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Authors: Darren Humphries

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The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol (3 page)

BOOK: The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol
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The spirit was standing high up in the roof of the hall atop another tall scaffolding structure. I had thought, at age 12, that they had been put there to support the lights and sets of the production, but I could see now that they were holding up parts of the roof
that could no longer support
themselves
.
Inside
the metal lattic
e
work
stood a tall figure.
It had
the shape of a man; a very large and powerful man. He was illuminated by a green glow (remember what I said about evil and its colour preferences) that was coming from a cauldron precariously wedged
in
the scaffolding
with him
. In one hand, he carried a large club that was clearly fashioned from the branch of a tree because it still had some of the leaves attached.

I probably could have shot him fr
om where I was standing or
brought down all of the scaffolding to
leave him smashed and impaled on
steel poles in the middle of the stage, but that wasn

t how I remembered it happening and
so
that isn

t what happened now. The door to the drama studio on the far side of the stage opened and
a
smallish boy stormed through it angrily.
My hair was in disarray and I was drowned in a costume that would have been incredibly inappropriate to the task of herding sheep.

I reacted immediately, throwing myself forward at ... well at myself. I knocked the kid aside just as the fur-clad feet of the spirit thumped onto the stage at the
exact
spot where both of me had just been. The younger me was knocked
,
winded
,
into a pile of old
pieces
of set decoration
that these days would have been removed as a major fire hazard. The older me swung around, pulled my gun clumsily out of my coat pocket and fired. The figure of the spirit took the whole charge and grinned. The only sign that I had hit it at all we
re the smouldering patches of its
red
beard. He swung the club at me in a wide arc that would have knocked me clean out of my skin had it contacted, but whilst it
was a powerful swing it was also a slow one and I was able to dance out of its way. The club impacted with the wall and left a sizeable patch of brickwork showing through the pulverised plaster.


I get to kill you twice,

the spirit, who was a full foot and half taller than I was and built from the same blueprint as American wrestlers
, said with a great deal of satisfaction
.


That

s nice for you. Killing me is the Christmas gift that just keeps on giving,

I told him and hurriedly tried to think of a course of action. Since my gun didn

t work, I had no weapons and very few options.

Except maybe...

I darted under his next swing and kicked him hard in the knee before leaping away again. He laughed at my ineffectuality and swung the club at me again. This time when I dodged
,
the club clanged into the scaffolding. For a moment, I thought that the whole lot was going to come down on us, but then it steadied. The spirit

s cauldron, however, was another matter.
Jarred loose from its perch, it tipped with terrifying slowness to one side until the centre of gravity was no longer centered and gravity could do its job.
The cauldron tumbled and landed upside down on the spirit

s head. I had been hoping that it might knock the creature out or at the very least distract or slow it down, but as soon as the head was encompassed, the green glow intensified and the cauldron sucked the figure bodily up into it. There was the faint sound of a scream. The cauldron then blinked out of existence with a small puff of foul-smelling smoke.


That was amazing!

a voice said from amongst the discarded sets. I (that is the younger I) was climbing out of the tangle of canvas and wood that I had knocked myself into. My eyes were wide and sparkling as
only the eyes of a child who
has seen wonders can be.

Who... I mean what... how...?


All good questions.
I work for an agency called U.N.D.E.A.D.,

I told my younger self, wishing that I had a hat that I could heroically adjust.

All those answers are there.

And with that unsatisfactory response I walked away from myself, knowing that I had just instilled a desire into a young boy that would not be sated until ... well until a few seconds ago, but a good few years later.


Wait!

I called after me, as I knew that I would (or had, take your pick).

You can

t just leave like that.

I recalled when this had happened to me the first time and how I had watched the stranger just walk away after making some cryptic remark. I recalled also tha
t I
had thought what a
dick
he was at the time. Still, I had heard what turned out to be me say what I had said and so I knew what my parting words had to be.


Watch me,

I told him, opened the
maintenance
door through which I had entered and stepped back out
into ...

 

...the Director

s penthouse office atop the Victor Von Frankenstein Tower in Oxford.

The global Operations Headquarters of the United Nations Department for the Enforcement and Apprehension of Demons has one of the most advanced intruder warning systems in the world and nobody can just walk in there without setting off a whole bank of alarms and triggering the automatic lockdown of the entire building no matter what kind of technology or magic they use.

Just as I was recognising where
it was that
I had
arrived, a whole bank of alarms burst into strident life and the window shields protecting the office from outside attack slid smoothly and impenetrably into place.


Oh that

s just great,

I said and swore.

Penny Kilkenny, the Director

s personal assistant, leaped out from behind a large potted plant yelling and brandishing what appeared to be a stapler. When she realised who the intruder was, she abandoned her attack stance and placed her hands on her shapely hips,

What the heck are you doing here? I thought that you were at home helping with the whole eggnog crisis?

Her mocking tone aside, at least I now knew not only where I was, but when as well.


I

m having a bit of a crisis myself,

I told her,

and one that involves something a whole lot more dangerous than eggnog.


Oh I don

t know, I can do q
uite a bit of damage after a couple of good
eggnogs,

she pointed out.


So I

ve heard,

I shot back, unable to resist the banter even considering the situation. It wasn

t as though we were in
any
immediate danger...


What

s that?

Penny asked, looking past me toward the Director

s desk at the far end of the room. The view
from the office
at night was even more impressive than during the day, the lights of the city spreading out away from the large picture windows,
or at least it would have been had the blast doors not been closed.
I was fairly sure that she was
instead
referring to something else. Something else that I could now hear growling in a manner that suggested it wasn

t a small fluffy puppy.

I turned slowly and the creature that was doing the growling was most definitely not a fluffy puppy. It also was most definitely not small. It was also not alone.


I would suggest that it

s a wild boar,

I told Penny having sized up the two creatures, a task that was made more difficult by the red alert lighting that had kicked in as soon as I had triggered the lockdown alarm,

and so is the other one.


I wasn

t aware that they came in that size,

she said nervously, holding out the stapler in front of her.
Exactly what she thought she was going to do with it I couldn’t guess.

The two boars were huge. Each was approximately the same size as a VW Beetle (the old cute kind, not the bland streamlined new kind) and possessed a lot more in the way of tusks and bad attitude
than their normal-sized counterparts
. Their eyes were narrowed with animalistic hatred and shone with an unearthly green luminance that didn

t exactly make them look any friendlier. They were restrained by dark chains around their necks and their feet were scraping chunks out of the polished surface of the floor in their eagerness to break free.

The current Director wasn’t going to be at all happy about that.


They don

t,

I confirmed,

at least not normally.

The other ends of the chains holding back the giant beasts were held in the slim hands of a tall woman who seemed to have no problem restraining several tonnes of maddened pig-beast. Then a
gain, she also had no problem with
floating three feet in the air. She was dressed in warm furs more suited to the Siberian steppes than a well-heated Oxford office building. Her long hair flowed out behind her in a breeze that didn

t
seem to
exist
anywhere else
. One side of her face was beautiful with flawless skin and exotic features. The other side was misshapen and ugly, twisted into a distorted mask.


I don

t suppose that this is something that we can discuss like reasonable, erm, beings?

I asked the floating figure. I was open to being utterly astonished by a positive response. There really is a first time for everything.

This wasn

t one of them.

The disfigured woman released the chains and the
boars were launched forward by
the sudden loss of restraint.


Down!

I shoulder barged Penny out of the way and pulled the gun out of my pocket.

I fired instinctively without really aiming, but the size of the nearest beast hurtling past us was such that it really would have been much harder to miss. The electric charge ran across the creature

s hide, sparking from coarse hair to coarse hair along
its back and even arcing
across
to its companion. None of this had
any
appreciable
effect at all.

Penny had scrambled to her feet after I had pushed her out of the way and was running for the lift. Under lockdown, it shou
ld have been immobilised, but Penny was
personal assi
s
tant to the Director and that meant that
she had access to all kinds of override codes.


It might be quicker to take the stairs,

I suggested. The boars had halted their headlong rush and were turning
around. T
heir bulk
was such that
the
manoeuvre
took them
considerably
longer to carry out
than
it would have taken their
purely natural porcine relatives
. The two-faced woman at the end of the room remained there, floating serenely with a smile on both sides of her face
, though on one side it looked more like a grimace
.


You want to give them the added momentum of going downhill?

Penny
demanded reasonably.

BOOK: The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol
11.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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