Queen of wands

CHAPTER TEN

Barb ghosted through the heavy brush of the island towards the eastern tip where they’d seen the boats gathering. The island was an Audubon preserve, based on the really clear “No Trespassing” signs. She felt oddly perturbed that, in addition to black magic, the girls were violating a nature preserve. All things considered, it was minor, but irritating nonetheless.

In the twilight she could see that a fire had been lit, and hoped that she wasn’t, for the second time, overreacting. The whole Lazarus thing was a good reminder that she might be a warrior of God but not a perfect one. This time, however, she could feel currents of power being used. Something mystic was happening on the island and it certainly didn’t feel godly.

Sliding up through the undergrowth, she used her Trijicon tactical scope to observe for just a moment. As advertised, the small clearing was filled with naked girls. They were not, however, skinny-dipping, but clearly engaged in some sort of ritual. The ritual appeared to be a complex dance, possibly on the lines of the Trilobular pattern. At the center of the pattern was a small stone altar surrounded by fire.

Circling the girls were a collection of mostly young men standing stiff and still. Barb, from her range, couldn’t tell if they were simply held-glamoured was the usual term-or had been soul-drained.

“Dei,” Barb whispered into her tac set.

“Go,” Marquez replied.

“Just west of the bridge,” Barb said. “You’ll see it from up there. The girls are the targets. Stepfords or something similar. High regen. Resistant to penetration…”

Barb was slammed forward by what felt like a lightning bolt right in the kidneys. The pain was blinding, but 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.”

“She’s only one woman,” Reamer said, angrily. “Misty, Buffy, Ashley. Each of you take a group of the Osemala. Corner her and destroy her.”

“Yes, Master Kom,” Misty said. “ We’ll teach her the power of Osemi.”

“Just kill her and send her soul to hell,” Reamer said. “And get back here before the ritual is complete. You don’t want to be outside the pentacle.”

Barb went up the side of a tree then leapt off, flying over two zombies and taking off both their heads in a really elegant Swan Passes Over River Under Moon maneuver. Her landing, however, was based far more on Master Ti Kwan’s “action movie” techniques. It was a surprisingly useful form, she’d discovered, for fighting zombies in near darkness in a heavily forested island covered in logs and stumps.

“Thank you, Seigun Kwan,” Barb said, grabbing a sapling in one hand to swing around and take off the head of another zombie. “And now I’m pole dancing. Janea would love this.”

She scrambled up the sapling until she’d reached the leafy part, then leaned out. The tree bent under her weight and she slowly drifted down towards the ground. Hooking her legs onto the tree permitted her to reach down and take off the head of another zombie from just out of its reach.

“Interesting,” she said, flipping off of the tree and landing on the body of the zombie. “Clean-up on this is going to be a bitch.” She backhanded, hard, and cut all the way through the torso of the zombie stumbling up behind her. “And I’m going to have to spend some serious time sharpening.”

Two levin bolts came out of the darkness and she managed to deflect both. They were much lighter than Vartouhi’s, but two was a bit much.

“Oy vey,” she said, charging down the line of one of the bolts. She caught sight of one of the GPA girls running away and wasn’t about to let her get away. However, as she closed through the woods, a zombie reared up in her way.

There was not much technique to the body check she sent its way. The zombie, totally uncoordinated, fell backwards. She stabbed down, then had to wrench the sword out of its skull. Which wasn’t particularly easy.

As she was tugging and twisting, three levin bolts came in from various directions. She deflected two, but the third hit her square in the face like a punch from a professional boxer.

“OW!” Barb bellowed, ripping the sword out of the zombie’s head. “I am so going to kick your spoiled asses!”

“What does it take to kill her?” Ashley wailed. “I hit her in the face! She should be dead!”

“Bring in all the Osemala,” Misty said, nervously. “Go gather them up. We need to swarm her.”

“Okay,” Buffy said, then screamed as a cat attached itself to her face.

Lazarus didn’t have any special cat martial arts training. But he didn’t really need it. When twenty pounds of tom are trying to scratch your eyes out, you’re effectively out of the fight.

“Aaah!” Buffy screamed. “Get it off!”

Misty grabbed Lazarus, but he was tightly attached to Buffy’s face. Except for his teeth, which he managed to turn around and latch onto Misty’s hand.

“Get back!” Ashley yelled. “I’ll get it off!”

Misty let go of the cat, then went “Noooo!” just a bit late.

Ashley managed a perfectly placed levin bolt, again, which hit Lazarus in the back.

The cat let out a yowl and bounced off of Buffy. Who dropped stone dead.

“You idiot!” Misty screamed. “ You killed Buffy! ”

“No problem,” Barb said, taking off Ashley’s head. “She won’t make that mistake again.”

“Wait!” Misty said, holding up her hands. “Time out!”

“Time…out?” Barb said, wonderingly. She spun in place and took off another zombie’s head, then turned back to face the junior sorceress. “Seriously? Time… out?”

“I didn’t want to get involved with this,” Misty said, whimpering.

“I’d say tell it to the judge,” Barb said, taking the girl’s head off. “But it’s sort of a judge, jury, executioner thing.”

She looked over at Lazarus, who was licking the burned patch on his back.

“Would you try not to get yourself killed?”

“Kabala field,” Mills said, holding up a crystal. It was sparkling blue.

The team had rappelled down through the trees with some difficulty and were now in an assembly area just east of the ritual point.

“D…ash it,” Marquez muttered, slinging his M4 and drawing a machete. “Why the See can’t come up with a reliable counter I don’t know.”

“Cold steel, boyos,” Mills said, pulling out a basket-hilted claybeg. “Zombies, witches and cold steel. Feels like old times.”

“At least it will be quiet,” Marquez said, stepping forward. As he did, a zombie, completely lost, stumbled up through the woods. He hacked it in the neck, then, as it grabbed him by the harness and pulled him in, he sawed and hacked at it until he’d taken the head off. “Quietish.”

“And bloody bloody,” Mills said ferally. “Right, let’s go chop up some naughty schoolgirls.”

Barb bounced off of two trees, taking out three zombies in a combination of Floating Iris On Wind-Tossed Water and another Heron Over Mountain. She landed with a slight stumble and realized that the combination of repeated hits from levin bolts and just hacking up zombies was starting to wear her down.

“Gotta get more PT,” Barb muttered as she stepped into the clearing.

She wasn’t sure exactly what the ritual was supposed to do. From her perspective it was just one more cult trying to raise some ancient evil.

“I wish these groups would learn already,” she said.

She could see Reamer and Dr. Downing in the group. No surprise. The rest appeared to be of an age to be members of GPA, with a few older women. About half of them were continuing to move in a complex pavane while maintaining a high chant. The other half were turned to face Barb and, emerging from the woods on the other side, the Opus Dei team. Most of the girls were holding fencing swords, and they were not protectively tipped.

“You know,” Barb said, pointing at the nearest foil, “That’s a terrible safety violation.”

One of the older women raised her hands and began to chant in counterpoint to the group of ritualists, then made a casting gesture at the Opus Dei team.

“Won’t work,” Marquez said, flicking blood off of a machete. “We cannot be made your servants. We are protected by the hand of God. I hereby state, as a licensed contractor of the Federal Government authorized to use due force, that you are in violation of United States Federal Codes Eighteen Sixty-Three A, Use of Black Magic, General; B, Performance of Black Magic for the Purposes of Raising Demon, Demons, Demoness or Demonesses; L, Use of Black Magic for the Removal of Souls; R, Use of Black Magics for the Purposes of Control of Others; and T, Use of Black Magics for the Purposes of Casting of Spells of Unweal, as well as moral laws of most major religions. The penalty is twenty-five years to life in a Federal Corrections Facility for each separate violation. Failure to desist shall result in the use of deadly force.”

“You want deadly force,” Dr. Downing said, cackling. “ This is deadly force!”

He raised his hand and threw a levin bolt at Marquez. The former spec ops trooper raised something that looked like a small shield, and the levin bolt grounded on it.

“Thank you,” Marquez said, hefting his machete. “That allows us to open up the whole can of whoop-ass.”

Barb and the Opus Dei team charged forward at virtually the same moment, and the scene descended into a maelstrom.

Barb was in the unfortunate position of having seven of the Stepfords on her side of the ritual. Three were wielding epees, and the other four foils. She knew very well that a good “touch” from any of them would put her out of the fight, probably dead. Just because they looked like toys didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.

“Laz, do not get near the swords,” Barb said, then stepped forward.

Barb danced around the seven for a bit, feeling them out. Fortunately, only one of the girls using an epee 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.”

“Why?” Barb asked.

“You’re holding that with your bare hands?” the redhead asked. “Your bare hands. Seriously?”

“Mrs. Everette could probably hold anything in the Dark Sector,” Artie said. “In her bare hands. Just put…put it in the bag.”

“Why not?” Barb said. “And why am I putting it in the bag, and, more to the point, who are you people?”

“So what’s so special about her?” the girl asked.

“We’re the people telling you to put the artifact in the bag,” Artie said.

“We’re the people that handle artifacts,” the redhead said. “And what’s so special about her?”

“Artifacts?” Barb asked, still unsure if she should just give up a symbol of evil to rather odd people she’d never even heard of.

“Secret Service,” Karol said. “They handle static items. Artifacts. Power symbols. That sort of thing. FBI, well, we handle nonstatic items.”

“What are non static items?” the redhead asked. “If it’s chopping up oh-my-gods, I’m your girl!”

“You don’t want to know,” Artie said. “Now put it in the bag.”

“You aren’t, in fact, our sort,” Karol said, smiling to relieve the blow. “You, Claudia, are much more a Warehouse type. Trust me on this.”

“But what’s the other type?” Claudia asked.

“People who can deal with nonstatic items,” Artie said. “In. The. BAG!”

“Alright already,” Barb said, dropping the “artifact” into the bag. There was a brief flash of purple light and the feeling of malevolence dropped to nearly nothing. “What is that?”

“None of your concern,” Artie said, putting the bag in the sample case. “We really ought to take that sword as well.”

Barb went to immediate two-handed cat stance.

“Whoa, whoa, sister!” Claudia said. “Friends! Friends! I’m sure he was just kidding, right? Kidding. Right, Artie?”

“I’m sure we’ll end up with it eventually,” Artie said with a sigh. “Although where we’ll find the room…”

“See you next time,” Karol said.

“Drinks?”

“Murphy’s?”

“Friday?”

“Rome. There’s going to be sooo many reports about this one.”

“Have your people call my people. We really need to get together more often.”

“Ciao.”

“But what are nonstatic items…?”

“What warehouse…?”

“Ask Germaine,” Karol said, looking around at the mess. “He’s a Regent. And we really should check on your cohort.”

“Janea!” Barb said. “Just let me…take a dive in the river, I guess.”