The Discarded

Chapter 35

Tuesday November 18th 2014

"She should be waking up in a few hours." Robert said, carefully securing Anastasia's mask. "How are you doing?" He looked pointedly at Cesare's middle.

"Not bad. Hurts, but getting gutted will do that. I overdid it yesterday and I'm paying for it today, but that's about it," Cesare said.

"You're lucky you didn't split your stitches and leave your guts lying on the floor. A little bleeding is a small price to pay for saving your friend's life," Robert said while he checked the bandages on her hands. "You going to be here when she wakes?"

"As long as you keep the nurses from kicking me out." They weren't friends, but the doctor knew stuff that Cesare wanted to keep quiet ... and he'd been good to Anastasia.

"I'll take care of it," Robert said with one last check of the I.V. before he left.

Cesare sat down next to the bed. He wanted to take her hand, so she'd know he was there, but they were wrapped in layers of bandages. The acid had burned her nerves, making the idea of her feeling anything with the mangled digits a suckers dream. Closing her hands was on the long list of things lost, ravaged by the chemical holocaust, her tendons and muscles were dead things of useless meat.

The door flew open with a bang against the wall. Cesare was up before it hit the wall, his gun trained on Alexandra. Locked on his face, her eyes didn't even register the gun. "Lady Kali's about to go nuclear."

"Fuck me." Cesare lowered the gun.

The two groups faced off in front of the school. The Mistress stood at the top of the stairs. A hole in the world, she pulled at reality with greedy tendrils of mad need. A maelstrom of emptiness, it devoured reality. Grass bent toward her, dust motes caught in her vortex danced in the air. Jerold, Viktor, and Sarah formed a wall at the bottom of the stairs, with the two men screening the woman.

Across from them, standing at all her less than five feet, was Lady Kali. Heat waves blurred her form with tortured rainbows. Grass smoked and burst into flame as an aura of malicious heat expanded, leaving dead ash behind. Her harem waited far away from the land of death racing from her. No one wanted to get too close to the ignition point.

"Twice I've been summoned to this slaughterhouse of a school because a person I cared for was attacked. My daughter lies close to death because of this shit hole and your incompetent teachers," Lady Kali said evenly.

"This wasn't our fault ..." Viktor began.

"Shut up." Viktor's face drained of color at the quiet words of promise.

"You cannot harm me, Lady Kali. You know this." Lacking triumph or gloating, its words were simple facts.

"You're right, I can't hurt you. But I can turn this school into a crater of burning ruin, your teachers into charred bones, your students seared corpses—rend this pile of shit into rubble. You can lord your authority over the dead, you soulless bitch." Lady Kali's dark eyes smoldered with fire hot enough to melt steel, her hair danced on the heat waves rising from her body.

Cesare walked into the no-man's-land between the two abominations. Without hesitation, Alexandra followed at his side and one step behind. Before he'd taken more than four steps, Elizabeth was at his other side, matching Alexandra step for step.

"Kali!" Cesare yelled across the ground. The word whipped everyone's attention to him. Their focus was a physical weight pressing down on the fissures of his soul. Each was a being of destruction, nightmares that butchered humans as easily as humans strangled chickens. But he only had eyes for the elder abomination that called itself Kali, Mother of Destruction. "I swear to the gods, if your daughter wakes and I'm not there because of your fucking ego, I'll beat your ass."