Necromanson (Beta) Chapter 13 (Patreon)

The old man’s flesh was in the process of melting, drooping to the floor as a bright red liquid escaped from beneath the cracking skin. Henry took one look at it, and shuddered. If he hadn’t seen Zack alive and moving a few days ago, he would have sworn this was a badly made horror movie prop, plastic and corn starch. No human body should decompose like that, leading Henry to believe that the old wizard may have done a fair amount of work on himself before the end in his pursuit of immortality.

The stench nearly made Henry heave again, but there was nothing in his stomach. Henry saw an opportunity. “Tell you what,” he said, eyeing the melting corpse through watering eyes. “I clean this up, you make dinner.”

Athena looked at Henry, aghast. “You’re thinking about food now?” she said, astonished.

“Well, no,” Henry said, shrugging, “Nearly throwing up made me realize that my stomach was empty, and I thought I’d give you an out. You’d probably be more comfortable in the kitchen.”

Athena cocked her head to the side for a moment, staring at him with her mouth open. “You know what, sure,” She said, glaring at him. “Despite your blatantly mysogenistic remark, the kitchen would be better than burying that. But know this, if you show up to eat covered in Zack, you’ll be having your clothes for dessert, because I’m going to feed them to you.” Athena turned and walked away, her heavy footfalls echoing in the underground chamber.

Henry watched her leave, then turned back to the melting corpse on the floor before heaving a sigh. It was a mistake. The sudden intake of breath filled Henry’s nasal passages with the horrific stench, and he fell to his knees and retched, dropping his manly façade as soon as Athena was out of eyesight.

“Ugh” Henry said, pushing himself to his feet when the retching had passed. He looked down at the corpse. “What am I gonna do with you…” an odd disparity made Henry look a little closer at the dead man’s right hand. Henry squatted down beside him and looked at the wizard’s right hand. the last two fingers of his right hand were missing, and the skin around it looked normal, and healthy, contrasting the sallow skin currently sloughing off the corpse.

Henry did what any sensible adult would do. He poked it with a stick. Taking one of the torture tools off the floor that looked like a dentist would own, Henry poked and peeled back the skin, discovering it was made of rubber. A prosthetic? Henry thought to himself, fighting down the urge to gag at his close proximity to the source of the stench.

Henry thought for a moment. According to the book, a focus was expensive, and if you disarmed a wizard, you essentially rendered them powerless. It wouldn’t be a stretch for a wizard to hide it, or have a backup. Which would explain why the old man casually tossed aside his focus as soon as it cracked, but was still able to work magic, his focus had been buried in one of his prosthetic fingers.

But why would the giant have taken it? Henry couldn’t see him as a wizard, drinking protein shakes and pumping iron while reading a book on a stand in front of his treadmill. Surely the old man wouldn’t have told a goon where his focus was hidden, it just wasn’t something the muscle needed to know, which meant that the big guy knew more than he let on.

Henry rose to his feet, musing. He’d have to think on it later, but for now, Henry had to get rid of a stinky melting wizard. After a searching the mansion grounds, Henry found a large plastic barrel with wheels for collecting trash. Henry parked it beside the old man, and leaned on the staff, willing his corpse into the air. It was the most Henry had ever tried to lift into the air at once, and the sustained effort drained him quickly, letting the old man’s legs or shoulders drop to the ground as his support fluctuated between the two areas.

Henry felt a strange creeping sensation from the staff as he channeled energy into moving the dead wizard, like all the goosebumps it raised along his arm were all pointing in the same direction. Henry dropped the old man’s head back to the ground with a splat, narrowing his eyes in frustration as gobs of the red substance splattered on his shoes.

Henry turned his gaze away from the corpse and regarded the staff for a moment. Henry pictured power flowing into the staff through his hand, directing it to take residence there. The staff greedily drank in all the power he directed towards it. Henry could vaguely feel it climb the wooden staff, whirling inside the gem that topped the wood.

The staff seemed to be some kind of Ye Olde Reservoir, Henry guessed. The style was straight out of Tolkien, and Henry imagined no modern wizard would ever have something so glaringly obvious, Zack being the case-in-point, but a smile broke out onto Henry’s face. Henry liked it, a lot.

After a while, Henry returned his attention to the body in front of him, and drew the stored power back out as he lifted the old man. After a few false starts, Henry got the feel of handling a larger load of sustained power, and successfully shoved the dripping corpse into the wheelbarrow.

Without Athena around, Henry’s evil laughter went unchecked. Henry pushed the wheelbarrow ahead of him with magic as he limped along, siphoning a small amount of it back into the staff as he progressed. Henry managed to get the old man out to the garden, and then he retrieved the spellbook, flipping to the hole digging spell.

Henry kicked off his shoes, wiggling his toes in the grass before sitting down beside the wheelbarrow, studying the spell. Despite being simple compared to others, it was a complex network of interwoven symbols contained within a circle. Henry stared at the book, committing the deatails to memory, and then glared at the grass ten feet away from him, pictureing a hole big enough to dump the body as he injected power through the spell, reconstructed in his mind.

Nothing happened. As he pushed the power through, the entire symbol began to warp and fade from his memory, the details falling away, as magic began to leak out into the air around him. Henry studied the spell book and then tried again, with the same result.

The power coursing through the spell would unfailingly find a weak point in the spell as he pictured it, and the entire thing would unravel. Undaunted, Henry tried for another half hour, before the idea to place the book in front of him while he did it. With his eyes on the spell on the paper, Henry was able to maintain focus long enough to make the spell go off without a hitch, and a small chunk of dirt in front of him lifted out of the ground and placed itself neatly along the edge of the hole. About three shovel’s worth of dirt.

Henry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He had succeeded, but he had done less with half an hour of concentration than thirty seconds with a shovel could accomplish. On the other hand, he had done it with his mind, which made the whole thing incredibly exciting.

Henry decided to go with determined, rather than swing between extremes of emotion. Henry tried again, his eyes of the book, channeling stored power from the staff. This time four shovels of dirt deposited themselves on the ground.

“No one said this was gonna be easy,” Henry said, gritting his teeth and gripping the staff tighter. Well, Henry admitted, Zack had said it would be easy, but that was compared to the average person. Henry channeled all the magic he could stand, flowing it through his mental construct from one end to the other. The power seemed to dissipate, losing force even as four shovels worth of dirt displaced themselves.

Henry lost patience and shouted, sending power at his mental construct, intending to destroy it in his frustration. For a second, Henry felt the power he sent form swirls and eddies as it flowed over the spell constructed in his mind. The spell dissolved in his mind just as the ground fell out from under him.

Henry flailed for a second, lurching because of the sudden fall, before he landed on his back, the wind driven out of him, coinciding with an ominous popping sensation coming from his side as he hit the ground. Henry’s mouth opened in a silent scream as his wound began to send sharp stabbing pain above the background ache. When Henry finally caught his breath, it was ragged, pain matched with exhilaration.

Almost as an afterthought, Henry checked his side for bleeding. “I did it,” Henry said, looking up at the walls of dirt surrounding him. Henry chuckled to himself, admiring his view at the bottom of a six foot deep bowl. Henry put his hand in front of his eyes, almost as if part of his brain were saying ‘hey, look at this!” while the other was too busy to care.

Henry’s eyes focused on the bright red on his fingers. “Shit,” Henry said, pressing his hand to his side with a hiss of pain. One of his stitches had busted, and the hole in his side had slipped, just a little. The scab covering it had broken open and begun to leak. Henry grunted as he climbed the bowl that resembled a meteor strike.

When he made it to the top of the ridge, Henry looked down at the sight, and grinned from ear-to-ear before he retrieved the book and staff, dumping Zack’s limp body into the hole. Henry used the staff’s built up power to bulldoze a fair amount of dirt over the corpse and began his trek back to the mansion, looking for some first aide for his side.

Henry made it back to the torture room, and snagged some bandages, reinforcing the stitches with medical tape and gauze. The smell still pervaded the area, but it wasn’t as bad as when the corpse had still been in the room. Henry finished the bandaging, breathing lightly as he wiggled his dirt-covered toes. His shoes were buried somewhere in the massive earthen bank surrounding the crater, and he didn’t feel like digging through the whole thing.

Zack’s feet were smaller than Henry’s unfortunately, but Henry found a spare pair in the giant’s room that fit well, a pair of combat boots. As Henry was lacing them up, the smell of leather and polish wafted up to him. Henry was reminded of crawling under barbed wire, the leather boots of the grunt in front of him nearly kicking him in the face, and sleeping on the bottom bunk with two pairs of boots carrying noxious odor up to his nostrils.

He remembered his eyes flinging open, still sticky from sleep, when the attack began. It was still dark, the sun not quite brightening the horizon, when armed men began to assault the groggy, sleep deprived troops. An echoing rumble told him that the explosion in his dream had really happened.

Henry and the others flew out of their beds with trained haste, grabbing their guns and heading out, barefoot, wearing nothing but government issue undies. Screams resounded across the base, and Henry’s squad kept their heads low, creeping through the compromised building. After a few minutes of sneaking, blowing holes in any bad guy who turned the corner and found them, the gunfire died down, and when Henry looked outside, he saw something he’d never expected to see in the modern world.

His CO’s head rested on a stick, lit by a flaming car. In the pre-dawn light, Henry could make out the pale, struggling shapes of some of the women stationed at the base pinned beneath dozens of hands. Henry could make out the naked asses of the men above them, flexing as they tried to push deeper inside their captives. It was a moment of clarity for Henry, it felt as though he were watching the discovery channel, the mindless expressions, the snarls. Humans were animals, and the universe could do without a few dozen of them . A cold rage passed through Henry, hardening into a smooth sphere inside him.

“Are we gonna help them?” One of Henry’s teenage subordinates asked, peeking over the edge of the windowsill.

“Yep,” Henry said, his eyes dead. “We’re going to the armory.” Henry and his team got all the way to the armory, rigged the entire building to blow, and then stole one of the enemy’s trucks, driving their translator up to the hill where the leader of the enemy forces stood, watching the americans die with some satisfaction. Henry and his team jumped out, secured the leader, and had the translator send orders to load up the survivors and bring them to the top of the hill before securing the building.

It worked like a charm. As soon as Henry confirmed the enemy trucks loaded up struggling soldiers, He had his men castrate the enemy commander with a cherry red knife. The man’s teeth had bitten through the sole of a steel toed boot jammed into his mouth.

When the American prisoners made it to the hill, they ambushed the drivers, dressed like their brethren, dragging each of them from their cars and putting bullets through their brains. After it was all, done, Henry looked back at the building, where antlike troops could be seen carrying supplies to the rest of their trucks, looting the base.

Henry took the bulky detonator out of the truck and turned back to the survivors. “Who wants the highest kill count?” He asked, waggling the detonator in front of him. A woman stepped forward with blood on her collar from where the previous owner had been blown away. She took up the detonator, and with a grim face unceremoniously uncovered the switches, flipped them up, and pressed the button.

The building they had been living in the day before, the gym, the pool table, the xbox they liked to play at the end of the day, all were destroyed. Henry watched the building explode, not accompanied by a gout of flame, but dust and shrapnel. Gouts of flame were a convention by Hollywood to make explosions look cool.

As the dust settled, Henry saw a few bodies moving around beneath them, and he turned back to the couple dozen people still alive, standing close to him. “Alright, who wants to come with us and mop up?” he asked, taking volunteers. In the end, all of them cruised back down the road in the enemy’s trucks, putting bullets into the fleeing men. All the while, the cold sphere of rage inside him kept spinning.

Henry finished the last lace of the boots and stood, leaning on his staff. The act brought to mind a man in his camo, boots and cap, with a Gandalf staff. Henry laughed. If only his past self could see him now. Henry headed back down to the kitchen for breakfast, the solid feel of the boots bringing him confidence despite the extra drag against his wounded side when he walked.