Chapter 20- For the Defense of Our State

Matt ducked back behind the wall. The man in the blue uniform didn't seem to care. He kept firing his rifle down the hall. Flynn leveled his pistol and braced his hands against the duel stage, then squeezed off one shot. The shot hit the man in the knee, but he didn't go down like a normal man. He continued firing down the hall and almost took Flynn's head off.

"Hit him hard, in the hand!" Matt shouted. "Don't shoot to kill!" Flynn crawled farther down the stage, leveled the pistol again, and squeezed off another shot. This one hit the man in the finger, which shattered. The firing stopped, because by some miracle Flynn had hit him in the trigger finger. Matt rushed out and grabbed the rifle out of the man's hands before he could shift to another finger, then grabbed the man by his colar and lifted him off the ground. Everyone else came out from behind the duel stage. All the other humans that had been behind the blue-unformed man had run away.

"Who are you?" Matt demanded. "Why are you shooting at us? Answer now!"

The man's mouth moved slowly up and down, but no sound came out. Matt, disgusted with the absolute failure of the interrogation, threw him to the ground. "Well, that completes my conclusion that a possessed human cannot talk." He picked up the rifle. The clip was almost completely expended. "Worthless." He threw the rifle over his head. "Let's get out of here." He pulled out his shotgun and walked out the door.

"What was that all about?" Drake asked Julie.

"Before we found you guys, we had found another of those zombie-ish humans. Matt tried to get it to talk, but it wouldn't. He suggested that we find another, and randomly blew the floor up!" she said.

"So, it was a complete accident that he saved all our asses?" Drake asked.

"I suppose you could say that."

"What are you holding?"

"Oh, this?" She held up a key. "This is the master key for the entire building. Matt decided that it would be better than blowing every closed door up. Less property damage, he claimed, would be good when this was over."

"Get down!" Matt shouted from the front, and he dropped to the floor. The others were not far behind him. More rifle shots echoed through the hallway over their heads. Matt leveled his shotgun from the prone position and pulled the triggers. Three of the possessed humans met their maker in the ensuing flak burst. Flynn got lucky and got one in the head with a quick shot. Matt rolled out of the way of a shot and jumped to his feet, then ran forward and impaled the last one on his combat knife.

"Where are all these armed zombie guys coming from?" Keith asked. Matt turned and looked him in the eyes.

"You didn't know that this academy has armed guards?" he asked.

"It does?"

"Yeah. We essentially have our own military. The administrators try to protect our 'secrets' or something like that. But now that I think about it…" Matt trailed off, scratching his hair.

"What's up?" Drake asked.

"Well, to have an army of any kind, there's always a barracks. Maybe we can find it and find something to protect us better than just my shotgun and the pistol."

"But where is it?"

"I don't know. But it shouldn't be hard to find. I mean, how hard is it to find a barracks filled with soldiers and weapons?" Famous last words (well, not really last). It took them nearly three hours (and about eight more shotgun shells) before they found it. "Well, that took a little long."

"A little? It's three hours later! Didn't you read that last bit?" Flynn asked.

"Ah, three hours is no time at all in the big picture of things. Julie, hand me the keys."

"Uh…"

"YOU LOST THEM?!?"

"Uh, yeah, I think I did when that last fiend-possessed attacked me." She patted her pockets and pulled out the insides. "Yeah, they're not here…"

"Ah, no matter." Matt said, and kicked down the door. There was no one inside, but there were lots of empty bunks and racks. "Seems to have been cleaned out, but look to see if they took everything." They all spread out, hoping to find something worth finding. Keith, the lucky dog of the bunch, found a full rack of the rifles that the fiend-possesseds had been using, along with a large amount of ammunition. Half the clips were bad, infested by some strange parasite, but they managed to salvage a fair amount of weaponry.

"Awesome." Said Drake, locking a clip into place in his M-24 and pulling out the stock. "This thing rocks!"

"Just make sure that you don't blow someone's head off with it." Keith said, hoisting an M-249 SAW.

"You should talk, Mister Squad-Automatic-Weapon."

"Just chill out, both you guys." Julie said, cocking an M-16. "I don't think any of us will blow anyone's head off."

"We'll just blow the fiend-possesseds away." Flynn said, loading a small cylinder into the breech of his M-203. "Let's roll."

"Yeah." Matt said. He alone had not picked out a new weapon. He claimed that the duck gun was all he needed. Then again, Drake thought, he was pretty dangerous with it, so that might be a valid point. They left the room, new armaments in tow, and set out for…

"Hey, where are we going, anyway?" Julie asked.

"We need to get back to the secret base. I want to know something." Matt said. They turned a corner and ran into… a monster! No, actually, it was just Professor Helen, the resident deck construction expert. But there was a strange force over her. Her eyes were blank and her skin was pale. Her duel disk seemed to have fused with her arm. When she saw them, one of her hands reached out and grabbed Matt by the throat. Then it lifted him from the ground. As Matt struggled violently against the cold hand at his windpipe, Keith got around to the side of Prof. Helen and began hammering away at her elbow with his SAW. Though there was no noticeable physical damage, Prof. Helen (or whatever was controlling her, Drake thought) released Matt and clutched her elbow in pain. Then she pointed at Matt.

"Hey, I'm not dueling someone who does that kind of stuff." He said, massaging his neck. "Pick on someone else."

"No!" came the voice out of Prof. Helen's mouth. But it wasn't her voice. Drake could tell. It had the tinge of the voice of a shadow realm fiend to it. "I want you! I want… your soul!"

"You can't have it." Matt said. "Not by dueling me, at least. Because you haven't a chance in the world of ever defeating me."

"Fine, then." She hissed. "I will challenge one of your friends for your soul, then! And I pick…" She sized up each of them. "...her!"

No! Drake thought. I don't think she's ready for the Shadow Game! And from the look of things, neither did Julie. She looked like she was ready to pee in her pants.

"Uh…" said Julie. She looked at Matt, then at Drake, Keith, Flynn, and back to Matt. "Uh, can someone help me out here?"

"No! None of them can help you now… I'll destroy you in a duel, then steal your friend's soul for your failure!" said Helen. She activated her duel disk. "We can do this right here, right now! Let's go!"

Julie reluctantly activated her duel disk. "Okay."

"Let's duel!"