Necroepilogos

Eseld wanted to run away.

Lykke had not spotted her, not yet. From where Eseld stood in the armoury she could not see much of the second chamber through the archway — not Shilu or the open resurrection coffin or the black sphere atop the grey metal pyramid. She could not see Lykke, so Lykke could not see her. Escape was still possible

Eseld’s whole body quivered with adrenaline. Her throat closed up. Sweat broke out beneath her armpits, down her back, and on her forehead.

Run. Run. Run!

Even with nowhere to go, she still wanted to flee. She could throw herself into the elevator and jab at the buttons, hoping that the lift car might respond before Lykke noticed; or she could drop to her belly and crawl beneath the weapon racks, then hold her breath and squeeze her eyes shut and curl into a ball, praying to the dead and empty heavens that once the violence was finished, the demon would pass over Eseld’s hiding place. She might be able to drag Cyneswith to safety alongside herself — Cyn submitted to orders with so little resistance, she wouldn’t question Eseld’s flight until it was too late. But Eseld had no hope of saving Sky, nor of helping Shilu.

All her long experience of survival had taught Eseld that confronting the strong was futile madness. No scavenger could stand up to a well fed, heavily armed, predatory revenant. It stood to reason that no revenant could hope to defeat a demon, or an angel, or whatever Lykke and Shilu really were, these appendages of the rotten pretenders who surely quarrelled over God’s empty throne.

But for the first time in an infinity of fifty seven deaths, Eseld was no longer naked and powerless.

Her flesh was wrapped in armour, a gun was strapped over her shoulders, her belly was filled with raw blue.

And Shilu needed her.

“Cyn!” Eseld hissed. She shoved the backpack full of blue cannisters into Cyneswith’s arms. “Hold on to that. Don’t lose it!”

Eseld took the grip of her submachine gun in her right hand, and shoved her left into a pocket of her armoured coat. She wrapped her fingers around a hard metal egg — a grenade.

Would these mortal weapons be enough? Absolutely not. Eseld had watched Shilu sever Lykke’s head from her shoulders, and then watched Lykke stand back up and turn into a nightmare. Bullets and bombs would not stop this putrid divinity.

Eseld’s newborn resolve faltered.

Cyneswith whispered: “She’ll freeze us again! Miss Eseld, Miss Sky, please, she’ll just paralyse us, like before!”

Sky hissed over her shoulder, without taking her eyes off the archway: “Not if we get the drop on her first. Let me take the shot. You two hang back, don’t foul my aim.”

Sky unhooked the tapered helmet from her belt and slid it over her head, hiding her face behind the tinted visor. The helmet locked to her armoured carapace with a sharp click and a short hiss, sealing Sky into a full-body suit of grey metal and reinforced ceramic. Then she swept forward, holding the microwave gun low and loose; Sky moved like a real predator, waking quickly and quietly, her boots soundless against the floor. Her four articulated weapon-mount arms swung outward as she advanced, covering the archway with the heavy machine gun and the pair of plasma rifles.

Eseld wanted to follow, but experience told her to turn tail and run away.

Let Sky throw herself into the fire. Let the predators and the monsters and the demons war amongst themselves. Eseld knew she would make no difference in a fight between Shilu and Lykke. The idea was madness. Eseld was meat; she would always be meat. Godless and abandoned, she was nothing but dead matter.

Lykke’s voice echoed from within the gravekeeper’s chamber once more, bubbling with toxic amusement: “Don’t give me that blank stare, Shishi, it’s really not sexy. Maybe it was mysterious or inscrutable where you came from, but right here and right now it makes you look constipated. Now, come on, cough up your zombies so we can both go home.”

Shilu answered. “Home died two hundred million years ago.”

Lykke sighed. “Always a literalist. You know what I mean, don’t be such a boor. I preferred you much better when you spent most of your emotional energy shepherding around that little pet you kept. What was her name? Lily? Lulli? Loopy? Something like that. Is she around here too?”

“Keep her name out of your mouth.”

Lykke laughed. “Or what? You’re going to come up here and slap me? Try it! Seriously, Shishi, maybe we can wring some entertainment out of this after all. Not that earlier wasn’t plenty juicy, mind you. Been a long time since I got double-fisted all the way to two elbows. Next time you try that, I’ll bite your arms off with my cunt.”

Sky reached the arch. She dropped to one knee and pressed herself to the wall, poised to swing out around the opening. Eseld saw Sky flex her armoured gloves on the trigger and forward grip of the microwave gun. She was really going to do it; Sky was going to shoot at the demon.

Hope was madness, and madness was intoxicating.

Eseld ripped her feet off the floor and scrambled forward. She hissed to Cyneswith: “Stay behind me!” Then she sprinted for the arch.

Lykke’s voice rang out again: “Ahhh, is that the sound of a little mouse I hear? Come closer, little mousey. Save me the trouble of breaking the skirting board to dig you—”

Sky launched out of her crouch, swung around the corner, and raised the microwave gun.

An ear-splitting hiss cleaved the air.

Hisssssssssssssssssss—

Eseld scrambled to a halt beneath the arch.

—ssssssssssssss—

Lykke was standing halfway up the grey pyramid, her blonde curls haloed by the negative light of the perfect black sphere. A cylinder of superheated air connected the flat muzzle of Sky’s microwave gun to the centre of Lykke’s mass, wavering with heat haze, hissing with a noise like a pit of giant snakes. Lykke’s eyes were thrown wide in surprise. A circle on her white sundress was turning black with heat, smouldering at the edges, sticking to the skin beneath.

—ssssssssss—

Shilu stood before the upright resurrection coffin, all black chrome and sharp edges. She twisted to stare at the arrival of her unlikely cavalry, with no expression on her pale polymer face.

The ‘gravekeeper’ — the insensate half-bodied zombie inside the coffin — did not react at all, still and serene, unblinking and unmoving.

—ssssss—

Eseld raised her submachine gun, tucked the short stock against her shoulder, and grabbed the forward grip with her left hand. She pointed the gun — pointed with her whole body — up at Lykke. She pinned the gleaming sunlit demon between the crosshairs of the weapon. Then she pulled the trigger.

The submachine gun bucked like a donkey, kicking back into her shoulder with a one-two-three slam!-slam!-slam!

Three bullets tore through Lykke’s flesh. One punched straight through the meat of her left hip while the other two ripped into her left thigh.

Eseld squeezed the trigger again; another three rounds stabbed into Lykke’s belly and out through the small of her back. A blossom of dark blood bloomed open across the white stomach of her sundress. A third salvo took her through the right hip, shattering bones, jerking her like a puppet pummelled by hailstones. A fourth trio went wide, plinking off the grey metal pyramid. A fifth, a sixth, a seventh — Eseld lost count, jamming her finger onto the trigger over and over, gritting her teeth, making Lykke dance.

This was power. To strike at a demon and see the demon twist and writhe. Eseld screamed through her clenched teeth.

—sssssss-splurpt!

The superheated circle on Lykke’s chest suddenly imploded, collapsing inward — and then exploded out her back in a shower of boiling blood, blackened ribs, and steaming chunks of ruptured organ.

“Fuck you!” Eseld roared with furious joy.

They’d done it — she and Sky, though Eseld knew she had barely helped, the bullets meant nothing. But the superheated flesh, the burns, the internal fire, wasn’t that what Shilu had said might work, might hold Lykke back for—

Lykke froze.

The eruption of blood and bone and burst lungs stopped behind Lykke, suspended in the air, like a cape caught mid-flap in a gust of icy wind.

The demon straightened back up, as if she did not have a fist-sized hole punched through her chest and half her entrails blown out of her back. Her white sundress was ruined once again, soaked in gore and torn apart by bullet holes, the fabric sticking to her pale skin with her own steaming blood. She was punctured by so many wounds, so many of Eseld’s tiny little bullets. Her right eye had burst inside her face in a splatter of blood and bone fragments.

Lykke’s lips curled with curious amusement — at Sky.

“What an interesting woman you are,” Lykke purred. “What blind hope. What reckless abandon. What did you think that would do to me?”

Sky slapped the microwave gun to the floor and grabbed the EMP weapon off her own chest. She pointed the weird blocky muzzle at Lykke. The little screens and readouts all turned green at the same time; the weapon went ‘ding!’ A tiny mechanical voice announced: “Discharge prepared.”

Sky pulled the trigger. The gun went buzzzzt-thump.

Lykke blinked once, inhaled with apparent relish, and licked the blood off her own lips. “Mmmm! Juicy and unique, but such a tiny morsel. You’re going to need a lot more than that to keep me fed. Is this the end of the meal, or is there a main course?”

Sky dropped the EMP weapon and grabbed the microwave gun a second time. She lurched to her feet; Eseld could hear Sky panting for breath inside her sleek-angled helmet. Sky’s suit-mounted gun arms twitched to correct their aim as she rose, locked onto Lykke. Sky twisted to brace her weight on her back foot.

Lykke’s face twinkled with girlish delight. “Oh, bravo. Encore, encore!”

Sky opened fire.

The heavy machine gun on her lower mechanical limbs opened up with a slam-bang of large calibre rapid fire, juddering and jerking Sky’s armoured frame with recoil. The paired plasma rifles whined and flared with bolts of eye-searing purple light. The microwave gun split the air with a fresh hiss of superheated particles.

Lykke’s cape of blood and bone and organs whirled into life. The mass of viscera split into two and curled around her sides like the petals of a rose, forming a shield to her fore. Bullets sank into suspended blood like pebbles landing on thick tar. Plasma bolts dissipated into crackling static upon bulwarks of baked and blackened bone. A wall of ruptured lung-flesh and heaving crimson innards absorbed the beam of the microwave gun, glowing orange like the sun at storm-tossed dusk.

Eseld raised her submachine gun again and added her own firepower to the barrage, but Lykke’s blood melted the bullets on contact, like dropping the lead directly into the heart of a forge.

She needed something stronger.

Eseld pulled a grenade from her pocket, checked the text printed on the side, and yanked the pin out with her teeth. She let go of the lever and counted — one, two, three, four — then hurled the grenade toward Lykke.

She wasn’t foolish enough to believe an explosion would prevail where directed heat had not, but the grenade she had selected was special; the text printed on the metal casing said ‘INCENDIARY ROUND WHITE PHOSPHORUS’.

Eseld counted in her head — five, six, seven—

Lykke’s bloody shield twitched upward at the last second, catching the explosive in a pool of suspended blood. The grenade vanished as if dropped into a lake. The shield bulged a moment later, then subsided.

Lykke had swallowed the grenade, explosive and incendiary and all.

Sky ceased fire. “Fuck,” she shouted inside her helmet. “Fuck. Fuck!”

“All done, are we?” Lykke asked from behind her bloody shield of rose-petal gore. “Is that it? I was hoping for a touch more spirit than that! Come on, somebody throw their gun at me in despair, that’s always a fun conclusion. No? Not going to play? Awwww, diddums.”

Lykke’s viscera unfurled and rose upward. Streamers of blood and spears of blackened bone and sheets of cooked organ-meat reached past her head and shoulders, spreading outward to either side.

Eseld’s submachine gun tumbled from numb fingers, caught on the strap around her shoulders. Her mouth fell open, skin flushed with cold sweat. She staggered backward, eyes wide, unable to breathe.

Lykke turned her wounds into a pair of gore-soaked wings.

The demon smiled down at the zombies and Shilu, bright and bubbly. She stood aloft on the side of the pyramid, haloed by the black sphere, ruined and punctured and covered in wounds, scorched and blackened and burned and bruised and bleeding. And none of it mattered — not the heat and the fire, not the ‘EMP’, not the incendiary grenade, nothing.

Bloated white flies began to crawl out of Lykke’s many wounds, swarming across her flesh, rising into the air around her body in a buzzing aura. The flies matched the distant pounding of the storm outdoors, a high-pitched counterpoint to the waves of precipitation washing over the exterior of the tomb, their fattened bodies pulsing and shuddering in time to the great gusts of wind.

The demon was as untouchable as the hurricane.

“Shishi, did you put them up to this?” Lykke said. “I would never expect such courage from a zombie. Usually they would be crawling around on the floor and clawing their eyes out by now.”

Shilu looked up at Lykke. “Stand down and return to the network.”

Lykke rolled her one remaining eye, shoulders slumping. “You are such a broken record. Even defeating you is boring. I’m not going to take your orders, so stop trying.”

“We’re in a gravekeeper’s chamber and nothing is happening,” Shilu said. “I shot at it, Lykke. I shot four bullets at the gravekeeper’s core and I’m still alive. I suggest you stand down and return to the network.”

Lykke laughed, spreading her arms and her gore-wrought wings. Her cloud of flies followed, billowing outward. “And I’m standing right here too, right on the bitch. What did you hope to accomplish by running down here?” She stamped one blood-stained white high heel against the grey metal of the pyramid. “This thing is a blind fool. No better than the worms. Did you think it would listen to you, care about you, give a single solitary shit about who feeds it and waters it? It can’t think on that level, Shishi. It doesn’t care. I own the tomb systems, because I’m here, and I’m the biggest node around. That’s all there is to it. You lost before you even drew your first breath.”

“Who sent the storm?” said Shilu.

Lykke frowned. “The what now?”

“The hurricane,” Shilu said. She raised one black metal finger. “Outdoors. Can’t you hear that?”

Lykke cocked her head, listening to the muffled fury of the hurricane outside. Then she shrugged. “Since when do we care about the weather? Gosh, you’ve been slumming it down there without permissions for what, a couple of hours, at the most? And you’re already going native. Scared of a little moist air, really?”

Shilu said, “You have no idea who sent it. You can’t see it in the network, can you? You don’t know what’s going on here any better than I do. Stand down.”

Lykke leaned forward, hands on her bloodstained hips, wings of tainted viscera spreading outward, wrapped in her chorus of bloated flies. “I don’t need to know, Shishi. All I need to do is eat you up.”

“You’re stalling.”

Lykke sighed again. “I’m waiting for my— ah!”

Lykke jerked upright, reached out with one hand, and clicked her fingers — at Sky.

Sky shuddered and stumbled, then righted herself, growling inside her helmet. Her articulated weapon-arms swung upward to aim at Lykke, but she held fire.

“Ah ah ah,” Lykke purred, wagging a finger. “No running, little one.”

Sky shouted, “I wasn’t—”

“And don’t lie,” Lykke added, smiling with flirtatious glee. “Try that again and I’ll hold you tight. And I don’t want to do that, not just yet. You interest me. You and I are going to have a one-on-one dance before this night is over.”

“I wasn’t running,” Sky repeated. “I wasn’t running!”

Lykke bit her bottom lip. “Oh, yes. You are an interesting woman. I think I’ll bend the rules a little, keep you around for a day or—”

Eseld stepped forward.

“Just fucking kill us!”

She screamed the demand at the top of her lungs; her voice echoed off the grey metal of the gravekeeper’s chamber.

Lykke turned a much less interested gaze upon Eseld. “Something to add? Or are you just—”

“Kill us!” Eseld screamed again.

She strode forward, stomping toward the foot of the pyramid; somebody tugged at her arm, trying to halt her — Cyneswith, pleading in a tiny voice. But Eseld was consumed by fury. Cyneswith didn’t let go, so Eseld dragged her along. She walked up to the pyramid and stopped next to Shilu, just in front of the open resurrection coffin. The bisected zombie inside the coffin had not reacted to anything, still staring straight ahead, unblinking and unbreathing.

Eseld spread her arms, empty handed, submachine gun hanging from her shoulders. She shook with rage, eyes bulging, showing her mouth full of sharp teeth.

“Kill us,” she repeated. “Get it over with. You have all — all the power! You always do!”

Lykke tilted her head to one side, unsmiling but curious. “What do you think I am, little zombie?”

“You— you give us these scraps, of promise, of bullshit. You feed us with each other’s meat, over and over again. You keep all this going, this rot and hate and— and— and you could just take it! Just take it for yourself! You left God’s throne empty so you could play these games with each other! Stop bringing us all back! Kill us or let us go! Let me stay dead! Let me go! Or I’ll— I’ll—”

Eseld’s throat burned from shouting, but a kind of madness had taken hold; she didn’t know if it was the power and the failure, or the raw blue roiling in her guts, or Shilu’s influence, or the gravekeeper’s chamber, or the storm outdoors, or a cocktail of all those things. But the notion struck her like a God-given inspiration. For a brilliant and shining moment her faith came rushing back, reborn in a new form.

“Or I’ll come back and come back and come back again, and eventually I’ll find out how to eat you!” she roared up at Lykke. “That’s it, isn’t it?! One of us just has to eat one of you, and then pull it all down, pull you all down, into meat, like us!”

She stopped, panting hard, blinking rapidly, unsure of what she’d said. She was losing her mind.

Lykke snorted and looked at Shilu. “They always come up with such interesting cosmologies, don’t they?”

Eseld whirled on Shilu. “And you, Shilu, why aren’t you doing anything?!”

Shilu stared out of her pale polymer face, perfect and poreless. “I’ve lost.”

“ … what?”

“I’ve lost,” Shilu repeated. “I can’t beat Lykke, not like this, not without network access permissions. My only hope was to appeal to the gravekeeper.” She gestured at the open coffin and the half-a-girl within. “My words have fallen on deaf ears. I still believe Lykke should stand down, because this situation is abnormal. But she won’t. We’re dead.”

“No, I— I wanted to help.” Tears filled Eseld’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. Her hands shook. She reached out for Shilu, but dared not touch those razor-sharp edges. “Shilu, you’re the first I’ve ever— you helped when you could have— you’re an angel. Aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry, zombie. Better luck next time.”

Eseld keened through her teeth. “I don’t want a next time!”

Sky raised her voice from inside her helmet: “We can’t just give up! There’s gotta be something else. Shilu, stun her again, buy us time!”

Shilu didn’t bother to answer.

Eseld turned away and stared up at Lykke. The demon was resplendent, haloed in black, with her aura of flies and her wings of meaty gore.

Lykke shrugged, and said: “Shishi, I thought you didn’t like watching them get destroyed?”

“Get this over with,” said Shilu.

“Haha! Hardly. I’m having too much fun playing with my food. That’s why I’m stalling, you see. I’ve called some acquaintances to help. I want to see how many of them you can handle before you give up.”

“What are you talking about?”

Eseld blinked away her tears. “Y-yes, what? There’s more of you?”

Lykke wrinkled her nose. “I can’t really call them friends, of course. Friendship across such a vast gulf is simply impossible. Just a few little puppies I’ve been nudging around out there, laying a trail of treats for them, leading them around the ridiculous blockage at the front of the tomb. They didn’t even know each other until I brought them together a couple of hours ago. They’ll be here any moment. Right through … ah, that wall, I think?” Lykke pointed to the right, at the blank grey metal wall of the chamber.

Eseld staggered backward. Other revenants were about to arrive, down here? Her hands scrambled for the submachine gun. She couldn’t fight Lykke, but she could defend herself against her own kind, if Lykke was so determined to draw out this torture.

Eseld blundered backward into Cyneswith, only a step or two behind her.

Shilu asked, “Why bother bringing more zombies into this?”

Eseld grabbed Cyn and tried to steer her away, back toward the arch. Perhaps if they could reach the lift—

“Originally?” Lykke answered. “To mop up any stray messes, of course. I hate having to chase down every last zombie, it’s such a bore. But now that’s rather redundant, isn’t it?”

Cyneswith wouldn’t move. She was staring at the girl inside the resurrection coffin, eyes wide, lips parted. Eseld tried to drag her back by one shoulder. Cyneswith pulled free and stepped forward as if in a trance.

“Instead,” Lykke went on. “I think I’m going to see how much zombie meat it takes to completely swamp you. Just think! One of us, felled by rotting meat. A first time for everything! And, oh! I’d almost forgotten. I still want a private dance with the brave little soldier over there.” She gestured at Sky, batting her eyelashes. “Can’t have anybody getting in the way of that.”

“Cyn!” Eseld hissed. “Cyn, Cyn we need to run, we need to—”

Cyneswith reached out with one hand and cupped the cheek of the girl inside the coffin.

The bisected girl — the ‘gravekeeper’ to whom Shilu had been addressing her plea for help, suspended from tubes and cables, unmoving and unmoved, insensate and beyond communication — blinked, opened her lips, and spoke.

“Crowned and veiled. Once again revealed. Do you wish this?”

Lykke looked down with a sudden frown. “What was that? What was—”

The right-hand wall of the chamber burst inward with a crack-thump of explosive detonation; metal fragments and whirling debris scythed through the air, plinking off the grey pyramid and pattering off Eseld’s armoured coat. Eseld threw herself forward to grab Cyneswith and shelter her face from the storm of shrapnel. Sky ducked low, protected by her carapace suit. Shilu twisted to face into the breach, extending both arms into lightless black blades as flying wreckage and rubble clattered off her armoured body.

“Hahaha!” Lykke cackled. “Oh well, who cares? My hounds are here! Din-dins, darlings!”

A mass of figures crept from the breach in the wall, shrouded silhouettes within the cloud of masonry dust. Armoured boots and naked claws clicked against the metal floor. Weapon readouts and warning lights glowed in the gloom. Generators and power plants hummed deep and low. Hissing saliva dripped from hidden maws.

The smoke and haze parted, blown aside by a gust of air from the wounded wall.

Revenants — three or four dozen, large and strong, heavily modified, well fed and well armed.

Skinless horrors stood shoulder-to-shoulder with suits of powered armour. Zombies bristled with more guns and limbs than Sky could ever have achieved with her articulated rig. Humming swords of electrical power were raised next to short-barrelled shotguns and heavy-duty rotary cannons. A dozen naked faces were encrusted with bionic enhancements or bio-mechanical sensory organs. Eyeballs glowed red or green or sickly yellow. Mouths were filled with steel teeth, or turned into sucking proboscises, or missing entirely, replaced with some other, more terrible method of feeding from cannibalised victims.

Half a dozen weapons pointed toward Eseld and Cyneswith. Loping hunters readied to pounce. Barrels began to spin. Fingers tightened on triggers. Grins split foot-wide jaws. A helmet-muffled voice shouted, “Fresh meat!”

And then Shilu was among them.

Shilu’s blades flashed and flickered through flesh and steel too fast to follow with the naked eye. Limbs went flying, severed from elbows and shoulders, trailing arcs of blood as they fell. Lightless black punched through armoured chest plates and sliced apart heavy shields like a hot wire passing through butter. Shilu weaved through the crowd, ducking and dodging, twisting on her ankles like a dancer, diving aside from flailing counter-blows, jinking around grasping hands and jerking claws. The scrum of revenants turned inward, shouting and screaming, trying to draw a bead on Shilu as she raced through the pack.

Injured zombies staggered free or slumped to their knees, clutching their own voided guts or groping for their severed arms. Blood sprayed upon the floor, forming great puddles slick with gore.

Gunshots rang out. Most of them missed, going wide, nowhere near Shilu’s ever-changing position. But a few landed true, ricocheting off her black metal body. The impacts slammed her sideways, forcing her out of position.

A bold revenant took the obvious opening and leapt on Shilu’s back, trying to knock her to the floor, lashing at her with sharpened limbs and two mouths full of extra teeth.

Shilu threw her off with a twist of her shoulders, opening the zombie’s chest with a blade as she dropped the dead weight.

At the other end of the chamber, Sky brought her weapons to bear upon the crowd. Her articulated gun-arms swung around, aiming into the mass of targets with the heavy machine gun and the twinned plasma rifles. She raised her assault rifle to her shoulder as well, aiming down the sights, finger slipping onto the trigger.

Lykke shrieked: “Did you forget, soldier-girl?! Tonight’s dance is all mine!”

Lykke launched herself off the side of the grey pyramid. Her wings of extruded viscera spread wide and snapped to catch the air; a wave of reeking pressure washed down upon the combat below. Several of Lykke’s ‘hounds’ looked up and around with dawning horror — but they were too busy with Shilu to realise whose orders they had been following this whole time.

Lykke twisted in the air, pointing her feet toward Sky, trailing a corona of bloated flies. Her pretty little white shoes warped and flowed, transforming into gleaming talons of razor-sharp bone.

Lykke pounced.

Sky tried to turn, to reorient her firepower at this priority target — but she was too slow. She pulled the trigger on her rifle but the bullets went wide. Her heavy machine gun opened up, but Lykke tucked in her legs at the last second, then crashed into Sky from above.

The pair went down together in a clatter of carapace armour and talons, topped by the whirring sheets of gore repurposed as Lykke’s infernal wings.

Lykke howled laughter into the visor of Sky’s helmet, grappling with Sky’s upper gun-arms, one in each hand. She snapped the articulated metal like brittle bones, casting the plasma rifles aside. Greasy insect bodies swarmed all over Sky’s armour, searching for a way inside. Sky jammed her assault rifle into the soft meat of Lykke’s throat and pulled the trigger — and held it down, the weapon switched to full-auto. Bullets tore through Lykke’s throat and burst out of the back of her neck, smashing vertebrae and pulping her spinal cord.

But the wound was nothing. It simply didn’t matter, not to an agent of the divine, no matter how far fallen.

Sky’s rifle ran out of bullets. Click.

Lykke smashed Sky’s helmet off with a lazy swipe of one hand. Sky’s head snapped back, her exposed face streaked with blood, eyes clenched in pain, flies descending to mob at the crimson on her skin.

“You were showing so much promise!” Lykke howled. “Don’t give up now, we’re so close!”

The heavy machine gun was still intact; Sky tried to jerk it upward and stick the barrel in Lykke’s guts, but Lykke rammed a knee into the weapon, grinding it into the belly-armour of Sky’s suit, holding it down with both hands. Her feet-talons gripped Sky’s thighs, cracking the ceramic and metal armour.

“Boooo-ring!” Lykke cackled. “Whatever, you can finish yourself. I’m going to go play with Shi—”

Sky reached down with her right hand and drew the machete from the sheath on her thigh; she wound back her arm, rocking her whole body weight to one side for more leverage, then reared back up. She used the momentum to ram the blade directly into Lykke’s left temple, point-first. The tip of the machete exploded from the other side of Lykke’s skull in a welter of blood and brains.

Lykke blinked — then grinned wide, showing all her teeth. “Yes! Yes, you’re it! You’re my new best friend!”

Lykke opened her mouth wide and vomited a torrent of glistening white flies directly into Sky’s face; Sky clamped her eyes and lips shut, but the bloated, greasy insects forced themselves up Sky’s nostrils. She bucked and writhed, her armour clattering against the floor.

Eseld couldn’t watch any more, because Shilu was losing.

Shilu had felled more than a dozen zombies and wounded about a dozen more, but the weight of firepower and the close press of bodies was beginning to prevail against her. She went down in a tangle of limbs, three revenants bundling themselves atop her slender black-metal form. She burst from the pile moments later, leaving a decapitated corpse behind alongside two howling wounded — but then a slam-slam-slam of shotgun rounds boomed through the air, catching Shilu in the flank and spinning her to one side. Another pair of revenants darted in, unloading weapons on her at point-blank, smashing her backward, pounding to her the floor. She tumbled to her knees, thrown about like a rag doll by the impacts.

Other revenants slipped around the combat, turning their attention toward the remaining targets — Eseld and Cyneswith.

Two armoured zombies and one slavering monster of skinless muscle rounded on Eseld. Guns rose to cut Eseld down. The skinless revenant advanced, opening a mouth full of suckers and tiny cilia.

Eseld grabbed her submachine gun in one hand and yanked Cyneswith back with the other. She jammed her finger on the trigger, spraying bullets toward the advancing trio. The skinless monster jerked to the side, deftly avoiding the fire.

“Cyn!” Eseld shouted. “Use your gun, use your—”

Bullets slammed into Eseld’s armoured coat, hitting her like rocks thrown by the hurricane outdoors. She went flying, crashing to the floor, pain shooting across her ribs and belly. Cyn screamed, going down beside her, gasping in shock, eyes wide and watering, clutching at the protection of her armoured poncho.

The skinless zombie loomed overhead.

Eseld threw one arm across Cyneswith, and raised her submachine gun with the other. She pulled the trigger — but the skinless monster slapped the barrel aside and yanked the weapon from Eseld’s hand. The bullets pinged off the distant ceiling.

In the corner of Eseld’s eye, the gravekeeper stared straight ahead, unblinking, unbreathing, uncaring.

“—help—” Eseld croaked.

The skinless revenant tore the submachine gun off the strap around Eseld’s shoulder and tossed it aside. A mouth of tiny suckers and blood-red cilia descended, opening wide enough to cover Eseld’s whole face. She scrambled at her coat for one of the pistols, eyes filled with tears, face streaked with snot. Did it have to end like this, so soon, so soon after this false promise of power? Eseld would never meet Shilu again; she had lost her one chance to be more than mere meat, her one chance to understand why, her one chance to claw her way out of this pit of eternal suffering. But all that was gone now, devoured by the strong, eaten up by those she could never hope to match, even Shilu—

A wave of invisible force smashed into the skinless zombie, slamming her sideways, sweeping her away from Eseld. She bounced off the side of the grey metal pyramid with a deep grunt, the wind knocked from her lungs.

Had the gravekeeper finally responded, descending to help this pitiful meat? But Eseld felt no wave of nausea, saw no wavering heat-haze pressure in the air; the black sphere was silent, the gravekeeper-girl unresponsive and still.

A silver-grey oblong about the length of Eseld’s hand hovered in the air three feet from her face, in the space the skinless revenant had occupied a moment earlier.

A voice rang out — from the right, from the breach in the wall, full of confidence and command.

“Newly resurrected, heads down! Drop to the floor, now!”

On Eseld’s left, the skinless revenant whirled to her feet, eyes wide with rage, spitting blood from split lips. She raised two sets of bone-tipped claws, opening her mouth to screech and squeal her outrage at a meal denied.

A stomach-pounding thump of magnetic discharge shook the chamber; a projectile slammed into the skinless revenant’s waist, bursting her apart. Blood exploded up the side of the pyramid and across the floor, showering Eseld’s face and coat with steaming crimson droplets. The two halves of the skinless revenant tumbled to the floor, her face caught in an expression of blank surprise.

The command rang out again, the speaker’s voice muffled inside a suit of armour.

“Fresh resurrected, stay down! The rest of you—”

The speaker paused for a heartbeat.

“The rest of you are done here.”