Eviction Notice
Page 5
sound is coming from the person you're supposed to be saving. Still, and I'll give her this; girl could run. She was clinging on to my hand just as tightly as ever, and she was making the same sprint I was, through the same obstacles. In a dress! Even if she did have raw terror propelling her along, that was a Hell of a feat. She was a screamer, and yeah, it was all her fault I was in this situation, but at least when presented with something terrible, she had the presence of mind to run away from it, and latch onto someone who knew what he was doing.
… well, at least I looked like I knew what I was doing.
The point was, she might have been in a blind panic, but she was doing the smartest thing she could have in this situation despite her obvious terror. Girl wasn't an idiot, whatever you might say about her. And she'd come out to this house despite being clearly horrified of stepping through the door, all to help a complete stranger. Wasn't her fault she'd gotten the opposite effect.
Well, mostly not her fault.
Totally her fault.
She was a smart, tough girl, and I respected her quite a lot after seeing even this much of her. And if we both survived this, I really was going to beat her face in. She had it coming! Just, y'know, in a respectful way. Shut up, it's logic.
I stomped down onto a particularly persistent hand which I was pretty sure had been following me across the room based on a ring it was wearing (Eeesh, were these the limbs of the people the ghost had killed while he haunted the house? Yuck.). “Okay, on my word, we dive and roll!”
“I do not believe I can do that, actu-” She said.
Oh, silly girl, she thought I was asking!
“And dive!” I said, yanking her forward, throwing an arm around her waist, and springing off the Doom Hand to give our leap some extra 'oomph'.
We flew. We hit. We rolled... well, I rolled, and Lydia kinda tumbled, while still shrieking. She never stopped. She was like a well-dressed noisemaker.
“Hee, hee, hee, you see that, Lyd? God, we rock! We are the Grand High Lords of Awesome! Two rooms down, and we are kicking some ghostly ass, baby! He hasn't even come close to inflicting mortal terror on u-” I began as we came to a stop in the next room over. I stopped short when I saw that Lydia was whiter than a sheet, and maybe telling her how scared she wasn't was a bit of a misnomer. “Well, okay, one of us is scared, but you're still doing really well! And... oddly clean! Is this dress soaked in scotch-guard or something, because it is weirdly stain resistant. I'm sure that fabric does not work that way.”
“I... I... cannot... this is...” She whimpered, her eyes filling with tears. “It's exactly like the last time! They all died, and all I could do was run, and run, and never escape!”
“Hey! Hey!” I snapped, shaking her. “You got out alive once, and you will again. You have me here, and I am oddly good at living through things. And you've lived through this once before, and come on, if you can live through a thing once you can do it twice! It's easy-squeezy!”
“I... I... I...” She sniffled, her eyes wide with panic and red with something that might have been shame and might have been pain.
“Good. Good person.” I said, patting her on the head. “That's a good girl.”
“I am not a dog, sir.” She whispered.
True, but treating you like one confused and annoyed you, which made it just a lil' bit harder for you to panic. Hee, hee, hee. I thought. Out loud I said, “Of course you're not. Goooooood girl! Smart girl, knowing such big things!”
“Are you quite sane, sir...?” Lydia asked.
“At the moment, no. Running on too much adrenaline, y'know?” I replied with a manic grin. “But we should keep moving. Lots of danger about... not that you should fall into gibbering terror again! You shouldn't! Look on the very bright side: we only have two rooms to go, and he isn't even trying to really kill us yet!”
Then, because the universe loves proving me wrong, the wall exploded and something giant and fur-covered and horrible burst through it.
It was, I couldn't help but notice, the wall between this room and the main hall we had started our little mad dash from, which I felt was kind of cheating since, after all, we had just been in there and there had not been, to my memory, something that looked like what you would get if a wild boar and a grizzly bear had a baby together and that baby grew up in the deepest pits of Hell. So how had it come in from over there? Stupid ghost-physics.
The boar... bear... thing narrowed beady red eyes at me. Long lines of drool ran down from its mouth to the floor, each of them tinged in red, and it dug disturbingly sharp hooves into the floor in preparation to charge.
Lydia made a kind of plaintive whimpering sound, like you'd expect from a frightened dachshund.
“Okay, now he's trying to kill us.” I admitted. “I have two knives and six very small bullets. That thing has a half-ton of evil. We should now run.”
Unfortunately, Porky had the same idea, because he started running too, with his head down and tusks in my direction and...
I pushed Lydia, who made her usual squeak, and threw myself the other direction. I've dealt with things that big before... granted, I usually had a high-powered rifle of some kind and preferably some silver-lined bear traps set up around the area, maybe a few land mines if they were in the budget this month and my supplier came through. But even if I was cursing my general lack of prep time, I still know how to handle the big ones. They are big and they are scary, but they also do not turn on a dime. All that mass has a downside, and once they get moving in a certain direction they have a rough time changing targets. Its current target was the spot where we were standing, and so the best thing we could do was to not be there anymore.
As planned, big ugly went right between us.
Not as planned, rather than skidding into the wall or even just stopping, it did a weird thing where it kind of... it's hard to put into words, but it was like the whole thing got suddenly blurry, there was a sound like 'plonk', and then it was just sort of facing right at me without even turning. And it hadn't lost a bit of momentum.
Cheater, I thought, just before impact. I was still in mid-dodge, so it only clipped me, but seriously, ouch. Have you ever been hit by something ten times your size? Even a little hit doesn't exactly feel peachy keen. I didn't hear a rib break, so that was good, but I felt like every bone in my body had been shattered by a wrecking ball.
I went flying like something far more dignified than a rag-doll, I swear, and sprawled with the sort of grace and gravity you don't often see these days anymore, which I think is a shame. All told, it was a highly elegant and poised flight across the room, and I challenge anyone to do better. That said, I wasn't too happy with it since I had lost my knife and the second one was in a sheathe strapped across my back, a.k.a. 'Currently underneath me'. I might be able to get to my gun before Big Pig got charging again... the bullets were silver, generally the best metal to be using on a surprising number of things, but I only had a few of them and it wasn't a large caliber weapon. Honestly, with the ordinance I had available, I might as well have tried browbeating him into submission with a severe scolding. It would be more likely to have a lasting impact.
“You,” I said, “Are just cheap.”
The creature gave its counter-argument, which was to just charge again. Big furry jerk.
“I want you to know that all this is making it very difficult to kill you!” I said, rolling to one side. I really had no other options, here, so I had to hope Demon Pumba played by the rules of the rest of the house and wouldn't leave this room. Next up was the dining room, and then through it, I could just make out the island where a kitchen counter-top had once been before rotting away.
It was a straight shot.
And I had a propulsion source. A big, fast, angry one that was almost on top of me, so I had to time this perfectly or I was gonna be a smear on the floor.
I rolled to one side, held my feet up flat, and let
the monster charge past me. As before, it redirected its charge by doing that weird, creepy blurry thing that left it instantly facing a new direction without turning. Normally, I would have found this to be kind of cool but horribly unfair; this time, I was counting on it. I planted my feet into the charging creature, and just as it swung its head to dislodge me I kicked off and-
Oh, well, it worked. That's the important part, right? You don't need to know the details, or the sound I made while I was flying through the air. It wasn't a girlish sound, I can tell you that much. Didn't scream like a girl. And I did not flail. I flew gracefully, like a falcon.
As I finished my frantic tumble... I mean, graceful eagle-like stoic flight, I rubbed my head. Ow. Oh, ow. I was gonna have bruises on my bruises tomorrow, and that was a fact. But I had pulled it off; skipped a room, even! I was in the kitchen, and now I just needed to find out what about this room had goaded Stanfield into getting serious on Lydia's family when she had lived here, before he got serious on me and I ended up without my sk-
Oh. I'd forgotten Lydia. Oops?
I got to my feet as quickly as adrenaline would allow, ready to sprint back through whatever was in the dining room and straight back to my friend the Hell-pig... and almost ran right into the girl in question, staring blankly into space.
“Gah!” I said, because when