Of course, it hadn’t helped the dead guy who had recently been wearing it.
As soon as we got out into the hallway, things went sideways. The surveillance hub, or control center as Dread called it, was off to the left of the interrogation room and down the hallway. It wasn’t far, according to Dread, but even as we eased into the hallway, one of the doors further down…between us and the hub… burst off of its hinges with a crash.
A man fell heavily down on top of it, halfway into the hall, his clothes ripped up and bloody. The fall seemed to stun him momentarily, but then he shook his head and tried to regain his feet.
Something must’ve grabbed him by the legs, because he was dragged back inside of the room, eyes wide with terror, screaming at the top of his lungs. He briefly caught sight of us and reached out a mangled hand for help before being pulled back into the room and out of sight.
More shouts and yells came from within the room, and then screams. Even worse, as the screams turned into more like shrieks, there came a kind of snarling, howling sound… I don’t know what was making that sound, but it was definitely not a human being.
“Back, back!” Dread whispered, pushing me back with one hand.
“That’s further into the cell block!” I said. “Away from the hub!”
“Yeah, well, whatever is doing that,” he said, gesturing toward the room of horrors, and then holding up his metal baton, “I cannot take out with this. We have to find another way.”
We pushed further down the hallway, away from whatever carnage was going on in that room, creeping along like thieves. I didn’t want to so much as breathe. There were doors scattered on either side of the hallway, and as we passed every one, it felt like a pull of the trigger in a game of Russian roulette. Would this one burst open, letting out crazed homicidal inmates or some sort of misshapen, inhuman horror? Or would it be an empty room? Or would whatever was tearing apart that guy down the hallway come out and see us?
I guess luck was with us, because every pull of the trigger in this game of Russian roulette ended with a dry click. Dread brought us to a stop as the hallway ended in a solid steel door.
It would be more accurate to say that the hallway had previously ended in a solid steel door. Now, that solid steel door lay twisted and mangled at a wild angle in the doorway, barely held in place by a scrap of metal.
The hallway door to our left was similarly wrecked inwards, leading to an office of some sort beyond. The furniture in that office lay splintered and in ruins, and there were splashes and pools of blood everywhere.
Dread looked into the office and nodded. “Whatever that thing is back there? It came through this door at the end of the hallway… which leads to the cell block… and then through this door into the offices. Looks like it’s smashing its way through room to room, killing anybody it finds.”
“And we didn’t hear any of that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We were a little busy with problems of our own.”
I had a lot of questions, like what in the hell could actually break through a door like that, but Dread held a hand to his lips and brought us to the smashed door leading to the cell block. Once again, we could hear shouts and yells coming from up ahead. We both stole a look around the door and into the main hallway of the cell block.
Past the doorway, the cell block became two stories, with cells lined on either side, and the whole thing looked like a swarming beehive, except instead of bees, it was inmates in khaki prison uniforms swarming all around the cells. Some were fighting each other, some were sort of milling about like they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and some were huddled around near a handful of other inmates who were in blue uniforms.
“Users,” Dread said, nodding towards the ones in the blue uniforms.
Oh, great. This was getting better by the second.
One of the cell doors close to us and to our left was blown off its hinges and lay in the hallway of the cell block. Body parts and limbs and little gory bits of tissue were scattered all around it, and I could see that there was a massive hole in the wall of the cell, leading all of the way outside to the yard. Every now and again, a few inmates would split off from the rest of the hive and run outside through that hole to escape the cell block.
Dread glanced back the way we came. I didn’t need to look inside his mind to know what he was thinking. Big giant killing creature behind us, which had to come out sooner or later, and in front of us, a swarm of potentially hostile inmates. We were stuck in the middle, and that jagged hole in the wall was our only way out, but the inmates kept swirling around and out of it, drawn to it like water down a drain.
Then, we caught a break.
As we watched, a few inmates dragged a dead body out of one of the cells and dumped it unceremoniously in front of the Users, backing away quickly once they had. Maybe twenty or thirty other inmates loitered nearby, watching what was happening but keeping their distance, as if the Users were about to light off a particularly interesting but dangerous set of fireworks.
A tall, thin User stepped closer to the body, hands fanned out and directed towards it. The crowd of inmates jostled around, all trying to get a better look but also trying to keep one of their buddies in between them and the spectacle in case something went haywire.
The body suddenly began to jerk and twitch, with a subtle blue swirl underneath the surface of the skin. It was all too familiar.
“Necromancers,” Dread whispered. “Death magic.”
God. Death magic? Death magic? I mean, I suppose I should’ve expected that, considering what we’d just seen with the guard and all, but the idea of it was so impossible and so unreal to me that I guess my mind couldn’t wrap around what I was seeing, even as I was seeing it.
You have to understand. Death magic is beyond illegal. We’re talking Schedule One restricted magic… the kind of magic that if there’s even a whiff of you messing around with it, you could be looking at the death penalty.
All magic is restricted. As soon as you sign up for your first course, you have to register with the government and disclose every single book or course you take in the pursuit of your career. If you’re an active User, you have to maintain a license and accept periodic oversight.
As you might imagine, the more dangerous the magic, the harder it is to get a license and the closer they keep an eye on you. Striker and Defense mages, anybody with combat capabilities really, are all on a short list at the local sheriff’s department. Those kinds of mages know better than to mess around; they’d instantly be the lead suspect in any crime involving magic.
Most schools of magic have certain Tricks that are too dangerous for public use and get restricted to say, military use only. A civilian can’t own a rocket launcher, and the average Striker mage can only go so far in their destructive capacity before they have to get special permission to get into any of the heavy-duty restricted Tricks… the kind that might destroy a building, for example.
Think of it like drugs. There’s some that are over the counter; anybody can use them. Some you need a doctor’s prescription for, and some of those prescription drugs are more closely scrutinized than others, like narcotics.
And like some drugs, there’s some magic that is considered so dangerous, so invasive, so unnatural, that it gets classified as Schedule One. Schedule One means nobody gets to study it, period… not even if it’s only for pure research purposes. It’s plutonium. Death magic was at the top of the list for Schedule One prohibited fields of study. The entire field of study was prohibited, not just little bits of it.
Which meant that you never saw it, or even met anybody else who’d seen it. Somewhere out there in some remote corner of the world, somebody had to be studying it, even if it was in a cave or something, otherwise it wouldn’t exist, obviously. But to actually see it being done, up close and personal, with nothing between you and it? This was like getting invited to a dinner party and finding out the whole place was full of cannibals.
It was definitely quite a show, because inmates all around the cell block began stopping whatever other nonsense they were doing and looking over at the body, leaning over railings on the second floor or wandering closer for a better look.
In fact, it was so interesting to them, that no more inmates came towards us or the hole in the wall that led outside into the yard. They all had their backs to us, shuffling a little closer to the big death magic show going on in the far end of the cell block.
It was our best chance to make our escape through that blown out cell and out of that hole in the wall. We crept forward, stepping over the remnants of the door hanging askew in the middle of the wall, and into the cell block.
Two inmates stepped out of the blasted cell, right where we were heading, and my heart almost stopped. They hadn’t spotted us yet; they had come back into the cell block out of curiosity, wanting to watch the death magic show, I guess, and so their backs were still to us and their attention was focused on the far end of the cell block.
Still, they weren’t moving. They stayed right next to where we needed to go. Dread crouched down ever so slightly, his shoulders bunching up a little. I could see his forearm muscles bulging as he gripped his baton tightly.
“If they turn around,” Dread whispered to me as we inched toward them, “get ready to run.”
This was bad. I had no doubt, after what I’d seen in the interrogation room, that Dread could take out these two guys, but the sounds of the fight would draw the attention of the other inmates, and there was probably fifty or sixty of them. They would chase us down and tear us apart.
Of course those two guys turned around and saw us. Of course. My luck has never been good. They turned and I saw them turning, almost like it was happening in slow motion, and at first, all I could think of was to hide behind Dread, which is what gave me the idea of how to get out of this mess.
I made myself invisible.
Okay, technically, I wasn’t invisible invisible. I mean, someone watching on any of the cameras scattered around the block would’ve seen me just fine. I was invisible to those two inmates.
You see, the way your vision works is, light bounces off an object, and then into your eye, and then lands on your retina. Your retina then sends a signal down the optic nerve to your brain, which interprets the signal as a certain object.
But it’s not perfect. You have blind spots. Sometimes, your mind sort of fills in the blanks around those blind spots with whatever else is around it. There’s a famous optical illusion where you draw a dot on a piece of white paper, look to the side of it, and move the paper closer. The dot disappears. Your mind fills in the area where the dot is with whatever is surrounding it… in this case, the white of the paper.
To make yourself invisible to someone, you do the same thing. You create a blind spot, and let the subject’s mind fill in the missing information with whatever is all around it. I used to do it to my cats to sneak up on them while they were playing, so I could scare the crap out of them.
Don’t judge me. I get bored sometimes.
It worked in bars or coffee shops, too, when there was some weird dude checking me out or generally being a creeper. I’d wait until he looked away or got distracted, and then make myself into a giant blind spot in their head. They’d look back and get all confused, because all they saw now was a table or whatever was around me. But not me. I was right there, and the light bouncing off me was still going into their eyes, but their mind simply couldn’t register that I was there.
Thank God for all of the creepy weird guys out there. Because of them, I’d had plenty of practice disappearing from people’s minds, so now, when those two inmates turned toward us, all they saw was Dread.
Dread was still coiled like a spring, ready to leap forward and strike, but they looked at him disinterestedly, almost dismissively. One of them nodded toward the big death magic spectacle.
“You believe that shit?” he said to Dread, turning away without waiting for an answer. To them, Dread was just another inmate… there was nothing else for them to see.
Dread’s shoulders lowered and his body relaxed a little. He glanced at me, confusion written all over his face. I gave him a big shrug and tried not to smile.
It felt really good. I kind of surprised myself. I should’ve been much more scared; in fact, I had been terrified only a couple of seconds before, but now that I saw that my Invisibility Trick was working on them… well, I guess I got a little cocky.
The two inmates were still too close for comfort for us to get to the blown out cell and escape, especially since you can’t move too fast when you’re working an Invisibility Trick. I’d had enough practice hiding from cats and creepers to be able to move around somewhat, but still, we needed a little more breathing room.
No problem. With my new cockiness, I felt confident enough to push these two knuckleheads and clear the way. We need to get a closer look, bro, I pushed into the one inmate’s thoughts.
I couldn’t help adding in the “bro”. I’m telling you, I was feeling super cocky.
A second later, that inmate nudged his buddy on the arm and said, “We need to get a closer look, bro,” and I almost started giggling in nervous delight as they wandered off and away from us.
Once they started moving, I shoved Dread towards the blown out cell. He stumbled along at first, still holding his baton half-raised as if unsure what to do with it, with an utterly confused look on his face. It took everything I had to keep from grinning from ear to ear.
“Just go, just go,” I whispered to him.
He shook himself out of his incredulity and led me through the cell, and then out through the hole in the wall and into the yard, and that’s when my cockiness abruptly died.
***
Outside of the cell block, everything was swirling chaos. Each of the long, rectangular cell blocks radiated out from the central hub like the spokes of a massive wheel, and since they were in between cell blocks, what Dread and Mickey could see was somewhat limited. All the same, they found themselves stumbling through a madhouse of running inmates, scattered gunfire, and wisps of tear gas vapor.
“This is it, baby! This is it!” shouted an inmate as he ran past, swinging a metal pipe over his head. “It’s Resurrection Day!”
Dread reflexively pushed Mickey behind him and raised his baton for a strike, but the inmate seemed to pay no attention to them, but ran into the haze of a nearby smoke grenade and out of sight.
“Get back against the wall,” Dread said, pushing Mickey up against the outside of the cell block until he could figure out what was what.
“They’re shooting at us!” Mickey said.
Dread listened to the intermittent rifle shots coming from the towers and shook his head. “That’s not coming at us.”
“How can you tell?”
“If the shot is coming at you, close by, it kind of snaps the air... whoa!” he said, ducking as a close round cracked the air overhead and splintered against the wall above them. “Now they’re shooting at us!”
Goddamn idiots, he thought, grabbing Mickey’s arm and leading her off on a zig zag run, can’t they see she’s a civilian?
Another rifle round snapped at the ground near his feet. Dread grimaced. There was no place for them to get to cover quickly, and even a mediocre shot with a rifle couldn’t miss forever at this range.
There was a whooshing sound as something large flew past them, and then a User landed heavily on his feet a few yards in front of them. Once he’d recovered from his landing, the mage stood up and stabbed a hand out toward the tower where the rifle fire was coming from.
A bright blue, jagged bolt of lightning arced out of his open palm, followed instantly by a clap of thunder that rattled Dread’s teeth and spine. The top of the tower facing them blasted apart in a shower of stone and mortar. Dread could see the body of the guard who’d been shooting at them fall lifelessly down to the yard, trailing smoke.
The User turned on them and looked them ov
er. “Are you with her?”
“What?” Dread asked. He tightened his grip on his baton, but the mage was too far away for him to rush and take out before getting blasted to bits by another lightning strike.
“Are you with her?” the User asked more insistently, raising his hand toward them.
“Of course we’re with her, look at us!” Mickey said.
She pushed into the mage’s mind. He was amped up with adrenaline from all of the fighting, his mind processing countless thoughts at once, and so she couldn’t really pick out what he meant by his question, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he needed to recognize them as an ally.
Are you with her? he’d asked, and Mickey figured that something equally vague would have to do, and so she seeded yeah they’re definitely with her into the midst of the mage’s thoughts and hoped that it would take root.
The Striker mage stared at her for a second, then at Dread, and nodded. “Right. Follow…”
More rifle fire, and red holes punched out of the front of the mage’s chest. He dropped instantly to his knees, blinked twice as he looked blankly at Mickey, and then fell forward on his face, dead.
“Come on!” Dread said, grabbing Mickey’s arm again and leading her away from the gunfire. Now that the tower off to their left was obliterated, Dread knew which direction the new gunfire was coming from… ahead and to their right. With a few steps, he was able to put the adjoining cell block between them and the guards firing from that tower.
Something hit the ground near them and thick smoke began to rise out of it. “Tear gas grenade,” he said to Mickey. “We have to move.”
“Who was he talking about?” Mickey asked. “Are you with her? Who’s ‘her’?”
“Hell if I know. It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get out of the open and back into a building or we’re going to get shot by the guards.”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 24
