Necroepilogos

Cantrelle accepted that God was speaking to her once again, after decades of unbroken silence. Divine messages were written upon the world in the language of pattern and sign — even here, after the end of all life, deep in the Kingdom of Death.

She didn’t give a shit. God could go fuck himself.

Yola was missing; Yola had advance warning.

Yola was a traitor.

“Eyes on the aircraft! Eyes on that fucking aircraft! That one, it’s coming around for us again! Phol, get that shoulder-mount locked on, scare it off!”

“Serpents in the sky, servants of a greater power—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Get your shit together!”

“—don’t think we can scare them, don’t think they scare at all—”

“It’s loaded with gravitics, in the core—”

“They all have fucking gravitics! Ignore it! Spook it before—”

“Run! Just run! Out the back! Fucking run!”

The air was filled with the screams and shouts of an uncontrolled rout. Boots thumped against blood-slick concrete, ankle-deep in half-eaten corpses; bodies slammed into walls and smashed through doors, shoved aside or dragged clear or thrown to the ground. Stray gunshots whipped and cracked, finding no targets; automatic weapons opened up and then sputtered out, swatted to silence by gravity itself. Stragglers cried out for help. Few stopped to assist the fallen.

The Sisterhood was breaking around Cantrelle’s skull.

“Argh! Aaaa! My ears, ahhh— comms are— f-f-fuck—”

“—look at my eyes! Look at me! Get— get up! Get up!”

“Yank her comms implant, cut it out if you have to. Knife, now! Get it out of her throat. Nobody access wide-band comms, it’s frying our heads—”

“Fuck the comms! Fucking run! Phone’s gone, phone’s gone! Shoot her, leave her!”

“I’ll shoot you first you rancid cunt! One finger on her and I’ll eat your heart raw!”

“—that thing in the air is flooding every frequency with bullshit. No comms! Do not leave visual range or you will be left behind!”

“Hahaha! ‘Visual’? We’re gone, bitch!”

Cantrelle’s peripheral vision throbbed black and red; the gravity-wave pulse had damaged her bionic eyes. She was on her hands and knees, struggling to stand up; frothy crimson bile hung from her lips. A puddle of vomit lay on the floor before her. Blood and gore was soaking through the bandages which encased her hands, seeping into her wounds with sharp, cold pain. The air stank of sick and shit and breached intestines.

“It’s God. It’s God, descended from the heavens at last, to scour us clean of our sins. Oh, God, we’ve sinned so much, so much, too much to wash off—”

“-you, maybe, you sick rat. Move!”

“It’s not God you fucking moron. God is dead. We killed him!”

“Airship. It’s an airship. Use your eyes.”

“I can’t see! I’m— bleeding— no— it’s too cold. Pholet, where—”

All organisation and coherency was lost; resources were being abandoned; Sisters were falling upon each other.

“Bag the meat! Get on that now! Bag the meat, get everything we can!”

“—fuck you, it’s mine! This one is mine—”

“Bitch, get off! I’ll fucking shoot you first!”

Bang! Bang!

“—gurrlk—”

Bang!

“Urgh, I still feel sick, I can feel that thing up there clawing at the air. Every time it moves I wanna hurl.”

“That’s gravitics. Get used to it. Run! Go!”

Cantrelle’s eyes recovered, though the edge of her vision was grey and flickering. She raised her gaze from the filthy floor, then staggered to her feet, boots slipping in the blood and gore. The slowest and most optimistic of the shattering Sisterhood were fleeing all around her, sprinting for the doors, shouting and screaming and shoving.

One of the ball-shaped rotary craft was swooping toward the entrance of the loading dock, unfurling wings of gravitic power.

Far behind the aircraft — past the jagged hillside of bone-white mech lying prone in the grey mud, beyond the skyscrapers on the opposite side of the impact crater — a golden diamond hung in the sky, bleeding toxic light into the atmosphere.

Lashed by lightning, shining with regal brilliance, giant beyond imagining. The golden titan boiled with waves of pressure which rolled over Cantrelle’s exposed face and throbbed deep inside her bite wounds.

A sign from God.

Cantrelle grit her teeth. She didn’t care.

Yola was missing; Yola was a traitor.

Six hours earlier the Sisterhood of the Skull had finally quit the weakness-inducing safety of their temporary fortress, inside the skyscraper on the opposite side of the impact crater. Yola had done everything Cantrelle had come to expect of her: she had roused the girls with a short speech, showing nothing but confidence and authority; she had focused her words on the need to reassert the Sisterhood’s self-evident primacy; she had highlighted the insult of the breakout, and decreed it would not go unpunished; she had declared her intention to exert the Sisterhood’s will upon the degenerates who had gathered to usurp the Sisterhood’s rightful prize — the mech lying prone in the middle of the crater. She would sweep them away with violence and add their meat to the Sisterhood’s bodies.

Yola’s obsession with the degenerate ‘superhuman’ — Elpida — appeared to have passed; perhaps she was suppressing it, but Cantrelle did not care. As long as Yola’s madness did not taint the Sisterhood’s purity of purpose.

As usual the Sisters made no attempt to remove the grinning skulls they had daubed on the outer walls of the skyscraper — the sign of their passing would remain until the city itself scrubbed away the blood and ink. Cantrelle approved of this habit; the skull was a reminder to others that there was only one possible allegiance in the Kingdom of Death.

Yola had led the Sisters away from the impact crater, ostensibly to avoid the sucking grey mud churned up by the night’s rain; Cantrelle had briefly worried that Yola was breaking her word. Was she leading the Sisterhood beyond the graveworm line, in doomed pursuit of her superhuman fixation? Had Cantrelle finally become unable to read Yola’s true intentions? Should she have killed Yola when she’d had the chance, or agreed to betray her to Elpida’s request?

No, not that, not ever.

Cantrelle had told nobody about the secret radio contact from Elpida. She told herself that such concerns would only risk the return of Yola’s languid obsession.

Alone with Yola, Cantrelle could save the Sisterhood with one bullet and a bit of quick thinking, but out in the rotting streets with the Sisters in motion, Cantrelle would have no choice but to follow Yola to certain doom.

But Yola had turned the group away from the graveworm line.

They had skirted the outer edge of the tangled ruins at the crater’s top end. Cantrelle had breathed a sigh of private relief, and stuck close to her prophet’s side.

Yola had not needed to issue orders — the Sisters had slipped back into their natural doctrine: small groups advancing without relying on each other, leapfrogging between scraps of cover, falling into loose competition over who could move faster, who could bag opportunistic kills, and who could surprise or taunt or interrupt other groups. Three fights had broken out — a small number compared to usual. Only one of those three required intervention: Hafsatu had attempted to shoot Ida in the ankle, in a disagreement over who got to stick closest to Tiri. The fight had turned into a fists-and-feet scuffle with screaming and shouting and some teeth knocked out with a brick. Yola had stepped in with but a word and the Sisters had disengaged.

Her authority had returned. Cantrelle approved, purring with inner satisfaction. All was right within the Kingdom of Death.

The Sisterhood spent five hours slicing their way through the ruins, limbering up muscles and stretching trigger fingers, flexing blood-lust and building an appetite for more. They caught and killed four lone revenants on the journey; the meat went to the killers, with choice cuts for the leadership.

When they reached the opposite side of the crater they spent forty five minutes setting up an assault on the first inhabited building they found: a long, low, metal structure between the skyscrapers, an ancient industrial plant coated with rust. A small group of zombie filth was huddled within — nobodies, without even a standard or symbol to their name. Too easy, hardly like overcoming a determined knot of Wreckers and Murderers.

But the Sisterhood needed the morale boost. Confidence was yet thin. Yola ordered; Cantrelle approved.

On Yola’s signal they hit the prey all at once. They poured through doorways and windows into some kind of ancient loading dock, all concrete platforms and faded markings on the ground. They avoided the main entrance — a gaping aperture which faced the crater and the crippled mech. Kuro had gone in first, bowling through the defenders and scattering them across cold concrete.

The fight was over in less than five minutes. None survived. No Sisters even wounded. Easy prey.

Cantrelle still hurt all over from the wounds she had sustained against Elpida and Amina. Her voice was still a scratchy strangled mess. She could not hold or fire a gun properly, not even the low-powered PDW she carried beneath her coat, not with her hands still wrapped in bandages. She still felt the insult of the bite wounds on her face and neck — especially the bite wound which neatly bisected the skull tattoo on her cheek. She had not decided what to do about that. She dared not remove the bandage; the sign would be taken as an ill omen, at best. She wanted to rip away the ruined tattoo and re-apply the black skull on her other cheek, so that her faith would remain unbroken. But her fingers had faltered at the symbolism of pulling the broken skull off her flesh.

She had told herself there was no symbolism. This was not a sign. She had not read signs since true life. God did not speak in the Kingdom of Death.

Relief was better than any painkiller. Yola had located her senses and bound the Sisterhood to her leadership once again, feeding them on victory and blood, on raw meat and quivering brains. After the humiliating ‘defeat’ by the so-called ‘superhuman’ and her degenerate friends, everyone needed the reminder: the brides of death would not be denied, for they are the incarnation of the world to come.

The Sisters had begun to feast on the dead while setting up a perimeter. Everyone was hungry, so Yola allowed a little laxity.

Cantrelle had been tearing off a piece of meat for herself, a nice chunk of fatty thigh from one of the dead girls, glistening and wet in the grip of her tentacle-pincers. She had shoved a quivering gobbet into her mouth, then turned toward where Yola had stood a moment ago, toward the back of the loading dock.

But Yola was gone, without a word or a whisper, without standing orders. She hadn’t even taken her fuck-toy with her — Kuro was right there, opening the face-plate of her armour to shove handfuls of meat into her maw.

The double doors at the rear of the loading dock had been swinging shut; Cantrelle was the only one to see that. Nobody else had noticed Yola leave.

Cantrelle had opened a line to Yola across the comms network. She had been about to ask what the hell Yola was doing.

Half a second later God’s Sign had appeared in the sky, heralded by a pressure-wave of gravitic power.

The Sisters had voided their guts amid the ruins of their conquest, slipping and sliding on the gore that fell from their hands. Cantrelle had felt the jelly inside her eyeballs shake and the contents of her stomach slam up through her throat. She had fallen to her hands and knees, retching, dizzy, blacking out. The comms network had gone down, filled with the screaming voices of every soul in hell. Clouds of flies had poured from the Golden Sign in the sky — ball-shaped rotor-craft, swarming over the impact crater, falling upon the corpse of the mech like carrion eaters upon rotten meat.

Cantrelle was back on her feet now. The Sisterhood was broken and fleeing. Cantrelle drooled bloody bile from her lips and stared up into the soot-black sky through a veil of tears. God’s Messenger glowed with a toxic gold she had not seen since true life, boiling with a mass of gravitic power she could dimly see through her flickering, glitching augmetic eyes.

A sign from God. A sign that God was not yet dead. The divine was still at work in the world.

Cantrelle had been eight years old when she’d first successfully deciphered the messages from God.

Her older brothers had ambushed a patrol of King’s Men who had wandered too deeply into the forests; the soldiers had died swiftly, cut down by the bullets of stolen rifles, distracted by the baying of hounds at their heels, and crushed beneath dead-fall traps on the single-file false trail. Cantrelle’s father and the other adults were mostly interested in the guns the King’s Men had carried, in the computers and machines in their pockets, in the strange liquid armour the leader had worn. The adults also discussed when the patrol might be missed, when more soldiers with better guns might visit the forest, or when Toulouse might dispatch more than scouting parties to enforce the peace.

They had piled the corpses upon the flat stone foundations of God’s House, in hopes of a sign, but the village had not boasted of a seer in generations. The adults had gathered all the children under thirteen and paraded them before the corpses, but no insight had struck, only tears and whimpers. Then a wild dog had gotten to the corpses and dragged out the entrails of one soldier. That was taken as a very bad sign. The village had prepared to flee to the deeper woods.

But on the night the village was to be emptied, Cantrelle had wandered into the dark of God’s House, alone and unguarded. The other children had been afraid or disgusted by the corpses and the looping entrails, but Cantrelle found them fascinating, like watching the flowing of a stream or the dancing of a fire or the wheeling of a flock of birds. The adults had kept asking questions about what the children could see, but Cantrelle hadn’t been able to concentrate, not with all the noise.

Alone in the dark with the bodies, the world had started to make sense.

She had sat with the entrails in the cold hours of the morning, reading truth in spilled guts. She had begun to see the meaning in the ravens and crows gathering overhead, in the sounds of their cries, in the numbers and sequences in which they alighted on the branches. She had read music in the rustle of leaves, seen art in the wriggling of worms in maggoty flesh, and heard the whisper of God in all things. She had woken up to divine truth, everywhere and always.

At sunrise Cantrelle had walked back home and informed her parents of what God had said: more King’s Men would come in ten days time, two hours before dusk.

Cantrelle had turned out to be right.

She had spent the next fifteen years reading signs from God. She saw the messages and meaning in everything. She had even read them in the flames that had licked her feet and blackened her toes, when the King’s Men had burnt her to death in Toulouse a decade and a half later.

When Cantrelle had first been resurrected in the Kingdom of Death she had attempted to read God’s words in the guts of other revenants. She had cut them open in secret places, sifting entrails even as she shoved handfuls of flesh down her gullet. Surely this afterlife was God’s doing, God’s work, God’s intention? Surely she had not been abandoned here, among demons and monsters and the eaters of the dead?

She had watched the skies and tasted the soil and listened for the rustle of leaves in the wind. But the sky was empty and the soil was barren and nothing grew here but false flesh.

God’s voice was silent. God was dead.

Cantrelle had spent many years as a screaming madness, then more as a scuttling thing of dirt and wordless hungers.

Eventually Cantrelle had joined the Sisterhood, the so-called Death’s Heads, the only ones who saw what the world had become, the only ones with a sensible answer. They had seen her potential. She had learned about nanomachines and metabolism and the nature of the ecosystem. She had learned science and medicine and chemistry. She had stopped looking for signs from God. She no longer believed.

But the signs these past few weeks had become too much to ignore. First the mech had fallen from the sky, a comet from the heavens. Then the ‘superhuman’, Yola’s perfect leader, had walked out of the empty void. Then the defeat, the sickening humiliation of being strangled to death but not killed. Then the symbol on her cheek, bitten through. The Kingdom of Death, thrown down.

And now this golden diamond in the sky. This celestial machine. This resurrection of the signifier.

Cantrelle’s younger self stirred inside her chest.

“Fuck you!” Cantrelle screamed at the sky, at the rotor-craft swooping down toward her, at the golden message dripping toxic light down onto the grey. “Where were you when I fucking needed you?! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

God was a liar and a cheat and a traitor.

And so was Yola.

Yola had stepped out of those rear doors seconds before the gigantic craft had appeared in the sky. Yola had advance warning from some unknown source. Yola had left the Sisterhood to die.

Cantrelle was going to kill her.

Cantrelle turned and ran before the rotor-craft could crash into the loading dock. Her boots slipped in the gore and blood, but she lurched forward and kept her balance. The rest of the Sisterhood was almost gone, running through the guts of the building, fleeing the revelation above the crater.

Cantrelle slammed through the double-doors at the rear of the loading dock, into the shadows and dust of a long and empty hallway; several Sisters were sprinting ahead of her, their footfalls and shouts echoing down the concrete tunnels, leaving nothing but bloody boot prints. Motes of dust swirled in the dim air. Sounds of combat pounded through the walls, backed by gravitic pressure-waves.

And beneath it all was an unmistakable grinding sound — a mountain range rubbing its back against the world, spiralling its way through gigatonnes of concrete and steel and brick.

The graveworm was moving. Cantrelle didn’t care.

“Yola!” she rasped into the dark, drowned out by the titans beyond the walls.

The comms network was full of cognitive hazard pouring from the god-thing in the sky; Yola’s direct frequency was inaccessible. Cantrelle bypassed comms entirely and reached out to Yola’s implants. She had not done this in years, not since Yola had stopped sleeping in the same bedroll as Cantrelle. Their last communication at this level of signals intimacy had been ugly and upsetting, filled with insults Cantrelle did not care to recall, and followed up by a personal visit from Kuro.

Cantrelle knew Yola would not accept the handshake protocol. Yola was a traitor, she had spat on everything they had ever shared, and Cantrelle would snap her neck before the Sisterhood broke and—

Yola accepted the connection.

<<Yolanda!>> Cantrelle screamed down the direct line; the connection was filled with static whispers from that thing in the sky, trying to break the private encryption. <<Where the fuck did you go? Where are you?! Answer me, you apostate fuck! You knew we were about to get hit, you knew! You knew all along! You bitch, you unfaithful heretic shit, you—>>

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Yola replied with a non-verbal systems ping, a three-beat metronome.

Cantrelle stopped breathing.

Back in the good days — when Yola had relied on Cantrelle for everything, when Cantrelle had known the taste of Yola’s tears and fingers and cunt, when Yola had whined and mewled whenever Cantrelle wanted — that three-beat signal had acted as a private cry for help. Not physical help; even back then Yola was a Sister in good standing, and now she was the prophet, the leader, and more. If Yola needed physical help all she had to do was shout. Every Sister would come running to her side.

That three-beat burst was for Cantrelle only. It meant: I can’t do this alone. Please, Ella. Please come to me.

The Yola who had last used that signal was long gone, replaced by a traitor, a shadow, a mockery of the sweetness that Cantrelle had raised up.

Cantrelle drew her PDW with her tentacle-pincers — awkward and clumsy, but better than nothing. Her hands hung limp, bandages soaked with gore.

“Yola!” she yelled into the dark. “Yolanda!”

<<Yola? Where are you?! Give me positional!>>

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Twenty five feet away, to the right.

Cantrelle hurried along the dusty corridor and slipped around an archway, leading with her weapon. She stepped into a room which had once been some kind of chemical mixing and storage plant. Huge upright steel chemical tanks branched off into hundreds of tubes and pipes, caked with centuries of rust, all leading to a shallow depression in the middle of the room, dry and empty.

Yola stood in that shallow depression. The helmet of her purple armour was peeled back to show her ruby-red hair and the burn wound on her face.

She was crying. Quiet tears made tracks down her cheeks, shining in the cracked flesh of her wound.

Yola’s eyes swivelled toward Cantrelle — one emerald, one blinded and milky, both hollow and lost.

Cantrelle’s heart lurched; that was her Yola, her sad, pathetic girl, her fragile little lamb who needed to bite Cantrelle’s shoulder until it all felt better. That was the girl Cantrelle had brought to sobbing orgasm hundreds of times. The girl Cantrelle still wanted. Her Yola. Hers.

Elpida stood in front of Yola.

The degenerate was touching Yola’s face.

One soft brown hand cupped the cracked and blackened flesh of Yola’s cheek, brushing her tears with a thumb. Elpida was dressed in her tomb-coat, the same as Cantrelle’s, but new and undamaged where Cantrelle’s was patched and torn from years of wear. She carried a submachine gun in her other hand, loose and lazy; she didn’t bother to aim as Cantrelle swept into the room. Her long white hair was clean, undimmed by dirt or dust. Her copper brown skin looked warm as velvet, as if she’d just stepped from a bath. Cantrelle couldn’t remember what a bath felt like.

Purple eyes flashed with amusement. Elpida’s mouth curled in a cruel smile. Her lips parted.

Cantrelle pointed her PDW and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Her tentacle-pincers had frozen as if gripped by invisible force, unable to finish depressing the trigger of her gun. Her muscles were locked in place. Her legs wouldn’t move. Even her lips were fixed and still. She tried to scream with humiliated fury, but her throat wouldn’t budge. What was this?!

Elpida smiled wider, and said: “You called your special friend, Yola. No.”

Yola whispered: “I-I’m sorry. I … I … I never wanted—”

Elpida interrupted: “Yolanda, I told you, my offer is only for you, and for you alone.” Elpida reached out and stroked Yola’s burned cheek; a shudder of pain passed through Yola’s body. Cantrelle had not seen Yola show pain in years. Sick jealousy gnashed at her heart. Elpida continued: “Have we not come to a special understanding, you and I?”

Yola panted through tears. “I-I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave my … my girls … my … ”

Elpida sighed. “There is no time for these petty dramas and stale loves.”

‘Elpida’ sounded nothing like the superhuman girl from before, nothing like the captive, or the voice on the radio. She spoke with the same timbre and tone, but her word choice was all wrong. Her attitude was different. The way she held herself was incorrect.

Cantrelle realised this thing was not Elpida. She figured out why she couldn’t move.

The figure wearing Elpida’s face turned to glance at Cantrelle, with an amused curl to her lips. Suddenly Cantrelle could move her throat and mouth again.

“Necromancer!” Cantrelle screeched and spat. “Corpse-fucker! Don’t touch her! She’s mine! Mine! Don’t you dare! Fuck you! Fuck you! Yola, step away from her! Yolanda! Fuck!”

The Necromancer smiled with Elpida’s lips. “This one is spirited, but she is bound to the cares of the dead.” The Necromancer nodded to one side. “Better than this one, at least. Poor taste, Yolanda.”

Cantrelle realised she wasn’t the only Sister frozen solid in that room. Kuro stood six feet to Cantrelle’s left, an unmoving giant inside her suit of grey war-plate. Kuro’s weapons were deployed, pointing at the Necromancer, but locked in place, just like Cantrelle’s PDW. Yola’s living dildo fuck-pet had not fared any better than Cantrelle. A cold comfort.

A rumble came from beyond the walls, out in the crater. Was the airship making a move?

The Necromancer turned back to Yola.

Cantrelle screamed again: “Yola! Yola, why are you crying?! What did it do to you?!”

The Necromancer smiled. “I have informed Yolanda of what is happening here. That is all. Our time is almost up, Yola. No witnesses to the Telokopolan machine will be allowed to leave here. Those who die beneath central’s eye will not be returned to eternity’s wheel. They will be held in the pattern, forever. I am giving you this one chance, Yolanda. You and I have shared something special these last few years. Have we not?”

Was this where Yola had been getting it all? All her confidence, her high-and-mighty play-acting, her new mannerisms and new-found independence? This thing talked like Yola, not like Elpida! This corpse-rapist had taken her Yola away and replaced her with a puppet.

Yola was weeping, staring into the Necromancer’s imitation purple eyes. The Necromancer’s hand brushed her burned cheek a second time.

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Cantrelle screamed in rage and humiliation. Perhaps Kuro was doing the same, inside her armour.

The Necromancer sighed. She lowered her hand and turned away from Yola, toward Cantrelle. “Very well, dead things. You will have your poetic end. But this one I will take myself.”

‘Elpida’ flowed apart like a torrent of water.

Skin lightened and rippled. Coat hardened and bulged. Hair shrank and darkened. The transformation happened in the blink of an eye.

The Necromancer turned into an imitation of Yola — a grinning, smug, imperious Yola. The Necromancer smiled at Cantrelle with all the charisma of the prophet Yola had become. She raised a slender pistol, one that Yola herself had not used in years, large calibre, hollow-point rounds, more than enough to explode Cantrelle’s head like a watermelon beneath a sledgehammer.

The real Yola let out a sob.

Cantrelle suddenly found she could move again; she tumbled forward as her muscles resumed their earlier motion. She caught her balance and brought her PDW up, aiming at—

Yola?

The Necromancer started to speak.

Cantrelle roared with anger and pulled the trigger. Bullets slammed into the Necromancer’s imitation skull, tearing through meat and shattering bone, pulping brain and breaking jaw. The Yola-mask disintegrated under a hail of gunfire, turned to shredded meat and splinters of bone.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?!” Cantrelle screamed. “Because you’re wearing her face?! Fuck you! Fuck her!”

Bang-bang-bang-bang-click—

Cantrelle’s magazine ran dry — but the Necromancer did not fall.

An eyeless head more meat than face stared back at Cantrelle through bloody wounds. Black orbs opened in the bullet holes, twisting and writhing and emerging as tarry-black tentacles, glistening wet and dripping with fluid. The real Yola whimpered.

“Ahhhhh,” the Necromancer sighed — a sound like blood-filled lungs struggling for a final breath, in Yola’s broken voice. “Never mind, then.”

She raised the pistol, pointed it at Cantrelle’s head, and pulled the trigger.

The wall of the chemical plant exploded inward.

Masonry fragments and steel shrapnel filled the air, pattering off coats and armour, slicing unprotected flesh, ringing out a mad chorus against the rusted chemical tanks. Cantrelle reeled from the impact, crashing onto her backside with a crunch of breaking bone, choking in the cloud of brick dust and debris.

Beyond the ragged stoma in the wall she caught a glimpse of the soot-black sky, with the toxic golden visitation hanging far above the horizon, framed by the sucking grey mud below. The fallen mech still lay like a stripped skeleton of bone-white amid the filth, surrounded by a cloud of flies.

The mech shuddered.

A monster slammed through the broken wall and into the chemical plant in a tidal wave of flesh — a seething, roiling, bubbling mass of semi-transparent iridescent protoplasm, flashing with dark purples and bright pinks and vomit-sick greens, flowing with rapidly re-forming eye-stalks and sensor-pads and blade-tipped tentacles. It was the size of a house and moved like a lightning bolt.

A true degenerate from beyond the graveworm line, a revenant changed beyond all memory of human form.

It pounced at the Necromancer.

Kuro turned as the degenerate attacked, released from the Necromancer’s control. Her armour bristled with weaponry as every firearm rose to slice into the side of the blob-zombie. But the monster lashed out at Kuro with a cluster of tentacles, faster than Cantrelle’s bionic eyes could follow. The monster tossed Kuro aside, hurling the power-armoured giant through the air; Kuro’s weight crashed through several chemical tanks and shattered the concrete with her landing.

The Necromancer was a parody of Yolanda now, a pulped skull atop a suit of imitation purple armour. It froze the degenerate blob monster with a glance, just like every other zombie.

But the flesh kept coming.

Like an avalanche of tar flowing around rocks, the glowing blob-thing did not stop moving; sections of it slammed forward, reaching for the Necromancer with any piece of itself it could unfreeze — a set of tentacles here, a splash of flesh there, a stabbing tendril or a sneaking lash. The Necromancer took a step back, then another, then another; her blind head jerked back and forth, as if she couldn’t keep up with all the different body parts of this creature. She froze them as they came, but this blob always had more.

The real Yola collapsed, freed from whatever control had kept her standing at attention.

Yola slammed to her hands and knees, scuffing her purple armour on the floor, and dragged herself into Cantrelle’s lap. Cantrelle caught her and held her tight; she wanted to crack open Yola’s armour and lever her rip cage apart and squeeze Yola’s heart in a fist. Yola was sobbing and wailing — crying, a noise that Cantrelle had not heard in too many years.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry— Ella, I’m sorry, Ella, Ella, I’m sorry—”

Cantrelle put her bloody, bandaged, aching hands around Yola’s throat; she barely had the strength to squeeze.

“Traitor.”

Yola wheezed. One emerald eye bulged in her face. “I’m sorry—”

A dark figure swept through the shattered wall on the heels of the blob-monster, framed against the distant background of bone-white mech. She was wrapped in a dark cloak from feet to scalp, showing only a mushroom-pale face and a jaw-mask of matte metal, painted with jagged black teeth. She carried half a dozen guns held in too many spindly hands. Chief among her weapons was a massive rifle. A pair of glowing red eyes flickered from the retreating Necromancer to Cantrelle and Yola.

The sniper. Wrecker and Murderer.

Cantrelle scrabbled for her PDW, but the gun was empty. The sniper levelled her massive rifle at Cantrelle and Yola to send a bullet through both their bodies. She used another hand to point a strange, boxy-looking gun toward the Necromancer.

She said: “Bye bye, death cult—”

Far behind the sniper, the fallen mech lurched to its feet.

Showers of grey mud shook from bone-white limbs. Weapons blossomed open all across the war machine’s body. The giant roared — a war-horn cry so loud it hurt Cantrelle’s eardrums and shook the ground.

Prone and unmoving it had seemed an ugly and twisted wreck. In motion it was beautiful beyond words.

The sniper pulled the trigger but her shot went wide, knocked off her aim by the roar of a waking god.

The Necromancer turned and ran.

The sniper shouted something from behind her mask — “Get her! Iriko!” — and the blob-monster raced after the fleeing corpse-fucker.

The sniper quickly levelled another shot. Cantrelle held Yola tight, even though she embraced only cold armour.

But the world exploded with sound and fury before anybody else could shoot: the god-machine bone-mech fired upon one of the tiny rotor craft, blossoming the air with explosions and laser-cannon beams and solid-shot rounds. Cantrelle didn’t even care that she was about to die at the hands of a degenerate, or that Yola was the worst kind of traitor, or that she was crying her own eyes out — the sight of that god-machine swatting a fly was like nothing she had witnessed in all her resurrections. The firepower was earth-shattering. Every motion was poetry.

“Yolanda,” Cantrelle whispered in the moments before the end. “You were right.”

Yola was looking up too now, lost in awe. “No … no … ” she whispered.

“With that machine the Sisterhood could have conquered a worm.”

Yola sobbed. “Ella.”

The sniper ignored it all; her finger tightened on the trigger.

The golden idol in the sky was reaching toward the mech with a nest of gravitic snakes, dimly seen through Cantrelle’s bionic eyes. The mech turned toward its foe, flowering open a hundred guns and missile pods and laser batteries. But it would not be enough.

Cantrelle felt tears running down her cheeks, tears for a lie she had abandoned so long ago. There could be no contest here. This grandest of all resurrections, this divine machine, this refutation of God’s word — it would be crushed into the barren mud like all other life. God had made his signs plain; the Kingdom of Death was his work after all. This place was his will and his desire, and he would brook no challenge, not even from an angel.

For the first time in decades Cantrelle wished it was not so.

But then the mech seemed to strain against its dirty white armour. Crimson flesh showed through widening gaps. A sound like tortured metal tore out across the crater.

The mech rippled — and burst.

A blossom of blood and bone opened like the first flower of spring, blooming into a whirlwind of flesh.