Twenty-Nine
I wiped golden ichor off my new sword and sheathed it over my back. I’d taken Michelle’s sheath, a little infinity-loop shoulder holster that let the blade rest between my shoulder blades, and torn off my jacket.
Gabby was now wearing Michelle’s armor as all three of us made our way into Camp Ferris. She looked shaken by what she had just seen me do. “I have underestimated you, your majesty. There has never been a mortal champion strong enough to defeat an angel. Perhaps there is yet hope for my mission to defeat the Herald of Darkness lurking in this world. Oh, your girlfriend is secure in your infirmary, your majesty. Her baby is on its way and your,” she tilted her head curiously, “twin says to stay focused.”
“He’s me. Not a twin. I needed to be in two places at once to handle everything going wrong in this city, so I divided and conquered,” I clarified.
Gabby’s eyebrows raised in alarm. “Such foresight. I am honored to serve one so powerful, your majesty.”
Derek snickered. “Dude, she wants the D so bad.”
He tried to be subtle about it, but Gabby had superhuman hearing.
“What is this ‘D’ you speak of?”
“Never mind that,” I interrupted. “We’re here.”
As we crested the last bend of the trail, the terrain gently sloped downwards into Camp Ferris proper. Down in the campgrounds there were hundreds of phantoms milling about. But right alongside them was a horde of zombies, all behaving passively as they stayed in one little huddle. Regular still-living humans milled around as well. Some were the college cultists who’d been following Kevin (before I put an end to him), but others were just… random people.
Construction workers. Cops. Garbage truck operators. You name it.
I had a sinking suspicion a lot of these people were possessed by phantoms.
Hannah? Selene? Euna? Does anybody copy?
Still no reply.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I moved forward. I loosened my blue tie a little and rolled up my sleeves. Something told me things were about to get messy.
“What’s the plan of attack?” Derek asked.
“The plan is to attack. But first we’re going to see if we can find my girls. So far they’re all being too quiet. I don’t like that.”
-
We strode through the center of camp, drawing quite the crowd as we walked in. Yet no one attacked us. Not even the cultists, who had to recognize me from the graveyard and the football field, did anything more than stare and move out of our way.
It didn’t take us long to realize that we were being herded towards a set of benches overlooking the lake, but by then I had already decided to go along with whatever this was. I still hadn’t heard anything from Hannah, Selene, or Euna, and I had a sinking suspicion that someone was holding them hostage.
Shockingly, I was right.
Selene and Euna, in her punk-rock disguise, were sitting on a bench guarded by several cultists, a pair of jacked bouncers from some nightclub, and about two dozen zombies.
I saw no sign of Hannah anywhere.
The phantom of a classy older woman wafted out of the crowd. She was wearing a dress that would’ve been the height of fashion back in the 1920s, putting her at somewhere around two centuries past her expiration date, draped in a fur scarf and wearing pearls. A long cigarette and a clutch purse really completed the whole ensemble, but my eyes were drawn to the impressive array of bullet holes crisscrossing her body.
She walked in from an oblique angle, crossing my field of view in such a way that she concealed the left half of her face until I was too caught up in her stunning appearance (if it weren’t for all the bullet holes she would’ve been a knockout) to look away. Then she reached the park bench and spun in place, revealing the other half of her face–along with the rest of her body–had been badly burned.
When she smiled at me, part of her cheek fell apart to reveal a little too much skull.
“Sheesh, lady. Someone really wanted you dead,” Derek blurted.
I blinked in shock and turned to stare at him. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one either. Apparently, commenting on how dead a ghost looks is a breach in etiquette many times harsher than asking a woman how old she is, because I swear even some of the zombies were staring at Derek askance.
Gertrude, for any phantom making this much of an entrance had to be the big bad, obviously, waved away the comment. “Ex husbands can be a real bitch, darling. When I took his whole syndicate in the divorce, good ol’ Georgie finally grew a spine. Hired a couple of goons to take me out. I killed one of ‘em and seduced the other one into repaying dear Georgie in kind. Poor sap didn’t make it. In fact, my old flame’s somewhere out there as we speak, aren’t you Antonio?”
A phantom emerged from the crowd. Poor guy looked like he’d had some cinder blocks tied to his legs and then been tossed off the docks. He looked bloated as hell and every time he opened his mouth, water came pouring out. “Hey, Gerti! Lookin’ good doll!”
Gertrude gave a thin smile that lacked any amusement whatsoever. “Yes, well, anywho. Ol’ Georgie offed poor Antonio and then sent the pigs after me. I drove right into that nasty little ambush and was positively riddled with bullet-holes. My car burst into flames during all that crossfire and the last thing I remember was a great heat on my left side, like the hand of a lover caressing my cheek. And then, by George, I was dead.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and let the smoke curl out of the open wound where her cheek used to be.
Ryan? It’s me, Hannah. Sorry for the radio silence. Give me the signal when you’re ready, and we’ll wipe the floor with these freaks.
My nostrils flared for a half-second, but that was all the change I allowed to take place as I controlled my expression and replied coolly. When this is all done you owe me a long explanation about what’s going on here. You’re my first love, and you crawled out of the afterworld to come back to me, so you’ve earned yourself one free save-the-world pass with no questions asked. But I want answers the second this is done.
You’ll have them. I’m sorry, Ryan. Thank you for trusting me.
Gertrude sighed wistfully. “True story. But that’s not the business that brought you here tonight, was it, dollface?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “I’m here to… well actually I don’t really know what I’m here to do. My fiance said it was of the utmost importance, and when your best girl comes back from the dead to recruit you for an important mission, you show up and you don’t ask questions. You’re up to something, I presume, and I’ll be needing to put a stop to that, whatever it is. Then I’m going to go take a very long hot bath because I’ve been thrown around this damn forest by two different angels and a gorgon today and I’m afraid every part of me is going to smell like pine needles for the next three months. So if you could honestly just save whatever fucked up sob story you have about why you need to destroy the world and why everyone needs to die, can we just get on to the part where I kick your ass and we can call it a day? I’m tired.”
Gertrude blinked in surprise, as did most of her goons.
“Highly unusual. Don’t you want to know why I’ve done all this?”
“Nope.”
“But it’s really quite clever if I do say so myself. Tricking that boy Kevin into-”
“Don’t care,” I cut in.
“You know? You’re really quite a rude boy you know that? You remind of my second husband, Ronald. The police never found his body. Do you want to know what I did to him?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Ugh. Have it your way. Kill him!” She commanded her army of goons.
Finally.
I charged, triggering several mutations at once.
As it turned out, my run-in with that Alpha Gorgon had synced up nicely with my lamia abilities and enhanced them, boosting my agility even further. I could feel petrifying venom coating my talons. Lana’s fairy wings sped up my movement speed and let me zip around on the ground and move in unexpected ways, making me extremely difficult to hit. Autumn’s powers had already proven themselves extremely potent here in the forest, and they did not disappoint now. Without Euna, I never would have been able to be in two places at once. Without Tabitha… I would never have made it this far in the first place, and any wounds I picked up would’ve taken weeks to heal instead of minutes.
Both of the bouncers instantly turned to stone as I hit them with the Alpha Gorgon’s petrifying gaze. A trio of phantoms burst apart into white sparks as I slashed through them with Michelle’s angelic sword. Roots shot up from the earth under several zombies; piercing through their brains in an instant.
Derek’s decoy dispersed beside me as the real Derek appeared atop the bench and freed Euna and Selene with a pair of spells. The zip-ties keeping them in place evaporated, and both women leapt into action.
Gabby’s wings shot out in two different directions, firing off a blur of feather-shaped daggers that dispersed phantoms and shredded through bodies left and right. Her mace came around in a vicious uppercut and reduced a charging zombie’s skull to gruesome fragments that scattered skyward.
And that was just the opening salvo.
My world descended into the frenzy of battle, and I reveled in the shere brutal simplicity of carving my way through a pack of vicious enemies hellbent on destroying the world. I’m sure they had their reasons for wanting the world destroyed, but I was fried. Too many flashbacks. Too much trauma and rage. All I cared about was the next enemy that came my way and making sure it stayed dead when I killed it.
Slaughtering zombies, it turns out, is a great form of catharsis. You get to go all out on a bunch of people-shaped things that aren’t actually people, you’re saving the world while you’re doing it, and it’s eco-friendly to boot. 10/10, I highly recommend it.
I sped around the camp, slashing any humans with my gorgon venom or staring them down so that they turned to stone. This forced the phantoms possessing them to burst free and go on the offensive, but Gabby or I took them out with our angelic weaponry in short order.
Derek remained on the bench, casting spells like a mad man. Not all of them seemed incredibly useful, as he was effectively throwing out the magical equivalent of whoopie cushions and banana peels, but he was causing an undeniable mount of havoc that helped us keep up our onslaught.
Euna split into a dozen copies and charged the crowd, screaming with one voice out of twelve mouths and charging in all directions.
“Somebody give me a gun!” Selene shouted.
I unholstered my gun and tossed it to her, shouting out, “Gabby, heads up!”
Gabby soared past and ever-so-gently tapped the pistol as it fell towards Selene’s outstretched hand, passing an angelic blessing onto the weapon before speeding by and smashing apart a zombie with her mace. As if it had been touched by King Midas, the gun took on a sudden golden filigree and began to glow with power.
Selen caught it, cocked it, and fired three golden rounds, striking down three undead in rapid succession. Looking satisfied, she smirked at me and informed me, “You’re not getting this back,” before she set up shop by Derek and defended him, putting rounds down range that never seemed to miss. She also never seemed to run out of ammo.
Gabby blessed all of Euna’s arm blades, giving them a faint golden glint that let her hack apart phantoms as well as zombies.
I got back to work chopping zombies to pieces with my dumb sword or whatever.
Strangely, shortly after that the number of cultists and phantoms dwindled away to nothing whilst the number of zombies rose exponentially.
Form up! I commanded.
Euna closed ranks, using her dozen bubble-gum pink copies (all with gilded arm-blades ready to go) to create a formation around the bench and killing anything that came near her. Derek stood tall atop the bench, casting his silly spells whilst Selene crouched beside him and embodied the one-shot-one-kill philosophy. Which left Gabby and I to the role of air support.
I had gotten the knack of floating up to about three meters off the ground, and could sort of skate through the air without too much trouble. It was nowhere near as graceful as Gabby’s majestic wings that let her flit across the battlefield, but I made do.
By the looks of things, we were actually running out of zombies to kill.
Then Gertrude just had to go and make me regret not listening to her evil villain monologue. The remaining cultists were off in the distance, chanting again. Only this time it didn’t feel like some sort of team-building pep rally nonsense. It sounded like they were casting some sort of complicated spell.
And they were all huddled around that damn casket.
Almost in the same second that blue team wiped out the last handful of zombies, the chanting stopped.
Kevin’s girlfriend floated up into the air over the casket, necrotic black energy swirling around her fingertips as she turned her gaze towards me. For a moment I thought I was seeing double as Hannah’s phantom powers kicked in and let me see who was piloting her corpse.
Gertrude was possessing Kevin’s girlfriend, and it looked like she had all of the powers his annoying scepter had had, minus the scepter.
Shit.