by Sean Shake
“Not so tough when you’re not ambushing someone are you?” I said to the crowd.
The two closest—Hunter’s attackers—both lunged at me, one a cheetah-like creature, the other, one that looked very much like a snake.
Before I could cut its head off, the snake latched onto my right forearm and then wrapped its tail around my leg, pulling my right arm and pinning it against my body.
I moved my wrist to slash at the snake, but it was not in range of my blade, even with its new length.
The cheetah leapt on me, and I blocked with my left arm—with my shield—trying to keep it away, trying not to let it knock me over.
Then—sensing weakness—my earlier attackers, the ones who had been watching, decided to join in.
A scorpion the size of a dog (or a child—dear God don’t let it be a child) skittered toward me and lanced its stinger into my left leg, the one the snake wasn’t wrapped around.
While the bear’s claw hadn’t pierced my skin, that stinger did. I felt a wave of cold agony go through me as the poison was injected into my body, and I thought of the fact, or the old wives’ tale, about baby scorpions not being able to control how much venom they inject.
Then something bit into my shoulder from behind, and I heard Hunter scream again.
The scorpion lashed out once more, this time getting my lower abdomen, and that icy pain went through me for a second time—guess it hadn’t used all its venom after all—though this time it felt more like terror. It became a struggle to keep my feet, to not let them pile atop me and take me to the ground, where I would surely be devoured.
Where I would surely die.
I can’t go out like this, I thought, hazily, sweating from the exertion, and from the poison coursing through my veins. I can’t die, I can’t let them down. I can’t let Hunter, and Abigail, and her grandparents die.
I can’t let Emma die.
But what did it matter anyway?
We were all going to die one day. This was a good a time as any.
Did it really matter when you clocked out? There was always more to do and more to see. So when was enough, enough?
Now, a voice in my head said. Now is. Just give in.
Everything ended the same. In death and destruction. In forgetting. In turning to dust.
This was my end.
More creatures piled atop me, and I finally went to the ground with the weight of them, no longer able to hold myself up, their attacks increasingly getting through, tearing into my flesh, my muscles.
Something clamped around my throat and bit in.
It hadn’t pierced the flesh there yet, but I could tell it was soon going to.
It was getting hard to breathe.
Over half my body was completely numb. All I could feel was my upper body from around my chest to my head, and then my right arm, my hand, my fist.
The blade that sat uselessly by my side, the snake still latched on to my forearm, though unable—for now—to pierce my skin, unable to shoot its venom into me, to add to that which was already doing its dirty work inside my body.
Venom that would surely be my demise.
I couldn’t see Hunter, but I imagined she was being torn apart, was already dead.
I didn’t hear her screaming anymore.
And soon I would hear the splintering of the cellar doors, then the screams of Emma and Abigail and her grandparents.
They would all die horrible deaths, and it would be because of me.
No Gage, they won’t die. They will be transformed.
Action, not reaction.
Don’t let others control you, Gage. Never let the enemy dictate the terms of battle, never let them control a situation.
You fight, Gage. You fight no matter what. No matter how stacked against you the odds are. People usually give up when things seem hopeless, that’s why they lose, that’s why they die. Not because they’re physically overpowered, but because they’re mentally overpowered. Because the collision of wills results in theirs losing. Their will is defeated, not their body.
Never let your will be—
Shut up old man, I thought harshly as I felt the teeth around my neck begin to pierce my flesh.
I relaxed my fist, my blade disappearing, and then felt the snake’s fangs finally pierce my arm and inject its venom into me.
That was fine. That was okay. We all had to die.
This was as good a way as any to go out.
Is it, Gage? Why do you give up so easily?
Act, don’t react.
Never let your will be defeated, Gage.
You are neither warrior nor great.
You’re right about that, old man, I thought.
My entire body was numb now. I couldn’t feel anything.
If there had been a hope of me fighting them off, getting a last surge of willpower, it was gone now.
‘Be the sword and shield,’ Gabriel had told me.
But how could I be the sword and shield, when they were so small?
‘Be the sword and shield,’ he repeated in my memory.
Be the sword and shield? But I wasn’t the sword and shield. I had a sword and shield.
Be the sword… and… shield.
I felt something again, in my chest.
It burned, and I thought of the stone I had swallowed. That mysterious, prismatic thing Gabriel had entrusted to me with his dying breath.
The teeth around my neck punctured fully.
I felt blood spurt out of me.
Then I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized they’d been closed.
It was dark and hard to see, just a blur of animalistic bodies above me.
How could I be the sword and shield? The creator… No, not the creator. The defender, and the destroyer.
That’s what Gabriel had said. Or what he had been going to say.
But I had neither defended, nor destroyed successfully.
Defend, I thought. Resist. I had been giving in.
Yes, give in. It will be easier. You can rest. Just—
Never let your will be defeated, Gage. It’s the one thing no one can take from you. Not unless you let them
Fine old man, but it would do no good.
I took a breath, and the thing inside my chest burned like hellfire.
Then I clenched my fists.
40
Nothing happened.
See, old ma—
Then I realized I could move: I had clenched my fists.
With this realization, feeling—feeling that had begun with the burning in my chest—started to return to my body and I felt fangs and stingers and teeth retreat, forced out from my flesh. Claws that had been digging in, losing their purchase.
Feeling returned to the rest of my body, and along with it, agony.
I ignored it, and focused.
There were creatures all around me. The snake was still on my arm, but it no longer seemed to have such a good grip.
I pulled my right arm hard against it, and felt its teeth slide against my skin, unable to break through.
My fist was clenched so hard it hurt. I could feel my fingernails digging into the skin of my palm—something which I’d heard people describe, though never before experienced.
Now could I see in my mind’s eye the blood flowing from my palms, my own nails able to pierce my flesh like some kind of kryptonite.
But I could also see the blade coming from my fist.
There was a yelp of pain as my shadow blade connected with something.
I traced a slow, agonizing path through its flesh, until finally whatever it was had had enough and leapt away, the weight on my right leg now partially gone, though the snake was still wrapped around it, refusing to let go as its buddies tried unsuccessfully to bite and claw and pierce their way into me, shredding my ninja suit, but not my skin.
I tilted my head down, barely able to see past the creature that was still latched onto my neck, despite its fangs no longer puncturing me. I moved my fist down,
trying to angle it toward where I felt the snake wrapped around my leg.
Suddenly, as though sensing what I intended to do—maybe not so dumb after all—the tension from my right arm and leg released as the snake hissed and let go.
It immediately readjusted itself, this time wrapping around my other leg, but now my right arm was completely free, and I swung it wildly, getting a chorus of cries, but I felt the teeth and claws and stingers pushing back into me.
I had pushed them out, I had resisted them, but nothing could last forever. Nothing was truly immovable. And now they were gaining ground once more. And I felt that if I let them, I would not be able to fight back again, not be able to push them out one more time, that I had used all my willpower, and this was my only chance, my last chance.
I concentrated on my left hand, trying to make the shield into a weapon, having the sensation that I should be able to do so, but it stayed a shield, at least as far as I could discern, though I couldn’t see it.
I waived my right arm wildly, getting hisses and cries and chitterings as I connected with the beasts atop me, but they kept coming back, like in that story where the man is alone and surrounded by rats, and they retreat every time he yells and waves the torch at them. But they grow bolder as they see that though he is much larger and stronger than they, he can’t possibly fight off all of them at once. They dart in for little nips, then back away, out of his reach, out of the cast of the torch and back into the shadows, until finally one crawls, unseen, up a wall and leaps onto the man’s head, distracting him, sacrificing itself, so the rest of its brethren can set upon him; a thousand tiny creatures devouring this giant.
I tried to sit up, to push the things off of me, but they were too heavy. I kept my right arm moving, not stopping for fear that something would latch onto it, and then I would be done for.
Don’t let others control you, Gage.
Action, not reaction.
I calmed myself, then stabbed through an eye socket of the thing that was on my throat.
It released my neck and cried out, falling away from me.
Now I could my move head and see, but then before I could do anything else the snake launched itself from my left leg, filling the vacancy and wrapping its tail around my throat.
Don’t react, Gage. Action, not reaction.
What the hell could I do besides react? I had all these things atop me, and I couldn’t seem to fight them off. I was fighting a war of attrition, and I was losing.
Action. What would be action? How could I possibly act, do something that wasn’t simply a reaction to their actions?
What were they doing? What was their goal?
To kill me? Was that what they were trying to do?
No, they were trying to convert me. To turn me into one of them, for whatever reason.
So how could I stop them? How could I prevent them from attaining their goal, prevent them—
The idea seemed crazy, but it was the only thing I could think of, the only thing that wasn’t a reaction.
Yes, a voice in my mind said, urging me.
I bent my arm, bringing my loose fist to my throat, but not tightening it, the blade not yet formed. If I squeezed, my shadow blade would shoot out from my fist and through my throat, perhaps killing me.
Certainly angering the snake that was wrapped around my neck.
But was that a reaction as well? Killing myself?
It was, wasn’t it? Because I wouldn’t normally kill myself.
No, I wanted to live.
I withdrew my hand, tightened my fist, and once more started moving it around to prevent anything from latching on.
Though everything now seemed aware of what that blade could do, and stayed away from it, whenever it got close, dashing away, before latching back on to me.
I wondered how Hunter was faring, wondered if she was even still alive.
Before the snake and cheetah had latched onto me—and oh how I would’ve liked for it to be just a snake and a cheetah now. How easy that seemed now to take out. Just two, I could do that no problem—she’d had chunks missing, her wings shattered, but she had still been alive. Was she now? Her screams had stopped what seemed ages ago.
But I had myself to worry about first.
I suddenly wondered if they had broken into the basement, or if I had distracted them all.
I hadn’t heard the doors shatter, hadn’t heard the screams of my friends being eaten alive, being turned into monsters. But then perhaps I wouldn’t have, my mind had been elsewhere.
Action, not reaction.
Yeah I got that old man. How about some better clues as to what the hell I’m supposed to do?
How could I act, but not react?
Things were starting to break through my skin again, just barely, and I clenched tighter, trying to resist, my airway closing as the snake tightened around my neck.
It was getting hard to breathe, and I felt the blood flow to my brain decrease.
The snake hissed, as though it knew it was winning.
“Fuck you,” I hissed back, though it came out as, “Fffkch ffu.”
I thought back to the hospital, to the infirmary where this all started, to the first of them I’d seen: the eyeless guard.
I thought of him tilting his head as he wrapped his fingers around my neck and squeezed, the confusion I thought he felt at not being able to squeeze the life out of me, to easily pop my head off like squeezing a banana from its peel.
The eyeless one, with the reptilian thing oozing out of its right boot.
With that hideous blackness behind its vertical eye-slit, hiding something eldritch.
But these weren’t like that.
No, these weren’t like that. The hellspawns, the animals, the terminators.
These weren’t hellspawns, these were animals.
But I didn’t see how that helped me.
The snake tightened, and again my mind went back to the infirmary, to the eyeless guard, those slits focusing on me.
There was something there. What was it?
Better figure it out soon, Gage, or you’ll be too dead to have the chance to.
I went through it again in my mind: Trying to strangle me, being unable. Stabbing its eye. Its surprise.
Yes, something like that. Get them to react to me instead of me reacting to them.
Something pierced through my left leg. I couldn’t tell what. A tooth, a stinger—I had no idea, and it didn’t matter.
Get them to react, get them on the defensive.
But how?
How could I make them react?
Flailing around or trying to kill myself, that was me reacting to them.
It’s what they wanted me to do, or at least, if not wanted, what they expected of me on some primitive level: to panic when attacked.
But that was reaction.
And I wouldn’t react. I wouldn’t panic.
I breathed out forcefully, clearing my mind, and focused on the present moment.
Focused inward, on the sensations all over my body. Felt each and every individual tooth and claw and stinger and fang.
Then I picked a target.
I stopped flailing my right arm and focused to my left. Something was latched on to my elbow on that side.
My vision was blocked by the beasts trying to tear me apart, so I closed my eyes and imagined my surroundings in my mind, then slowly moved my right hand toward whatever had my left elbow, my fist open, the blade not formed, not giving them any cause for alarm with my slow, unthreatening movement.
Then my fingers brushed against something and I clenched my fist.
Whatever had been biting me there let go as it died. I moved my hand toward it and felt its blood go up my arm.
It made its way past the snake around my neck, seeming to ignore it, again into my mouth and nose and eyes and ears.
I felt the change, and the creatures atop me retreated, as though they sensed something had shifted.
As though they sens
ed they’d ceased to be the predators, and become the prey.
41
Staying calm, ignoring their flailing, their pathetic attacks that were no more than distraction, I methodically dispatched each creature, growing stronger as I did, more easily resisting their bites and scratches and fangs until all that was left was the snake around my neck.
I sat up, pushing now-human bodies off of me. At my feet, I saw a small naked body, maybe the size of a dog, but which was not a dog.
I turned my attention away from this, reached up with my left hand, and dug my fingers into the snake around my neck.
It tried to tighten, but I worked my fingers beneath it and pulled and pulled, and then when I had it far enough away, I made a fist and lowered the blade toward it.
It instantly released, somehow again sensing what I was about to do, and thrashed in my grip.
But I didn’t let go. Instead I ran my blade through it, severing it in half.
It screamed an eerily human scream and fell to the ground in two pieces.
I watched it writhe for a moment, but then remembered what it would turn into, what it would turn back into, and put it out of its misery.
I watched its animalness pour off it in a ooze of red, revealing the pale dead flesh of the human beneath.
It had been a young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and she now lay severed before me, the top and bottom half of her body separated, a gash in her skull from my blade.
I looked away, thinking of the Garden of Eden, and thinking it must’ve been a bitter man who’d written that story; someone scorned.
I stood there for a moment, my ninja suit in tatters, clinging to my body in scraps and shreds, revealing dried, caked blood beneath.
But despite all this, I felt good.
I felt powerful.
And when I made a fist again, the blade on my hand was no longer the size of a letter opener, but the size of a broadsword, a good five feet long.
And when I clenched my left fist, my shield was no longer a dinner plate, but now a proper shield.
I had a brief moment to wonder how big the two could get, but then a rustling from behind me drew my attention and I spun, blade at the ready.
The nine-foot tall lizard was there, missing an eye.
