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...presents... Linus Killed Your Sister, Charlie Brown!
A Fan Fiction
by Gary Achenbach
__//////\ -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- /\\\\\\__
__ Grand Imperial Dynasty __
Est. 1984 \\\\\\/ cDc paramedia: texXxt 429-10/30/2024 \////// Est. 1984
___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ __
|___heal_the_sick___raise_the_dead___cleanse_the_lepers___cast_out_demons__|
Disclaimer: I do not own Peanuts or any of its characters, who were created
by Charles M. Schulz. This fanfiction is written purely for entertainment
purposes and is not intended for profit.
***[The present. Pre-disruption]***
"Life used to be simpler," Charles thought vaguely as he ran down the
street, firing wildly with twin Uzis into the shambling mob of zombies moving
menacingly forward. Every now and then, he'd throw a grenade into an
especially large clump of them.
Both Uzis ran out of ammo at the most inopportune moment. Charles
shrugged and tossed them aside, dropping into a defensive stance. If he had
to die, he'd make sure a good number of the Dead died more than he did.
"YOU STUPID BLOCKHEAD!" someone screamed. Despite himself, Charles
grinned. The cavalry had arrived. The next few minutes were a confused
jumble of war cries, machine gun fire, and the whoosh of jury-rigged
flame-throwers.
Captain Schroeder strode dramatically out of the haze of smoke, a hot M60
held in each arm. As the bullet-ridden zombies stirred occasionally, he fired
brief bursts to make them extra-dead. The faceless extras comprising his
squad busied themselves with dragging the stilled zombies into big piles and
turning flamethrowers upon them.
Schroeder tossed one of his heavy machine guns aside in order to salute.
"General, your distraction worked. The sector's ours. Beethoven would be
proud."
Charles sighed deeply. "Good... he would?"
"Oh yeah. If he were here."
Charles gestured to the flaming piles of Van Pelts. "Maybe he was."
"That wasn't funny."
He shrugged, and removed a large walkie-talkie from his belt. Thumbing
the transmit button, he said, "General Brown speaking. All officers report to
HQ. Out."
- x X x -
He didn't look particularly old. His eyes were whirling pools of
something inhuman, but they weren't old. A young demon's eyes, perhaps. The
darkly glowing apparition that he was speaking to, however, was old. Very
old, and very powerful.
--how goes the plan, my servant?-- the manifestation questioned, wavering
slightly, its words appearing via telepathy in Van Pelt's mind.
Linus did not look up from the ground. Even as he was now, he could not
bear the direct sight of his Master. "All the materials are at hand. The
platinum, the crystals, the DNA samples from Stephen Hawking...." He'd been
gathering up these materials for the last twenty years, more or less
simultaneously with raising his army of the dead and subjugating the world in
the name of his Master... at least, subjugating those parts that Brown's
Alliance hadn't taken back or refused to give up.
--excellent. you will require one more vital ingredient.--
"What ingredient, my Master?"
The manifestation was silent.
"Master?"
--you require a handful of dirt.--
He nodded sagely. "Dirt. Of course. The ritual can begin within
minutes, then." As he said this, he scooped up a clod of earth from beside
him.
--no, you fool. not just any dirt. you need special dirt for this
task.--
He dropped the handful of earth. "Special dirt?"
--soil charged with innocence. soil charged with youth.--
"The soil around any number of your sacrificial altars, then."
--no. soil charged with hope, soil charged with passion and desire.--
Linus hummed. "Tall order. Take a few days longer."
--not just anyone's hope and passion. you require soil charged with all
these things. charged by *you*--
Linus looked up. He screamed, briefly as the sight of his Master tore
away another shred of his humanity and sent it spinning into oblivion, and
said, "You yourself took those from me, Master!"
--in exchange for power of which you could only dream--
"Very true. But they are gone, lost in the past."
--yes. and that is where you must find this last material. loam from a
place where, year after year, you charged it with your childhood innocence and
naivety, with your darkening desire. the place where you finally succeeded in
calling me.--
Comprehension dawned. "The pumpkin patch...."
--you must go there the night before the one you called me. it is
foretold. you should not have any problems. you already have enough
ingredients to conjure the device needed. here is what you need:--
- x X x -
"Van Pelt's stronghold is thirty miles that-away," Brown gestured with
one hand while slamming the pointer against the tactical map, which had so
many symbols and different color-coded regions on it that it was near
unreadable. "Those thirty miles have more Dead per square yard than the
entire European front. A straight assault won't get the job done."
"Therefore we need a distraction," said a harsh mechanical voice.
Brown nodded to his second-in-command, who was scratching his ear with a
hind paw at the moment. The vocoder, built into his collar, spoke again, its
miniature speaker making a slight pop. "My division is ready. Lieutenant
Woodstock will be beginning the diversionary air assault at 1800 hours,
October 30th" Colonel Snoopy finished scratching his ear and began to noisily
lick his groin.
It had been a pleasant surprise when it was discovered that the
perennially-silent Franklin had been probably the smartest man alive on the
planet, even before Van Pelt unleashed his hordes of darkness. When Snoopy
had been hovering on the edge of death some 20 years earlier, Franklin not
only healed him, but took the time to install a wide array of nanoimplants
in his brain, in effect adding an artificial human cortex on top of the
already abnormal dog's brain. A few interface plugs allowed Snoopy to hook
up to speaking devices, vehicles, and robotic arms.
Woodstock and sundry other animals had come a few years later, when he'd
shrunk the devices down even further. He had solved a major manpower problem
at the time.
"We'll be putting up literally everything we have that can fly, under
Woodstock's command," Brown resumed. "As yet, the Dead can't do much against
air assaults."
"But Van Pelt is certain to have anti-air defenses in place," Schroeder
pointed out.
"Which is why it is a diversionary assault. While Woodstock is trimming
the defenses in that regard, *we* will be making the primary assault from the
one direction Linus won't be expecting us." Brown made an odd motion with his
hand. "We... will tunnel. Franklin has designed a tank that can travel
underground at speeds of two hundred miles per hour. We'll be in Van Pelt's
stronghold before he realizes what's happening. And once we're in, the
operation becomes a straightforward seek and destroy. With any luck, Van Pelt
will be a corpse before the stroke of midnight."
- x X x -
Van Pelt stood in front of his time machine, finally satisfied with his
work. The core of it was rather simple - a basketball-sized crystal tinted a
rather sickly green. It really wasn't a full-blown H.G. Wells type of thing;
it was created specifically to send him back in time twenty years and bring
him back after his task was completed. All he had to do was activate it by
spilling a drop of blood on it and go.
But, it just wasn't impressive enough, he had decided. This, after
all, was the device that would lead him to building the device that would
finally give the world into his Master's hands. He had spent weeks after the
crystal itself had grown, adding several dozen Jacob's ladders and huge Tesla
coils about the thing. So many, in fact, that walking to the actual crystal
was a task fraught with danger.
He held his hand over the crystal, and intoned the activation mantra in
a stentorian voice. Just before he jabbed his middle finger with a ceremonial
needle, every alarm in the stronghold went off. It was very loud.
Cursing, he stormed out of the time travel chamber to see what was up.
"BANZAI!" is what Woodstock would have been screaming had he been wired
into a vocoder at the moment. He wasn't, so he simply thought it. What he
was wired into was a heavily-modified F-16, so loaded down with ordnance that
it could barely stagger through the air.
Things got easier as he activated the computer-controlled bomb release
series. Tactical nuclear cluster bombs arced away and detonated, carving a
twenty-mile wide path of destruction through the haplessly milling Dead below.
Woodstock felt mildly worried as the shockwaves tossed his plane about
the sky like a ping-pong ball, and thought a brief prayer to the Seed God,
Keeper of the Holy Feeder, asking simply that the EMP shielding on the plane's
miles of circuitry held out. It did, and Woodstock mentally wrestled his
fighter under control. He quickly chose some tempting clumps of Dead and
dropped some fuel-air explosives that were only slightly less impressive than
the peewee nukes themselves.
It was around this point that several warning buzzers went off. He
chirped in frantic alarm and thought his plane through a series of evasive
maneuvers that would have killed him had he not been sealed in several cubic
feet of acceleration gelatin. Through a combination of skill and luck, he
managed to avoid the dozen or so SAMs that had locked on his plane.
Then things *really* got hairy.
- x X x -
Hundreds of feet below ground, a wedge-formation of several dozen
unlikely-looking vehicles burrowed busily. Inside lead-lined compartments,
the various shock troops under Brown's command tried to ignore the fact that
they were seated over a barely-controlled fusion reaction.
The moles spat out a constant stream of superheated plasma ahead of
them, vaporizing the dirt and rock and essentially surfing down the
lava-slicked passageways.
Things went well until they burst out of the rock and into a very large
cavern. Trailing plasma and clinging magma, the moles slammed to the ground
in a lazy arc.
Inside his control room, Van Pelt watched the air assault being
systematically carved apart with an air of smugness. Bombers and fighters
were blown out of the sky with pathetic regularity, though a few seemed to be
dodging with truly unlikely luck.
He dismissed the tremors rumbling through the ground. Any thought of a
subterranean attack was absurd. Even Brown wasn't foolish enough to try to
attack through a tunnel network so infested with Dead that it made aboveground
look like a walk in the park.
Brown hadn't planned on the cavern being there. He'd expected to emerge
more or less in Van Pelt's basement. According to the instruments, the
stronghold was half a mile distant. It could be worse, he supposed, and gave
the order to disembark.
Squads of the most elite troopers in the Alliance fanned out from the
steaming moles, in textbook-perfect formation. Night-vision goggles made the
cavern seem bright as midday. Swarms of red dots, cast from the weapons'
laser scopes, swam dizzyingly across the walls.
Portable radar mappers swept the cavern, uncovering multiple tunnels.
Soon, an easy route was discovered leading to Van Pelt's stronghold. The
small army moved out.
- x X x -
Snoopy paced irritably across the bridge, his claws ticking continuously
on the floor. He stopped at a console, his harness unfolding a telescoping
arm, which tapped a few buttons. Cameras panned across the battle raging
outside. His augmented brain weighed the kill ratios of the air forces.
"Diversionary raid my ass," his vocoder barked. "We'll have this wrapped
up by the time the mole squad breaks through."
A faint rumble ran through the floor, as several Phalanx point-defense
cannons blew an incoming SAM to shreds.
Snoopy gestured at a large clumping of radar emitters on the ground radar
display. "Someone please destroy those," he said. Faceless extras hit the
proper buttons. The "Leviathan," the half-mile long, rocket-propelled,
armor-plated, radar-invisible atomic dirigible that was the flagship of the
Alliance's air forces, swung a few degrees to the left. One of the two
hundred untapped weapons bays irised open and fired a salvo of tacnukes at the
largest remaining SAM site. A bit of overkill, but it definitely worked.
- x X x -
The walk through the caverns was relatively quiet for about fifteen
minutes. Then, as the walls crumbled apart, unleashing a veritable sea of
Dead, things got very noisy indeed. Continual gunfire, screaming,
explosions... that kind of thing.
There was a single functioning SAM site left. It fired its last salvo of
eleven missiles seconds before it was destroyed by approximately thirty
different bombs.
Ten missiles locked onto the drifting bulk of the Leviathan. Four
immediately did a neat 180 and slammed into the ground, sophisticated
electronic brains curdled by the ECM gear the airship carried. Three more
veered to various harmless tangents, following clouds of chaff, flares, and
electronic decoys. Two were carved apart by the point-defense phalanx
cannons. The final one punched through the Leviathan's most lightly-armored
section and exploded in the primary hydrogen envelope.
The Leviathan used hydrogen for lifting power because it was required to
fuel its onboard fusion reactors. Also, hydrogen, even the tons of it
contained, simply couldn't combust with enough force to damage the frame of
the airship. The Hindenburg had essentially been a cloth bag. The Leviathan
was made of a composite Kevlar laminate with the strength of titanium. So the
problem was not the explosion itself. The problem was that the explosion
consumed all of the gas that kept the airship afloat. Very quickly. Almost
instantaneously, in fact.
Gravity took note of the situation, and the Leviathan obtained all of the
aerodynamic properties of a large rock. It fell, with a tremendous amount of
force.
It collapsed the caverns below it.
- x X x -
Brown and the remnants of his assault force were so busy trying to stay
alive that they didn't even notice when they emerged into Van Pelt's
stronghold. Things did get easier, however, when the caverns suddenly
collapsed behind them, burying the onrushing wave of Dead. The ones that had
made it through were quickly disposed of.
Unfortunately, when the caverns collapsed, the wave of rubble killed the
three remaining members of his squad. Charles stared blankly at the settling
wall of dust. Schroeder had been in there.
Grimly, he reloaded his assault cannon and proceeded, alone.
- x X x -
The eleventh missile described a brief circle as it searched for a
target. It found one.
Woodstock tried to dodge this missile like all the others. Seconds
before impact, he realized that there was no way in hell he'd make it.
Unfortunately, the ejection mechanism didn't seem to work.
He solemnly uttered the age-old bird death thought. "Fuck."
- x X x -
Snoopy crawled, snarling, out of the twisted wreckage of the Leviathan,
miraculously unharmed. The scent of scorched metal and dead bodies assaulted
his nose--the battlefield was silent. He shook his head to clear it, and
began padding toward Van Pelt's battered stronghold, some hundred feet
distant, hackles raised.
- x X x -
Van Pelt chuckled as he saw the Leviathan smash into the ground. His
chuckle died when his floor tilted slightly. "That's over with. Now... back
to the past." He strode purposefully to his temple/laboratory.
Linus and Brown rounded the corner simultaneously, and stared at each
other in unavoidable shock for a few seconds. Finally, Linus smiled
sardonically. "Well, well. If only we had a wall to lean against, we could
philosophize."
Brown sneered. "Philosophize this, you son of a bitch!" He leveled his
weapon. Van Pelt made a casual gesture, and an unseen force yanked it out of
his hands before he could fire.
"You never could get it right, could you?" Linus sighed. "You..." He
gestured again, and Brown yelled as an invisible hand picked him up and
slammed him into the ceiling. "...stupid..." and Brown crunched into the
floor "...blockhead!" He made a final gesture, and Brown hurtled down the
length of the corridor like a bullet through the barrel of a gun. He crashed
into the far wall and lay unmoving.
Van Pelt nodded decisively. "Right." He continued on his way.
- x X x -
Brown woke to a worried lapping at his face. He snapped alert and rolled
to his feet, muscles tensing.
"Calm down, General," Snoopy rasped. "I can smell that blanket-lugging
bastard here."
Brown rubbed his head and retrieved his gun. "Can you track him?"
"Can you walk on two feet? Come on."
"...and don't waste time talking to the fucker this time," Van Pelt heard
as he lanced his middle finger.
Brown didn't. He dove, rolling, through the doorway, placing a big red
targeting dot on Van Pelt's forehead. His finger tensed...
The drop of Linus' blood struck the crystal. There was a flare of light.
Brown's assault cannon roared and tore a huge hole through the space where
Linus had been standing.
"FUCK!" snarled Brown, throwing down his gun in disgust.
The crystal rolled off of the housing, and bounced across the floor to
stop at his feet. As Brown scowled at it, a single drop of blood from one of
his many minor wounds fell onto it. There was a flare of light, and he was
gone.
The crystal began to steam. Snoopy clawed and opened a small cut on his
muzzle. A drop of canine blood fell onto the crystal just as it shattered.
And then there were none.
Outside, everything froze into a free-standing probability wave...
waiting.
- x X x -
[Commercial break. Get Met. It pays.]
***[20 years earlier]***
***[Pre-disruption]***
It was Halloween. The gang, at an average age of 15, had gotten a bit
too old for the trick-or-treating, but still gathered for a party. Peppermint
Patty had contacted some older friends, and there were kegs there. Costumes
ranged from elaborate to stupid. Most of the kids were drunk.
The main topic of joking was Linus. He was, apparently, spending the
night in the pumpkin patch. Again. Granted, Sally was with him, but the
general concurrence was that there were better make-out points.
"Like, I'm sure," Lucy was saying, loudly. "Gawd, my brother is stupid!"
"Oh, he'll grow out of it," said one of her girlfriends in a mock serious
tone of voice. "Like, when he's thirty-five or something." The gaggle
dissolved into howls of laughter.
"What do you think, blockhead?" Lucy called out as Charles drifted by.
He was wearing his standard costume, a white sheet covered with irregularly
spaced holes.
"Ah... fuck you," he said without real emotion. Puberty hadn't made Lucy
any prettier, but it sure as hell had made her bitchier.
"Like you'd know how!" she retorted, cuing the Coven's giggle fits.
A fairly typical party. Childish squabbles had gotten a bit uglier, and
of course the upstairs rooms tended to have couples making out in them, but
otherwise, fairly typical.
- x X x -
Sally Brown didn't pay much attention to the fact that the pumpkin patch
seemed to have a pentagram inscribed in it when they arrived. A small hollow
was present in the direct center of it.
The past few years had seen Linus ditch his blanket and hit a major
growth spurt. In the past several years, he'd led several of the school's
athletic teams to championships, before suddenly losing all interest in sports
entirely. This disappointed the coaches and much of the community, but Linus
did not care.
Neither did Sally. The intervening years hadn't stripped away her
childhood crush on him; it had deepened it into full-blown infatuation. She
made sure that they were essentially bonded at the hip, and after Linus'
gonads had activated, he didn't mind the fact.
Sally had blossomed well. That's really the only tasteful way to put it.
Just about every male in the school wanted her, and, truth be told,
not-a-small percentage of the girls did too.
All this physical detail has to be related because at the moment, Linus
and Sally were naked, and, bluntly, fucking like crazed rabbits.
During the height of the libido-fest, Linus' hand moved away from
Sally's blossoming bosom and into the pile of his discarded clothing. It
came back out gripping a slim ceremonial dagger. Sally was a bit too busy
moaning to notice.
A brief thought flitted through Linus' maddened brain. *How can I do
this? I can't...* Then a more powerful voice roared through his mind.
-NOW, MY SERVANT!-
As he climaxed, at the stroke of midnight, he drove the dagger hilt-deep
into Sally Brown's chest. Her moans abruptly changed to a shocked gasp of
pain. Betrayal flickered briefly in her lovely eyes before the light went
out forever.
Moving hurriedly, he flayed open ribs, and ripped out her still-beating
heart. As he deposited it in the hollow in the ground... his Master, at long
last, rose.
Linus screamed at the sight. Something inside him shattered forever.
Then -they- began to speak.
Unnoticed, the boy who'd been watching the couple from behind a giant
pumpkin, masturbating, threw up onto the ground and ran as fast as he possibly
could.
- x X x -
The party was just getting into the swing of things when Pig Pen burst
through the door, breathing harshly. Someone screamed as he ran in--his face
was so pasty-white that they thought it was a particularly frightening
costume.
"Eww, gross!" was Lucy's immediate reaction. "Pig Pen, *when* are you
going to learn to take a fucking shower?"
He ignored her statement and blurted out, "Linus..." he gasped,
"Linus..."
"What about my stupid brother?" Lucy demanded impatiently. People
drifted in from other rooms, staring curiously.
"He... he... he just killed Sally!"
Lucy laughed. "Okay, okay. Lame joke."
Charlie frowned. Pig Pen looked very shook up. "What?" he asked.
"He killed her, Charles! Oh God!" The dirty boy fainted.
Peppermint Patty, perhaps thinking to be "helpful," walked over and
dumped the tub of water and apples over him. It did bring him around again,
though, sputtering and choking.
A sick coil of fear twisted in Charlie's gut. Linus had been acting
progressively weirder as Halloween approached.... "Bullshit!" he said. "This
isn't funny."
"I'm not joking!" snarled Pig Pen. "Linus killed your sister, Charlie
Brown! Something came out of the ground!"
The discussion went on in this vein for quite some time. The practical
upshot was that several of the gang decided to follow Pig Pen back to the
pumpkin patch to see for themselves.
They saw for themselves. A stunned silence settled across the group at
the sight of Sally's gutted body. Charles led off a resultant chorus of
vomiting and dry heaves. There was a long moment of silence.
"My God. She's dead," someone said, quite unnecessarily.
"Yes," said Linus, stepping out of the darkness. "But worth it."
Brown's head slowly lifted. "You. Twisted. Motherfucker," he heard
himself say.
"All of you laughed at me. Year after year after YEAR, you laughed at
me. Now... now you will kneel before the Great Pumpkin or die!"
And all of them saw the Great Pumpkin rise from the ground, a form of
darkness and hate and rot incarnate. Laughing, it surged forward. The gang
split up and ran. And ran. And ran.
- x X x -
"It's time to stop running!" Brown yelled. "We have to fight back!"
It was a week later. The gang was starved, thin, dressed in rags. They
all kind of looked like Pig Pen now.
The town itself had been leveled. The 'Great Pumpkin' had sank back into
the ground.. .and every corpse in the cemetery, and quite a few out of it, had
clawed their way out of the ground and set out on a rampage.
That had been the first night. And the second. The third... no one in
the town was left alive except the group of frightened children. The fourth
night, the National Guard came. The last of them died out on the fifth night,
but not before setting off enough explosions to burn the town to cinders. The
fifth night passed uneventfully... the Dead were marching toward the nearest
city. The sixth night they reached the nearest city, and now, in the seventh,
were involved with destroying it and swelling their ranks.
Franklin surprised everyone by speaking up. "How? They tore the fucking
army apart, man."
"And left their weapons scattered behind them. They're STUPID, Franklin!
The only brains of the outfit is Van Pelt!"
"And the Great Pumpkin," Marcy said morosely. "It's not just zombies,
Chuck. It's that... demon."
"Is it?" Brown retorted. "Why didn't it catch any of us that first
night?" Silence. "Yeah, it gave Linus its power, I guess. But that's all
it's done. All we have to do... is kill Van Pelt."
"'All we have to do,'" snapped Lucy, mockingly. Everyone waited, but she
had no further point.
"All right," Schroeder said finally. "Who's going to accomplish all
this? We need some kind of leader."
Brown scowled. "I will. I owe it to Sally, and this whole damn town!"
Lucy burst out laughing. "You?! You can't do ANYTHING, you blockhead!"
"Look, bitch," Brown began.
"Stop! A test!" Peppermint Patty said. "Let's see if Chuck really *has*
changed."
"I know just the one," Lucy said. She reached into her battered backpack
and pulled out a football. She shrugged. "I grabbed whatever was handy when
we all left town." She placed it firmly on the ground, bracing it by her
fingertips. "Come on...'Chuck.'"
Brown felt only a twinge of nervousness. Not this again. "Fine." He
ran towards her, legs tensing at the last moments... she *snatched* the
football away as his foot started up... and he bent his leg, and pushed it out
from his hip. His heel smashed into Lucy's face with a resounding crack.
Lucy tumbled over backwards, out cold.
"Enough bullshit!" he screamed. "WHO'S WITH ME??!!"
As one, the gang surged to their feet and cheered. (Except, of course,
Lucy.)
- x X x -
Twenty years passed. Skirmishes were fought. Battles were won and lost.
Brown became the head of a mighty Alliance... the Living's only chance against
Van Pelt and his hordes of the Dead. He watched friend after friend fall in
battle. Pig Pen, torn in half. Peppermint Patty...immolating herself and
hundreds of approaching Dead when there was no escape. Lucy...dying after
coming heartbreakingly close to crushing her traitor brother's throat with her
bare hands. Schroeder... crushed in a collapsing cavern. A cybered-up
Woodstock... dead in a fiery explosion in midair.
Twenty years. And one final chance.
- x X x -
***[World War I. Post-disruption.]***
The breath whuffed out of Snoopy as he fell six feet into the bottom of
a muddy trench. The soldiers next to him didn't even look at him as they
surged out of the ditch. Ten seconds later, the last one was cut in half by
German machine gun fire.
"Long way to Tipperary," Snoopy muttered, crawling hurriedly along the
bottom of the dirt passageway. He couldn't scent either Brown or Van Pelt
anywhere nearby, so he assumed the fact the crystal had cracked had fucked
something up in his case.
The doughboys around him ignored him completely, apparently too concerned
with surviving the next two yard charge to worry about a small dog sporting
several metal attachments. Snoopy was content with this. An old memory
tugged at him, leading him somewhere specific...
He reached his destination quickly. An abandoned airbase, located
several hundred yards from the front. There was, however, a functioning
Sopwith Camel. Snoopy barked excitedly and bounded into the cockpit.
Extending his toes to the fullest, he could work all the controls quite well.
He had to modify the shoulder harnesses, but overall, not bad.
He taxied out and took off. He had an old, bizarre canine fantasy to
fulfill.
Baron Von Richtoffen was understandably surprised when the Sopwith Camel
screamed down out of the low cloud cover at the German squadron. He was
understandably even more surprised when he saw who piloted it.
"Mein Gott! A dog?! The Americans must be more pressed for pilots than
they admit!" He scoffed and climbed steeply.
"YEEHAA!" screamed Snoopy, nearly blowing out the speaker in his vocoder.
He dove straight down through the German squadron. Three of the enemy pilots
panicked and ran into each other. He pulled the bi-plane through a tight
reversal, nearly blacking out from the g-forces involved, and fired a brief
burst into two more, neatly carving off their wings.
The remainder of the squadron fled. Snoopy ignored them, focused
entirely on his arch-nemesis, the Red Baron.
"This dog is very skilled," Richtoffen muttered to himself, but in
German. "Appropriately enough, he is a skilled *dog*fighter, hmm?" He
guffawed loudly at his own pun.
The duel began in earnest.
A tense, violent hour passed. Both planes were running on fumes.
Finally, Richtoffen succeeded in pulling a tight Immelmann, and blew huge
holes through Snoopy's Sopwith Camel. Snoopy ran out of ammo, missing
entirely, and began to lose altitude.
"Curse you, Red Baron!" he screamed. But wait! One last chance. He
pushed his plane into a tight, do or die dive. It succeeded. Snoopy and the
Red Baron collided in midair. The mingled wreckage began to tumble
helplessly towards the earth. Richtoffen's eyes widened as sheets of metal
sheared through his torso, and he saluted Snoopy sardonically before he died.
Snoopy's body flared in light and vanished seconds before the planes
carved a flaming crater in the ground.
- x X x -
***[20 years in the past. Post-disruption]***
"About fucking time," Van Pelt muttered. He'd thought that at least the
crystal would deposit him closer than a three hour walk to the pumpkin patch.
At an earlier time, he might have felt nostalgia. Not anymore. Now he
simply wanted to get his handful of dirt and leave. And finally, he was here.
He knelt down, reaching to the ground.
"I don't know what you're doing back here," Brown's voice interrupted.
"And I don't care. I'll kill you here just as well as any place else."
Van Pelt snarled and stood up, flinging his hand outward, calling to his
Master to smite Brown down once and for all.
Nothing happened.
"You haven't *summoned* it yet, 'dear friend.'" Brown dropped into a
ready stance, waiting. "Mano a mano. Come on!"
"All right, all right. Fitting. I'll kill you over the very spot where
I killed Sally tomorrow night."
Brown slide-stepped forward and lashed out with a snap kick. Van Pelt
batted it away easily, following immediately with a flurry of roundhouse
kicks and punches. Brown blocked or evaded them all. The two circled warily
for a time.
Brown exploded into a flurry of blows, driving Van Pelt back.
Eventually, a spinning crescent got through Linus' guard and crashed with
devastating force across his face. He stumbled away, wiping away blood. He
nodded calmly to Brown. "First blood. Too bad you kick like Sally!"
So saying, he executed a jumping side kick ten times faster than any
human being had a right to. It would have been more impressive had it
connected. As it was, Linus landed off balance, stumbling long enough for
Brown to step in and drive an elbow into Van Pelt's right temple. The blow
landed, he backed off, watching his foe reel.
"You've used too much fucking 'magic' over the years, Linus. You've
gotten soft!"
Linus shook his head sharply, regaining his senses. "Soft," he laughed.
"No. Your *sister* was soft." Then he attacked, so fast that Brown barely
could track it, desperately blocking.
Van Pelt dropped low, spinning momentarily, sweeping Brown's legs out
from under him. He rose, and dropped an axe kick into his face. Cartilage
splintered, and Brown howled in pain, rolling desperately to the side to
avoid the following kicks.
"Pity," Linus muttered. "An inch higher and that would have killed you."
He followed the downed Brown, kicking him repeatedly.
Finally, Brown moved no more, staring blindly upward. Van Pelt knelt
down. "You never could finish anything," he said, drawing a knife from his
boot. He raised the knife high. "Say goodnight, asshole." He brought the
knife down.
Brown caught Van Pelt's wrist, stopping the knifepoint millimeters from
his throat. They remained that way, frozen for the longest time.
"Goodnight," Brown whispered, "...asshole!" He slammed his knee into Van
Pelt's groin, and surged upward, literally picking Linus up and throwing him
to the ground. He backed away, shaking his head violently, blood and sweat
flying. He grinned through the pain as Van Pelt rose to his feet, still
holding the knife.
"Nice gesture, Brown. But useless!" He stepped forward, whipping the
knife in a horizontal arc.
Brown caught his wrist, stepping neatly around, digging his thumb
savagely into a pressure point. Van Pelt sucked in his breath as Brown
locked his elbow and kicked his knee, causing him to collapse. He *drove* him
into the ground, and Linus' elbow snapped loudly and bent backwards. He took
the knife almost as an afterthought.
Linus rose shakily to his feet, cradling his shattered and dislocated
elbow. He seemed about to say something, but Charles stepped in and drove the
knife into his heart. Van Pelt collapsed, shuddered, coughed up a mouthful of
blood, and lay still.
Brown sighed wearily, and began to walk away. He froze at the sound of
Linus rising behind him and rasping "Brroowwwwnnnnn."
Brown almost turned slowly, dramatically, but instead whipped around in
less time than it took to blink. "You...cannot..." Van Pelt's body said, its
head tilted at an odd angle, its eyes glowing a baleful red. "...do this...I
will not allow it!" It yanked the dagger out of its chest and threw it
aside. "You have slain this vessel, but you will not stop my plan!"
"Well, well. The 'Great Pumpkin.' All bluster as usual. You've lost."
Fearlessly, he stepped in and kicked the corpse in the head two dozen times.
It fell over and struggled to its feet again.
"NO!" it screamed. It flung an arm out at Brown, snarling something
arcane and hideously old.
Nothing happened.
"I bet," Brown said, conversationally, "That you can't do anything
without a living, *willing* soul to tap...other than to animate a few corpses
here and there. I bet that Linus provided the power all along... you simply
provided the means and corruption."
"NO! I AM YOUR DARKEST NIGHTMARE, TORN FROM THE PITS OF HELL!"
"You're a joke!" Brown snapped, and knocked the corpse over again.
"I... NO! NO! YOU CANNOT WIN! NOT HERE! THE PARADOX WILL RIP THE
UNIVERSE APART, MORTAL!!!"
"Let it," hissed Brown. "The future you two made sucks."
A spark of life returned to Van Pelt's eyes, and the corpse howled in
sudden triumph. "HIS SOUL HAS NOT YET FLED, MAN! HIS POWER HAS NOT FLED!
YOU... YOU... shut up *Master*" its distorted voice changed to Linus' halfway
through the sentence. Linus' voice, laced with pain and determination, and
the last spark of humanity left to him. Van Pelt looked up at Brown.
"Charlie Brown! I'm sorry! If this can change anything... even if not...
it's worth it." Linus cupped his hands, spoke a single syllable, and the
possessed near-corpse burst into blinding blue flame, greedily enveloping the
flesh in seconds.
Linus' mouth opened wide in a scream, "NO!" while simultaneously, Linus'
voice said, resignedly, "Yes." Then the flame devoured him entirely, leaving
a pile of smoking ash.
Brown stood silently for several long minutes. As if in a dream, he
smoothed the soil of the pumpkin patch before flaring in light and
disappearing.
- x X x -
***[The present. Branch 1. Probability wave collapse.]***
Brown and Snoopy reappeared in the lab in time to watch the crystal
shatter further into plain dust. There was silence for a long moment.
"Where were you?" Snoopy asked finally.
"Twenty years in the past. I just killed Linus."
"Good. I just killed the Red Baron."
"Interesting." He turned to watch several troops enter the room and
salute tiredly.
"General. The Dead... they've all just... dissolved where they stood.
We've won."
Brown looked around. "'rip the universe apart.' Right." Finally, he
shrugged and looked at his expectant troops. "You can spread the word that
Van Pelt is dead."
"Is that all, sir?"
"For the moment. In a couple days, we'll have to start planning the
rebuilding. But for now, let's bury our dead."
- x X x -
***[20 years ago. Probability wave collapse]***
"Wait a minute," Linus thought to himself as he gripped the knife in the
most sincere pumpkin patch in the world. "I can't do this! This is nuts!"
For a brief fleeting moment, there was some distant, dark echo. And then
nothing. Unnoticed by Sally, he whipped the knife as far away as he possibly
could. He thought he heard someone (was that Pig Pen?) curse in sudden pain
and limp away, but paid no real attention. "Oh, my sweet babboooooo!" Sally
moaned as Linus tended to his true love once more.
- x X x -
***[20 years ago. Probability wave collapse]***
No one took the captured German pilots' account of Richtoffen's death
seriously. An otherwise obscure Allied pilot wound up getting the credit for
the kill.
- x X x -
***[The present. Branch 2. Probability wave collapse]***
The gang grew up and led fairly normal lives. Nothing spectacular, but
they were generally happy. Pig Pen still walks with a limp, and has an
interesting scar on his foot which he still refuses to discuss. Linus has
some dark memories that he's succeeded in suppressing, except for the
occasional nightmare.
Cliched, overused, but true: everyone, more or less, lived happily ever
after.
THE END
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