It was then that he heard the oddest noise.  It was not unlike a volcano with a smoker’s hack, a roar that became a harsh rasping, a monstrous wet cough.  It took Wesley a moment to realize it sounded like one of the Berserkers was choking on something.  His first thought was he'd eaten something that disagreed with … oh shit!

Fearing that someone had just been devoured, he stumbled out of the hole his sudden transit had made through the wall, ready to hack at any bit of Berk that he saw.

But the nearest Berserker, the one who must have goaded him into action, was hunched over, coughing up something onto the floor. At first he thought it was entrails, but they weren’t colored right - also, they were moving.

The Berserker was vomiting up snakes.

Live snakes, that slithered across the floor after uncoiling, dripping with Berserker digestive juices but
no worse the wear for it.  Several became more than a dozen, colorful snakes raging from the size of shoestrings to ones the size of a wizard’s wand.  Wes hardly recognized a one of them, and knew many - if not all - might not even be native to this plane.

They were Degei’s avatar snakes - and they were attacking the Berserker from the inside out.  If not exactly eating it alive, then at least tearing it apart.

So he had sent them some help after all.

The Berserker had collapsed to its knees, still either attempting to spit out all the snakes or forced to provide them another exit - either way, he was out of the fight.  Wesley wiped the blood out of his eyes with the back of his hand, and looked towards the other end of the hall, where he had last seen the kids.

There was a huge hole where the front door used to be, and chunks of melting ice all over the floor … but no kids, and no second Berserker.

Fear caused adrenaline to dump into his system, making him feel more clear-headed and less pained, and he darted down the corridor, careful to avoid the ice and snakes, scimitar raised high in attack position. “Rogue?” He called, wondering what the Berks had been after in the first place. Certainly the snake barfer couldn’t tell him now. “Brendan?  Bobby?”

“Mister Price, you’re alive?” Rogue asked, and he turned his head sharply toward the voice.  It was Rogue, with Brendan and Bobby, all three of them crouched at the top of the staircase.  She had her gun out, although her hands still shaking a bit, and Brendan was still in his Brachen form, while Bobby looked, by turns, both startled and tired. “We thought … I mean, you’re just a normal …”

“It’s all right,” he told them, and it was.  He was used to being the perceived “lightweight” in the field of
the extraordinary.  It was one of the first things you had to get used to as a Watcher; you cultivated a tolerance of people constantly underestimating you.  The stereotype was generally correct - it was usually the quiet ones you had to watch out for…well, or until the preternatural ones snuck up on you and kicked your ass. “Where’s the other Berserker?”

“They got his attention and dragged him outside,” Rogue told him.

“They?”

“The Sisters.”

“The -” For a moment, he almost asked, but then he understood exactly who Rogue was referring to.  But it couldn’t be … could it?

He went to the door, and noticed viscous black blood on the front walk, pooled on the grass close to where the front door used to stand.  And farther away from the house, on what passed for the front lawn, were two Berserkers fighting the Weird Sisters.

Correction: they were attempting to fight the Weirds, but the sisters seemed to be hitting and running, frustrating the Berserkers by never quite standing still - and most vampires were faster than your average Berserker (less mass to drag around), so they were doing a very good job of irritating them.

Both the girls (How did one tell Beatrice and Belinda apart?  Angel could, but then he'd only turned Belinda - perhaps vampires really could instantly identify their “progeny”, no matter what) had what looked like long, thin wrought-iron lances, and then he realized they looked like staves from a metal fence; the front gate of Xavier’s, perhaps. That certainly explained the blood near the entrance; they must have stabbed one to get its attention.  But if they had the drop on a Berserker, why not just kill it?

Wes heard their peals of laughter - in stereo, of course - as they each used the metal poles to vault upwards and slam both feet straight into the mouths of both Berserkers; a synchronized, acrobatic hit that made the Berserkers stagger back into each other, spitting teeth like reeling boxers.  The girls simply rolled to the grass and ran around the Berserkers, retrieving each other’s fence posts, “switching” partners.

That’s when Wesley knew, with a sick twist of his stomach, what the girls were doing.  They were playing with the Berserkers, like a cat might play with a mouse. They could kill them at any time and they knew it - they simply wanted to have a bit of fun with them first.  Bloody psychopaths.  But he should be glad they were on their side, right?

(Were they ever really on their side?  How could you dare trust such things as the Zhuravleva Sisters?)

This was bad news. As much as the Sisters were expertly handling the Berserkers, if one decided to charge the house or get accidentally knocked into it, they could bring it down.  They had to stop playing and get rid of them.  But since there was no talking to them, he realized he had to go out there and do it himself.

Him, with broken ribs that sent electric shocks through his body every time he took a deep breath, a mouth that tasted of blood, and a head that was now throbbing like a bee sting.  If he did stagger into that field of enraged Berserkers and bitch queen vampires, he’d be a smear on the grass in under two minutes. Shit. “Do you know the Weird Sisters?” He asked, still watching them play with their prey.  Rogue had just said “The Sisters” so casually, it was like she was familiar with them.

“Yeah. They, um, helped us - well, helped Bob - keep this, like, demon pain queen or something from crossing into this dimension.  She was going to smoosh them all together or flip them or something,” she explained, with a bizarre casualness.  Clearly, she was more accustomed to the unseen world than most of the adults around here. “Bob explained it, but I didn’t always follow it. That’s where he and Logan did that weird body switching thing - and you can’t believe how funny it is to hear Logan speaking with an Australian accent.”

“Dis.” He supplied. Where Logan became Bob’s unfortunate avatar.  So she was there too, was she?

“Yeah, that place.  I still can’t find that island on any map.”

“Why did Logan talk with an Australian accent?” Bobby asked her, sounding both confused and amused.

“Well, it wasn’t him.  I mean, it was Bob, using Logan’s vocal cords.  And since Bob couldn’t hear his own accent, he still had it, but his voice was deeper, like Logan’s.  Bob had Logan’s voice.  But it was funny hearing Bob speak with no accent at all too.”

From the way the sky had become a dark, swirling vortex, Wes knew that time was winding down on him. He had to get downstairs and finish the ritual.  The Sisters looked like they had the Berserkers well in hand, but could - and should - he leave things like this?

That’s when he heard Bobby curse under his breath “Shit,” and looked down to see several jewel toned, multi-colored snakes slithering past him, out onto the lawn.  They didn’t bother him, they hardly seemed aware of him, as they motored easily past, gliding on the melted pools of ice in a colorful, silent procession of victors.

“Snakes were takin’ too goddamn long to finish the job,” Marcus said, slumping against the ruins of the wall beside him.  He tucked a hunting knife in the waistband of his pants, the blade still black with Berserker blood.

Must have been an easy kill.  Also, a mercy killing, considering the agony the Berserker must have been in.

“Where did all those snakes come from?” Brendan asked, sounding creeped out.

“Degei, right?” Marcus looked to him for confirmation.  Wesley started to nod, but stopped, as it made him dizzy, and caused the pain to swell up inside his skull.  “Man, snake gods are more dangerous than I thought.”

All gods were more dangerous than you thought, but, again, some more than others.  Degei was obscure, and what little reputation he had was benign, but any entity that could partition its consciousness into a million trillion entities in uncountable dimensions and still keep a semblance of self must have been more powerful - and therefore potentially dangerous - than anyone could actually comprehend.  He was obscure only because his culture had been swallowed by time; not because he was weak.

Marcus gestured to the psychotic fighting out front as he pulled out one of his larger handguns and popped out the empty ammunition clip, letting it fall to the floor with the rest of the detritus. “They on our side?”

“It would seem that way,” he said, hedging his bet.  He took a good look at Marcus, and in spite of his almost automatic dexterity in reloading the gun, it was a minor miracle he was upright.  His shirt and chest had been shredded by massive claws, and his jeans were almost black with his own blood, which was also continuing to trickle from his nose and the corner of his mouth.  His protective goggles had been broken and cast aside, revealing eyes with pupils so large it looked like they took up the majority of the space, making him resemble a hybrid between a Human and an alien “gray”.  Wesley wondered if his pupils looked bloated only when he was using his infrared vision, or if they looked that way all the time. Marcus had never clarified if he had normal vision that could go infrared, or if it was always infrared. “Perhaps you ought to sit down,” he whispered quietly.

Marcus looked at him with a raised eyebrow.  His strange eyes were slightly glassy, probably from pain, and his own blood slicked the silver surface of his Glock. “The guy with the bloody face can’t possibly be talking to me.”

“I know I look like shit,” Wesley hissed in reply, hoping the kids couldn’t hear them over the sadistic giggling of the Sisters and aggrieved roars of the Berserkers out front.  “I feel like shit.  But you’re -” Probably dying, he thought, but could he actually say it?  From this angle, it looked like there was blood in Marcus’s ear canal. “- you’re just as bad off, if not worse.” After all, he’d only been thrown through a wall by a Berserker - he hadn’t tried to fight them.  He’d never gotten the chance.

Marcus studied him for a moment, as if he knew what he really wanted to say, and was weighing a response to it. Finally, he said, “Isn’t there somethin’ you’re supposed to be doing downstairs?  Look, go, I’ll hold the fort here. If any of those fugly Godzilla motherfuckers gets within twenty feet of the house, I’m gonna see if it can stand up after taking a dozen adamantium rounds in its leg.  Think Berserkers can hop?”

So that was how it was going to be, was it?  Denial as a shield. “Marcus-”

“I have a job to do,” he snapped, an angry set to his jaw. “I’m gonna do it.”  Even if it killed him?

Wesley sighed, and glanced up at the kids, to see if they were listening.  He honestly couldn’t tell; they had the same stark look that he knew as the ‘freaked out by pretending not to be’ face, eyes shining and jaws tense.  Rogue’s grip on the gun was so tight it looked like it might shatter in her hand.  They could have gone upstairs and hid, but none of them were moving.

That’s when he understood why Bob had pulled them into this, instead of relying solely on demons.  It wasn’t just that they were mutants with powers that might be useful - although surely that was a major factor - it was that they were all extraordinarily brave.  If they were going to die, not a one of them would go without a fight.  He was used to that in his friends, but he sometimes forgot other people could be capable of it as well.

He slapped Marcus gently on the shoulder, and told him, “Don’t let the kids invite them in unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Marcus nodded, looking out at the lawn. “So they’re vamps, huh?  Figured as much, to be that stupid.”

“I have to go.”

“Then go already.  I ain‘t stopping you.”

He wanted to tell him it was good working with him, but that seemed to be acknowledging something neither really wanted to acknowledge. Besides, he might still pull through; he was a mutant, and stranger things had happened.

Wesley simply nodded and turned away, glancing up at the kids to tell them, “If things get bad, come downstairs. We can regroup and fight better from a less accessible position.”

They nodded, but they had a grim look that suggested they considered that the absolute last resort.
“We’ll do that,” Rogue lied, bare knuckles turning white on the gun butt. (She had taken off her gloves? Anticipating disaster, perhaps.)

But again he just nodded, sliding the scimitar loop off his wrist and leaving the blade on the bottom step, in case anyone wanted or needed it.

He thought about telling Amaranth to throw a healing spell up here, but then he realized if he didn’t finish the job he was supposed to do, there would be no one left to heal anyways; they’d be all dead.

Marcus had the right idea.  He had a job to do, and he was going to go do it, come Berserkers or the end of the world.

17

Xia had broken through the wall, but it was slow going.

Each punch knocked out a chunk of wall, but the wall was impossibly thick, full of … well, whatever the material was, it was dense and chalk white, light but unbelievably strong.  It was unlike any material Scott had ever seen before, and he was almost envious of it.  Just think how impervious the mansion would be if it was made of this.

“My wife, the irresistible force,” Tom said, with obvious pride.

Xia kept punching away in a single spot, so she was about half-way through the wall (or so he guessed - how deep was it?), but she looked like she was getting tired.  She didn’t stop, though; she was the John Henry of wall punchers.

Helga sniffed the chunk of wall he was holding, and he stepped back, away from her. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Trying to identify that shit,” she said, giving him a sharp look of irritation.

“By smell?” He scoffed. “So what are you, Logan now?”

Her glare had an almost physical impact. “I thought you two had called a truce.  Is it off again ‘cause an enemy of one of his friends made your girlfriend an avatar?”

He glared back, but he knew it was wasted, as she probably couldn’t tell.  “He knew long before we
were told, didn’t he?”

She shrugged. “I have no fucking idea; I ain’t a mind reader.  But I think I know what that shit is.”

She must have meant the stuff in the wall. “What?”

“Super calcareous ossified deposits.”

It took him a moment to decide she wasn’t making that up, and then another moment to recognize one of the words. “Ossified?  As in bone-like?”

“No, as in actual bones.  I think it’s the compressed bones of a million different things, supernaturally hardened into this.”

She was serious.  He let out a small, strangled cry as he dropped the chunk he was holding and backed away, hastily brushing the dust off his hands on the side of his pants.  It was people?  A million people? “You couldn’t have told me earlier?” He snapped.

She just shrugged again, tail swinging back and forth like a metronome. “I wasn’t sure until I smelled it.”

He just bet she was lying; about the first, the second, or all of it.  She seemed to live to torment him.

“Hon, want me to take over?” Tom said to Xia, who had paused to catch her breath.

“Think the structural integrity’s been weakened enough?”

He looked it over and nodded. “I think so.  If not, at least it will make things easier to punch.”

Xia came out of the human-sized hole she had punched (and kicked, and otherwise forced) into the wall, but Tom didn’t move at all.  He looked over his shoulder at them, and suggested, “You all might wanna get back, and maybe sit down.  I’ll keep the fissures away from you, but the ground may get kind of animated. I’ll only push things as far as I have to.”

They all backed up several meters farther away from the wall - they hadn’t been that close anyways - and Scott felt silly enough without sitting on the ground like they were waiting for a rocket launch.  But Xia sat down, and so did Helga, and then he felt kind of silly standing up all by himself, so he relented and sat back down in the tall grass.

Tom just remained standing where he was, back to them, and Scott saw him clench his hands at his sides.

And the ground began to shake.

The sound seemed to roll in like a wave as the earth shook with growing violence.  Scott would have sworn the ground beneath him no longer felt solid; it was gelatinous, soft and trembling, and the wall looked as it was starting to sway, ever so slightly.  How was Tom staying on his feet?

What a stupid question.   It was his power, that’s how. Until now, he thought it was a strangely limited power - causing earthquakes. Woo.  Whoever thought that was good for combat?  But of course it was.  If you could drop buildings on your opponents, turn the ground beneath their feet uncertain and hostile, it was a devastating weapon indeed.  Not to mention the fact that it technically made Tom a weapon of mass destruction, because limiting the scope of the damage with his ability might prove difficult.  Scott knew the feeling well.

At just about the point where he could feel the fillings vibrating in his teeth, the wall started to crumble where Xia had made an access hole, but it seemed achingly slow.  Scott was on the verge of yelling at him to stop (he could swear he could feel his brains sloshing up against his skull) when finally cracks appeared in the wall, black on the bleached bone white, snaking out from the Xia-sized hole and slowly spreading out in all directions, heading North, South, East, and West, and every direction in-between.

Once the cracks had reached the top, once the veins of it had spread wide enough that they made the wall appear to be a sort of mosaic, it started to fall away in chunks, but only where Xia had damaged it.  The wall began falling in at its weakest point.

Scott didn’t know how it could keep resisting so hard.  The ground was rolling like the ocean, starting to fissure, but as Tom had promised, it wasn’t breaking anywhere near them.  He wondered how hard Tom could push it - could he break the tectonic plates or whatever might beneath this foreign soil?  Right now,
it felt like he could.  Scott also felt like he might get sea sick.

They all heard the “snap”, like the brutal cracking of the spine of the world, and the wall collapsed into itself, right where Xia had made the dent.

Finally, Tom slowed the violent shifting of the ground to a shiver, and looked over his shoulder to face them. “See?  Easy as pie,” he claimed, panting as if short of breath, his eyes filmed over completely with a white fog.  Just like Storm. Wasn’t that a little creepy?

“That’s one hell of a ride,” Helga said as she stood up. “You could make a mint renting yourself out for parties.”

As the fog cleared, and his normal eyes reappeared, he grimaced at her. “Oh joy.  Hollywood, here I come.”

“They’d hate you in Hollywood,” Helga replied. “They get skittish about earthquakes on the coast.”

“Damn. There goes my sitcom.”

“Quake and Bake?” Xia said as she got up, joining in the fun. “The mutant chef who accidentally collapses his own soufflés when people get him angry?”

Tom threw back his head and laughed, beads of sweat sliding down his face.  Xia came up to him and clapped him on the shoulder before adding, “We can make a cool million endorsing cookware.  We’ll be set for life.”

“Hate to break up the chuckle fest,” Scott said, getting to his feet and heading towards the new opening
in the wall. “But we’re here about the end of the world, remember?”  He swallowed down the sense of nausea as best he could, but it felt like the earthquake was still going on in his stomach.  The muscles in his legs seemed to think the ground was still shaking too.

“Stiff Boy is right,” Helga agreed. “We gotta get this thing done. We’ve spent enough time dicking around.”

“Stiff Boy?” He repeated bitterly. Debris blocked the way through the hole, and he shot out a brief, narrow beam from his visor, blasting it out of the way. “What the hell’s that … oh, forget it.”  It actually occurred to him to say “That means a lot coming from the green slut,” but even he was appalled at the inherent nastiness and bitchiness of that potential comment.  It was also possible Helga might try and kill him if he said that, and the team was barely a cohesive unit as it was.  So he simply said, “Can the stupid nicknames.”

He went through the hole made in the broken wall first, not bothering to see if the others were following, and once he made his way past the rubble, he got a clear look around him.

It was truly disorienting.  He was in a huge circular courtyard, and the sky looked … lower here; larger, more intensely blue, the castle seemed even larger and more gothic, while the courtyard itself was made of something hard and heavy, and as violently red as spilled blood.  How had the courtyard not cracked under the strain?

He thought it was just his eyes at first, that they were still recovering from the earthquake, but that made no sense. It wasn’t an optical illusion.  The red stuff was moving under the plaza. Swirling and pulsing like … like blood in a body.

Okay, now he was going to be sick.

“What the hell did we just break into?” He asked Helga, as she was the second one through the gap.

She glanced around, tail flicking impatiently, and then looked down to see what was beneath their feet. “Oh, cool.”

“Oh wow, isn’t that trippy?” Tom commented upon seeing it. “It’s like a dance floor in a rave club.”

“Are we actually standing over a heart?” Xia asked, sounding just as freaked out as Scott felt.

“Something like that,” a familiar voice said, and Scott looked up so fast he almost gave himself whiplash. He still couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“Jean?” He gasped, feeling like he had been hit with a lightning bolt to the chest.

She was standing in front of the castle entrance, her eyes as red as the blood pulsing beneath them, and wisps of the same red energy trailing into the air from the corner of her mouth.

Helga didn’t gasp as much as she just sucked in a hard breath. “Collin?  So we’ve been sent to a hell dimension, huh?”

“That would explain it,” Tom said weakly.  He looked pale and almost sickly. “I don’t even know the names of these people.”

“What people?” Helga asked.

“The villagers of Tierra Verde.”

Scott didn’t know who or where that was, and he almost didn’t want to know.  Just the way Tom had said it suggested it was something bad.

“Okay. We’re all seeing dead people-” Helga began.

Xia gasped, and grabbed Tom’s arm, as if seeking protection. “Logan?  Wh-what are you doing here?”

“Correction,” Helga immediately amended. “We’re seeing the people that haunt us.”

“In multiples,” Scott agreed, his heart starting to kick down into a more normal rhythm as he realized this couldn’t be real.  There were now several red-eyed Jeans, joined with several red-eyed Cressidas.  But now he could also see what everyone else must have been seeing: several male versions of Helga, muscular green men without tails (only the females of her species had tails, or was she just some kind of hybrid?); many Hispanic people, some children; and several Logans, claws sprung and reflecting the throbbing, sanguineous light from below.  All had red eyes, and red energy trailing from their mouths like smoke.  It was an army of imperfect ghosts; the demonic personification of regret.

(Why was Xia haunted by Logan?  Wasn’t that curious …)

It was then that a woman appeared before the strange Army Of Guilt.  A woman as clear and blue as the sky above, her strapless dress and long hair both like swatches of night, deep black with faintly twinkling stars within.  Her eyes were as yellow and bright as the sun.  In fact, they were suns in miniature, one in each socket. “Dear little creatures, you have finally freed me from my imposed exile,” she said, her voice surrounding them somehow, as if it was actually coming from above.

(She was the sky.  It made no fucking sense at all, but she was somehow the sky.)

“What?” Helga exclaimed, speaking for all of them. “You’re attacking our dimension.”

The woman put a blue hand (Hey, did he just see a cloud on her palm?) on the shoulder of the red-eyed Jean clone beside her, indicating they were at least solid to her. “My dear, dear followers have been trying to punch through to your flawed little plane. But they could never free me from this prison.  Some gods just have no sense of humor. But you have, and I thank you for it.”

“I think we just made a major tactical error,” Scott told the others quietly.  But why were they sent to this place if not to stop this; if not to bust in and bring this down?  Would it have killed Bob to give them a tactical briefing?!  If they ever made it out of here, he was going to blast that Aussie bastard into next year.

The woman made of sky fixed her blind gaze on him, and oddly enough, it did feel warm. “You take the gratitude of Ereshkigal so lightly?  But yes, you would.  Your kind have forgotten about me, haven’t you?”

“Is this where you give us your autobiography?  Can you make it the A&E version? ‘Cause we don’t have a lot of time here.” As Helga said this, Scott noticed her tail reaching into the back of her own low slung jeans. Going for a weapon?  What weapon was of use against the sky?

Ereshkigal’s eyes narrowed while the suns flared, like they were on the verge of going nova. “Impudent demon. Do you think the blessing of Moros is enough to protect you from me?  Have you no idea where you are?  This is the Big Land, also known as the Underworld, from which no one ever returns.  Only the dead reside here, the things that have passed and become shade; nothing living has ever come here, and nothing living has ever left.” She smiled then, and its coldness was not diminished by the sunlight bleeding through her teeth. “You will be no exception.”

“Wanna bet on that, sweetheart?” Helga replied, her tail tossing the oddly shaped gun into her waiting hand, and it had barely landed in her palm before she fired it.  It made an odd noise, a muffled kind of “poomf”, and from what little Scott could see, it didn’t shoot a bullet.  Or at least not traditional ones - they weren’t black.

The projectile seemed to hit Ereshkigal hard, and as she fell back into the waiting arms of one of the Tierra Verde villagers, the rest of the dead swarmed them as a single entity, screaming and roaring, glowing with red energy like fire.

Scott started shooting out beams, and tried to hit as many as possible at once, doing his best to ignore the aching in his chest every time he hit one that looked like Jean.  This looked like a no-win scenario, but hell, he’d experienced those before, hadn’t he?

(Why did they have to look like Jean?)

None of this made sense, and he had a nagging feeling that Bob had set them up.  But Scott decided he would worry about that later, if he was alive to do so, and they ever found a way out of here.   they were going to die, fine, but he was going to take as many of them with him as he could on his way out.

And that was his final thought before the dead took them all down.