «But you are a detective», she answered with an innocent look on her face. Her voice had the quiet tilt of someone who isn't surrounded by self-moving corpses, or is accustomed to be.

  «I know. And I don't need to be reminded continuously.»

  «As you wish, detective.»

  Shim gave up. There were other things on his mind.

  Fortunately the creatures surrounding them seemed to be simple zombies. They were tenacious and dangerous beings, showing an extraordinary strength not because they were actually stronger as dead than when they were alive, but because there was nothing preventing them from using their full physical abilities. A normal human in some situations was able to use his full potential – such as the proverbial mother lifting a heavy beam to free her son trapped under it – though they had to suffer the consequences once the adrenaline rush wore off. Muscles strained too much got damaged, the same way they did on a smaller scale each time they were put to the test in a gym, although damages healed over time, making them even stronger and more resistant. But a zombie felt no pain, didn't realize muscles strain, it was able to push his body to the upper limits and beyond at any time. This way it usually caused itself irreparable damages, as it was no longer able to heal, and sooner or later it ended up self-destroying, but usually in the meantime it had accomplished the task it had been created for.

  In spite of all this, there was still a good side of facing zombies: they were slow. Once they reached you, you had to worry, seriously, but as long as they were out of reach you had all the time for planning. In the open and in small packs they weren't even a true menace. In an enclosed space and in large numbers, as it was the case, they were deadly. Standard stunning weapons used by police were useless against undead, of whatever flavor they were. Shim knew that well, and he also knew well that, while investigating on something that involved necromancy, it wasn't unlikely to end up facing that kind of creatures. That was why he had gone prepared.

  He removed from his belt a slender metal wand of an opaque bronze color, letting the light crystal fall on the floor, and aimed it to one of the zombies coming from the opposite side of the room. A dark projectile, surrounded by a fiery aura, popped out of thin air and was hurled at incredible speed against the creature, hitting it in the middle of its forehead. The back of its skull exploded in a thousand of bone shards, blood spurts and lumps of cerebral matter, staining the wall behind. The zombie didn't seem to care and kept walking, steering just a bit from its original course.

  When a second projectile hit its right knee, making it fall and almost shearing its whole joint away, it just fell face first and started crawling on its arms, its left leg and what was left of the right one.

  The other zombies were getting closer by then.

  Shim gave its wand to Krey, who had had no time nor chance to get a similar weapon. He took it with an unsure look. «And you?»

  «I'll get by», he replied, while starting to run in the direction of the crawling zombie. «Follow me.»

  He reached the undead and walked on it, caring to stay out of the reach of the hands trying to grab him, then he went to the table, and upturned it so to create a sort of barrier, albeit weak, between him and the advancing cadavers.

  While Krey and Vivienne reached him, the former trying to delay the zombies as much as possible with his wand, the latter as if she was strolling through the park in the moonlight, he used his weight to break one of the legs of the table, so to use it as an impromptu weapon. Paradoxically, it could prove to be more effective than a wand, as the only way to render a zombie harmless was destroying its body so utterly that it could not move anymore, even if that meant shattering most of its bones, or cut it into pieces with something sharp and strong that he really didn't have at present.

  The stream of corpses kept walking toward them, without even looking at them. They looked like a bunch of somnambulists who had for some reason decided to go all in the same direction. Krey's shots delayed them but could not stop them, even the more badly damaged found a way to carry on their inexorable advance.

  Shim took his communication crystal and tried to contact the central, getting no answer from them. That wasn't a good omen at all, and he would worry about that if he hadn't had in front of him some twenty undead willing to eat him, or dismember him, or whatever zombies did to their victims.

  «You're a necromancer! Can't you stop them somehow?» he almost shouted to Vivienne, who still wasn't showing the faintest trace of worry on her face. If anything, she seemed thoroughly bored by the whole situation.

  «I would violate the law if I used necromancy», she answered. At least she didn't add "detective".

  «I'm willing to turn a blind eye on that», he replied sarcastically.

  «I am glad to hear this.»

  Vivienne straightened in all of her height, taking a statuary pose that someway made her look more powerful, as if she had just shed away the aristocratic look to wear a cloak of a totally different nature. She opened her head, with her palms lifted and her fingers slightly bent, then pushed them in front of her, slightly opening her arms, with her elbows pressed against her hips, and looked up at the creatures.

  Apparently nothing happened, but it was as if an invisible vibration radiated from her body, expanding in front of her like an untouchable but undeniable wave of power.

  Two of the zombies started stumbling, or at least stumbling more than they already did, then fell on the floor, lifeless. Nothing else happened. The remaining zombies ignored the fallen ones and kept advancing. Those who had been behind trampled them, or walked over them the same way they would have done with any other nonliving obstacle on their path.

  «He's... strong...», Vivienne murmured faintly. It was the shortest and less elaborated sentence Shim had heard her say so far. It seemed clear to him that she had done what she could, and it was far from being enough.

  «We have to get out of here», he said in a dry tone, looking around. The main door was impossible to reach, the only way was trough the zombies and they couldn't get there alive. The only remaining way out was a door on the wall behind them. He gestured for Krey to turn that way.

  «Go there, I'll back you up!» he said, moving around the table and going much too close to the undead. He took a deep breath – and immediately regretted it when the stench filled his nostrils – then gripped the table leg with both hands and hit with full strength the legs of the nearest zombie. There was a noise, much like a withered branch snapping, and the creature fell forward. He would have fallen on him if he hadn't backed, at the same time launching a second assault at its head, which flew away like a baseball set to an home run.

  Meanwhile, followed by Vivienne, Krey reached the door. He turned the knob, meeting with no resistance, and pushed, with no result. He was about to shoot to the lock when he realized that the hinges were on his side of the wall. He grabbed the knob again and pulled, stepping back as much as needed.

  A hand closed around his throat. Before he could even try to react, the dry crack of his neck snapping was heard, and his body fell lifeless on the floor.

  Behind the door stood a man, unmoving. His gaze was directed at a point on the opposite wall, or most likely he wasn't actually watching anything. Aside from this det
ail, there was nothing peculiar in him, he looked like a mere human, and if he hadn't just killed a dark elf using only one hand there wouldn't have been many reason to think otherwise.

  Vivienne stood and looked, astonished, trying to understand what she was seeing.

  Shim didn't care at all about that detail. He had just lost a man and couldn't afford to waste time thinking about what had happened. He turned around and hit the new opponent, with the only result of forcing him to make a step backward. He tried a second time. That was the only passage available, and he had no intention of letting anyone stop them. This time the man grabbed the table leg in midair, making the arms of the dwarf shake, then pushed it back, thrusting it and its owner right in the middle of the zombies.

  Shim crumbled against one of the corpses, pulling it down on the floor, and got up more or less unscathed, knowing far too well that this wouldn't last long. He started milling around the table leg, without any real purpose, just trying to keep the undead at bay. Unfortunately, the limited room he had was not an advantage. Some zombies retreated under his attacks, just to start advancing again after a second or two, and soon he was almost submerged by those rotting bodies.

  In that very moment, a weird red light crossed Vivienne's eyes. With exceptional speed, impossible for a normal human, she jumped into the middle of the undead, attacking them barehanded. What followed was too fast for the dwarf to really understand what was happening. He saw flesh being slashed, limbs ripped apart and thrown away, as the room around him increased and the number of the zombies decreased visibly.

  He didn't waste time looking for an explanation. Doing his best to survive so that he could ask for it later seemed the best choice. As soon as he could, he run forward and recovered his wand from Krey's hands, pointed it at the men, still standing in the doorway, and shoot, without bothering to take aim.

  The projectile went through the shoulder of its target, leaving a burned hole in its clothes and an exit hole as large as a fist, which should have been enough to separate his arm from the rest of the body. But, under the unbelieving gaze of the detective, the hole disappeared almost immediately, leaving the holed and smoldering jacket and shirt as the only evidence that it had existed.

  «What... what's that...?» he asked himself more than Vivienne. It was her to answer anyway, «I am afraid I do not have the slightest idea, detective. But there are more coming.»

  «How do you know?»

  «Do you really think this has any importance?»

  Shim had to admit that, at the moment, it was quite irrelevant.

  «It seems he only wants to prevent us from passing by», he remarked. Indeed, the man had stood still even after his attack, and didn't seem about to change his tactics.

  Shim risked a quick glance behind him. The zombies were remarkably less than before, and the room had started looking like a slaughterhouse. There were chunks of corpses scattered everywhere, heads ripped away from their bodies, severed hands which still crawled blindly searching for something to grab. The zombies that where still healthy enough stood still in front of Vivienne, making guttural noises and grunting softly. If they had had any feeling at all, Shim would have thought they were afraid of the woman. As per Vivienne, nothing seemed to have changed in her. If she really had fought against those creatures, she had been able to do so without even tussling her hair or staining her clothes. The dwarf turned again.

  «I believe this might be a further reason to try to go into the adjacent room», the woman said, replying to his previous statement. «It is likely that the one who has planned all this is there.»

  «Doing what?»

  «Waiting for us to die, I assume.»

  «Nice.»

  «I am afraid you will have to try to handle the situation alone here, detective. I will try to reach the necromancer.»

  «What?»

  Shim received no answer. He didn't see Vivienne move, or pass him by, still a second later she was on the other side of the door, behind the brute. She must have passed aside him, but he couldn't see how, the distance was anything but enough. The man seemed surprised as much as him, because he wasn't able to do anything to stop her. He turned when he realized she was behind him, tried to grab her and found himself holding only her cloak as she walked by.

  Shim tried to seize the moment to pass in turn, lowered his head and charged toward the now free space between the legs of his opponent and the frame of the door. The men turned suddenly and hit him with the back of one hand, throwing him against the table, which didn't stand the crash and broke in two, in a shower of splinters.

  Beyond the door, Vivienne went through a short corridor, ignoring the three doors opening on its walls, and going directly to a fourth at the end. She opened it with a single gesture and moved a step inside, then stopped as if she had hit a solid wall, although there was nothing visible in front of her. She tried to touch the air around her and found out she was enclosed into some kind of circular barrier. A lightning of awareness crossed her features as she looked down, seeing the symbols traced on the floor all around her and the double circle they where inscribed into.