Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “What do I do? What do I do?” Mickey said, slapping weakly at the ghoul’s mangled arm.

  “Sit back and hang on,” Lysette said. “Big turn coming up.”

  A warbling, murky voice came to them, muffled through the windshield. “You. You.”

  “It knows you!” Mickey said. “How does it know you?”

  “It’s her,” Lysette said.

  “Her who?”

  “Kel.”

  Lysette felt the ghoul’s arm trying to push toward her even harder now, and she was forced to weave the car back and forth as she reversed, trying to keep the ghoul off balance and focused on clinging to the car. Kel had demonstrated before that she could see through the eyes of her ghouls; now, it seemed she’d found exactly where Lysette and Mickey were.

  “All of you,” the ghoul said. “All of you, find them.”

  “All of you?” Mickey said. “Who’s it talking to?”

  “It’s Kel,” Lysette said, gritting her teeth with the effort of holding the ghoul’s arm away from her throat as she continued to twist backwards enough in her seat to navigate the car in reverse. “She’s giving orders to the other ghouls.”

  “What? How does she know where we are? This isn’t fair!” Mickey said.

  “She can see through the eyes of the ghouls, remember? Hang on.”

  Up ahead, Lysette spotted a space where the sidewalk opened up in front of a small shopping center. As soon as their car pulled into line with the shopping center’s parking lot, Lysette spun the wheel, backing into the lot and sliding the ghoul off the hood of the car.

  Almost. As the ghoul started to slide off the hood, it pulled its arm out of the windshield, leaving behind a gory mess of skin that degloved from its forearm along the way. With both hands now, it gripped on to the hood of the car and the rear view mirror, clinging now to the driver’s side of the car as they sped backwards through the small parking lot.

  “Persistent,” Lysette said.

  She continued steering with her right hand while with her left, she began swinging her door open, slamming it again and again into the ghoul clinging to the side of the car. With each hit, the ghoul snarled at her, but it still clung doggedly to the vehicle.

  “My car!” Mickey said.

  Lysette saw her chance. They were coming up on the far edge of the small strip mall’s parking lot; it led into a side street that would take them away from all of the stopped traffic clogging the main street.

  Even better, there was a telephone pole next to the parking lot exit.

  Lysette pressed down on the gas, steering the car toward the exit and the telephone pole. The ghoul started to hammer on Lysette’s window with its fist, and she flung the door open to give her enough time to spin the wheel again and launch the car out of the parking lot and into the side street.

  There was a crunch and metallic shriek as the telephone pole scraped along the length of the car, followed by a crash and thud as it slammed into the ghoul and the open car door. The door ripped out of Lysette’s hand, swinging backwards until it crunched flat the wrong way against the side of the car.

  It didn’t rip off of its hinges; the door flapped feebly against the front of the car, bent backwards completely the wrong way. Mickey stared aghast at Lysette and the open space gaping next to her where the door used to be.

  Lysette leaned out slightly, looked at the scraped side of the car, looked at the door bent backwards, and then looked at Mickey.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Mickey said. “You’re s… oh, God, is it getting back up?”

  Lysette had brought the car to a halt in the side street after clearing the ghoul off with the telephone pole, and now, the mangled ghoul lay in the street in front of them, directly in their headlights. As they watched, it twitched and twisted, pulling itself up onto its side so it could point a bloody, mangled finger at them.

  “What’s it pointing at?” Mickey asked.

  More movement caught Lysette’s eye; ghouls from the main street rushing towards them from all directions.

  “Us,” she said. “It’s pointing at us.”

  She shifted the car into Drive and hit the gas, turning in a tight circle to point the car away from the traffic jam on the main street. Glancing in the rear view mirror, she could see the ghouls charging after them, pouring into the side street like a flood.

  “They’re chasing us?” Mickey said. “Why are they chasing us? What did we do?”

  “Well, you did shoot her,” Lysette said. “Guess Kel’s the type to hold a grudge.”

  Mickey twisted to look behind them, wincing at the pain in her ribs as she moved. “Can they catch us?”

  “I don’t think those can.”

  “Those? What do you mean, ‘those’?” Mickey asked.

  Lysette nodded ahead of them as an answer. One hundred yards ahead, a half-dozen ghouls filled the narrow side street they now drove down.

  “What do we do?” Mickey said.

  “You’ve got good insurance, right?”

  Mickey stared at her. “Seriously?”

  Lysette shrugged. “Look on the bright side. You’ll have an opportunity to get a whole new car after this.”

  “Newish.”

  “Whatever,” Lysette said, and stomped on the gas.

  “Shouldn’t we slow down?” Mickey said.

  “No. If you’re going to hit a deer… speed up.”

  Lysette watched the movements of the ghouls ahead of them, looking for any sort of break in their formation. She needed to try to find a gap so that any ghouls she ended up hitting, she would hit them off-center and knock them to either side of the car, rather than head-on. A head-on impact with a body might either damage the front of the car enough to render the car inoperable, or send one of the ghouls straight through the windshield and right into their laps.

  She noticed Mickey shrinking down in her seat and bracing her hands against the dashboard. “Mickey. Take your hands off of the dash and cover your head. If your hands are on the dash when the air bags go off, they’ll hit your arms.”

  Mickey pulled her hands away from the dash, hiding behind them as they hurtled towards the small group of ghouls charging down the street at them. “I hate this job.”

  Lysette couldn’t help a small smile. “Not me.”

  Jolly

  I’m starting to hate my neighbors.

  Okay, that’s not fair. I think I just started to get spoiled. After they let me out of prison, all of a sudden, I had so much space. And quiet. Any time I wanted to be alone, I could be alone. Any time I wanted everything to be quiet, it was quiet.

  It’s not like that in the joint. People are piled up all over each other, always getting in each other’s way, in each other’s space, in each other’s face.

  It’s no wonder fights break out. Human beings aren’t built to rub elbows that closely all the time without a break.

  And it isn’t like you’re hanging out with the most socially aware people in the universe. By definition, a guy’s in the joint because he never learned to work and play well with others.

  Courtesy is a scarce resource in prison, and as someone once said, courtesy is the lubricant that allows people to pass each other in life without too much friction. I think someone said that. Maybe it was me.

  Anyway, the reason my neighbors were driving me crazy was, I was exhausted. Simple as that.

  Pulling Tricks is, well, tricky business. Even after you’ve got the hang of it, magic requires really intense concentration. It’s kind of like a combination of trying to do advanced math while improvising jazz music.

  The result is, it eats up your neurotransmitters, the little chemicals in your brain that allow one neuron to spark off another and generally make stuff happen. I’m not an expert on the physics of magic… I’m a street mage, so I’ve had no formal training… but I do know that if I work too much magic, too closely together, my mind feels like I’ve been awake for a couple of months straight.

 
You can try to prop yourself up with caffeine or other stimulants. A lot of those work by basically keeping your neurotransmitters from disappearing too fast. Or, you can mega-dose certain vitamins that your body uses to make those neurotransmitters in the first place.

  But really, those are temporary patches. What you really need, what you can’t put off forever, is sleep. Good old-fashioned sleep.

  That’s what I needed after the craziness at the mall. With all that gunfire and magefire flying around, and those giant, freaky two-headed dogs that Cass called hell hounds running around biting the crap out of everyone… well, there was a lot of work for a Healer to do.

  I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve got pretty good endurance for a mage, but even deep reserves run out eventually. I lost count of how many people I put back together at the mall. I hadn’t had to fix that many wounds so quickly since the massacre at Trubuilt prison that got me pulled into all this in the first place.

  What it all added up to was, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t see straight. I needed to sleep for about seventy hours straight; at least, that’s what it felt like. I needed a big ol’ comfy bed and peace and quiet.

  Of course, I had none of those things. First off, I didn’t really have a bed. Not yet. I’d just gotten my apartment and hadn’t had a chance to move any furniture in yet.

  Not to mention, I didn’t actually have any furniture to begin with. Consequences of a vagabond life followed by a stretch in prison, I suppose.

  Anyway, the end result was, I was temporarily using an air mattress until I could get around to finding a real one. In fact, that coming weekend, I was supposed to have an official house warming party where I finally got around putting down some roots by acquiring some heavy wooden objects to sit and eat and sleep on.

  Lack of a bed wasn’t the only challenge. By the time I got home, it was mid-day, and there was plenty of light coming in through the windows along with the normal noise and bustle of a city in the early afternoon.

  Despite all that, I still passed out cold on that air mattress almost as soon as I got home. And when I did wake up, it was a slow, dragging, drawn-out process. I didn’t jump up in one go; my brain left the land of slumber practically kicking and screaming.

  It was loud voices that woke me. My neighbors.

  It wasn’t the first time the combination of their loud voices and the apartment building’s thin walls combined to jolt me out of a restful sleep, and I’d only been there for a few days at that point. In fact, the very first night I’d spent in my apartment, they woke me up at 2 a.m. with some sort of argument about whose turn it was to do the dishes or some such domestic squabble.

  The worst part about being forced to overhear someone else’s conversation through thin walls is that you can’t quite make out most of the words. That makes your brain strain even harder to try to hear and make sense of it all, which wakes you up that much more. I took to running a little fan by my bed in an attempt to cover up their marital spats with a little white noise. I had mixed results.

  So you’ll have to forgive me for being a little snippy about my neighbors. When you’re exhausted and are forced to wake up too soon, you end up feeling almost the same as if you had a bad hangover. And that’s how I felt when my neighbors woke me up after the fight at the mall; my head ached dully and my eyes almost felt like they’d been scooped out with a spoon.

  I groaned and went to switch on my little fan, but pretty quickly, it became evident that this conversation wasn’t about something as trivial as the dishes. It had a different tone to it; rather than two people re-hashing the same complaints about the same old irritations that had built up over years of marriage, this sounded more urgent, more immediate, more desperate.

  “…have to do something!” I heard the wife’s voice say through the wall.

  “Like what? I’m not a…” the husband’s voice said, before lowering and becoming muffled and lost.

  I sat up and scratched at my face. I was thirsty anyway, so I fumbled my way out of the squishy grip of the air mattress and stumbled toward my kitchen.

  More sounds, now, but not from the couple next door. This was from outside. Car alarms were going off here and there; scattered, but more than only one or two… enough that it caught my attention as being strange.

  Then, there was yelling and shouting out on the street. I got up on my tip-toes to try to see what was going on outside the kitchen window, but that window pretty much has nothing but a view of the apartment building on the other side of the alley, so no dice.

  That’s when the power cut out. When you’re used to the lights always being there for you, a flick of the switch away, and then suddenly, they’re all gone, it’s jarring. There’s a few seconds where you think to yourself, what happened, and then another couple of seconds where you kind of stand there like a dummy, waiting to see if the gods of electricity or elves or whoever it is that makes the lights work, fixes the problem right away, or if you actually need to fumble around and find a flashlight.

  Well, the lights didn’t come back on. And, I knew it wasn’t only my building, because no light came in from the street lights outside, so whatever took out the electricity, took it out on the whole block, at least.

  My cell phone was on the counter nearby, and it had a little built in itty-bitty flashlight as one of its apps, so I scooped it up and looked at it. No service. That was weird, too.

  Then, the yelling and shouting outside turned into screaming.

  Oh, boy. It looked like nap time was definitely over for Jolly.

  I was still dressed from earlier… I hadn’t even taken the time to take my shoes off before passing out on the air mattress… so I went to my front door and opened it, peeking out into the hallway. About the same time, my noisy neighbor poked his head out of his front door as well, shining a flashlight around the hallway, and we met each other’s gaze.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “People are going nuts or something. Some kind of riot or crazy flash mob or something.”

  A few years back, the city had run into some problems with idiots arranging via the internet to all show up in numbers and cause trouble at such and such a place and such and such a time. The trend was called a “flash mob” and thankfully died out quickly.

  I’d only been working with Cass and her team for a few months, but already, I’d picked up a few habits and instincts. Top of the list was, I no longer believed in coincidence.

  Nothing but peace and quiet for months… well, not counting the late night wake-ups from my neighbors... and now, just as Kel starts up the Crazy Parade again, now there’s a disturbance outside, at the same time as the power goes out? Something was definitely up.

  I stepped all the way into the hallway. “Did you see anything?”

  “Not much,” he said, also stepping into the hallway to meet me. “I was on my way home from work, and…”

  He paused as another door opened in our hallway and a curious head peeked out. Once she saw that we were just two dudes having a civil conversation and not crazed killers, she came out into the dark hallway to join us.

  My other neighbors on the floor must’ve heard it, as well, because that seemed to be a signal for everyone who was already home from work to come out into the hallway and compare notes. There were six or seven of us, kind of nodding awkwardly towards each other in our collective flashlight beams, most of us not having any idea who anybody’s name was and feeling a little dumb for never having met our neighbors before today.

  “Donald,” my noisy neighbor from next door introduced himself, and before I had the chance to reciprocate, one of my other neighbors chimed in.

  “Do you know what’s happening out there?”

  “I just woke up,” I said, adding after some of these fine hard working folks gave me the hairy eyeball, “because I was at the thing at the mall earlier today.”

  “I heard about that,” a young lady from dow
n the hall said. “Oh, my God! You were there?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m with the FBI, so…”

  That was probably a mistake to say. As soon as those words fell out of my big mouth, everybody stopped talking to each other and started grabbing my arms and peppering me with questions.

  “You’re an FBI agent?”

  “So you know what’s going on?”

  “Yeah, what’s going on?”

  “Who are these people? Why are they…”

  “Everybody, everybody!” I said. “I just woke up. I have no idea what is going on out there. You folks have seen more than me, so…”

  Right then, there was loud crashing sound as the doors from the stairwell flew open. My apartment building was only three stories high, and didn’t have an elevator, only a wide stairwell that led to the front door. At each floor, there was a set of double doors that let you out from the stairwell into the hallway.

  Anyway, the double doors on our floor flew open with a loud crash. Some guy who looked like he’d been beaten all day long burst through the open doors, looking around wildly in the flashlight beams everybody pointed at him.

  One glance, and I knew it was a ghoul. After seeing about a zillion of them a few months back at the prison, I could pick out a ghoul from a mile away. Those all-black eyes, the talons for fingertips, and the weird way they kind of loped along when they ran… talk about pattern recognition. Ghouls really stand out in a crowd.

  This ghoul took all of half a second to look around the hallway before it spotted us. We were all standing there like dummies, staring at the ghoul in mostly confusion, when it lowered its shoulders and charged us.

  I’d love to tell you that I immediately fell into some sort of Chuck Norris karate stance or something and met that thing head on. That’s not what happened.

  In the last four months or so since the prison, Cass and Dread had been pretty insistent that I train with guns and self-defense moves, and it wasn’t that I hadn’t been paying attention, it was that all of that training seemed to evaporate in an instant once I saw that ghoul. I’m not saying I bitched up. I grew up in a rough neighborhood with brothers and so I was somewhat used to being around violence, but when you get taken by surprise like that, it’s human nature to revert to the most base level of instinct.