Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology

by Eric S. Brown

  “I’ll try and retrieve it,” Axiom-man said. He glanced over the edge. The dead were still far below. Ivy and Ross were safe for now.

  “Thank you,” Ross said and, after a second of hesitation, held out his hand for a handshake.

  Axiom-man shook it, then flew into the air.

  Up and over, up and over, he thought as he kept around twenty-five feet above ground level. He could make out most of the street signs from his vantage point and only dipped lower if he needed a closer look.

  “Searching for a rifle for somebody. This is a new one,” he said quietly.

  Zombies roamed the street below, most just aimlessly wandering up and down the streets in search of their next meal. No sign of human life anywhere.

  Finally, Axiom-man found Hillcrest and flew up and down the street, searching for Ross’s rifle. Nothing. He even checked the neighbouring streets. Aside from the dead, parked cars and a bit of trash, there was nothing to be found.

  He kicked on the speed and flew back to where Ross and Ivy stood waiting for him atop the enormous, steep rocky hill.

  “Get it?” Ross asked.

  Axiom-man shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Great,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey!” Ivy shouted and gave Ross a hard nudge in the arm.

  “It’s okay,” Axiom-man said. “It’s all right.” He crossed his arms. “Do you folks have anywhere safe you can go?”

  “We were trying to make it out of town,” Ivy said. “That’s when you found us.”

  “No car?” They shook their heads. “You’d be better off staying inside.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said. “Not sure if you noticed, but some of the houses have their windows smashed. Those things are relentless if they know we’re around.”

  True, he thought. “Where were you headed?”

  “Baker’s Narrows,” Ross said. “There’re some cabins there. Probably some folks there that would accommodate us or, maybe, we could find one that’s empty. We figure those things haven’t made it that far and if we lock ourselves in, we’d be safe until this blows over.”

  “If it blows over,” Ivy said.

  “All right,” Axiom-man said. “I’ll take you. But first, Ivy, you said the creatures came from the hills. Which hills, exactly?”

  “Next to the mine, or thereabouts. That was where people first saw them.”

  Axiom-man glanced past the roads, boulders and high rocky hills to the shadows of the smokestack and mineshaft at the edge of town. Then I’ll head there, he thought. “Here,” he said and held out his hands, “let me take you where you need to go.”

  Finding Ross and Ivy an empty cabin didn’t take as long as Axiom-man expected. The first one, a pine-sided bungalow—no one answered the door, but not for lack of people within. Axiom-man heard voices murmuring inside, but figured if they didn’t want to help, he wasn’t going to push them and cause even more trouble. The second cabin—tall, fancy, with a low and high balcony—treated them to a man with a shotgun, a family behind him sitting at the kitchen table. Instead of ripping the gun from his hands, Axiom-man opted to feign weakness and carefully step away, Ross and Ivy in tow.

  The third cabin brought them safety. It was small, faint yellow and slightly worn, but upon inspection of the interior—once no one answered the door—they discovered a cellar beneath a trapdoor. Perfect. And either those who lived there had fled and left the door unlocked, or the trio simply got lucky. Either way, it was a blessing Axiom-man was happy to have.

  Leaving Ross and Ivy behind was a bit unsettling, but Axiom-man also knew Ross was an able-bodied chap and that he and Ivy should be okay. The man had preserved their lives thus far.

  Getting back to town was done quickly, Axiom-man keeping high above the treetops, covering as much ground as possible, heading straight for the mineshaft.

  Below, the undead dotted the landscape, some seeming to be feasting on people, others simply stumbling about. From up here, if it wasn’t for their slow movements giving them away, the dead could easily be mistaken for the living.

  Axiom-man dropped down in front of the mineshaft. All apparent access points were closed.

  They came from the hills, Ivy said. They came from the— He jogged around the lot out front of the shaft while also keeping his eyes on the surrounding rock for any undead visitors.

  All seemed clear.

  What about— He floated into the air, getting a better view. “There has to be something.” Except he couldn’t see anything but a handful of empty parked cars, a foreman’s trailer—doors closed—and a stretch of chain-link fence with large, out-of-date mining equipment sitting behind it.

  Axiom-man touched down again, wondering if Ivy’s statement of the dead coming from the hills was true.

  He drew closer to the base of the towering smokestack. When he was a mere five or six feet away, raspy groans grew on the air, seeming to come from either side. Axiom-man checked left and right, but found he was all alone. Facing the smokestack again, an undead man shuffled out from behind it, the creature’s face dry, gray and hollow. It wore a tattered flannel plaid shirt and overalls. Another zombie stumbled in behind it, a girl, large and covered in blood from the neck down, wearing nothing but a dirty green nightgown that was torn at the hem, revealing more than Axiom-man wanted to see.

  The two undead moved right for him, mouths open, eyes wide, utterly zoned in at making him their next meal.

  Taking several steps back, he readied his fists. More groans rose on the air; these came from behind. At least ten more undead emerged from the other side of large boulders, some from lower levels in the ground. He hadn’t seen them because he hadn’t flown high enough when he did his hovering scan of the area. Besides, aside from a few lights, it was hard to see here.

  Lesson noted, he thought, thankful that even though he was still learning the ropes of being as proficient a crusader as possible, that at least he learned most of his lessons with little to no harm.

  So far, anyway.

  The man who’d come out from behind the smokestack moved his jaws up and down, as if already tasting Axiom-man’s flesh. He was quickly dealt with by a swift blow to the head, the creature’s skull swivelling on its neck, the vertebrae snapping. The chubby large woman stepped on top of her kin the moment the dead man hit the ground, arms out, fingers opening and closing as she attempted to get hold of the top of Axiom-man’s cape.

  Axiom-man snapped out a fist to the woman’s mouth. He felt his knuckles scrape across her jagged teeth, but fortunately they didn’t pierce the fabric of his glove. Past experience in that parallel universe showed that the undead gained his powers if his blood entered their system. The strength of his blow was enough to make her stumble back several steps.

  With a quick lunge forward, he swung at her head again, this time his fist connecting full force, his immense strength being enough to crack the woman’s skull open and for her brain to leak out around his fingers.

  He shook the gray matter off his hand and faced the oncoming horde. There were even more than when he last looked, more than double. Twenty-five, twenty-six, maybe?

  No point taking them all on, he thought, then realized he had no choice but to do so to ensure the threat of the undead wouldn’t spread beyond the town, if it hadn’t already.

  “Make it quick,” he told himself and powered up his eyes. Immediately, his vision was masked in bright blue light, the figures and shapes of the dead just beyond like blue silhouettes against the bright sky-blue of his vision.

  He rose into the air and quickly hugged his knees up to his hips when he felt a pair of hands grab onto his feet. He shook the creature off, banked to the right, and proceeded in what he hoped was a circle around the undead horde.

  Blue energy gushed forth from his eyes. The groaning calls of the dead and their wild grunts and shrieks told him he was hitting his targets. Doing his best to maintain course despite his limited sight due to his eye beams, Axiom-man gave it all he had and
cut down every blue shadow he saw.

  They better all be the dead because— What if one of those shadows was someone who was really alive and needed his help? He rose higher into the air, keeping a safe distance from the dead below, and let the energy leave his eyes. On the ground, over half of the undead had been cut down, their bodies a mass of severed limbs, heads and torsos littering the ground in piles of flesh and pools of black, coagulated blood.

  Some of the remaining zombies gazed up at him while others merely gazed off into the distance elsewhere, probably having no clue as to what they were looking at and just checking for their next meal.

  Fortunately, no human survivors had stumbled into the fray. Axiom-man powered up his eyes from where he floated—a solid thirty feet off the ground—and picked off the dead one by one, aiming his eye beams for the middle of their foreheads when possible. The undead dropped, bodies crumpling to the ground.

  All were dead and would stay dead.

  He scanned the rocky hill, the roadway next to the mine, and spotted more undead in the distance. He might as well eradicate those while he had the mind to and then get back on surveying the area afterward.

  Axiom-man headed toward them.

  Throwing out both fists ahead of him, he kicked up his speed and flew as fast as he could, skirting the ground, fists aimed square-on the first of the shambling zombies in front of him. His fist connected bang-on and the force of the impact was enough to cleave the head from the zombie’s rotting neck. He pulled the same manoeuvre on a second, then finished off three more with his eye beams.

  When he had first encountered the undead in that parallel universe, the fighting had been more hands-on and took longer to complete. The undead there versus the ones here—there didn’t seem to be that much of a difference.

  With experience comes speed, he surmised and touched down. More drones of the dead filled his ears, their deathly calls permeating him to the core despite having heard them many times before. Their calls carried an undertone of agony, as if somewhere deep inside there was still the living person, a now-helpless prisoner inside a rotting shell of flesh. Whether that was true or not, he didn’t know, and right now wasn’t the time to theorize about the deceased.

  The zombies groaned, some of the calls hollow, echoey.

  Faint patches of loose gravel, dust and dirt blotted the rocky surface. In some parts, he could make out where the undead’s feet scraped across the ground. Axiom-man’s own feet left the ground so as to not obscure what might be a trail, and he followed it as best he could until he hit a rocky alcove with large chunks of rock strewn about its mouth. Moans of the dead sounded from its dark entrance.

  From the hills, Ivy said. “But it doesn’t mean they came from here.” He debated if he should head into the mining tunnel and take out whatever undead were within, or hope they came out on their own and he would take care of them out in the open. But if indeed Ivy was right, then this area in general would be the place to stop the dead’s advance. Of course there’d have to be an origin point, but still . . .

  More moans floated on the air.

  With a deep breath, Axiom-man lit up his eyes just enough to illuminate the dark mine tunnel ahead, and with one steady foot placed in front of the other, he made his way in.

  To ensure he didn’t accidentally trip over any stray stones or sudden drops in the rocks, he floated a few inches above the ground, making his way forward.

  The dank smell of the tunnel reminded him of wet socks and grass, and he was thankful he had the thin layer of his mask’s fabric over his mouth to help stifle the stench.

  The tunnel went straight for a few minutes before taking a sharp turn to the right then suddenly dropping a few feet before resuming a straight path again. Groundwater rushed somewhere in the distance, though Axiom-man figured it was more an echo-effect rather than the water actually being near. However, the white noise of the water’s movement made listening for anything else more difficult.

  Up ahead, the tunnel took another turn. The faint dark blue outlines of scattered rocks—some as big as a car tire, others as small as a baseball—sat in a pile to either side.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The smell had gotten worse. Much worse. The stench of rotten meat replaced the musty smell from before and made him gag.

  Hands latched around his waist from behind. He immediately took hold of the cold appendages and pulled, slamming whoever they belonged to against his back. The force of yanking them forward so hard ripped the arms from the sockets. There was a tug on his cape as something clasped onto it. With a quick spin in the air, he threw the thing off him, tearing his cape in the process. The shadow of a body slammed against the wall. No scream. Just the meaty thunk as the armless torso hit the ground. If it had been human, it would be wailing and certainly not be trying to get to its feet.

  Axiom-man let loose a blast of blue energy from his eyes, burning a large hole through the undead creature, cutting it down the middle. Each half of the body fell to either side.

  Ahead, the sound of rushing water grew. He relit his eyes and made his way further into the tunnel, the rocks and boulders he spotted earlier now beside him. From what he knew about mines, after a blast, debris was hauled out, making room for the miners to come in and do their work or blast further. These rocks remained, which meant either the undead attacked before the workers had a chance to finish their job, or this was where the undead originated.

  The putrid smell grew increasingly vile the further he went, and Axiom-man had to stop, put a palm over his mouth, and put his head between his knees.

  Keep it together. You’ve been through worse. A quick mental flash of fighting Redsaw—his bloodthirsty enemy with similar powers to him—the day the Doorway of Darkness opened filled his mind’s eye. Is this surfacing of the dead a result of the Doorway as well? He knew it was the lingering black cloud from when the Doorway of Darkness first opened that acted as a portal and swept him into that other universe with the undead. But that cloud was in the city. I’m hundreds of kilometers up north inside a mine. There’s no way— The air suddenly grew thin, the stench of decay making his eyes water and his stomach roil with discomfort.

  The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right, deep and far. The sound of the moving water cut in half. The path must have put up a thick wall of rock between him and the water thanks to this turn.

  Now he could hear the moans and the soft sound of scraping on the rock.

  The monsters filled the darkness, their foul hisses sending the sound of demonic serpents through his heart and stomach.

  Firm hands gripped him on the right and jerked him sideways. Axiom-man lunged out with his fist, catching something with his knuckles, but it was too soft to be a head. Another pair of hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him back so far his body couldn’t take the arc and he fell on his backside. With a scream, he let loose the energy from his eyes, stood and spun in a circle. Bits of rocks and debris from the tunnel wall sprayed out, several of the pieces cutting into him. Shrieks echoed in the tunnel, then silenced.

  Axiom-man let the light fade from his eyes, now nothing but black pitch around him.

  A raspy groan.

  Ignoring the sting of over a dozen cuts, he relit his eyes again, just enough to see what was around. The undead were coming toward him from either side, emerging from shadows along the side walls and from the black abyss further down the tunnel.

  There was no way out.

  Bouncing on his toes a couple of times, he decided it’d be too dangerous to try and take them on all at once, even with his eye beams. Though he wasn’t one to retreat, it was his only option.

  He turned around, facing the direction he just came from and rose up into the air, his body hugging the rough and jagged ceiling. The ceiling’s terrain was uneven and he had to be careful not to snag his shoulder or back or even head and neck against a small outcrop of rock otherwise he might quickly find himself face first on the hard floor, or worse, spillin
g blood into the open maws of the creatures below.

  He moved as swiftly as possible, flying above the heads of the undead, the underside of his body scraping against fingers reaching up to grab him. A low drop of the ceiling appeared in front of him. Axiom-man took a quick mental snapshot of what it looked like, then fired up his eyes and dropped his flight level by half. Immediately he was submerged in a sea of the dead, their filthy and rotten bodies crowding around him as he flew through, his speed too fast for them to get a solid hold on him. Some of the dead stumbled off to the wayside as he plowed through them. A couple others took his fists in the gut and rode with him for a moment like dirt in a plow before dropping underneath him. Blasting hard, Axiom-man shot the energy forth from his eyes and cut down the undead in front of him. Groans and screeches echoed throughout the tunnel.

  Figuring he was past the sudden drop in the ceiling, he cut the light in his eyes by half, enabling him to see through a bluey haze. A wall came up before him. He banked sharply to the left, nicking his shoulder on the rock. Something cracked inside and a blaze of pain shot through his shoulder, arm and collarbone. All feeling left his arm then came back full force in blinding fury. He couldn’t move it.

  Screaming, he instinctively slowed down. The moans of the dead echoed behind. Two creatures were up ahead. Angry, hurt, and his heart quickening from the pain and growing claustrophobic, Axiom-man blasted the undead in front of him. He had already flown past them before he heard the thunk of their bodies hit the ground.

  Sweating, heart pounding, he spotted the entrance to the tunnel up ahead, the moonlight from outside brighter than he remembered it. Emerging out of the entrance, he cut the light from his eyes, turned around midair, and landed.

  After a quick check for the undead and seeing a few more about thirty feet off, he pumped up the energy in his eyes until there was nothing but blue-white before his vision. Letting loose with all he had, he fired the energy straight ahead then to either side of the tunnel’s entrance. The thundercracks of rocky explosions sent his ears ringing. Dust mushroomed from where the energy beams connected with the rocks and rushed toward him, instantly filling his nostrils and mouth. He didn’t care. He took off into the air, cut the energy from his eyes, and surveyed the ground below. Though dust obscured most of it, he thought it appeared like he’d sealed off the tunnel. He took a shot off either side of the main entrance, these ones with a little less force, enough to crack the rocks and force them to collapse in on themselves.