Notes from the Future: Iron Rachel II

I hear the screams.

I sense his dark rapture at their pain, the tearing of their flesh, their eyes wild as they watch him eat them. I am crossing the field. We have taken the ranch house. The barn will be next. I am not stopping. It is almost time. 

Almost. 

Time.

Something is fluttering in my awareness, somewhere behind me and to my left. I turn to see, about five hundred yards back the way we've come, Her Hottieship locked in combat.

With Iron Rachel.

"Boggs! Didn't you bayonet her?!" I shout, my voice carrying the ring of command for the first time. Ever.

Boggs turns and, if a blue-eyed Anglo can get more pale than he already is, Boggs would be a gold medalist. Which means Iron Rachel died. 

And is alive again.

"Oh, fuck NO!" I shout, launching myself back toward where they fight. I'm there in about seven strides, just as Iron Rachel swings something at Henrietta's legs and she jumps away in time to avoid being severed at the knees by a ...

"What the fuck is that, you fucking ugly undead cunt?!" I shout, stepping in on Iron Rachel's left and clocking her with the chunk of stone I don't remember picking up. "Is that a scythe? Are you the Grim fucking Reaper now, you damn ugly bitch!?"

Rather than fall from the shattered jaw and broken cheekbone I have brought as a housewarming present for her first night in hell, Iron Rachel huffs two or three times, kind of hunched to the right. She's laughing. This crazy ass bitch is laughing at me when I broke her face open with a stone. Then she raises up slightly and I see something black and glistening sticking out of her left cheekbone. It's wet and pulsating and has two little holes in it.

Good Lord. It's a dog's nose. 

"What the fuck?" I step back involuntarily, looking to Henrietta, whose eyes are fixated on the hole in Iron Rachel's face; now I see that Henrietta is injured -- her left arm deeply wounded, blood flowing freely from a slice through her tricep. I look back to Iron Rachel in time to see the dog nose press forward, out of the hole in her face; a snout follows, canine teeth gritting in exertion. In one grunting push, the jaw and much of the head -- the eyes, certainly -- are free, the jaw popping open with a sickening crunch of the left side of Iron Rachel's face. Tongue lolling, eyes wild, this thing is not a dog. 

It's a wolf. Only, not: it's a thing. It's an infection. I recognize it, and, glancing at Henrietta again, I see that she does, as well. Iron Rachel is still grunting and huffing, bent over to her right. The soldiers and nurses around her are backing away, frank disgust on their faces. I step back as well, but only to get a clearer picture; she does not scare me anymore, even with half a wolf head poking out her face.

She appears to be doing something to her lady parts, though. And from the sound of things and the fresh smell of blood, it can't be good. As though she senses my thoughts, Iron Rachel turns in that moment and lifts her skirt. I know what she wants to show me, but I will not look. I will not take my eyes from her face. I don't need to. And as she raises a torn, bloody chunk of her own flesh to her mouth I know that the only thing to do is kill her, now, before she can infect anyone else. The rock drops from my hand and I'm lifting the flap of the pouch I still carry slung diagonally across my body when the scythe in Iron Rachel's left hand whips out behind her and slices a young soldier neatly, diagonally in two. His eyes wide in shock, the upper half of his body slides wetly to the not-so-dry grass to his left and his fellow soldiers shout and cry out, a nurse falling to her knees and cradling his head in her lap. This is what demoralization looks like; I recognize it from my days at Ajilon.

"Veronica," Iron Rachel says, for all the world as calm as someone standing in the lobby of a theatre. "A word in your ear?"

Henrietta is chanting something, or yelling something. I can't really tell. I can't really hear her. I can't seem to hear much of anything. Why is that. And what is this dark fog rolling in?

I know that to allow Iron Rachel to speak another word may spell doom for us all. I step forward, pressing the muzzle of my gun against her forehead and firing, but at that exact moment another young soldier has darted forward to behead her with a sabre. I feel and smell and hear the bullet hit the sword and snap it before it can fully sever Iron Rachel's head from her body.

The bullet ricochets to the right and I sense rather than hear another soldier or a nurse fall dead or mortally injured. Then I am being tickled and poked in the ass cheek and I feel leaves on my arm and I turn and see little trees all around us, little trees growing and shining with a warm amber light. The dark fog -- which I had hardly noticed -- disperses, and it's like when you're driving in the rain and you can't see anything until the defroster vents clear the windshield of your own condensation. 

We are surrounded by hundreds of little saplings, and the thingbeast that is trying to birth itself through Iron Rachel's face does not like them at all. She is turning and spinning and trying to find a way out, but she is pinned in. She stomps on any that start to grow beneath her, but this just seems to make the trees around her grow stronger, taller and more determined. 

"I desecrate you!" she shouts, grabbing a sapling and stripping it of its leaves, then, to the mutual abhorrence of all present, mounting the sapling and forcing herself onto it, just as the false prophet Torvald Mayberry forced objects into innocent Rachels in the compound. She is cackling like the ugly crazy hag she is, the creature squirming in her face is panting in ecstasy, and I understand in an instant what is going on.

"Heal her!" I shout, grabbing the scythe from where she let it drop so she could push an Oak up her cooter. The nurses are staring at me like I'm the crazy tree rapist, but Henrietta seems to understand.

"Do as she says! Heal her now! Dull the pain!" As she barks these orders, Henrietta herself steps forward and holds Iron Rachel's arms to her sides as nurses dart in with syringes and bandages, simultaneously binding Iron Rachel's arms at her side and trying to stanch the flow of blood from her badly damaged body.

The thingbeast in her face hears and sees everything we are doing. With renewed fervor it wriggles and squees and grunts, but there is no way it is getting out. 

When Iron Rachel's head falls from her body to land in the bloody earth beneath her, I realize what it was doing: the thingbeast was using the claws of its feet to cut the rest of the way through her neck. Iron Rachel's body slumps where it is, still held upright by the strapling. As we all stare, shocked to silence and stillness, the first tip of the tree pokes up through her torn, ruined neck. The tree is growing at a faster rate than all the others, drinking her blood and absorbing her as an offering.

The thingbeast stuck in her severed head gives a cry, a howl, and I scythe it in half before I realize I've thought of doing so. At the same moment, a second thingbeast snout begins to push up out of her neck. 

The two halves of the first thingbeast begin to twitch and bleed and ... begin to regenerate.

There is a silence, then, as we all realize what we've done. Then, from the darkness out around us, comes the first howl. Then the second howl. Then the third, and fourth and then too many to count joining in, and we understand: for every one of the false prophet's followers we've cut down, some monstrosity has been unleashed into the night. 

I can sense, smell, taste them. They are all around us.

All the way back to where Mother Henrietta was shot. 

All of their dead have risen, birthing these abominations from their wounds, unholy children of darkness pushed from false wombs of the uncaring dead.

Flames light the sky and I see the first tongues of destruction crest the hill to the east of us; glancing to the south and north, I understand: the fire has eaten through the businesses and tract homes, it is coming up the hill to devour these unnatural things. There really is no escape. 

"Listen to me," I shout, and the murmuring and near-hysterical panic goes still, though the reloading continues. "We are surrounded. What the creatures don't get, the fire will. Our job -- our only job, now -- is to incapacitate as many of them as we can!"

We can hear them running for us, now. 

"I've seen Henry V," I cry, turning to face the barn where thingbeasts are grunting and struggling from the dead of our first charge. "I've seen it, but I don't remember his speech. So here's all I have to say: do not kill these motherfuckers! Pin them down and let the fire do the rest! Stake them to the earth, to each other, impale them on a willing tree! I'm gonna go kill me a false prophet!"

The cheer that follows as we surge forward feels really, really good. Before we turned, I caught a glimpse of the misshapen horde racing at us from all sides.

I realize, now, that I will never call Max to me. I want him to live.

Ah, well. My sweet boy, I think, and leaping over a barb-wire fence, I impale a thingbeast backwards to the fencepost with the scythe, leaving it there to rust and not quite die. Good boy, stay, Maxwell, and when I am gone, know that you are free.

A gas main bursts somewhere on the far side of that hill, down among the houses that were, the explosion roaring up into the night sky like hell unleashed. Scattered before us as I lead the charge are thingbeasts, thousands of them, growing faster and stronger than the Oak and Bay saplings that spring up in my wake.

On a certain level, it's funny. Tad should be the one doing this, not me.

I laugh. The laugh becomes a howl, a challenge, a mocking taunt.

Thousands howl back at me, enraged.

In the little silence that follows just before I crash through the windows of the ranch house comes a solitary, plaintive howl, far, far away.

I hear You, it says. I'm coming. You good stay! You good stay! I am Max, I come when you call! 

If there is a second howl, I do not hear it above my own.