Alex gave her a “thumbs-up” and the little warrior acknowledged him with the barest of grim smiles.
The thing was still twitching. Wounds gaped, but there was no blood.
“Zombie,” Chester said. “Our Enemy is pulling out all the stops—” He shielded his eyes and peered down the road, mouth tightening. “Second wave. Panthesilea, Grifffin, you Spearhead this time.”
Griffin surprised himself by asking, “Should we be throwing salt at them?”
“What? No, Griffin, zombies are a different religion. Voodoo. Just fight, okay”’
There were three of the undead this time, moving with rust-stiff joints, faces split into mock-grins. Gagging on the smell, he raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Dust puffed from the face of one of the undead. It staggered back a step, then laughed and came on.
The smell. . .! Griffin jacked another cartridge into the chamber and fired again and again, and the thing fell to one knee. The skin of its face had peeled away like rotted wet parchment. One of its eyes was gone, a moist red socket gaping, the useless eyelid shuttering up and down irregularly.
Acacia wasted a moment staring at the results of Griffin’s marksmanship, then cursed and clicked her sword free of its sheath. The second and third zombies broke toward her, one carrying a machete, one carrying the bayonet off an M-1. They attacked in tandem, and she backpedaled a step to gain time, then dove to the side and slashed brutally at the nearest knee. The creature was hobbled; it fell with a bone-jarring thump. It chittered at her with brown, stubbly teeth and crawled toward her.
The second backed away more cautiously, then smiled. She felt a clammy grip on her ankle, and chopped back to catch the fallen zombie in the head. It howled, but didn’t let go. “Drown you! Let go of my—” Kicking and jerking, Acacia managed to evade the second zombie’s machete blow and passed her sword through its arm, which went limp. Another backhanded blow and the zombie on the ground released its grip.
Alex stood over Acacia’s first victim, holding its machete. “Bullets don’t work as well as blades on these things,” he said. He peered down the road.
Acacia took the other zombie’s weapon. “Just how much damage can they take?” she wondered.
They moved on. Minutes later they could see man-high sand dunes through the thinning trees. This, at least, brought whoops of delight. Alex found himself missing S. J.’s tireless enthusiasm for the Game; he forced himself make extra noise. He whipped the machete round his head and glowered what he imagined to be a savage grimace.
Mary-em spotted them first. “Company.” She tilted her halberd and squared herself, her steps more measured.
They came wobbling out of the dunes, looking vaguely, disturbingly familiar. There were four this time, three men a woman. They were blocking the path out of the trees. The woman carried a spear of some kind; the men carried the usual machete.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Mary-em, “that’s Eames.”
Eames’s face was a black mask. He walked at the same dead-steady pace, and there was a huge, bloody wound in his chest. Alan Leigh walked on his right, his step devoid of bounce, expression frozen in death, machete held high,
Acacia started to move in on Leigh, but Henderson warned her back. “Caution, please. We’ll keep it at two-on-one as long as we can. Nothing fancy. Just get the job done.” He motioned quickly, dividing up his remaining team members.
Acacia and Alex had moved in on Leigh. The zombie wizard seemed to be restraining a bare smile, but the blade in his hand was far from friendly. It flickered in the air, and Acacia made the deflection while Alex chopped at an extended arm. The arm went red, and Alan switched hands moaning. Alex raised his machete again, and Acacia screamed, “Watch out!” He wheeled and ducked in time to avoid decapitation.
His attacker was a giggling native woman, long dead, a great hanging flap of scalp obscuring much of her face. She swung a machete at Alex’s throat. Alex ducked and reached for the wrist with both hands. A disarming throw— An instant late he remembered that hand-to-hand was illegal. Too late, The hologram sword-arm passed like shadow through his hands, swung back and slashed clumsily at his short ribs. Red light bathed his side.
Alex broke out of his immobility to slash backhanded with his recovered machete. He chopped away until the creature slithered to the ground and stopped moving. Alex was breathing like a bellows, dripping sweat; he looked around, wild-eyed, for more enemies.
“Griffin!” The high, nasal voice of Dark Star called for help, and he spun about. She and Lady Janet were under attack by a duo of shuffling dead. Both zombies were clotted with dirt; one was in an advanced state of decomposition, and he showed Asian features. Janet had picked up a stick, and seemed able to keep the Asian at bay. Dark Star’s forearm glowed red. She had been forced to drop her weapon.
Griffin took a step in her direction, but more dead were emerging from the bushes around them—men and women and half-grown children—and suddenly the entire group was threatened. He saw Dark Star go down with a blade in her neck, and Holly Frost’s swift reprisal. Janet had disarmed the rotting zombie, and was using its own machete against it.
Chester had slain three of the monsters with magic. His aura was weakening; he conserved energy by picking up a machete and having at them. Gina used her power staff as a physical weapon. She had little style, but four feet of reach made up for it. The staggering, stumbling Undead women couldn’t cope with her extra reach, and couldn’t cleave through her staff, and they went down before her in shrieks of painfully sustained laughter.
Oliver had several red streaks on his body, but none of them were in vital areas. Vigor points undiminished . . .Teeth clenched in a fighting grimace, he stood back to back with Margie, who couldn’t quite keep the smile off her face as she warded off blows and dealt death. She gave up trying, and seemed to become a demon, her fluffy grey hair billowing behind her as she whirled and slew.
It seemed to go on forever. Alex stopped seeing opponents. They came like waves on the sea; faces formed and faded, grinning and bellowing their hate in choruses of laughter. And always his arm rose and fell, rose and fell . . .
He bore red slashes in half a dozen places, and he waited for the shock to his throat that would announce his death. When the shock came he could lie down . . . but it didn’t come, wouldn’t come, though the stench of death rose in his nostrils strong and thick enough to choke. Not when he tripped over the body of a fallen Undead and saw that it was Alan Leigh, who winked at him insolently. Not when only Acacia’s sharp eye and piercing voice saved him from a zombie attack from the rear. Exhaustion had turned his arms to dead things. The laughter of the dead women was driving him crazy. The sweat rolled down his forehead, obscuring his vision and burning his eyes.
And in Alex Griffin’s mind something gave way. It didn’t matter that he could see the blades passing harmlessly through each other, that the red slashes were dye or glowing light and not oozing wounds. It didn’t matter that the sounds of steel on steel, and steel on rigor-stiffened flesh, were coming from the necklace on his chest. None of that mattered. He was fighting for his life in an alien place, against legions of the damned, and people he cared about were wounded and dying and slaying around him.
He bobbed and weaved among the shadow blades without conscious thought, spinning and capering with a fighting-smile twisting his mouth, and the machete wove a path of destruction. When a red slash appeared on his shoulder he gasped in pain; when a savage thrust brought an enemy down to the dirt, he howled in glee, slashing again and again and again.
And suddenly only Gamers still stood. At least twenty bodies were strewn grotesquely about, limbs tangled in death. Kibugonai, the small man whose mother had been bitten by a pig, was dead. He sat propped against a tree, hands to his stomach, eyes wide and surprised at the cascade of crimson in his lap. Dark Star was face down in the dirt. And Margie Braddon knelt over the corpse of Owen, stroking his hair and whispering in his ear. She looked up at Chester, her face like
thunder. “What now, Chester?”
“I’ve been counting. We’re down to nine, and no clerics. If we’re wounded we stay wounded.”
“Ten,” said Lady Janet, lifting a machete. The projected blade was bloody.
“Nine,” Chester repeated coldly. “We can’t trust you.”
He touched Margie sympathetically on the shoulder. ’Whatever it is we’re after, it can’t be far.” Alex could see he fatigue and worry in his eyes, but his voice showed one of it. “Come on. We’ve got to keep moving.”
Margie kissed Owen on the back of the neck. Of all the Gamers, perhaps only Alex saw Owen’s hand fumble back to find hers, and give it a reassuring squeeze. Chester rolled the Cleric over and secured the padded bag, and checked to be sure that Kasan Maibang’s skull was intact. A few teeth had come loose, and some flakes of black char. Three pale tindalos were coming through the trees. The Gamers didn’t wait.
Nine Gamers and Lady Janet moved out of the woods and into the great dunes. Waves boomed ahead of them. Weapons ready, they traced a weaving path. Abruptly Mary-em threw down her pack, flopped against a sandy slope, and gasped, “Rest break, Chester?”
Chester shook his head. “We’ve used them all up.”
He lent her an arm and she shook it off irritably, standing on her own. I’m not that old.”
Griffin rubbed his eyes and said, “I am.” He felt as if he had been awake for days. Last night’s rest hadn’t touched him. Did “neutral scent” disrupt sleep, or was it just the Game? Or Acacia? His vision blurred, and a chill ran through his body. He wanted to curl up in the warm sand. From the look of the other Gamers, the feeling was shared.
But they marched on. Now the sea showed a white frothed triangle between the dunes.
Alex watched Acacia try for the hundredth time to strike up conversation with Tony. McWhirter’s dark-rimmed eyes flashed from her to Griffin, and Griffin felt murder in the air. Acacia gave up and trudged back to Alex, head low.
“Whew. I guess I give up.” Her eyes met his, and the self-pity vanished from her face. She tugged at his arm. “Come on, handsome. Let’s go get killed.”
“Let’s.”
Griffin watched her as they marched, and saw her rub her eyes three times in three minutes. “Eye trouble?”
“Yeah. Damn, I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t need to change my contacts for two more weeks.”
“I don’t think it’s the lenses. Listen—” They had reached the top of a dune, the sand sliding beneath their feet and making every step a calf-aching effort. As they crested, Griffin gathered his thoughts, gazing out at the expanse of blue-green water. What met his eyes froze the words fast in his throat.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
CARGO CRAFT
Chester ran up the dune, slid down a step and finished he scramble with the assistance of his hands. He stood, dusting off his pants, and Alex was gratified to note that the Lore Master was as shocked as he was. Awe, surprise, disbelief, a growing hint of laughter—“He’s kidding! There never was anything like that!”
Less than a hundred yards out from shore floated a tremendous seaplane. It looked as big as any flying thing had ever been, short of a dirigible or a spacecraft. There were four lean-looking propeller-tipped motors on each huge wing. The hull was a nearly blank wall with a tiny afterthought of a windscreen on top, a pair of tiny portholes just ahead of the wing, and a tiny door open in the flank, with lines trailing out into the water.
Margie was sitting spraddle-legged, helpless with laughter. “There was. There was,” she giggled.
Chester turned. “Margie?”
“It’s the Spruce Goose!” And she was off again.
Big airplane. Alex covertly studied the other Gamers. McWhirter and Holly Frost and Gina Perkins, all staring across the water. McWhirter and Gina looked thoughtful, speculative; Holly laughed with her head thrown back. The rest of the Gamers were looking at Margie, waiting.
“Oh my Lord. Let me get my breath. Oh, I hope Owen’s watching this.” Margie swallowed. “Well. I saw it once, the real thing, long ago.”
“Come on, Margie.” Chester dropped into the sand, completely relaxed. “This is it. It’s got to be. Whatever it is. So what is it?”
“It’s the Spruce Goose. Oh, dear. Where shall I start? World War Two? before my time, dear, but I read about it. There was an industrialist, Howard Hughes; you’ve heard of Howard Hughes?” Some of them had. “Howard Hughes designed an airplane made mostly of wood because the Allies were running short of metal. It was the biggest airplane ever built, then. Maybe it still is. It would have carried seven hundred and fifty troops.”
“So it really was supposed to help win the war.”
“Yes. I expect it was too ambitious. The plane didn’t even fly until 1947, at Long Beach. It wasn’t supposed to fly then. Hughes had orders to run it across the water without taking off, just for a trial run. Afterward he told the Congressmen that he couldn’t hold it down.”
Henderson was nodding. “But in this line of history the Cargo Cult magicians got it.”
“I expect so. Our present allies must have taken control as soon as it was in the air. They used their magic to fly it from Long Beach to New Guinea. At some point the other tribe took control. And here it is.”
“Here it is. But it couldn’t possibly have had enough fuel . . .”
Margie shrugged. “Magic.”
“Uh huh. Well, that’s it. Obviously we’re supposed to fly it out of here somehow—”
Gina cut him off with a kind of whispered scream. “Chester. The top of those rocks. There.”
From the dune they could see a natural wall of rock that stretched from the tree line out into the water, terminating about fifteen meters from where the plane was moored. Three shadowed silhouettes stood and gesticulated at the seaward end.
Even at this distance there was no doubting what they were. Those oversized heads . . . Alex recognized the beaver-dam hair, shaped with the aid of sticks and mud. The clawlike hands, the scarred, greased bodies. The priest at the Anglican mission, multiplied by three. Foré.
Their voices harmonized with the roar of the sea, so that the sea almost drowned them out. But Gina said, “They’ll be summoning more Undead.” Her voice shook.
A whiff of the wind carried the message: Gina was right. “Stations!” Chester bawled, and the remaining Gamers formed a ragged wedge bristling with machetes.
“Space out more!” the Lore Master screamed. “We have to give each other room! Make for the rock wall!”
But the Foré priests had already been answered.
The Undead emerged from the brush in twos and threes, and the smell was like a gut-split skunk ripening on the road. Alex held his forearm across his nose and held his blade ready. Oliver was to his left, sword high. Gina to his right, spirals of light running along her power staff. Alex felt someone’s warm behind wiggle against his, and knew that Acacia guarded his back.
To reach the rock breaker, the Gamers would have to cut through a line of the Undead.
“Advance,” Chester said, voice cautious and hoarse. “Slowly.”
A dark, pure-blooded New Guinea zombie was the first to reach the wedge, and the first to go down under the blades of Mary-em and Oliver. They had gained another three or four meters before three Undead reached them, two of them women hiccoughing their horrible mirth. The third was the reincarnation of Rudy Draeger, the bullet slain Engineer.
Once again, something within Griffin, something logical and cool, died without protest. In its place rose a red shadow that yearned to kill. He chopped at Draeger. Rudy moved stiffly but intelligently, and Alex granted him a block, swerving part of his blade to home on the ribs. Draeger blocked again, but Alex’s move was a feint, and the dead Gamer howled as a glowing blade slashed his throat. This time Griffin took no chances. He chopped twice more until Draeger’s whole head glowed black: decapitation.
Other Gamers were engaged, and Alex wanted badly to break formation and h
elp them; but he held his place. It was their only chance to survive. By slow increments, they had already moved to within twenty meters of the wall. If they could get their backs to it . . .
A machete blade flicked past Alex’s ear: someone behind him had missed a block. He turned in time to see Tony McWhirter take a wound in the arm and answer it with a stroke to the knees that sent the zombie tumbling to the sand.
“Move!” Chester’s voice could hardly be heard above the grunts and the laughter, but heard it was, and they moved another few steps before resistance grew too heavy.
In the corner of his eye Alex saw Oliver gaping, frozen, eyes wide and puppy-moist, his sword pointing toward the sand . . . Alex spared a glance in that direction.
Trudging with heavy steps, eyes fixed on the rotund warrior with a bloodlust that was more threatening than the uplifted weapon, came Gwen.
Oliver made a half-hearted attempt to block her stroke. It was as if he’d never held a sword before. Her descending blade slipped past his guard easily, and a wet red line appeared on Ollie’s shoulder.
Behind Alex, Acacia, temporarily without an opponent, had seen the attack. “For God’s sake, Ollie . . . fight back!”
Ollie fought like a man unwilling to strike back. Again zombie-Gwen scored. Her matted blond hair stuck greasily to her face as her arm rose and fell again, her eyes lolling lifelessly in their sockets. Ollie blocked—and missed a perfect opening to her stomach. In a voice so soft that Alex might have imagined it, Gwen said, “Kill me, Ollie. Please.”
And Norliss gritted his teeth and slew his woman, plunging his sword into her breast. She went down like a sack of meal, and the Warrior looked sick. Alex took an instant to grip Ollie’s shoulder hard. He was relieved when Ollie wheeled to face the next zombie with a vicious stroke worthy of Frankish Oliver.
The Gamers had gained another few meters. Alex grew impatient; he shifted his position in the wedge until he was closer to the lead.
Behind him, Chester used a final bolt of lightning to strike down a zombie, then snatched up a blade as his aura dimmed and winked out. He cursed as he handled the unfamiliar tool, and he attacked clumsily.
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