“How bad?” Tyler greeted us as we reached the second floor.
“Bad bad,” Callan said.
“The sort of bad where we barricade the stairs now,” I told Ty.
“On it.”
“More the bad where we break out the machine guns,” Eva commented.
“You have machine guns?” I asked.
“Not here. But if we did, this would be the time to use them,” Eva said.
Ty emerged from the room where Roxanne and Kathryn were holed up, dragging a dresser. Alexis helped him.
“Alexis is an other now?” Ty asked.
“No,” Alexis said. “Running on borrowed power.”
“It’s bad, then,” Ty said.
The first arrivals had already showed up at the landing on the staircase where I’d dispatched the clock man. Too uniform in appearance to be goblins, they were half the size of an ordinary person, pale, hairless and spindly, with fingers like a spider’s legs and no noses or ears to speak of. Their mouths were wide and crowded with teeth. Their teeth and fingernails looked like they’d been collected from people who’d lost theirs. Diseased, cavity-ridden to the point I could see through some, torn, splintered, crusted with plaque or fungus…
The rest of them were so featureless that it almost suggested there was nothing to them but tooth and nail. They seemed fairly craven, shying away as Eva’s eye fell on them. Mustering up the courage as more crawled up from downstairs.
“Jesus,” Callan said, eyes going wide. “Christoff, go in with Roxanne and Kath. Tell them-”
“Don’t tell them anything,” I said.
I didn’t wait to argue or clarify the point. I descended to the landing on the stairs. Then I attacked.
I wasn’t sure what the story was with the little guys, but they weren’t fighters. I plunged into and through the water, to appear in their midst. Four seconds of action, not with any style, but raw brute strength, both hands on the Hyena, slashing at center mass.
Six to eight of them, reduced to twitching bits of gore and blood in the water.
They hadn’t put up much of a fight, but there were a good number of them, and the sheer amount of foot traffic in the hallway downstairs suggested there were more on the way. If one of the little guys got to someone like Tiff, Ty, Alexis or one of the Thorburns, I was betting they would lose the fight with the human, but from the look of those teeth and nails, the human would get sick pretty fucking fast. That wasn’t getting into the damage those mouths could do, biting out a pound of flesh.
Playing the odds. There was too much chance for someone to get distracted or for one of those little guys to slip through and do a lot of damage.
I took on the next group, my head, shoulders, and both arms emerging from the spray. Fighting them wasn’t hard, and I was pretty damn sure there was an assortment of Others lurking in the downstairs hallway. If my actions here could be savage enough to make them second guess what they were doing, all the better.
When there were too many body parts for me to have anywhere to stand, I was shunted, putting me in the hallway. Down again.
Various Others were left to back away as I continued attacking. I didn’t get tired. The incidental scratches caught wood, and very little flesh.
I didn’t feel much fear, and the fear I did experience was a disconnected kind. Distant and buried.
I didn’t feel much pain.
It was easy. Except easy was the wrong word. I was riding a wave, nourished by the reaction I was getting from the Others, using that to push forward.
In the midst of entering and exiting the water, I was getting glimpses of my surroundings. I couldn’t even be sure, in the midst of spray and moving bodies and the tactile part of it, blade dragging a ragged arc through something that wasn’t flesh, if I was actually getting glimpses of what was happening around me, while I was in the real world. I felt like I was lasting longer before my footing eventually crumbled.
I caught myself wondering if this was the way out. If somehow I could just push myself far enough and hard enough, and somehow emerge.
Then something else caught me. Two hands seized my wrists.
I had a full ‘say-Mississippi’ second to recall what I’d glimpsed in the hallway as I hung there, blind, my wrists in an iron grip. This guy was big, muscled, bare chested, with scars on his chest, tiny eyes buried beneath bristling eyebrows, wild hair and mountain-man beard framing his face.
He pulled one hand away from the Hyena, then pulled my arms in opposite directions.
I felt one of his feet settle on my upper chest. Pushing my chest down while my arms were pulled up.
Pulling my arms from their socket. Wood splintered and cracked. One arm jerked as something gave, only for another thing to catch it, the broken end snared in a tangle of other bits of wood and flesh.
My footing was gone, though, and I disintegrated, disappearing from his grasp. Cast down to the basement, into darkness.
My shoulders worked on healing, the skin on my chest crawling as the tattoo moved to cover where he’d planted his foot, healing the scratches.
When my right arm healed, I used my hand to pull my other arm back into position. I waited while branches reached around, hooking into open spaces at my neck and back, like great wooden fingers finding purchase. My eyes were turned toward the first floor.
There was a lot of foot traffic. The floor of the hallway was broken up by a countless number of splashes. Twenty, thirty Others in total, now making their way up the stairs.
But, even with the hallway floor being as disrupted as it was, I could still see. There was light there. Not everywhere, but patchy.
I moved back up to the hall.
Ah.
Not the floor.
There was enough blood on the one wall of the hallway to reflect me.
Useful.
I lunged from the wall, going straight for the big guy.
The Hyena raked him between the shoulderblades.
He half-turned, his hand catching mine, forceful enough that specks of blood flew into the air.
I was quick to switch the Hyena to a free hand, and stabbed him through the wrist.
He, in turn, caught the Hyena, tearing the weapon from my hand.
His spare hand came down on my forearm. The spikes of the Hyena’s handle tore sideways across my palm as my hand came free, my wrist wrenching.
I was shunted.
Not to the basement this time.
Surrounded by darkness, I found myself almost drowning. Nothing to grab, nothing to breathe or touch. Swallowed by darkness.
I wasn’t inclined to feel spooked, to be afraid. I’d killed a big part of that fear in me.
But I felt a note of genuine fear as I waited, adrift in darkness.
I couldn’t tell if I was rising or falling. There was no up, down, or any of that.
I broke the surface. I found myself in the basement. I might have gasped for breath if I still needed to breathe. Instead, I felt drained. No power, no strength, I was unable to move, able to experience only dull sensations, a world of light and darkness, while I lay prone in the water.
A few more of the little toothy bastards were still crawling in through the window.
There was probably a source. They were so nearly identical that I suspected they were being poured forth by a cauldron or pushed out by some kind of injection mold. A monster-bake oven.
The spirits that had occupied my body stirred around me, hopping here and there, wings fluttering periodically.
My fingers moved under my own power, agonizingly slow, bones grating against one another, as my fist clenched. Dead branches fell away.
A piecemeal hand, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. My left hand was worse off, with a gaping wound in the meat between index finger and thumb. The fingertips were shredded.