No Bones About It Pt. 4
May 26th, 2009 |< < > >
Parts 1, 2 & 3. Trust me, read those first and then come back.
PART 4
Bones and dead skin flew everywhere, floating past me in an odd sensation of slow motion. When did this become my life?
Most of the older corpses, the ones that had been dead for a while and were mostly bone, crumbled easily. It was the fresher ones that were the problem. My battle-axe kept getting stuck in their skin. One of them still had some blood in him and when I brought my axe down across his chest, the blood squirted onto my clothes.
“Oh, gross,” I muttered.
The mass of corpses swarmed around us, like killer locusts from the Bible, or something. I swung the battle-axe wildly. I so hated graveyards..
From behind me I heard Danni scream. At first I thought she might have been hurt. Then I realized it wasn’t a scream of pain, but one of pleasure. She was enjoying herself. Of course she was.
I shook my head as I swiped my axe through a grungy-looking corpse that was, for some weird reason, wearing glasses. I really had to do something about my taste in woman.
We progressed faster than I thought we would’ve. The corpses were incredibly easy to take down. The only real problem was that there were so freaking many of them.
I brought my axe down hard on an arm that belonged to a leggy blond who must have been very attractive before she had died from what appeared to be a traumatic injury to her face. It looked like someone had dropped a anvil on her.
We reached the altar.
I gave Danielle a hand up, cutting down corpses with the axe in my other hand. I think I was starting to get the hang of this.
Wolfe tried to smile again. Up close he looked incredibly disgusting. I was pretty sure saw a maggot crawl through his nose. But when he tried to smile, for some reason he just looked really funny. I didn’t laugh, though. No reason to antagonize him further, you know.
“This is what I like to see: Eager young people, ready to lend a helping hand,” he pulled out one of those weird knives, the kind where the blade was all twisty. “Who wants to go first?”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, shut up.”
I whipped the axe around and then let it fly.
The axe sliced through Wolfe’s neck and landed on the wall across the room. Wolfe’s head, however, fell to the bottom of the altar and shattered into a thousand pieces.
“That might have not been the best use of your weapon,” Danielle said, looking from Wolfe’s body to the sea corpses that surrounded us. Strangely, none tried to come onto the altar.
“I know,” I said, “but he was really starting to get on my nerves.”
The corpses shuffled restless around the altar, groaning their favorite tune. I’m sure if these guys put their minds to it, they could’ve probably broke into the music biz big time.
“Well,” Danielle asked, switching her sword from hand to hand, looking eager to hit something, “now what do we do?”
“I’m thinking,” I glanced up at the hole above us. It was too far up to reach without some kind of assistance.
“Well think faster. I don’t like the way these guys are looking at me.”
“How are they looking at you?” I asked.
“Like I’m a piece of meat,” she replied. “But, you know, not the eating kind, the sexing kind.”
I did a double take. “Ok, that was really disturbing.”
The ropes that were strung together across the ceiling appeared to be tied off along the walls. If we could get one of those . . .
“Michael!”
I looked down. One of the corpses was trying to pull himself up onto the altar. Danielle brought her sword down, splitting the corpse’s skull wide open. Some kind of green stuff oozed out of the open skull and the corpse fell away.
I carefully snatched up the twisted knife from Wolfe’s still upright, headless body. I hoped it was as sharp as it looked. Then, as an after thought, tipped the body back off the altar. It was just too disturbing to see it standing there.
Holding the knife by its tip, I flung it towards one of the ropes.
The knife flew sharply through air and sliced the rope before lodging itself in the wall. The rope began to slowly swing towards us.
“Here, give me your sword.”
“Hey,” Danielle said, keeping the sword out of my reach, “I gave you a weapon, you’re the one that lost it.”
“Danni, now is not the time!” I reached forward and snatched the bronze-handled sword from her small hands. I staggered for a moment. It didn’t look very heavy when she was holding it.
A brave corpse jumped onto the altar, waving its decomposing arms threateningly. I slammed the flat end of the sword into its head, shattering it. The rest of the corpse fell back.
“When the rope is within reach,” I quickly explained to Danielle, “grab it and climb up to that hole. Think you can do that?”
The rope was closer now, but the corpses were growing braver.
Danielle nodded.
Another corpse jumped onto the altar.
“Then go!” I shouted, as the rope came into reach. Danielle jumped up and grabbed the rope.
I swept the sword in a wide arc, slicing the corpse into two parts. Another jumped in its place.
I glanced up at Danielle, she was moving pretty quickly. She had almost reached the halfway mark.
I swiftly cut the new corpse in half only to have it replaced by two more dead guys. Jeez, these guys were persistent.
One of the corpses managed to get its decomposing hands around my neck and tried to choke me. I twisted sharply, cutting the sword across the other corpse and there was an uncomfortable tearing sound.
I turned to face the corpse that had been choking me and discovered his hands were still around my neck, but his hands were connected to his body anymore. The corpse was an elderly man who appeared to have died from a chest wound. He stared dumbly at the ripped stumps just below his forearms.
“Sorry about all this,” I said, ripping the dead hands from my neck. “It was my girlfriend’s idea to come here in the first place.”
I slammed the handle of the sword into the dead man’s face and he fell back into the sea of death. I looked around and saw that more of the corpses were ambling their way onto the altar. I glanced up and saw Danni was safely above ground.
“Time to go, Mike,” I muttered. But first . . .
I snatched up the vial containing the red liquid. What’s the worse that could happen? I tossed it and the vial smashed against the far wall. A red mist began to spread quickly around the room. The corpses began to scream in agony.
I turned to grab the rope, but discovered it had drifted away. I was going to have to make a leap for it. I looked over my shoulder, the red mist was getting closer and from the sound of it was going to hurt me a big one if I didn’t move soon.
I took a running jump, and just managed to grab the dangling rope with my left hand. My grip, however, wasn’t as firm as I thought it was and I began to slip towards the collection of corpses down below
TO BE CONTINUED . . . . IN PART 5
