by Aaron Crash
The Meelah leapt from his back and onto his feet. A nightstand tumbled down through the hole in the roof and Ling cut it in half with a twirl of his nunchaku.
The staircase came unglued and crashed into the room.
Ling was lost in the smoke, but the damn house was coming apart. The flames were growing higher. From on top of the dining room table, Blaze witnessed the destruction.
“We have to get to the barn!” Elle called out. “I can ward the enclosed space and we can regroup. What in the shit were you doing while I was out, Blaze? Pissing off the entire planet?”
Ling’s nunchaku glowed in the smoke and Blaze readied himself for the next attack. “Elle, you have to deal with Ling first. Or he’s gonna cut me up like the blue-ribbon prize bull I am. Comprende?”
Elle growled out Onyx and then sighed. “There’s no Onyx in him. His brain chemistry is jacked. There’s nothing I can do. We’re just going to have to wait it out. He’ll come around. He is a goddamn Shaolin monk after all. Aren’t they supposed to be all about letting go of selfish desire and self-centered fear?”
Blaze swallowed hard. “Get my shotgun and my ax, Elle. Get Trina to the barn and get her ready. I’ll get there. Somehow.”
“Hurry, the ghosts are coming back. Millions, Blaze. Do you know what that means?”
Blaze couldn’t answer. Ling flipped through the smoke, the flame, and the dust from the disintegrating house. His nunchaku was a glowing blur around his body. Blaze relaxed his thoughts, let go of his fear, and did exactly what Arlo had trained him to do. He fought.
Swinging his nunchaku, he blocked Ling’s attacks, blow after blow, but the Meelah was driving him back. The Meelah managed to scorch his arm and laid a bad burn across his thigh. Blaze hardly felt the pain.
Elle struggled with Trina. His sister had to pull the Irish woman out the door by her feet. It was going to take the Onyx witch a bit to get the unconscious vampire to the barn. Blaze had plenty to do in the meantime.
Then the entire second story fell into the living room, more fuel for the fire. A toy soldier marched out of the flames, unscathed, which meant it wasn’t of this world.
A baby cried in the basement, and a mother screamed. The ghosts were returning, getting their mojo back.
In the middle of their nunchaku duel, Blaze dropped his weapon and grabbed Ling’s right hand, where his own nunchaku glowed. He then grabbed Ling’s left hand. Using his brute strength, he bent the Meelah back. “You want to skin me, Ling?” Blaze thundered out the question. The goddamn dining room table was starting to smoke, and the gunny could feel his boots melting. “You want to expose the Meelah inside me?”
Ling snarled and snapped at Blaze, trying to bite him. “Yes! You are not Human! You are Meelah!”
“And you are a pinche Shaolin monk! Can’t you let go of your own selfish desires? Doesn’t desire lead to suffering?” Blaze screamed the questions. Goddamn, he was in a burning house, choked by smoke, wounded by a fusion nunchaku, freaked out by ghosts, millions of ghosts it seemed, and here he was arguing ancient Chinese philosophy with a space sloth. Fuck his life.
Ling blinked. “My selfish desires? Me? Mine. What I want. I want. I want.” The sloth grinned. “So that’s what it means to be a homicidal maniac. While there is a certain joy in the freedom and chaos, I do not think I like it. What I want? I want to be your friend, your brother, and I want to end suffering in the universe. I will start with my own.”
The ceiling above them was shrouded in flames. The smoke was unbearable. Blaze scooped up Ling’s other nunchaku, threw the now docile sloth over his shoulder, and leapt out of the dining room, out of the house, and into the blackened corn.
The heat from the burning house washed over them as the last part of the second story tumbled inward, consumed in a hurricane of sparks and fire. The rain falling did nothing to stop the inferno.
The wispy voice of a little girl broke through the snapping and crackling of the fire. “Here’s the church…here’s the steeple…”
The girl in the yellow dress was back, her fingers together, but this time, Blaze saw that she was touching her index fingers together.
Raziel dashed from around the house and hissed at the girl. The ghost faded. Then the cat raced across the ground, past the burning house, toward the barn.
A heartbeat later, Blaze saw people marching toward him in the cornfield. Not marching, floating, an entire city of ghosts, every kind of person, every color of skin, every size and shape of Human, adult, child, an entire city. Millions of ghosts coming toward him, reaching toward him.
“While I do discount selfish desires,” Ling said, “I do not wish to be driven insane again. It is very exhausting to cling to insanity. However, as we’ve seen, the touch of the ghosts will drive us mad. Let us, run, Gunny, and run fast!”
Ling sped away, tucking his nunchakus into his sheaths. Blaze was right on his tail. They had to abandon the starcycles and the plasma minigun. Those weapons wouldn’t work against the phantoms anyway.
All the ghosts—a continent of them, or so it seemed—shrieked and screamed after them.
Blaze remembered when he and Arlo lived in Omaha, in a creepy house with a cellar. Arlo would send him down there to get canned creamed corn, and every time, Blaze would run out of the darkness, away from the dampness and the spiders, sure that some ghost was reaching for him.
He could feel the cold hand clutching at his neck. Of course, back then, it probably hadn’t been a real ghost, only his imagination. If the specter in the cellar had been real, Arlo would’ve stuck a salt shotgun up the ghost’s butt and pulled the trigger.
But on Hutchinson Prime, the ghosts were real, and they were coming, en masse, for Blaze and his family. Ling was faster, and he made it to safety.
Blaze, slower, sprinted toward the barn. Elle had the door open, motioning for him to hurry. A finger of some horror touched a neck hair, or it felt like it, and then Elle pulled him inside and slammed the door. She held a glowing fusion katana to give the place light.
The entire barn shook as the force of the ghosts tested Elle’s warding sigils. Boards slammed against nails, the big doors shook, the small doors bowed inward, and the glass danced in the panes. Even the dust in the hay was sent swirling up by the otherworldly energy of the mob.
It was your typical barn, a hayloft above, empty stalls, side doors, and two big sliding doors in the front and back.
But this barn had a gorgeous woman dangling from a chain in the middle of the room. She was very much alive, and she was scared out of her mind. Hair the color of honeysuckle framed a face full of bright blue eyes, blushed cheeks, and lips as full and red as ripe Fourth of July strawberries. A tight blouse, most of the buttons gone, cupped her chest, and denim cutoffs showed shapely legs. Her sandals had come loose and lay in the dirt.
Trina, newly awake, crept toward the bombshell blonde with black teeth and inky claws. The freckles were gone. She was a vampire now, and Blaze could see every vein.
He and Elle could stop Trina, but who was the blonde? Who had chained her there? How could she still be alive? And damn, how many inches of cleavage was she showing?
ELEVEN_
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“Trina! Stop!” Elle ordered.
The horde of ghosts outside continued to scratch at the barn, and the temperature inside plummeted as their chill presence seeped through the cracks in the boards.
Trina stopped and sighed. “But look at her. Can you smell her? Someone needs to eat her. She smells so fucking good. Can I eat her, Elle? Please, can I eat her?”
Elle grinned, her face devilish in the glow of her katana. “No. But talk about making a deposit into the spank bank. I’m gonna use that later when I’m alone in my bunk.”
“Enough of that, Elle,” Blaze said. “We have to help her. And you know Trina didn’t mean it like that.”
The blonde woman wept. “Oh, please, help me. Don’t let her hurt me. Won’t you help me, mister? Please, I’m
a-scared something awful.”
Blaze retrieved his ax from where Elle had dumped it in a corner, stalked past Trina, and sliced through the chain holding the woman. He caught her when she fell. Her skin was warm and wet, and yeah, she did smell good. The frightened chica turned and buried her face into Blaze’s chest, weeping like her heart was broken.
Trina sniffed and smiled a chilling smile, revealing fangs. Every vein and capillary on her face was visible through her translucent skin.
Blaze tilted his head. “Are you back on our side, Trina? I just fought Ling to a standstill. Do I need to worry about taking you on as well?”
Color returned to her face and her freckles spread across her nose and cheeks. Her eyes returned to their emerald green and her hair was red once more. “No, I’m okay, but I changed to avoid the ghost. When I’m alive, they are drawn to me. When I’m undead, they could give a shit. I thought I could control myself, but this planet is dicking with me. I’m thirsty. I’m going to need blood and a lot of it.” She opened her arms and Raziel jumped into them. The cat immediately began to purr.
Elle patted the vampire on the shoulder. “We’ll find a village somewhere that you can ransack.”
“Not civilians,” Blaze said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“For the record, Gunny did well against me,” Ling said. “I would’ve thought I’d defeat him easily. He’s tougher than he looks. And faster.”
“Whatever,” Blaze smirked.
Something big, some huge force of evil, smacked against the front barn door. The whole barn shivered as the whispering of the ghosts outside continued.
Ling checked his plasma bow and his nunchakus. “I’ll go up and make sure the loft isn’t compromised.” The Meelah clambered up a ladder into the hayloft.
Blaze, holding the woman, Trina, holding the cat, and Elle were left standing on the hay-strewn dirt of the barn.
“You ready to talk to us, darling?” Blaze asked the crying woman in his arms.
She nodded. “You can set me down now, mister.”
Blaze eased the woman to her feet. “Who chained you up here?” he asked.
She crossed her arms across her chest. “Don’t suppose y’all know about the Gorebacks. They were gonna kill me and eat me.” She glanced at Trina.
Trina mouthed, “Sorry,” and winced, crinkling her nose.
Elle laughed. “Those pinche Gorebacks. I say we find them and Trina gets her Thanksgiving dinner ten months early.”
“Yum!” Trina agreed.
“Why did they look…why did they have that makeup…” The woman shivered. “And why did they have red noses and green hair?”
“They’re clown worshippers, psychopaths, cannibals. To them, the evil shit they do makes perfect sense ’cause they’re so warped by their kooky religion,” Blaze said. “What’s your name?”
“Folks call me Patricia,” she said. And gave him a smile so hot and sweet it might as well have been a cinnamon stick. “You can call me Patsy though.”
Elle sidled up to the girl and took her hand. “Can I call you Patsy?”
The woman nodded. “You sure can.” She gave Elle the same smile.
Damn, but his sister could be annoying. “Tell us about the planet, Patsy. How come you didn’t evacuate when you had the chance?”
She blushed. “My family…Daddy wanted to stay. This ain’t our farm, but we have one, with a big sorghum crop, about three miles away. We thought we had another season easy, before the suns collided. Goddamn IPC was trying to scare us away so Hutchison Prime’s crops wouldn’t affect their Americatus Quadrant farm indexes. I was out scavenging supplies when the Gorebacks found me. Daddy, Momma, they’re at the big air force base north of town getting a ship ready. We filled it full of hogs the other farmers left behind. Got a whole mess of meat ready to keep us fed during the space travel. Please, can you take me to them?”
Blaze glanced at Elle, and his sister ignored him. She was looking at Patsy with a combination of interest and lust. No, it was at least ninety percent lust and ten percent interest. Sometimes his sister acted like a lovestruck sixteen-year-old boy with an Interstellar Porn Cache account. Another IPC acronym that no one talked much about, though the IPC owned the IPC like it owned most things.
The gunny snapped his fingers in front of his sister’s face.
Elle struck his hand away, then pulled Patsy in for a hug. She petted the chica’s hair. “Yes, Patsy, we can get you to your family. I don’t suppose you know anyone named Granny around here. She won’t look like a grandma, but she will insist everyone call her Granny.”
“The bad woman.” Patsy shuddered. “She came into town about six months ago. She made sure everyone knew her and no one liked her. She hit every bar she could, slept with anyone she could, and none of them were ever the same again.”
Elle drew back from Patsy. “What’s the name of the town in the distance?”
“Know Return. It was a joke when the first settlers got here about a hundred years ago. “That’s when my family came.” Patsy winced as the barn shook again. “What’s outside? What are those whispers?”
“Ghosts,” Blaze said.
“Ghosts?” Patsy crinkled her nose. “Like for reals?”
“Yeah, real enough to kill.” He turned on his sister. “So, Elle, you gonna try another consume spell and another dispel Onyx? It worked for a bit. It might work long enough to get us out of here.”
“I’m out of teeth,” the Onyx witch said, “unless you all want to make a donation. Then I could get some of my mojo back.”
Blaze checked his display, and her Onyx energy was at twenty percent, but it ticked down to nineteen point eight and continued to drop. She was keeping the specters out of the barn and taking care of Trina, no doubt, so she wouldn’t snap.
“You have an Onyx syringe,” Blaze said.
Elle nodded. “I do. One left. But I don’t think I should spike myself just yet. There must be Human remains around here. Or I could rest up. We seem safe for now.”
A quick time check. They’d been on the planet about an hour, which made it three in the afternoon. It felt so much later. With nine hours left until the stars collided, they had some time, but not much.
“Was it luck we landed in the same town as Granny?” Blaze asked.
Elle shrugged. “We don’t know she’s here. I could cast a find spell and get to her, but again, I go dark, Trina is going to be a problem. I can’t cut our margins that close.”
“You need teeth,” Blaze said.
“I do.” Elle paused. “Blaze, there are millions of ghosts out there. What if the Onyx energy we saw covering the planet is from ghosts? What if the entire planet is haunted?”
From above, Ling laughed. “A haunted planet? Such a place would be a terrible place for the living but definitely interesting. What were Chthonic’s honorific titles? The lord of death. The master of haunts. Wouldn’t the archduke of death be found on a haunted planet?”
“Chthonic.” Patsy grew pale. “Daddy talked about Chthonic. Said it was a terrible creature, one of Satan’s sons, a fallen angel from the pit. Before, when I was hanging on that chain, that woman, that pregnant woman…I begged for her to help me and she walked on by. I guess she scared away the Gorebacks, though. When she came, they ran off and left me.” The girl burst into tears again.
Both Blaze and Elle moved to comfort her. His sister shoved him away.
Trina slapped the gunny. “I’m right here, Blaze. And notice how good I was. I didn’t even lunge for her throat. You sure you can’t smell her blood? Goddamn, it’s like being starving and trying to sleep inside a Taco Bell.”
“Sorry,” Blaze said. “Habit. Well, if we’re going to rest here a bit, we need heat.”
“I can help with that. This here barn came prefab. We got one just like it.” Patsy sniffed. Near the front of the barn was a storage compartment. She pulled open the door to reveal a stove with a pipe leading outside. She found a box of stick matches and dry wood. S
oon, a happy fire crackled in the stove. Patsy sat against the wall near the stove to keep the fire fed.
Elle pulled down some wool blankets and curled up in the straw. “Wake me in an hour, Blaze. I should be able to cast a quick find spell. Then we’ll get some teeth and I’ll eat some ghosts, cast spells, it’ll be awesome.”
Trina sighed. “If you need teeth, why don’t I drain the blonde bitch dry, we knock her teeth out, and the problem is solved. We get on to finding Granny.”
“Nombre de Dios,” Blaze cursed. “Trina, enough of that.”
“What?” Trina asked innocently. “It makes perfect sense. And we don’t really know her. She’s just blood and teeth, right?”
Patsy let out a wail of fear.
Elle kept her eyes closed, but she must’ve cast some kind of spell. “Better, Trina?”
“Yeah, I can’t believe I said all that.” The freckled vampire made another cringe-y face. “Sorry, Patsy, I’m usually not so evil. It’s the planet. Blaze, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Tears on her cheeks, the blonde girl let out a long breath. “I never thought vampires and ghosts were real. And this Chthonic thing. It sounds awful.”
“Yeah, awful. Blaze, over at the other end of the barn, if you don’t mind.” Trina put Raziel on the ground, and the cat ran over to curl up next to Elle.
Blaze followed Trina to the double doors of the barn. He kept his ax ready just in case Trina lost it and went for him.
When they were in the shadows, away from Patsy and Elle, Trina pulled him close. The rain had picked up, but it was hard to tell what was the rain pounding on the roof and what was the storm of ghosts, millions of them, scratching to get into the barn. Without Elle, they wouldn’t be able to leave. Though he didn’t like the idea, he figured he’d have to get Trina to use her vampire strength and rip the teeth out of his jaw. The galaxy had plenty of dentists to fix him up once they closed the Onyx Gate.
