Chapter 40: Pyromania

Marci and I were in the altar room, piling up broken pieces in a hotel cart to drop off the balcony when I picked up one of the upside-down candles. I dropped the rest of my load on the ground, surprised, brought it over to her. “Hey, look at this. The top, or bottom, or whatever, the place where the wick is, has been sheared off.” I passed her the now much shorter candle.

She set her burnables into the cart, then joined me to examine it. Jagged where we’d broken it in half, but severed neatly under where the wick had formerly been. “It looks like someone cut the top off. Yeah, I think someone took maybe a third of that candle. I wonder.”

“Why would anyone do that? The only reason I can think of is if they want to light these candles. But they’re not exactly good at producing light.”

“They’re likely only for performing necromantic rituals. Either one of us took the tops off or there’s another necromancer around here.”

“I’m guessing Bentley took it. He suggested restarting the altars to get the zombies back up to fight the ants.”

“Did he learn how to build these,” she gestured around the room, “things? We don’t even know if restarting the altars would give us control over the zombies. They might just continue on their last orders and attack us.”

“It doesn’t matter. We aren’t doing that. Come on, let’s toss this stuff over the side. I’ll ask Bent about it later.” I picked up my load piece by piece quickly, trying to focus on doing so and not being annoyed at our wizard.

“Maybe he’s just hypothesis testing?”

“Maybe.”

***

When we got to the room directly overtop the entrance, which was one of the lesser necromancer’s, and had no balcony, Fred and Eve were forcing a dresser with a giant mirror out the window. The mirror, though, had other ideas and had caught on the wall above the window.

“Push!” yelled Fred.

They both strained against the strength of the wooden posts supporting and attaching the silver mirror to the dresser.

I said, “Maybe it’d be better if you guys took the mirror off first?”

Holding the back end of the dresser, Ave looked over at me and winked, “Nah, decidedly not.”

Resting the dresser on the windowsill, Fred ran back to join her at the end. “One more time! Ready? Now!” Both their muscles bulged, a great cracking sound filled the air, the supports for the mirror cracked, then bent forward, pieces of the wall came crumbling down, and the two heaved the dresser and everything out the window. They both ran over to look, pulling flashlights out of their pockets and pointing them down.

Marci and I couldn’t help ourselves and we joined them just as it all crashed into a pile, the sound of breaking glass almost lost under the boom of the crushed wood being torn apart. We then dropped our pieces of broken altar and evil candles down.

From here, the pile of wrecked furniture and garbage looked small, but it had to be fairly large, given that it had spread out at least a car length. “How much furniture have you tossed down there?”

“Everything from this room except the bed. That was the dresser from the other room, Boss,” said Fred.

Marci brushed her hair back, asking, “What about the clothes? We’ve all been wearing the same clothes for a while now and I’m not above pilfering theirs.”

Fred looked at Ave, “Uh . . .”

Ave looked over, saying, “We were just about to start on the library.”

“The library?” Marci looked aghast.

“Who wants to read evil books?”

“We don’t know that they’re all necromancy. We should probably try to preserve what’s left of this world’s cultural history, but I guess we don’t have the time to sort them,” I said.

“So much for our fire sale,” said Ave, shrugging. “Maybe just the larger books?”

Marci rolled her eyes, then looked outside the window, “Will the alcohol be enough to get it lit from up here? I’m worried the flames will go out during the drop.”

“If none of them work, maybe we can toss a torch or something down,” I said.

“Boss, we found a couple of lanterns, too. They’ve got some kind of oil in them. That’ll carry the flame down if the Molotov cocktails don’t.”

“That’s great, Fred. I wonder, though. We might need oil lanterns after our flashlights run out of power.”

Marci shook her head, “That won’t be for a long, long while. The batteries in these would outlast us if we ran out of food.”

“That’s not as comforting as you think.”

Bentley’s voice rang out from the entrance of the now mostly empty room, “Light isn’t a problem. One of the easier spells I’m learning is a light spell. As in, it produces light. So, we’re fine when and if the power runs out in our flashlights.”

He was carrying three full bottles of spirits in each hand, and Dylan had brought four in each. Dylan set his down near us, saying, “These are the bottom shelf ones, Fred.” Opening the caps, he began stuffing rags into each of them. After, he passed me an unlabeled bottle with a clear label, “Here.”

“What’s in this one?”

“Not really sure. I think it’s moonshine. Or some other alcohol, perhaps for cleaning. It smells pretty harsh.”

“No!” Fred took it out of my hands, “Moonshine might be the best stuff!” Pulling the cloth out, he took a sip. “Oh. Uh.” He coughed into a fist. “Nope. Never mind.” Fred stuffed the cloth back in and picked up one of the other bottles, holding it up to look at the label. “I’m going to need something to clean out my mouth.”

Ave said, “That was probably evil moonshine. The kind used to give the undead their happy dispositions.”

“On that note,” said Marci, “I bet they have all kinds of burnable liquids in their laboratory. Maybe we should have started there if Fred wants to save this stuff.”

“Trust me, I don’t want to save that stuff.”

“Yeah, no thank you. I don’t really want to go back into the lab,” I said. “That place was all kinds of wrong.”

“And maybe some tools I could use,” she continued. “You know, for first aid. Or any unlicensed surgeries I need to perform.”

Imagining her with a bone saw and a twisted grin, I gave her a look, “You really want to head back to the labs? I don’t think we have the time.”

Marci just smiled back.

“Here,” said Bent, passing me a rag-stuffed bottle for each hand. He then sprouted a flame atop his forefinger, touching it to the rags, blue flame dancing across the folds immediately.

I leaned out the window and threw the bottles at the debris mound below.

“Boss,” said Ave, leaning over the side. She released one bottle, then the other, “You can just drop them.”

“Right.”

Soon, the bottom shelf was well represented down below, and a little fire was spreading. Little from up here, that is. Then Fred dropped the oil lanterns on the pile and the fire grew yellower and higher.

“Yeah,” Marci said, “they’re coming. Look over there,” she pointed off to the left. “Little ones first. They’re staring at the fire. Others are gathering dirt up, some running away. Huh. I think the ones that ran are going to get reinforcements. Yeah, River, we don’t have a lot of time before they organize to contain that fire. These guys move quickly.”

“Alright, get your gear, check your weapons, let’s head out. To the staff stairwell first.”

After gearing up, readying our weapons, submachine in hand, pistol in the holster, double checking one more time that the fire was burning – it was, very high, with lots and lots of little ants throwing dirt on it – and tossing a couple dozen more bottles of alcohol down for good measure, we stood at the double doors.

“Remember,” I said in a low voice, “they have an enormous hearing advantage. And probably can smell better than we can. Hand signals from here on out, whispers if we need to.”

Everyone nodded and it was through the double doors, flashlight beams ahead, down the stairs.

Ave stopped suddenly, holding her hand up. We all stopped behind her. Ave’s beam illuminated one of the little wedge-headed ant people standing by the elevator doors. It reached up a hand, claws uncurling, and rapped on the door hard. Then, it placed its head against the doors.

I listened but couldn’t hear anything. Just breathing from my teammates. That worried me, but it hadn’t reacted to us yet.

Fred lifted his gun and took a bead on the little guy.

Holding my hand up, I shook it to pause him. If we shot out now, they’d probably hear it. We didn’t know if this one had friends hanging outside of our light.

The little creature looked eerily like a tiny adult human. It seemed to tilt its head in our direction, maybe listening for us. It didn’t have eyes, so I couldn’t tell where its attention was directed. Its head turned back to the doors, and it rapped again loudly, standing still. After a few moments, it squirted a little urine on the door and headed for the stairs going down. Ave kept her flashlight on it until it moved down and out of sight.

I pointed in the direction of the staff stairwell, opposite to the way it went, and we headed over there.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it was doing. When they approached the hotel, they knocked, just like this one. Then scraped. No, a little one peed on the door first. Then, a big one had come to scrape them. This one knocked much more loudly, though, and didn’t try to enter. The urine was clearly a chemical signature, but without a machine to analyze it, we couldn’t decode what it meant.

But it worried me.

We got to the door to the stairs. Fred pointed at the lock. Right. Letting my submachine gun rest on its straps, I dug around for the keys as quietly as I could, found them, and opened the door with the metal sounds of keys sliding into it, the click of the lock opening, scraping of the door moving. I tried not to wince at all this noise, hoping they couldn’t hear us, hoping the stairwell was empty.