Rob Thurman - Slashback

I hadn’t seen anything on World War II week on the History Channel that had been anything like this.

This was where the entertainment element plummeted.

“Zombies!” I shouted as they rushed us. It was a slow rush, I’ll give you that, but they were serious and there were a shitload of them. We’d have to get rid of them before we could get Jack back out to play. I kicked one over the side of the bridge that wasn’t currently on fire. “Real zombies! You”-and by you I meant Niko, Goodfellow, and anyone I’d met in the paien community-“said they didn’t exist. Not real. Just legends. Now I’m in the middle of every fucking crappy horror cliche known to man!” I hated zombie movies. If you couldn’t speed walk, then you were too fragile a flower for this world anyway and the apocalypse had always been in your future. I used the flamethrower on the next one before kicking him over. Not that it was necessary or useful as it continued to drag its burning torch of itself along, but it made me feel better. But if it was no use, other than improving my mood, there was no sense in carrying the extra weight and I shrugged the pack off.

“We’ve faced mullo before,” Nik started as he first sheathed his katana in one gaping eye socket to puncture the withered brain, then separated one’s head from its neck. Guess what? It kept coming. That’s why I was throwing them over the side where they could be the problem of the fish, assuming there were any fish alive in the Harlem River that weren’t somewhat zombified themselves.

“Mullo were not real zombies. You said so. Just corpse flesh reanimated by a pissed-off antihealer.” There’d been no bones. No lingering brain stem harboring the chow-down instinct. Basically remote controlled undead Jell-O. “ This is not the same.” Considering what we’d fought in the past-gods, we’d fought gods -this was just humiliating. Humiliating, time-consuming, and not at all entertaining. “Why can’t they at least be the kind that can run? That would be something. This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Dead fish. Dead putrid fish that are stinking up a five-mile radius.” I felt grasping hands at my back and flipped yet another one to the river about a hundred and forty feet below. It was brown and stiff with arms like twigs and wearing a wedding dress. That would’ve been sad if I hadn’t been her first bite of “wedding cake.” “Shit.” There was the dull pain/teeth grinding pressure that only came from the bite of blunt human teeth at the base of my neck. “One of them bit me. I’m not only part murderous monster from the beginning of time, but now I’ll be an undead one. A stinking slaughterer running amok, even more unkillable as I’ll already be dead. And I thought it was bad before. Everyone happy now?”

“If your tongue would rot with the rest of you I’d be ecstatic.” Niko gave up on the tried-but-not-true putting metal, bullet, or sword through their brain and did the same as me, booted their undead asses over the crumbling wall down to the water below. One, fresh and gooey, was wearing a horrific red, blue, yellow, orange, and green Hawaiian shirt. He’d been buried in that thing, apparently going with the theme song of “life was just a party and parties weren’t meant to last.”

“And I highly doubt they’re infectious,” Niko added, “or we’d have seen this sort of thing a long time ago. You watch too many horror movies.” He swung his katana again and impaled one moving toward me and flung it through the air over the rail, its frozen limbs windmilling like dead winter tree branches.

“Watch? I live horror movies! Watching a horror movie is a frigging comedy treat for me, okay?” More of the undead were shuffling out from the end of the bridge where we’d rammed our way through with the truck.

Goodfellow had muscled his way through the pack to fight beside me as I threw the latest zombie-wannabe. This one had gone to his heavenly reward wearing the worst toupee in all of history constructed out of possum ass-hair, over the edge. “What’s up, buttercup?” I said, tossing another one. “I’d thought you’d be more pissed over the chunks of rotting flesh on your Armani.”

The puck looked worried and, for once, not about his clothes. “He raised the dead. I don’t know of any storm spirits that can raise the dead. Yet, he has.”

“Yeah,” I said impatiently, although thankfully only about twenty or so and we’d handled most of them so far. “So did Suyolak.” Suyolak, the pissed-off antihealer.

“Suyolak animated their flesh, not the entire body. It’s different.”

I lived in a world where there were different types of mobile putrid undead flesh. That wasn’t disturbing at all, was it?

I gave a one-shouldered shrug, using my other arm to send the last one flying at Niko, who vaulted him over the edge and zombie playtime was over. The smell, however, was going to linger with me for a while. “Suyolak’s were much harder to deal with. They were fast as hell.” Mounds of amoebalike flesh that moved so quickly you couldn’t avoid them no matter how badly you wanted. Considering how they smelled, much worse than these, that was damn badly. I did wonder where Jack had gotten them though. I couldn’t think of a cemetery near this area. But with him appearing and disappearing, a new development I didn’t care for, he could’ve brought them in from Jersey for all I knew.

“True.” But he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “The mullo were more formidable. More power had to be involved. Perhaps. But it’s still not the behavior of your average storm spirit and he’s annoying enough without a new power. He could be a new species of storm paien. ” He peered at the back of my neck. “And no worries. That’s barely a hickey. I doubt a zombie lifestyle is in your future. Although with your fashion sense and ability to sleep twenty hours a day, I know Niko might disagree with me on that.”

“It would be a step up in his ability to function,” Niko said dryly as the sirens wailed in the distance. “We don’t have long. We’ve taken care of Jack’s miniature and slow-moving mob. It wasn’t even worth the time and had no amusement value at all. Now where is Jack himself?”

“Jack is here, betrayer of the Flock. I will take your skin but I will not save you.”

He was above us by nearly twenty feet, a cloud with shadow tendrils stretching out, a hundred-no, a thousand small storms. I already had the MP7 out and pointed up. “Hear that, Nik? Your skin isn’t worth saving now. No Niko-shaped square in his quilt. Maybe you should loofah more? Is that what they call it? A loofah? You know, one of those scrubbing things?”

I’d already pulled the middle part of the trigger to disarm the safety and now eased the trigger down. No single shots for me. I had a forty-round magazine and I didn’t plan on taking a single round home with me.

Robin and Niko had already spread out. Jack was too far for a sword and they’d proved ineffective anyway, but Niko had scooped up the flamethrower, our third use now since we’d bought it. It was nice to get the bang for your buck. He sprayed an astounding plume of flames, the finger of a fiery god, at Jack. That, combined with my armor-piercing rounds had Jack spinning, a small agitated tornado. The rounds seemed to be pushing him back. He might be made of rock or crystal or God knew what but it wasn’t much stronger than armor because he felt it. I could see it in the shudder as I aimed the blast higher toward the glow of his eyes.

Jack decided that was enough. Robin had gone away from the fire and Nik toward it to cover as much of the bridge as possible. Jack, who apparently disliked the armor piercing rounds more than flames, fell on me with the force of a demolished building. Knocking both of my arms outward, the MP7 almost skittered out of my hand, almost being key. My breath exploded from my lungs from the force of his landing. I thought I felt a rib or two crack as well. It wasn’t a good feeling and unfortunately I was familiar with it. The weight of him was the same as the night in my bedroom, not crushingly heavy but immovable. I started to gate, this time hoping to take something important of his with me-something he couldn’t live without, but then hesitated. Niko had said that wasn’t the way. Fight like an Auphe, become an Auphe, kill my brother like an Auphe. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to be that Auphe even more.