So I was getting overwhelmed pretty fast, despite beating the ever-loving shit out of some zombies. I was surrounded, and no matter how many I pushed down, bowled over, and stomped the shit out of, more of them kept coming. I made one last surge toward the church doors, but it was no use. I was stuck, hemmed in on all sides by clawing, biting, scratching zombies, and it was only going to be seconds before they took me down once and for all.
Until the sky split open with a roar of thunder, and zombies started dropping like flies all around me. Well, not exactly thunder. More like Joe from the steeple sniping zombies with his Remington 700 rifle. The crack of that rifle splitting the air above my head was the most welcome sound since I blew out my knee and the doc at the hospital taught me the word “morphine.”
Three zombies right in front of me dropped in quick succession, and I snatched my right glove off with my left hand and drew my Judge revolver from the back of my belt. I went through the five shots in the cylinder in seconds, but at that range, I didn’t miss, and five more zombies hit the dusty street, leaving me with a narrow path clear to the door. Two more shots from Joe dropped another pair of undead bastards, and I shoulder-blocked another one to the ground as I bull-rushed my way up the three steps to the church door.
It flung open just as I reached for the handle, and I heard Skeeter yell “DUCK!” even before the door was all the way open. I dropped to my knees and crawled through the left-hand door as Skeeter stood on the other side of the double doors, his shotgun blowing zombie heads to mist as fast as he could rack the slide.
Three seconds later, I was through the door and looking up at the unsmiling face of Agent Amy Hall, still the most beautiful woman in the world, even when she was pissed at me. “You scared the shit out of me, Bubba. I hope that trip to the bar was worth it.”
I grinned up at her and said, “Well, I don’t know yet, darling. But pass me that bottle, and I’ll let you know.”
5
Spoiler alert—the faerie booze wasn’t worth fighting a bunch of zombies over. It was watery, and weak, and tasted like a blend of muscadine wine, cheap gin, and paint thinner. Which is basically cheap gin, so it tasted like cheap gin cut with muscadines. I hate gin and muscadines.
But I took a swig, spit the vile shit out all over the floor, and used the rest of the bottle to wash the worst of the zombie guts off my arms and legs. I checked my clothes and found no tears of any size, then peeled off my shirt to make sure I didn’t have any tooth marks hiding in a tattoo or something. I splashed a little more booze on my arms for good measure, then pulled my shirt back on and turned to the inside of the church where a faerie preached stood in the center aisle with his mouth hanging open.
“Howdy, Padre,” I said. “I’m Bubba. You seem to have a hell of a zombie problem around here.”
He didn’t speak, just looked way up at me. Like most of the Fae, he was shorter than me, and skinny. Admittedly, most of humanity is shorter than me, too, but this dude was downright petite. I stuck out my hand, looked at a little scrap of brain, or maybe a tiny piece of eyeball stuck to my thumbnail, and wiped it off on my damp jeans before extending my hand again.
He shook it, still staring up at me. “You have a tooth in your beard,” was the first thing he said to me.
I reached up to my chin, felt around for a couple seconds until I found something too solid to be breakfast leftovers, and pulled it out. “Nah, Padre. I’m pretty sure that’s a piece of skull. See how it’s thin and curved, kinda like an eggshell?” I held the half-inch chunk of brainpan out to him, and he fainted dead away.
Amy shoved past me to the fallen priest, muttering something about not being able to take me anywhere.
“I didn’t do nothing,” I protested. “He was just helping me with a little personal grooming.” Amy shot me a dark looked and knelt beside the priest, who was starting to wake up. In my girlfriend’s arms, which, for the record, is where I like to wake up. I had to get the hell out of Fairyland. Now I was getting jealous of a preacher from a different species.
I looked back at the door where Skeeter stood with his shotgun at the ready. The double doors of the church looked like pretty sturdy wood, and there was a thick wooden bar laid across a couple of brackets set into the wall on either side of the opening. “Is that gonna hold?” I asked.
Skeeter kept his eyes on the door when he answered. “The preacher and the mayor both said it holds every night, but they also said this looked like way more zombies than they usually get.”
“Nice of them to roll out the red carpet and invite a bigger band for us,” I said. I turned to the two dozen faeries huddled in the front of the church. “Who’s the mayor? I need some information,” I called.
Nobody spoke up, but a round little man with a bald head save for two tufts of white hair poking out over his ears was working extra hard to look inconspicuous, so I assumed he was the mayor. I walked over to stand over him, not a difficult task since he was sitting on the floor, and a short dude to start with. “What’s your name, Mr. Mayor?”
He looked up, and he got that look on his face that politicians get when they’re about to lie. Which is to say that he looked like he was going to speak, then thought better of it. He stood up, straightened his bright red vest, and stuck out his hand. “I am Mayor Frumblecrump. I am in charge here. You are welcome to rest the night within our sanctuary, but once the sun rises, you must be on your way. It is no longer safe in Dun Sheene for outsiders. I’m sure you understand.”
As if to punctuate his words, a loud thump came from the doors, and they rattled in their hinges. “Don’t sound like it’s real safe for anybody, Mayor,” I said. “They usually this determined?”
“No,” he replied. “Normally the dead come in much lower numbers, and they have never been so persistent in their assaults on the church. When I looked down from the steeple upon the crowd of dead surrounding you, I was certain you would not survive. I am happy to have been proven incorrect.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. I sat down on one of the front pews facing the mayor and the gathered townsfolk. “Do y’all have any idea why they’re here? What do they want? Are they magic zombies that somebody sent here for something? Or are they just asshole zombies that hang out in the woods all day and come back to visit every night?”
“That makes no sense, Bubba.” Amy sat down next to me, her new buddy the faerie preacher in tow.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But nothing about this makes any sense. Zombies aren’t like vampires. They don’t have to hide from the sun. There are more zombies out there now than this village has living people, so where did they come from? If they’re imported zombies, why didn’t we pass any on the road? This is all crazy. If somebody conjured this many zombies, where the hell are they getting the parts?”
“Well, I can answer that much,” Joe said, coming down a set of steps behind the pulpit. He sat down on the steps leading up to the altar and laid his gun on the floor in front of him. “The zombies you killed have all disintegrated. Same for the ones I shot from the bell tower.”
“What?” My head snapped up, and I stared at Joe. “Disintegrated?”
“Yep. It looks like they were more golem than zombie, conjured from mud and moss, clad in human clothing, and sent here to attack the town. I watched some of them turn back into clumps of dirt when the magic left them. It seems that the only part of them that had a human component was the skull.”
“So it’s not that somebody needed a shitload of corpses, they just needed a shitload of skulls and magic. I don’t know that I find that any less creepy,” Amy said.
“That would take magic the likes of which I’ve never seen,” the priest said from where he sat next to Amy. “Whoever wrought a spell of that nature would not only have to be completely amoral, but have no regard for life whatsoever and have incredible power.”
“The kind of power that would let a person poke holes between worlds?” I asked.
The priest looked a little surprised at
the question but nodded. “Yes, someone powerful enough to craft a world-breaching spell could probably handle magic on the necessary scale.”
I looked around at Joe and Amy. “I reckon we know who we’re dealing with, then.”
“Yeah, and it makes sense,” Amy said. “He knows we’re coming after him, so he’s throwing roadblocks in our way.”
“Who?” Mayor Frumblecrump asked. “Who have you angered that has such power?”
“Puck,” I said. “I’ve tussled with the little shit before, and he can definitely sling mojo on this level.”
Every faerie eye in the room locked in on me when I said Puck’s name, and more than one person leaned over to their neighbor and started whispering. “Let me guess,” I said. “He’s kinda like Voldemort.”
The priest looked confused. “I don’t know who that is, but we don’t say that name here. Names have power, and using his willy-nilly can have dire consequences.”
“Yep,” Amy said. “Totally Voldemort.”
“Voldemort is a fictional…never mind. I’ve met so many people since coming over here that I thought only existed in legends and tales that I can’t even say that anymore,” Joe said. “Voldemort is an evil wizard of legend in our land. It is said that merely speaking his name could focus his attention on you, and no one wants his attention.”
“Then yes, the person who you spoke of is very much like that.” Mayor Frumblecrump kept looking around, like he expected the little shithead to appear out of thin air. Hell, given the way my day had gone so far, I kinda did, too.
“Well, then we won’t mention His Assholishness’s name again,” I said. “But it makes sense that he’s set this whole mess up to screw with us.”
“Isn’t that giving him a little bit too much credit, Bubba?” Amy asked. “I mean, we’ve only been heading this way for a few days, so how would he have been able to put all this in motion? I mean, the zombies have been attacking the town for a long time now, right?” She turned to the mayor, who shook his head.
“The attacks started with just a few of the creatures about five nights ago.”
“That’s the night after you killed the dragon, Bubba,” Skeeter said.
“So as soon as we didn’t die in that stupid encounter, P—the person we’re after knew we would be coming his way,” I said.
“So he started the attacks in order to make sure we would come here?” Joe raised an eyebrow.
“He knows me,” I said. “This is the kind of thing I couldn’t pass up, especially if he set a certain merchant on the road to tell us about the trouble in town. Mr. Mayor, did you guys have a traveling merchant named Terlindor come through here early this morning?”
The plump faerie shook his head. “No. We have had no traders pass through in weeks. It’s almost as if they knew what was happening and wanted to avoid any chance of getting caught up in our troubles.”
“So we got suckered into coming here,” Amy said.
“But why?” Skeeter asked. “I mean, sure, the goal looks like getting us eaten by zombies, but that only works if we’re out there where the zombies are. As long as we stay holed up in here, we’re safe and sound.”
I didn’t slap him, but man, it was tempting. As it was, I just glared at my best friend and reminded myself that he wasn’t the field ops guy, he was the guy in the chair. Then I really wished he was back in a chair this time because then he wouldn’t have jinxed us like that.
“You didn’t just say that, did you?” Amy asked.
“Say what?” Skeeter looked around, but we all just shook our heads. Even the mayor and priest looked stunned at my little buddy’s idiocy.
“You jinxed us, pal. We might have had a chance of staying safe, but you just ruined it,” I said.
“Oh, come on, Bubba! You know that’s a load of crap. Jinxes are bullshit, and we all know it. Nothing I said is going to have anything to do with whether or not those doors hold up against the zombies. And if they’ve held out the last few nights, there’s no reason to think they won’t hold out tonight.”
I didn’t answer. I just stood up, rolled my shoulders, and drew my sword. This was about to get ugly. As Joe walked over to his rifle, a loud CRACK came from the doors. We all turned to look, and sure enough, the bar was pushing into the room as one of the brackets began to tear loose from the wooden door frame.
“Yeah, Skeeter, it’ll all be fine,” I said. “You just move off to one side and get ready to shoot everything that comes through. I’ll take the center aisle.”
“I’ve got the right flank,” Amy said, drawing her pistol and moving into position.
“I’ve got the high ground,” Joe said from the pulpit. I looked up to see his rifle nested on what I assumed was some kind of holy book, barrel aimed at the doors.
We were as ready as we were going to get, and it was a good thing since about ten seconds later the doors gave way and all hell broke loose in the church.
6
The sturdy-looking bar across the doors pulled free of the frame and clattered to the floor. I knew things were about to go from bad to shitshow in about eight seconds. I was proven right when the wooden double doors split open with a loud crack and opened inward, spilling a horde of zombies into the sanctuary. The church looked remarkably like the ones I was used to back in Georgia, with two rows of pews, a wide center aisle, and narrow aisles down the sides of the room.
The townsfolk were clustered in the first few rows of pews, and Mayor Frumblecrump immediately started shuttling them up onto the pulpit area past Joe into the hallway that I assumed led either to the choir loft or some offices that hopefully would be secure. I had no such hopes for our security.
Guns barked all around me as Skeeter, Amy, and Joe started dropping zombies one after another. I just stood in the aisle, Great-Grandpappy’s sword held with the point down, trying to stay relaxed for the last few seconds before the horde reached me. The aisle was about four feet wide, so the zombies couldn’t easily come at me two abreast, but there were enough of them stumbling and shambling my way that I had no illusions about being able to hold out forever.
I thought about Mama, and Amy, and all the things I wouldn’t be able to tell either one of them if I got turned into zombie kibble in Fairyland. Then I turned all that maudlin bullshit into anger, and the power of pissed-off redneck drove the weariness out of my arms and shoulders, and I started mowing down zombies like some kind of crazed Super-Michonne, only without the dreads and with way more belly.
My vision narrowed to nothing but hack, kill, hack, kill, lather, rinse, repeat. I lifted the sword, brought it down on a zombie head. Then I lifted it again and decapitated the next zombie. Then I shoved the blade through the eye of one zombie all the way into the skull of the shambler behind it and kicked them both backward off my blade. I don’t know how long it went on, or how many zombies we killed, but after what seemed like a year and a half of chopping, suddenly there was nothing in front of me. I looked to one side, and Skeeter took out a zombie by smashing his shotgun butt through its face, but nothing stepped up to take its place. I turned to the other side and saw Amy fire her pistol into a zombie’s face, dropping the last undead just as the slide on her service weapon locked open.
I spun in a slow circle, but there were no zombies left. Something brushed my ankle, and I looked down to see a hand clawing at my leg. There was one head lying off to my left between two pews, from a zombie I decapitated but never pierced the brain, so I took two quick steps over that way, stabbed my sword through its temple, and looked back at the hand. It lay motionless on the floor, so that hand must have been driven by that head. Okay, then. Problem solved.
“Did we win?” Skeeter asked.
“I can’t tell,” Amy said. “It looks like we’ve survived the first wave.”
“First wave?” Joe’s voice was incredulous. “That must have been fifty zombies! The only way we survived was the door made a natural choke point.”
“The only way you survived was I le
t you.”
My head whipped around to the door where a fat man leaned against the splintered frame. He was dressed all in black, with a rich purple cape, bad skin, and a goatee. If you looked up “douchebag” in the dictionary, you’d see his picture, right next to an entry that said, “see also: poseur.”
“And who the hell are you?” I asked, leaning down to wipe my sword on a zombie’s shirt.
“I am Marek, Lord of the Dead. Welcome to my domain.” He stood up straight, then made a big, cape-sweeping bow. Like I said, douchebag.
“I think you might have mistaken yourself for somebody with some juice. I know who’s running the show around here, and it ain’t you, no matter how many sex-bots you’re reanimating for yourself,” I said. I stepped back one row and sat kinda sideways on the arm of a pew. He struck me as the kind of bad guy who pontificates, and I didn’t feel like standing up for it. After all, I’d hacked a good three or four dozen zombies apart in the last two hours, so I needed a little break.
Marek flushed beet red at my insinuation that he banged dead people but kept most of his composure. “I may not rule the Land Without Seasons now, but I will very soon, and you shall be the instrument of my ascension.” He actually held both arms out on the last word, making sure to grab his cape with both hands so it billowed out behind him dramatically. I revised my opinion of him. He wasn’t a douchebag. He was an uber-douchebag.
“I don’t think I want to have anything to do with your instrument, pal,” I said. “I’m just here to get my sister back, kick a faerie’s ass, and go home.”
“But it is in that endeavor where you shall usher in the Age of Death!” He dropped his voice an octave on “Age of Death,” and I started running out of ways to categorize the level of douche he was reaching. He was speeding toward DoucheCon One like a bullet train with no brakes, and I was tired, so I decided to move things along.
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 32
