Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology (32 page)

Finding Ross and Ivy an empty cabin didn’t take as long as Axiom-man expected. The first one, a pine-sided bungalow—no one answered the door, but not for lack of people within. Axiom-man heard voices murmuring inside, but figured if they didn’t want to help, he wasn’t going to push them and cause even more trouble. The second cabin—tall, fancy, with a low
and
high balcony—treated them to a man with a shotgun, a family behind him sitting at the kitchen table. Instead of ripping the gun from his hands, Axiom-man opted to feign weakness and carefully step away, Ross and Ivy in tow.

The third cabin brought them safety. It was small, faint yellow and slightly worn, but upon inspection of the interior—once no one answered the door—they discovered a cellar beneath a trapdoor.
Perfect
. And either those who lived there had fled and left the door unlocked, or the trio simply got lucky. Either way, it was a blessing Axiom-man was happy to have.

Leaving Ross and Ivy behind was a bit unsettling, but Axiom-man also knew Ross was an able-bodied chap and that he and Ivy should be okay. The man had preserved their lives thus far.

Getting back to town was done quickly, Axiom-man keeping high above the treetops, covering as much ground as possible, heading straight for the mineshaft.

Below, the undead dotted the landscape, some seeming to be feasting on people, others simply stumbling about. From up here, if it wasn’t for their slow movements giving them away, the dead could easily be mistaken for the living.

Axiom-man dropped down in front of the mineshaft. All apparent access points were closed.

They came from the hills, Ivy said. They came from the—
He jogged around the lot out front of the shaft while also keeping his eyes on the surrounding rock for any undead visitors.

All seemed clear.

What about—
He floated into the air, getting a better view. “There has to be something.” Except he couldn’t see anything but a handful of empty parked cars, a foreman’s trailer—doors closed—and a stretch of chain-link fence with large, out-of-date mining equipment sitting behind it.

Axiom-man touched down again, wondering if Ivy’s statement of the dead coming from the hills was true.

He drew closer to the base of the towering smokestack. When he was a mere five or six feet away, raspy groans grew on the air, seeming to come from either side. Axiom-man checked left and right, but found he was all alone. Facing the smokestack again, an undead man shuffled out from behind it, the creature’s face dry, gray and hollow. It wore a tattered flannel plaid shirt and overalls. Another zombie stumbled in behind it, a girl, large and covered in blood from the neck down, wearing nothing but a dirty green nightgown that was torn at the hem, revealing more than Axiom-man wanted to see.

The two undead moved right for him, mouths open, eyes wide, utterly zoned in at making him their next meal.

Taking several steps back, he readied his fists. More groans rose on the air; these came from behind. At least ten more undead emerged from the other side of large boulders, some from lower levels in the ground. He hadn’t seen them because he hadn’t flown high enough when he did his hovering scan of the area. Besides, aside from a few lights, it was hard to see here.

Lesson noted,
he thought, thankful that even though he was still learning the ropes of being as proficient a crusader as possible, that at least he learned most of his lessons with little to no harm.

So far, anyway
.

The man who’d come out from behind the smokestack moved his jaws up and down, as if already tasting Axiom-man’s flesh. He was quickly dealt with by a swift blow to the head, the creature’s skull swivelling on its neck, the vertebrae snapping. The chubby large woman stepped on top of her kin the moment the dead man hit the ground, arms out, fingers opening and closing as she attempted to get hold of the top of Axiom-man’s cape.

Axiom-man snapped out a fist to the woman’s mouth. He felt his knuckles scrape across her jagged teeth, but fortunately they didn’t pierce the fabric of his glove. Past experience in that parallel universe showed that the undead gained his powers if his blood entered their system. The strength of his blow was enough to make her stumble back several steps.

With a quick lunge forward, he swung at her head again, this time his fist connecting full force, his immense strength being enough to crack the woman’s skull open and for her brain to leak out around his fingers.

He shook the gray matter off his hand and faced the oncoming horde. There were even more than when he last looked, more than double. Twenty-five, twenty-six, maybe?

No point taking them all on,
he thought, then realized he had no choice but to do so to ensure the threat of the undead wouldn’t spread beyond the town, if it hadn’t already.

“Make it quick,” he told himself and powered up his eyes. Immediately, his vision was masked in bright blue light, the figures and shapes of the dead just beyond like blue silhouettes against the bright sky-blue of his vision.

He rose into the air and quickly hugged his knees up to his hips when he felt a pair of hands grab onto his feet. He shook the creature off, banked to the right, and proceeded in what he hoped was a circle around the undead horde.

Blue energy gushed forth from his eyes. The groaning calls of the dead and their wild grunts and shrieks told him he was hitting his targets. Doing his best to maintain course despite his limited sight due to his eye beams, Axiom-man gave it all he had and cut down every blue shadow he saw.

They better all be the dead because—
What if one of those shadows was someone who was really alive and needed his help? He rose higher into the air, keeping a safe distance from the dead below, and let the energy leave his eyes. On the ground, over half of the undead had been cut down, their bodies a mass of severed limbs, heads and torsos littering the ground in piles of flesh and pools of black, coagulated blood.

Some of the remaining zombies gazed up at him while others merely gazed off into the distance elsewhere, probably having no clue as to what they were looking at and just checking for their next meal.

Fortunately, no human survivors had stumbled into the fray. Axiom-man powered up his eyes from where he floated—a solid thirty feet off the ground—and picked off the dead one by one, aiming his eye beams for the middle of their foreheads when possible. The undead dropped, bodies crumpling to the ground.

All were dead and would stay dead.

He scanned the rocky hill, the roadway next to the mine, and spotted more undead in the distance. He might as well eradicate those while he had the mind to and then get back on surveying the area afterward.

Axiom-man headed toward them.

Throwing out both fists ahead of him, he kicked up his speed and flew as fast as he could, skirting the ground, fists aimed square-on the first of the shambling zombies in front of him. His fist connected bang-on and the force of the impact was enough to cleave the head from the zombie’s rotting neck. He pulled the same manoeuvre on a second, then finished off three more with his eye beams.

When he had first encountered the undead in that parallel universe, the fighting had been more hands-on and took longer to complete. The undead there versus the ones here—there didn’t seem to be that much of a difference.

With experience comes speed,
he surmised and touched down. More drones of the dead filled his ears, their deathly calls permeating him to the core despite having heard them many times before. Their calls carried an undertone of agony, as if somewhere deep inside there was still the living person, a now-helpless prisoner inside a rotting shell of flesh. Whether that was true or not, he didn’t know, and right now wasn’t the time to theorize about the deceased.

The zombies groaned, some of the calls hollow,
echoey
.

Faint patches of loose gravel, dust and dirt blotted the rocky surface. In some parts, he could make out where the undead’s feet scraped across the ground. Axiom-man’s own feet left the ground so as to not obscure what might be a trail, and he followed it as best he could until he hit a rocky alcove with large chunks of rock strewn about its mouth. Moans of the dead sounded from its dark entrance.

From the hills, Ivy said.
“But it doesn’t mean they came from
here
.” He debated if he should head into the mining tunnel and take out whatever undead were within, or hope they came out on their own and he would take care of them out in the open.
But if indeed Ivy was right, then this area in general would be the place to stop the dead’s advance. Of course there’d have to be an origin point, but still . . .

More moans floated on the air.

With a deep breath, Axiom-man lit up his eyes just enough to illuminate the dark mine tunnel ahead, and with one steady foot placed in front of the other, he made his way in.

To ensure he didn’t accidentally trip over any stray stones or sudden drops in the rocks, he floated a few inches above the ground, making his way forward.

The dank smell of the tunnel reminded him of wet socks and grass, and he was thankful he had the thin layer of his mask’s fabric over his mouth to help stifle the stench.

The tunnel went straight for a few minutes before taking a sharp turn to the right then suddenly dropping a few feet before resuming a straight path again. Groundwater rushed somewhere in the distance, though Axiom-man figured it was more an echo-effect rather than the water actually being near. However, the white noise of the water’s movement made listening for anything else more difficult.

Up ahead, the tunnel took another turn. The faint dark blue outlines of scattered rocks—some as big as a car tire, others as small as a baseball—sat in a pile to either side.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The smell had gotten worse. Much worse. The stench of rotten meat replaced the musty smell from before and made him gag.

Hands latched around his waist from behind. He immediately took hold of the cold appendages and pulled, slamming whoever they belonged to against his back. The force of yanking them forward so hard ripped the arms from the sockets. There was a tug on his cape as something clasped onto it. With a quick spin in the air, he threw the thing off him, tearing his cape in the process. The shadow of a body slammed against the wall. No scream. Just the meaty thunk as the armless torso hit the ground. If it had been human, it would be wailing and certainly not be trying to get to its feet.

Axiom-man let loose a blast of blue energy from his eyes, burning a large hole through the undead creature, cutting it down the middle. Each half of the body fell to either side.

Ahead, the sound of rushing water grew. He relit his eyes and made his way further into the tunnel, the rocks and boulders he spotted earlier now beside him. From what he knew about mines, after a blast, debris was hauled out, making room for the miners to come in and do their work or blast further. These rocks remained, which meant either the undead attacked before the workers had a chance to finish their job, or this was where the undead originated.

The putrid smell grew increasingly vile the further he went, and Axiom-man had to stop, put a palm over his mouth, and put his head between his knees.

Keep it together. You’ve been through worse.
A quick mental flash of fighting
Redsaw
—his bloodthirsty enemy with similar powers to him—the day the Doorway of Darkness opened filled his mind’s eye.
Is this surfacing of the dead a result of the Doorway as well?
He knew it was the lingering black cloud from when the Doorway of Darkness first opened that acted as a portal and swept him into that other universe with the undead.
But that cloud was in the city. I’m hundreds of kilometers up north inside a mine. There’s no way—
The air suddenly grew thin, the stench of decay making his eyes water and his stomach roil with discomfort.

The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right, deep and far. The sound of the moving water cut in half. The path must have put up a thick wall of rock between him and the water thanks to this turn.