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« on: February 05, 2014, 06:56:43 AM »
The castle was even bigger from up close.
The ruddy man looked up, craning his neck to stare at the castle's parapets. Beside him, several upright skeletal warriors stood idly, awaiting their next command. On the ground a half dozen police officers lay sprawled, their uniforms trashed and weapons destroyed. The man had little fondness for law enforcement. He had even less for displays of power worthy only of the Middle Ages.
"Go," he growled around sharpened incisors. As one, the mass of Dragon Tooth Warriors obeyed.
The gate had been breached before, and the supernatural strength of the warriors was soon set upon breaking it open again. While that group became a battering ram, others scaled the walls with inhuman agility, finding an untiring grip in even the smallest of cracks between stones. The scuttled, spreading over roof and jumping into any open courtyard they could find and spreading out like a spider's web.
They had not been ordered to refrain from violence, only to make attempts to spare the lives of those they defeated, for further interrogation. Any movement would be met with near mindless aggression.
It had been a bit presumptuous, the man 'behind' the man knew, but he couldn't bring himself to care about disposable troops. Doubtless the owner would soon return and find his palace ransacked, but that was fine as well. Putting their name out into the city was almost as important as finding information about its visitors and inhabitants. Stories of walking dead would spread fear into people's hearts, and if they were lucky, those without hearts as well.
And if they ended up slaughtering the place's inhabitants, there would be no regrets.
The man walked to one of the fallen policewomen and prised a cell phone out of her hand. He flipped it open and dialed a number.
Many miles away, a similar situation was preparing itself. A woman with dead eyes and an undead body gazed at an ugly apartment complex without blinking, a mobile phone pressed against her ear. Around her, and around the complex, a much smaller group of skeletal troops had formed up, surrounding the place from the ground. Behind her, a collection of junk and metallic parts shifted around, growing and coming together like some kind of sentient monstrosity.
The woman had been standing there for a few hours. The camera set up on a tripod beside her had been there for more than twenty four of them. She crouched down next to it, and with clumsy fingers replaced its battery. It had been beaming its video to a different location all day, and it would need to last at least another hour to document the events that were about to take place. It had seen explosions, assaults, slaughter, and some rather creepy cult-like behaviour, but it had yet to see what truly mattered.
"Bait," the woman said. The dozen skeleton warriors, as one, let out an inhuman howl, not from any sort of theoretical emotion, but as a calculated announcement of their presence to the Law Unto Herself. As one mass, they trudged forward, their only goal to get inside the apartment building while killing anything in their way. Unknown to their non-existent minds, their true purpose was simply to stir up the hornet's nest some more. The cameras secured to the insides of their rib cages would show those watching everything they needed to see.
The main camera's light beeped red to show it was on and broadcasting, as did countless other cameras all around the complex.
The woman dialed another number on her cell phone.
Even more miles away, on the other side of the city, a man in a red suit relaxed on a recliner on a balcony. He closed the phone in his hand and pocketed it. He took the bottle of alcohol on the small table beside him, twisted off the cap, and poured a small portion into a glass in his other hand, taking a flavourless sip before replacing the bottle and glancing at the second, untouched glass next to it.
"It's begun," he said to the hooded sorceress on the other side of the balcony. "Tequila?"
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