“How come the guards aren’t shooting at us?” Jolly asked. “We’re all standing out here in the open. We’re sitting ducks.”
“Look at the guard towers,” Dread said.
All four of the guard towers on the outer wall and the fifth tower over the top of the hub were blackened, charred ruins. Smoke still rose slowly from the fractured stones, giving silent testimony to whatever mage’s Trick had destroyed them.
“Damn. You’d think they would’ve warded the towers against that sort of thing,” Jolly said.
“You’d think,” Dread agreed.
“Must not have been in the budget,” Cass said. “Let’s all try to move a little closer to the edge of all this, see if we can slip away from this little party. Not too quickly. We don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves. Keep Mickey in the middle. She’s not wearing an inmate’s uniform and I don’t want anyone to start to wonder what she’s doing here.”
“Fine by me,” Mickey said, as they pushed their way slowly through the mass of inmates towards the far side of the yard. “At least it’s not raining any more…whoa, check it out.”
They all looked up where she was pointing and had to pause. High above them, tiny splashes of red energy appeared and disappeared, scattered high across the sky. They were spread out and appeared in a random fashion, winking in and out like lightning bugs in a dark meadow, but the sum total of the brief splashes of red energy hinted at a wide, dome-like shape enveloping the entire prison.
“That must be the rain hitting the prison’s anti-magic shield,” Cass said. “Except I thought the shield was supposed to be just anti-magic, not an actual physical barrier.”
“We saw something like that earlier,” Dread said. “A User tried to fly out and ended up hitting that shield like it was made out of steel.”
The five of them took a moment longer to watch the spectacle of faerie fire above them created by the impacts of the rain before moving on. They had made their way a little more than halfway across the yard, pushing closer to the outer wall, where the mass of inmates began to thin out a little, when a loud voice began to shout from somewhere closer to the hub.
“Make some room! Make some room, motherfuckers! Make some room here! She’s coming!”
“That’s Fly,” Jolly said. “I recognize his voice.”
The mass of inmates pressed in around them, all trying to simultaneously make some space while also jockeying for position to get a glimpse of the star of the show. Dread and Lysette had to push back hard to keep from getting pulled away from the group, and Cass grabbed onto Mickey to keep her from being knocked off her feet.
“Get off! Get off, man!” Dread snarled, pushing away a few inmates to buy their group enough space to stay together. His actions drew a couple of angry looks, but one glance at his huge bulk and the baton in his hand kept any of the inmates from making an issue of it.
They didn’t seem to care all that much, anyway; the entire mob was too focused on trying to get a better spot for whatever show was coming. Dread’s height allowed him to see over the other inmates’ heads that a large circle was forming in the middle of the mob, with a tall inmate that Jolly had identified as Fly standing in the center of it.
“Come on, goddamnit, come on, give her some space!” Fly said, waving the mob back. “Make some more room here! You know who’s coming! Show her some respect, motherfuckers!”
“He really loves to use that word,” Jolly said. “I swear to God, he can’t go two sentences without it.”
“Keep moving,” Cass said, elbowing her way towards the edge of the crowd, one hand gripping Mickey’s arm tightly.
They were starting to break into a thinner section of the mob when Dread heard a distinct, familiar popping sound. It was like the sound of a vacuum tube or giant light bulb breaking, the sound of air suddenly being displaced, and Cass looked at Dread with alarm.
“Dread? Did you hear that?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you see?”
“What is it?” Mickey asked, fruitlessly trying to get up on her toes to look back in the direction of the sound.
“Teleportation,” Cass said. “Someone just teleported into the open space in the middle of the mob. Dread?”
Dread stretched to try to get a better look over the crowd. “There’s… a woman… dressed in dark clothes. Dark hair.”
Cass traded a look with Lysette. “Yeah. We’ve caught her act before. We need to get out of here. Right now.”
Lysette nodded and began redoubling her efforts to push through the crowd, practically knocking people over as she shoved through, making a path for Cass and Jolly and the others to follow. Inmates cursed at her, but trying to push back against the Physical Adept was like trying to push back against a freight train. Dread followed at the back of the group, making sure nobody got left behind in the mass of moving bodies.
A voice seemed to fill the air around them, somehow amplified over the dull roar of the crowd, but with none of the distortion of a megaphone or other electronic equipment. Every word the voice spoke held a hard edge of power and a cruel tone that made them all cringe from the sound of it.
“Hear me!” the dark woman’s voice commanded, filling their ears from every direction at once. “Those who would be reborn, hear me!”
“How can we hear her so loudly?” Mickey asked. “Does she have a microphone or something?”
“Mage’s Trick,” Cass said. “Keep moving. Whatever is about to happen, we don’t want to be here for it.”
“The time has come,” the dark woman’s voice said. “The day is here. Today is your Resurrection Day. The day of your rebirth. The day you escape the shackles of the life that has been forced upon you. The day you begin your true purpose and join my army as thralls in my great crusade.”
“Thralls?” Jolly asked. “What does ‘thrall’ mean?”
“Slave,” Cass answered, still pushing her way through the crowd. “This is about to get ugly.”
The dark woman’s voice continued to fill the air around them. “The pain you are about to feel is nothing compared to what you will become. What you will achieve as my thralls will shape the face of the entire world. You will be stronger than you were in life. You will not know doubt or fear or pain. Now, set aside this existence you call life and bow to my will. Die, to rise again!”
It came again, that loud popping sound of air displacing, and Dread saw a huge mass appear in the circle next to the dark woman. Titanic, misshapen, it was the stuff of nightmares; a tangle of what had been human limbs and heads and torsos, melded together as if some crazed god-child had crammed warm wax figures of human beings together. The bodies were covered in places by the remnants of both khaki and blue uniforms, even guard’s uniforms, and the entire mass scuttled about on its many limbs like an enormous centipede.
The many heads of the creature looked about wildly, screaming in rage or pain or both, and it charged into the mass of the inmates, swinging appendages that had once been human arms, but were now formed into stalk-like limbs tipped with talons the size of a spearhead. The mob gave way before its charge, the mass of inmates piling up over top of each other in a desperate, fruitless attempt to get away from the monstrous killing machine.
Lightning bolts suddenly arced out of the creature, from extended hands that still appeared somewhat human, and half a dozen inmates exploded into gory pieces under the impact. The creature threw itself into the mob, slaying indiscriminately, howling and screaming from misshapen mouths that had once been human.
“Run!” Dread shouted, struggling to keep his feet in the sudden stampede of the crowd away from the creature. On the far side of the crowd, away from the creature, he could see dozens of ghouls charging into the yard; they tore apart the mob as the inmates tried to flee from the terrible creature wreaking havoc on them from their midst and ended up running straight into the ghouls.
Dread reached out desperately to grab at Cass, but the panicked tidal wave of inmates swept he
r away, swept all of them away, and then spun him around and knocked him to his hands and knees and all the world became a mass of desperate limbs running and fighting and dying.
Jolly
When that thing… that creature the death mage had created out of the combined bodies of God knows how many inmates and guards… crashed into the crowd, we all got pulled away from each other like little kids caught in an undertow.
I’d never experienced anything like that before. It was total chaos. The creature was screaming, men were screaming, women were screaming; hell, I’m pretty sure I was screaming. The crowd became a tsunami of bodies slamming into me, spinning me around, crushing me, always threatening to knock me over and pulverize me underneath it. I knew that if I went down, that would be the end; all of those desperate feet trying to escape the creature would stomp the life out of me without ever realizing that they were doing it.
I lost the others almost instantly. I caught a glimpse of Mickey’s wide eyes and terrified face, and I tried to grab a hold of her, but fighting against the current of that rout was like trying to fight a charging rhino. She disappeared into the swirling mass of bodies, and I felt an instant of pity for someone as small as her being caught up in all of this before I went back to fighting for my own footing and for my own life.
Even Lysette couldn’t fight the tide. I’d seen how crazy strong she was, but she still only weighted like… what, a buck twenty-five? The pressing mass of all those desperate people swept her away too, out towards the wide end of the yard, towards the outer walls of the prison.
I stumbled along with the rest of the mob, swimming with the current as best I could, and as we got further away from the screams of that ripping, tearing creature, it started to thin out a bit and I could start making sense of myself a little.
That didn’t last long. The current I was caught up in started to swirl back on itself, more bodies pushing back the way we came, and I only had about a second to wonder why before I saw the answer.
Ghouls.
Lots of them. They were coming from both sides of the yard, running into the crowd of fleeing inmates, grabbing a hold of them with those crazy black talons and tearing them up.
It was a slaughter. The nightmare creature in the middle of the group, over towards the hub, panicking everyone and driving them like cattle right into the dozens of ghouls who were waiting. The inmates tried to back up, tried to shrink away from the ghouls ripping them to shreds with their black talons, but the tidal wave of inmates running from the massive creature pressed them forward, and it all turned into a trapped whirlwind of fleeing victims who didn’t know which way to run to get away from it all.
That includes me. I had no clue what to do. I’ve never been so scared. I found myself running this way and that, almost randomly. I couldn’t think straight; I heard the screaming of the creature behind me and I had to run away from that but then I saw a couple of ghouls tearing guys up in front of me and I had to run away from that but then people kept shoving into me from all angles and I had no idea which way was which and then something grabbed me hard and practically yanked my arm out of its socket.
It was Lysette. Thank God for her. She’d spotted me in the crowd and grabbed on to me with that super strength of hers, grabbed me so hard it hurt but I didn’t care; I had someone on my side and she was a serious badass and that was at least a glimmer of hope in the midst of all this madness.
“Where are the others?” she shouted over the chaos, dragging me behind her like a sack of potatoes.
“I don’t know!” I shouted back. “I saw Mickey disappear and I think Dread went down… look out!”
A ghoul had finished off a victim nearby and made a leap for her, but she kind of twisted around in a way that didn’t look possible and side-stepped the attack. In the same movement, she lashed out with the metal baton that she still carried, knocking the ghoul into the crowd, where it got swept up in the current of fleeing bodies and started attacking someone that wasn’t us.
“Come on!” she said, grabbing a hold of me again. She’d had to let go of me to fight off the ghoul, but where we were now, the crowd was thinning out a bit and we could start to force our way free of the madness.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Anywhere but here! This is a kill zone!”
We made it past the outside of a cell block that bordered the yard, and now the chaos was suddenly manageable. That horrible screaming creature was now killing people and shooting lightning bolts on the other side of a ton of stone and concrete walls, and the tidal wave of fleeing inmates was more of a stream now, easily navigated. Ghouls were still running amongst the crowd, though, dragging down victims, and Lysette had to fight off another one that got too close to us.
She pushed the ghoul back into the crowd of inmates and dragged me into a narrow alley between two cell blocks. When the prison was first built, the rectangular buildings were laid out like nice neat spokes of a wheel, but over the years, more buildings were added in between those spokes, and so you ended up with some weird, narrow alleyways like the one we sprinted down. It was probably the closest thing you could get to a hiding place, unless actually you went into one of the cell blocks. In the alley, nobody would be able to see us unless they came into the alleyway after us.
Which, unfortunately, they did. We’d started to reach the dead end of the alleyway, slowing down to catch our breath… okay, slowing down so that I could catch my breath… when I glanced back and saw them.
More ghouls. They’d been led in by a few inmates who had spotted Lysette and I running into the alley and apparently decided to follow suit. They must’ve figured that we had some sort of master plan, other than just get as far away from that creature and that rout as we could.
Now, a half a dozen ghouls were in the midst of those inmates, dragging them to the ground and ripping off pieces of meat in a gory display. I started to panic; there was no way out of the alley other than past those ghouls, and I was completely unarmed.
Lysette seemed to read my mind. “Here,” she said, handing me one of the makeshift shivs she’d taken off of the gangbangers in the infirmary. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” I asked. “What do you mean, go?”
“We have to attack now.”
“Bullshit, we have to attack now! Are you crazy or something?”
“Jolly,” she snapped at me. “There’s no time. There’s too many for us to handle ourselves. We have to attack now while they’re distracted with killing those other inmates. Find one that’s busy killing someone, knock it down, and keep stabbing it in the head until it’s dead.”
She didn’t give me a chance to debate the matter further; she plucked the other shiv out of her waistband with her left hand, keeping the baton in her right as she charged into the melee at the mouth of the alley. I ran after her, cursing my luck, sure I was about to get torn limb from limb by tooth and claw.
Two of the ghouls spotted her and pulled away from the rest of the action, moving to intercept her, and she hit them like a tornado. Man, I can’t even express how she could move. It was like watching a tiger or a panther or some other kind of big jungle cat leap and attack; absolute grace mixed with raw power. Her body would flow and twist and lean in ways that looked like it had to end with her losing her balance, but then she would simply flow back out into another move that kept her just out of reach of those black talons or biting teeth, all while striking back with the baton or stabbing with the shiv.
She cracked open the skull of one ghoul almost effortlessly and then somehow flung the second one through the air like a rag doll towards me. It almost landed on top of me, and I remember thinking what’d I ever do to you, Lys? before I jumped on it in a panic, stabbing with my shiv at its head in clumsy desperation.
It’s not as easy as it looks, I’m here to tell you. First off, even though the ghoul was flat on its back, it still swung those crazy black talons at me, so there I am trying to knock those away, all while trying t
o get a stab in whenever I had the chance.
My foot was on its chest, pinning it down… I got that part right, at least… but even when I managed to get a stab in, it just landed on its face or skidded off of its skull. Sure, those wounds would really get the attention of a living person, but this dead thing underneath of me didn’t seem to care, it kept trying to tear at me with its claws or force its way upwards enough to bite me with its bloody teeth.
The struggle seemed to go on forever. I’m pretty sure I was screaming the entire time. Hey, give me a break; a hand to hand fight like that is desperate and terrifying enough all by itself, now add in that I’m fighting for my life against a dead man come back to life with the claws of a grizzly bear, and it’s covered in blood and wounds and not seeming to care about either, and also the fact that I’m not exactly a super ninja warrior like Lysette, and maybe you can forgive my lack of vocal restraint.
Finally, though, I realized that the ghoul’s one arm wasn’t really able to do much; it was sort of flopping up against me. Lysette must’ve shattered it before she threw the ghoul at me, or maybe it shattered during the ghoul’s fall to the ground. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was, now I was able to shift my foot to pin it down more easily, grab its one good arm, and stab the shit out of that dead bastard’s head like I meant it.
It took a lot more tries, but I finally managed to ice pick my shiv into the ghoul’s brain, punching through the skull with a dull thunk. It twitched hard a few times and I twisted the shiv, trying to pull it out, but all that did was snap it off at the handle. The ghoul finally stopped moving and I fell over backwards from unexpectedly not having to fight for my life any more.
There was a moment of terror… I had lost my only weapon and had also fallen over onto my dumb ass… but as I scrambled up and looked around, I saw that there was nothing left alive or moving in the alley.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 31
