The Sword of Saint Michael Page 3

  Starting the ignition, he tapped the accelerator to back up, but the car wouldn’t move. The engine was on, but the car wasn’t budging. He verified that the transmission was in reverse. So why wasn’t he going anywhere?!

  He put it in drive, then back to reverse. No luck. Still stuck.

  Then he remembered that you couldn’t disengage the parking brake by depressing the accelerator without a fastened seat belt.

  So, he disengaged the parking brake and finally started to back up, but he had to stop abruptly because then there was a stationary car in the way behind him. He honked for it to get out of the way. It didn’t move. So he honked again, and then a third time. It still didn’t move.

  He put the car back in park and got out to see that the car blocking him in was waiting for a car ahead to extricate itself out of a parking spot.

  He looked around, exasperated. He needed to get out of there! They all did!

  And then suddenly, he saw three zombies, or whatever they were, coming out the front entrance of the hotel.

  Alexander fled into the side entrance near his car, abandoning any hope of fleeing in his car. He was running for his hotel room at the opposite end of the hotel, hoping to shelter in place. It was at the opposite end of the hotel, so he’d have to run the entire width, dodging any zombies he encountered.

  And he knew they were faster than him. He only hoped that any zombies he came across would distract themselves while chowing on victims, or running toward them.

  He ran down the hallway past hotel room doors on his left and right. Up ahead, the corridor turned slightly to the right, and then a loud thump sounded from that direction. He slowed and then stopped against the wall. Another thump. He peered around the corner.

  A zombie was violently and repeatedly throwing its body against a hotel room door, about every few seconds. Finally, the zombie broke through and a woman screamed from within.

  So much for sheltering in place.

  He remembered there was a gondola near the other side entrance near his hotel room door. It led right to the center of town. He had a vague recollection that there was a police station and grocery store near the terminal.

  More screams from the hotel room.

  The zombie wouldn’t be preoccupied for long, so he turned the corner and ran as fast as he could, blowing by the door behind which he had stopped hearing screams.

  He made it to the lobby where a zombie, a man wearing a blood-stained Chernobog Disney t-shirt, was busy putting back together the skull of the dead concierge. Even from five to ten feet away, the zombie smelled like a combination of sulfur and roadkill.

  From the direction of the front desk, Alexander heard a gun fire. Alexander wished he had brought his own gun, but he didn’t have a license to carry in Colorado. He turned to see a woman holding a .22, firing round after round at Chernobog-man.

  Spinning rapidly, he turned back to face Chernobog-man, who didn’t react to being shot at. At first, Alexander thought the woman had missed him completely, but then he saw a bullet strike at the head.

  He was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he realized that the bullet hadn’t stopped the zombie for more than two or three seconds.

  Bullet-wound in the head, the zombie snarled and rushed at the woman, who betrayed a look of horror as she managed to get one more shot off, what little good it did her. The zombie leapt over the desk and bit the woman on the neck. She cried out and gave Alexander a pleading look of horror.

  But there was nothing he could do for her.

  And the concierge would come back to life soon enough.

  So Alexander ran.

  Chapter Three

  Day Two

  George moved with tremendous speed and bit Jocelyn on the neck. He landed a few punches to her jaw and face before she mustered strength she didn’t know she had. She stood up and slammed his much larger body into the side wall.

  He tightened his grip and continued to chomp on her neck, and she guessed he was going for her jugular vein. She flicked her neck back and crushed his skull into the wall, and his hold on her loosened. Using her arm as leverage, she broke away from him and ran out into the hall.

  George was dead! Or had been. How could this be? Why attack her?

  George followed and lunged after her, fresh blood running off his teeth down his chin. She backed away, unsheathed her sword, and struck him with a clumsy swing.

  The sword skimmed his flesh, a thin line of blood appearing on his forearm below his shirtsleeves. She took several swift steps back and readied her weapon. He leaped at her again, and this time she plunged her blade into his stomach, acting on instinct—she didn’t want to kill him.

  She watched in horror as he betrayed no sign of pain and continued to move, pushing himself forward along the sword, and then lunged and flailed, his arms struggling for purchase.

  Only a small amount of blood surrounded the sword. There should have been much more.

  Am I hallucinating? This can’t be real.

  She stepped back, avoiding him, but he had stopped. She couldn’t fathom why.

  He grabbed the blade with both hands, pulled himself off, and took several steps backward. She matched him step-for-step and drove the sword into his right shoulder, just below the collarbone. She pulled it out and backed away. Instead of crying out, or showing any sign of pain, he snarled. Just as with the abdomen, there was not as much blood on his shoulder as there should have been.

  They eyed each other. George had been dead, she was sure. Yet here he was, attacking her with superhuman strength.

  Could he be on powerful drugs? Like PCP? How would that explain a lack of pulse and breathing?

  Whichever was the case, it was clear her sword thrusts were useless. But it suddenly occurred to her that maybe he had stopped short while on the sword to avoid severing his spine.

  It was worth a shot, and if it didn’t work, then she was a dead woman—if killing her was his intention.

  Jocelyn ran up to him and gave him a flat kick to the torso, knocking him backwards against the wall. With both hands, she shoved her sword into the center of his neck, striking the wall behind it.

  He went limp. She withdrew the weapon, and he slid down the wall. Adrenaline taking over, she hacked at the neck and severed his head, now generating a lot of warm, spraying blood. Only then did she collapse to her knees, keeping her eye on George.

  She had never killed a man. With her head in her bloody hands, she wept. After her sobs died down, she examined his wounds, trying to understand how he had no reaction to them, how there was only a little blood.

  The wounds had healed! Wiping away the small amount of blood showed smooth, unblemished skin.

  What the hell?

  She communicated with George’s spirit. Her grandfather had told her she could communicate with the recently deceased who still kept a memory of the last few hours of life. “Pretend you are meditating a prayer,” he had said. She had never tried doing this, however, until now.

  All she got from George was a hunger for brains.

  Brains?!

  She struggled to contact Saint Michael—no response. She had never felt so alone.

  Jocelyn’s racing heartbeat slowed as she noticed slickness and pain on her neck. Instinctively, she put her hand there. There wasn’t much blood, and the wound superficial. Carrying her sword in her other hand, she went into the bathroom, cleaned the wound, and covered it with a large bandage.

  What the hell just happened? George had been dead. He had clearly been dead . . . hadn’t he?

  Whether or not he was dead before, he was alive when he attacked her. What would possess him to do that? Her first blows, such as running him through the abdomen with her sword, should have killed him, but she didn’t kill him until she severed his spinal cord in his neck. Or did chopping off his head seal the deal?

  This was all impossible . . . right? Well, some would say her communing with spirits, her shamanic journeys, her mild spell-casting—all of that
they’d say was impossible, too. All the more advanced things her grandfather, her mentor, did—the advanced spells he cast, the rituals and their results, the astrology, the focusing power of gems—impossible, they’d say. What, really, is impossible in this world? If everything—the astral plane, Skunk, etc.—was in her mind, how could this be explained?

  Up until now, she had had nagging doubts about the realness of her magic. Deep meditation, communicating with spirits and the recent dead on the astral plane and with flora and fauna on the material plane, and shamanic journeys—these things could be only in her mind. And it was mere coincidence that these things seemed to influence the outside world.

  Like the parking magic, the Instant Magic. She had programmed herself to perform Instant Magic, to, of all things, find a good parking spot in the city. She always seemed to find one, if she executed the spell the correct amount of time ahead, which seemed approximately ten minutes. Later than that yielded less time for the universe to find a spot. Earlier than that, and the power of the magic tended to fade before she arrived at her destination.

  Seemed. It always seemed. The truth is she didn’t know what to believe, except that her life became so much better since she started performing magic. Her relationship with her boyfriend improved. She finished her PhD thesis—finally!—and graduated. Both of those things she had cast spells to get. But the spells only gave her confidence, right? They allowed her to be assertive, to live life on her terms. Her spirit guides? All in her mind, too. She supposed she explored parts of her mind she never knew existed.

  But her instructor, her grandfather, always told her the magic and the spirit guides were real. But it didn’t matter what she believed—how she explained it was her own business. Everyone saw the universe differently. Everyone had their own version of the truth. The key was not to deny things one observed that were inconsistent with one’s truth, but instead to reshape one’s worldview. To do otherwise is cognitive dissonance—the biggest enemy of the shaman. So, he said to come up with any explanation she preferred, but to always keep in mind that her worldview needed to be flexible.

  So how does she explain this?

  She’d learned biology while studying for her bachelor’s degree at Cal State-Bakersfield. But nothing prepared her for this.

  Jocelyn could only conclude her magic was as real as the cold from her sweat. How else could she explain the premonitions from Skunk and Saint Michael that something was amiss with the world? Sure, magic helped her life in so many ways, but that didn’t mean it was real. It could merely focus her mind on the important tasks and goals and give her the confidence to achieve those goals. But if her magic was all in her mind, she never would have understood that something bad had happened.

  As Jocelyn rinsed the blood off her sword, she recalled that her grandfather’s will had specified that she was to inherit his sword. She also recalled how her grandfather admonished her at age seven for openly talking with Pepsi, the family dog. He told her she was special and that she had to hide how special she truly was. The mundane world, as he called it, didn’t understand such things. Instead of treating her as special, they would treat her as an outcast. The vast majority of people didn’t understand that magic actually works.

  But she didn’t need to hide her abilities from him. He had those abilities, too. In fact, he taught her how she could communicate with Pepsi without verbally talking, but merely thinking at him. Of course, the dog always thought back to her, incapable of human speech.

  Much later, at the onset of her mental illness at age twenty-six, he told her one way to control her illness was through discipline and magic. It was easy to persuade her to train in both sword combat and Shamanism. Through the training, she found Skunk, who helped her moderate her illness, though she still required powerful medication.

  Now at thirty, as she recalled this conversation, she didn’t feel grown up. Afraid of getting a real job, though an assistant professorship was still in academia, she would be drawing a real salary and have to pay real rent and make huge payments to repay her student loans.

  That is, if killing George hadn’t just derailed her whole future.

  She should have been in love by now, but she hadn’t been. Her biological clock was ticking. She blamed her father. When he left the family when she was ten, she blamed herself, thinking she had done something wrong. Grandfather Cummings consistently told her she had not until she believed it herself. And then she got angry at her father and had hated him ever since. He’d ruined their lives, and now she couldn’t love. Because of him.

  She looked at the runes the sword bore. She had translated them soon after her grandfather’s death. From close to the hilt down the length of the sword for several inches, the runes read:

  ᛞᚱᚨᚢᚷᚨᚱ

  Transliterated, it spelled “DRAUGAR.” The Draugar, in Old Norse mythology, were dead creatures come back to life, very strong, quick, and indestructible, requiring only brain and spinal cord to survive. Someone could kill them a second time by severing the brain from the spinal cord. Why name a sword after such creatures?

  Jocelyn’s heartbeat quickened. George had fit the description.

  What would Jocelyn tell the authorities? That her diseased friend had attacked her? Just contemplating her options made her dizzy.

  The next thing she remembered, she was lying on the couch, hot under a few throw blankets, which she soon threw off. George’s stench overwhelmed her. Nauseous yet again, she barely made it to the toilet in time, almost tripping over his body.

  Now she was burning up and disoriented. In George’s medicine cabinet she found a digital thermometer—she registered 103 Fahrenheit. Feeling sharp pain in her neck wound, she took off her bandage, and the bite looked inflamed, maybe infected. That would explain her fever. Luckily, George had antibiotic ointment and Tylenol, and after treating herself with those, she felt exhausted, almost crushed, as if gravity had tripled. It was all she could do to make it back to the couch and instantly fall asleep.

  Chapter Four

  Day Zero

  Sheriff Marty Hill heard the familiar Marimba ringtone.

  Sigh. Why did he have to tell his mother he took the day off? With the coming snowstorm, he’d be extremely busy over the next two days, and he wanted to rest up today. He did that by sitting in his living room, viewing old M*A*S*H reruns. Had there ever been a half-hour show as good as M*A*S*H? No.

  The only thing he had left to do outside the house was drive into town and get gas for the patrol car.

  The kids had yet to start school. Jamie, twelve, was off visiting his best friend Jimmy, while Amanda, eight and undergoing a phase, didn’t want much to do with her father. His beautiful wife Karen, his high-school sweetheart, lay on the couch with him, her head resting upon his shoulder, either sleeping or pretending to be asleep.

  Marty fished the phone out of his jeans pocket, trying not to disturb his wife. The screen did not say “Mom” but “Kevin,” one of his deputies. Didn’t Kevin know he was on vacation? Marty had made that clear.

  “Kevin,” Marty said after accepting the call, “this better be good.”

  “Marty.” Kevin’s voice was shaky and then silent for a few seconds. “I think we’re under a terrorist attack.”

  “Oh, hell. Where? New York?”

  “No, here in Beaver Park. The ski resort!”

  The ski resort was six miles south of Marty’s house and only a mile south of where his son Jamie was right now.

  “Have you talked to anyone at the resort?” Marty was calm yet firm.

  “Not anyone that works there, I’ve tried, but . . .” Kevin’s voice was tremulous before it trailed off.

  “But what bro, out with it, if we’re under attack, time’s a wastin’.”

  “Marty . . . I think they’re all dead.”

  “Who’s dead? How many?”

  “The entire fucking resort, Sheriff . . . And I sent four deputies in there . . . God dammit, I killed them. Marty, they’re all
dead!”

  Four deputies? Dead?

  “What was it, a bomb?” Marty asked.

  “No, worse, a bunch of crazed people beating and biting everyone to death!”

  “Did you say beating and biting them to death?”

  “Y-Y-Yes,” Kevin replied. “No guns, no bombs, no fucking knives! Just beating them.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “That’s what one of my deputies said before . . . Jesus, he said it must be some kind of diseased cult or something.”

  Diseased? “How many cars do you have up north?”

  “Four.”

  Marty stared at the TV. He had seen this episode. Pierce was being pranked on April Fool’s Day.

  “Send two cars from up north down here. Set up a roadblock past my house down to the Northern end of Airport Road. No one gets north of Airport Road, understand?”

  “Yes, sir, I gotcha.”

  “Good. Now for the south of town. Once you’ve dispatched those cars and given them instructions, call Bullhead City and get them to send some units up north. Leave the other two cars up north on high terrorist alert.”

  “What about us?” Meaning Beaver Park itself.

  “Are you at the office?” Marty asked. The Beaver County Sheriff’s office was in the heart of Beaver Park, only three miles from the resort, a half mile north of the gondola that takes you from the ski resort right into town.