“Yeah, well, I don’t think paintball guns are going to take them down. If anyone has a better idea, let’s hear it.” He was right, though. In close quarters, we were more hazardous to ourselves than anything, and if we spread out too much, we’d be easier targets. And if the Yeti came back and entered the fray, we were all screwed.
Marty fished his possibly illegal slingshot out of his pack and fastened it to his arm. “If we can find some rocks, I can try this out.” No one really had any inclination to go rock hunting off the trail, however.
“Will it shoot paintballs?”
Marty shrugged. “For whatever good it would do, yeah, I suppose. Not gonna hurt much, but damn they’ll be pretty while they eat our faces off.”
My gaze happened to fall on Cameron, still crumpled on the ground. “Cam…? How much juice you have left?”
He raised his eyes, and I instantly regretted asking. His face was gray, drawn, and his pupils were dilated oddly. He wasn’t doing well. “I can’t do the light again. Only works once, and it didn’t hurt them, just scared them. It’s a novice’s trick…”
He was done in. Drained, nothing left. I could see that. And I asked anyway. “Could you put a blessing on something? Just a little?” Defensive magic took less than the big attack spells. Maybe, it would be enough less.
He took a long time to answer, so long that I wondered if he could even hear me. Wasn’t I supposed to be the deaf one? Finally, he nodded. “Nothing big, like a patch of ground. But something small, yes. I think so.”
“Guys, get your markers out. Have Cam magic the paintballs.” They all looked at me like I was crazy. “Come on, we don’t have much time!”
It took a few minutes to get the guns assembled, and another few for Cameron to gather up the willpower to actually cast the blessing. At the last second, Marty stuck a pocketful of change in the pile too, and we wound up with holy quarters and nickels. Hey, if he thought he could shoot those with a slingshot, more power to him.
I could smell the cloves on the air as Cameron passed his hands over the colorful jumble of ammunition, but the scent was so faint. The priest was just plain out of mojo, and I honestly wasn’t sure if he’d make it down the trail. If we couldn’t carry Zane, we damn sure couldn’t carry Zane and Cam.
I gave Zane my marker, hoping he could at least fire off a few shots with his good arm, and slipped my now free left hand under Cameron’s arms as he stood up. “All right, folks, hobble like your lives depend on it.”
It took a bit for the nasties to rally and come at us again. It was possible that they were afraid of Cam’s light, but I didn’t believe that. Handless was figuring out a better way to kill us. We got about fifteen minutes of peace and a good chunk of distance behind us without incident.
Then the howls started up, the voices all around, echoes of other people’s lives.
“I’m a little teapot!”
“Pow, right in the kisser!”
“Hey, does this smell funny to you?” The tiny bit of protection from Cameron’s blessed water still held, but that didn’t make it any less nerve-racking, marching through this gauntlet of macabre commercial slogans and sitcom theme songs.
It did occur to me, sometime during my stint as Cameron’s crutch, that we were leading the creatures down into a populated area. Sure, Ericson’s store wasn’t exactly a teeming metropolis, but there were innocents there. Somewhere along the way, we’d have to make a stand, get rid of as many of them as possible, or subject everyone there to the seductive lure of the stolen voices.
At the next dark patch in the trail, a place where the trees overhung enough to block out a good portion of the late-morning sun, we found out why they’d taken so long to attack us again. The bitch and her pack had set up an ambush for us. I was seriously going to have to talk to Axel about his definition of “feral,” ’cause these things were doing too much thinking for my comfort level.
The voices cut off abruptly at the same instant that Cameron threw a shoulder into my ribs, flattening me. A split second later, an enormous dead tree crashed down across the path, sending wickedly sharp pine needles flying like shrapnel. While the trunk missed us, we were both caught in the skeletal branches, and I couldn’t even struggle free before something dark and reeking landed on top of us. Only luck put my sword across my own chest, enough that I could use it to fend off my new best friend.
This one had tangled with something before. Something I rather suspected was Duke. There were gashes across what was left of its face, gray, decayed tendons visible through its hole-riddled cheeks as it gnashed its rotting teeth inches from my nose. Its breath-if you could even call it that-reeked of busted guts and bile. Only the thought that I’d choke to death kept me from vomiting, and even then it was a near miss.
And the worst part (yes, that other stuff wasn’t even the worst) was that I could almost see the human it had been in that ravaged visage. There was a strong jaw there, under the gore, high cheekbones. Once, this had been someone’s son, or father. Husband. Brother.
Of course, at this exact moment, it was trying to eat me, so my sympathetic horror had to take a backseat to survival.
For all that it had very little body mass, and its bones were made of balsa wood, the damn thing was strong! We fought over my katana’s blade, both of us gouging ourselves on the entangling tree branches. It wasn’t smart enough to let go of the sword to claw at my eyes, thank God and Buddha both, but the sharp side of the blade was slowly working its way through the filthy palms, and soon it would cut the hands right in half, leaving the thing free to collapse down on top of me.
Whatever I was lying on was wriggling, and I remembered Cameron about the same time his hand shot past my face, delicate gold chain dangling between his fingers. Whatever he had, he slapped it against the minion’s forehead with force, and a breath later it reeled back, abandoning its attack with an earsplitting shriek. Or, it would be if my hearing wasn’t already fried. Beneath me, Cam cried out in pain and writhed as he tried to protect his own ears.
No sooner did the creature stand fully upright than bone chips exploded out the left side of its skull. Something shiny and silver dropped out of the open mouth, and the scream was cut off abruptly. It dropped like a puppet with the strings cut.
Nothing else immediately tried to rearrange my bodily organs, and I sagged a bit, only then noticing how Cam’s knee was digging into the small of my back. He squirmed uncomfortably too, and with some effort, we managed to thrash our way clear of the dead branches.
The silver object from the now dead creature (I know it was dead, ’cause I stomped the skull to gooey bits, just to be sure) turned out to be a quarter. I fished it out of the tall grass and stuffed it in my pocket. Guess I really wouldn’t be able to give Marty any crap about his slingshot now.
The other gleam I retrieved from the foliage was Cam’s delicate gold chain, sporting a very plain gold cross. I handed it back to him, and he nodded his thanks.
We won that one, mostly. Aside from some nasty cuts and scratches-mostly mine and Cam’s-the tree had done little damage to us other than scattering our forces. There were four dead creatures, three of them splattered with colorful neon paint. I could see where the blessed paintballs had blistered the skin beneath, no doubt distracting them long enough for my brother to deliver the coup de grace with his gun.
One of the corpses was in several pieces, and Duke refused to relinquish the severed foot he was proudly carrying in his massive jaws. His brindle fur was as colorful as the things we’d just killed, and his muzzle was almost entirely neon pink.
I grimaced and swallowed hard. “Take that away from him.”
Marty looked at the big dog-who outweighed me by a good fifty pounds-and back at me. “You go ahead and try.” I didn’t.
None of the bodies was female. I checked twice. Handless was still out there, and we had no way of knowing where, or how many friends she had with her. It. Think of it as an it. If I started thinking of it as a person, even a former person, I was afraid I might go completely bonkers.
As we gathered ourselves to move on again, I cornered Marty. “How far do you think we still have to go?”
He glanced up and down the trail like he could chart our position just from looking. I don’t know, maybe he could. “Another half an hour, if we don’t get stopped. We should be in sight of Ericson’s by then.”
Our departure was delayed further when Will had to check Zane over. The black streaks were almost to his elbow by now, and even from a few yards away, I could see how fever bright his eyes were. Will had him dry
