by Aaron Crash
In a zigzagging path of projectile death, the clown gunner, maybe Calhoun himself, fired at them. Elle tossed aragonite crystals from Granny’s pouch, created an Onyx shield, and stopped the bullets.
In the light of the tracers and the muzzle flash of the big machine gun, Blaze saw who was in the net under the chopper. It was Trina, freckled and red-headed, and from the looks of it, completely unconscious. The plasma minigun with the silver spear gun attachment wasn’t with her.
The Gorebacks had captured Trina and somehow disarmed and incapacitated her. Knowing them, they’d grabbed the vampire as the main course for their victory feast before escaping the doomed world.
Blaze growled, “We’re not letting the Gorebacks get off this planet alive, Ling. If you can’t pull the trigger, step aside and let me do it. I’ll feed them to Trina myself.”
EIGHTEEN_
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The helicopter banked to the side and Calhoun, in mime makeup, gave them all the finger. Then the chopper disappeared into the rainy night, heading north toward the air force base.
Elle’s shield spell faded away. Ling and Blaze ran for the starcycles. Elle ripped a jawbone from Granny’s purse, pulled off a few teeth, and scattered them onto the roof. From the consume spell, fresh Onyx energy filled her from all sides of the grocery store.
She tossed a magnet wrapped in thread and levitated Blaze and Ling on their starcycles using Onyx telekinesis.
Once over the edge of the building, Blaze saw that the ectoplasm river was choked with zombies, some alive and struggling in the fluid, others lifeless and drifting along in the current. On the north end of town, there was a small hill, and it was enough to keep the liquid Onyx dammed up. The ectoplasm spread out to where they fought the horde on the crane truck, creating a massive reservoir of the fluid and entrails. The rising flood of ectoplasm in Know Return would keep the zombie horde from dicking with them again. Now it was just Blaze and his crew against the Gorebacks.
But there were the ghosts to consider. “Elle,” Blaze said, “I saw iron weapons in the antique store. We should load up in case we get caught by ghosts again. You’re out of dispel Onyx bags, right?”
“I am.” Elle used telekinesis to move the starcycles back to the antique store.
The ectoplasm tentacles they’d fought during Blaze’s insanity were gone. The gunny hopped down from the starcycle and slid into the hole in the roof and into a foot of water. He collected two muskets with iron bayonets as well as a couple of pistols. Black powder, percussion caps, lead balls, and cotton padding had been stored next to the wickedly old firearms. They’d been inside a glass-faced display cabinet, off the floor, so they were dry.
The gunny knew how to load them from Arlo, who had had a love affair with guns from every era. But the lead bullets wouldn’t do a thing to the ghosts. No, he needed iron balls, though no one had ever used iron. The original soldiers and mountain men had used lead because they could melt the metal down and fashion their own balls in molds. Iron was too difficult to work with.
Raziel came creeping out, picking her way across a shelf on the wall. She’d found a dry place to hide while Blaze had been completely out of his pinche mind. She moved forward and meowed. Her eyes were on a cupboard near Blaze.
He bent and reached out with a hand. Raziel sniffed his fingers and then allowed Blaze to pet her. “Sorry, kitty, about before. You were right to hiss at me, but I’m better now.”
He tried to pick her up, but she avoided his hand. She continued to meow and stare at the cupboard.
Blaze opened the door to the storage space, and there, inside, were rusted iron balls that would fit the ancient guns.
“Good kitty!” Blaze said, laughing. This cat was amazing.
He wasn’t sure what kind of interstellar kookiness or historical factors on Hutchinson Prime gave him iron ammunition, but whatever, he’d count it as good luck, thank Raziel, and move on. He gathered up the iron and left the lead. The calico purred on the dry shelf while he worked.
Blaze saw a leather satchel. “You want a ride?”
Raziel didn’t run away, so he eased the cat into the satchel and slung it around his shoulder.
“Bring me up, Elle,” the gunny said, and his witch sister levitated him out of the hole and back on the starcycle. He gave the satchel full of cat to Elle while he stowed the guns and ammunition. Funny, they had the most advanced fusion and plasma weapons money could buy, but it might be rifles and pistols from nineteenth-century Earth that would save them. You fought old shit with old shit, end of story. Luckily, the rain had stopped. Those old black powder guns didn’t much like the rain.
Another batch of ectoplasm tentacles reached for them, but in a blast of blue-fire, the starcycles shot away, off the building, through the air until they hit the asphalt on the other side of the hill. They headed north. After her TK spell ran out, Elle settled down behind Blaze.
The rain-soaked highway was clear all the way to the big church outside of Know Return.
The chopper was gone, but in the distance, the air force base glowed on the horizon. That’s where the Gorebacks had Trina and Granny and that was where they were ultimately headed. But first the church.
They pulled off the highway and drove into the muddy parking lot in front of the church. They stopped the bikes in front of the building. The windows of the holy place glowed with light, bright in the night.
Raziel, from her seat in the satchel, hissed, and all three of them knew what that meant. Some kind of Onyx monster was about to attack.
The first of the ghosts was a gorgeous woman standing in a wet dress in the fields surrounding the church. She had a figure that made Blaze celebrate his heterosexuality. She was all hips, butt, and boobs, barely covered in a gown that was glued to her skin by the rain. For a second, she looked alive, but then in a flash of lightning, she transformed into a woman who had been burned to death. Suddenly, her long hair was gone. Her scalp was a mixture of sick pink flesh and charred black skin. Her eyes had melted out of her head. She opened her mouth and a fire still burned in her throat. The smoke blackened her teeth. The stink of burning hair filled the air. She sped toward them, burned arms above her head.
Blaze reached back and snatched up a black powder pistol. He unloaded an iron ball into her skull, and she vanished in a ragged mist of black stink.
The lights inside the church winked off. Raziel leapt out of the satchel and went dashing away, following whatever weird cat logic the kitty had.
Blaze triggered his ax, Ling his nunchakus, and Elle a katana. Nice thing about having starlight weapons, it was never dark when you fought. Their fusion weapons, however, wouldn’t harm any of the ghosts they encountered. Blaze reloaded the pistol, replacing the used percussion cap on the hollow metal nipple in the firing mechanism. He then shook in a fair amount of black powder before ramming the cotton wadding and the ball into the barrel. The pistol was ready. He handed it to Elle and gave Ling the other one. For himself, he picked up a fully loaded musket with an iron bayonet. They were ready.
In the window of the church, a boy peered at them and then faded away.
All three paused. “It’s not Catholic,” Elle said. “I’d feel better if it was. Catholic ghosts I understand.”
No, this was some ecumenical, label-less congregation. They called themselves the Interstellar Christian Coalition of Believers.
Blaze checked his watch. It was nine o’clock. They had less than three hours. Plenty enough time to get their people, find a ship, and get off Hutchinson Prime forever. “Do you believe in God, Ling?”
“In that end, that question makes no sense,” the Meelah said. “If by God you mean an entity that looks upon our every move and judges us, I find that improbable, and in the end, unsatisfying. If you mean Meelah, the eternal moment, the vibrancy of life across the universe, warmth in the cold, voices in the silence…if you mean that, the question fails on every level. It’s like asking if I believe in puddles. Yes, Blaze, I b
elieve in puddles.”
“So, God’s a puddle?” Elle asked with a grin cracking her lips. “Kind of blasphemous, doncha think?”
Ling shrugged. “Ask a Meelah dying of thirst? A muddy puddle would become her god in that moment. There is no blasphemy, there is only Meelah, and I am a child of Meelah, the universe’s offspring, the son of this moment here, the child of this place now.”
Blaze chuckled. “Well, if you walk into the church and we’re not hit by lightning bolts, I’ll take that as divine approval.”
The three moved toward the church. Behind them came a screech that knifed through Blaze’s brain. It made his ears hurt, and his soul shivered from the caterwauling cackle.
They spun to face the women in fancy dresses Blaze had seen before in downtown Know Return. The women’s hands grew into glowing talons and the black faces seemed to grow even more dark. This time, there wasn’t a dozen, but hundreds, no, thousands of phantom women in ghostly dresses.
Their gowns blew about them from some mystical wind from the great beyond. Around them clustered ghost children, some only spectral toddlers, but others were older, faces gray, the features indistinct. Looking at their faces only seemed to blur them further until noses were where mouths should have been, mouths were catty-corner across foreheads, and noses expanded to form new faces. It made Blaze dizzy.
The thousands of ghost women and children screamed and sped toward them. The chill of all that death hit them like a frigid ocean wave. Their smell was the stench of snow on rotting bodies or of a drizzle on graveyard dirt.
Blaze fired his rifle as Ling and Elle unloaded their pistols. The first three ghosts evaporated into black smoke, but thousands more were on their heels. There was no escape. Blaze snatched up a fresh musket with a bayonet and charged forward as Ling started the laborious process of reloading the pistols and the used rifle. Elle knelt as Ling reloaded them. Three shots at a time wouldn’t do anything against the spectral mob descending on them.
Ghost after ghost went down as Blaze slashed the iron bayonet through their partially corporeal bodies. Ectoplasm splashed down on the mud of the church’s parking lot. Hands reached out for him, but Blaze ducked and dodged, keeping himself moving.
One woman spun her head around and tried to touch him with her ponytail but before the hair could touch him, Ling blasted her out of existence with one of the pistols. They hurried forward, giving up on reloading. They either tossed an iron ball through a ghost or bashed at them with the wood and iron of their ancient weapons. The Meelah had both pistols, and he flipped and somersaulted his way through the ghosts, a pistol in each hand, dissolving every one of the apparitions he hit with the metal.
Elle used her rifle almost like a bo staff, sweeping the bayonet through phantoms and sending their undead forms back into the abyss in screams of fury and splashes of ectoplasm. A fresh ocean of the liquid Onyx was forming around them and starting to rise. With it came miniature tentacles that tried to rip them up.
“Get to the church!” Ling yelled. “Perhaps whatever respect they had for the holy ground in life followed them into their uneasy death. I will hold them off.”
Ling used one of his precious bullets to blow away a ghost boy in overalls reaching for him. The Shaolin sloth jammed the still smoking iron barrel into a ghost girl also in overalls before she could touch them. Both turned into a black mist and dissipated.
A ghost woman drove both of her hands into Ling’s head, and the Shaolin sloth’s eyes rolled back into his head. But only for a minute.
Ling laughed. “Yes, I understand that thought. I know that feeling, but I am not my thoughts nor am I feelings. I am Meelah.”
The Shaolin sloth dropped his pistols and spread open his arms. “Come then, my friends. Your selfish desires, your self-centered fears, your errant whimsies and deepest agonies are nothing new to me. The voices of the dead are only echoes of my living mind. And echoes have no voices of their own. Shadows in my light. Oh, ha, you are all just shadows in my light.”
The ghosts all converged on the Shaolin sloth, disappearing into him. Shadowy figures in tattered clothes, flickering imps of ghost kids, abyss-faced women in flowing gowns, all disappeared into Ling’s fur until it almost looked like there was an irresistible magnet drawing them all in.
Elle and Blaze stumbled back, freed for the moment, while Ling had become the peaceful eye in a spectral storm of furious, vengeful spirits.
Ling continued to laugh…and whether that laughter was sane or insane, Blaze couldn’t tell. Could Ling survive the cold touch of so many ghosts? One small caress had driven both Ling and Blaze into a homicidal rage. Blaze had lost his shit, for real, and the memory of that shamed him. But here was the poor Meelah drowning in a sea of ghosts.
The mixture of ectoplasm and mud slurped at their boots as Blaze and his sister retreated to the doors of the church. There, on what was left of her knees, was a dead ten-year-old girl in a yellow dress, the same yellow dress the girl ghost wore. Most of the skin had rotted off her. The girl’s skeletal fingers had scratched at the door. It was covered in long, desperate fingernail marks.
Blaze glanced up and said what the yellow-dress ghost had mouthed over and over. “‘Here’s the church and here’s the steeple.”
“‘Open the door and see all the people.’” Elle whispered the quote.
Acting on instinct, Blaze bent and picked up the bones and decayed fragment of the girl as Elle pushed open the doors. If this was the yellow dress girl’s bones, they were safe to touch. Only the ghost herself could drive the gunny crazy.
Lights winked on inside—no, not lights, candles. Inside were men, some in Astral Corp uniforms, some in armor, others in Union Air Force flight suits, but all were dead.
A ghost colonel, snow-white hair on his gray scalp, eyes black pits in his face, shambled forward and reached out with white transparent fingers.
Elle threw one of her muskets like a spear, but the colonel dodged the bayonet and continued his charge forward.
Ling, behind them, cackled. It was clear that the Shaolin sloth had lost his hold on sanity. Blaze and Elle were about join him. Shuffling toward them came the hundreds of ghostly men in the church, flickering in and out of existence even as the candles in the church flickered.
Chthonic’s voice thundered in the air around them. “Death and decay! All hail death and decay!”
NINETEEN_
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The colonel slipped by Blaze and Elle and slammed the door shut. He turned on Blaze, but the gunny had no idea what kind of expression was on the ghost’s face. Hard to read a guy when his eyes are like marbles of ink and his lips are so pale and dead.
Elle was sweating, breathing hard, and her hands went to the pouches on her bandolier. She didn’t have the components for another dispel Onyx trick, but maybe she was thinking of a consume spell to eat up the colonel or maybe some derivation of an exorcism spell. Or maybe she’d come up with a flush spell that she could use outside of the Lizzie Borden.
Chthonic’s voice came muffled through the door, something about death, perfection, decay makes you pretty, whatever. It was all evil archduke of hell propaganda. Poor Ling, though. It seemed they had lost the Meelah forever.
The colonel put out both of his hands in a mysterious gesture.
Blaze’s sister went to cast a spell, but he stopped her. “Wait, Elle. Hold on a second.” When he spoke, his breath drifted out in a mist. The ghosts had turned the church into a freezer.
All the dead men’s eyes were on the living pair in the room. But the colonel wasn’t touching them, or trying to scare them, or anything. He was waiting, hands out and palms pale. The wooden benches of the church were clearly visible through the apparition’s form.
Again, Blaze could feel what the colonel wanted. Careful not to touch the ghost, he set the bones of the yellow-dress girl onto the outstretched hands. The bones and the dress fell through the ghost’s hands. The remnants clattered onto the floor. But ther
e, in the colonel’s arms, was the phantom of the girl herself. She reached up and pulled herself onto the colonel’s chest. Each hugged the other.
The girl had wanted to get inside the church to join her family. That was what her ghostly rhyme had been all about. Blaze had picked up her bones, but not her ghost, and it was the colonel’s touch that brought her spirit to him.
Thank you. The cold voice of the colonel drifted through Blaze’s head. The devil killed our women and children first and we were driven into the church. We barricaded ourselves in here to protect ourselves from the dead. It hurt us to be separated from our families but then that was what the devil wanted. My daughter, she had crawled here, still alive, and reached the door. I wanted to open it, but my men disagreed. They thought she had already turned, but she hadn’t. It was my daughter, dammit, and then there was Chthonic, whispering madness in my brain. I fought them, and it turned into a slaughter. We killed each other in the end. And my daughter died on the doorstep. This is a damned planet, forsaken by God. But I get to hold my daughter one last time.
The little girl turned her ghostly little head. Her white, chapped lips opened. Thank you. You opened the door so I could see all the people. And my dad. Thank you for letting me see my dad one last time.
“You hearing this?” Blaze asked his sister.
Elle laughed brazenly. “Uh, yeah, Onyx witch here. I’m far more attuned to these poor assholes than you are.”
The colonel’s chuckles filled their minds. We are poor assholes. Some of us were born on Hutchinson Prime, others moved here to raise our families. Others landed here to help with the evacuation when it was clear the suns were going to collide. That was me, though my wife and daughter were residents. I came here to get them. We were barely off our ships when the zombies hit us, then the ghosts, and the devil, he was the worst. Never thought I’d see a dragon in my life, but there it was.
“Sorry, man,” Blaze said. “You weren’t trained to deal with Onyx energy, not like us. You never had a chance. But I’m going to find wherever Chthonic is and I’m going to end that pinche puta.”
