Free The Sword of Michael - eARC by Marcus Wynne

the sound of the fight, not away. He was already bounding up the stairs while I was still shaking off my journey trance. I grabbed a handy long-gun, a cut-down Remington 870 stoked with Dillon’s hand-loaded buckshot, and chased him up the stairs. He was at the front window, peeking cautiously through the curtain gap.
    “Four,” he whispered. “Stacked up. Like cops…”
    The heavy tread of boots at the doorway and then, without pause, the crash of a kick against the door.
    Somebody’s foot was going to hurt.
    If they were human, that is. Dillon had steel fire doors mounted in reinforced frames front, back and side. It would take more than a few undead kicking those doors to get inside.
    “We’ll go out the side,” Dillon said. “We’ll flank ’em.”
    “Is that a real term? Flank ’em?”
    Dillon’s grin got even more feral, if that was possible. “Find ’em, fix ’em, flank ’em, finish ’em.”
    “Um, okay.”
    I followed him through the front room and the kitchen, where he quick peeked out the window, and then went out the side door.
    “Pull it locked, Marius,” he said.
    I did. The heavy latches fell into place. So no retreat through this door.
    We edged wide around the corner of the house. Dillon had his AK up, I had my shotgun ready, every other step I looked back to make sure no one came up behind us.
    In front one man in plain clothes kicked again and again at the front door. The three behind him, also in plain clothes, held pistols to cover the front windows. Plain clothes, acting like cops…but none of them uttered a word.
    The last man in the stack saw us. He raised his pistol and started shooting—no warning, no announcement—in our direction.
    It was his last action.
    Because all of a sudden it got like Quentin Tarantino meets John Woo.
    Gunfights at close range get violent very suddenly. It’s often over before you know it, too fast for conscious recall, or else it’s one of those that hang in front of you in slow motion.
    This was a slow motion event.
    I saw the ejected casings hanging in the air above the pistol from the guy shooting at us. He was focused and intense as he concentrated on his sights (not a good sign since zombies don’t have the fine muscle coordination necessary to shoot well with a handgun); I watched Dillon’s leather jacket crinkle (one of those weird details you remember after a fight) as he shifted his weapon mount and fired POW POW POW three fast shots from the AK and hit that first shooter, whose look of sudden surprise and his arms out flung reminded me of that picture from the Spanish Civil War. It was time for me to get in the fight, so I let fly with the 870 and Dillon’s custom buckshot (a .45 caliber ball on top with 00 buck beneath) and watched the door-kicker spray red and stagger back off the steps before he fell out of the line of fire.
    Dillon aggressed on them, a steady cadence of aimed fire, crouched over his rifle and walking like Groucho Marx in an experienced roll of heel and toe, me to his right, BOOM BOOM BOOM of my shotgun before it ran dry and then I cleared my Glock and continued shooting…
    Silence, then.
    Everyone was down except for us.
    The shooting part was done.
    But the fight wasn’t over.
    The ground shook. The grass of Dillon’s lawn lifted and pulled itself into a larger than man-sized form, a man made out of the lawn.
    I was still disoriented from my journey and the loud shots ringing in my unprotected ears. And I still couldn’t help but think, The Lawnmower Man?
    Dillon watched his lawn rearrange itself into a huge green opponent. Two glaring red eyes rimmed in black appeared in the head.
    “I think it’s your turn to lead,” he said.
    The entity turned towards me, and I felt anger rising like a red tide within me.
    What I do both is and isn’t what is thought of as “magic.” Magic involves combining your intention and emotional content in partnership with entities and powers in the Other Realms to get specific