Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“Grenades!” I ordered, in a firm and manly tone that did not sound at all like a panicked fourteen-year-old.

Sir Stuart held a pair of his black minibombs out to a Capone-era gangster, who produced a lighter and flicked it to life. Sir Stuart rose, the lit fuses trailing small sparks, took a couple of steps back from the tower, and flung the grenades swiftly upward, one at a time.

It was a little ticklish, taking the shield down in time to allow the grenades to pass by, then bringing it up again, the wizardly equivalent of interrupting a sneeze, but I pulled it off. Both of the little bombs made clinking noises as they bounced off the inner lip of the firing slits, and there were snarling sounds from above us for a second or two.

Then there was a loud whump of an explosion, and inhuman shrieks of what could only be pain. A second later, there was another whump , and clear fluid spattered out of the bunker’s firing slit and pattered down onto my shield.

“Cha-ching!” I crowed.

Sir Stuart’s shade shot me a fierce grin.

“Get ready to move to the next one!” I called. I scrambled down the cliff face to where stone gave way to sand and shale, and the steep slope swept up from the beach to whatever was above. We’d taken out the bunker on one side of the slope. We’d have to take out the one on the other side, or be riddled with fire from several directions as we made the ascent.

I brought my shield around and angled it as best I could as I stepped out into the open. Firing points at the top of the slope opened up instantly, intently, and my shield blazed into sight again as more focused enemy power came down upon it from the positions atop the slope. I crossed the thirty-foot gap to the base of the next tower, keeping ferocious will on the shield, and the spook squad came with me.

On the way, I got a glimpse of the opposition. They wore the blackand-grey uniforms of the old Waffen-SS, but they weren’t human. Their faces were stretched and distorted into the muzzle and jaws of a wolf, which looked damned peculiar without any fur covering it. Their eyes were black, empty holes—and I’m not being metaphorical when I say that. There were simply no eyes there. Just empty sockets. Machine-gun crews and riflemen—or maybe rifle things —alike poured fire into us, a panting, eager hunger to spill blood apparent on their monstrous faces.

I stopped at the other corner, holding the shield until all the spooks had made it across, then took cover myself, redirecting the shield, as I had the last time, to cover us all.

“Handsome fellows,” Sir Stuart’s shade noted cheerily. He looked less faded than he had only moments before. I had a feeling that Sir Stuart, in life, had been the sort of person who was invigorated by action—and that his shade was no different.

“We’ll send them a nice written compliment later,” I called back, and gestured up above us, at the second bunker. “Do it again.”

Stuart nodded and turned to the gangster once more. And again he made two excellent throws, pitching a pair of little bombs up the steep angle and into the bunker. Again, enemy ectoplasm sprayed, and again the tower above us went silent.

“Now the fun part,” I said. “We’re going up the slope. My shield won’t last very long—whoever is behind this is going to put everything he has into taking it down. So we close to grips with them as fast as we can.”

Sir Stuart nodded and gestured to the nearest of the mad ghosts. “Give them the order.”

I pursed my lips for a second and then nodded. “Hey, you guys,” I said, pointing at the twins.

Two little sets of dead, empty eyes turned toward me, along with dozens more, and I felt that same cold chill at the touch of their awareness.

“We’re about to go up that slope. The very instant my shield drops, I want you to close with the enemy as fast as you can and take them down. Don’t hold back. Give it to them hard. Don’t stop until they’re all down. Clear?”

More soul-empty stares. None of them moved. None of them responded.

“Sure,” I said. “You got it. If you didn’t, you’d say something, right?”

No response.

“God, it’s like Gallagher performing at the Harvard Faculty Club,” I muttered. “Here we go, folks. One! Two! Three!”

And I went around the corner again, shield held in front of me. It coalesced into a blazing blue-and-silver dome almost instantly, taking so much energy that the kinetic force began to transfer through, pushing against me like a gale-force wind. I staggered drunkenly, unable to see through the shield and anticipate my next steps up the steep slope. The footing was treacherous. Shale and sand and loose stone twisted and turned beneath me. Even with the occasional supporting shove from Sir Stuart, my forward momentum began to falter and I slipped to one knee, my bracelet getting hotter and hotter around my wrist.

I managed to lunge awkwardly forward a couple of times—and then something hit my shield like a runaway train, and silver-and-blue energy shattered into a coruscation of sound and light. I was abruptly able to see up the slope, where the enemy was momentarily reeling from the explosive feedback of the failed shield.

And the Lecter Specters went to work.

As I stared up the slope, the only thing I could think was that this must be what it looked like in the interior of a tornado. The mad ghosts of Chicago rushed forward with such speed and power that their forms blurred into elongated streaks that jostled to be the first to reach their victims, corkscrewing up the cutting. They ignored ridiculous constraints such as gravity and the solidity of matter, and as they rushed upon the enemy, they changed —and I gained fresh nightmare material.

I’m willing to share the least disturbing bits. The twins, for example, just leaned forward and seemed to slither sinuously through the air toward the foe. As they went, their bodies elongated, intertwined, and twisted into a single entity that looked like a demented artist’s rendition of a battle between a giant squid and some kind of unnamed, deep-sea horror fish with too many spines and too many fins and great, googly-moogly eyes. They reached the nearest bad guy, bobbed up, and then slammed down with so much grace that I almost missed the fact that they’d smashed the wolfwaffen so hard into the ground that he was no thicker than my old checkbook. Tentacles shot out and ripped a rifle from the wolfwaffen next to the first, then plunged forward into its mouth and throat, in through its nostrils, in through its ears . A second later, they came whipping out again—along with slime-covered chunks of whatever they’d happened to be able to grab while they were in there. They pulled the creature’s stomach out through its mouth, along with several feet of intestine—and then the tentacles whipped said loops of flesh around the wolfwaffen’s neck and strangled it.

It got considerably less cheerful and humane from there.

Snarls, then screams, filled the steep little opening in the cliff wall. Ghosts, twisted into monstrous forms by decades of hollow, mindless hunger, fell upon the wolfwaffen in our way, uttering howls and squeals and clicks and screams, filling the air with a nightmare cacophony that left me slamming my palms up over my ears and biting down on a scream of pain.

The enemy fought at first, and those who did died swiftly. As more and more hideous things dealt with the wolfwaffen, their morale faltered and they began to run. Those that did died horribly. And, toward the end, overwhelmed by terror, a handful of the enemy could only stand, staring in horror, and screaming high and piteously.

Those last few died indescribably.