Chương 42: Chapter 39: Nora Does A Stupid Thing

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I was absolutely going to die. It was the only thought in my mind as I ran toward the bonfire, and it kept repeating over and over. When I reached the fire, flames licked ten feet into the air, and heat hit my face instantly, stinging my skin. My boots crunched over charred debris at the edge of the stone ring. I scanned the firewood and found exactly what I was looking for— A branch, maybe four feet long, one end on fire and the other jutting out from the pile.

Snatching up the branch, heat seared through my palm; the unlit end of the wood felt as if it were already aflame. My health bar ticked down as blisters formed on my palm, but I gritted my teeth and held on. STATUS APPLIED: BURNED (MINOR) Effect: Movement -15%, ongoing pain. Clear with healing Salve or better. Behind me, metal struck metal with an echoey clang. I spun to see that Isabel had caught the Bald Mother's hook on the spear's shaft, holding it off with both hands. The Mother towered over her, pushing back.

Isabel's boots skidded backward through the grass, losing ground inch by inch. Her face twisted in a grimace of effort, arms shaking. Then she did something I didn't expect. Instead of pushing back, she twisted hard to the left and ducked low. The spear's shaft levered the hook sideways, and the Mother's momentum carried her forward, off-balance. Isabel didn't hesitate. She reversed her grip on the spear, planted her feet, and charged.

The Bald Mother was still recovering when Isabel drove the spear straight through her sternum with everything she had. The blade punched through rotted flesh and kept going— SPLORTCH —pinning the monster against the cabin's wall. She roared, wrapped both hands around the spear shaft, and tried to pull it free. Isabel stumbled back, panting. The Bald Mother pulled harder at the spear. The wall splintered around the blade, but it remained lodged in the wood. It bought us a few precious extra seconds.

"NORA, GO!" Isabel screamed, sprinting away from the Bald Mother toward the stoner cabin. I watched her run and let my eyes do the work. Camp Stillwater's cabins curved around the bonfire in a wide semicircle. That meant three on my left, three on my right, a lot of open ground between them. The Bald Mother was pinned to the far right cabin, near the canoes. The stoner cabin was on my far left. The Naked Mother had her back to me, all of her attention on the door she was about to punch through.

The frame was buckling. A few more hits and she'd be inside. Under the cabin's front stairs, lying on its side against the foundation, was the propane tank. Isabel reached the far side of the stoner cabin and disappeared around the corner. A moment later, I heard her palms slam against the side window.

"GET TO THE BACK! AWAY FROM THE DOOR! NOW!"

"We can't! She's gonna get in!" Thin. Terrified. The Naked Mother's head jerked toward the sound. Then her hook slammed into the door again, and the wood splintered outward in a spiderweb of cracks. A kid's leg appeared at the side window. Then another. They were coming out. I ran. In my peripheral vision, the Bald Mother tore herself free from the spear with a deafening yowl. Her footsteps resumed more slowly, limping toward the parking lot. Right where Liam's group had scattered. One thing at a time.

The branch in my hand was still burning, flames crawling up toward my grip. Now or never. I slid the last few feet, dropping beneath the stairs. The tank was right there, lying on its side against the foundation. Close enough to see where the metal had been damaged. One good rupture and all that pressurized gas would blow. Above me, through the floorboards, I could hear feet scrambling. Kids moving toward the back. Tre's voice, low and urgent, herding them.

In the ideal version of my stupid plan, the blast would come up from underneath the Naked Mother, throwing her away from the door. But a propane tank under a wooden structure didn't give two shits about my plans. Tre and the kids were still only about twenty feet away from where I was about to create a massive explosion. The only thing between them and this blast would be wood, insulation, and prayers.

And let's be honest, there was no deity out there worth praying to if a demon had been allowed to take over the Earth in the first place. But the Mother was about to breach that door, and once she was inside, it would be a bloodbath. There was no version of that where any kids survived. And in all scenarios, I was likely to be blown to pieces along with them. Not that it mattered. I had nothing to go back to anyway. But I couldn't let anything happen to Isabel and Tre.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Nora?! What the fuck are you doing?! Tre screamed in my head. Fuck it. I brought the broken shield down on the propane tank's valve as hard as I could. Metal hit metal with a dull clang. The damaged valve snapped clean off, spinning away into the grass. The shield shattered and disintegrated. Gas escaped the broken valve in a pressurized jet; invisible but loud. The smell hit. Propane. Strong enough to taste.

I had seconds. Maybe less. Scrambling out from under the stairs, I put as much distance between me and the tank as my arms and legs allowed. Gas filled the space under the porch. The burning branch slowly died in my grip, flames sputtering closer to my blistered palm. Above me, the Naked Mother's hook crashed through the cabin door one final time. Wood exploded inward. She was through. No time left. I threw the branch. WHOOOOM. Bright orange fire consumed the porch. Heat belted me even at ten feet away.

My eyebrows singed. The air in my lungs turned to knives. The shockwave tossed me into the air. I was flying, weightless, defying gravity. I hit the ground shoulder-first, skull second; every thought knocked clean out of my head. Gravel flayed my palms and shredded my burnt clothes as I skidded to a stop. Everything went dark. I might've been out for seconds, or minutes, or days. Time has no meaning. Am I dead?!

The voice in my head sounded pretty excited by the idea, but there was no time to explore that fucked up thought because— Everything fucking hurts. Which confirmed I was alive and well… Well, alive. Sad trombone. Sound returned as a high-pitched scream of static. And my vision went from black to white to orange. Finally landing on smoky gray. I was on my back staring up at a sky smothered in thick smoke. Stars had turned to smudges.

I tried to move, but my body lagged behind the command, like it had to think about it first. I focused on pushing myself upright. My right hand pressed against the ground and— Something gave. The arm folded under me, dumping me back onto my side. My brain registered a thought before the pain arrived: my arm doesn't normally bend that way. It was an oddly detached thought that should've come with alarm bells. It didn't. I looked down. Blood.

So much blood it was hard to see shape through the thick, black-red gore, streaked with ash. I tried to make a fist. The muscles fired… at least I think they did, but nothing moved. My left hand wiped at the blood, clearing away the caked-on viscera. Just enough to see my damaged hand underneath. The skin on my right hand was shredded. My pinkie, ring, and middle fingers were gone. In their place were three mangled stumps, bone jutting through torn meat.

I tried to move them, and a squirt of fresh blood pulsated from the stumps. There was no pain, but I did feel an immense amount of pressure, like the nerves were still coming to terms with the loss. A broken sound ripped out of me; half gasp, half laugh. The Naked Mother jerked to life. What was left of her. The blast had torn her in half, destroying her from the ribs down, the ruin of her body smoking and black. One arm dragged her forward in staccato bursts.

The other arm hung limply at her side, stripped to the bone. Her upper torso was clawing toward me through the mud, leaving a trail of thick black fluid behind. Move. Move now. Through the ringing in my ears, Tre's voice, faint and steady: Stay down. I got this one. A small shape broke from the burning cabin. Tre. Soot-streaked, eyes fierce, paring knife in hand. He sprinted straight for the Naked Mother. She was faster than a half-destroyed corpse had any right to be.

Her good arm whipped out and caught Tre mid-stride, fingers caging in his torso. She lifted him and squeezed. The paring knife was pinned against his side, trapped between her fingers and his thigh. The Mother's ruined face turned toward him. Her jaw opened and closed limply. I was ten feet away. Concussed. Half-blind. Missing extremities. I dragged myself forward anyway. Elbows and knees, face down in the mud and ash, pulling with my left hand and pushing with the ruined right.

The stumps where my fingers used to be screamed every time they hit the ground. Tre made a creaky-hinge sound as the Mother tightened her grip. Hurry. Up close, the Mother's remaining arm was a wet mass of burned muscle and exposed tendons. I shoved my hand into the gap between her fingers and Tre's body. My stumps slid into the crevice, slick with blood. I pushed. Bone rubbed bone. Gritting my teeth, I tried to make space where there wasn't any. It wasn't enough.

So I pushed harder, my vision flaring white for a beat. Something in her arm cracked. I pried harder, putting my shoulder into it, teeth clenched hard enough to shatter every last one of them. Her fingers loosened just enough for Tre to wrench his knife arm free. In a single motion, he drove the knife through her eye, burying it to the handle. The Mother's grip spasmed once, then released. Tre collapsed to the ground. Holy shit, that worked! A full-body shudder traveled from her arm down through her shredded torso.

Then she went still. HOSTILE NEUTRALIZED: LAKE MOTHER (1/2) Isabel came running through the smoke, face streaked with soot and blood. She kneeled beside me.

"Oh fuck. Oh fuck, Nora. Your hand—" HEALTH: 31% STATUS: [CONCUSSION] Vision -30%, Movement -15% STATUS: [MAIMED] Right hand critical damage STATUS: [BURNED] Right side, face, ear STATUS: [SHRAPNEL] Multiple foreign objects embedded I took the last Salve in my inventory. A dizzying rush of warmth hit me, like sinking into a hot bath, as my health bar climbed to 56%. The concussion faded. My vision cleared, the strobing resolved into steady firelight. The ringing in my ears thinned to a dull background whine.

Shrapnel pushed itself free from my arms and ribs with soft metallic tinks against the dirt. Burns on my face and side cooled, blistered skin smoothing over. Then I looked at my right hand. The blood had vanished. The torn flesh had sealed. And there, extending from my palm, were three bony fingers: Pinkie, ring, and middle. No muscle. No skin. Polished white skeletal fingers that somehow still curled when I tried to move them, clicking faintly against each other like dice.

At the base of each fleshless finger, thin streaks of red and black clung to the seams. The skeletal fingers looked too long without muscle, too thin, and every tiny joint was visible when I tried to move them. They twitched and curled, but there was no strength behind it, no feeling. It was simply a bone obeying the signal, like I was puppeting a corpse's hand.

"What... what the fuck..." Isabel's voice came out small, barely audible over the crackle of the fires.

"Are you okay?"

"Weirdly fine."

"The Salve regrew the bones but not the rest," Tre said.

"That's... new." I tried to grip Isabel's arm, but the bones only brushed her sleeve, sliding off with no pressure. A shriek sliced through the air. Isabel's head jerked toward the sound.

"Shit. The parking lot." Kids stumbled from the blown-out cabin wall, coughing, burned—six of them. One clutched an arm where bone showed through. Another held his eye, blood streaming. They ran toward the parking lot. Toward the screaming.

"Wrap it fast," I said. Isabel grabbed a Stabilizer Wrap from inventory. She wrapped the thick gauze around my right hand, covering the skeletal fingers. The fabric absorbed into my skin, vanishing completely. A warm tingle spread through my hand. The bones were still skeletal, but the wrap had integrated, stabilizing the structure. I climbed to my feet and scooped up Tre with my left hand. The Bald Mother was still in the parking lot, hurting people. We had to end this. I examined the skateboard in my inventory.

It wasn't much of a weapon, but other than some heals, it was all I had left. We were out of fire, out of tricks.

"We need to go," I said, steadying myself.