Queen of Wands-eARC (15 page)

“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?”