she rolled forward, then up, bringing the AR-10 up and targeting the figure in the darkness behind her. She gave the trigger a slight squeeze and was rewarded with a click.
“Capable of rendering your weapons useless,” Vartouhi said, raising her hand and sending another levin bolt at Barb.
Not even sure what she was doing, Barb raised her hand and deflected the bolt. Again she felt a surge like electricity. But it wasn’t, it was clearly mystic.
“That all you got, bitch?” Barb gasped. She felt as if she’d been pushed through an industrial wringer by the first bolt. But what didn’t kill you…
“No,” Vartouhi said, waving her hands and chanting.
“Try to get this to misfire,” Barb said, releasing her AR and drawing the katana.
Before Barb could move forward, Vartouhi made a drawing motion, and Barb felt as if someone was sucking the air out of her. For a moment.
“Oh, you are not,” Barb said, laughing. “You really think you can draw the ka of a Warrior of God?” She released the sword with one hand and held it out. “Lord, please send to me the power to explain to this foul sorceress the extreme and absolute error of her ways.”
Barb could feel the mystic channel that Vartouhi was using to pull at her ka. What she sent down the channel was a tithe of the full power of God, but it was more than enough.
Purity and godliness exploded into the soul of the sorceress, who let out a scream of pain and terror.
“Time to meet your demoness,” Barb said, stepping forward, sword upraised.
Vartouhi stumbled backwards into the brush. As Barb started tracking her, she heard more movement behind her. Turning around, she found out that the guys who had been gathered around the ritual had, in fact, already been turned. They were crashing through the brush toward her, eyes flat and dead in the firelight.
“Zombies,” Barb said, shaking her head. “This is going to get ugly.”
There were about thirty of the zombies, and Barb quickly determined that the most important thing was to keep them from grabbing her. The best way to stop that was also the ugliest; take off their arms.
Sword combat is poorly understood in modern times. Fencers dance around, touching each other for points. When the sword was the height of killing technology, nobody tried for “touches.” The point was to render your opponent incapable of further combat. The best way to do that wasn’t to hack at their body, but at their limbs. Casualty analysis of medieval combat showed that some sixty percent of the casualties were due to loss of arms or legs. Then all you had to do was let them bleed out screaming.
As one of the zombies reached for her, Barb came across in a picture-perfect Nanameburi, the razor-edged katana neatly taking off the zombie’s arm. Which didn’t even spurt blood. And equally didn’t slow the zombie one bit.
“Seriously?” she muttered, taking off arm after arm as the zombies swarmed her.
Acting on some instinct, she whipped the sword behind her and bounced away an incoming levin bolt.
“ Bitch! ” she shouted, dodging behind a tree to put some cover between herself and the apparently recovered Vartouhi. That just put her in line with a zombie. This time she didn’t aim for the arm, but took off its head.
That dropped one.
She dodged in and out among the trees in near darkness except for the firelight, playing tag with the zombies.
“Karol, now would be good!”
Dean pedaled furiously onto the Veterans Bridge. He wasn’t sure where this cat-he was pretty sure it was a cat-was heading, but it was firm in its intentions. It made clear when he needed to turn by pulling on one of his ears with its claws.
“I’m wearing out, okay?” Dean gasped. “I mean, can’t you grab a car or something?”
What with everything else that was going on in his life at the moment, the sight of a bunch of SWAT guys tying lines to the Veterans Bridge and apparently getting ready to go rappelling wasn’t anywhere near the top of the list of weird shit. But it was close.
“What the hell is going on?” he gasped.
The claws indicated he should pull in where the four vans were parked, and he hoped his misery was about at an end.
He pulled to a stop as one of the group of heavily armed troopers lifted a gun and pointed it at him. He didn’t know from guns, but the barrel looked as big as a cannon.
“Halt,” the masked man said in a thick accent.
“I want to!” Dean wailed. “But you’re going to need to kill this cat first!”
As he said that, he felt the cat leap off his shoulder. He got a quick flash of it running down the railing, then it launched itself into space.
“Hopefully it drowned,” Dean growled.
“Oh,” the cop said, pointing his gun at the ground. “I see. Very well. Go away now. And you probably shouldn’t talk about this. Nobody will believe you.”
“What the hell is going on?” Dean asked.
Dean found himself looking down the barrel of the gun again.
“Using foul language at this time and place is not a good thing,” the cop said. “Go away. Do not discuss what happened here.”
“Okay, okay,” Dean said, picking his bike up and turning around. “I’m out of here. Just don’t shoot me, please!”
“God speed your travels,” the cop said. “You have done God’s work this night though you knew it not.”
“What the fuck ever, dude,” Dean muttered as soon as he was pretty sure he was out of shooting range.
Barb had managed, by much dodging and hacking, to take out six of the zombies. But the bitch kept throwing power bolts her way, and dodging both was getting tiresome. She needed to take out Vartouhi. The problem being, the sorceress apparently knew the island much better than Barb and was proving decidedly hard to corner. And the zombies were getting so turned around, Barb kept running into them in every direction. Most of them appeared to be lost when she ran into them, but that didn’t make them less dangerous.
One of them finally managed to snag her, dragging her in and sinking its teeth into her arm. It couldn’t penetrate her tacticals but it hurt like fire.
“Cock sucker!” Barb swore. She managed to retain her sword with one hand and drew her tanto with the other. She jammed it up through the zombie’s jaw, driving it into the thing’s brain. As the now fully-dead zombie released its bite, another appeared out of the darkness, stumbling towards her.
She backhanded the katana and took off its head just as another levin bolt came in. This one scored, and she was slammed back into a tree, then slumped down, half paralyzed.
“Not…good,” Barb muttered. She reached over and wrenched the tanto out of the zombie’s skull and waited. She could hear the zombies thrashing around in the darkness, but at the moment they didn’t seem to know exactly where their quarry was.
She heard a stealthier movement and waited. This time she felt the gathering energy and caught the expected levin bolt on her katana. And in the flash of mystic light she spotted that bitch Vartouhi.
The tanto flew straight and true. But instead of it hitting center of mass, the bitch dodged, and it just caught her in the arm.
Barb surged up and charged forward, but Vartouhi vanished again into the darkness. And she apparently could call the zombies, because they started closing on Barb’s position.
“Fine,” Barb said, spinning in place and taking another zombie’s head off. “As long as it’s only whack-a- zombie, I’m good.”
“I hit her with three bolts,” Vartouhi gasped, wincing at the pain of the knife in her flesh. “Any of them should have killed her. She just shrugged them off. She deflected five more. And don’t try the Akasa ritual. Whatever she sent back at me nearly killed me.”
