“Greek fire!” Simon shouted. “Do you have more?”
“One,” she replied as bony fingers seized her flowing dress. She managed to tear a portion away. “I knew I should’ve ignored fashion and brought a sword.”
“Take this.” He pulled a short sword from his stick with a whisper of blue. A quick word sent an electric glow coursing along the blade. Simon extended the stick sword to her, handle first. “Do not touch the blade or you will die.”
“What will you use?” The moment she took the curved silver handle, the exhilarating surge of power registered in her face.
“I’ll manage.” He wrapped his arms around a large marble cross on top of a vault. With a grunt, he broke the huge ornament off and hefted it like a cricket batsman. As Kate worked the sword in a galvanic arc, slicing limbs and heads, Simon swung the heavy cross with thunderous effort. The wet sounds of impact filled the air.
Still there was no respite from the vacant faces with exposed teeth and sunken noses. Kate was swinging for her life, but the sword was losing speed and height. She didn’t have the stamina that Simon’s tattooed runes provided. If her arm faltered, she might fall under the ragged fingernails and clamping jaws of the dead.
“Kate,” he roared over the squelching blows from his heavy cross, “I need thirty seconds.”
“Of course,” she rasped with faltering breath. “I have it under control.” She drew her last vial of Greek fire, popped the cap, and sloshed it in a semicircle around them. Blue fire rose from the ground, consuming the wretched cadavers that approached without reason or fear. She turned to cover the other direction with the sparkling sword.
Simon lifted the cross over his head with both hands and hurled it with all his considerable power, mowing down the closest ranks of undead. He dropped to one knee and began to draw runes in the dirt with the end of his walking stick. This wasn’t the perfect way to write a spell, but it was their best hope.
“Stay still,” Kate warned Simon, and began a deft dance about him, the slight blade flashing as it crashed against the surrounding corpses, wreaking havoc more like a broadsword. She neatly worked her way around the focused Simon, leaving a ring of anatomical wreckage in a sheer ballet of viciousness.
He heard Kate moving around him and felt heat as the blade passed near his head. He tried not to see the mud-crusted feet pressing ever closer. He smiled grimly, ready to make the last stroke on his rune, when the filthy hem of Kate’s dress swept across his design and brushed it out of existence.
“Hurry please,” she huffed.
“Yes, thank you.” He set about redrawing the runes, keeping one arm out to block another gown disaster.
“It’s been thirty seconds.”
He didn’t look up. The tumult grew louder. There was nothing but the sound of colliding bodies and Kate’s desperate, hacking breath. He shoved it aside and continued to scribe in the dirt, focusing his concentration.
“Simon!” Her voice was a panicked shout. “Have you forgotten how to tell the bloody time?”
He traced one last line and hissed an ancient word. The rune glowed up into his face and an eldritch luster spread outward across the ground. He leapt to his feet. Kate’s right arm was trapped by desiccated limbs. Clawed fingers grasped her hair and she was being dragged off her feet. Simon seized the arm holding her and snapped it in half. He kicked out at another cadaver while pulling the sword from her hand. He spun and sliced the wrist tangled in her hair.
With a whispered word for additional muscle, he grabbed Kate around the waist and leapt for a marble vault. Filthy hands reached out as his foot struck the edge of a tomb and he dropped hard to his knees. Dead figures surrounded the raised platform, reaching and clawing for the living pair. Fingers fell short of Simon and Kate, the cadavers slipping lower as if the vault were lifting into the air.
All around them the churchyard glowed with eerie smoke and the ground had turned near liquid. The flailing cadavers were sinking unwillingly back into the earth. Even the Greek fire was swallowed by the dark, cold ground.
The vault shifted to the side like a sinking ship. Kneeling quickly, Simon grabbed an edge to keep from slipping overboard into the quicksand of waiting undead. Kate did the same, her eyes wide in concern, but she said not a word.
Then the pitching stopped with a final burst of eldritch light as the ground hardened again. A few corpses around them still clawed up through the dirt, but found it less pliable than before. They were trapped. For now.
Kate leaned into him, taking solace in their survival. “For future reference, I now despise cemeteries.” There were trails of blood on her face and neck but she wasn’t badly injured.
Simon grinned and tenderly kissed her scratched forehead. He reached toward Kate as if to caress her, but instead fumbled with her hair, pulling painful tangles. He came away with a moving hand.