“Who are you?” Kerri asked.
“Dunia Morris?!” Andy answered.
“Oh, Deboën’s fine,” Dunia dismissed with a wave. “Whatever.”
“It was her!” Nate shouted from his corner, still tied to the beam, red with anger and possibly near-suffocation, but mostly anger at the woman strutting around the room. “She brought us here! She needed us to come!”
“Yup. Guilty,” she said, resting gracefully on the workbench.
“We are the pentacle! Not this one, the whole island—the four of us and her, we made the pentacle! She took our blood signatures thirteen years ago! The tooth was Peter’s,” he told Kerri. “And she had your hair too, from the barbershop! And Andy’s blood! And I haven’t been to the rocks, but I bet there’s something of mine too!”
“Used gum and saliva,” Dunia clarified. “Good thing you’re good little campers and dispose of your trash properly. Mother Earth thanks you.”
“But…What did she…Fuck, why?” Andy settled on.
Dunia drew her cigarette case from her leather pants, opened it, and produced a cherry lollipop. She put it in her mouth and shrugged coquettishly, grin-biting the stick.
“Because the ritual requires five,” Nate narrated for her. “Like the glyphs at the bottom of the mines said: five priests to open the gate and release Thtaggoa. Only we weren’t priests. She just stole samples from the four of us to form the pentacle and then she lured us to the isle! We weren’t meddling kids; we were pawns. She probably caused the tremor that made our boat capsize, so we would be trapped here and be part of the ritual without us knowing.”
Dunia leisurely paced the room, entertained by his rancor.
“You were bound to come,” she said. “How could Blyton Hills’ teen sleuths fail to visit the local haunted house?”
“And she would’ve gotten away with it,” Nate resumed, “if I hadn’t resurrected her father by mistake!”
Dunia stopped on her feet, wincing like the record had scratched.
“What?”
She eyed the gang as if trying to identify the smart one and despairing.
“God, okay. Sorry. My fault. Sometimes I forget I’m dealing with the Blyton Summer Detective Club, not the FBI.”
“I read your spell book,” Nate told her. “I raised his avatar and it used us!”
“No, you didn’t,” Dunia said with a scowl, at the same time that Tim began growling at the door.
“I did! I resurrected Deboën,” Nate cried.
“Deboën wasn’t dead!” she snarled. “I am Damian Deboën!”
Tim burst into riotous barks, oblivious to the mainstream focus of attention—the little owl-eyed woman parading among them.
“You…what?!” Kerri half-phrased.
“That’s impossible,” moaned Nate. “I brought Deboën back!”
“Please,” Dunia droned. “Avatars and resurrection—not the same thing. Resurrection is impossible. Believe me. (Pointing at Peter’s corpse wrapped in black on the floor.) That’s the closest I ever got, and he was little more than a puppet.”
NATE: But I saw your book. I read the spell!
DUNIA: Don’t flatter yourself. You read my notes.
NATE: I saw smoke rising from an urn on that bench!
DUNIA: Said the kids who spent their childhood running from losers in costumes.
NATE: We have all the symptoms you listed: the nightmares, the bitterness, the feeling of being lost!
DUNIA: I just described any twenty-five-year-old ever, you self-centered twit! (Gracefully turning, leaving Nate to shatter behind her back.) I’m afraid the only evil that possessed you was Generation X. It’s a shame, really, what youth has come to. When I was your age…(Pause. She pops the candy out of her mouth, tastes her own lips, then retreats.) Bah, forget it. You wouldn’t even believe where I was when I was your age.”
She drifted toward Andy, stroking the Weimaraner’s back en passant. He was still growling threats at the door. And the worse part was something was threatening back from the other side.
Nate, Kerri, and Andy stood wordless. Night was falling apart.
“The world has changed a lot,” Dunia went on through a deep sigh. “But people are the same. A few keep pulling the wagon of progress while the rest just truck along. Always the same ignorant, pitchfork-wielding mob. Easily scared. Easily cheated. They started growing suspicious once, so I chose to leave and come back as my son. Oh, nothing noteworthy—it’s been done before. But two decades later, they start harboring suspicions again—you’d almost think they’re getting wiser. So I try the same trick with a flourish: I die and come back as my daughter, and voilà! Cheated again! They don’t even know how easily you can do the switch today!”
She stopped in front of Andy, scanned her from bottom to top.
“You might be interested—ask your doctor.”
Andy unexpectedly brought the shotgun between them, hardly restraining her trigger finger.
“I’m gonna give you something to ask your doctor about, bitch.”
KERRI: NO! Andy, don’t shoot!
Dunia put the lollipop back in her mouth and smiled, watching Andy scourging her brain for a valid reason not to open fire.
“Oxygen,” Kerri cued. “The air in this room is saturated with oxygen. If you light a spark it could blow up.”
Dunia yielded to a chortle.
ANDY: You’re kidding.
KERRI: No. Oxygen is flammable. We can’t shoot in here.
The chortle paved the way to frank, disrespectful laughter.
“Weee! Look how everything falls into place!” Dunia said, delighted at the infinite hatred under Andy’s brow. “C’mon, you gotta see the humor in this!”
On a side note, the door came off its hinges and slammed on the floor.
Andy immediately switched targets and Kerri ran to pull Tim out of the horde’s reach at the sight of an imprecise number of wheezers staggering in from the staircase.
But to everyone’s surprise, they stopped. The lead one dropped onto four limbs right outside the doorway, its third pair writhing in the air like the forearms of a praying mantis. It hissed at Tim, the dog barking his heart out in hard-learned hate.
“There they are.” Dunia smirked, swaying with her pirate cutlass. She walked idly toward the door as if to greet them, and the first one took a step forward and shrieked at her. Dunia looked on like she would at a yapping poodle.
“Interesting vermin, aren’t they?” she remarked. “They’ll try to eat you, but they don’t actually need to eat. In fact, they don’t even need to breathe. They’ve got these gas bladders or something they can fill with air and waltz in here. You’ll see; they’ll come in in a minute. (To Kerri.) You should write a paper on them.”
Kerri was busy enough holding Tim back, just as Tim was holding the most daring of the creatures at bay.
“The first time I tried the ritual, in nineteen forty-nine,” Dunia once-upon-a-timed, back to her easy-minded ambling, “I was young and reckless. I’d just found the way to the underground city after searching for it for like a hundred years; I had performed the proper steps down there, knocked on the door like the book says; everything was ready to wake up that sleepyhead from his millennial slumber. I knew the ritual called for five officiants, but I reckoned a well-versed expert like myself would be worth five amateurs, so I thought I could pull it off by myself.” She scoffed, inviting some sympathy. “Boy, was I wrong! I failed to wake the big one up, but these pesky little buggers took over the house and nearly smothered me.”
The amphibian section of her audience raised a liquid hiss at the mention.
“I lived, all right, but they’d almost destroyed my house; I would have to face some tough questions and it wasn’t like I had many allies in town. So I decided it was time to change generations again and faked my own death in the fire.”
“But they buried you,” Kerri objected.
“They buried some charred corpse,” Dunia brushed off. “If you nosed about my basement, you’ll have perceived human samples is not something we suffer a scarcity of in this house. I had left the instructions in my will and dug my grave in advance. You’ve been inside; all I did was seal the entrance into the caverns: they dumped the body, threw a marble slab over it, and moved on—hurtfully swiftly, I must say. But whatever; dying is easy. The tricky part was to return as my daughter.”
“You…killed your own daughter?” Andy asked.
Dunia stopped again in front of her and gave a disappointed moue.
“No,” Kerri second-guessed. “You never had a daughter.”
“Thank you,” Dunia approved. “It was all a strategy to solve my image problem in town when I first became Daniel. My wife was a concession, and my daughter was a ruse.”
“But someone must have seen the child,” Nate complained.
“Oh, of course they saw an infant. My wife’s daughter born out of wedlock, her oh-so-shameful scarlet letter. But hey, I had no trouble calling her mine! I pretended to mail her off to a boarding school as if she were my own blood! Luckily she actually died in infancy—those places are expensive.”
“You supplanted a teenager?” Kerri asked, trying to navigate through all the other objections arising.
“Yes. I mean, you’re what? Twenty-five? You could still look twenty-one with the right makeup. Considering my real age, taking thirty years off your skin is basic magic. So, yes: new gender, new age…People still detested the family name, but I needed my claim on my old property. Luckily, my gutless wife/mother had offed herself already. I had to live in the house on Owl Hill and the townsfolk were as friendly as ever, but at least they stayed away from here. And I could come and go as I pleased through the gold mine. So I just had to sit and find a way to circumvent that stupid five-officiant thing. And then in ’seventy-seven, because I’d been such a good girl for so many years, you came along”—she grinned, spreading her arms to kindly embrace them all—“the Blyton Summer Detective Club.”
Andy awkwardly acknowledged the reference as she finally untied Nate, side-eyeing the creatures that were gathering inside the doorway.
“Use the gun,” she told Nate, giving him his rifle and switching to Pierce herself. “Just don’t fire it.”
“ ‘Blyton Hills’ heroes’!” Dunia quoted happily. “When you started building a name for yourselves, I knew you’d eventually visit my mansion. All I needed to do was start a rumor in the right circles. Rumors lure gold diggers like Wickley, and Wickley lured you. As soon as you arrived that summer I started arranging things. I got the jock’s tooth from the dental clinic, your pretty red hair from the barbershop. (Re: Andy and Nate.) You two were a little more difficult, until you came to the lake and I swept your campsite while you were away. That was enough to build the isle-wide pentacle. All I had to do now was wait for you all to enter into it, which you did some days later…although I rocked your boat a little to persuade you.”
“And so we became the other four officiants,” Nate summed up, his knuckles white around a rifle gripped like a baseball bat.
“Nobody said that the participants had to be willing,” Dunia argued through a shrug. “I mean, when the rules call for pentacles and incantations, you know they are going to be pretty flexible, don’t you think?”
Andy swung the pickax at a skulking wheezer, making it recoil and sneer at her in a vicious teeth display.
“Wait, so…you were here in the mansion that night?” Kerri asked Dunia.
“Of course. I’ve got my safe room underground; maybe you’ve seen it. Oh, I didn’t mean to harm you, really! It just happens that as soon as you go through the first motions in the ritual, Thtaggoa stirs in his sleep, the ground shakes, and these buffed-up gremlins crawl up and go all Night of the Living Dead on your posterior. So while you lot were yelling and running all over my house, and incidentally causing a hell of a mess, I was down there going through the ritual, and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that meddling kid Thomas Wickley!”
Andy and Kerri and Nate turned at the name, ignoring the knife-clawed needle-teethed hordes of hell.
“Who?!”
“Yes!” she said, feeling her indignation supported. “Can you believe it? That sad old jerk-off finally found the way to my treasury and walked right into the ritual while I was in the middle of the aklo—the most glorious moment! Of course he got scared—I’ve been told before I’m on the theatrical side when I summon. So he ran away upstairs and fell right into that Wile E. Coyote contraption you call a trap, but by then he had led the vermin to my safe room, and I had to escape through the mine, thus stepping out of the pentacle, and…Basically that asshole ruined everything!”
A wheezer chose that exact moment to step forward and hiss in a particularly nasty way at the hostess, to which Dunia responded by swinging her sword at the provoker and decapitating it as cleanly as such a thing can be done. The severed head rolled to Kerri’s feet, who instinctively kicked it away.
The headless body was still writhing on the floor as Dunia continued, now pointing the black-stained blade at the kids. “You’d think I could just start again, but noooo! Turns out once the ritual has started, it can only be finished or undone by the same five officiants! (Falsetto.) ‘Ooh, look at me, I’m the Necronomicon, you must follow my rules!’ ” she mocked. “And by the time the creatures wormed back into their holes, your army friend and the sheriff were poking around on the isle, reporters were knocking on my door in Owl Hill, and soon after that summer was over. You kids left and didn’t come back.”
The next line she delivered in a serious, almost sympathetic smirk—the closest thing to respect the kids would get from her.
“Oh, but I knew you would come back. You’d seen too much to just turn your back on it. You couldn’t just smile it off and pretend forever. You were broken. You had to come back.”
Her eyes strayed for a moment to the dead human body on the floor.
“Of course I began to worry when this one killed himself, so I went to California and got him. I pulled him out of the grave. Did my best to make him pass for living. Fortunately, his death was the triggering event that set the rest of you in motion. Now, you are all here. I had him posing as the villain just to keep you off my back. He wrote the messages; I dictated them. Maybe I misjudged you there; you would have obeyed the messages like idiots thirteen years ago; not now. But whatever. You’re here now. All four of you.”
She saber-pointed at Nate, a wicked smile on her white face. “You scampered off a little too early.” Then, at the girls: “Oh, but don’t be hard on him. He came back. He tampered a little with my pentacle too, so I had Dead Pete apprehend him and fix the damage. All systems are go!”
Kerri, munching through the lengthy villain monologue, was only left to ask: “But…why? Why do you want some alien god to rise and end the world?”
Dunia paused, surprised, and carefully observed the question.
“Oh. Well, I don’t know. Same reason you want to open a frog or split an atom. I just…(Shrugging.) Fuck, I just want to see it!”
She paced around them once more, intimately proud of the unskimped attention.
“There’s not that many things I’ve got left to see in this world, you know? Shit, when you’re writing fantasy erotica for a living, you’re really scraping the bottom of the bucket list!”
“Well,” Andy intervened, stepping forward, “let me help you put an end to your boredom.”
In a lightning-fast movement she drove the pickax right at Dunia’s neck, stopping it just short of puncturing the jugular. Dunia stood still, the cold steel point perched on her shoulder like a skeleton sparrow.
“For thirteen years I’ve been hiding from this,” Andy uttered through gritted teeth, an opportune slash of hair darkening her face. “For thirteen years you haunted me. You ruined the better half of my life. But that’s over. I’m going to beat you. I’m going to feed you to these goddamn things. And I’m going to see you dead once and for all before you have time to complete the fucking ritual.”
Even the bad guys fell silent.
Dunia stayed in position, head held high, neck tendons inching away from the sharp instrument pointed at them, mouth closed tight, struggling to placate a mischievous smile.
ANDY: (Understanding.) You finished it already, didn’t you?
DUNIA: (Giving up, chuckling.) Please! Why would I even be telling you all this otherwise?
A wheezer ruled that enough time had been wasted on uneventful dialogue and charged at Andy from behind. A shout from Kerri warned her to spin and duck, dodging an eviscerating slash, and then she blocked the other claw with her left as she dug her knee on the floor and struck upward with the pickax, nailing the point through the creature’s chin and into the palate.
Two more jumped into the ring, Tim immediately catching one in midair and pounding it to the floor, Nate delaying the second’s attack by batting its head with a Browning nine iron while Kerri jumped to the forefront to fend off the hissing peanut gallery still sitting it out and Andy rolled back onto her feet, struggled to yank the pickax out of the dead creature, finally pried it out, along with its head, just in time to swing at a fourth one coming out of nowhere.
The wheezer took the hit, staggered for a second, unharmed from the torn-off head corking the point of the tool, then shrieked into Andy’s face. It was its last action before Kerri and Nate clubbed it at the same time, Tim going for its legs a second later to keep it occupied while Andy stepped on its shoulders, gripped the edges of its lower upper jaw, and twisted its neck.
“Whoa, look at that!” Dunia cheered, along with the rest of the wheezers still waiting by the door. “See? I told you they would get used to the atmosphere in no time! They can hold their breath long enough to disembowel you!”
“We need to get out of here!” Kerri urgently suggested.
“Good luck with that,” Dunia intervened, inviting the kids to peer through the circular windows.
The night had dissolved into white. An Endeish Nothing had erased the lake and the firs and the sky.
“How long can you hold your breath?” Dunia challenged them. “Long enough to reach your car from here?”
“But you will die here too,” Andy told her spitefully.
“Me? I already survived this situation once.”
“I wasn’t talking about the situation, bitch!” she retorted, as she swung the uncapped pickax at her face and Dunia leaped back, amused by the surprise attack. She raised her saber to block the pickax’s comeback, tried to yank it from Andy’s hand, failed, and then took advantage of her rival’s weapon’s unwieldy shortness to hack at her arm. Andy pulled back an inch shy of amputation, the pirate blade missing the bone and slashing cleanly through skin and muscle.
Andy threw out a cry of pain, and in the next breath she retaliated by jumping forward, swinging back vertically then horizontally one, two, three times, forcing Dunia to bend backward and spread her legs for balance, and then, suddenly channeling all of her pain-born energy into her right foot, Andy launched the Tsar Bomba of nutkicks into Dunia’s leather-wrapped groin.
The hit lifted Dunia two feet off the ground.
She landed on all fours, saber still in hand, eyes wide open at the shock, then wider once the pain hit her neuroreceptors.
The room held its breath for a long while, all through that unconfirmed knockout, even after Dunia coughed out her surprise.
And then she scoffed.
“Aw, fffuck!” she puffed through an astonished, astonishing laughter, her hand still shielding the offended area. “God, that was literally below the belt, you stupid cow! What the fuck was that about?!”
The kids remained silent while she caught her breath. Then they turned to Andy for the reply.
“Uh…I was hoping you’d still have your birth genitals.”
Dunia laughed again while she brought herself back on her feet, color flushing back to her cheeks.
“Girl, you’re so adorable,” she said, having more difficulty speaking due to hilarity than fatigue or pain. “I do keep them. Remember the rumor about me being the son of a witch that was supposedly burned at Salem?”
She burst into laughter while the kids queried one another, the realization etching a new age line around their eyes.
“I told you it’s been done before!” she hollered. “Boy, you should see your faces! Gets you every time!”
She laughed for another two seconds before Andy charged at her and she had to parry her off, then lunge back.
Andy stepped back to defend, at the same time checking her six o’clock to find several wheezers ready to jump in, and she rolled out of the way of the first one to let Dunia deal with it while she started to dig for gold on the second and Nate swung his rifle at the third and Kerri lost her rifle to the fourth and Tim dashed to her assistance while the rifle slid across the floor into Andy’s hand, who stood up, flipped it in the air, butt-bashed the wheezer ahead and barrel-stabbed the one behind, and threw the firearm back to Kerri, shouting, “Catch!”
A new throng of slimy, eyeless maniacs avalanched onto the battlefield as Andy gripped Pierce, dove to the ground with a hand anchored on some writhing creature’s face, and merry-go-rounded, slashing wheezers at three o’clock, twelve o’clock, nine o’clock, and finally Dunia at six, who blocked the pickax with her blade down, smiling with joy at the sight of an actual spark from the clashing metal that Andy and Dunia paused to follow throughout its microseconds life span, witnessing how it failed to set the room on fire, and then forgot about it as they engaged again, Andy striking blindly with Pierce, trying to knock Dunia off-balance, Dunia repelling the hits coming faster and faster and hoping for the gliding steel to trigger a new spark until she got tired of waiting and connected a surprise kick at Andy’s nose, time dropping to slo-mo to appreciate the beautifully arcing wake of blood as she backflipped, then speeding up again as Nate dented the butt of his rifle against Dunia’s face and took the opportunity to swing it back at the wheezer charging from behind, and in the same circular motion try to finish off Dunia by hammering the base of her neck, a blow Dunia dodged by rolling away and then using her sword to attempt a twirling moulinet counterattack to the heart that Nate’s ribs barely shielded, forcing him to trip backward over a dead wheezer and allow the actually-not-so-dead body to clamber on him and try to bite his face off, which Tim forbade by leaping onto the creature’s neck while Dunia somersaulted back to her feet in time to deflect Kerri’s rifle swinging her way, only noticing too late that the rifle was a distraction for the knife slicing toward her jugular, forcing her to jump back and lose a heartbeat to recover her balance before ducking under the next blow as she directed her momentum to strike back at Kerri with an angry, vertical hack that the redhead parried with the stock of her rifle, then a slash from left to right that hewed the scalp off a passing wheezer, then finally a kick below the belt at which Kerri’s outraged hair hollered in shame as she crashed into the workbench, her center of gravity on tilt for the crucial instant where Dunia advance-lunged to impale her through her stomach, their eyes locking in midair, Kerri’s suddenly catching the alarm in Dunia’s as she glanced down to notice she had planted her left foot too far ahead and that Andy, lying on the roadkill carpet, was driving Pierce right through Dunia’s leather boot and the floorboards and into the second floor where Dunia’s vintage blood dripped on the heads of the wheezers below turning their eyeless heads up and hallelujahing the red rain in a pitch that could not possibly eclipse Dunia’s bestial, gut-born cry of pain threatening to blow off the ceiling.
Andy grabbed Kerri and kicked a wheezer off Tim and snatched Nate from a one-on-three skirmish, ordering retreat.
“To the walls! Quick!”
They clustered into the hole, Andy shoving the others first as she looked back at the melee in the center of the room. The last sight she ever caught of Dunia Deboën was a terrified black eye trapped in the middle of a nest of slashing, friendly-firing gray limbs, her voice muffled under the dozen creatures fighting for a bite of her flesh.
“You…” her little voice gasped. “It won’t end like this! I swear, Andy Rodriguez, this has just begun!”
Andy slithered into the passageway after the others and tried not to listen to the bone-snapping sounds coming from the attic.
They emerged into the room with the oxygen tanks on the second floor, surprising a single stray creature that faced them and threw the proverbial massacre-promising hiss.
Andy and Nate backswung their firearms like hockey sticks before Kerri mentioned, “It’s okay to shoot now.”
The wheezer grunted a question mark as both flipped the weapons in their hands. The next second, two-thirds of its obliterated body were flying through the broken window in convenient snack-sized chunks for vultures.
Andy led the way through the hole to the next room and down the trapdoor slide. This allowed her to blast away two wheezers that were crawling up the ramp.
They landed softly onto the pile of coal and spine-dangling bodies in the basement.
ANDY: To the mines! We’re going under the lake!
Buried alive under a living mass of sleazy, cold-skinned, frenzy-feeding hellspawn, suffocating under the corrupted air out of their dripping mouths, Dunia lay squirming on the floor, one leg and a torn, bleeding arm defending her vital organs while her other hand, lost amid the pandemonium, scurried blindly among webbed feet and dead bodies in the viscous dark, desperate for a last resource.
And then a brave fingertip reported back to the brain: the touch of ivory.
The scouting hand clutched the pommel of her cutlass and Dunia summoned from her heart, her gut, the house, the isle, and the unnameable powers the final burst of strength necessary to bring the sword home, slashing through every minion in the way. The pile exploded from its core, catapulting mauled, severed, intestine-kiting wheezers through the air as Dunia rose with an ecstatic, life-bearing scream, her sword swaying at lightning speed and splitting the very atoms of oxygen in front of her.
The ridiculously high number of wheezers still able for combat watched mutely and then shrieked in senseless, suicidal joy as Dunia knelt down to yank the pickax from her foot with an appetizing crunch of ground bones, raised her head, eyes devoid of pupils and glowing white, and snarled.
The handles of the pickax and the sword gasped in pain under her grip while she said through a psychotic shark smile: “Come and get it.”
Andy and Kerri and Nate and Tim had stampeded through the lower basement and dove through the hatch to the mines when, as they were reaching the lower end of the winding staircase and facing the tunnel to the Allen stairs, Kerri, carrying the only working flashlight, noticed the relatively improved lighting of the cavern.
And once facing the stairs, she needed only to formally peek down the crevice to find out the reason: what the last time had been a far, picturesque stream of red magma glowing at the bottom of the rift had grown into a river of yellow lava, flowing at whitewater speed not ninety feet below the lower ledge of the crack.
Tim leaned over the edge, saw the fire, unintentionally trod on the first blazing metal step, and yelped.
“Whoever is down there, I think Dunia really pissed him off,” Kerri said.
The stair bridge, temperature aside, looked just like they had left it: no rails, no second-to-top step, quivering, clattering, dying of old age.
“You two first, over the sides,” Andy instructed.
Nate took a deep sulfurous breath and placed his foot on the top step. Every bolt in the structure moaned for euthanasia as he transferred his weight. The thin sheet of iron under his feet and the beams supporting it were the only things separating him from a dip into the three-thousand-degree caldera. The idea that lingering up there for too long might roast him alive prompted him to leap across the gap onto the third step, and then hurry down the middle ones and skip over the last five. Kerri followed his steps, to the letter.
Andy lifted the dog in the air, careful to avoid putting pressure on the green-checkered bandages. Sixty-two pounds.
Tim whimpered increasingly on every other step that Andy leaped on, but fell silent as she just jumped off the middle of the stairs, too scared to even vocalize his impressions for the second it took them to land on solid rock.
“Nice!” Nate said admiringly while Kerri hurried to take the dog into her arms.
As another token of appreciation, a tiny nutcracker noise announced the secession of a large slab of volcanic rock from right under Andy’s feet. Andy leaped from the falling rock and grabbed the ledge, but her fingers slipped in the dust. Gravity claimed her full weight just as Nate miraculously clasped his hand around her outstretched forearm and Kerri dove to catch Nate’s leg and Tim ran to grab Kerri’s foot.
At the other end of that line, Andy hung a few meters above evaporation, sweat sizzling down her back as she looked up and Nate gave her back a smile.
“We’re not splitting up, are we?”
A plethora of besieging Thtaggoalites gathered in the attic and clogged the stairway, eyelessly and brainlessly listening to Dunia Deboën in the center of the floor wasting perfectly good lines on them.
“Come on, you ungrateful bastards! I freed you from hell, I can send you back!”
A wheezer finally replied with a multipurpose, nuance-rich shriek as it ran forward to meet her, leading the final charge.
The foremost one was neatly dodged, a single clean slash through the throat; then followed numbers two and three, who shared a single Zorro cut, but Dunia noticed with surprise that even as the dead piled up, the high morale among the fiends did dwindle not but rather thrived, and soon the eyeless screaming things weren’t coming forth in ones or twos but bumrushing the barricades and climbing over bodies too, and Dunia’s strikes became much wider, splashing black gore right and left, tornadoing on a single foot, her saber ever bringing death, severing arms and legs and necks in whirling, dazzling pirouettes, and stabbing one only to get her pickax stuck inside its chest—she had to use him as a shield to bump her way out of the press, all this while slashing through more wheezers not expecting to be next, prancing impishly on their corpses toward higher ground ahead, leather boot heels squeezing brains out of the skulls of mangled wrecks—and wheezers welcome it and shriek in glee to join the slaughterfest—forcing Dunia to dive into a jungle of claws out to gut her alive and she’s fallen, yet still she just lobs off their legs and they fall to their knees and she rises again and keeps slashing away, and they keep coming roaring clambering piling up, smothering her, reaching her, scratching her, making her bleed, and she knows it, she feels it, lungs wolfing down oxygen, heart pumping at drill speed, muscles overdosing, brain ordering a dash to the left, stab to the right, kick to the stomach, elbow at four o’clock, comeback through the jugular, triple gut combo ahead bonus 10K for style, slice the neck, bash the head, nail the hand, twist inside, eviscerate decapitate mutilate amputate cut it hack it stab it kill it die motherfucker die motherfucker die die die die die die die—
The two-way radio on Nate’s belt was beeping.
“Al!” Nate shouted into the microphone, breath rasping its way through the vocal cords as they all sprinted along the tunnels below the lake. “Al, do you hear me?”
Andy paced down to take the radio from him, pushed him forward. “Cap! We’re underground and heading back to Sentinel Hill! Do you copy, over?”
The radio cracked, but Captain Al’s voice still pushed some words between the noise: “…Andy…and clear…on our way, over.”
“Cap, the isle is infested! Dunia Deboën is there—she’s the necromancer! Repeat, don’t go to the house! Over!”
“…understood…worry…bringing a ship…soon, over.”
“Al, you’re breaking up! Did you just say you’re bringing a boat, over?”
The last message came loud and clear:
“No. I said a ship. Over and out.”
Dunia rolled down from the last mountain of corpses, sinking the pickax into something that gasped, and she found herself unable to take it back. She was beyond extenuation. Beyond ecstasy. Beyond death. But she kept moving.
The penultimate monster still clambered on top of her, missing four out of six limbs, digging its nails into her right arm, snapping its teeth at her turned cheek. She kicked it aside; it bounced back. She ordered her arm to swing the sword at him, and the arm came up empty-handed. The saber was lost.
The torn monster shrieked, tongue whipping her face, while her hand felt through the corpsescape for anything not viscous. She touched wood.
The air, despite the insane smell of quick-rotting viscera, still felt cool and zingy with oxygen, tense like a gas explosion waiting to happen. But it was unavoidable: she had to use a firearm.
She breathed in the last feast of oxygen before death and injected it into her right arm, then clutched Uncle Emmet’s shotgun, brought it home, and rammed the barrel into the creature’s mouth. Deep down into its gullet where oxygen is unknown.
The definitively ultimate wheezer charged at her at that exact moment, and she rounded on it, a legless hellroach dangling off the point of her gun. The muffled blast liquefied both targets at the same time and sprayed them to the far end of the battlefield, loose chunks of monstermatter pluffing into the gore pool.
Dunia staggered to find a spot of flat wooden floor between the many strata of dead wheezers, panting, waiting for someone else in the room to dispute her point.
Nothing did.
She breathed, dropping the shotgun and sweeping six ounces of blood off her gracious white face.
“And not a single spark was produced.”
She pulled her cigarette box from her pocket, chose a lollipop and put it in her mouth. The cherry taste of victory.
And then she turned at the sudden roaring noise coming from the round window.
USAF veteran Captain Al Urich cordially saluted her, a close-lipped smile on his face, from the right seat of an airborne UH-1C Iroquois helicopter gunship, while with his left hand he popped open the lid of the fire button and thumbed it down.
An AIM-9 Sidewinder missile flashed to life and launched from the chopper, screaming on its brief trajectory to the mathematical center of the circular window.
DUNIA: (Mostly annoyed.) Oh, fuck off.
The missile crashed through the glass and into her chest, exploding on contact with the opposite wall.
And thus Deboën Mansion and all of its contents were vaporized from the Western Hemisphere.
The station under Sentinel Hill was still lit from the previous visit, just as the detectives had left it, down to the far echoes of wheezing laughter as they rushed in—one of them incidentally falling to the floor after tripping on the rails.
“Nate, come on!” Andy puffed, picking him up. “Just a little more!” Her own arms could barely help him.
Nate peeped into the adit, caught the wink of one white dot of daylight glowing at the very far end, like a minor star in an obscure constellation.
“I can’t do it,” he puffed. “Please. Let’s take a mine cart.”
“The carts are too slow, Nate, it’s quicker to run!”
“Not necessarily,” Kerri mentioned. Andy saw her kneeling by one of the six-feet-tall oxygen tanks, still loaded onto one of the carts, reading the specs on the side. “Quick, push this onto these rails.”
Tim ran behind them, desperate to help as the three pushed a heavy cart along the rails, aiming it toward the adit, until they felt the almost unnoticeable slope was starting to take over. Then Kerri lifted the dog up and dropped him inside.
The whole party clambered on board, struggling for the scarce foot space the oxygen tank left. It rested at the rear of the cart, with Nate and Kerri and Andy and even Tim forced to lean on it and against themselves, Andy caught somewhat off guard by surprisingly happy orange hair on her face.
“We’re riding a mine cart,” she realized.
“Even better,” Kerri said, reaching for a rifle. “I give you the Lake Creature Rocket Wagon.”
“Uh…I don’t remember that move.”
“I know,” Kerri said, suddenly pulling her by the waist and hugging her tight. “I just invented it.”
And then, as the first wheezers poured from the drift into the station, Kerri shot the nozzle off the oxygen tank.
As first experiments go, it didn’t turn out bad, even if not completely according to Kerri’s calculations. Some aspects exceeded expectations, some didn’t. The opening wasn’t spectacular, though the sound was deafening from the very start. And even the combined weight of all four passengers on the tank did not prevent it from rattling like a caged mad robot, threatening to rocket off or blow them all up well before the cart wheels reacted to the jet force. But when they finally did, much to Kerri’s teeth-gritting satisfaction, the car went in record time from 0 to 5 mph, and on to 20, and on to 80, and on to roller-coaster-on-Mars velocity, with Tim as the ecstasied figurehead at the prow, wind baring his eyeballs and gums and threatening to rip his flapping tongue off, and the humans’ voices rivaling the roar of the gas-belching rocket in a continuous scream while they zoomed through the concrete tunnel, approaching the bewildered light of day.
The cart flew out of the adit mouth, far over the debris slope at the end, hurling the passengers out to free-fall ouching and whoaing and F-word-yelling all the way into the Zoinx River. The freezing water straight from the Cascades was the last but not least of the shocks the ride offered.
Kerri was the first to swim up and locate the rest of the team’s heads bobbing up, coughing water, paddling to the rocks.
“Everyone okay?” she polled, aware of how stupid the question was. “This way”—she pointed—“we gotta get back to the lake!”
It was Nate who, as they were climbing back up the slope, dripping icicles, first noticed the trees around.
“I don’t hear any birds.”
The sky was blank. The world looked like an unfinished oil painting—every rock and reed on the dilapidated banks of the Zoinx neatly detailed, the trees sketched lifeless against an empty canvas. There was no sun nor clouds nor space.
The party ran, or let gravity pull them downriver along the shore, legs slowly awakening from the cold into the agonizing weariness of the last twenty-four hours. Andy viewed the sharp line of the horizon against the white sky and feared they would reach it and simply meet the void beyond the rim of the paper.
What they reached instead was the vast mirror surface of Sleepy Lake, and the fogged-out hills on the other side, and black smoke.
The kids caught sight of the majestic pyre burning where Deboën Mansion used to be, just as the helicopter gunship flew into view.
Captain Al greeted them through the two-way radio. “Morning, detectives. Over.”
“Cap!” Nate responded above the deafening cheering of the girls and Tim, in celebration of the one violent deed that they had not been involved in. “Al, I love you, man! You’re my hero! Over!”
“Thank you, thank you,” the captain said, and Nate was able to spot him among the crew by his grandiose saluting as the helicopter veered their way. “Let us find a landing spot so I can congratulate you in person, over.”
“Copy, Al. There’s a clearing over there. We’ll meet you in—”
The communication was cut exactly then.
On the radio, it was just a spittle of static. But Nate and Kerri and Andy and Tim didn’t need the radio: they saw it happen in front of their eyes. They didn’t understand it; reason rejected it. But they saw it anyway.
What they saw, altogether spanning no longer than three seconds, was something—a sequoia, an oil derrick, perhaps a colossal snake—darting out of the water, piercing the gunship’s sides, curling around it, and bringing it crashing down. In spite of common intuition, the fall was so violent that the helicopter just broke apart against the water. A spinning rotor snapped like a twig and the spark ignited a short-lived fire whose flames swam and choked over the sudden frantic waves while the rest of the helicopter was dragged to the bottom.
It had long disappeared from sight before Andy and Kerri succeeded in boiling down all the impossible interpretations of the thing they’d just glimpsed into some sort of tentacle. And by then, Nate had almost convinced his own confounded brain that the disproportionate, insane, blatantly wrong-sized-for-earth leviathan that had just swatted a four-ton gunship like a fruit fly in front of his eyes was, most likely, one of Thtaggoa’s fingers.