ACADEMY FOR THE DAMNED

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Four

Juliette, Dillon, Emily, Amina and Ike broke contact and stared at one another. Amina was shaking. Emily had her crucifix out and was praying and weeping. Dillon and Ike sat immobile with shock. Juliette was the first to recover.

"Ut'Urlis-Hr'Her is here! In this world! We must form a collective mind."

They knew what she meant. The five held hands once more and reached out with their minds to the other teenagers in the building. Most of the teenagers in and around the building had been forced to take Dr Frank's poison and were now like the walking dead. They wandered about aimlessly, not looking at one another. Some stood leaning against walls with drool dribbling down their chins. These minds could not be reached.

But a significant number hated and mistrusted their masters and through trickery or downright acts of defiance had not taken the tranquilizers, and these minds the five could reach. These teens knew of Ut'Urlis-Hr'Her's appearance and understood survival against this powerful enemy lay in their numbers. They all embraced the group mind. The handful of adult psychics understood the danger and they too melded their consciousness with that of the collective mind.

smashed its way through the passages and rooms and as it encountered the spaced out teenagers it absorbed them into its substance, tearing their flesh from their bones and their blood and then the bones themselves which flew across space and vanished into its body allowing Ut'Urlis-Hr'Her to become bigger and more powerful. Below the building, within its bowels, the caged monsters sensed the arrival of their master and struggled ferociously against their confinement and finally broke free, tearing aside the steel bars and making their way out of the dungeon like room into the passage leading to the upper levels.

Outside in the courtyard Macleod and his people were fighting a life or death battle. The creatures outside the wall who had bided their time, unable to scale the wall or even fly over it, but drawn to the psychic feast within, now were given the power to move up the wall and drop down into the courtyard below.

Things that scuttled like spiders approached the building. Others that seemed like giant insects with flat heads and mandibles and large compound eyes and antennae and jointed bodies but who walked upright on two human-like legs and advanced on the building obeying the summons from their master.

Other creatures flew over the wall on leathery bat like wings and alighted on the concrete courtyard and looked about them as if wondering where next to go. They half strode and half flew to the building. Macleod and his men opened fire with their automatic weapons and fired grenades at the approaching army of terror. Monsters looking like giant octopi slithered over the wall on their tentacles and dropped onto the courtyard and started to slither across the concrete towards the armed men.

The invasion over the wall was taking place at every point. Macleod had what was left of his people distributed around the wall in a defensive circle but they were massively outnumbered. Macleod wore a head set allowing him to communicate with his people. He was hearing screams of terror and pain as his men were attacked on other parts of the building's outer perimeter.

"Bailey!" he barked into the microphone. "Where's the Browning?"

"On it!" came the reply.

.50 calibre bullets sprayed out of the heavy mounted gun in the tower. The Browning M2 was on a motorised turret and had a full circle sweep of the ground below and the bullets ripped into the creatures coming over the wall.

"All forces, the big gun has it for the moment. Get inside the building."

Some of the men around him succumbed to the beasts. Tentacles whipped out and surrounded one man and picked him off his feet, drawing him to an octopoid beast. A crab like creature had leapt and landed on one man and he fell to the ground as the creature started to eviscerate him and, by means of its pincers, fed morsels of flesh into its waiting mouthparts.