Chapter 16
As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents, I congratulate you on the great success of your life's work, but I am of the sad belief that your Peace Ray may have been inappropriately named.
– Albert Einstein,
Letter to Nikola Tesla for Tesla's 75th Birthday, 1931 Mar Pacifica, California "Been a long time, Jake," his brother said, still blocking the rifle barrel.
Sullivan looked past the ruined face to where Delilah was lying on her back, hands pressed against her stomach, blood leaking between her fingers. "Go to hell, Matty," he snarled, reaching for his Power and Spiking it hard.
Magic crashed against magic. "It's Madi now." His teeth gnashed together behind ruined lips as he fired his own Power. Gravity collided and ruptured around them. "Matthew was my old name. My weak name. I had to take a new one as an Iron Guard. Remember where it came from?"
"Yeah… Jimmy had a hard time with t's." The destroyed body of the Summoned and the rubble around it fell into the sky. Delilah screamed as she was shoved across the lawn. Heinrich was heading their way when he suddenly tumbled backward, flailing, toward the house. I forgot how strong he was.
"I got baptized in the blood of the innocent. The only decent Sullivan there's ever been." Madi's tie was whipping around his face, torn back and forth, as the pull of the Earth shifted. "Our brother deserved better."
"You think Jimmy would want this?" Sullivan hissed as the ground underfoot began to sink. Water from the broken pipes spun weightless around them. His Power had already been used hard on the demon and he could feel it weakening.
"He was too good and pure and dumb to know what he wanted." Madi didn't even seem to feel the strain. Heat was radiating from his body as dozens of kanji burned magic. "But he was strong. We all were, but we gave our lives to protect the pathetic. They used us. And how'd they thank us? You saved a thousand lives, and you come home to what? Going to prison because you tried to keep some Active kid from getting lynched?"
"Like you would have cared." His pulse was pounding inside his skull. It was almost like he could see the line of Power stretching from his soul to the center of the Earth, and it was flickering bad. He was almost done.
"They didn't even waste a Healer to fix my face."
"Whole unit only had a few Healers. They did just enough to keep you from dying. It's called triage, dummy," Jake said. Madi had too much Power. With the forces buffeting them, the first to slip would be crushed. "You were always the ugly one anyways."
Madi laughed. "And you were always supposed to be the smart one." Suddenly, Madi dropped his Power, but rather than being smashed by the sudden increase in pressure, his body flared in strength like a Brute as he took the hit. The dirt around them exploded outward in a shower. Sullivan staggered back, surprised. "Who's the smart one now?" Madi asked as he slugged Sullivan in the face.
Sullivan rocked back. The blow rattled his thickened bones. Madi kept coming, hitting him over and over and over again, moving faster than was humanly possible. It was like being worked over by a meat hammer. "See, Jake. I'm the strongest there is. I've got the magic of ten Actives now. What you got?" He knocked Sullivan's return punch aside with one casual forearm.
Sullivan ducked a hook, falling on his butt, then jerked up the BAR and fired. The magazine had mostly been expended on the Summoned, but at least five rounds struck Madi in the chest, exiting his back in gouts of meat and fabric. His brother fell, crashing hard into the ground.
Sullivan lay there, gasping, bleeding. His head was swimming from the beating. He had just killed his own blood.
Then Madi got up. "Ahhh… yeah. Felt that one." Blood was pouring from the holes in his chest. Sullivan scrambled back as Madi strode toward him. "Like I was sayin', I'm the strongest." He slammed a boot into Sullivan's chest, rolling him hard. "I can see that pissant little Healin' spell on your chest. You think that makes you a big man or something?" He booted him again. "Shit… I got five of those."
He managed to get to his hands and knees but Madi's next kick landed in his ribs and lifted him several feet off the ground.
"Madi is here!" Faye shouted as she appeared in what was left of the foyer.
"We know," Garrett said, pointing with one bloodied hand toward where a maelstrom of water, dirt, concrete, and fog was swirling across what had been the lawn. It was terrible to behold. Somewhere inside there were the two titans, slamming each other with Powers beyond comprehension.
Heinrich appeared, carrying Delilah's limp form in his arms. She seemed so very small and there was blood all over the German's coat. "Jane!" he shouted. "Help!" He set her down gently where the piano had been.
"One second!" Jane replied. She was crouched next to Mr. Browning, who was bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to his neck. "Keep pressure on her, Heinrich."
"Help the girl," Browning whispered, his teeth stained red. "I'm fine."
"No offense, John, but shut your yap and don't tell me how to do my job," Jane responded calmly, her hands glowing like molten gold.
Lance shrugged past Faye, working the action on his Winchester. "Undead are coming. All those assholes we killed once are back up and moving this way fast."
Heinrich closed his eyes and let out a long string of something that Faye could only assume was profanity. "Zombies. They've got a damn Necro… a Lazarus!"
Grandpa's Bible teachings hadn't been very good, but Faye didn't remember any of the dead people who came back to life in the New Testament going insane with a desire to kill like the radio shows said this kind did. On the other hand she'd slept through a lot of masses. "I got the one with the demon. If I shoot the man with the zombies, will that make the magic stop?" she asked.
"Nein. Undead are different," Heinrich said as he shoved what had once been the living room curtains against Delilah's wound. "Their spirits can't leave their bodies. They have been chained forever."
"How do we stop them?" Faye asked. The same show on the radio had made it sound like you could just shoot them in the head and they'd leave you alone, but she knew that those programs were just make-believe. This was real.
"You can't. You just damage them until they can no longer move, but that's difficult when they are still sane and have guns. How many, Lance?"
"Probably twenty undead. I don't know how many alive."
"More than we can handle," Heinrich stated with grim finality. "The Lazarus will whisper to them that the only way to end the pain is to destroy us. Poor bastards don't even realize they're dead yet." The way the others acted when he said that made Faye certain that the German was their expert on zombies.
The storm of flying debris finally stopped, and everything instantly fell as gravity returned to normal. All of them turned to see who had won, and sadly all they saw was Mr. Madi kicking Mr. Sullivan across the yard like a child's ball. Behind the two giants was a crowd of mangled bodies, running right for them.
The dead men were shrieking and crying, bones visible, flesh hanging off in strips where the slugs had hit, eyes bulging out of shattered skulls, bullet holes fresh and puckered in drained skin, white shards sticking out of broken limbs, and somehow she knew that they could still feel it all, every terrible unending ounce of hurt, and all those dead men held her and her friends responsible. The dead lifted their guns and Faye's insides turned to water.
Madi grabbed Sullivan by the throat and jerked him from the ground. "Hell, Jake," his brother said, punching him in the stomach, "I had this all built up in my head like you were gonna be a challenge. This is just like when we were kids." Sullivan blinked through the blood and tears. He grabbed Madi by the tie, pulled him forward and rammed his elbow into the side of his head. Madi dropped him and stepped back, rubbing his face, grinning savagely. "That's more like it."