And then she scoffed.
“Aw, fffuck!” she puffed through an astonished, astonishing laughter, her hand still shielding the offended area. “God, that was literally below the belt, you stupid cow! What the fuck was that about?!”
The kids remained silent while she caught her breath. Then they turned to Andy for the reply.
“Uh…I was hoping you’d still have your birth genitals.”
Dunia laughed again while she brought herself back on her feet, color flushing back to her cheeks.
“Girl, you’re so adorable,” she said, having more difficulty speaking due to hilarity than fatigue or pain. “I do keep them. Remember the rumor about me being the son of a witch that was supposedly burned at Salem?”
She burst into laughter while the kids queried one another, the realization etching a new age line around their eyes.
“I told you it’s been done before!” she hollered. “Boy, you should see your faces! Gets you every time!”
She laughed for another two seconds before Andy charged at her and she had to parry her off, then lunge back.
Andy stepped back to defend, at the same time checking her six o’clock to find several wheezers ready to jump in, and she rolled out of the way of the first one to let Dunia deal with it while she started to dig for gold on the second and Nate swung his rifle at the third and Kerri lost her rifle to the fourth and Tim dashed to her assistance while the rifle slid across the floor into Andy’s hand, who stood up, flipped it in the air, butt-bashed the wheezer ahead and barrel-stabbed the one behind, and threw the firearm back to Kerri, shouting, “Catch!”
A new throng of slimy, eyeless maniacs avalanched onto the battlefield as Andy gripped Pierce, dove to the ground with a hand anchored on some writhing creature’s face, and merry-go-rounded, slashing wheezers at three o’clock, twelve o’clock, nine o’clock, and finally Dunia at six, who blocked the pickax with her blade down, smiling with joy at the sight of an actual spark from the clashing metal that Andy and Dunia paused to follow throughout its microseconds life span, witnessing how it failed to set the room on fire, and then forgot about it as they engaged again, Andy striking blindly with Pierce, trying to knock Dunia off-balance, Dunia repelling the hits coming faster and faster and hoping for the gliding steel to trigger a new spark until she got tired of waiting and connected a surprise kick at Andy’s nose, time dropping to slo-mo to appreciate the beautifully arcing wake of blood as she backflipped, then speeding up again as Nate dented the butt of his rifle against Dunia’s face and took the opportunity to swing it back at the wheezer charging from behind, and in the same circular motion try to finish off Dunia by hammering the base of her neck, a blow Dunia dodged by rolling away and then using her sword to attempt a twirling moulinet counterattack to the heart that Nate’s ribs barely shielded, forcing him to trip backward over a dead wheezer and allow the actually-not-so-dead body to clamber on him and try to bite his face off, which Tim forbade by leaping onto the creature’s neck while Dunia somersaulted back to her feet in time to deflect Kerri’s rifle swinging her way, only noticing too late that the rifle was a distraction for the knife slicing toward her jugular, forcing her to jump back and lose a heartbeat to recover her balance before ducking under the next blow as she directed her momentum to strike back at Kerri with an angry, vertical hack that the redhead parried with the stock of her rifle, then a slash from left to right that hewed the scalp off a passing wheezer, then finally a kick below the belt at which Kerri’s outraged hair hollered in shame as she crashed into the workbench, her center of gravity on tilt for the crucial instant where Dunia advance-lunged to impale her through her stomach, their eyes locking in midair, Kerri’s suddenly catching the alarm in Dunia’s as she glanced down to notice she had planted her left foot too far ahead and that Andy, lying on the roadkill carpet, was driving Pierce right through Dunia’s leather boot and the floorboards and into the second floor where Dunia’s vintage blood dripped on the heads of the wheezers below turning their eyeless heads up and hallelujahing the red rain in a pitch that could not possibly eclipse Dunia’s bestial, gut-born cry of pain threatening to blow off the ceiling.
Andy grabbed Kerri and kicked a wheezer off Tim and snatched Nate from a one-on-three skirmish, ordering retreat.
“To the walls! Quick!”
They clustered into the hole, Andy shoving the others first as she looked back at the melee in the center of the room. The last sight she ever caught of Dunia Debo?n was a terrified black eye trapped in the middle of a nest of slashing, friendly-firing gray limbs, her voice muffled under the dozen creatures fighting for a bite of her flesh.
“You…” her little voice gasped. “It won’t end like this! I swear, Andy Rodriguez, this has just begun!”
Andy slithered into the passageway after the others and tried not to listen to the bone-snapping sounds coming from the attic.
—
They emerged into the room with the oxygen tanks on the second floor, surprising a single stray creature that faced them and threw the proverbial massacre-promising hiss.
Andy and Nate backswung their firearms like hockey sticks before Kerri mentioned, “It’s okay to shoot now.”
The wheezer grunted a question mark as both flipped the weapons in their hands. The next second, two-thirds of its obliterated body were flying through the broken window in convenient snack-sized chunks for vultures.
Andy led the way through the hole to the next room and down the trapdoor slide. This allowed her to blast away two wheezers that were crawling up the ramp.
They landed softly onto the pile of coal and spine-dangling bodies in the basement.
ANDY: To the mines! We’re going under the lake!
—
Buried alive under a living mass of sleazy, cold-skinned, frenzy-feeding hellspawn, suffocating under the corrupted air out of their dripping mouths, Dunia lay squirming on the floor, one leg and a torn, bleeding arm defending her vital organs while her other hand, lost amid the pandemonium, scurried blindly among webbed feet and dead bodies in the viscous dark, desperate for a last resource.
And then a brave fingertip reported back to the brain: the touch of ivory.