by M. E. Betts
Daphne hurried ahead, taking advantage of the element of shock provided. The dagger lashed out at its next victim, slashing the man's throat from ear to ear. She was already moving on when the sadist's legs crumpled, swinging herself up into the canopy overhead to evade the two individuals who were shooting in her direction.
As she reached for a throwing stick, she heard the rustling of dry, decaying leaves from the treeline to her left. She glanced over her shoulder, her gaze seizing on the source of the sound. It was the older female from earlier, the mother, now undead. She got within a few feet of the living sadists, who were somewhat distracted before they became aware of her presence. The last of the group to notice the zombie was also the first one the undead woman seized upon. The others began to scatter, some running backward to face the attacker as they aimed their guns.
The young woman whom Holly had chosen to be her victim screamed as she felt a full set of teeth close in around the lump of flesh and muscle covering her cheekbone.
"Uh-oh," one of the sadists said. "Sucks to be her. She's gone."
"Uh, yeah," another one said. "Since, you know, we can't exactly amputate her cheek."
A moment later, two shots rang out. One entered Holly's skull, neutralizing her, and the other entered the brain of her victim, penetrating the face between the eyes. Both women, the formerly alive and the undead, fell to the earth. The sadists returned to the task at hand, which was to apprehend the red-haired monster picking them off.
Daphne raised her hand, still holding the pointed wooden stick, and sent it hurtling through the air. It struck a male sadist aiming a shotgun in her direction, piercing through the inner corner of his eye and burrowing in several inches, going in straight.
She plucked another stick from her bag, stepping back further into the tree momentarily to shield herself from the rain of gunfire. As she moved toward the branch of a neighboring tree, she heard the male of the three undead sadists awakening, the one with the green and yellow hat. He shot to his feet, pursuing his warm, breathing former companions with wild, feral abandon.
While the living focused on the dead, Daphne moved forward again to the front of the treeline. With her left fist, she clutched the bundle of remaining sticks from the bag. There were three wooden ones in addition to the five steel ones she had found on Holly. She transferred them, one at a time, to her right hand, throwing them one after the other without pausing. The three wooden ones all found their marks in the chests of three different sadists. The steel implements all hit their targets, but not in the exact spots Daphne had intended. The results were still satisfactory enough, with each of the eight sticks having been lodged into the sadists' torsos. Two of them seemed determined to avoid being cast down and out, as they raised their guns through their bleeding and agony, not ready to quit. The rest, however, either dropped where they stood or attempted to return to the building.
There were five left, the ones who were still alive and uninjured only because of the fact that Daphne had run out of sticks. As they entered the timber line and advanced toward her, she retreated slightly deeper into the woods, bounding from branch to branch. When she was obscured enough by branches to have eluded the sadists, she slid down a trunk to the ground and headed back toward the edge of the treeline, but to her right. She ultimately circled around until she was behind them. She snuck up behind the one at the rear of the group, putting her hand momentarily over the man's mouth. While her right hand held the front of the head steady, her left hand went to the back of the skull. She jerked hard, turning the head counter-clockwise until the neck snapped. She used her back to catch the corpse before it hit the ground, grabbing hold of the man's limp arms as they flopped over her shoulders. She ducked beneath the cover of an over-grown pine, stashing the body and continuing ahead.
Daphne saw one of the sadists begin to turn back. She pulled herself up and into a tree just in time to avoid detection.
"Austin?" the sadist called out. "I think he's gone, guys. She got him."
"Austin was at the back," another one said. "How the fuck did the ginger get behind us?"
"'Cause she's a goddamn demon, that's how," said a third as he started toward the road. "I'm out."
He retreated, and Daphne thought she was down to only four. Just then, a ranged shot rang out from behind her. She dropped from the limb, then from her feet to her belly, just as a .308 round whizzed through the air where her head had just been. Since she was able to dodge the bullet, she knew that its sender must be a fair distance away, likely one who had been injured and left behind nearer the building. Even so, in a background part of her psyche, she was surprised that she had actually been able to dodge it. She was beginning to see Merlin's attraction to certain altered states of mind.
She slithered on her belly, turning her body in the tall weeds and ground cover to regard the shooter. She wanted to take care of them, but she was out of ranged weapons. She glanced back over her shoulder as she lay prone, looking and listening over the tops of the weeds for the group ahead of her. She bolted upright onto her feet and headed east, evading both the lone sadist to her north and the group to the south. She ran through the forest with her feet and lower legs a blur, her path parallel to the treeline and about 150 feet in.
She quickly put enough distance between herself and her opponents to lose sight of them in the dense wood, though she could still hear their footfalls as they pursued her.
She ran about one-hundred feet to the north, within roughly fifty feet of where the woods ended and the clearing surrounding the mine began. She ran to the west, her feet barely grazing the forest floor as she weaved and bobbed to avoid rustling limbs and boughs around her.
Up ahead, Daphne could make out the lone injured sadist, bearing a rifle and doubled over slightly with one hand pressed against the bloodied lower front of their jacket. She crept in like a through the grass like a reptile, getting within two feet of the sadist without rousing his attention. She armed her dagger.
With one quick, graceful curving motion, she swung herself to the sadist's front left and then around to his right side, the dagger's tip dragging through the area where his jaw met his neck. He gurgled in response before his eyelids began to flutter closed, and he sank to the Earth for the final time, at least in human form.
Daphne listened closely, her senses gathering details on the proximity of the final three sadists. Their footsteps were headed in her direction, the beams from their flashlights bouncing and shaking as they ran. Daphne scaled the nearest pine as they approached, leaving the corpse for them to find. The first to reach the body shined her light toward it, her expression vaguely annoyed but otherwise indifferent.
"Caleb's dead," she said, her tone flat.
Daphne waited until the three sadists were clustered relatively close together, then dropped from the overhead limb with her arms out at her sides and her forearms flexed. She caught two of them by the shoulders, forcing them to the ground and pushing down with her own weight. She heard the snapping of bones and the tearing of tendons, extending her leg as she touched down to spin around and catch the third enemy with a roundhouse kick. As her lower leg made contact with that of the sadist, she shifted her body weight in order to wrap her leg around that of her young female opponent. She squeezed hard, gripping the woman's leg tightly as she continued spinning. The young sadist lost her balance, and Daphne flung her face-first onto one of her own companions, who lay moaning and clutching both shoulders while tears streamed down his face.
Another male lay a few feet away, his collarbone visibly crumpled, his face still and his eyes closed. The one whom Daphne had thrown suffered a messy complex break to her shin bone, with a few shards poking through her leggings. She had also absorbed much of the impact of the fall with her face, and she appeared stupefied.
Daphne disregarded the debilitated trio and continued north, back toward the building. She exited the treeline and came into the clearing preceding the large, open-air mine. As she glanced over it
s vast emptiness, she saw a sight that made her gasp and flinch, startled and amazed.
A towering rainbow arched over the mine, glowing in stark contrast to the inky, overcast backdrop. Instead of colors, the spectrum ran from glittering black to iridescent white, with a series of silvers in between. It stretched from one side of the mine to the other, its western terminus touching down near the building and driveway. She watched the achromatic arc contract rhythmically as if it had a pulse. After a moment, she began to stalk again toward her prey, who waited at the end of the rainbow.
As she neared Red, she became distinctly aware of how much blood she was wearing. She peeled off her suit, replacing only the belt holding her dagger and discarding the rest on the ground as she continued on her way, her body naked and her face spattered with blood. She could see and smell a cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke rolling from a partially open window. Inside, Red and his remaining companions, presumably the ones to which he was more partial, laughed and conversed loudly. From somewhere to the north, Daphne heard the purr of approaching motorcycles traveling down 49. The toxic remnants of smoke still drifted west from across the highway, permeating the air as the nearby building continued to burn.
She reached the building, using the tree once again to gain access to the roof. From her high vantage point, she gazed to the northwest, where she saw headlights approaching from no more than half a mile away. She averted her attention to the target beneath her, his voice clearly audible to her from the building below. Her footsteps were silent on the cool, metallic surface as she crossed to the other side of the roof, retrieving the spear left lying in waiting. She stood, gripping the shaft with both hands, her chin tucked in toward her neck and her gaze glaring up over her eyebrows. At that moment, the wind kicked up, rustling the traumatized nerves on her bare back and sending strands of her long, filthy hair across the burns etched by Red.
She let out an utterance of rage that began as a low, rumbling growl. As her gaze panned to the colorless rainbow to the east, the growl gradually intensified and increased in volume until it was a roaring battle cry, the sound waves echoing through the empty mine. The imposing arc only continued to pulse in response. From inside the building, however, Red and his group had gone silent. Due to the excess of sound reverberating from the mine, it was impossible for them to determine where their opponent was lurking.
Daphne crouched at the border where the peak met the lower part of the roof, separated by a row of tall windows. She dropped down between two of the windows, landing and rising soundlessly, and turned to peer through the glass and into the faintly lit interior. Reflected in the glass was the brilliantly lit rainbow, throbbing faster in encouragement.
Inside, Red and his five friends stood with hesitation and brandished their weapons, turning toward the exit. Daphne grinned, taking the dagger from the sheath at her left hip. Focusing her eyes on a raised loft space inside, she laid down her spear against the window frame, then raised the knife and used it to penetrate and shatter the glass.
Hanging by the window frame with one hand as she resheathed the knife and grabbed onto her heavy spear, she kicked out the larger remaining shards and swung feet-first into the building and onto the loft. In the same second that she touched down on the floor, gripping the long, wooden weapon with both hands, she sprang over the railing to her right and onto the ground level below. From about twenty feet away, a stunned Red and his equally shocked followers stared at the naked, blood-covered intruder, their mouths agape. She bared her teeth, which, along with her eyes, shone extra bright white surrounded by the crimson fluid.
Wielding her ironwood spear, she rushed the six sadists, crossing the twenty feet between herself and her adversaries before they could respond. Two of them were lanced, standing one behind the other, and effectively stapled together. The pointed tip had entered through the soft, boneless flesh of their abdomens off-center and above the pelvis. One screamed in pain, and the other made only shallow, gasping sounds.
Red and his three remaining underlings made for the exit, showing the two dying sadists that they were essentially no different from the others in the groups he had abandoned. Daphne allowed their ill-fated bodies to slump to the floor as they lived out their final moments. They slid off of her spear one after the other, one body coming to lie briefly on the one beneath it before they rolled into their own final separate, limp heaps. Daphne spun, liberated spear in hand, and advanced toward the exit through which Red and his friends had already escaped. The heavy, automatic-closing door began to swing slowly closed. From outside, out of frame from Daphne's point of view, one of the sadists yelled to another one who was standing just outside of the door. He held a small object in his raised fist.
"Throw it, Reese!" said the unseen sadist. Reese used his other hand to fiddle with the apple-sized object before he threw it. Because the interior of the building was dim and heavily shadowed, he didn't see Daphne raise her wooden lance. She propelled it toward and through the doorway, watching it spear Reese through the chest, pinning him to the ground and leaving him on his back just as the steel door latched closed. The fist-sized object never got the chance to leave his hand.
Outside the entrance, a blast of sound, light and debris ripped through the mill yard and mine. The sturdy conrete and rebar structure suffered no ill effects, other than a pelting of matter onto its outside walls. From the broken window near the building's zenith, a sickeningly powerful echo leaked in, ringing and rebounding off of the walls.
With no small amount of difficulty, Daphne made her way to the door. As she reached out to push it open, she supposed that the sound was likely to be worse outside.
She wasn't wrong. The echo was unlike anything she had ever heard, pulsing through the mine, the yard site and the entire clearing surrounding the facility. It flowed up and down 49, a channel for the sound waves with its high-sided treeline as a barrier. As the door swung all the way open, Daphne saw a flash of headlights as a motorcycle came skidding past her. It tipped onto it side as its stupefied, panicked driver engaged the brakes upon approach of the mine's edge. The bike's momentum was great enough to propel the vehicle and its driver over the edge and past the steep drop-off. As the man plunged into the mine, where Daphne saw the silverey rainbow still hanging, his terrified screams were quickly lost to the overall roar of the explosion.
Daphne glanced down the driveway, the direction from which the motorcycle had come. She saw over a dozen more headlights, though several of the bikes were already stationary, having either tipped over or crashed in the explosion and its ensuing chaos. She steadied herself, navigating carefully as the lights and sounds around her shook and vibrated with excessive energy. From a pile of rubble that was, only moments before, a conveyor and its corresponding building, at least two sadists moaned, finding themselves in pieces among the debris. As Daphne peered through the wavy air, she saw Reese's disembodied head. She moved closer to inspect the pointed length of wood protruding from beneath what was left of his nearby torso. She reached the object, bending down to look more closely. As she had hoped, it was her ironwood lance. She yanked it from beneath the headless corpse.
It had been previously tempered, so it was no worse for the wear. Even its sharpened tip had held its shape. Lifting its heft with both hands, she rose and looked around her. She could see several forms to her right, moving down the driveway and toward the building, but they were largely obscured by the enveloping cloud of dust and debris. She looked to her left, toward the mine. She saw two figures rushing away, retreating south toward the treeline.
From somewhere north, likely miles away, Daphne heard another group of motorcycles being started and embarking down 49. She hurried over to the building, lance in hand, and waited in the shadows as she held the pointed length of stony wood like a staff with its tip sitting well above her head.
As she had predicted, it was only moments before the motorcycle-riding newcomers rounded the corner in pursuit of Red. They were on foot, having
left their bikes in front of the building.
"Is that him?" one of them asked, peering down the narrow stretch of gravelled clearing situated between the mine and the woods. The two figures moved quickly, the sound of their hurried footsteps amplified by the presence of the man-made canyon beside them.
"Hey, Red!" one of them shouted. The two figures only responded by picking up their pace even more. "Yellow-bellied, limp-wristed shitlicker," the sadist muttered.
"Did he really call us out to help his ass, just to run away and leave us to deal with that maniac?" asked a female just arriving on the scene, turning the corner of the building.
"Sure as shit," said one of the men.
"Miller tried to tell Pfeifer," another male said. "Red's good for nothin'. Not sure why we haven't cut him loose yet."
Daphne watched from the shadows as the surviving motorcyclists congregated between the mine and the eastern wall of the building.
"Is this all of us?" one of them asked.
"Yeah," replied another. "The rest either crashed, blew up or slid into that god damned mine."
"Oh, my God," said a sturdy, plus-size female through gritted teeth, unholstering a rifle from behind her back. "I wanna kill him more than I do her."
"Hold off," one of them urged her, holding his palm up toward her. "Red," he yelled, "stop right there, buddy, or we'll shoot."
An emission of gunfire was dispatched from Red and his companion. The area was sprayed with .44 rounds and buckshot, though no one was hit.
"As you can see," Red shouted, "we'll shoot, too. Should we make it to kill?" He continued to run backward, aiming his revolver at the group.
"Should I do it?" the rifle-bearing woman asked the others in her party, pointing the muzzle at the fleeing pair.
