by Ben Stevens
“We can’t fight this!” Jon yelled, holding back panic more effectively than he was holding back the pack of beastly thugs. The savage ignored the gaping chest wounds and redoubled its efforts to overtake Jon. Its boldness tipped the scales of caution for the rest of the pack, and they all charged in from the edges of the camp, their half-circle closing around the party like a fist.
Maya perched over the comatose Ratt like a mother bird protecting its young while more flat cracks issued from Carbine’s pistol, followed by a series of clicks.
“Reloading!” Carbine shouted.
Jon acknowledged his buddy’s alert only mentally; he was too preoccupied with the charging savage. He timed his dodge perfectly, waiting until the last second before rolling to the right, pivoting on his heel and swinging the spiked back of his hammer’s head, trailing just behind the passing attacker. The spike sank into the flesh of the thing’s back and hooked the shoulder blade. Jon leaned back into his pivot and pulled the savage, swinging it around like a stone on the end of a rope. He was gaining momentum and speed, and not two full revolutions later, a nasty, meaty rip resounded as the blow sundered the savage’s torso. Half a rack of ribs and one arm hung from the spiked head of the hammer, while the rest of the man-beast went spiraling out into the dark, crashing to the ground. At this point, Jon was no longer surprised by the lack of blood. He knew they were dealing with lifeless meat puppets, but their exact nature still eluded him. He started to use the bottom of his boot to pry the half-rotten flesh from his hammer’s nail, but only got as far as lowering the head before he became aware of yet another rabid man-beast using the cover of the lean-to to covertly gain on Jon.
“Shit!” He flinched, anticipating the pounce he could tell was coming from the creature’s stance.
Brrrraapptt came the cavalry call that was the familiar report of Lucy’s automatic pistol, the Big Fucking Gun.
Before the savage could pounce on Jon, its left leg disappeared at the hip in a spray of gray, clay-like flesh matter. The savage listed like a sinking ship and went partly to the ground, providing the perfect springboard for Lucy, who was in full cyborg sprint behind it.
“Behind you!” Lucy shouted, leaping onto the back of the fallen savage and jumping from it, flipping into a tight roll in the space above Jon’s head. Jon turned in amazement, watching as she unfolded in the air and came down on another savage that had been stalking Jon from behind. She sliced downward diagonally across the creature’s chest as she landed. She half-squatted as she landed, bounced right back up, and rolled her hips like a belly dancer as she cross-slashed across the savage twice more, spilling its rotten entrails down its lap and legs. The creature staggered, pausing in its approach. Lucy gritted her teeth and spun in place, whipping her Macuahuitl around and taking the dumbfounded savage’s head clean off.
“We may not be able to provide a true death for them, but we can at least slow them the fuck down!” Lucy called out.
Lucy’s sudden appearance slowed the advance of the savages; they behaved like hyenas, unsure of how to proceed after watching a lioness—or in this case, a jaguar—slaughter two of their own. It revealed a sort of intelligence, no matter how primitive and animalistic. They made to regroup, back off some, but Lucy gave no quarter, pointing her BFG at one nearby and dumping a volley of explosive rounds into it. The eruptions in its torso served as tracers, allowing her to steer the burst from navel to forehead, causing the undead creature to come apart like a humanoid string of firecrackers.
Inspired by Lucy’s triumphant return, Jon kicked the ribcage off his hammer and charged the nearest savage, a female, who was presently giving ground. When she realized that Jon was chasing her, she stopped her retreat and made to scrap. Like the others, this one’s clothes had long ago disintegrated, revealing flat, saggy breasts smeared with filth. Jon nearly hesitated to strike a woman, even one as wretched as this one, but her claw-like fingers and glowing red eyes reminded him that if he did not, she would happily murder him and possibly eat him.
She shrieked like some demonic bird of prey and showed her claws in a threatening display, but made no real move to attack. The hesitation would cost her. Jon let fly one blow, then another and another, rolling his elbow and shoulder, dipping to return the hammer quickly over and over again. He could not slice and dismember the way Lucy did, but he could deal enough damage to the she-thing that it would slow her down for at least a few minutes. He stepped away from the crumpled pile of woman and ran over to Maya and Ratt, now unguarded, as Carbine and Lucy gave chase to the routing savages.
“We can’t keep this up forever.” Maya looked up into Jon’s eyes as he approached. She was kneeling on the ground next to Ratt, one hand on his chest.
“I think they’re running,” Jon said and looked out into the darkness. From where he stood, the starlight from his hammer barely illuminated the silhouettes and shapes of Lucy, Carbine, and the retreating savages.
Lucy seemed happy to chase and cut down every one to the last, but Carbine called her back. “Lucy! They’re coming back again!” Lucy paused, her head scanning side to side, searching the periphery of their makeshift camp.
“No, not like that!” Carbine shouted. “These ones are regenerating!”
Jon, hearing his friend’s words, turned away from Maya to see that, indeed, several of the fallen ones between him and Lucy were again upright.
The few whose heads Lucy had managed to separate from their bodies only wiggled around on the ground, damaged to the point of preventing regeneration, but still a long way from death. Jon wondered for a moment whether he and Lucy could possibly behead them all, but before he could decide one way or the other, a barbaric rally cry from out in the desert decided for him. He turned and scanned the desert, the dark of the night somehow easier to penetrate than it had been earlier. More were coming. At least two dozen.
“Fall back!” Jon shouted to Lucy, glancing left and right to make sure he had successfully kept track of Maya’s and Carbine’s whereabouts. Concern bordering on panic covered each of their faces like a mask, but they were as of yet unharmed.
“Form a circle! Back to back!” Lucy yelled as she ran toward Jon and the others. Directly in her path, one of the fallen savages began pushing itself off the hard-pan floor of the desert. It looked up just in time to witness Lucy’s charge. It raised one of its arms in a futile defensive gesture, and her Aztec war-club sliced the arm neatly in half before passing on into its neck and beyond, her aim and power unaffected.
Jon watched the balance shift, as slow and persistent as the incoming tide, with growing concern. One of the more daring savages leaped an impossible leap—for a normal man—and landed directly in front of Maya, its legs rooted in the sand to either side of Ratt’s prone body.
Jon caught the blur of movement from the corner of his eye and sprang into a counter-attack before Maya’s scream of alarm had reached his ears.
He swung high, going for the thing’s head and ensuring that he wouldn’t accidentally hit Maya, but the savage dipped, just in time to prepare for a lunge at the goddess, and caused Jon’s blow to miss by an inch.
Rocking back on his heels and engaging every muscle in his body from head to toe, Jon slowed the hammer swing and regrouped, trying to turn his missed shot into a new opportunity. Releasing the haft with one hand, Jon intercepted the hammer just below its head and jumped forward, landing right up against the back of the savage. Before the man-beast could react, Jon lowered the long haft of his weapon over and in front of the savage and quickly pulled back, effectively pinning the villain against his chest.
The wretched creature struggled mightily against Jon’s hold and its foul stench assaulted Jon’s senses, but he held fast, preventing the attack that surely would have torn Maya to shreds.
“Run!” Jon growled to Maya through gritted teeth, forgetting that they were surrounded and there was nowhere for the goddess, or her comatose ward, to escape to.
“Jon!” Carbine shouted, and qu
ickly sidestepped the ground they held to get a clean shot at the pinned savage.
Trying his best to stay out of the grasping arms of the grappled creature, Carbine placed the tip of his pistol to its temple and squeezed the trigger. Jon was in perfect synchronization with his life-long battle buddy and pulled his head back to one side, maintaining his iron grip on the hammer that trapped his victim. Rotten brain matter and soupy viscera ejected out the side of the savage’s head a split-second later and Jon felt the struggling stop with a jerk and spasm.
“Behind you!” Jon heard Lucy call from off to his right. Releasing his grip on the hammer and letting the half-headless savage slump to the ground to smother Ratt, Jon began to spin in place, but it was too late.
Claws raked across his back, etching deep grooves into him, severing corded muscles and scraping rib bones.
Blood poured down Jon’s back like water breaking through a dam. Falling to his knees, he let slip his grip on the hammer and braced his fall on both the slain savage and Ratt.
Lucy yelled something unintelligible and let rip a burst from her BFG, but the volley of rounds was intercepted by a half-dozen more attackers moving in for the kill, clearly inspired by their pack-mate’s success.
Grimacing, Jon rolled onto his rear, picking his hammer back up in the process, and feebly turned to face the one that had nearly sundered him. Waves of heat ran through his body, though he was not sure if it was the pain of his coming death, or the serum kicking into overdrive to heal his grievous wounds.
The savage before him grinned with primal glee. It flashed its claws triumphantly before him. They were dripping with Jon’s blood, droplets forming little pools in the sand. Sadistically, the lording man-beast raised the slick claws and extended his too-long-to-be-normal tongue, slowly licking one clean.
“I’m still standing, bastard!” Jon hissed, despite the fact that he was, in fact, half kneeling, half sitting, and not, in fact, standing at all.
The savage’s eyes widened abruptly, and for a moment, Jon thought that maybe the incoming jaguaress had reached him. Then the thing leaped backward, perfectly maintaining its footing upon landing. It tilted its head back and issued a series of short, bark-like noises.
As suddenly as the leap backward had been, the rest of the savages, the entire pack, froze in place and stopped their assault.
Lucy bridged the gap between herself and her companions with great ease, as some of the beast-men moved out of her way, giving her a wide berth.
Lucy slowed her sprint and cautiously re-joined the others, sweeping her pistol and Macuahuitl, waiting for the attack to resume.
“Why did they stop?” Carbine asked, flicking his pistol back and forth from one target to another, like eyeballs in a stationary skull tracking a fast-moving insect.
“I don’t know, and I don’t like it,” Lucy replied, weapons at the ready, her stance low.
“We don’t dare wait and find out if they’ll change their minds again. We have to make a run for it,” Jon said, slowly rising to his feet.
“Jon! You’re hurt!” Maya exclaimed, reaching forward, but stopped short of touching the tears on Jon’s back.
“I know, but the pain is subsiding,” Jon said without taking his eyes off the blockade. “I think the serum saved my life… again.”
“How? How do we escape? I mean, what do we do?” Carbine muttered.
Keeping the pistol aloft, Lucy saddled her war-club and bending down, first rolled the body of the savage off of Ratt, then picked him up and threw him over her shoulder.
“I have one explosive charge. I’ll toss it into the crowd. After it goes off, we run in that direction. My lady, you stay between me and Jon. Aim for the head. That seems to work best.”
“I’ll take the rear,” Carbine announced.
Lucy nodded at first, and then, apparently having a second thought, added, “No, you aren’t strong enough. You stay with Maya. I’ll take the front. Jon, you cover our rear.”
“Ten-four,” Jon and Carbine said in unison.
“On my count, three, two—”
“No, wait.”
It took Jon more than an instant to realize that the speaker wasn’t Lucy, or Carbine, or even Maya, and snapped his head around in bewilderment to find Ratt alert and attempting to climb down from Lucy’s shoulder.
Jon kept his attention away from the line of savages longer than he intended, as Ratt’s visage stunned him. The kid’s eyes had two sets of irises and pupils.
“They’re vampires. I know what to do.”
The vampires hovered just outside the perimeter of the camp. They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared longingly with their red eyes at the potential meals before them, yet they twitched and behaved as if afraid. Pacing, shifting their weight from one foot to another, taking a step forward, only to hesitate, and return to where they started.
“They look like they’re holding it,” Carbine said.
“I doubt having to use the bathroom is their issue, bud,” Jon said dryly, reminding himself to knock some battlefield sense into his friend later if they ever made it out of this.
“I hope this plan works, Ratt,” Jon said.
“It will,” Ratt answered with calm concentration in his voice. “Just remember. After the beam is established, we need to stand inside of it. We will be safe there until morning.”
“I still don’t get why they aren’t attacking,” Carbine said. “They clearly had the upper hand.”
“That I don’t know. But they will. They will. We want them to, for this to work best,” Ratt explained. “But we don’t need them to.”
“Well, let’s get this party started!” Lucy cried as she finished reloading her BFG and took aim at one of the vampire savages’ heads.
One squeeze of the trigger later and the head of her target disintegrated and scattered to the wind like a fistful of thrown confetti. This brought a chorus of shrieks and growls from the vampiric host. She took another carefully aimed shot, sending another head to the wind, and with its departure, she brought about the charge they’d hoped for.
Crazed with an insatiable thirst for blood and overcome with a rush of a pack-mentality lynching, the three dozen or so savage vampires charged the party from all directions, screaming, claws outstretched, some galloping like apes on all fours, only adding to their feral, dog-like appearance.
“Hold,” Ratt said calmly, but loud enough for everyone to hear over the demons’ shrieks and Maya’s soft singing. Memories of his dream and of the Tarantino and Rodriguez magicians’ work were fresh in his mind and coming alive before his very eyes. He paced and gauged the mob’s distance.
“Hold,” Ratt repeated himself, this time with more intensity and urgency in his young voice.
The sea of glowing red eyes grew closer and closer like a crimson meteor storm until they were bearing down on the party. Ratt could see their faded human features glow in the light of Jon’s hammer and their own fevered eyes, their mouths yawning open, saliva dripping from their fanged teeth.
“Now!” he barked, setting Jon, Carbine, and Lucy into action.
The makeshift poles that held up the lean-to had broken, and Carbine, Jon, and Lucy pushed the roof backward so as to fall away from the party rather than on top of them. The sudden flinging off of the roof caused the mob to pause for a heartbeat, and that was all Maya needed.
She shot her hands up to the sky and spread her palms open wide, her previously silent song ending in a high, beautiful note. A ball of twinkling light shot forth from the little diamond-shaped space between her hands and launched high into the dark and starless night sky.
Like a pyrotechnic effect from a Lily Sapphire show, the twinkling ball exploded into a bright ball of brilliant sunlight. The ball was not like sunlight; it was sunlight. A small portal had been opened to a place far away, a place near and dear to her, a place where it was already day.
Maya’s eyes closed, and her face was bathed in the warmth and glow of a miniature Sol, no more
than twenty meters above. The rays of light shot out from the sphere like a spotlight, hitting the savages facing the party like a tsunami and reducing them to falling piles of ash. One could even hear the whoomp as if a lit match had just touched down into a large puddle of gasoline.
Taking advantage of the lull in the stunned beast-men’s attack, the companions bolted forward, stepping into the beam of sunlight and occupying the space filled by savages just a moment before.
Jon looked here and there, scanning and listening, his mouth slack. He looked over to Carbine, who was doing the same thing, and they exchanged looks of amused relief. Carbine let out a sigh, which tripped, stumbled, then fell into full-out laughter. Even Lucy cracked a grin.
Ratt wore a look of proud satisfaction and gave Maya a thumbs-up.
“That’s our little lady.”
She shyly returned his smile.
“And now we wait,” Ratt added. “Sunrise isn’t too far off.”
To their sides, the remaining beast-men stood, dumbfounded and impotent, unable to press their attack. A few, either daring or stupid, tried to test the beam, only to pull back with flaming and smoking limbs.
For a short while, none of them, neither Jon nor Maya, nor Carbine or Lucy or Ratt did anything at all. They just stood in amusement and mild awe and admired their handiwork, relieved that it seemed to be over.
They watched as the dark sky slowly but surely grew lighter and lighter until eventually soft blues could be seen on the eastern horizon. One by one, the savages reluctantly slunk away into the desert hills, until at last the wayward companions were alone.
When they felt it was safe, Maya canceled the portal with another wave of her arm.
“It worked!” Carbine exclaimed.
“Yes. I am so tired, though,” Maya said quietly.
Ratt, having returned to the company of walking, talking people, explained his dream-vision to them while he constructed a working light out of the salvage they had consolidated near their shelter. He couldn’t answer or speculate further as to the origins of the prophetic dream, just that it had happened.
