“I saw something in the chairs. It was like, I don’t know, like silhouettes of people.” I paused. “They disappeared as soon as I looked directly at the table.”
“Guardians,” Zola said as she took a few steps and pulled out one of the chairs.
“Like Aeros?” I said, surprised.
She shook her head. “No, they come when something threatens things most important to them. Old ghosts.” Zola bent down and wiped away a patch of dust. A dark brown and black stain was visible on the floorboards beside the chair legs.
“Is that blood?” I asked.
Foster nodded. “It’s old too. I bet that’s what Glenn was talking about.”
“Should we dig it up?”
Zola laughed and pointed a few feet to the side. “There’s a hatch to the crawlspace.”
I blinked and said, “Oh.”
We pulled the hatch up. I was surprised that the hinges were well oiled and quiet. Someone had taken great care of the old church, but they were nowhere to be found.
“I can’t see shit,” I said, squinting into the black square in the floor. I slid my backpack off, dug out a flashlight, and handed it to Zola. She pointed it into the hole. When nothing came screaming out to attack us, I stuck my head in.
“Nothing but dirt,” I said an instant before I started spitting and rubbing my face.
“What was that?” Foster said.
“Cobwebs.” I scraped them off on the edge of the hole.
“Ah wouldn’t complain about cobwebs.”
I glanced up at Zola and cracked a smile. “Sure, but you don’t have to crawl into the scary hole in the floor.”
Foster and Zola both muffled a chuckle.
“Alright, I’m going down,” I said against my better judgment. I spun around on my ass and put my feet down first. One more glance over my shoulder, watching for shadows, and I dropped to the dirt a few feet below. “Foster, keep watch at the front in case some of the church folk come back. I don’t want to completely freak them out with strangers snooping around in their crawlspace.”
“Ah’ll hold the light,” Zola said.
I nodded and crouched down, slipping my entire body into the crawlspace. I managed to stick my face right into an even thicker cobweb as I pushed forward. After some sputtering, cursing, and wiping my face off repeatedly, I looked around. “Can you hand me the flashlight for a second Zola?” The acoustics of the tiny space muffled my voice.
She handed me the light and I pointed the beam to each corner of the crawlspace. Nothing. Not a damn thing. I placed a hand in the dirt and pulled myself off to one side. I crawled a few feet deeper and my knee knocked on something hollow. A second later my brain informed me dirt shouldn’t make a hollow knocking sound. I banged my knee a few times in the same place.
A dark shadow moved through the beam of light as it swam deeper into the crawlspace. It vanished as soon as I looked at it. I clenched my teeth, shivered, and pointed the flashlight at the ground. My fist pounded the dirt methodically as I backed up slowly. The first few spots were a heavy thud. Just what you’d expect. The fourth spot I hit echoed with the same hollow sound my knee had made.
“Zola, I think I got something!”
“Really?”
“Yeah, why do you sound surprised?” I said as I scraped a couple inches of dirt off an old board. “I’m passing the flashlight back to you. Can you point it at that clean space I just made?”
“Foster,” Zola said. “Go with Damian.”
She waved the beam around for a moment, then settled on the bare spot. Foster followed the light down and landed nearby.
“Don’t get yourself eaten by a spider,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“Just saying,” I said with a grin. “It’d be a tough one to explain to Aideen.”
Zola coughed to cover a laugh. I wiped the board down with several flicks of my wrist. Dust and dirt filled my nose in the narrow crawlspace. I uncovered another board beside the first and another, and yet another. There was enough space between the second and third board to squeeze my fingers in. I tried really hard not to think about what might be waiting to bite them off. I grimaced and bent my fingertips around the gap. One hard yank and the board splintered around the nails at either end.
It looked like a tattered uniform was beneath the boards. A moment later I realized it was a body, long, long dead. I snapped another board up and could see the skeletal remains wrapped in a dark uniform.
“It’s a body, Zola. Looks like a Union soldier.”
I heard her sigh. “Check around it.”
Another board disintegrated with a hard pull. I stuck my head in inches from the corpse in the dim light. I shook my head.
Foster hopped down onto the chest of the old soldier. “There’s nothing here.”
“Move the body.”
I met Foster’s eyes and we both frowned before he jumped back out of the grave. “I’ll wait upstairs,” he said.
“Me too,” I grumbled before I cursed and pulled another board out of the way. It gave me enough room to get my hands under the body and feel more boards. I sighed and said, “Sorry,” as I rolled the body to the side. At the same time I wondered what kind of interesting bacteria was getting in my ferret wounds.
I found it beneath the corpse and the rotted boards. The black cover of the book had an inverted Ankh with an extra line three quarters of the way down the stem. It reminded me of a cross with a thin ankh hanging from it. Yellow and brown papers were sticking out from the edges of the book. I picked it up and something screamed at my senses as my fingers grasped the dry leather. A shockwave, much like one from a small explosion, ripped through the tiny crawlspace.
“What was that?” Zola said as her voice rose in pitch.
“You felt it too?”
“Something happened,” Foster said.
“Great.” I glanced at the book in my hand. Scrawled below the ankh in faded gilt Latin was the phrase ‘from those who have come before.’ My Latin was shaky at best, but it was a phrase Zola had drilled into my head. It was a mantra for most necromancers, the acquisition of knowledge and the passage of that knowledge from master to student. It was repeated generation after generation, and a generation of necromancers could last a damn long time.
I handed the book up through the floor to Zola. I heard her gasp as I laid the boards down again and rolled the corpse gently back into place. It fell apart a little, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t mind. I climbed back out of the hole to find Foster perched on Zola’s shoulder. Her hands were trembling and her eyes were wide. She already had a sheet unfolded and laid across the front of the book.
Her voice was only a whisper. “The forbidden … Philip, you fucking idiot.”
“What is it?” I said.
In answer, she held the sheet up. It was a diagram of a dagger. A pentagram circled the interior of the pommel, with runes noted in each section, and more runes in a ring within the second circle encasing the pentagram. It was a diagram of the dagger sheathed on my belt.
“That dagger,” Foster said as he pointed at my waist, “is a key of the dead.” He blew out a puff of air and flew over to the closest pew. He sat down and hung his legs over the front edge. “Those aren’t even supposed to exist anymore. Gwynn ap Nudd had them destroyed ages ago.”
“The Fae king?” I said. “Why did he want them destroyed?”
Zola folded the paper and stuffed it back in the book. “He is also the Lord of the Dead, Damian. No one should hold a key of the dead other than him. A key can be used as a focus, for necromancy and much blacker arts. Ah would say we should destroy the key, but Ah doubt we could so much as scratch it. We’ll have to return it to Gwynn ap Nudd.”
“Yeah, that sounds peachy.”
Foster snorted. “You still haven’t told him?”
“Told me what?” I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting an answer when Zola moved her gaze down to the leather tome.
“There is this, as well,” Zola said as she opened the back cover of the book and slid a sheet of gray metal out. It was roughly the same height as the book, but narrower. She turned it in the dim light and I could see dozens of runes, lines, and knots etched into rows and columns on the surface. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Do you, Foster?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve seen sheets like it before, used to make fairy bottles, but this … it doesn’t feel right. I’ve never seen runes set in knots like that before, either.”
I glanced at the sheet again as Zola slid it into the book. To say the knots were intricate would be an enormous understatement. I’d want to take a closer look at it when we weren’t in the creepy old church. “Alright, let’s get out of here,” I muttered.
We turned to leave the church, the odd presence still nagging at my senses. Between that and the glimpses of shadows, I was on edge.
“Something is wrong here,” I said. “Like we’re being watched.”
Zola turned slowly, studying each window. I followed her gaze, but saw nothing.
“What is it?” I said.
“Something’s here,” she said. “Ah don’t think we’re welcome here.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Foster whispered as he landed on my shoulder.
I nodded and walked quickly to the front door. My fast steps sent small creaks into the eerie silence. Zola was right behind us. The instant the book crossed the threshold of the church, everything went to hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“My God, Philip, what did you do?” Zola’s eyes shone with moisture as she stood watch over hell.
The earth heaved. A deep rumble shook the church and the ground beneath us, thickening the air with a roar. Concrete and soil cracked and opened into churning chasms, swallowing trees and felling power lines. Skeletal limbs and rotting flesh burst through the surface in showers of dirt and debris as the land birthed the first zombie horde the world had seen in centuries.
“Get to the car!” I screamed, even as the front wheels sank into the soil. A huge slab of concrete vanished into the earth a moment later, the road now impassable. I leapt over an emerging zombie as it reached for me. Vicky’s front bumper was beneath street level. I managed to brace myself on the car to keep from falling over as the earth moved again. I opened the back door far enough to grab the backpack. “Fuck, we gotta get the hell out of here.” Another chasm opened and I took a running leap to get back to Foster and Zola. I hit hard, sliding on my knees toward another zombie, its face destroyed and dripping fluids. Zola’s cane smashed the zombie’s head an instant later.
“Careful,” she said. “We have to run.” She slid the ferrules off either end of her knobby old cane. She pulled blades out of both ends and locked them in place by slipping the slotted ferrules back on and inserting locking pins. She spun the double-bladed weapon like a quarterstaff.
I shoved six speed loaders into my pockets for the pepperbox while Foster grabbed his helmet out of the backpack. He fastened a thin chinstrap on, nodded, and drew his sword. There was a narrow path of concrete ahead of us. Zola led as we jumped and dodged and ran through broken concrete and dirt, down that collapsing strip until our legs began to burn. Foster followed just above our heads. Parts of the horde were almost free. Their hands grew ever closer as we finally reached an intact portion of the road. I had to push to keep up with Zola.
“Where are we going?” I yelled.
“Four blocks down Zeigler and over West Maple to North Main and Buzz’s General Store.”
“What’s there?”
“A place to make a stand,” she huffed.
“Fuck.”
Foster laughed and sped up. “I’ll scout ahead a bit.”
I nodded and watched the roiling dirt around me as I ran. A house cracked and half of it shifted into a sinkhole. A jagged line ripped it apart. The sound of splintering glass and the continual rumble of thunder filled the air.
“One foot in front of the other,” Zola said. “Keep moving. Caught in the open, we die.”
Two blocks disappeared behind us before the ground stopped shaking. The air thickened with the stench of roadkill left out in the sun for two weeks. I stumbled like I’d hit a wall, making an effort to control my gag reflex. I suddenly forgot about the smell as we came up to West Maple Street and rounded the corner.
“Horde!” Foster screamed as he careened into view.
They were everywhere. Only a few limped or dragged their half-decayed bodies. The rest were disturbingly mobile. A half circle, four or five deep in most places, wrapped around the block. They closed on us to the sound of faint groans and shuffling feet. A quick glance backward showed me just as many dead in pursuit.
“Why are so many of them whole?” I said between breaths. They were able to totter along at a slow but ground-devouring pace.
Zola didn’t answer or stop to talk. Her staff swung in an arc and split two decaying heads at eye level.
Foster landed on the ground beside her and took a step forward. For the second time in my life I watched him grow into a colossus on a warpath. His claymore flashed up in a two-handed diagonal strike from left to right. Bits and pieces and torsos collapsed into groaning piles on the ground. The dismembered bodies still grabbed for us, clawing their way forward.
“Take out the heads, Foster!” I extended my arm and pulled the solo trigger on the pepperbox. Burning gunpowder and a crack of thunder joined the stench of decay. Skull and brains sprayed out from my target. Foster’s next strike cleaved horizontally through three heads with a grisly crunch. Zola took down two more before her staff lodged between the ribs of another zombie.
“Get back!” she said as she took an aggressive stance in front of us. The instant Foster and I were three steps away she took a deep breath, pushed her right arm forward, and screamed
“Modus Ignatto!”
I felt the tingle of power brush my senses a second before a spiraling torrent of orange and yellow fire melted everything in its path. Bodies went up like tinder as dirt and grass sizzled with the heat. The entire scene was bathed in an eerie orange glow. I, for one, didn’t need anything more eerie than a town full of zombies. Zola’s arm shook as she held the incantation. Moments later she sagged and blew out a breath of air as the flames dissipated.
The fire died to reveal a narrow path through the wall of zombies.