The Human Xenocide

Chapter Twenty - Fire in the Courtyard

Finally the screaming stopped. Everything in the room was dead.  Three guards darted around the corner at the end of the hall leading up to the doors. “Hey!” a voice roared then continued in another language.  Lilly sighed and stood up, time for more.

She decided to run instead of jump, showing off her speed.  As she sped off towards the three guards the doors behind her crashed open.  The ghouls were free.  Lilly drew the six inch army knife and reached her arm out as she aimed for one of the guards.  To the men she was a blur—they panicked, they had less than a second to think.  It wasn’t enough.  Lilly slashed one in the neck then spun allowing her speed to fling the sixty pound cape into the air.  She stabbed the blade into the chest of the man adjacent to the one she just slashed and forced the blade up ripping a large gash in his chest before he to fell.  The third man was mauled by the cape that was hurled through the air behind her.  He bounced off one of the nearby walls and slumped down, he was lucky he didn’t get caught by the blades at the bottom end.

With the groan the man was thrown against the wall let out Lilly knew she broke several of his bones. She jumped into his face and stopped letting him get a good look at her. “Let’s play a game.”  Lilly smiled.  Two ghouls sped up beside her but Lilly lifted a hand telling them to stop.  She pulled the revolver out of her pocket and discarded the knife into another.  She spun the chamber and sucked in the soft clicking.

She jammed the revolver up against the man’s face and said, “I’m going to pull the trigger five times, all you have to do is tell me which chamber to skip.  If you live five pulls I won’t kill you.”  He was frightened, terrified, she could see it in his face.  She wasn’t quite sure if he understood English.  Then he held up three fingers.  Lilly smiled and pulled the trigger twice. Click, click. She rotated the chamber once and pulled a few more times. Click, click, click. “Hmm.” She murmured and flipped the chamber open.  The bullet was in the third one.  “Luck’s on your side,” she said as she stood up straight and left the man broken against the wall to take the isle back outside.  The two ghouls narrowed in on the defenseless man. A scream blew through the stone hall but was shortly cut off by the distant sound of crunching bone. “Or just very unlucky.” Lilly resolved in a low whisper as she walked casually down the hall spinning the revolver in her hand.

Several bodies scattered this hall, most she didn’t kill.  Looked like the first ghoul was doing all the work.  Finally Lilly weaved back to the staircase she came down earlier then passed it and out to the sunlight.  Before she broke into the rays she flipped the hood back over her head and smashed all her hair down under the cape. She walked up to the sunlight and broke its barrier to peak around the corner. She quickly pulled her head back behind the safety of the stone.  It was a large walled in courtyard.  The stone walls reached about fifty feet into the air and were swarming with armed guards walking the tops.  Two guard towers were an additional twenty feet high on either end of a locked steel door along the far center of the courtyard.  Each guard tower had heavy machine guns stationed on top.  In the courtyard were at least forty crates lining the walls and well over forty stationed soldiers. If she counted the one’s guarding the exit and the ones on the wall it was almost a hundred guardsmen.

Lilly closed her eyes for a moment and let everything slow around her. She let all the noise around her turn into nothing and concentrated only on her breathing.  A minute passed, it was all she could afford.  Her eyes snapped hope and she jumped out into the courtyard. 

She reappeared mid-air in between two guards spinning in perfect sync for the razor blades of her cape the make contact with an unsuspecting back.  She drilled her teeth into the man in front of her and flung her hand up revolver ready and pulled the trigger twice. Click, pop! The man arming the heavy machine gun on the left tower stumbled back and dropped seventy feet to his death.  She vanished and the man she bit spun once with the force of her colliding into him before hitting the ground.  With the way he moved so violently she may have accidently broken his neck with such force.