Deal With The Devil: Library throwdown

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

Kyle and Tabitha's talk about literature is interrupted by an attack of the Dante's Inferno variety. Poor Tabitha, her library will never be the same again.



Tabitha scowled at the windows that showed the darkness outside. She really HAD meant to get out of the library at a decent time tonight. She sighed and started to close out her work and shut down the computer.

"You know, when phones make the bzzt noise, it means someone's texting you and not that the phone's just vibrating for the hell of it." Kyle said, as he came into the library, steaming-cardboard-boxes first. "I'm pretty sure phones don't do that for fun. Or maybe they do and I just have a phone that's not fun." He waved his free hand at a box. "I come bearing bribery and tribute in the form of steamed bbq buns."

"Food!" Tabs exclaimed happily. She inhaled deeply. "It smells so good." Then the rest of what he said filtered through. "Phone?" She opened her desk drawer and saw several waiting text messages. "Oops?"

"See, this is how we end up one of those mummy corpses in ancient tombs. That dude didn't mean to be there, he just got into his work and like, ten hours later, oh shit, walled in." Kyle joked. "Also that dude didn't get BBQ buns from the bun place." He snagged a chair from one of the library tables and plopped down on it. "So while you try to put a whole bun on your mouth at once, Ima need to pick your brain because dude, I was making with the lesson plan and seriously, did you know that Alexandre Dumas was a black dude? I mean Obama black, so really only half or something but dude. So I want to like, dig up some stuff on anyone else who was from before, I dunno, Mark Twain or whatever. We've got a bunch of kids who aren't white, I wanna not like, alienate them with nine hundred years of white dudes writing white people."

She grinned, Kyle touched on one of her favorite subject. "Actually, Alexandre Dumas was TWO black dudes. They were both quite prolific and talented. Father and son-" A split second of something resembling a migraine aura preceded the Professor's voice. The mansion was under attack. She looked up to see if Kyle had received the message as well. She reached into the bottom drawer of her desk for a pair of jeans. Not as durable as her team leathers, but a damned sight better than the flowy, completely impractical skirt she favored. There was no helping the ballet flats, consequences of working where you lived, she supposed. "I should really start wearing combat boots. No one will see them," she muttered as she pulled her jeans up under the skirt.

Kyle's reaction to the warning had been a pained grunt, and an almost startling change in posture and demeanor. The loose casual English teacher was gone, replaced with a wary expression and a predatory pose. Before Tabitha had managed to zip and button her jeans, he'd kicked off the holey sneakers and his vest and tie were now decorating the desk. "Fuck I hope that smell is Kurt and not something worse." The smell of sulphur and acid had drifted in through the vents. "I like having skin."

The library doors blew off their hinges, cutting off Tabitha's carefully clever reply. Instead, she growled in anger and flew over the counter to kick at the first body she could identify. She tossed a flash-bang through the doorway mid-leap. "Bright light!" She shouted the warning to Kyle.

It wasn't Kurt. Which was about all Kyle could say for it - the largest thing in the group of things had the forked tail, but was scaly red and hissing, and he was pretty sure that it wasn't Catholic. He hit the ground, clapping both hands over his ears - the bright light wasn't going to be half the problem that burst eardrums would be if Tabs' bomb went off big, and popped back up almost immediately after the very loud Bang!

Kyle had just enough time to notice that the scaly red thing was gone before he had a bigger problem - a pair of smaller, also-scaly brown things that leapt at him from the open doorway. The pair of demons moved fast enough to almost be untrackable, and for a few moments he had his hands full with one wrapping itself around his leg and biting and the other jumping at his neck and face with sharp talons. He felt the thing slice open his cheek - and managed to get it by the neck and slam it down on the ground.

She slammed into her target, a big blue-brown scaly bit of terror, with both feet. She may as well have hit a brick wall, her knees burned with pain as she bounced right back off. Before she hit the floor, something caught her. Claws bit into her ribs and thigh, she only caught a glimpse of more blue-brown scales before she flew back through the air. Reflex curled her body right before she hit a tall bookshelf. Tabitha and the bookshelves toppled into the next one.

One shelf after another crashed down as Tabs struggled to remember how to breathe.

"Oh man, now you've done it." Kyle said, through gritted teeth - he had one arm wrapped around the neck of the demon that had been chewing on his leg, and was dragging it towards the windows as it screeched and tried to bite at his hand. "Tabs, I need a exit! We'll -fix- the wall. Get us outside!"

"Sure," Tabitha wheezed as she pulled herself to her knees among the broken wood and shredded books. Two bombs, fast and dirty, hit the closest wall, shattering glass, more wood, and gypsum. She threw her arms up over her face to shield it as much as possible, the thunderclap of destruction made her ears ring. Before the smoke cleared completely, she stumbled to her feet, struggling to follow Kyle's directive to get outside.

Between Tabitha's bombs and the demons, it had gotten hard to breathe. The explosion that took out the windows let in fresh air that helped clear the acidic smoke out, but sent ash and dust everywhere at the same time. Kyle kicked at the demon that was still writhing around trying to bite him anywhere it could gain a hold of, and then bared his teeth and growled at it as it showed him a mouth full of needlelike teeth. It screeched and opened it's mouth to bite, and got a set of sharp claws slashing across it's face in return, as Kyle raked down it's head and neck.

She remembered to tuck and roll when she hit the ground, but she flopped out spread-eagle at the end of her roll. A giant clawed foot nearly crushed her head, but she scrambled out of the way with only a scratch on her cheek. She twisted her body in the snow, hooked her legs around her attacker's, and dragged him to the ground with her. She shoved a bomb into its mouth and rolled away as it went off. Instead of filling the air with wet chunks of flesh, the creature dissolved into smoke.

Kyle went out the gaping hole in the wall with a demon-imp-thing still clawing at his back. He hit the ground in a crouch as it got it's teeth into his neck, and his snarl of pain drowned out it's ugly screeching. He grabbed blindly, got his claws into it's ears and dragged the thing off his body and hen slammed it down into the ground hard. It twitched a few times and then didn't move - just melted into the ground into a sort of muddy lava that left the grass smoking.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, are there any more of those?" He got out, between labored breaths and trying to wipe blood off his face.

Tabitha looked around carefully, catching her breath. "Looks like there aren't any here. Should we go find more? Do you need the infirmary?"

Kyle shook his head, made a pained growl, and then pulled his shirt off without unbuttoning it to wipe the blood off his neck and face. It was half in shreds already anyway. "By the time we'd get there, it'd heal." He pressed the ruined shirt into a really ugly looking slice in his side and then sniffed the air a few times. "There's still more, I can smell them - they stink. We should get back in and check the kids." Dammit, the kids, hopefully most of them were smart and evacuating and he knew most of them weren't, because they were teenagers.

She stretched out her bad knee, tested weight on it. She nodded. Nothing needed stitches. "Let's go."