The Fifth Element

Part 2 Chapter 35

The clay man began to walk out of the park and towards one of the abandoned roads before it was standing in the middle of it. It turned and looked at me with eyes that glowed dimly in the bright daylight. The message was pretty clear to me. Follow me.

I began to move towards the clay man and when it saw me moving towards it, it began to walk away. Maybe it knew where Arnold was and was heading towards him, not that I was too thrilled with the prospect of seeing him again, but hey I kind of needed that creepy little kid. So, I began to follow the doll.

We had only been walking for a minute when I noticed a sensation. Almost like a slight pounding in my body like little men where drumming rhythmically on my insides with their fingertips, and it only seemed to grow worse with each passing second. It was at that point I began to notice stains on the black tar road we were walking down. Some were a reddish brown color and some were scarlet red. It was blood, I had no doubt of that. Except where were the victims that it came from?

The sound of snapping sticks caught my attention, while we were rounding a bend in the black road. My eyes flew around my deserted surroundings but I couldn't find the source

Up ahead from us was a group of people just standing there with their backs facing away from me, but they were too far away to be making a sound that crisp and loud of a sound. And that's when suddenly something jumped in front of me and I was immediately staring into a gaping mouth full of oval-shaped teeth. I didn't even scream, I couldn't a cold hand had wrapped itself around my throat. The thing stared into my eyes with its cloudy pupils, and with the sound of snapping twigs, it opened its mouth wider. It began to lean towards me.

The little pounding sensation within me suddenly increased tenfold and my head began to spin. But despite the dizziness, lack of oxygen, and the monster's foul breathe on my face I knew what I had to do. I raised my weapon to plug it into the monster's skin when the soundly the soulless man was yanked away from my face.

I looked to see that the clay giant held a soulless man dressed in a raggedy green shirt and ripped pants in its grip and the clay man was repeatedly stabbing it with the channeling weapons, while the soulless man thrashed around. Every time the weapon plugged into the creature's skin it would let out a shriek and its struggling became less and less.

I felt someone tugging lightly on the back of my shirt. Great, what now? I whip around to see that the people we had seen in the distance had caught up to us, except they weren't people, at least not anymore. A middle-aged woman in a green shirt stared at me with cloudy eyes while her mouth hung up and droll trickled down the side of her mouth. She had a bunch of pink fabric in her hand and was weakly trying to pull me closer to her. I did what was only natural I wound back my hand and punched the monster that had my shirt in its pale hand in the face. It groaned loudly but it let go. It wasn't as strong or aggressive as the soulless bodies that had come from my wood. I was going to take that as good news.

I jumped away from her and the hordes of drooling cloudy eyed people that were all reaching towards me. I turned back to the clay man and saw that he dropped the soulless monster and the thing was starting to crawl away on all four legs. The clay man began to walk towards me.

"No! No! Finish him off!" I commanded and tried to run towards the retreating monster but the drooling shells of people behind me had other ideas. A couple more of the drooling people behind me had grabbed my shirt and the back of my pants and were dragging me towards them, this time more effectively. One even shoved some of my hair in its mouth.

I had to still that monster. Like Lacy had said, the souls of these other people were circling around it and would hopefully be returned to them once I ended it. I'm not sure how many of them would survive their souls returning to them though. Some of the bodies had horrific injuries. One of the male drooling people had a huge dent in the side of his head that went at least a half inch into his skull.

That's when the clay door reached down, grabbed me around my middle, and yanked me out of the horde and placed me gently on its shoulder. By this point, my voice was going hoarse from shouting at it to go after the soulless monster from my world an excessive amount. Either that or four hundred years of not speaking really affected the stamina of my ability to use my voice. Maybe it was both.

The drooling people around me began to reach up towards me but the gigantic clay man dangled me high in the air, well out of their reach. I felt like I was a fairy being dangled above a hungry group of gnomes. The stone-like man placed me on its shoulder and I quickly wrapped my hand around its neck and hung on tight so as not to fall.

I waved my hand in front of the giant's bright glowing eyes until it turned to look at me. I then pointed to the thing the escaping monster that was now attempting to scale a building but with little luck. It would make it halfway up the building before gravity would yank it down again.

The clay man, seemingly finally understood what I was trying to get across because it finally began to move towards the direction of the monster at an incredible speed. The monster must have heard us coming because it turned around and hissed loudly and gave up its attempt to scale the building and began to scuttle away.

The clay man soon caught up with the thing and ran it down. It crushed its misshapen limbs beneath its feet. What was once a living man who had probably fought against Greta and her unwarranted grip that she had wrapped around our land before he had been forced through the portal into the other world under Greta's command at the wrong moment, and had his soul yanked away from? But speaking of which. What had happened to the souls that had been the force through that had come here and still been intact? A hand full of them had made it through before Santana had yanked me back. I knew this because I had dragged the souls across the plains in order to balance them out.

As carefully as possible I slid off the clay man shoulders and landed on the dead man's back. It bulked under my weight but I managed to maintain my balance and crouched down. I held up the channeling spear in my hand. The glass bulb briefly swirled with black smoke. I raised it above my head and plugged it into the man's back. The man went still and behind me, I heard a loud shriek.

I spared a look behind me to see that the drooling people weren't drooling people anymore. They were just people... and dead not animated people. I saw several of them lying motionless on the ground while some looked around in confusion like a flock of startled chickens.

There was one person who was not looking around in confusion for sure. It was a woman, dressed in a purple top that only covers half her torso, which left most of her stomach exposed. She wore a pair of very short jean shorts. She had separated herself from the rest of the people and she looked calm and focused. She held a metallic object in her hand and was pointing it towards Arnold's doll and me.

Before I really registered what was happening a loud bang, similar to ones I had heard earlier, filled my ears.