Chapter 15

I had dismounted the Ma Duce earlier, and for this particular dash or disaster sort of operation, I grudgingly agreed that our Dillon-clone mini-gun was really the right tool now for the job. We had dozens, maybe hundreds of company and battalion sized groups of shambling things in our path, and try as Barry might, he couldn’t hope to run them all over under its wheels. Dottie had wanted to give the barrels a spin anyway, and we’d conducted a brief dry-run earlier to familiarize her with the weapon, since I’d be unfortunately elsewhere, up here on the hill. Short - sweet - sharp bursts, I reminded her ... and watching her now from above as she first pressed the dual-triggers, I was delighted to see smooth and steady streams of 5mm death cutting down entire groups of the enemy ahead of us!

Now in the back seat of the Goat, Jack was cradling the Ma Duce, ready to either pass it upwards to Dottie, should she blow through the last of our meager 5ooo rounds of available 5mm ammo, or to train it out either open passenger window, to deal with anything might break through our flank cavalry screens.

At the front of our right flank, the side marginally nearest the pyramid, Gerta was flying, glowing wand in hand, at the head of her prince’s column of armored mounted knights. They were still quite tired, but they’d enjoyed enough short rests in the last few hours to find strength in both their sword arms and their mounts. Each had one of our factory-crated H&K417’s strapped to their back, the whimper .556 NATO version of my favorite assault rifle. Sure, they had much less stopping power, but this smaller ammo allowed the knights to carry a double-loadout of magazines in their saddle packs. Our lighting assault was quite likely to turn into a prolonged siege, once we reached that pyramid and needed to park.

Leading our left flank was Jasmine, our next most competent flyer. There were no trees or even large rocks to hit anywhere near here! Her flight skills didn’t approach the grace that Gerta already exhibited, but in a more or less straight line, she was doing fine. Just below her were the centaurs, riding like the wind and howling the ancient battle cries of their race. In their hands, they swung their massive two-handed swords that could cleave into half anyone or anything in their path and none of the monsters that crossed their charge could hold against their fury.

Above, slowly catching up from behind, was Trinity and myself. I let her take low-center point, flying rather raggedly just above the Goat’s towed trailer, wand out in hand. Her job at this point was to stay out of trouble and help her mother deal with anything colossally big that the roaring mini-gun couldn’t handle.

Further a bit back and at least ten yards higher, I was attempting to handle ceiling patrol. I didn’t see anything flying to engage us, and that was a huge relief! My job was to avoid getting caught up in any temporary tactical situations and instead keep my eyes scanning further outwards, especially towards the slowly growing pyramid before us. I still couldn’t fly worth shit and I could feel Gerta glaring at me, as if I were embarrassing the team by my incompetence. Mentally, I told her to fuck herself with long, sharp, rusty gardening tool. I was fluttering about wildly side to side like an expertly thrown knuckle-ball, but I was keeping pace and I could keep my eyes on the job.

The Goat kept to the fastest pace that our mounted knights and centaurs could match and Barry didn’t stop or slow down for anything. Our cavalry screens somehow managed to keep to their marks, cutting down with their magically sharp swords everything in their paths. But then, I noticed a moderately impressive roadblock about a hundred yards ahead of us, and we were closing fast! With a thought, I replaced my assault rifle with the rocket launcher, the weapons instantly changing in my hands. I was up high enough to have a good clear field of vision ... and of fire, and I tried to hold my flight steady enough to keep the laser target-pointer on target. Hell ... those damn things were way too fucking big to miss!

My first rocket round was incendiary, targeting right at the front-centermost creature. Something like a shaggy zombie mastodon that mounted a dozen or so large tusks, quite like deer horns, twice the size of any elephant. The second round was HE, and it was downrange and on-target before the first round had detonated. Now that definitely got their attention. Unfortunately, being apparently already dead and having nothing for living brains inside their car-sized skulls, they didn’t flee or scatter, like I had hoped. They burned, their rotting old fur quite went up like a torch, but they were far too dense to care and the beasts just stood there right in our pathway.

I frantically loaded and fired off alternate rounds of HE, incendiary and also frag, and frankly I couldn’t see much difference in the net results of any of the scattered impacts across their standing formation. Some of their tree-size legs had blown off nicely and most of them were now quite in flame, but still ... they remained in the fucking way! Nope, not even a Barrett was going to fix this problem. I mentally shrugged with exasperation to my three Fae ladies on point and ceased fire, so that they could at least be able to see well enough to act without explosions going off in front of their faces. We were at most, forty yards away from crashing into them and I didn’t think that Barry wanted to screw up our formation by swerving hard to either side to avoid them. Besides, there looked like another herd of the damned things still up ahead!

Wands started to blast away, mostly with concussive force energies that at close range did satisfactorily push or blast the blazing giant zombies somewhat out of our direct path, enough for the Goat to force a passage without crashing into any of them. Our cavalry screens swung wide around them, to the left and the right, bypassing the obstruction, and rejoined us in formation half way to our destination. We had a bit less than an hour left of daylight, but I think we were indeed going to arrive there just in the nick of time.

I didn’t even try to blast away any of the larger groups of foes with my launcher. With reluctance, I also drew out my wand and tried to make myself useful, blasting like a mid-range mortar or close-support artillery barrage to help clear out the path in front us. With a little practice, I could duplicate the arced projectile effect of the spell, so when it landed there was a nice circular explosive effect and flung bodies and bits of assorted things out everywhere in a ten yard radius. I think was starting to get the hang of my wand and how to make it work to my will. Even my flying was starting to improve, well ... a little anyway.

We sliced and diced, blasted and battered, rammed and crashed, and carved and burned our path ever closer to the great pyramid. A vast army of skeletal undead arose from the sands and staggered towards us, but they were only dried dead bone, and we rode straight through them. A few centaurs received their first wounds here, along with a single armored knight hit in an unlucky place with a spear, but they each kept to the pace and did not fall behind. The pyramid was so close now that I had to keep raising up my head to look at it as it began to tower over us.

Right at the base of the pyramid, maybe about 500 yards up ahead of us now, I began to see flashes and then felt bullets whizzing by me. These were the mercenaries!

Then, one of the bastards shot me ... which I didn’t in the least bit appreciate! The mundane lead bullet couldn’t penetrate my Fae skin, but it still stung like crazy where it had smacked into my hip. I didn’t want to feel that again anytime soon, so it was rocket launcher time again, mostly frag rounds.

“For what they are about to receive, let them be grateful!” I muttered, loading and firing as fast as I could while hovering now in place.

The poor band of a dozen or so mundane mercenaries didn’t have a clue what they were now up against and in less than ten seconds the entire area around their fortified base camp of carefully stacked sandbags and machinegun emplacements exploded with sound, light and fury as three fairy wands, a 5mm mini-gun and a rocket launcher all unloaded their blessings upon them. Sandbags, hands, heads, boots and assorted weapons exploded upwards in a bright Technicolor cascade of vaporized blood miasma and the Fae looked upon the carnage with approval and pronounced it to be good.

Another huge army, mostly of shuffling zombies in old tattered military uniforms, arose out from the sands and awaited us before the great steps of the pyramid, blocking our path. Despite the blasts of our four combined wands, that showered bits of zombie parts across the entire desert for miles, more always staggered forward or arose from the sands right at our very feet. The Goat didn’t care, and it plowed inexhaustibly through their masses, but our cavalry was now in trouble. They were slowed at first as they hacked and slashed their way forward, but the masses of the undead crowded ever tighter towards them and finally the two flanks of our mounted forces had to condense together into a tight and nearly stationary defensive circle as they tried to hack free of the zombie nightmare. We flew in every closer, tighter circles above our brave men and centaurs and our wands burned with non-stop magical energies as we tried, largely in vain to clean some sort of pathway for them out to relative safety. Small wounds were starting to become mortal ones, and slowly but steadily men and centaurs fell to the surprisingly bloodless sands and were overwhelmed, dying where they fell.

The horde of undead was massive, seemingly endless, and first a quarter of our host had fallen, then a third, and at last a full half of our number was down. The odds for the rest, the prince and his remaining guard, was grim. We just couldn’t kill them fast enough! Desperate times and desperate measures ... never a good thing!

The Goat had now reached the first steps of the pyramid and parked, tight against the stone. Dottie was obliterating entire hordes of the undead with every sweep of her mini-gun, but her bursts were starting to become more precisely measured, slower and even more accurate. I could feel her panic growing in our heart-line. She was almost out of 5mm ammo! Jack had the M2 hanging outside the left passenger window and was steadily blazing way with his first case of .50mm ammo. A single round was pretty much enough to rip apart most zombies, so he too kept his bursts short precise and sweeping in motion. He was keeping that next encroaching army of undead off of the Goat and our wounded cavalry, perhaps even long enough for Barry to make it those long, long, high steeps ... hundreds of them, up to the top to rescue the princesses.

Well ... one of us needed to survive long enough to accomplish that or this whole trip will have been to waste! Suddenly, I then had an idea. Desperate times ... yeah.

“Dottie!” I mentally screamed through my heart-link with her, “We’re fucking Fae, Goddess damn it! We’re supposed to be one-girl armies, smiting the ungodly. One angry fairy bitch, one riot, sort of deal! Think! Lydia gave Barry, once before when we were here, all sorts of powers and unlimited fucking ammo! Do that ... turn your will to those last few miserable rounds of 5mm and make them grow! Hell, turn them all into fucking 10mm chaingun fodder instead ... and upgrade the Dillon too! Make it be what you need it to be! Now get blasting because you’re got incoming!”

I didn’t look to see or even listen if Dottie had managed that transformation. I didn’t have the time ... my friends were dying all around me! I focused my will on the smaller group of our cavalry, the centaurs, and I focused my will to seize them all, grasp them in mind ... and I teleported them, almost flinging them through a vacuum in the air, to arrive next to the Goat. Then I did the same for our slightly greater remaining force of knights and the prince.

Already exhausted, the four of us lone fairies flew off at top speed to join them at the base of the pyramid, but not before I ground-zero blasted massive explosive chunks of most of our old foes into bits. With our friendlies fighting earlier right at our feet, I couldn’t have used such excessive point-blank force. Now, just watching a thousand zombies exploding into tiny bits made me feel a bit better.

The expected siege at the base of the pyramid had now begun, but at least there was one limited field of approach that the endless hordes of undead could take to storm our now fortified position. We positioned the six remaining centaurs behind the Goat, right up against the steps of the pyramid so that their meagre numbers could deal with the relatively few monsters and creatures now stumbling down its steps towards us. Here and with their great swords in hand, they could hold those steps and still attend to the binding of their many flowing wounds.

The knights were in slightly better shape, but their horses were done for. Torn and bleeding, they were all at the end of their strength, too weak even stand. They helped the wounded horses to lay down in the sand beside the Goat, behind and to the side, to the best cover and protection we could provide them. The remaining eight men then climbed on top of the Goat’s towed trailer, the strong canvas and plywood roof taking the weight only barely. Then they laid down into prone firing positions with their assault rifles, with which they had received limited, but hopefully sufficient training. With a smile, I touched each of their guns, willing that the magazines remain ever full, with endless ammunition.

“Go full retard, boys!” I laughed as I waved my wand for the last weapon blessing. “Rock and roll ... flick those selector switches over to full-auto and push down those triggers and don’t let up!” They didn’t. Dottie’s mini-gun was now a more robust and lethal 10mm chaingun of the sort famous for obliterating entire battlefields when mounted upon attack helicopters and Spectre gunships. Jack’s Ma Duce now purred constantly, firing an endless stream of death as well, even as it gun barrel burned a bright cherry red from the heat. Magically unprotected, the gun would have jammed long before now ... but like us, it now had the will to fight and win! Both the .50 and 10mm turned the endless hordes swarming to reach us to chum, each round blasting through their first target and penetrating to strike several more targets behind, but many more kept always coming towards us.

Worse, a rather large group of zombies with bright rotting clothing kept somehow picking themselves up and shambling just another step forward, no matter how many big heavy bullet rounds struck them. They had long hair, sandals, love beads and an overload of tie-dye, and big protest signs like ‘Love thy Dead Neighbor, Man!’, ‘Fight the Living Establishment’, “Peace – Love – Starbucks’ or ‘Occupy the Magic Kingdom’. Barry once tried to explain the 1960’s in mundania to me and it sounded like a nightmare!

The unholy howling of the mob as it moaned for our blood (and probably brains) did remind me though of our honeymoon in Australia. Australians are all savages who drink blood from the arteries of pallid nuns kept indoors and beaten with reeds to keep their flesh supple. In their spare time they (the Aussies, not the nuns) devote countless hours to the worship and glorification of a hybrid clone of Kim Jung-il, Hitler and Carrot Top, whose man-breasts spew forth the nectar that is Fosters Extra-Bitter. Those who cannot assist in the genetic engineering of the creature show it their fealty by flinging boogers at the wall of its temple and conducting the blood sacrifice of infants, or a visiting Kiwi from New Zealand.

Barry now stood upon one of the lower steps of the pyramid, ready to assault the top with his Grendel in his hands and the prince dashed over to join him. Smiling, I flew down to hover next to them, and with a touch on Barry’s arm I bid myself to locate the traces of Lydia’s old bodily protection enchantment, and I bid it to restore itself to full working order. With a quick burning of our flesh, where my fingers touched his arm, it was restored and Barry grinned with pleasure, bid me to do the same with first his old .45 pistol and Ka-Bar knife, both of which had once enjoyed substantial enchantments too! In a flash, they were renewed as well and with just a blown kiss in the air, Barry began running up those great stone steps one at a time. His vigor, quickness and even energy should have been also restored by the spell, but it was a long, long way up those steps! I bade the prince to wait for a moment and I gave him a similar but weaker, more temporary protection enchantment. I was getting exhausted already, being very new to working magic and I needed to keep something of myself in reserve for later problems.

The prince valiantly dashed his way up the steps and I slowly started to fly again behind them both, wand in hand. I was ready to provide immediate close support backup for my hubbie and for the first time in days I felt like everything was now going just the way we wanted it! Gerta rocketed off after me and she soon soared past us to clear the pathway ahead and upwards. She had turned her knightly sword into an angelic flaming sword of mass destruction, and with wide sweeps of her burning blade she largely entirely destroyed several dozens of what looked like grey uniformed Civil War era Confederate soldiers.

Just below us, I could hear new different sounds of gunfire. The dismounted knights were indeed rocking away, blasting with their assault rifles, and above them, hovering just over the Goat and the trailer, Miranda and Trinity were also going gun-wild, each toting a pair of Uzi’s that endlessly spit a reign of fire across the battlefield. Then finding the knock-down powers of the 9mm slugs rather insufficient, the quartet of submachine guns turned instead to a pair of vintage German MG42 machineguns firing unceasingly at the full barrel melting rate of 1200 rounds per minute!

This impossible heavy field of sustained firepower kept the Goat’s perimeter finally secure at last and allowed Dottie and the girls to mentally rest, to restore their magic willpower for later needs. For the moment, pure old-school guns and endless ammo was sufficient for their needs.

Several companies of the grey-clad troops remained above us on the steps, and they had completely functional muskets and a swarm of ‘Minnies’ starting hitting us. I’d restored Barry’s protections in just the nick of time! The balls, probably .54 or even bigger, hurt like a bitch when they punched us, but they couldn’t penetrate or really hurt us significantly, not even our fairy gossamer wings!

Gerta started cutting this lot down with her flaming sword and I helped, by just blasting away with simple explosive force at the ones further ahead. Interestingly, the well-uniformed men at the back of their force, their officers, seemed disturbingly bullet and even flame resistant. Even headshots would just knock them down, but in moment they’d turn to their feet.

Their leader, a grey-bearded gentleman with a kindly sort of face, for a zombie, and ported a large button on his immaculately tailored jacket saying ‘Undead Lives Matter’. This singular foe traded and matched sword blows with Gertie for nearly a full minute without result, much to her dismay! In exasperation she left this more complicated challenge to Jack, while she dealt more suitable foes yet further ahead.

“The Zombie South will rise again, sirrah, and again, and again, again!” The smiling General said as Barry brutally butt-struck the valiant zombie commander to ground with the butt-end of his rifle and he too surged onwards up the seemingly endless steps, unwilling to waste any more time trapped down here on the steps. Zombie Robert E. Lee rose again and he gave me a slight smile as he carefully adjusted the brim of his hat and politely offered me a pamphlet, the Protocols of the Elders of Virginia.