Harshing My Mellow

Nothing soothes the savage, newly vampiric zombie like a nice, hot shower.

Before my latest transformation, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the act of taking shower. The sensual pulse of the spraying water would’ve been lost to me before, leaving behind a sopping mess of dead, wet flesh.

Now, however, I looked forward to being able to take a shower. The water was scalding hot since I didn’t even bother to use the cold water. The steam from the shower and the steady stream of sound created by the water crashing into my body helped create a cocoon of solitude that usually left me invigorated and refreshed.

Not even ten minutes into my late night ritual, my mellow mood was harshly interrupted by the insistent pounding on the glass shower door.

“Dad! Dad! Ravyn needs you right now!”

I turned off the shower to hear my daughter’s voice calling out as she continued pound on the shower door.

“Dad, hurry up! Ravyn needs you!”

“Calm down, Jazz. I can hear you. What’s going on?”

As the steam began to subside, I wiped away enough of the inside of the glass door to look out at her face as I reached for the towel hanging just above the door with my other hand.

Her face showed obvious concern. “I’m not sure. I was studying in my room when I got an emergency message from Ravyn through one of her special fire stones.”

I wrapped the towel around my waist before the glass door completely de-fogged. “What did the message say?”

“It was really short. All she said was ‘Get your father to the workshop, armed for battle.’ So I came to get you straight away.”

“Ah shit. She’s with Cerrydwen, isn’t she?” I opened the door and stepped out.

Jasmine nodded. “I think so.”

“Alright, go let Jim and the Frau know, rouse the others. Get everyone on alert and armed. Who knows what those two have come across this time.”

As Jasmine rushed out, I dropped the towel and padded into my room. It wasn’t exactly a bedroom since I didn’t have to sleep, but it was my personal space decorated to my own very bizarre tastes. (I will provide details and a description in a later post.) Cursing aloud, I opened the closet and quickly began gearing up for a battle.

After getting dressed, I grabbed my batons and slipped them into their normal placed and then debated between the modified M-16 assault rifle and the powerful .45 magnum Desert Eagle handgun. Both weapons were loaded with the special ammunition that Jasmine and her team of assistants had been working on for months now. In fact, the bullets in my weapons were unique even compared to the other rounds that Jasmine had been working on. I still refused to take up any firearms unless they could be designed to harm only the person or foe that I designated with each pull of the trigger.

It was only quite recently that Jasmine had made the breakthrough that could allow for the creation of these ultimate smart bullets.

Remembering the last time I needed to respond with similar short notice, I grabbed the belt that held the holstered handgun and snapped it into place on my waist and grudgingly reached for the rifle as well. It had taken me a couple of weeks, and buckets of fresh blood, to recover from that last battle, back before I had the advantage of these weapons. I really missed having Excalibur in that battle!

I slipped out the back door of the Den and ran down the twisting, wood-lined trail that led to workshop.

The workshop was actually a fairly innocuous looking steel-framed and roof barn that was set up with the rear end of the building butting up against a towering, ridgeline that allowed for the heart of the ‘workshop’ to be concealed inside the hill itself. The steel building held all sorts of rather mundane lawn and gardening equipment, ATV’s, snowmobiles, and other tools, but it was the door leading out the rear of the building that I was heading towards.

The door was slightly ajar, which was standard practice when Ravyn or Cerrydwen were working inside, so I yanked it all the way open and stormed down the rough hewn stone steps that led down towards the real workshop below. I was vaguely aware of the voices of Jim and the Frau calling out to the others as they followed a few hundred feet back down the trail.

I slipped the safety off on the assault rifle as I hurtled down into the unnatural darkness of the stairwell—that was one of Cerrydwen’s personal touches, “…to help scare away any curiosity seekers who happened to slip through our other wards,” as she had put it at the time. No mundane light would cut through this patch of darkness.

I pushed through the darkened zone confident that I could rely on my other senses to tell if anything was amiss.

Bursting through the other side of the ten foot patch of pure darkness, the stairwell leveled out to a hallway that was marked with several strong steel doors on either side. Small globes of flickering flames hovered on each side of the doors, Ravyn’s touch, of course. I ignored these side doors even though each led to someone’s individual workshop. None of these would be where the trouble was brewing.

No, it was the double doors at the far end of the hall that drew my attention. Those doors opened up into the Summoning Chamber. There were bright flashes of light and the sounds of a major struggle taking place behind those doors.

I slowed my advance just long enough to take a deep breath and to gather my strength.

With my finger on the trigger of the rifle and my resolve firmly in place, I yanked on the heavy silver lined-steel left door and stepped into the maelstrom.

The room was far larger than one would have imagined it could be. It was easily fifty feet wide, another fifty feet deep, with a ceiling that vaulted up at least 4 feet in the center. The center of the room was normally dominated by the etched image of a large pentagram that served as the summoning circle. At the moment, however, the center of the room was a blazing dark mass of writhing tentacles, misshapen heads, clawed arms and feet that seemed to be growing darker and stronger despite the best efforts of Cerrydwen and Ravyn. It was a true Lovecraftian nightmare.

Cerrydwen was wearing her highly modified travelling armor that she had designed for her journeys with Ravyn. Her torso was covered front and back with shiny plates of reflective metal that weighed no more than plastic might, but gave the protection of Teflon-coated steel. Her head was uncovered, her helmet having been apparently knocked off by a flailing tentacle. Her face showed a large purple bruise across her cheek and several small gashes that trailed blood as she dodged additional attacks by ducking behind a heavy table and lashing out with her carved black travelling staff.

Ravyn was on the opposite side of the chamber, surrounded by huge shroud of flame as she directed beams of highly concentrated fire to fend off the limbs that were trying to get at her. As quickly as she sliced off one offending limb, three more lashed out at her. She was ankle deep in the thick black goo of flambéed chaos, still apparently unhurt, but seemingly flagging under the constant assault.

Cerrydwen was the first to see me enter the room, followed almost instantaneously by the abomination. “Rusty, aim for the heads! It will be the only way to kill this thing!”

Even as I leveled the rifle towards the creature, it shifted its focus from both of the women towards me. Its body shifted constantly, heads appearing and disappearing every moment in different spots. There had to be at least six of them at any one time. Before I could begin to take a bead on one however, I was besieged by a wave of attacking limbs. A second wave of shrieking, wailing sound crashed over me drowning out all further attempts to communicate with either woman as the screams of thousands of tortured souls emanated from the creature.

Tentacles spiked with razor sharp teeth and nasty looking suckers lashed out my legs and hands, but I pushed forward anyway, snapping off a series of shots just to see what kind of impact these rounds would have on the creature’s body and limbs.

The noise from the creature was so great that I didn’t even hear the report of the rifle as it fired. The creature recoiled briefly as it was blasted by the bullets. The bullets seemed to burst into the thing, exploding in colorful flashes of energy that dissolved limbs and tore chunks from the body.

But that reprieve didn’t last long. The entire mass of the creature seemed to lurch forward. I was overwhelmed in an avalanche of tearing, rending, burrowing appendages. The rifle was torn from my grasp and I was driven to the ground, buried under its bulk as it tried to consume me.

Ignoring the nearly unbearable pain of the creature’s attacks, I managed to get a hold of one of large, malformed heads before it could recede back into its bulk again and squished it like a grape.

The bulk shuddered around me as I felt more than saw Ravyn’s renewed assault with her flame bolts. I could also sense another head explode just above me as Cerrydwen was able to focus her own considerable powers upon the beast now that I was its main offensive focus.

The next few moments passed in a haze of pain, struggle, and fear as we fought against this unfathomable horror of a beast. Eventually I was able to free up my right arm in order to draw the Desert Eagle hand gun and begin taking out the head as they appeared. Between Ravyn’s fire bolts, Cerrydwen’s sorcery, and my bullets, the creature finally succumbed and dissolved into a quivering mass of black goo that stunk worse than a chicken carcass left to rot in the sun for week.

Cerrydwen helped me up, extending a bloodied hand to me as she crinkled her nose at the stench. “Why do these things have to stink so damn much?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, but it sure makes miss those days when I couldn’t smell shit, literally.”

Ravyn laughed, as she wiped blood and goo from her own face. “I’m glad that Jasmine could get you here so quickly, Rusty. It was looking pretty grim there for a moment.”

“Yeah, well, I was taking a nice hot shower before you summoned me.” I looked down at my battered and thoroughly coated body. “I guess I’m going to have to take another one, aren’t I?” I shifted my gaze to Ravyn. “Where the hell did you guys go this time to attract such a nice…follower?”

Ravyn pointed to the rifle that lay under a few inches of slimy black ooze. “Finding the energy and the ingredients to make weapons like the bullets in those things requires to range a little further out into the multiverse than I’m really comfortable doing. But if we don’t take some of those risks, we’ll never come up with the resources to have a chance in this war we’re waging.”

I reached down into the ooze to pick the weapon up. “Still, if you risk bringing another one of these things back, we might have to reconsider these forays of yours.”

Ravyn punched me in the upper arm. “You’re just jealous because you can’t go gallivanting off like you used to. You never worried about the crap you used to bring back from your trips!”

I threw up my free hand in mock surrender. “OK, OK…I’m guilty on all counts. Let’s call it night.”

The Frau and Jim barged into the room with their own weapons in hand only to curl up their noses and step back in disgust.

I pushed past them as they recoiled, leaving Ravyn and Cerrydwen to explain it all to them. “Hey, I’m going to take a shower and the only other interruption I want is for someone to bring me a fresh pint of O negative.”