“Like being vaccinated,” Nita said. “The weakened bugs make you immune…”
“A useful metaphor,” Carl said, over more of the upstairs screaming. He grinned in the dark. “I should get back in there: some of those spells have to be reset after they fire a few times.” He patted Nita on the shoulder, vanished into the dark again.
Nita sat there for a few moments, listening to the noises from inside the house, and then glanced over at Jackie. “You’ve been quiet…” Nita said under her breath to the pumpkin.
It took a moment before the answer came back. Something’s wrong, the pumpkin said.
Nita started to get concerned. Oh God, I did something wrong and the cutting’s affecting it now after all…! “Are you all right? Do you want to go back home?”
Back home, it said, yes. But not your place. My home. Where I grew. Something’s wrong…
Her pulse had been starting to slow down, but now it started to pick up again, and she wasn’t even clear why. After a few minutes, when Kit wandered out into the garden looking for him, Nita’s pulse was beating even faster. “We have to go,” she said.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Jackie needs to go back to the pick-your-own place,” Nita said. “Something’s wrong there, he says.”
“Wrong?” Kit bent down and put a hand on the pumpkin. “What is it, guy?”
I don’t know. Just… something’s wrong. And getting wronger.
It was sounding more agitated by the second. Nita and Kit looked at each other. “Don’t ask me what’s going on,” Nita said. “Maybe a pumpkin can start getting sensitive to things if it spends all evening hanging out with wizards? But he was connected to that ground for a long time… he’s in a position to know if something’s wrong there. And considering the day he’s had, I think we should humor him a little, don’t you?”
“Can’t argue with you there. ”
“Where’s Ronan?” Nita said.
“He’s inside having some of that punch,” Kit said. He wiped his forehead, looking a little surprised at the sweat there. As if on cue, his mustache promptly fell off. Kit started fishing around in his pockets for the spirit gum again, and then muttered something rude under his breath and stuck it back on again, even though it would only go on crookedly now.
“Done with the punch,” said a voice out of the dark. “Dairine’s right behind me. I could smell you two worrying out here. What’s up?”
“Jackie wants to go back to where he was picked,” Kit said. “There’s some kind of trouble there.”
Nita had pulled her manual out of the little belt pouch where it hung on this costume, across from the chased sheath for her rowan wand. She paged through it hurriedly to the mapping section, tapped on it until it brought up an image of the little strip of suburban farmland that remained between her town and Uniondale. “I’ve got the coordinates,” she said.
Got them here too, said a calm voice in the back of her head.
Here’s another one who’s been quiet today, Nita said privately to the peridexis. Taking a day off?
Just staying in the background while you enjoyed yourself, the peridexis said. But the enjoyment seems to have hit some kind of hitch —
Because we may be back on duty again! Stay with me—“Dair, Bobo’ll feed Spot the targeting data—”
“Got it,” Dairine said a second later. “Spot, do us a circle—”Almost instantly a large spell-transit circle with five personal transport subcircles appeared on the grass opposite the koi pond. “Check your ID data and jump in,” Dairine said, stepping into one of the circles herself. “Concealment field’s built in, don’t worry about being seen…”
Nita shoved her manual back into its pouch, grabbed Jackie’s handle, and carefully stepped into one of the vacant subcircles, checking to make sure that Spot was using the most recent version of her name. Bobo, you’d better add something for Jackie here—
Spot’s handled it: there’s extra language in the submodule attached to yours, see it there?
Great. Nita glanced up after a few seconds to see everyone else in place, and Dairine waiting for her. “I’m good,” she said. “Hit it—”
*
Things around them went black, and then bright again. Nita glanced around hurriedly, trying to get her bearings.
The harvest moon had risen some hours earlier, and now it stood high over a rather sad and lonely landscape. Long ridges where pumpkins had been planted and raised ran down the length of the field, and from the ridges straggled tired-looking pumpkin vines. Some of these were withered and dying: others were still alive, but had only small or misshapen pumpkins left attached to them. The field was surrounded by windbreak trees on all four sides, with here and there a break or a gate through which tractors could drive in, and off to one side, a long line of plain wooden tables where the people who came to pick the pumpkins could clean up what they picked before paying for them.
Everything looked monochrome in the moonlight, ever so faintly golden, and very still. There was no sound. Nothing moved. The pirate, the caveman, the Jedi and the alien princess stood looking around them, not speaking for the first few moments.
“Okay,” Nita said to Jackie at last. “We’re here. What’s the problem?”
Something bad is happening in the ground, Jackie said. It was happening before. But it’s much worse now. It’s trying to get out—
They all stood still in the silence, looking, listening—
And then a pale thin hand shot up out of the damp crumbly dirt and grabbed Dairine by the ankle.
She shrieked at the top of her lungs, jumped back about three feet, and then staggered and nearly fell down, for the hand hadn’t let go of her ankle, and the arm behind it was pulled further up out of the ground and kept hanging on. A second later the blue-white fire of her lightsaber broke loose, and Dairine sliced the arm off at the elbow. She then spent the next few seconds jumping up and down and trying to dislodge the hand, which still wouldn’t let go—
All around them in the field, other bumps and lumps started heaving themselves up out of the dirt—skinny fleshless hands scrabbling at it, knobbly shoulders and backs heaving up, whole lank tatter-clad human shapes struggling up on hands and knees, staggering erect; blind faces and empty eyes searching for signs of life in the field, targeting on it, lurching toward it. Nita knew immediately that these weren’t actual high-end zombies of the animated-full-corpse type. But they were more than undead enough to be going on with: staggering cobbled-together shapes meant to inflict terror, disgust and despair. They had a blunt, insufficiently-detailed look to them that in some ways was worse than genuine rotting human corpses would have been. And they were unquestionably the bearers of a message: Take…Me…seriously!
“Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks cubed!” Ronan said. “What on earth brought this shite on?”
“Our old buddy,” Kit said. “Taking advantage of the moment.” He scowled and pulled out his wand. “Too many people have the idea that the forces of evil are stronger tonight… so to some extent, they really are. Lean that much conviction up against reality, and it frays around the edges a little. Then You Know Whose little friends that hang around the edges of existence to do Its dirty work jump right in and use the available energy to make mischief—”
“You call this mischief??” Dairine shouted. She’d finally stopped jumping around in sheer gross-out mode, and paused long enough to simply pull the gripping hand off her ankle by brute force. Then she sliced and diced it thoroughly where it lay on the ground, and having done that, spent a few moments jumping up and down on the pieces in infuriated disgust, yelling, “Eww, eww, eww!!”