Zola followed him out, spinning the shotgun off her back and unloading with the pump action in quick succession. With the loaded shells spent, she let the shotgun fall across her back as she grabbed her staff and started eviscerating another series of zombies. The undead tottered and reached out, but never quite made it through her defenses. She jammed her staff into the ground and let go once the closest zombies were down.
Zola closed her eyes, extended her hands, and said, “Inimicus Sanation!”
My eyes widened. That was a healing incantation. “Zola, what the hell?” I yelled.
Foster laughed and cleaved through another zombie.
Zola’s mouth quirked up just a little as white light flashed from her hands and through the nearest zombies. Seven of them fell over, unmoving. “They’re undead,” she yelled back.
“Oh, right.” I smiled, raised my arm to the side, and let my pepperbox release another zombie from the heavy burden of brains. If it will heal the living, it will kill the dead. Umm, kill the dead, again. I sighed, palmed two speed loaders, and started spraying brains around like confetti.
Foster moved at just the wrong time as one of my shots blew a rotten skull to bits. I tried really hard not to laugh as he blinked his eyes to clear the gore. His face was blank until he smirked and said, “Mmm, brains.”
At that, I did laugh. In the middle of a zombie horde, Foster and I were damn near hysterical. I pulled the trigger three more times, felling three more zombies, cracked the pepperbox open, and jammed another speed loader into the chambers.
Zola cursed as a partially-dismembered zombie managed to grab her ankle. They were slow, but strong, and after she rammed her staff through its head, she was limping.
“You alright?” I said.
“Pay attention, boy,” she said and pointed behind me.
I jumped as I turned to find a particularly nasty zombie two feet away. The skin of its rotting face was hanging from its chin and the muscles beneath oozed black blood as they twitched. One eye was missing and something squirmed in the socket. I fought my gag reflex and shot it in the head. It hit the ground with a wet smack a second after its brains did the same. The smell was getting unbearable.
“It reeks!” I said.
“They’re zombies,” Zola said.
Foster curb stomped a crawler and said, “Sure, but why do they smell so much worse on the inside?”
“It does smell a bit like that cheese you like to eat, boy.”
I frowned and reloaded. “Thanks for that. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat Limburger again.”
“Thank god,” Foster and Zola said in unison.
We went on like that for ten minutes. Prattling, killing zombies, more prattling. We’d only hacked our way through three quarters of the thinnest line of zombies when I heard Foster scream. “Back! Get back! Gravemaker!”
“Fall back!” Zola’s voice broke with a shrill note. She was scared. She was terrified, and that sent a chill up my spine the likes of which I’d never felt.
My master retreated toward the burned out doorway we’d just come out of. Nothing terrified Zola. Sure, she got upset, but … I tripped on a body and caught myself a moment later. The pepperbox made short work of another crawler as I picked my way through the carnage. I could see the concern on Foster’s face as my feet crunched on the blown-out glass in front of the windows. The small fires burning around us buried everything in a smoky orange glow. I could almost chew on the rancid stench of the dead and the stink of burning oil.
I turned and watched as bits of iron and earth and rust flowed together. The zombies vacated my thoughts as more and more substance rolled out of the ground like ink through water, slithering onto the rounded form. It happened fast, but my brain slowed the spectacle like the reversed time lapse of a decaying tree trunk. I focused my Sight, grunted, and dropped it immediately. I couldn’t see anything. The creature was a blinding sun of raw power. As I blinked the spots away, my physical sight returned to a semblance of normalcy. I saw the legs solidify first, roughly human, with feet like tree stumps. The body snapped out from there, torso, arms, and head, all forming from nothing, leaving a hunched body in a pool of shadow and flowing earth. Some addled part of my brain marveled at the process, curious just what the hell this thing was. Most of my brain just wanted to scream.
The hands began to twitch as thin, inky tendrils of darkness rose from the shadows beneath the abomination, slithering along its form in a twisted caress. One finger jumped and relaxed before another random finger did the same. The rolling vision of iron and earth slowed and solidified into a grotesque skin—like rich bark with deep cracks and crevices saturating the surface. The body was a blackened brown nightmare. A thousand cracks echoed around us like cartilage breaking as the gravemaker straightened and raised its face to us.
I stepped back when the eyes locked onto me. The horrible, dead, milk white orbs shouldn’t have been able to see anything, but I could feel the will behind them. I’d seen the power the thing had, but now I could feel it.
My gut tightened and an oppressive sense of dread fell across my shoulders as the thing moved forward. Its eyes flicked from side to side behind the horde of zombies.
Zombies. I blinked as one of the bastards came within pawing distance. I raised the pepperbox and blew her head off. An airborne pigtail whipped by me as the body collapsed to the ground with a spasm.
The gravemaker’s face split as it opened its mouth. A deep bass rumble crawled across my senses, buzzing the soles of my feet and rattling my teeth.
“Nudd be damned, did that come from the gravemaker?” Foster said.
Zola nodded, shifting her staff from one hand to the other, all our eyes tracking the monster before us.
Almost faster than I could follow, the gravemaker swept its arm in a flat arc and burst a series of rotten skulls with a rapid sweep of impacts. Its fingers were still twitching and its eyes flashed all around as it took a step forward and flattened two more zombies.
“Ha, look, it’s helping,” I said nervously.
The gravemaker screamed, turning the rumbling groan into the high-pitched war-cry of a devil. The scream was a lion’s roar and a child’s shrill cry of terror; it was the most horrifying cacophony of sound I’d ever heard. The tendrils of darkness erupted out of the earth around its feet, thickening and spinning and finally settling over the gravemaker’s shoulders like the cloak of a medieval reaper. The cloak of darkness didn’t move like fabric as a strong breeze tore through the scene, rattling branches, litter, and clothes alike. It was more a great void hung around the gravemaker’s body, wisps of black trailing it and flowing around it in random patterns, swallowing any light daring enough to touch it. My heart stuttered and I silently told the flailing muscle I’d understand if it wanted to stop beating.
I tore my eyes away and looked to Foster and Zola. Zola was gone. “Where to?” Panic turned my voice into a scream.
“Back door you idiot!” Foster’s shrill scream told me that probably wasn’t the first time he’d told me to move.
Shit.
One last glance showed me the gravemaker effortlessly throwing a zombie thirty feet to the side in a crunch of bone. I cursed again as my feet carried me toward the back room. I heard Foster scream, this time in pain, but he was at my side before I had time to worry.
I raised my eyebrow in question.
All he said was, “Fine, later.”
Zola was wrapping her ankle with a bandage and she was scowling, deepening the lines etched around her eyes.
“You’re hurting,” I said.
“We have to move. This place is no protection from a gravemaker.” She tucked the edge of the bandage into the top of the wrap and nodded. “That gravemaker murdered this town. Ah have no doubt. Someone brought it here.” Zola’s head sagged and she took a deep breath.
“Who would raise that thing and let it loose on a town like this?” Foster said.
“Ah have no idea. The power and disreg
ard for life it would require are unthinkable.” She put her head in her hands, squeezed, then sat up straight.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Foster said.
Zola took a deep breath, nodded, and stood up. “Ah’m going with Damian’s plan. We’re going to burn our way out the back.”
“Damian’s plan?” Foster squeaked. “That’s not a plan!”
She looked at me with a faint smirk. “Pull the door open then get the hell back.”
I nodded and placed my hand on the doorknob of the metal door. “Tell me when.”
“Now.”
I yanked hard and caught a glimpse of about thirty zombies packed into the small brick alley before I dove behind Zola. I don’t take anything the woman says lightly.
Foster knelt down beside me with a psychotic grin on his face. “This is nuts.” He had his wings pulled down and was rubbing the edges of them with his fingertips. “At least it should be fascinating.”
Zola held both her hands out in front of her, fingers splayed and palms facing each other. “Modus Glaciatto!”
I quirked an eyebrow as a blizzard of ice shards tore through the zombies and glazed the asphalt with a thick sheen of ice. Some of the dead stopped completely, some slowed, and a couple fell. I heard something crash in the front room and my stomach tightened. Death was knocking.
“Modus Ignatto!” A torrent of flame roared from Zola’s hands and followed the ice shards through the narrow alley. The frozen zombies blew apart as the superheated flames reached them. My eyebrows crawled higher.
Foster laughed and said, “That was so cool!”
I stared at my master slack jawed. “You froze them? And the heat blew them apart?”
Zola grinned and limped out through the carnage. “Most importantly, had Ah just melted them, the asphalt would have melted and we’d be trapped.”
As it was, the asphalt was still soft from the blast of heat. I checked to make sure my eyebrows were still intact and wondered if we’d leave footprints in the softened surface. A bitter laugh escaped my lips a moment later and drew a raised eyebrow from Zola. Who gives a damn about footprints? There were zombies everywhere and some kind of monstrosity that frightened her even more than the old gods, and it was right behind us. Footprints … I shook my head as Foster scooped Zola up and we tore out of the alley as fast as we could run.
A thunderous crack exploded behind us, followed by the grinding crash of brick and metal. A glance over my shoulder as we fled across the street showed me the gravemaker, standing where the back wall to Buzz’s General Store used to be. It took a step forward, the darkness continually whipping about its body in tendrils.
Foster cursed and his strides lengthened and I was quick to follow suit. We passed West Maple Street again and I could see zombies shambling toward the wreckage of the store. They didn’t seem to have noticed our departure.
We ran at a dead sprint for almost ten minutes. Fires had broken out across the town as homes collapsed, filling the air with acrid smoke and a dirty orange glow. It didn’t slow us down. Burning lungs and eyes were no match for the adrenaline surge of facing the gravemaker. We jumped over buckled pavement and sinkholes as we circled back around to the church.
“Foster,” I said, “where we going?”
“Car,” he shouted back.
“Uh, what?”
He flashed a smile back and kept running, his enormous wings locked together behind him. I flinched when I noticed a sizable tear in his right wing. I slid to a halt beside Foster as he set Zola down a minute later. We were standing by Vicky, without a zombie in sight. The front of her frame was still flush with the ground but Foster didn’t seem concerned at all.
“Okay, fairy boy, what the hell are we doing here?”
Zola sat down on an upturned section of gutter and rubbed her ankle.
“Look,” he pointed at a vast expanse of relatively flat yet churned up dirt, “we can make it over that.”
“Sure, but the wheels are still in the ground.” I pointed at said wheels.
“Ah’m sometimes ashamed to call you my student, boy.” Zola smiled and stood up, favoring her injured ankle.
I raised my eyebrows as Foster’s grin widened. He grabbed the front of Vicky and lifted the submerged wheels out of the dirt and concrete. Debris fell away, rocks clinking as they bounced off the wheels and pattered across the ground. I was shocked to see none of the tires were flat as Foster freed them from the deep ruts. The strain showed on the fairy’s face, but he barely grunted as he shuffled to the right and set the front end of Vicky down on more solid earth.
He flapped his wings, his right wing moving in a lopsided motion, shedding dirt. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here.”
I nodded slowly and worked my jaw up and down a bit.
“How the hell did you do that, Foster?” I said once we were piled into Vicky and bouncing across the uneven ground.
He laughed from his perch on Zola’s knee, small once more. “What, you thought you already knew all there is to know about the Fae?” He waved his hand in dismissal.
“Perhaps you could educate me,” I said with complete and utter sincerity.
Zola chuckled, rubbed her ankle, and grimaced. “Foster is a warrior, Damian, gifted with great strength in either of his forms.”
“I noticed.” I sighed and glanced at Foster. “How’s your wing?”
“It hurts. A lot.” He frowned and tentatively touched the tear. “No worries though, Aideen will fix it up.”
“Yeah, right after she kills me.”
Foster chuckled.
I glanced at Zola and caught a grin before I turned back to the pothole marathon. I wanted to apologize to my battered car, but that could be awkward with a car full of people.
Foster flitted up to the dashboard in a shaky leap and sat down. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m strong, but I’m no knight. A knight could have turned that gravemaker inside out.”
“No, Foster,” Zola said. “No one short of a lord of the courts could have withstood that creature, much less defeated it. Ah’ve never seen one so powerful so far from a major battlefield.”
“The fort was right across the street,” I said.
Zola shook her head. “No, Ah mean major, like Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Stones River.” Her voice faded as she listed the last, and I didn’t press the issue.
The car took one more jarring bounce and we were suddenly driving on an undamaged piece of Highway 21, the steady hiss of tires on pavement a heady balm. “Hallelujah,” I muttered. “Should we really just leave the gravemaker back there?”
“The incantations around the town will keep commoners away until morning, at the very least,” Zola said. “That monstrosity will be gone by then.”
“Gone where?”
Zola rubbed her hands together and stared at the passenger window for a minute. “To wait for another awakening, Ah suppose. No one knows for sure, but they’re never truly gone.”
Foster was silent on the dashboard, flexing his damaged wing and wincing. His back was to the windshield and his eyes angled back toward the city. “What happens to all those people?”
Zola sighed. “They’re gone. The power binding the town will expire soon.” She looked back toward the burning town. “The ground will swallow the long dead. The others …” she shrugged, “Ah suspect most will be burned in the fire. No one ever tried to give a zombie chicken guts for being smart.”
“Chicken what?” Foster squeaked.
I laughed. “You know, like honor braids in the military? They used to use braids to designate officers way back in Zola’s time. Some people called them chicken guts.”
“That’s just weird.” Foster rubbed the bottom of his right wing and shook his head. “Weird.”
Zola cleared her throat and I caught her glare as I glanced across the seat.
“Did I say way back? That’s not what I meant.”
Foster and Zola both let a little laugh escape and I couldn’t help bu
t smile.
My eyes trailed over the rearview mirror and my brief moment of humor died. I could see smoke rising from Pilot Knob, lit from below by the red and deep orange flames. It was a twisted memorial to the worst violence the town had seen since the Civil War. My fingers tightened on the steering wheel and I gritted my teeth. “The whole town, Zola, fuck.”
“Ah know Damian, Ah know.”
We drove back to Saint Louis in relative silence.
Chapter Twenty-One
Cara greeted us with a brief wave from the counter as we entered the store. Foster gave her a quick hug, then bobbed and jerked through the air towards the back room on his lopsided wing. He hadn’t stopped talking about Aideen since the halo of light over Saint Louis appeared on the horizon on the trip home. The cu siths started barking and growling like poster children for rabies as Foster cleared the door frame. Less than a minute later, he returned with Aideen in tow. The fact he was flying straight was a dead giveaway his wing was already healed by his wife’s arts. I smiled at Aideen as she glided down to stand beside Foster and Cara.
“At least he was still in one piece,” I said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Only a crippling wound from which he could have lost his wing.”
Foster rolled his eyes behind Aideen. My lips quivered as I hid a smile. Aideen sighed, swung her fist blindly to her left side, and caught Foster on the jaw. He stumbled backwards, eyes wide in surprise as he tripped over a pencil, flailed his arms, and crashed into a small pile of paperclips.
Cara snorted a laugh. “Idiot. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
I looked down at Bubbles. She was sitting on her haunches, gleefully smacking her tail against the ground in a green-black blur.
“You hear that?” I said.
She sneezed.
I narrowed my eyes. Bubbles jumped in place, sniffed the air a few times, and went back to thumping her tail beside Zola. The cu sith stared up at my master until Zola’s eyebrow finally started to rise.
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