Storykiller (18 page)

“You didn’t answer me. Are you afraid?”

“Of what?” Micah asked, knowing full well Snow was talking about her ‘eventual change.’ She had to admit, now that Brand had experienced his change,
it was more on her mind than ever.

“Of your change. Your infection. Your mutation.”

“Okay!” Micah said not turning around. “Enough of THOSE words, change is fine. And the answer is no. I’m not nervous.”

“Liar,” Snow said, with no malice. Micah ignored her, but in truth, her mind had been racing ever since Brand had changed. What would hers be? Would it be benign and even beneficial as Brand’s seemed to be? Was his as simple as it seemed? Would hers be a reflection of what she loved the way Brand’s had been? Stories were his first and last love, well, except for Trisha Madsen, but since she had never given him the time of day, stories were the only thing that he loved that sorta loved him back. And so when he ended up with the ability to speak any language, on some level, Micah hadn’t really been surprised. It made a ton of sense actually. Would hers be like that? Would it be something about music? Surely that was what
she
loved more than anything. Somewhere deep inside, she was hoping very hard that it would be something just like what Brand got. Something that not only didn’t ruin her life but actually made her better. Something that related to what she loved most and enhanced her. Her best friends were now a badass, chosen one superhero and some kind of language savant—was it wrong of her to want something cool? Something that would make her extraordinary? What if instead she just got a frog head?

“Maybe I am a liar, but at least I’m not trapped here with people that despise me,” she said, grinning into the window where she could see Snow’s constantly superior
expression reflecting back at her.

Robin and Tessa had been running around the park for nearly an hour with not a thing of interest to report. They’d come across two couples making out, six joggers, and another dozen people walking dogs, but it was all incredibly normal.

Certainly nothing that called for a broadsword.

But not long after Tessa had started to think that they would have been better off in the backyard with a rope climb, a single, faint but still blood-curdling scream sent them running north. A second scream a moment later sent them up a narrow running path surrounded by dense trees. And a few minutes later, Tessa collided with a panicked woman on the path. The woman bounced off Tessa and fell back on her butt roughly. Tessa reached down to help her up as the woman looked frantically behind her on the path, her eyes crazed, twigs
in her hair.

“Are you okay?” Tessa asked. Robin came up behind Tessa but stayed back so as not to startle the woman further. The woman nodded blankly at Tessa, and Tessa took the opportunity to look her up and down. She didn’t see any cuts or anything serious. The woman seemed more frightened than anything else. She tried to speak but couldn’t catch her breath. Tessa nodded at her. “Just go, get home.”

The woman nodded again and ran full tilt down the path as if she could not get home fast enough. Tessa looked at Robin and shrugged. “What do you think?” she asked. And just as she finished the sentence something lumbered out of the trees toward her, all gaping jaws and decomposed flesh. As it tackled her, Tessa’s only thought was, ‘Holy crap, Zombies are real.’

The zombie hit Tessa with a force that threw them both backwards, but Tessa was able to use the momentum to her advantage, and as she rolled back, she flipped the thing over her head with her legs to send it crashing into the bushes behind her. Tessa scrambled to her feet and looked for her sword. Robin jumped forward as the thing climbed to its feet again. Tessa looked at him.

“Zombies?! Seriously? ZOMBIES?!” Tessa shouted more at the world than at Robin. Robin gave a half shrug and waited as the thing stumbled through the trees toward them. It seemed to be caught on some brush. Tessa found her sword, picked it up, and then covered her mouth with the crook of her arm. Good Lord, the smell. There was no way to describe it as anything other than what it was, walking death. Tessa raised her sword at the zombie and looked at Robin, “So does the Fiction hold?”

“How do you mean?” Robin asked, watching the thing as it struggled against the tangled bushes that held it back.

“I go for the head? Cut it off, or destroy the brain or whatever?”

“Probably,” Robin said with another slight shrug.

“Probably?!” she said in a hissing whisper. “What do you mean probably?! I thought you were supposed to know about this stuff!”

“That’s definitely what you should do,” he said, still watching. “But keep in mind, if these are
Story
zombies, I’m not going to be able to kill them. I can slow them down, but you’ll be the only one that can kill them permanently.” Tessa shot a glance at him.

“Oh you’ve got to be f’ing kidding me,” Tessa said to herself. And then, seconds before the thing freed itself from the branches, asked, “You think they’re fast ones, or slow ones?” and as she said it the thing tore free and ran at her full speed. “Shit! Fast ones!” she shouted and raised the sword, hoping to swing it at its neck and decapitate it. But just as she did something hit her from the side, tackling her from the bushes. She launched it off her body a literal second before it chomped down on her wrist. Luckily, it crashed into the other one, and they both went down like bowling pins. Tessa looked for Robin to see why he hadn’t stepped in, only to see him in a similar situation, with two zombies trying to eat him alive. She ran at the clump of them, knocking one of them down as Robin elbowed the other one off of him. “C’mon,” Tessa shouted. “We have to get clear of these trees, who knows how many are
in there!” Robin followed her as she ran down the path toward the clearing some 150 yards away, the zombies crashing awkwardly but way too quickly through the tight path behind them.

At the clearing, Tessa and Robin got a reasonable distance from one another and stood back to back. Seven of the undead creatures came charging out of the woods toward them.

“Oh
migod,” Tessa breathed.

“Stay calm,” Robin said. “Quick clean strokes, don’t waste any of your movements. Don’t let them in too close. Don’t be afraid to move. They’re fast, but you’re faster. And no matter how fast they are, they’re dumb. They’re always dumb.”

“Tell that to Romero,” Tessa breathed. “And if they bite us?” Tessa asked, shuddering at the question.

“Don’t get bit,” he said, refusing her question.

“But if I do?”

“You’ll turn,” he said and then, as if to reassure her, “I won’t let that happen.”

But it was cold comfort. Not that Tessa doubted him or his heroic streak a mile wide, but they weren’t even sure he could kill them. Tessa took a deep breath. She was going to kill them so damn hard. She wasn’t about to be a zombie after less than a week of being The Scion. “Zombie-Scion” just didn’t have a good ring to it. Robin was beside her as the first one closed in on Tessa, alone, the other six a short distance behind it.

“That one’s yours,” he said. Tessa took half a dozen steps toward it and lifted her sword. As it got in range, she swung the sword toward its neck.

And missed the neck entirely.

The sword went deep into the thing’s head with a thunk. It dropped to the ground, pulling Tessa’s sword with it, still stuck in its skull.

“That’ll work,” Robin said appreciatively, stepping in front of Tessa to intercept the next one. “Get your blade out.”

“I was aiming for the neck,” Tessa muttered, as she put her boot on the thing’s face so she could get leverage to remove her sword from its brain. The sword made a disgusting sluishing sound as it came out, and she had to resist throwing up on the zombie corpse. The smell was so potent it felt solid.

“Fortunately, you’ve got enough strength that it worked anyway,” Robin said and swung his sword at the next one, going cleanly through the neck, the head sailing off onto the grass. “Good news,” he said, as the thing lay double dead before him. “They’re Mortal.” Tessa’s stomach did a flip-flop. She knew that was supposed to be good news, but it made everything a little more horrifying. The next five were all together and looked as though they were going to hit them basically at once. Tessa stepped up next to Robin, her sword raised as his was. She looked at him and swore she saw a little flash of excitement in his eyes. ‘Action-junkie,’ she thought, and then felt a surge inside her and wondered if she was one too. Her heart hammered in her chest, and she locked eyes with the one coming right at her. It had been a man once. Maybe mid-30’s, kind of handsome in a young dad kind of way. Except he was missing a good section of his torso and part of his face was scraped off. Also, he was all grey-ish brown and decomposing. But that wasn’t his fault. Tessa wondered what had killed him. Car accident, maybe.

Tessa raised her sword at the walking dead dad and swung it with less power but more aim than the first time. The sword passed through the thing’s neck like it was warm butter, which made Tessa gag again. Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa could see Robin’s sword arcing gracefully through the air, glinting in the moonlight. The second of Tessa’s zombies came at her but she didn’t have time to get rid of it before the other was going to chomp on her, so she kicked it in the chest and it stumbled backward. Tessa sent her sword through the third zombie’s middle, and it gurgled and continued coming at her as if she had just shaken its hand. She levered her strength upward, and the sword yanked up through the thing’s torso, then neck, and clean through the head, until the top half of it was in two neat pieces and the thing collapsed. Tessa swallowed the bile in her throat and as the last one came at her she arced her sword up, swinging it with incredible speed through the creature’s neck. It fell to the ground impotently at her feet.

Robin was staring at her.

“Beautiful,” he said, and Tessa blushed and then thought how bizarre it was to blush considering the circumstances and covered her mouth with her sleeve again. She looked around at the mess.

“Do you think that’s all of them?” Tessa asked, looking at the tree line and listening intently. With all their moaning and crashing through trees, the zombies hadn’t exactly been subtle. The woods were silent.

“I hope so. They made enough noise that I’d think it would have drawn out others—”

Tessa cut him off, finishing his thought, “—But if not, we’re going to have a zombie apocalypse on our hands.

Robin nodded. “Yes.”

“Balls,” Tessa said, to herself more than Robin, and then, after a long pause, “So what now?”

“I think we should burn them,” Robin said. “I don’t want anything eating them, just in case.” Tessa shuddered at both ideas, but she helped Robin drag them into a pile and then lit it on fire. They gazed into the blaze, covering their noses periodically to hide from the smell, which was a particular brand of horrifying, reanimated dead, now sizzling.

“So, you were able to kill them, which means that they’re Mortal?”

“Yes, they’re not Stories,” Robin said,
crouching down and looking into the fire.

“So, what does that mean?”

“I don’t know, could be a lot of things.”

“Well, that narrows it down,” Tessa said, sulking.

“Sorry,” Robin said, as if embarrassed. “I’m not much of a detective, not a book guy, just a fighter, a hunter, maybe I’m not much use to you—”

“Oh no,” Tessa broke in, “I didn’t mean that, I, you were great.” He looked at her, his eyes kind. Tessa tried to start again, “I—” Everything had gone wrong,
and Tessa didn’t know how to get it back. She scratched her head absentmindedly as she racked her brain for how she could remove her foot from her mouth, but instead something else came to her. “Magic,” she said suddenly. Robin looked up at her, puzzled. “Could it be magic?” Tessa asked.

“Sure,” Robin shrugged. “That’s one of a bunch of options, I suppose. Why?”

“Because last night something broke into my house and took some of my hair, and Brand said—”