The Zombie’s vengeance couldn’t be satisfied with a few broken bones or a handful of someone’s innards pulled from their living abdomen. The direct perpetrators would know his wrath, and the rest of the National Guard would see their weapons turned against them.
All of that began with skipping the empty air between this bloodstained soil and that shattered window. The ballistic magic that had recently prevented General Osman’s demise could now enable a series of murders. With Schuler’s help, the Zombie could become an intelligent missile, and he could bring back a secular weapon so powerful that it nearly required his invincible hands. All of it could happen now, not minutes later.
Now, while anger burned.
The Baron stared up at him, sorrowful but understanding. d’Holbach’s blood soaked the collar of his white t-shirt, literally bled through the cotton. That injury would be answered.
Meister Schuler shook the Baron’s shoulder from behind. “We have to go!”
The philosopher’s head snapped to face that touch, stretching the open wound along his neck. Strings of torn tissue and ropy arteries strained along invisible lines, and fresh blood surged through the clotted flesh and along the wound surface before flowing up into his brain. “Okay. Yes. I’ll go,” he said, alive despite the missing chunk. He cast one last look at the Zombie, nodded his tentative approval, then turned and ran for the cover of the nearest tree.
Schuler stepped towards the Zombie, meeting his gaze with lustrous copper frames. Eyes communicated a silent understanding. They’d both turned enough living men into corpses to share a common value system. While the Baron hesitated, Schuler saw wisdom.
“Turn and face the building,” the Diviner said.
The Zombie pivoted, pointing a bloody hand towards the fifth-story window, some twenty yards away and up. “There.”
In the window, a guardsman struggled beside the machine gun, tugging on its bolt. In a moment, if secular efforts failed, magic might solve its broken mechanisms.
Meister Schuler put his hand on the Zombie’s back, bent as if he was about to throw him forwards, and wished, “Launch.” Then Schuler expressed the strength of titans, or maybe the gods threw the Zombie and Schuler merely mimicked it at a discount. Either way, the only comparable acceleration in the Zombie’s memory was from 1943, when he crashed a jeep into a concrete barrier and launched himself over the hood at about sixty miles per hour.
The world blurred; wind roared. The Zombie tumbled over exactly once, seeing the trees spin around him and then retreat away with the rest of the park before the building rolled into view, offering an open window to catch him. Gravity slowed him to the peak of an arc, but air resistance hadn’t stripped more than half his horizontal velocity.
The guardsman working the Browning’s bolt was staring at the mechanism. He looked to someone behind the weapon, who simultaneously spotted the Zombie and pointed in dumb shock. Thus, the man at the bolt glanced back just in time to witness the invincible man’s ballistic body, crashing into him.
It was like a collision in a Newton’s cradle, miraculously inelastic. The Zombie struck the guardsman, his invincible body stopped, and his victim absorbed all the momentum, flying across the room. The Zombie landed heavily on his chest and belly. The guardsman tumbled like he’d fallen from a passing truck and crashed into the back wall, breaking several bones. The impact sounded like a bundle of spring branches cracking over a knee.
One guardsman, still pointing at the Zombie, shouted at the absurd mechanics, at the collapsed Zombie, and at the crumpled and dying man beside him. “The fuck just happened?”
“He fuckin’ flew!” yelled another, as if that explained anything.
Then all the other voices joined in, overlapping: “Is there a fuckin’ catapult?”
“That’s impossible.”
“I don’t fucking know!”
“Maybe it was a trick of the light?”
“What fuckin’ light are you looking at?
Someone roared at the top of his lungs. “Shut up! All of you, shut up!”
Voices died away, and for two heartbeats, everyone was silent. There were five healthy guards in the room, staring at each other. A wet wheeze escaped the sixth, crumpled man, and he shuddered one last time, falling still. He wasn’t long for the world.
The Zombie waited with one cheek to the floor, eyes open and unblinking. He’d let them marinate for at least a few more seconds, and when he rose, their fear would be exquisite.
The man who’d demanded order spoke with the iron-certainty that he understood the world. “There has to be some sort of rational explanation.”
Then the guy at the back gestured at the crumpled man. “What about what Bobby said?”
A very reasonable sigh of frustration. “What about it?”
“He said those rainbows were magic. What if this was too?”
So the Zombie had already killed the occult member of the squad. Perfect.
The very reasonable man replied, “Magic isn’t real, private.”
And the Zombie couldn’t help himself. “Oh, it’s real, and you’re all dead,” he said, putting his arms beneath himself and pushing up to his feet.
“Oh, shit!” the reasonable man sputtered. He pulled a 1911 from a belt holster and jerked the slide in a clumsy panic. “Shoot him! Shoot the fucker!”
The Zombie stretched as men shouted, lifting personal weapons and toggling safeties. Then he ambled cheerily around the Browning’s temporary emplacement—a tripod mount, mounted with sandbags onto a factory-floor push.
The man with the pistol finally racked his weapon, lifted it, and pulled the trigger. One terrified shot instantly became a fusillade, as two other guards opened fire at the same time. The Zombie walked into the storm, feeling the bullets skip off him, stop dead, or sail through unimpeded. The man with the pistol ran out of bullets first; the slide stayed back.
“Stop shooting!” someone roared. “Don’t hit the Sarge!”
Gunfire stopped, though there were panicked shouts. “Watch it! Watch it!”
“Are you the Sergeant?” the Zombie asked the reasonable man.
The Sergeant, pale-faced, answered by wordlessly trying to reload his 1911 before dropping the loose magazine onto the floor.
The Zombie darted forward, thrusting his fingers towards the Sergeant’s chest. Luck favored the attack; instead of stopping, his fingers sank through cloth and flesh with unnatural ease, and the Zombie instantly curled his fingers over, hooking all four of them over a man’s living rib.
The Sergeant threw himself backwards in animal panic, and that one wild motion broke the rib and set it floating, but there was too much flesh and muscle holding that anatomical handle in place. The Zombie turned and dragged the Sergeant off his feet, eliciting the primal scream of a murder victim. If the poet Dante had truly dreamed of Hell, this was the sound he’d heard echoing throughout the nine circles. This agony. This unreal terror.
Everyone watched, stunned, as the Zombie dragged the screaming, half-paralyzed man for five long seconds. He held the Sergeant as if he were a suitcase, hanging from that rib, arms dangling and feet dragging, and he took him all the way to the window, heaved with poor form, and received the gods assistance while launching the screaming Sergeant over the windowsill and out onto the street below. They heard him fall across all five stories, two seconds of vanishing terror, until he struck the ground with a wet thud.
Then the Zombie turned back to the stunned onlookers and said, “Four to go.”
The Baron stood with his back to an old tree, while Meister Schuler finished lifting hands off the freshly scarred skin of his neck. He hadn’t seen the man fall, but he knew those kinds of screams. They haunted his worst nightmares. “It’s like the Napoleonic wars,” he told Schuler.
“Or when people know they’re being crushed,” the Diviner offered.
“It’s awful,” the Baron replied.
Schuler patted the Baron on the shoulder. “The body makes it awful. Otherwise, we wouldn’t struggle to live.”
A second scream erupted from the distant window, and a few seconds later, they both heard another man fall to the ground and slap onto asphalt with a wet smack, barely distinguishable from the ongoing battle. The Baron had nothing to offer in defense of the Zombie’s defenestration or against Schuler’s cruel observation. Indeed, the world contained agonies, and his dearest friend sometimes inflicted them in his name. Worse, there would be no justice for that pain; or maybe this was justice in some narrower sense, a response to the lethal shot to his neck.
One could ache with moral righteousness all they wanted, but no amount of feeling could change suffering, and in the end, he needed the Zombie’s violence to protect him.
Schuler peered at him through lustrous copper frames. “Do you feel guilty?”
“Never enough to stop fighting,” the Baron answered honestly. “As long as I’m around, I know he kills fewer people. He hesitates because of me.”
“Then why are you upset now? This is no worse than Salem.”
Another long, falling shout ended on hard streets. The Baron flinched, then met Schuler’s eyes again. “I wanted to leave without this kind of fighting. Without cruelty.”
“To my mind, this is less cruel,” Schuler argued. “In a few minutes, he’ll be carrying the nicest weapon on the battlefield.”
“Nice?” the Baron asked. “The Browning?”
“In his hands, a machine gun’s bullets can kill quicker and more kindly than even Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Just ask him to be quick. Merciful.”
“I’ll ask, but he might refuse me. He doesn’t want mercy.” The Baron tapped the scar on his neck, covering the healed carotid. “He wants satisfaction.”
The Zombie had killed his second soldier by driving his head through the panels of the wooden door and yanking down on his arms until his throat caught on the splintered edges. That corpse had kept everyone else in the room long enough for multiple defenestrations.
Now, only one possible victim remained. The final soldier was a skinny figure, holding onto a fatal chest wound with both hands. In all the madness, a ricochet had bounced off the Zombie like light off a mirror, striking him with his own shot.
Unlike the others, he hadn’t screamed or shouted even once. He was just a private, but he had the steel of a killer. When the Zombie turned to him, the soldier asked calmly, “Do I have to go out the window?”
The Zombie laughed under his breath. “How would you like to die?”
“Old.”
“Not an option.”
The soldier coughed. “Quick then.”
The Zombie glanced around the bloodied and gunshot floor, finding the dropped 1911 and the fumbled magazine. He nudged the pistol with his bare toe. “This?” he asked.
“Better than dropping.”
“Brave man.” The Zombie scooped up the weapon, grabbed the ammo, and reloaded it expertly. “You’ve earned this. Close your eyes?” he asked, aiming.
The last soldier grunted, shutting his lids.
The Zombie waited to the count of four, utterly soundless and motionless as he readied the fatal shot. Between the eyes, angled down to strike the brainstem. Then he pulled the trigger, and his last victim left this world without the pain of anticipation or any perception of his death.
“Not a single scream,” the Zombie said, tossing the pistol aside. “If the gods save you, hear this. You would’ve been a legend in another century.”
He quickly checked over the mounted Browning. It had most of an attached ammo box left, more than enough to kill the rest of the National Guard checkpoint. He fussed around the head of the tripod, pulled the pintle latch out, and freed the weapon. At a glance, he couldn’t tell how it was broken, but it’d hardly matter. It’d probably break even worse in a second, and then Schuler would restore it for the final assault. Unlike most men, he wouldn’t have to fire it from a hip or underarm position and could aim it without risking a shoulder injury.
Holding the Browning by its carrying handle, he went to the broken window, put one foot onto the sill, and looked down at the three bodies that he’d dropped onto the pavement. Each was mangled by a ragdoll impact, surrounded by the slow seeping of blood through all the cracks. He peered further out, above all but the oldest trees in the park. The Baron and Schuler were recognizable, hiding behind the oldest tree.
The Baron waved, recognizing him.
He waved back, then casually jumped out of the window, twisting to put himself between the Browning and the Earth. In that two second plunge, as the building rushed up and away, he prayed for the gods to preserve the weapon against his invincibility. Then he struck the road, splashing pavement in a spray of dark gravel, and the machine gun’s handle snapped off in his hand with a bang, but the gun itself rested neatly against his chest, stopping entirely.
“Hahaha! Yes!” He scooped up the machine gun by the foregrip, rolled up onto his knees and onto his feet, and carrying the massive thing like it was a mere hunting rifle, he sprinted towards Meister Schuler and his oldest friend. His heart soared.
“This weapon!” he shouted, glad for the kindness of the gods. “This fucking weapon! This violence, this proof! They love me!”
“Who loves you?” the Baron called as the Zombie came into earshot.
“It’s the will of the gods!” Meister Schuler shouted, smiling gleefully along with the Zombie. “If gods make devils, then they must love their fell creations!”
The Zombie whooped and sprinted past them. “Fix the weapon!” he shouted. “I’m clearing the gods-damn checkpoint!”
“Already fixed, in blessed silence!” Schuler yelled at his back.
“Make it fast!” the Baron shouted, pleading. “Kill them quick!”
“I will!” the Zombie roared, pleased with the tacit approval of murder, handed over by the most moral man. The soil and grass vanished beneath his footfalls, kicking up into wild plumes. New York soldiers were crouched behind the trees, firing at sandbags over a no-man’s land littered with the bodies of CPUSA mercenaries.
“Go get ‘em!” one New York cultist yelled.
The Zombie whooped, shooting past the last New Yorker, and he leaped over the outer hedge onto the intersection of Union Square West and East 15th street. Four members of the National Guard remained, shooting blindly at the Zombie’s approaching figure. About five blocks away, another jeep was pulling onto the street, carrying a vehicle-mounted Browning and a back seat lugging three more soldiers. Reinforcements were rushing in.
The guardsmen at the sandbags concentrated fire, peppering him and the Browning, but it hardly mattered. If the gun didn’t fire when he pulled the trigger, Schuler would restore it again.
He closed the last of the distance at a full sprint, clutched the machine gun to his chest, and performed an Olympic quality long-jump, legs up and out, sailing right over the sandbags. When bare feet hit the asphalt on the other side, it crumbled beneath his landing, and the rest of the force bled away into invincible joints and limbs. Soldiers were shouting at him.
“Shoot him! Shoot him!”
“I am!”
“He’s bulletproof!”
The Zombie bounced up into a standing position, planted his right foot, and swiveled, lifting the machine gun into a shoulder-aimed position. He closed one eye and peered over the sights, looking at the four desperate, already dead men.
One of them said, “Broken.”
There was a loud click in some internal part. The Zombie pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.
That cultist shouted, “Run for it!”
The weapon unclicked. Schuler had sensed the wish, and he’d repaired the weapon. So the Zombie pulled the trigger again, and the gun jumped in his iron grip, barking with enough force to tickle his cheek and tousle his hair. The first bullet managed to turn the cultist’s face into a hole and his brain into an insensate splash across a sandbag barrier, and the second two just chunked off pieces of bone until the corpse barely had a head.
The Zombie didn’t let off the trigger. He swept the weapon over, blasting out parts of the street and spattering sand, until he wrestled the secular source of thunderous wrath to face the next soldier, taking off the top of his skull. The third soldier foolishly jumped up and tried to run, which meant he took three shots to the chest before falling backwards onto the pavement like dead weight.
The last member of the National Guard shouted, “Right pocket!” and vanished with a clap of thunder.
The Zombie let off the trigger, lowering the Browning’s massive barrel. “Huh,” he said. There’d been two embedded occultists. Langley hadn’t sent enough men to hold this position, which meant they’d either planned to rely entirely on reinforcements, or they’d planned to use cultists for intelligence gathering on New York’s current movements and little else.
The only major threat left was the enemy jeep. The Zombie swept around, aiming the weapon again, ready to kill as many civilians as necessary—and the radio roared into life on the back of the nearby truck. The voice was Robert Heckhaus, shouting: “All lower Manhattan units, belay your current orders! Do not approach Union Square! I repeat, do not approach Union Square! Until further notice, retreat to a minimum of four blocks distance to avoid enemy mortar fire! Your commanding officers will have new orders for you shortly! Over and out!”
The incoming National Guard jeep, three blocks away, suddenly cut right, tires screeching on the pavement, and shot around an intersection and out of view.
The Zombie laughed, tipping the Browning up and leaning it against his shoulder. “Good enough for me,” he said cheerily, glancing around at the corpses. “You lose, and I win.”
The Baron heard the thunderclap of a dodge and the final shots of the Browning machine gun. Then silence finally fell over Union Square Park, and it was the true end of this battle. Even if his shoulders remained clenched, even if his heart pulsed and prepared him for a resumption of death and destruction, he understood that the Zombie had finished the job.
Over the last few minutes, the remaining CPUSA forces in the park had been driven into a National Guard checkpoint, and now the Guard itself had been eliminated. By now, the New York enforcers—those men with skills like Enzu, Mr. Roach, or Lt. Sadgrove—should’ve cleared Tammany Hall. All that remained was to walk to the intersection, to finish this task.
Meister Schuler was standing one step back and to the left of this old tree, smiling placidly while peering through his bifocals at something in the distance. He tipped his head slowly towards the Baron, raising a hand like a gentleman asking someone to a dance. “Follow me, Baron. It’s over. Together, I will win my prestige, and you will win your final chance for the world.”
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach accepted that old, calloused hand and left the comfort of cover, of strong wood and bark against his back. There was no reason to hide now. All nearby enemies were dead, and if they somehow weren’t, the Cat could save him again.
As they walked through the grass, he said to Meister Schuler, “I can’t kill like you can.”
The Diviner shook his head like he’d heard a child complaining about the bitter flavor of nutritious vegetables. “Mm. You can kill. You have killed. I know this.”
They reached the hedge, and the Baron finished formulating his response. “I’m saying, I’m not a wizard, and you have oceans of prestige at your back. Is there anything I can say to get you to help me? To fight for the world you live in?”
Meister Schuler giggled. “You often speak of loyalty, devil. You shouted it at my keepers this morning. Was that a lie?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Schuler looked back, catching the light in his bifocals, turning them briefly blank with reflections of the sun. “You haven’t given me a century of creature comforts despite my madness, Baron. They have.” He led the Baron towards the final gap in the sandbags, where the Zombie stood waiting. “I am as loyal as you. Respect that.”
“But it’s the world,” the Baron said. “For them, be loyal and save it.”
“No,” Schuler murmured. “Tweed is waiting for the world to die, so he can die with it. Find your own heroes. I’ll stay here to defend my cult against an army, and if you need prestige?” He briefly turned his head towards the Baron. “Buy it, or earn it.”
“You really don’t care,” the Baron said.
“I really don’t.” Schuler stepped between the sandbags, and the Baron crossed the final line with him. Then Schuler released his hand, and the Baron was in the checkpoint, surrounded by three corpses, three abandoned jeeps, and a flatbed truck with a radio set in the back.
Schuler spread his arms, fell to his knees on the pavement, and beamed at the open spring sky. “Ahhh!” he said, letting out a deep breath. “Beautiful day! That is a reward!”
“Friend,” the Zombie said, waving him closer. “Aren’t you glad you swallowed the Cat?”
“I am,” the Baron agreed, putting a hand on that neck scar. “I’m still here.”
The Zombie reached out very, very carefully, put a pair of fingers gingerly on the Baron’s scar, and grinned as if that wound, and that survival, were his in effigy. “You are here, and I won’t let you leave this world before your time, you old bastard.” Then he removed his hand and laughed, and the Baron couldn’t help but smile with him, even in this grim hour.
They had in fact escaped Tammany Hall.
The radio in the flatbed truck crackled to life. “Baron? Baron d’Holbach? If you’re still at the intersection, please respond, over.”
The Baron recognized the voice with a twinge of paranoia. “Is that Heckhaus?” He glanced around. “Does he have a spotter on us?”
“No!” Meister Schuler said, jumping to his feet and bouncing on his heels. “No, that was the end of the task! His Oracles say you are here, because the reward was paid!” The Diviner darted past the Baron and Zombie, rushing over to snatch up the handset. He depressed the call button, shouting gleefully, “Special Operations Group, Robert Heckhaus! The Baron will not be answering this call, for this is not his place. It is mine! Over!”
He released it and hummed, waiting for a response.
Heckhaus came on the radio. “Then pass along this message to him. Since the Baron must be alive, tell him that he’s failed. The National Guard is taking over Manhattan, and we’re encircling Tammany entirely. At this point, I suggest he surrenders to me immediately. If he does, my hospitality will be generous, and his patriotism will be rewarded. Over.”
Schuler pressed the call button and laughed like he’d heard a bad joke over a beer. “One moment. I’ll tell the Baron what he needs to hear, and then I’ll tell you what you need to hear.” He lifted his hand away briefly. “Baron, if you please?” He pointed past the truck, towards a distant building. “There’s a woman two blocks away, waving at you.”
The Baron took two steps left, looking down the empty roads, evacuated ever since the fighting began. There was a woman leaning out of a storefront—not Phyllis, but a lady of similar stock, wearing pants and work clothes. She waved eagerly, as if summoning him over.
“An Artemisian,” the Zombie said behind the Baron.
“Absolutely,” Schuler said. “I sense her prestige. Now, if you devils will go and participate in your apostasy, I would appreciate being rid of you. Hmm?”
The Baron took a deep breath and sighed. For him, the day wasn’t even close to over. “Let’s go,” he said to the Zombie. “Maybe she knows where we can find Phyllis.”
“I hope she knows how to get out of Manhattan,” the Zombie said. “You heard Heckhaus.”
As the Baron started off along the sidewalk, he heard Meister Schuler back at the truck again. “Agent Heckhaus, thank you for waiting! The Baron ran off with his soulless monster, gods know where they’ve gone, but here’s some important news. I, Meister Schuler, will remain here, defending Tammany. So go to your secular contacts and tell them to fuck off entirely. They’ll have to give up on the Hall unless they want to keep losing men to ancient weapons and powerful wizards…”
They left earshot before Schuler finished, and if Heckhaus replied, they never heard it. They didn’t have to. They’d escaped, and by hook or by crook, their next step was to reach Denisov and deliver the Cat out of the Baron’s belly and into the diplomat’s bloody hands.
Author’s Note:
That ends one of the really heavily rewritten arcs in my book! I hope you enjoyed it. <3
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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