by Diane Duane
Jackie, now taller than some of the trees around the field, glanced around with slow fierce exaltation at the crowd of its people gathering around it, burning. And then, with one accord, they turned their attention to the zombies…
Jackie roared again so that the sky shook with it, a truly monster-movie-ish roar, and the pumpkins charged.
All hell broke loose— or at least what might have been mistaken for events in one of those dark outer spheres of existence where the Lone Power’s minions normally prefer to congregate. The whole field turned into a mad vista of snarling mouths, eyes full of devouring fire, roaring shapes that started to purposefully herd the zombies, piling up on one another and hemming them in out of view.
Then the serious screaming began.
Dairine came up behind Nita, staring. “What is going on in there??” she said.
But her tone of voice suggested that she knew, and Nita shook her head with mingled shock and approval as a couple of detached zombie-legs and arms came flying out of the fracas. These pieces did not have time to reproduce themselves, for other pumpkins rolled or leapt after them and devoured them, then turned to look for more prey: and with every zombie they ate, the pumpkins got bigger. Nutrients, Nita thought. It’s all just nutrients to them. Uh oh—
In desperation a crowd of the zombies, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, had managed to break out from the main body of the attack and were lurching in desperate speed for the edges of the field. It was futile. A second wave of ever-growing pumpkins charged after the zombies and hunted them across the field no matter which way they ran, snatching at them and pulling them down, grabbing and gobbling every hastily-shed scrap, every half head and pulled-off leg: everything.
And then, without much warning, the roaring and the growling stopped. There were no more zombies. There was nothing left but a field full of gloriously bright orange pumpkins of unusual size, rolling slowly to various sprawling patches of vines, settling themselves down against the ploughed-up ridges, the light gently fading out of them. One last pumpkin, the very biggest of them—easily four feet across, its top beautifully webbed with the browned veining of sunburn—was settling down into a spot at the corner of the field: but it had a ghostly quality about it, unlike its smaller kindred. As the spell ceased execution, as the huge pumpkin’s interior effulgence very slowly faded and the cut places in its face smoothed over and healed themselves, the pumpkin looked at Nita one last time with eyes that had nothing to do with knives.
Thank you, Jackie said, for picking me.
And it vanished.
All around the four wizards fell a great stillness. The only thing breaking the sudden peace was the much-amplified noise from some nearby neighborhood’s own “haunted house”, a single werewolf-y howl echoing into the moonlit night around them.
Nita dusted her hands off; Dairine put up her lightsaber, and Kit stowed his wand. Ronan knocked one last sliotar of light across the field, where it fell in a brief bright burst of wizardry and dissipated. “And now we see,” Ronan said as they looked across the former scene of zombie carnage, “why demons are scared of pumpkins.”
Off to one side there was an abrupt BANG! as someone teleported into the field a few yards away, in so much of a hurry that they didn’t care about the air displacement. Carl was standing there in his ghoul outfit, though all around him was a hot blue halo of light that suggested he had arrived ready for serious destruction of almost anything he might find. He looked around him in slight bemusement at finding nothing but a quiet moonlit field, a surprisingly large number of large leftover pumpkins for a suburban Hallowe’en, and a caveman, a pirate, a Jedi and an alien princess, all looking somewhat out of breath but very pleased with themselves.
“Tell me I missed the zombies,” Carl said, sounding actively regretful.
“We handled it,” Nita said. “But thanks for checking.”
Carl laughed. “I have a feeling the précis on this is going to make interesting reading,” he said. “Don’t skimp on the details. And don’t forget, you left your candy bags at our place.” He glanced around him one last time, shook his head, smiled. “Meanwhile, I have to go put more dry ice in that punch bowl…”
He vanished again, more quietly this time.
Ronan sighed and looked around the field. “Is it just me,” Ronan said, “or has my desire for large amounts of sugar completely deserted me?”
“It’s just you,” Dairine and Kit said, more or less in unison.
“Come on back with us anyway,” Kit said. “Who knows, you might recover.”
“Oh, all right…”
“One thing first,” Nita said, as Ronan and Dairine wandered off toward the edge of the field, with Spot trailing after, to set up a new set of transit circles.
“What?” Kit said.
“Right here…” Nita had bent down to examine the spot where she’d smashed Jackie to the ground. Some pulp and smashed skin fragments still lay there. She started turning over the broken pieces carefully.
Kit got down beside her. “What?” he said.
“Here,” Nita said. Under one of the broken pieces she found a few pale white seeds. Carefully she picked them up and slipped them into the pouch that held her manual. “You see any more of these?”
Kit helped her look. “A few under here…”
“Good.” After a few moments Nita sat back on her heels and accepted them from Kit, considering for a moment. “I think we take these home and leave them out to dry a little.”
“In the oven?”
“No, just near the radiator, I think. Then put them away…wait for spring, start the seedlings going, plant them out. Daddy was talking about starting a vegetable patch. I bet he wouldn’t mind some pumpkins.”
Kit gave Nita a look that even in this moonlight was plainly visible as a teasing one. “Not sure this really counts as changing the equation…”
“What?”
“You have got to stop giving things nicknames.”
She gave him a look of deadly amusement. “’Kit’,” Nita said, “is a nickname.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t give me—”
Nita pulled off Kit’s crooked mustache, chucked it away, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close in the dark.
“What are you two doing back there?” Ronan said from some yards away. “Hurry up and come on, or the Jedi Pig here’s gonna get ahead of you and raid your bags for all the chocolate.”
For a few seconds there was no answer. Then Kit said, “Tell her she can have it.”
Ronan and Dairine exchanged a glance and a grin, then vanished.
And behind them, the Hallowe’en moon kept shining down, glorious and round and somewhat scarred… like a pumpkin with character.
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