Dream (36 page)

“They’re going fast,” Shad thought to himself as he punched the point of his enchanted sword through a wight’s skull. “Our turn is next.”

It seemed as if he had fought this way forever in the blue-tinted night under a topaz half-moon, his lungs burning, his arms as heavy as stone, his head aching from the effort of the melee and the crashing of weapons. A rusty point punched through his battered armor and drew a hot line of savage pain and fast-flowing blood across his left side, proof that his charms and runes were gone for good. He chopped off the arm that wielded the blade and caved the wight’s breastbone in as it recovered from the amputation, but more took its place. Parrying with his blade, he plucked a charm from his belt with his left hand and spoke the word, the charm crumbling to dust as he blocked a swing with his damaged shield and the bleeding stopped.

To his far right only a few knots of warriors held out, the Germans for certain and maybe some Chinese, still holding the main enemy force’s attention and tallying no small toll from the Undead ranks; the outcome there was not in any doubt, only how long before the Talons received the full attention of the enemy.  

Derek ran out of arrows despite having brought nearly eighty shafts with him and joined the fighting line, short sword and buckler in hand. He wasn’t as much help with his blade as he was with a bow but none of the four had any illusions left as to the eventual outcome. They fought with a wooden resignation, hacking at the endless quality of Undead, cutting the foe down as fast as they arrived, dully thankful that they faced but a tiny segment of the foes’ total force.

Then Astkar exploded into flame. One second the mage was dashing wights out of existence with each sweep of his glowing staff, and the next sickly greenish flames seemed to erupt from within his body, charring him to a twisted charcoal figure in seconds, his staff burning like a bar of magnesium.

Fred roared like a grizzly bear on steroids and lunged into the wights, his great brass-bound axe wreaking havoc, a savage engine of destruction that would not be denied. Caught off-guard by Astkar’s sudden death and Fred’s fury the remaining Talons scrambled to cover his flanks.

The Black Talons punched into the Undead line, advancing more than a dozen feet before the surviving wights rallied and pressed in, compressing the small group together.

Cursing Fred’s sudden unexplained charge Shad hacked at the foe as blows crashed into his splintering shield, turning back to back with Derek and Jeff. They were rapidly being surrounded, and the Jinxman swore bitterly until a dying wight knocked a white object towards his feet and for an instant Shad saw Yorrian’s severed head roll past, her white hair still in a blood-spattered braid.

That explained Fred’s sudden rush and the death of Astkar: obviously Yorrian had deduced Fu Hao’s plan and moved in person to counter it with everything she had to hand. But for the warehouseman’s quick thinking one of the Talons would have been the next to burn.

“At least the bitch didn’t live long enough see us fall,” he gasped.

A blade sliced into his left thigh and the leg buckled, spilling him to the bone-littered dirt of the field, blood spurting into the night air. He hacked wildly while he expended three anti-bleeding charms and two of healing to stop the bleeding and kill most of the pain.

Struggling to his feet he saw Derek go down under three wights; the Shadowmancer punched the point of his short sword through one’s skull even as the other two stabbed him to death. The sight drove a spike of pain through the Jinxman’s chest, but he thrust it aside and fought on-Derek was the first, but he would not be the last if Fu Hao didn’t get her part done quickly.

Something flashed overhead and up near the north crest three pillars of flame exploded into life one after another like mortar rounds bracketing a target before firing for effect; in the third a Human figure twisted and screamed. Fu Hao had just killed the second Council member, the Jinxman realized dully through the pain, loss, and fatigue. Unless more arrived here very soon the wights were left to their own devices.

That really didn’t matter, though, as only a dozen or so Germans still fought on the west slope, and a corroded axe cut through the weakened metal rim of the Jinxman’s shield; the next blow unseated the slats and twisted the rim, although the axe-wielder was bone fragments a second later.

Shaking off the ruined shield Shad parried with his sword as he slapped Fred and then Jeff on the back, burning charms on spec, sensing wounds healing as he did so.

Drawing his Dwarven-forged dagger with his left hand, he clumsily parried a blade and slew its wielder, wishing he had put a point into off-hand weapons. Fu Hao’s charm, the area’s effect, and blind luck kept him in the fight, killing three more wights as he acquired a couple of small cuts and his coat of plates suffered terribly.

He never saw the stroke that sliced through the left collar of his armor and filled his body with the sensation of burning gasoline. His dagger fell from nerveless fingers as his knees buckled and blood gushed across the breast of his torn and battered armor. Half-blind from pain he slammed his sword into the breast of a wight and released the hilt to grab and deploy a charm even as he crumpled onto his left side.

He was pulling another charm from his belt, Fred standing like a tower of death to his front, his left arm clumsy and pain-wracked, when Jeff crashed into the dirt, the Night-grifter’s blood splashing onto Shad’s face as the shop-teacher stabbed the wight atop him. Shad used the charm he had in hand on Jeff even as the wight dissolved into bone fragments, and fumbled out a second to add to the healing just as a blade punched through the shop teacher’s armor and slid deep into his chest. The second charm did almost nothing to help, and as he fumbled for another with increasingly unsteady fingers Shad knew that Jeff was dying too quickly for his limited powers to affect.

The blue-tinted world was taking on a dream-like quality as he used the charm on himself and dug for another, and he realized the puddle of blood he was lying in was almost entirely his own. The charm crumbled away, restoring very little clarity or strength; as he reached for another he managed to guide the unsteady fingers of his left hand to his neck where they encountered a steady flow of blood and a deep gash. He felt the grating of bone on bone as he did so, and a distant part of his brain advised him that the blow had likely severed his left collarbone as well as a major blood vessel.

Reaching out with a hand that shook as if with palsy he touched Fred’s booted ankle as the barbarian whirled past, fighting desperately as the wights closed from all sides, and expended the charm he had managed to fumble out of his belt on the barbarian. Exhausted by the effort and the wildfire of pain that raged through his torso, he slumped onto his back, staring past Fred’s last powerful blows towards the stars overhead. The small part of his mind that was not consumed by the pain wondered if they were the same stars that had hung largely unnoticed over his life on Earth. 

Something metallic struck him in the torso but it was far away, as far away as the stars. Then everything slipped away and there was nothing at all.

Chapter Eighteen

Shad sat bolt upright, gasping and clawing at his neck, locked in a mindless storm of terror. Gradually the horror leaked from his consciousness, leaving him sweat-soaked and breathing hard.

As his breathing steadied he looked wildly around him: he was sitting up on his bed, which was a mattress and box springs sitting on the beige carpet of his bedroom. The poster of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark looked down from its place on the wall, and the light he had left on in his open closet illuminated the sparsely furnished room. 

The black plastic milk crate that served him as a nightstand supported his Kindle Fire HD, his cell phone, and a Colt M1911A1 with a tactical light, just as it always did. Across from his bed his gun safe stood open, the racked rifles and shotguns partially visible in its shadowy interior.

“Dreaming,” he muttered, picking up the pistol. Flipping back the poncho liner he struggled to his feet, wincing at the stabbing pain in his torso. Looking around his bedroom which was both completely familiar and yet oddly removed as if he had been gone for an extended time, he shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs.

“Some sort of PSTD thing,” he muttered, starting out of the room, catching himself after a couple steps; turning, he grabbed up his cell, which read 04:25 AM.

Dropping the phone into the pocket of his running shorts he staggered into the hall and down to his bathroom, wincing as he cut on the lights.

He was staring at his reflection in the mirror as his phone started playing the theme from Red Dwarf. He ignored the tune as he stared at a face that was much thinner and more tanned than it had been since Iraq, at an inexpert and uneven haircut, but most of all at the thick, twisted scar that writhed like a red worm along the left side of his neck.

Finally he pulled the rectangle of plastic from his pocket and clumsily thumbed the locked screen to unlock. He had to look down to recall the screen-taps to answer and switch to speaker. “Yeah.”

“Shad?” Derek’s voice was high and tight, but Shad wasn’t listening. He was staring at the wrist of the hand holding the phone, at his left wrist. At the forearm which was marked with a row of five faint scars, each the size of a nickel, and a black ink tattoo, a Chinese character or pictogram on his wrist.

“Shad?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. He never had gotten a tattoo in his life. Certainly never had a row of scars on his left arm.

“Shad.”

“Yeah, Derek. What?”

“Are you…OK?”

He considered that carefully. “Not really. I thought it was a dream, that I was dreaming. Now…”

“I have two scars on my belly, pretty good sized ones, still red, you know,
recent
scars.”

“Yeah.” Shad looked back at his reflection. “I have one on my neck.” His thoughts were thick and sluggish, and he forced himself to concentrate. “We need to contact Jeff and Fred. Jeff…fell after you, and I…went right after. Fred was…OK at that point. But alone.”

“Jeff called me, he is all right but he has scars on his chest. He was heading to Fred’s place-Fred is all right but his kitchen was kind of on fire.”

“He left a brisket on,” Shad said slowly as impossible memories rose up.

“Yeah, and filthy as his place is, the grease and trash went up. He’ll probably have to move.”

“Did Fred remember…
anything
?”

“Jeff said Fred told him that he has a new scar around the base of his neck, a big one, like his head was almost off. Did we really…did we…”

“Die? I don’t know, but I bled out from a hit to the neck and now I have a scar, a big one. I saw you get stabbed to death, wounds to the lower torso. You notice your left arm?’

“What?”

“Look at your left forearm.”

“
Shit
-five little scars and a tattoo.”

“The banishment wards and…Fu Hao’s mark.” It sounded really strange to say her name.

“She’s real.”

“Who?”

“Fu Hao-I looked her up on Wikipedia while Jeff and I talked.” Shad could hear the plastic rattle of keyboard keys.

“What are you doing?”

“She said…I remember…in the…”

“Spit it out. If you’re crazy we all have it.”

“She said the blob she put on our wrists would tell us how it all turned out.”

“I know how it turned out for you, me, and Jeff. Fred’s no surprise under the circumstances,” Shad said tiredly. “I don’t imagine he lasted more’n a couple seconds after me.”

“Look, the tattoo you have, it looks Chinese, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Like an A with an extra horizontal bar next to a snowflake?”

Shad tore his eyes from the reflection to examine his wrist. “Yeah.”

It’s a Chinese pictograph. You know how they don’t really have an alphabet, instead each symbol means a single word?”

“Yeah. It has to be the stupidest way to write imaginable.”

“That’s what is on our wrist, a word in Chinese.”

“Yeah? Can you find out what it means?”

Derek’s voice was low. “Yes. There it is.”

“What does it mean?”

“ ‘Victory’.”