appeared to be well trained in fencing. She quickly concentrated on that one, blocking the others as she needed to keep alive. The girl was good, and more than willing to put the others to the front to retain her ability to dash in on Barb when there appeared to be an opening.
Barb brought her katana across, blocking a thrust from one of the foils, then up and across, taking off the Stepford’s arm. The girl shrieked and backed away, her stump spurting. However, the bleeding stopped almost immediately and the girl simply picked the foil back up.
Another slash took off an arm at the shoulder and had much the same result. Scream, stop bleeding, get back in the fight.
The expert epee wielder had circled to Barb’s left and rushed in, going for a thrust to the chest. Barb performed a desperate Sparrow Circling Flowers, taking the head off of one of the Stepfords and the hand from the epee wielder. Cutting off the Stepford’s head did not, however, have the effect she expected. The girl’s body began to stumble around until it could bend over and pick up the head. Then it set it back on.
“Oh, you did not,” Barb said.
“You cannot kill us,” the epee wielder panted. “That wound will heal in moments. We are made invincible by the power of our Goddess.”
“Really?” Barb said, blocking a foil. She rammed the katana into the mouth of the foil wielder and called upon the power of God. A surge of power went down the blade, and the girl twitched and dropped. “My master is the One True God, brat. And I’m here to explain to you, permanently, the error of your ways. Prepare to be spanked like your momma should have long ago.”
She dodged out of the forming ring and came in on the beheaded girl’s flank. The katana slid up through her ribs like butter. With another surge the Stepford dropped, fully dead.
Dodging again, she crashed directly through the group, blocking epees and foils on either side, then into the ritual.
“Nooo!” Reamer screamed, throwing a frantic levin bolt.
Barb blocked it and took two heads off of the ritualists in two quick slashes.
She turned back to the group of sword wielders, blocking more thrusts and taking off arms with abandon, figuring if they didn’t have any arms, they couldn’t use swords.
She had seen, in her brief crossing maneuver, that Opus Dei was barely holding its ground. She wasn’t sure that they could call God’s power in an offensive manner. She’d been told that was, to say the least, unusual. Which meant killing these Stepford bitches was mostly up to her.
One of the foils finally managed to plink her in her left arm, which hurt like hell. She adjusted her chi to fight the pain and wondered if God was willing to send some healing her way. Or some energy since she was starting to flat wear out.
Levin bolts. Foils. Epees. One of the remaining zombies. At one point Barb ended up stumbling over a flopping and apparently still-alive arm. The hand latched onto her boot for a moment until Barb cut down, close to her body, and took it off at the fingers. She retained it as the oddest image of the really weird entire night: Clutching pink fingernails with yellow French tips. It was a horrible combination. Barb wanted to track down the manicurist and cut her head off.
Most of her blocks and cuts were hair-close. She was spinning and slashing so fast she was well beyond technique. It was just a dance of death, with the air so full of spraying arterial blood the whole clearing smelled of smoke and iron and roasting pork.
She had more cuts than just the plink on the arm at this point. Frankly, her tacticals were so cut up, she was starting to feel half naked.
She finished off the last of the sword wielders on her side and waded into the group continuing the ritual. She expected, given the amount of time they’d been at it, that whatever demon they were summoning would have appeared by now. Barb was, in fact, sort of looking forward to it. Generally, if you took out the demon, the acolytes ended up running or going mad. At the moment it looked as if she was going to have to kill them all. Which was just work, work, work.
The ritualists were unarmed, but that didn’t mean they went down easily. Some of them were, unbelievably, able to block the katana with their hands. Rhino. Tough. Skins. Barb had started to cut their heads off then kick them aside. That kept them out of the game for a while at least. She managed to punt one bottle-blonde all the way to the river.
“Marquez! How you doin’?”
“I’m going to apply to the See for a pay raise after this one!” Marquez yelled. “How do you kill these things? Oh, good Lord Jesus…”
Barb looked across the clearing as one of the Opus Dei team surged back to his feet and began lurching towards Marquez.
“Go with God, Brother Sutphin,” Marquez said, taking off his head with the machete.
“God damn you all!” Barb screamed, suddenly losing all technique. She began wading through the group, katana slashing in a butterfly. The blazing sword, finally carrying the full weight of God’s fury, was no longer simply “hurting” the Stepfords. At its touch they were dropping in severed and quite dead bits.
Technique dropped away, thought dropped away, time dropped away. At that moment, it became simply the dance of the sword. Blood and limbs flew through the air like fleshy butterflies as Barbara Everette, Warrior of God, brought His judgment down upon the coven.
Reamer finally ran, and Barb paused in her slaughter just long enough to draw another tanto and put it squarely in his back. He apparently didn’t have the same resistance as the Stepfords; the tanto sank into his back and straight into his heart.
With Barb’s berserker charge, the Stepfords all started to flee, scattering in every direction. They were, however, on an island, and Barb wasn’t done by any stretch of the imagination. It took the group of God Warriors, with able help from a tracking cat, about twenty minutes to finally clear the island.
Barb found Vartouhi and Dr. Downing boarding one of the boats on the eastern end.
“I don’t think so,” she said, leaping aboard.
“You can’t do this,” Dr. Downing said, holding his arms over his head as if they were going to stop a sword. “You can’t just go around killing people! There are laws!”
“More like guidelines,” Barb said, tiredly. “And there’s no such thing as angels, demons, supernatural, zombies, and the Vatican doesn’t have special-operations troops. You can, at this point, surrender. You’ll be given a very quick and very unfair trial and incarcerated in a very special holding facility.”
“What about me?” Vartouhi asked. Her arm was completely healed.
“Stepfords are classified as a special form of undead,” Barb said. “Executive termination, absent retention for examination, which means dissection, by the way, is authorized. In other words,” Barb continued, bringing the katana across and taking off the thing’s head, “kill first, ask questions never.”
“You, on the other hand, doctor,” she said, “are going to be asked a great many questions…”
“I suppose the real question is, what do we do with this?” Barb asked, holding up a tablet. She’d tried wiping some of the blood off her face, but her arm was even more coated.
The center of the ritual had been a rough stone altar. Really nothing but some river rocks piled up in a makeshift fashion. On them, however, had been an obviously ancient clay tablet. The tablet felt absolutely malevolent and actually seemed to be sucking in the blood off her hand. “Take it to the Foundation?”
“You put it in the bag,” a man’s voice said from behind her.
She spun in place, katana at the ready, and paused. There were two people who had somehow gotten behind her, a short man with dark curly hair in a frumpy overcoat carrying an old-fashioned sample case, and an equally short redhead who looked a bit like a younger, punkier version of Janea. Given that Barb was keyed to the max, nobody should have been able to sneak up behind her, but she checked the impulse to behead both of them. Despite the fact that the redhead was carrying what looked like…a ray gun?
“Whoa, sister!” the redhead said, holding up her unweaponed hand. “Friends! Friends! Nice job on the slice and dice, by the way. Best use for prep girls I can imagine.”
“You put it in the bag,” Brother Marquez said, walking over. “Hello, Artie. Long time.”
“Karol,” Artie said, putting on a pair of purple rubber gloves and pulling a Mylar bag out of the sample case. “Cairo…right? Cairo? Just put it in the bag.”
