LotS/The Story/Lu Bu's Halloween/NosferatuNick
Nosferatu Nick
"Hangar secured," said a Cybersmashette's voice. "We've overridden their access to the pressurization controls."
"See?" Natasha said. "They're not just pretty faces."
She stood near the exit, clad in a battlesuit's green armored plates -- her beautiful visage hidden beneath its mask even as it smirked from the androids behind her.
"Ladies first," she added.
With that, she jumped out. Her bound took her clear of the ramp, and onto the hangar's imitation wood floor. There she flicked her arms out to either side. A rod detached from each vambrace and slipped into her grasp. With the next flick of her hands, long lengths of metal snaked out from each one. And when she pressed the buttons, luminous sheaths of energy surrounded the whips.
Lu Bu and Chou took the stairs instead.
The robot's weapon attachments, his elegant sword and vicious claw, were on the ends of his arms. He'd pulled them from their compartment and assembled them, whilst the Cybersmash Cyclone ploughed through the barrier that had sealed the Haunted House's hangar. That astral maw lay ruined behind them, its screams muffled by a shimmering energy field.
Chou had requisitioned a pair of hefty laser-edged axes from the Cyclone's arsenal. He brandished them like some kind of zombie berserker, and looked as though he belonged on the poster for an especially gory Halloween holo-vid.
The room was remarkable. Its walls were covered in imitation oak paneling. Chandeliers swayed high overhead, amidst the cobwebbed rafters. There were portraits of creepy men and women on the walls, each one huge enough to be viewed in perfect clarity in spite of the chamber's vastness. The Haunted House took its role seriously...
But there wasn't time to enjoy the ambiance. Up ahead, some of the Cybersmashettes were already moving deeper into the ship, in search of the kidnapped children. The three of them followed, leaving the other androids to fan out behind them.
"You can't let them stop you!" the voice hissed. "The children must die!"
Nick Hallix didn't know if it was coming from outside his head or within his brain. He didn't even know if it was his own voice. He'd stopped asking those questions. The questions didn't matter. Only one thing mattered: The children had to die.
They had to reach that world. The world in his dreams. In his mind. The world he'd been shown. And he had to paint its dusty ground with blood. Because Jack needed the blood.
He rose from the captain's chair and left the bridge. None of the others said a word. They understood what must be done. They continued to fly the ship towards its destiny.
Nick walked down the oak-paneled corridors, lined with their portraits' sinister visages and dusty suits of plate armor. His long black cape billowed behind him. Nosferatu Nick... The vampire entertainer. He sneered, displaying his fangs. Soon he would be so much more.
A blonde woman stepped into the corridor in front of him. She turned, and began to bring her laser rifle to bear. Nick was faster. A ball of flame flew from his hand. It screamed as it whooshed down the hallway, its fire twisting into the image of a grinning pumpkin. It blasted a hole through the woman's chest. No... Not a woman. A robot. Melted metal instead of cooked innards. It didn't matter. She fell anyway.
Footsteps... More enemies were coming. The fools. They couldn't stop him. No one could stop him.
Three of the robot women, all identical, all dressed like prostitutes, surged into the passage from one of the side rooms. Nick thrust both his palms towards them. A wave of whiteness, a spectral tsunami of billowing ghosts with howling black maws, washed over them. Their broken, sparking bodies collapsed in a heap.
They were trying to take the children. To steal his precious victims. Jack's victims. They would all die for that.
Nick Hallix threw the dungeon door open. The cells were empty. A vampire and a pair of zombies lay dead on the ground, in pools of deep, dark crimson. He hissed. But they hadn't won yet. He knew his ship better than they did. He knew its shortcuts. Its secret passages.
He pulled at a candelabra mounted on the wall. An expanse of fake stone blocks opened inwards.
Nosferatu Nick ran down the passage, his cloak flapping in his wake. There... At the other end of the long, hidden corridor, he saw them. Beyond the one-way mirror that marked the route's terminus.
He didn't slow down. He didn't stop to work the panel. Instead he crashed through the glass, and landed before them.
A robot, a hulking zombie, and a woman in green armor whirled round to face him. Beside them was a big crowd of shrieking children. His children. His victims. Jack's victims.
Nick's hands glowed with purple light.
They would all die.
She felt its darkness. Just like in her visions, but now even more potent and undiluted in its black malevolence. Mistress Sun had made it in time. No splashes of crimson daubed the ground. The screaming victims hadn't yet been dragged to that place, their throats slashed and their blood spilled as libations to the infernal spirit whose mind haunted the dust where a pumpkin patch had once burned.
"Jack..." she said.
But there was no need to evoke him, to bring him forth by force of will. He was already coming. Coming for her.
Jack rose. But the dust remained undisturbed save for the mournful shifting of the breeze. For he wasn't a creature of matter. Not yet. Not unless and until he drank his fill.
He was a creature of thought.
And so his burning pumpkin face blazed inside Sun Xi's mind.
The hallway whirled around Lu Bu. Its shapes collapsed and its colors ran, until his world was one great kaleidoscope of twisting, turning, blending unreality. Only one thing in the entire universe remained whole, to mock existence with its eternal stability. The vampire.
His red eyes glared murder and triumph. His fangs gleamed with the shining light of dying suns. His cloak billowed, the colors of blood and death. Ghosts danced around him in a spectral corona. Burning pumpkins grinned as they orbited that anchor of solidity in the shifting universe.
It was... impossible.
"Your mind is a tinkerer's toy, golem," the vampire said. "Nothing more. It unravels like any other."
Lu Bu screamed.
The burning maw opened. Its jaws parted wide to reveal plains of fire, oceans of boiling yellow-redness which threw a sulfurous stench into the air. Flames danced along her limbs, across her face, within her lungs.
"You're mine!" Jack hissed. Each word was seared into the tissues of her brain.
Images hardened before her inner eye.
She's standing in the dust, above Jack's entombed remains. One of her arms is wrapped around a girl in a white dress, clutching her tight, overpowering her feeble resistance. The girl is sobbing. Not just in fear, but from the magnitude of the betrayal. A long, curved knife gleams in the psychic's other hand. One single thrust, and blood will flow. One single thrust, and Jack will-
"No!"
Mistress Sun shrieked the word. And it cut through the flames like a celestial razor, a war god's mighty blade. The pumpkin face contorted in pain. It howled as its flesh parted beneath the might of pure will.
Jack knew many things in his malevolent, ancient brain. But love was beyond his comprehension. He didn't understand its power. He saw weakness and vulnerability in what was truly strength.
Sun Xi smiled. Then she gathered all of her psionic might into a single, shining, invincible lance.
And thrust it into Jack's mind.
She blinked. The world was as it had been. A gentle breeze flitted across her face, and sifted through the dust. She sensed no trace of darkness, of the murderous malevolence she had come to vanquish.
It was gone.
So she turned, and walked back to the ship.
The dust continued to dance and shift for long hours after she left. All was silent save for its soft susurrations.
Until a voice, a faint echo lodged in time and space and thought, cried out.
"No!"
In a deep place... a deep, burning place... Jack smiled. For that echo was his doorway.
"No!"
For a moment Lu Bu believed the scream was his, only half-understood in the wreckage of his mind. But then he knew that it was a woman's.
Natasha's? No... The voice wasn't hers. She was still moaning in agony nearby.
It didn't matter. What mattered was that the world stopped spinning. Its colors separated. Its shapes regained their form.
A look of incomprehension dawned upon the vampire's face.
Lu Bu's mind fell back into its orderly system of processes and mechanics and electronics. Logic and normality returned. And there was only one sensible, logical, normal solution to the matter at hand.
He lunged forward and thrust with his sword. It took the vampire through the heart.
The vampire screamed... Though it seemed to come from far away. Then he slid from the blade and thudded on the ornate floor.
"Heh... You got him..." Natasha said.
Her face was hidden by her helmet, but her tentative movements bespoke her anguish. And Chou... He looked as though his zombie makeup concealed nothing better underneath. The big man staggered, and had to brace himself against the wall.
"We should leave," Lu Bu said, "before more come."
The children, who had shied away when the fighting started, ran the moment he gestured -- towards hangar at the end of the corridor, where the safety of the Cybersmash Cyclone awaited.
Lu Bu brought up the rear, ensuring that none were left behind. And strange thoughts flitted across his mind.
They remained lodged there as the green and purple ship left the hanger, and flew out into the void. Behind them, the Haunted House made its jump into hyperspace at last. But it wouldn't go far. The alert had gone out, and someone would locate it.
So Lu Bu continued to ponder, as he gazed out into the void.