Estylwen
Punished GN
AtomicEmperor
FernStone
NoriWasHere
Arkitekt
Damycles
Fetzen
Atrocious
Vashti flinched as two bullets crunched against her back and didn’t even pierce her skin. Amara and three of her ghostly copies surrounded Vashti, one of the phantoms leveling a shotgun her way. Vashti held strong to her grasp on Lila’s wings. The connective tissue was sturdier than she thought it would be, like it was anchored to more than just a section of her spine, but Vashti was determined. The wings would make a nice Halloween costume for next year’s festival. She glared at the shotgun, honestly hoping the stupid bitch would shoot, thinking that enough force from the blast would be the extra umph she needed to clip Lila’s wings.
”GET AWAY FROM HER, RIGHT NOW!!!”
“Oh my god, bro, I get it, I had a glow up so everybody wants a piece of me now but fuck, your incel ass is as thirsty as ever,” barked Vashti. “Wait your turn-uhhhhhh…”
Vashti blinked, her attention completely transfixed by the wings that pulsed like the lights at a rave. The irresistible urge to pluck a feather free caused her to loosen her grip on Lila, but was checked by an animalistic instinct coming from deep within. Her hand trembled, divided between desire and dangersense. She could just pluck a feather now, couldn’t she? No no no, she felt it, an old but familiar sensation, one she hadn’t felt since she had regained, or maybe it actually should just be gained, control: influence. Something else was trying to influence her. Control her. Cage her. She couldn’t allow that. She wouldn’t.
Her hands released the wings and moved to snap Lila’s neck but was instead caught by surprise as Lila clawed kick slashed against her legs. She scrambled to get back on the offensive, swiping slashes of her own at Lila’s back that fell short as a wave of pink mist expanded across the field. Vashti glanced up to the sky, yelling in anger as she saw Emily’s stupid signal, not understanding why they were backing off. They were winning. They had Sycamore on the ropes. This was the time to bathe in their blood and wear their skulls like crowns. Emily was so weak. So shortsighted. So fucking stupid. Maybe the mist would provide enough cover to let an accident befall their idiotic, fearful leader.
Vashti smiled, her eye twitching, as she reached down to grab her gas mask and patted her thigh instead. Just as a wave of pink engulfed her she saw Lila struggling with her mask. The rage faded from her face, replaced by a look of pure bliss as the storm overhand crescendo into a thunderous finale like it was the artilleryman invited out on stage to perform the finale of the 1812 Overture. She sliced, kicked, licked, arched her back, ripped, tore, broke, and whispered sweet nothings at whatever was in her way—Lila, Amara, phantoms, zombies, illusions—as she partook in her half of a violent phantasmagoria.
Then, suddenly, a portal opened up and her jaws snapped down on a Dilly Bar shoved into her mouth by George as he grabbed her with his large, meaty mitts, the temporary shock from the cold sweet the only thing stopping Vashti from turning the giant of a man into a meat ribbon. She was pulled through Brianna’s portal and disappeared, the storm vanishing with her. Elsewhere, a group of Dairy Queen employees scattered and ducked for cover as a sudden and violent wind chucked a picnic bench through the lobby window.
No, no, nononononono!
Sully had experienced several moments in his life where time had come to a crawl, the inevitable end stretching out before him, no action existing that could divert the course, powerless to do anything but watch. Bright stadium lights flooded the fields and cheers poured from the stands as he felt the interception slip from his grasp. Bright headlights appeared from around the dark corner on a slick back road, the horn blaring as he jerked the wheel as metal crunched on metal. Bright light flashing from the barrel of a gun as he started to dive to protect the kid, the shots ringing out through the storm, turning his head to see the bullets impact against the kid. Only the kid kept standing and the slow motion crawl stopped as Sully splatted in the mud.
“What the fuuuuu…” whispered Sully as he looked up at Clancy.
The kid should have been dead. The triggerman might’ve been hired by Walt or one of the Warners to take out the competition and had gotten a little too trigger happy given the headshot he had landed on the America’s third favorite t-shirt duck, “Marty Mallard”, but the crossbow expert had been going for the kill. Sully grimaced in pain just by looking at the bolt sticking in the kids face, his hands over his head and his knees pulling up to make himself a smaller target as more gunshots rang out. The kid was iron, unflinching. Sully would’ve almost been impressed if he wasn’t still internally panicking from watching two adults try to kill a kid, a panic that spiked when another kid got picked off by a sniper and dropped to the ground.
“Oh good it’s only Carol. Hey kid,” said Sully, his voice still in a low hush. He wiped the mud off the rim of the Chalice with the one clean part of his shirt. “You hurt? You look like you should oh my GOD!”
The kid wasn’t just a kid. Of course the kid wasn’t just a kid. Sully hadn’t just seen it in horror movies, he’d experienced it before the last go around—he still refused to go to toy stores after that last time. Why were the kids never just kids? They were always also ghosts or gods or demons or middle-aged Eastern European women with a rare genetic disease. At the very least Sully could confidently say that his wits were about him: the kid, well, the shadowy demon nightmare thing, had been the same “kid” he’d seen shot the other week. So he hadn’t been hallucinating, although he wished he was as he watched the kid start shredding into the man with the gun, more shots ringing out from elsewhere, before suddenly he was yeeted across the yard as the announcer yelled, “TOUCHDOWN!”
“TOUCHDOWN! TOUCHDOWN! TOUCHDOWN! NUMBER FORTY-SEVEN, SULLIVAN MCPHERSON, HAS WON THE SUPERBOWL FOR THE ATLANTA FALCONS! THE FANS ARE RUSHING THE FIELD! OH MY GOD! SULLIVAN MCPHERSON HAS MADE HISTORY!”
Flashes of lightning became the flashes of camera, the mud a podium, the twig poking him in the face a microphone. Sully stood covered in grime, the Chalice held as the MVP trophy tucked under his arm, nodding his head along to the questions of an imagined interviewer, uttering canned responses, loudly declaring to a mob of dancing zombies, “I’m going to Fantasy Land!”
He blinked and the stands fell away like dominoes, colossal redwoods standing in their place, the cheers of the crowd replaced by the calls of birds as he sat in a folding chair in front of a lake and watched the rising sun. The Chalice became a cold can of refreshing lager, foam splashing up onto his shirt as a hand playfully slapped him on the back of the head.
“Little early for that, don’tcha think?” said Ashley, snatching a can from the nearly empty cooler before using it as a seat. She jerked her hand towards an older man nodding off in a chair, a can of beer still loosely gripped in his hand as he snored. “You guys seriously drink all night?”
“No. We also talked,” said Sully.
“Oh, the McPherson men finally solve all of the world’s problems?”
“Yeah,” said Sully. He looked at his dad. It was funny. He couldn’t remember a single thing about what they had talked about. Really, it wasn’t the conversation that really mattered anyway. The thing that was truly important was the time they spent together. Sully smiled, choosing to believe what the mist told him—that they still had plenty of time left—as he took a sip from his beer. It tasted funny, almost like metal, and left his mouth feeling dry. “Something like that.”
Sloane gritted her teeth as undead nails slashed across her forearm and jerked her shoulder sharply to avoid being grappled by one of the zombies behind her. Her knife was stuck between the ribs of one of the bodies, frantically wiggling up and down as she channeled lux into her tarot card to yank it free so in one final act of desperation she could turn it into an Object of Obsession and distract the horde. It wasn’t working. Besides, enchanting something else meant turning the spell off on the jacket, and Anya might still be in swinging range of the monster. Even if she could cast the spell, she wasn’t sure she would go through with it.
Between being separated by the storm and struggling in fights of their own Sloane accepted that nobody was coming to her rescue. Really, said the once tiny voice inside of her that sounded awfully like her mother and had started to become louder and louder until it was like the wail of a banshee, it was to be expected. They didn’t really want her in their little group. She had only been saved by Amara because she’d been in the same room as Lynn. Hands grabbed at her shirt and hair as she kicked and shoved the zombies back in a futile effort to buy herself a few more seconds. From the corner of her eye she saw one of the zombies lunge for her faster than she imagined possible, its hand grabbing for her throat. She didn’t scream at the oncoming death, refusing to give it the satisfaction as she turned to face it.
She felt her skin begin to sizzle, too engulfed in the moment to realize the implication, as her pointless bravery broke. Sloane threw her hands up in front of her as she closed her eyes, the noise coming out of her mouth not a defiant yell at the face of death but a quiet, desperate whimper, one final plea, as she braced for the pain. It came, but not in the form of ripping and tearing and biting. Rather, it was just that sizzle on her skin growing in intensity as if the rain had become acidic. Breathing heavily, she opened her eyes as she put her hands to her chest. She felt some kind of sludge slip between her fingers as she saw Luca smiling at her, the decaying flesh of the zombies slopping off of his body.
”I'll clear us a path…”
Sloane followed behind Luca, somewhat dazed by how she was alive, somewhat uncertain if she actually was, a ‘thank you’ trembling on her lips but never fully making it past. Luca carved a path through the zombies, their flesh and muscles melting off them and becoming a bubbling black pudding of decay that swirled with the mud. Sloane stepped carefully, trying to avoid the gore as best as she could, scared to get any closer to Luca but terrified to fall behind. The battlefield had gone from a brawl to a live reenactment of the grotesque art of Hieronymus Bosch, portraying a literal hell on earth for the modern generation with dancing Thriller zombies, burning crosses, and the creeping pink fog of chemical warfare. Sloane moved a hand to her mouth but was unable to cover as she violently gagged at the dark, bloody strings of flesh still webbed between her fingers.
And then she blinked and saw that she was looking at a painting inside of a small shed that she both simultaneously knew that she had never seen before and also knew that it was hers, no, their studio. The burning house became a burning stick of incense, the sickening decay a sweet scent of lavender, the blood and viscera coating her splashes of paint on a white smock, the storm a bit of white noise caused by the trickling of a small, tabletop water fountain. Dozens of paintings lined the wall, some of them hers, most of them not. Her eyes narrowed. Something was wrong. She grabbed a fine paintbrush and dabbed it across the corner of the painting, removing her signature by blending it to become a part of the painting, leaving the piece of art anonymous. Satisfied, she put the brush down as she felt his presence behind her.
"I’m so glad. I’m not dying anymore… I didn’t want to. I’d accepted it, but I really didn’t want to. Not after I met you again. For the first time since I found out, I actually wanted to live again,” Sloane heard him say, his voice strange at first. Perhaps he was coming down with a cold?
“That’s a funny way to say I love you.”
“Really?”
He pulled her into a hug. The words were confusing, but she understood the sentiment. She had felt that way before—taking on the burden of protecting the whole city, refusing to cooperate with others due to simply being a control freak, a compulsion to collect and to hoard power for the sake of hoarding power. She had been dying, too, killing herself with stress, hating what she was doing, blaming others for her faults, and slowly becoming a hypocrite. Ironically, it was hypocrisy that would ultimately save her life, allowing her to stop worrying so much about what others were doing and thinking and focusing instead on slicing out a little happiness for herself. But really, he had been the one person honest enough to give her the harsh truth: she was acting like an addict. Severance was her form of going cold turkey.
“Sorry, I meant to say stupid. By the way, I have something to tell you.”
She wasn’t special, she wasn’t important, and that was completely okay. Yet even knowing that, he still treated her like she was—he was obsessed. Sloane acquiesced. Okay, perhaps she was too. She hugged him back. She felt like she was melting in his arms, the warmth of his love rushing over her. It hurt, actually, having someone who really cared for her, because it made her realize how much of her life she had truly been without that feeling. It really hurt. It really, really hurt. For the longest time she had pushed and nudged any away because the loneliness had been so normal that it had felt right—her legs felt weak, her heart was about to burst, uncontrollable tears of pain formed in her eyes as she desperately grabbed on to him—but now she was so happy that she could die.
“What is it?”
“I love you too, Jasper,” said Sloane softly, bloody tears and black mascara running down her cheeks as she stared lovingly at Luca through glassy eyes. The skin sloughed off of her fingers as she caressed Luca’s cheek. As Luca moved to try and avoid touching her any further by lifting his arms, her mind saw Jasper do a strange, little dance, the mist contextualizing it to make sense, telling her that it was just one of his eccentricities that drew her closer to him.
She gave a girlish giggle, her skin darkening and festering it continued to rot. She moved in to give “Jasper” a kiss, coughing a mist of black blood on Luca’s face instead as she briefly choked. Her legs buckled as she fell to her knees, desperately grabbing at Luca to try and remain upright as she coughed and another cascade of dark blood poured over her cracking lips. The strength started to rapidly escape from her body as it began to succumb to the Rot, vital organs beginning to shut down as she pawed at Luca like a lost puppy.
“I’m so sorry honey, I got paint on you,” she said, still in the middle of a giggling fit that gurgled on her own blood. She attempted to hold up her hand, imagining the loose flap of skin as a towel, and slumped forward into Luca’s legs instead, consciousness fading, “Let me…let me…help you clean up…”