Chương 42: Chapter 41 - The Last Zombie

"No." I breathed the word out. It was a flat rejection of everything. Just no. I looked again. I ran my finger around the rim of the hole, feeling for the paper. I shook the skull, hoping to hear it rattle. Nothing. The excitement was gone. Without the pressure, there was nothing to stop my heart from caving in. It was a complete internal collapse that left me swaying on my feet.

"It's empty." The words escaped with the last air in my body. They echoed in my head. It's empty. But— how? How could it be empty! A mist of anger rose from the rubble in my chest. The skull wasn't supposed to be empty! I'd had a dream! I was a stupid seer who'd had a stupid dream—the spell should've been there! I had rights! Small hot tears ran down my cheeks. My stomach was sick with disappointment. Someone called my name. It didn't seem important. What was the point of all those nightmares?

All those sleepless nights? If I was going to put up with a set of overrated magical eyeballs, then I ought to be able to save at least a few people's lives! A hand grabbed my shoulder and forced me to turn. It was Igor. His face was only a few inches from mine, and he was staring right into my overrated eyes. He spoke quickly.

"It's not there. A shame. But we're still alive, so we keep going." He pressed one of the pipes he'd been carrying around on his back into my free hand.

"Conrad heard something out in the hall. He's already out there with the sledge hammer. Bring the lantern." He turned and limped toward the open door. I stared numbly at the pipe in my hand. A fleeting thought of my poor bat, cremated before I even got to use it, fluttered through my head. Yet another injustice. My hand tightened around the end of the pipe. I'll avenge you, Zombiebane. I slammed the skull back onto the shelf, grabbed the lantern from off the table, and ran after Igor and Conrad.

When I was out in the hall, I turned toward the part of the hall we hadn't checked yet. If there were any zombies, they should've been coming from that direction. It was empty. The noise was all behind me. I turned and raised the lantern. The light fell on the crowd of shambling skeletons. They were standing only five feet away. There were so many of them that the light couldn't reach them all. Conrad was already swinging the sledge hammer. Bones shattered, flying like shrapnel away from its path.

Igor stomped stiffly forward, his ax in hand and raising his splinted arm like a club. My nostrils flared and the mist of anger gathered into a red fury that shot through my temples and ran down my neck. This was wrong. This was not how it was supposed to go! We'd faced a collapsing world, demons, zombies, undead chimeras—and now skeletons? How dare they! Almost lost in my absurd outrage was another thought, branching off from my certainty that everything about this situation was wrong.

"Autonomous zombies can't move without muscles." The sound of bones shattering rained around me. Pieces clattered against the stone wall. In the mad press of skeletons, one managed to get past Igor. I stepped up and twisted into a home-run swing that staved in its skull and sent it flying into the crowd. The rest of the skeleton kept coming, and it didn't struggle blindly like the zombies had. It lunged toward me, its finger bones set to claw at my face.

I stumbled back and dropped the lantern to get a better hold on my pipe. Hands. Arms. Ribs. If I had to break every bone in its body, I would. I kept swinging. It could move without muscles. It could keep going without a head. There was more than one kind of zombie. They were puppets. Sweat flew from my head as I dove to grab the lantern. As I rose, I smashed my pipe as hard as I could across the thick bones of the skeleton's upper legs. I only managed to crack the first one. I kicked out the crack.

When the skeleton collapsed, I stood on top of its rib cage and raised the lantern as high as I could. There! White and silver threads were hanging in the air. They were so thin that they seemed to appear and disappear as they waved through the light and shadows. Each strand of magic led back to one skeleton's head, making the matte white bone of the skull glow in the darkness, and illuminating the tiny figure perched on top of it. The thing was no larger than my hand.

It had a thin, long humanoid shape with pins for fingers and toes. Its skin looked black from that distance, but near the center of the web, where the light was the best, I could make out a hint of dark red. I couldn't hear it over the fight, but I could see it was laughing—a tremendous laugh that revealed miniature tusks curling up from its lower jaw. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Conrad!" I yelled.

"Igor! The zombie is right there!" I threw my arm out, finger extended. The thing stopped laughing.

"Conrad!" Igor shouted.

"It's yours!" I glanced at Igor. He was fighting back the front line of skeletons. His arm splint was already broken. His cheeks and forehead were flushed, but the rest of his face was pale—almost yellow-white. There were spots of blood on him, and there was no pretending that it had come from the skeletons.

"Emerra!" Conrad shouted. My eyes jerked away from Igor. The wolfman was in the center of the battle. The floor around him was littered with bone fragments.

"What am I looking for?" he yelled.

"It's small!" I yelled back. The thing was glaring at me with eyes whiter than the whitest puppet threads. I went on.

"It's the size of my hand. It's dark. It's riding that skeleton, and it's mad as hell!" Conrad swore. I took that to mean that he'd seen it.

"Kill it!" I screamed. Conrad grabbed a nearby skull, ripped it free from the skeleton it was attached to, and threw it as hard as he could. It slammed into the skull the thing was riding, knocking the zombie off and breaking the magic threads. They drifted through the air like spider silk in a hard breeze, then disappeared. The skeletons all collapsed. The bones were still tumbling to the floor when Conrad leaped toward our dislodged tormentor. Igor was stumbling toward them.

Lantern in hand, I was coming at a run, my feet scrabbling over the loose bits of bone. The zombie pulled itself free of the bones that had fallen around it, stood at the highest point of a rib's arch, and unfurled a set of bat wings from its back. They rolled out like old leather that had been scraped too thin. They beat the air once, lifting the thing away from its perch just as Conrad landed. His claws closed over nothing but air.

By then I was close enough to see the yellowed piece of rolled-up parchment curled in its tiny hand.

"It has the spell!" I cried. It rose toward the ceiling, cast one last murderous glare my direction, then flew toward the wine cellar. Conrad went after it. Igor got tangled in a skeleton and fell, first to his good knee, then, unbalanced by all his injuries, to his side. I hesitated until I saw the larger of his eyes glaring up at me in the lantern light.

"Go," he ordered. I obeyed. Conrad had the thing trapped against a side wall of the wine cellar, above the shelves of wine. The wolfman was keeping himself between the little flying zombie and the open trap door. The ceiling there was low enough for Conrad to grab it if it tried to get by him. It scanned the room, glanced once more at Conrad, then threw itself at my face as I came running through the door. I raised my hands to protect myself and managed to blind myself with the lantern.

I felt a set of fine points tear a set of bloody lines across my scalp, I dropped my pipe to bat at the thing with my hand. I heard Conrad moving. I heard another voice—Iset's—calling my name. They must have come back inside to check on us. She'd heard me screaming.

"Iset! The bat!" I yelled, almost breaking my vocal cords from the effort of being as loud as possible.

"It's a zombie! It has the spell!" I could see again. The thing had dodged around Conrad when he came to help me. It disappeared out the open trap door. Conrad and I ran after it. I clamored up the tiny spiral staircase, using it more like a jungle-gym than a set of stairs. Conrad followed my lead, almost launching himself out of the hole. We escaped in time to see the thing finish circling the pantry ceiling. Iset came into the doorway that led to the kitchen. She looked up.

"My god!"

"Kill the bat!" I yelled.

"Bat?" Mrs. Park said from somewhere in the kitchen. The thing dived over Iset's head. She ducked and turned to the kitchen as Conrad and I arrived beside her. The thing was flapping around above the kitchen island. The morning sun bleeding through the boarded-up windows made it easy to see. It was oxblood red and looked like no bat that I'd ever seen, but the term was still more accurate than any other I had. Mrs. Park was standing between it and the oven with the shotgun in hand.

Kappa jumped onto the far edge of the island. Ignoring the shotgun, Mrs. Park snatched up one of the frying pans that Igor kept hanging on the wall. Between one of my steps and the next, she swung. The frying pan crashed against the zombie, mid-air, and sent it flying across the room with a louder-than-I-would-have-imagined clang. Kappa threw himself after it. The thing hit the tall cupboards and dropped to the floor. The parchment in its hand rolled free.

The zombie didn't have time to twitch before Kappa landed beside it, scooped it up with both hands, tossed it into the air, and shut the great wide cage of his fangs over its body. Kappa gnashed his teeth, revealing new bits of severed wings or limbs each time, then he raised his off-white chin and swallowed. He stood there a moment, on all fours, then he walked his front hands back, dropped on his butt, and looked around.

When he saw all of us staring at him, a guilty, worried look entered his eyes and put a wrinkle on his small forehead.

"Kappa!" I cried. He brought his arms and legs in closer. The fin on the top of his head retracted.

"You're perfect!" I ran across the room, scooped him up, just like he'd scooped up the miniature zombie, tossed him in the air, caught him, and pulled him into a hug while laughing the whole time.

"You're a wonderful, perfect, fantastic little guy! You're the best bog-monster in the whole world!" He made the oof sound that meant I was squeezing him too hard. Really, I was so full of stupid joy that I could've squeezed him until he popped like a balloon, but wringing the hero-of-the-day to death seemed ungrateful. I forced myself to ease up. Letting his weight rest on my hip, I leaned back to look at his sweet face. The worried expression had mostly faded. Mostly.

"I hunted," he whispered to me, as if confessing a great sin.

"I know. I saw." I laughed and rubbed my nose against his.

"You're a great little hunter."

"Supposed to hunt outside." Conrad came over and picked up the piece of parchment still on the floor. As he straightened up, he said, "The rule is 'catch it outside, eat it outside.' You caught it in here." Conrad put his huge hand on Kappa's head and ran it backward so he wouldn't hurt Kappa's fin.

"Good job, buddy." The sound of clumping and grumbling grew louder as Igor limped into view.

"Did we get it?" he asked. Conrad passed Iset the parchment. She unrolled it and gazed at it. Her hands started trembling, and when she spoke, her voice sounded like light and honey—like every good thing in the world all at once.

"Yes!"—make that slightly choked-up light and honey—"We have it!" She handed it back to Conrad. Conrad didn't even glance at it before tearing it in half. The world shifted. My stomach lurched like it had dreamed of dropping a thousand feet, and then it settled. I blinked away the last of the feeling that I'd seen something, and two specks of tears. Conrad pointed his nose towards the broken windows and took a deep breath. Kappa started bouncing on my hip.

"Home!" He tried to climb me but kept sliding back into my arms because he was too excited to find any good footholds.

"We're home!"

"We're home!" I shouted with him. I hugged him again, put him down, and ran out to the hall where my shoes were just waiting to be thrown on. With a whoop, Kappa followed me. Sounding more weary than after he'd finished fighting off a mountain of zombies, Igor said, "Conrad."

"I've got her," Conrad said. Shoes on! Door thrown wide! I ran outside while Conrad was still coming up behind me. I ran around the edge of the mansion, through the front yard, and down the road that led to Quicholt and my friends. Kappa hopped, ran, and bounded along beside me. I didn't worry about Conrad. He would catch up.