The scouting hand clutched the pommel of her cutlass and Dunia summoned from her heart, her gut, the house, the isle, and the unnameable powers the final burst of strength necessary to bring the sword home, slashing through every minion in the way. The pile exploded from its core, catapulting mauled, severed, intestine-kiting wheezers through the air as Dunia rose with an ecstatic, life-bearing scream, her sword swaying at lightning speed and splitting the very atoms of oxygen in front of her.
The ridiculously high number of wheezers still able for combat watched mutely and then shrieked in senseless, suicidal joy as Dunia knelt down to yank the pickax from her foot with an appetizing crunch of ground bones, raised her head, eyes devoid of pupils and glowing white, and snarled.
The handles of the pickax and the sword gasped in pain under her grip while she said through a psychotic shark smile: “Come and get it.”
—
Andy and Kerri and Nate and Tim had stampeded through the lower basement and dove through the hatch to the mines when, as they were reaching the lower end of the winding staircase and facing the tunnel to the Allen stairs, Kerri, carrying the only working flashlight, noticed the relatively improved lighting of the cavern.
And once facing the stairs, she needed only to formally peek down the crevice to find out the reason: what the last time had been a far, picturesque stream of red magma glowing at the bottom of the rift had grown into a river of yellow lava, flowing at whitewater speed not ninety feet below the lower ledge of the crack.
Tim leaned over the edge, saw the fire, unintentionally trod on the first blazing metal step, and yelped.
“Whoever is down there, I think Dunia really pissed him off,” Kerri said.
The stair bridge, temperature aside, looked just like they had left it: no rails, no second-to-top step, quivering, clattering, dying of old age.
“You two first, over the sides,” Andy instructed.
Nate took a deep sulfurous breath and placed his foot on the top step. Every bolt in the structure moaned for euthanasia as he transferred his weight. The thin sheet of iron under his feet and the beams supporting it were the only things separating him from a dip into the three-thousand-degree caldera. The idea that lingering up there for too long might roast him alive prompted him to leap across the gap onto the third step, and then hurry down the middle ones and skip over the last five. Kerri followed his steps, to the letter.
Andy lifted the dog in the air, careful to avoid putting pressure on the green-checkered bandages. Sixty-two pounds.
Tim whimpered increasingly on every other step that Andy leaped on, but fell silent as she just jumped off the middle of the stairs, too scared to even vocalize his impressions for the second it took them to land on solid rock.
“Nice!” Nate said admiringly while Kerri hurried to take the dog into her arms.
As another token of appreciation, a tiny nutcracker noise announced the secession of a large slab of volcanic rock from right under Andy’s feet. Andy leaped from the falling rock and grabbed the ledge, but her fingers slipped in the dust. Gravity claimed her full weight just as Nate miraculously clasped his hand around her outstretched forearm and Kerri dove to catch Nate’s leg and Tim ran to grab Kerri’s foot.
At the other end of that line, Andy hung a few meters above evaporation, sweat sizzling down her back as she looked up and Nate gave her back a smile.
“We’re not splitting up, are we?”
—
A plethora of besieging Thtaggoalites gathered in the attic and clogged the stairway, eyelessly and brainlessly listening to Dunia Debo?n in the center of the floor wasting perfectly good lines on them.
“Come on, you ungrateful bastards! I freed you from hell, I can send you back!”
A wheezer finally replied with a multipurpose, nuance-rich shriek as it ran forward to meet her, leading the final charge.
The foremost one was neatly dodged, a single clean slash through the throat; then followed numbers two and three, who shared a single Zorro cut, but Dunia noticed with surprise that even as the dead piled up, the high morale among the fiends did dwindle not but rather thrived, and soon the eyeless screaming things weren’t coming forth in ones or twos but bumrushing the barricades and climbing over bodies too, and Dunia’s strikes became much wider, splashing black gore right and left, tornadoing on a single foot, her saber ever bringing death, severing arms and legs and necks in whirling, dazzling pirouettes, and stabbing one only to get her pickax stuck inside its chest—she had to use him as a shield to bump her way out of the press, all this while slashing through more wheezers not expecting to be next, prancing impishly on their corpses toward higher ground ahead, leather boot heels squeezing brains out of the skulls of mangled wrecks—and wheezers welcome it and shriek in glee to join the slaughterfest—forcing Dunia to dive into a jungle of claws out to gut her alive and she’s fallen, yet still she just lobs off their legs and they fall to their knees and she rises again and keeps slashing away, and they keep coming roaring clambering piling up, smothering her, reaching her, scratching her, making her bleed, and she knows it, she feels it, lungs wolfing down oxygen, heart pumping at drill speed, muscles overdosing, brain ordering a dash to the left, stab to the right, kick to the stomach, elbow at four o’clock, comeback through the jugular, triple gut combo ahead bonus 10K for style, slice the neck, bash the head, nail the hand, twist inside, eviscerate decapitate mutilate amputate cut it hack it stab it kill it die motherfucker die motherfucker die die die die die die die—
—
The two-way radio on Nate’s belt was beeping.
“Al!” Nate shouted into the microphone, breath rasping its way through the vocal cords as they all sprinted along the tunnels below the lake. “Al, do you hear me?”
Andy paced down to take the radio from him, pushed him forward. “Cap! We’re underground and heading back to Sentinel Hill! Do you copy, over?”
The radio cracked, but Captain Al’s voice still pushed some words between the noise: “…Andy…and clear…on our way, over.”
“Cap, the isle is infested! Dunia Debo?n is there—she’s the necromancer! Repeat, don’t go to the house! Over!”
“…understood…worry…bringing a ship…soon, over.”
“Al, you’re breaking up! Did you just say you’re bringing a boat, over?”
The last message came loud and clear:
“No. I said a ship. Over and out.”
—
Dunia rolled down from the last mountain of corpses, sinking the pickax into something that gasped, and she found herself unable to take it back. She was beyond extenuation. Beyond ecstasy. Beyond death. But she kept moving.
The penultimate monster still clambered on top of her, missing four out of six limbs, digging its nails into her right arm, snapping its teeth at her turned cheek. She kicked it aside; it bounced back. She ordered her arm to swing the sword at him, and the arm came up empty-handed. The saber was lost.
The torn monster shrieked, tongue whipping her face, while her hand felt through the corpsescape for anything not viscous. She touched wood.