[First Published on Facebook on 18/12/2012]
He shouldn’t be here.
It was Christmas Eve. He was eighteen years old. He had a home. He had a family. He had a thesis to write. He had promised his father he’d help make the Christmas dinner this year. And he was wearing his favourite vintage Beatles T-shirt, the orange one, and it stained easily.
All good reasons why he shouldn’t be here, now, on the cold and dusty stone floor of a dark and malodorous cellar in one of the crappier parts of London, with no-one for company except an equally-malodorous basement-dweller and his three pet Draugar. Handcuffed to a rusty iron loop cemented into the wall.
Goddammit, Lex.
***
Alexander Gunpowder had been barricaded in his room that day. And, this being Mad Lex, the term was particularly accurate. Joseph knew the security well enough by now that he could bypass or avoid most of the more deadly of the ramshackle systems.
Lex was at his workbench, concentrating intently on some clear substance he was gradually heating until it began to turn purple. With the hand not occupied by keeping the scientific equipment positioned just so, he was periodically shooting at the far wall, without looking. A large pane of bulletproof glass had been set up, and it was already pretty frosted over, the spiderweb-pattern densest at specific points which, if the pane had been an approaching unidentified humanoid, would mostly correspond to the positions of vital organs. Embedded in the glass and littering the floor in front were enough chips of metal, glass and wood to verify that Lex had been thinking for some time.
“I have a PhD to earn,” Joseph complained, deftly sidestepping away from the spot through which Mad Lex Gunpowder’s startled bullet immediately passed. “And I deliberately took the Christmas period off.”
Mad Lex humphed derisively. “I know that, slacker,” he said dismissively in his instantly-recognisable, slightly-aggressive Australian accent. His eyes, as usual, darted constantly in all directions, as if constantly suspicious of impending sneak-attack, only occasionally focusing on Joseph’s face. “But this is important balls going down here. And you shoulda been finished by now, anyway.” Lex, of course, had earned his doctorate in zontanecrology when he was only seventeen. His absurd level of undeniable natural skill in the field was the only reason why he hadn’t yet been permanently banned from practising and incarcerated somewhere with soft walls and a strict no-weapons policy.
Joseph sighed and brushed a dark curl from in front of his eyes, silently wishing in the back of his mind that his hair would hurry up and finish the bizarre curly-to-straight transition it seemed to be permanently stuck in. “What kind of important, Lex? Because –”
“Got a right dangerous nasty bloke needs brought in,” Lex answered, before Joseph could berate him again. “Tough job. I need a wingman.”
“A slayer?” Joseph asked, suddenly all attention. Mad Lex preferred to use his skills for hunting down undead-slayers or undead criminals, rather than serious scientific research. There were fewer sanctions for shooting at people in the field than there were in the lab.
“Worse than a slayer, mate,” Lex replied, taking the long, reinforced-leather jacket from the back of his nearby chair and donning his brown, feathered Tyrolean hat. “We got ourselves a balls-out necromancer. Get your coat.”
***
The deranged basement-dwelling necromancer was babbling something, probably not anything important, and the Draugar were content to simply stand, guarding the stairs to the door, with the kind of resolute patience that came with being already dead.
One of these days, he really had to stop trusting his mentor, Joseph thought. His godfather was bad enough, but at least Mediochre never gave the impression he was one bad day away from declaring war on antelope.
The lunatic in whose house he was currently imprisoned – dangit, what was his name again? Something stupid. He’d assumed Lex was just delusional when he’d said it, but the man himself had confirmed it when he’d first captured Joseph. But at that point, Joseph had been distracted by two Jiang-Shi leaping at him and a Draugr grasping him from behind, so he hadn’t really been listening. Oh, screw this. He’d just ask.
“Hey!” he interrupted the still-rambling man. The pale, bony, greasy-haired figure turned in disbelief. He could have passed for undead himself in this light. “Sorry, mate, what was your name again?” Joseph asked, shifting his body and causing the metal of the handcuffs to clank against the wall bracket. The man stared in delirious indignation.
“I am Stormhold Elect! Dreadlord Servant of the Thousand Voices! I –”
“Right, thanks,” Joseph interrupted quickly.
The lunatic in whose house he was currently imprisoned – Stormhold Elect – had at the very least had enough of his brain on the right plane of existence to confiscate as many weapons from Joseph’s person as he could find. Joseph, however, had been privy to far more experience in hiding weapons than Stormhold, and could feel, as he shifted his body against the wall, the single pistol working its way free from its concealed nook within his clothing.
“NO!” Stormhold raged, glaring at Joseph and waving his hands in the air. “No-one interrupts me anymore! You listen now! People listen! I’m special! I’m chosen! I was raised by the Order for their higher purpose – but not even they know that my goals are bigger than them! Higher! Purer! No-one controls me – not even the voices!”
“Right, thankyou, got it,” Joseph insisted. “Don’t worry, I know the drill. I work with a madman.” The Draugar didn’t move – didn’t even react – but it was a fairly certain thing that they would charge him as soon as he was free. Joseph knew the type and purpose of every firearm he kept on him, because when you were out in the field with Mad Lex you usually needed to. This particular one was an expensive lightweight number with only six bullets, but those were solid silver bullets in a copper shell, specially strengthened by tightly-woven enchantments and blessed by an exorcist. They had to be imported from a family-run specialist outlet in Mexico, and were one of the most expensive forms of ammo Joseph had access to. It was much cheaper for him though, because he got them from Mad Lex who bought them in bulk every Christmas as a gift for himself and his apprentice. There would be no harm, therefore, in using these six up right now. Provided Stormhold could be kept talking for long enough. “Tell me,” Joseph said, fixing the greasy necromancer with a quizzical look, “What are you trying to do here? What is higher and purer than the goals of the, uh, ‘order’? Sounds pretty spectacular.”
“Bah!” Stormhold shouted, drawing an ornamental dagger from his cracked leather belt and moving to a rusty sink in the corner to… wash the blade, presumably? “You don’t know. You don’t even know. I’m going to raise them all.”
OK, well, that made sense. He was, after all, a necromancer. Raising things was what they did. ‘What goes down must come up’, that was the standard necromancer’s motto.
“Raise what, exactly?” Joseph asked. He was a little put out to realise that, at a mere eighteen years old, he was already starting to think of himself as ‘getting too old for this nonsense’.
“Everyone. It is my purpose. It is why I was chosen – not by the order, or the voices, but by powers higher. I will end death.”
“Don’t the Forgotten Triumphs stand in the way of that?” Joseph asked, as if this was a serious debate and not a nearly-grown man trying to communicate with a glaze-eyed lunatic. He wriggled to shift the gun further up his back, towards his right sleeve. “Without somehow gaining the kind of power that no mancer has exhibited since shortly after the dawn of time, all you can do is use your own mantic energy to drag the odd soul back to this plane of existence for as long as it takes you to run out of energy and/or die. You can’t breathe it back into the body and make it alive again, and you can’t even permanently anchor it to an animated flesh form, unless you yourself happen to be immortal and of limitless energy.” At this, he turned his head to wink at the three hulking animated flesh forms who were still dumbly guarding the staircase behind Stormhold. “S’up guys.”
Stormhold made a sound that was probably best written as ‘Pfah!’ and turned around again, waving his knife through the air in practised, presumably-significant motions. “A tool like the rest of them. Made stupid by the schools and the unis and the mentors. No thinking outside boxes for you. No. I have overcome the First Forgotten Triumph. I have found an alternative route.”
“You’re insane,” Joseph said, flatly. “Not even the normal kind of bad-guy insane. Just straight-up, balls-out, teeth-to-the-bar, bona-fide-dinkum mal-hinged.” These were all Mad Lex’s phrases, but occasionally Joseph found that the words of a madman were the only ones that could accurately describe certain forms of stupidity.
“So say you!” Stormhold screamed, the arm holding the dagger dropping to his side. “So say everyone! But they are wrong! The Sons of Earth shall be raised, and shall make war with the Daughters of Heaven!”
There was silence, as Stormhold’s intense stare met Joseph utter blankness.
“…what the Jesus,” Joseph eventually enunciated. He wondered dimly whether blasphemy on Christmas Eve was worse than blasphemy on other days. He’d certainly be more irked to be unintentionally called upon at – he twisted his neck painfully to check the time on his wristwatch – 11:34 the night before his birthday.
“You speak of the Christ-child, but you do not know him!” Stormhold insisted. Fair enough, Joseph privately conceded. He’d heard all about the fellow, but they didn’t seem to be on speaking terms, beyond the occasional ‘Holy God if you’re real please don’t let this thing eat me’. “But here,” Stormhold continued, “on his most holy of days, I shall change the world! The powers of the Daughters of Heaven shall be used against them! The dead of Earth shall rise!”
“Right,” Joseph nodded. With that last twist of his neck, he had transferred his gun, unnoticed, into his sleeve. He straightened his back and leaned forwards slightly, allowing the weapon to slide down towards his hand. “So, uh, just so’s we’re clear, why am I here?”
Stormhold looked at him with incredible seriousness. “It requires a sacrifice,” he stated. “To conquer death, there must be death. It loosens the tensions between the planes.”
“Oh crap.”
Joseph was a good shot. At this sort of range, he was very good. He had to be good at most of the things he did, given his position: student to Mad Lex Gunpowder, godson to Mediochre Q Seth, latest descendant of a long line of influential zontanecrologists and similar practitioners of the mantic-based sciences. If he hadn’t happened to excel, he’d probably have been driven mad by the pressure. He lived for the day he finally earned his PhD, and could relax, knowing that he had proven himself to be more than just a crossroads where more important figures met.
The trouble was the logistics of the situation with those three Draugar in the way. As soon as he freed himself, they would come at him, and he wouldn’t get a clear shot at Stormhold. Assuming all three Undead had been raised by Stormhold personally, which he was willing to just assume was probably the case at this point, they would drop stone dead as soon as their master went down, but if they got to him before he could kill the necromancer, they’d shatter his bones like Mad Lex’s whiskey cabinet that time he forgot to set up the bulletproof glass in the right place. These bullets could fell almost anything, living or undead, but, somewhat inconveniently, one of the few creatures immune to them was the Draugr.
Stormhold raised the knife and began to walk slowly towards Joseph. Joseph’s eyes flickered from the necromancer to the Draugar. Was he close enough? Were they? He began to manoeuvre the gun towards his grip, pushing it out of his sleeve with the bracket he was attached to, trying to make as little noise as possible and painfully aware of every little clink of metal-cuff-on-metal-bracket-on-metal-gun.
“You,” Stormhold intoned in a higher, more nasal voice than before. He gestured to one of the Draugar. “Hold him down. The blade must pierce the neck just so.”
You have got to be kidding me, Joseph thought, as the Draugr obediently crossed in front of his target and reached out towards him. He could grip the gun now, shuffle it around until his finger could reach the trigger, but it was useless against the big ol’ hunk of undead, Viking-level muscle currently obscuring the squishier human target behind.
Almost useless, anyway. Useless without a little imagination and a convenient distraction.
Joseph gradually became aware of a series of violent crashes from above. The whole house was swarming with obedient Undead, mostly Jiang-Shi because Stormhold clearly had a flair for the exotic. If something had gotten close enough to the cellar door to be heard fighting from down here, it would have to be something worth paying attention to. Stormhold clearly heard it as well, because he held up a hand and the Draugr stopped, not yet in range to crush Joseph’s head with one fist but certainly uncomfortably close to it.
Stormhold moved to look at the door atop the stairs. The remaining two Draugr turned around to face it. There was the unmistakable moaning screech of a distressed Jiang-Shi, accompanied by a series of loud crashes and three sharp gunshots. The sealed door to the cellar shook violently with blunt-force impact, and part of the doorframe splintered, letting three finely-spaced shafts of light burst in from outside.
“Bounce bounce, ya bloody galahs!” called an unmistakeable Southern-Hemisphere voice through the crack, punctuated by repeated crashes, like something powerful was being made to repeatedly jump against the door.
“Do it!” screamed Stormhold, his voice rising straight into castrati territory. “Hold him down!”
The Draugr tried, to his credit, to make a further step. Joseph had taken advantage of its pause to position his gun correctly, and now he fired, at point-blank range, away from himself and into the rusted metal bracket. The crack was deafening, as if it was the sound of his own skull splintering, and his hands burned with hot pain, but they came free of the tangled mass of metal as he brought them around and fired twice more in rapid succession, instants before hurling himself to the side. The Draugr lurched for him and missed, smacking headfirst into the wall in a cloud of dust and damp, shattered masonry.
As it pulled itself away with a bewildered roar, the two distorted, misshapen silver bullets where its eyes should have been were clearly visible.
“Get him! Get the boy! Stop him!” Stormhold shrieked, and the other two Draugr turned as Joseph tripped up their fellow and rounded on their master.
The door exploded open under one final impact, and for a second everyone was dazzled by the sudden light and deafened by the shriek of a captured Jiang-Shi and the ecstatic cry of aggression from the madman riding it.
The animalistic humanoid sailed through the air, the coating of short, green-white hair that covered its body quite evidently bedraggled, black sluggish blood dripping from several wounds on its head and torso. As was typical of its species, its limbs were fixed, straight, unable to bend or move beyond a few degrees, but its ability to build up a charge of energy in its feet and thus propel itself through the air in leaps and bounds made it an efficient semi-airborne predator, especially when serving in a whole horde as this one had been.
Apparently, it also made it a pretty decent battering ram.
Mad Lex Gunpowder had his feet firmly planted on the undead beast’s hips, leaning backwards like a fictional cowboy on an unruly horse as his right hand, bunched in the fur at the back of the creature’s head, prevented him from being thrown off. His favourite peachwood katana – specially designed for fighting unruly Jiang-Shi; Lex also had a rosewood one for Vampires – was currently slung haphazard across the back of his brown leather jacket so that his left hand could wield what was, even in all this hectic movement, clearly a water pistol.
Joseph’s first bullet missed, Stormhold evading it either by skill, luck or the favour of some gleeful patron god of basement-dwellers while Joseph’s eyes were trying to adjust to the new light levels. The two Draugar moved, one going for Joseph, the other for Lex. Lex fired the water pistol, the cool liquid arcing in a fantastic spiral pattern as he spun to a semi-controlled crash-landing. It shone oddly where it caught the light, in a way ordinary liquids generally do not.
Criss-crossing lines of liquid which Joseph knew from first glance was exorcist-prepared holy water spattered across both Draugar, who howled and recoiled. Joseph dodged the wild swipe of the nearest one and readjusted his aim on Stormhold, who gave no reaction save to drop both jaw and dagger. A blow from behind knocked him to the floor several meters away: the blind Draugr from earlier had blundered into him. Mad Lex emptied the rest of his holy water into the face of the third Draugr and headbutted it on his way past, heading for Stormhold.
The necromancer suddenly snapped back to as near to reality as could be expected from someone who uses the phrase ‘Daughters of Heaven’ in the middle of a rant, and made a summoning gesture. A new horde of Jiang-Shi pounced through the open door to land between him and Lex, who drew his katana and began slashing, driving the creatures away from the peachwood they detested so. Stormhold fled for the door.
Joseph pushed himself up with aching hands and shook his head to clear it, cursing the dark curls that fell in front of his vision as he cast his gaze around for the gun he had somehow managed to drop. Two bullets left, and he only needed one to end this.
His scrabbling hands found something, and he raised it – but it wasn’t the gun. It was a lump of coal that had presumably lain forgotten in this cellar for unknown years. The tiny pool of dissonant calm that always sat at the centre of his mind during fights noted that the wristwatch attached to the hand he was holding the coal in proclaimed the date to now be December the 25th. Thematically appropriate, he supposed, then, but not as helpful as a gun would have been.
The blind Draugr blundered towards him. The second Draugr was coming at him, slowly and cautiously but inevitably. Behind that, Lex was holding his own, surrounded in all directions including upwards by furry, greenish, vampiric balls of stiff fury. He had just stabbed the katana backwards under his arm to pierce through the torso of what appeared to be the same one he’d ridden in on – Lex was fickle that way when it came to homicidal monsters of any species. Behind Lex, the third Draugr, although it was clutching its wounded face in both hands, was preparing to barrel into the fray and crush the insane human who had hurt it. Behind that, Stormhold ascended the stairs and, for a moment, stood framed in the light of the doorway.
What the hell. Aim was aim, and Joseph was good at it.
The lump of coal sailed past the ear of the Draugr in front of Joseph, over the swarm of Jiang-Shi piling onto his mentor, narrowly missing one that was still in mid-jump, and flew straight and true to the human silhouette in the rectangular patch of light at the top of the cellar stairs.
Even from here, over the cacophony of brawling, Joseph swore he could hear the crack of coal-on-skull as he slid across the floor to evade the stumbling blind Draugr, who immediately careered straight into the one that had been about to lunge for Joseph, tripping it over so that it smacked its head off the filthy stone floor.
There was the crack of a gunshot as the sighted Draugr rolled out from under the blind one, and the force of the impact sent it stumbling backwards again before it could properly get to its feet: apparently, the Draugr had accidentally found Joseph’s gun.
One bullet left.
Stormhold was tumbling down the stairs, knocked off balance by the impact to the side of his head, yelping. Joseph snatched up the gun and fled from the one fully-sighted Draugr as it rose to its feet again. He could see Mad Lex, swearing and beating with his katana at the Jiang-Shi that clung to his body, screeching as they fought to pierce his protective jacket with their teeth – he had reduced their numbers by about half already, and the floor around him was fast becoming coated in a layer of fuzzy corpses, although one of them had managed to ruin his hat.
Joseph hurled himself into his mentor, his momentum taking them both out of the path of the third, wounded and now charging Draugr who stopped and turned with a level of grace and control that being his size would simply not have had if there was any justice in the world. A Jiang-Shi snapped at Joseph’s face and Mad Lex split its skull with a peachwood uppercut.
Two Draugar, one perfectly sighted, the other with its vision impaired by holy-water burns, faced off against Joseph and Mad Lex while their blind colleague stumbled around in the background. A wild sweep of the wooden katana sent all of the remaining Jiang-Shi recoiling save for one, which Mad Lex bit, dragged in towards his body by mouth, and stabbed through the abdomen. The Draugar took their first step forwards.
Stormhold Elect, Dreadlord Servant of the Thousand Voices, landed heavily between Draugar and humans with a whimper. His eyes flickered open just as Joseph fixed his gun between them.
“OK, mate. If you don’t call off your minions, I will be forced to shoot all of those pretty little voices out of the back of your skull.”
Stormhold whimpered again, and the Draugar respectfully backed off, the remaining Jiang-Shi hopping over to hide behind them. Joseph left Mad Lex to retrieve his hat – swearing and cursing at its bedraggled state – while he hauled Stormhold to his feet.
“Stormhold Elect, I am a qualified zontanecrologist, covered by my mentor’s license. On his behalf, I therefore have the legal right to detain you – as a necromancer – in my custody until the proper authorities can take you off my hands. Do you understand?”
Without warning, Stormhold seized Joseph’s wrist, and Joseph was struck with a sudden nauseating mix of existential angst and a sense of detachment from the physical world as the necromancer clumsily connected to the boy’s lifeforce. It was an impressive trick, hacking the lifeforce of a living being, and one that only the best necromancers could pull off. At even higher levels of skill, they could actually nullify the lifeforce right then and there and kill the victim outright, but even at Stormhold’s less adept level it was uncomfortable enough to give the necromancer a brief upper hand.
Joseph came round to the sight of his own gun, barrel-first, pointed inexpertly at his face.
“You underestimate me!” Stormhold half-giggled. “They all do! Everyone! But now, now it’s my turn! Unless you expect Santa Claus to bring you another gun, little boy, you do as I say now!”
There was a click. An unmistakeable, characteristic click of the kind made by a handgun being cocked.
“Ho ho ho, ya third-grade wombat.”
Stormhold turned in horror.
“There’s your problem, mate,” Lex said, his face unsmiling. “You get all caught up in the moment, you forget that you’re not alone in the room. You forget there’s another zontanecrologist straight-up right next to you. That, and you’re bloody mal-hinged.”
“Get him!” Stormhold screamed suddenly. At the other end of the room, the undead minions began to run. Of course, Stormhold’s addled brain hadn’t even considered that the bullet would be faster, and it had a head start.
“Merry Christmas to all,” Mad Lex spat as the Undead hit the ground in perfect unison, lifeless without their creator. “And to you, a good night.” He glanced at Joseph, who was standing stock-still behind Stormhold’s corpse with an expression of distaste. His vintage orange Beatles T-shirt was covered in blood-spatter. “Nice work, ‘prentice. You make the best distraction, cos I don’t have to worry you’ll get your stupid head caved in without me there to hold your hand.” His gaze shifted from Joseph’s face to his shirt. “You wanna start wearing something that doesn’t show up the blood so much, boy. Try black. Black’ll suit ya.”
It was Christmas Day. He was eighteen years old. He had a home, he had a family, he had a thesis to write, and now he’d have a legal investigation into the necromancer’s death on his hands, and probably a court case to attend. He still had Christmas dinner to make, and here he was, still in this cold and dusty cellar, now even more malodorous than before.
Goddammit, Lex.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Donna, Craig, Jeri, Timothy, Rowan, Ali, Findlay, Kirsty, Mic and (Rowan’s dad) Tim for sharing.
Matt, David, Ally, Findlay, William, Mic, Jeri, Kirsty, Timothy, Peter, Rowan and Ali for liking.
Hugh Jackman for inspiring the sudden revelation that Australian accents sound BADASS.
Jesus Christ for being born and thus inventing Christmas (also the whole salvation shtick, that was cool too).
Story by Calum P Cameron (the P stands for Père Noël).
This fictional universe and all who dwell within are copyrighted (copywritten?) and owned by Calum P Cameron, Esq, although if you want to use them in a not-for-profit fanfic I probably won’t get too upset.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
The Court of Ranternal Affairs 