Ronan burst out laughing as the tatty dark shapes came lurching and staggering closer and closer to the wizards in the darkness, bits and pieces occasionally falling off them as they came. The laughter had a slightly panicky edge to it, though, and after a moment Ronan got his control back as he reached inside his costume’s tunic. “Sorry, sorry,” he said as he pulled out something hard to see, “honestly. I just keep expecting them to start dancing. Naturally you guys are carrying—”
Nita ripped her wand out of its sheath and shook all the safeties off the spells in her charm bracelet. Kit threw his plastic sword away and pulled his Edsel-antenna wand out too. “Time to make a stand,” Nita said. “We let It mess up Hallowe’en, it’ll be coming after Hanukkah or Christmas next!” She whispered a word or two, and the rowan wand blazed with ready power. “You hear me?” Nita yelled, not just at the growing numbers of oncoming, shambling undead, but at the amused Power responsible for them and doubtless watching this whole thing. “I am taking Hallowe’en back, and you are not getting away with this! Not on my patch!”
“What she said,” Ronan said. And the unseen something in his hands abruptly expanded into what at first glance looked like another caveman club of some kind. It was definitely a club, though, broad and flat and kind of rounded at the business end, narrower down at the handle, and burning inside with a peculiar pale brown light.
“Ronan,” Kit said. “You finally got that thing built!”
“I surely did,” Ronan said. “Say hello to the Magic Hurley!” And from under his caveman skin he pulled a small round core of blinding yellow light that he tossed into the air. “Watch the sliotar, boys!” he yelled, and whacked the ball of light at better-than-fastball speed hard into the nearest zombie.
It exploded, arms and legs and pieces of other whatnot flying yards away. Ronan pulled out another of the sliotar-bombs, tossed it, hit it with unerring aim at the next nearest zombie. It blew up too.
Unfortunately Nita noticed that as soon as the pieces fell to the ground, the earth started humping and bumping up underneath them, and shortly each piece was a whole new zombie that headed right back toward the four wizards. “Guys,” she shouted, “this situation’s math isn’t exactly working in our favor!”
“They need to be completely destroyed,” Kit yelled back as he targeted one and then another of the zombies with the laser-like output from his antenna wand. They went down, but also quickly got up again. “Vaporized! Or canceled out or something!”
“And how is this even happening?” Dairine yelled, slicing another zombie right in two, only to see the two halves each make another of themselves. “There aren’t any bodies buried here!”
“Not sure there need to be,” Ronan said, in one of those extremely rational tones he put on sometimes. He whacked another magic sliotar at a zombie and neatly took the head off, then scowled but its head grew another body and its body grew another head with unnerving speed. “Think about it. For more complicated reanimation spells, you can make do very nicely with human byproducts, human…waste. That winds up in all kinds of places, and even after you process it and process it…”
Nita rolled her eyes as the white rowan-fire wrapped around a zombie and blasted it backwards, and it too got up again. “Too much information, Ronan!”
“No, seriously, think about it. Think about all the stuff that was you, once, or part of you, that gets thrown out or goes down the toilet and gets into the waste treatment system. I mean, besides the usual stuff. Hair. Dandruff. Tissues you’ve sneezed in. Nail clippings—”
“How many toenails does it take to make up a whole person??” Dairine hollered at him as she sliced her way out of a group of the zombies that was converging on her, and within a few breaths found herself dealing with an even bigger group. “Did I ever want to be thinking about this? Will the inside of my head ever be clean again? Somebody better get me some Clorox after we’re done here!”
“Consider it revenge for your bedspread,” Ronan said. “But I think whoever grew these had better look into their fertilizer’s supply chain. The raw materials aren’t the real problem, though—”
“It’s what’s animating these things!” Kit said. “And what is animating them? We can’t stop them if we don’t know what’s making them go—”
Bobo, Nita said, hurry up and get me a reading! She gasped for breath as she shot down another one and it started putting itself together.
I’ve got one, the peridexis said, and you won’t like it.
I’m already well along the not-liking-it spectrum at the moment! What are they??
The animating entities are yangshi.
Dairine looked up in alarm as she caught Bobo’s data via Spot. “Oh, crap!”
“Wow, and to think I was just worried about them eating my flesh,” Kit said, the sarcasm not hiding his growing unease at all well.
Nita, for her part, gulped and kept fighting, but now she too was getting freaked. Thinking of yangshi as demons was almost giving them too much credit: but as the Lone Power’s minions went, they were nasty. They needed living creatures’ life force to survive, and they got it by prolonged physical contact, during which they sought to bite or wound the victim. If one of them had time to get so much as a tooth into you, that would be the end of it all. Might be quick, Nita thought, or might take a long time. But let the wound be as little as a snakebite, or as big as a whole leg pulled off, it wouldn’t matter. Every sentient living thing came equipped with an invisible barrier layer that kept its soul bound inside its physical structure. The yangshi’s bite would open up a wound in the boundary layer that couldn’t be healed and would only tear wider with time. Inevitably the soul would leak out, and when the body no longer contained the threshold amount of soulstuff necessary to sustain the body/soul matrix, the spirit would go and the body would die.
“This is just to wear us out,” Kit yelled as he kept fighting. “They’re gonna dogpile us and put us out of the running for good if we don’t think of something real fast!”
“Right,” Dairine said, backing away in a hurry from the yangshi zombies that were trying to engage her. “Time to get radical.” She started pulling the top of her inner tunic askew.
Kit gave her an almost comical look as he kept fighting. “Not exactly the time for a striptease, Dair!”
“Not what I have in mind. Somebody mentioned vaporizing them?” Dairine got a grip on what suddenly gleamed bright at her neck in the moonlight: a pale golden torc with a big yellow cabochon stone set in it. She started talking very fast in the Speech, something Nita had trouble getting a handle on because of the speed and the complexity of the language, something very involved and full of fire imagery. Dairine shouted one last word, stood there with her fists clenched—
And nothing happened. Dairine cursed and looked desperate, for though the saying goes that “a spell always works,”, nothing can make it work if it’s not plugged into a viable power source of the correct type. “No, no no no!” she yelled. “Spot?!”
“What happened?” Kit said, shooting at another zombie and taking it down, but again not for long, and the crowd of them was now pressing in closer—
“I was using the Sunstone on Wellakh this morning,” Dairine moaned, “and the damn thing’s still in phase with Thahit, it takes fourteen hours to get back in phase with Sol after I’ve been using it with its home star and I can’t pull power with it yet—”
Something else then, Nita thought. Vaporization—
And Kit’s earlier suggestion came back to her. Or canceling them out. If their raw material is coming out of the soil— “You’re a genius!” she yelled at Kit.
“I am?” he said, shooting again. “That’s great, maybe you could let me know how before I become a dead genius??”