So here I am, aboard a burning zeppelin that’s been ripped right out of time, fighting off a pack of snarling Nazi werewolves. There’s a hole in my sides; the only thing that’s keeping me from bleeding out is the spear-head that’s lodged against my ribs. The altimeter alarm is screaming and there’s a chill wind blowing against my back, tousling up my hair. Something below screams, as whatever’s left of the passenger hull grazes against the Edgarhorn, shedding glass and bits of its support-frame as it goes. A mass of packed snow and century-old ice becomes dislodged from the top; comes cascading down the mountain range, burying the derelict church on Bloch Hill under a couple metric tons of snow. The way things are looking right now, I will either be torn apart by werewolves, drop 3 kilometers down to a messy death, burn to a crisp, bleed out or all of the above.

Dad would be so proud of me right now.

I am told there are worse ways to die: my mother always told me she was afraid she might waste away at that nothing little desk job she had before she met Dad, pushing buttons on keyboards according to on-screen instructions from 9 to 5. Sometimes, when my dad was gone for a long time hunting some creepy-crawly across the Urals, she would have nightmares. She would dream that faceless accountants would drag her kicking and screaming back to her cubicle, to serve until the end of her days.

One of the werewolves pounces on me so I whack him with my silver-plated baseball bat to the side of the head, send him flying down a two-kilometer drop all the way down to splat against the rusted, rotted remains of the ancient railway tracks that snake out of the mountain range. The ground might not be silver, but it’s going to be a while before he’s up and running again. Another one of the werewolves lunges at me, goes for a feint and swipes at my face, so I wheel around and land a blow to his chest with my reinforced elbow-guard, knocking the wind out of him. The force of the blow sends me sliding down across the floor. It makes the fingers on my right hand flop down like wet hot dogs, so I switch the bat to my left arm. Won’t make for much of a swing, but it’s definitely going to sting. Somewhere ahead of me, in the bowels of the zeppelin an engine explodes, adding to the conflagration that is consuming the Hindenburg. Smelted, burning engine parts pitter-patter over house roofs. An axle smashes that ghastly gypsum cat statue on top of Mister Landsdale’s pet shop. The surface of the balloon makes a sharp forty-five degree incline. I click my heels together and Mister Nomura’s patented AdhereAll™ smart-spikes shoot out from the soles of my shoes, grip the surface below me. One of the werewolf braves moves in, thinking he’s up for an easy kill. This one’s a little bit smarter; he fixes his claws down into the wooden planks, digs in deep to steady himself, tries to bite my neck. The following explosion, which destroys the zeppelin’s auxiliary tanks makes him stumble; turns his killing blow into a mighty miss. So I crack him one in the ribs, another in the jaw and watch the teeth scatter in the high-velocity wind. We’re dropping like a meteor straight out of a disaster movie now, as big as the sky and wreathed in a halo of flame. Orsonville rises up to meet us.

I wonder if this will make people look up, this time. Or maybe they’ll just shrug and move on, unless the Hindenburg crashes into the school or totals the library. Even then, one of the residents in the Valente Old Folk’s home will tell you how they got it worse in ’65 and how young people got it easy these days.

I hear something wailing below, over the roar of the flames. The altimeter’s gone quiet, probably reduced to a mass of boiling glass and melted metal by now. I make out the distant, mournful wailing of an air raid siren. Looks like Uriah finally found some use for it. All those weeks, months, years of watching the skies finally paid off. He’s probably cackling like mad down there, screaming I Tol’ You So’s and Who’s Crazy Now’s at Skeptic Jane and Cynic Cleetus down below. The Hull finally sheds off the Hindenburg, lands on Mister Guttierez’s convenience store, reducing it rubble. I think of all the rows of stale donuts and the creaking, cranky Slurry™ machines and the comic books and the cheap Zippo knockoff lighters going up in flames and his cash stall, filled to the brim with all the change he short-charged me every day of every week during this entire year that I’ve visited his store. The loss of all that dead weight make us gain a little bit of altitude, just enough so we won’t end up crashing into Ellison Street, with its rows of neatly-packed houses with their green lawns and its worried, terrified families.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Two of the werewolves skitter by and grasp my jeans to hold on. One of them tries to pull himself up, get a cheap shot in. I bring the baseball bat handle down on his face again and again until he lets go. The fur on his face sizzles where the silver has landed. After another couple of hits, he lets go. I don’t even notice my pants leg is ripping until I feel the wind against my calves. When I turn to look, the other werewolf’s gone. They’ve probably landed all over the Orsonville Mall roof by now.

I chance a glance behind me and see that we’re heading toward Henderson Lake. There’s enough industrial waste and runoff petrol from frakking operations there to turn the entire mass into a fireball as soon as the flame hits, but at least it’s a long way away from Orsonville. There shouldn’t be too much damage. Mission accomplished. The world is as good as saved. I don’t dare say it out loud, but I’m feeling pretty damn invincible right now. Like Major Steele and Jean LeFevre the parkour champ all rolled into one. I feel ten feet tall and my heart is pumping fast; like I could chew steel and breathe fire. But when I see Gunda stomping out of the flames, fur bristling, claws at the ready, a row of teeth so long and sharp they could tear strips off a battleship's hull, so angry she could tear down the Moon and eat it, I remind myself that it’s time to get the hell out.

“Finn! You bastard!” she howls like the Bad Wolf in the picture books Mom used to read to me, when I was four and scared of the dark. Time to go. Putting pressure on my heels to activate the switch that retracts the spikes, I let myself slide down the incline just a little bit, turn my body to brake my descent. If I do it the way Dad showed me, I should be able to jump over the railing, do a flip and then let the wind carry me behind the zeppelin just in time to control my fall enough to maybe break only a couple of bones on landing.

If I don’t, at least I’ll make a pretty corpse. Glancing back, I see Gunda stomping down across the incline. She moves like something out of a nightmare, deceptively slow. Her every step is calculated, seems to ignore gravity and the steepness of the incline. I tell myself that she’s not as close or as fast as she seems and that I’m going to make it. I guess that’s the same thing all those stumbling, doomed cheerleaders tell themselves in slasher movies, just before they turn around and see the man in the bloody coveralls standing right in front of them.

Skidding down the floor, approaching maximum velocity, I jump up in the air. True to form, Gunda slams into me like a steam-hammer. Her moon-mad face fills my field of vision, her eyes as wide as saucers.

“You ruined everything!” she snarls as we bounce off the railing, across the balloon, down the nose. Her claws dig into my back. I hear her tearing my backpack across the seams, reducing it to canvas ribbons and useless lengths of zipper. It all happens in the span of a couple of instants, almost too fast for the eye to see. My tools rain down, a hail of vials full of wolfsbane concentrate and mandrake root powder and mercury, strewn across the forest floor. If I make it out of this alive, Mister Pettus is going to be so pissed. He will probably berate my corpse at my own funeral. Grab me by the neck and just beat the living tar out of me, ordering me to get up so he can chew me out some more. Provided there’s enough of me left after the drop.

“Die!” she howls.

“After you.” I say.

Gunda opens her mouth so wide that she could fit my entire head between her jaws. I push the tip of my baseball bat up against her wide open mouth, let her taste silver. She bites into it anyway; grazes the plating, reduces the shaft to splinters. Her gums and tongue sizzle where the silver lingers, but she’s too mad to care. She spits at my face, grazes my cheeks with her front teeth looking for a vein or a patch of flesh that she can peel clean off. She rakes her claws across my back, tearing up the spider-silk layers of armor underneath. I’m too terrified to scream, settling instead for twisting my bat handle and the mess that’s left of the shaft into her mouth. It cracks and I drive the jagged edge against her palate.

Tree-branches whip at the back of my head, my ears and eyes. Shifting my weight slightly, I turn both of us in mid-air so she’s below me, hoping that her body can break my fall. I mutter a quick, garbled mess of a prayer. Gunda finishes off my bat, moves in for my throat. I feel her teeth grazing my jugular, piercing the skin. I’m perhaps three seconds away from dying and all I can think of is how pissed Anton is going to be if he finds out I stood him up on our date because I’m dead.

We crash into the ground at thirty meters a second just as the hijacked Hindenburg falls into Henderson Lake, turning its surface into a pillar of fire a hundred meters tall.