Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

from taking the idea too seriously. Some inner voice, that whispered it would be a very, very bad thing for the uber-espers ever to become separated.
    So instead they decided to take control of Logres first, and then send their thralls out to conquer the other worlds. Once they forced their way into the Imperial Palace and possessed Emperor Finn, they could shut down all reports of what was happening, wait a while, and then happy smiling faces on all the news sites would announce that the emergency was over, everything was fine, and the happy smiling Emperor would order the other planets to open their starports to the goodwill ambassadors he was sending them . . . and the plague of possession would jump from world to world to world . . .
    The uber-espers laughed, drunk on blood and suffering and power, and the promise of so much more to come.

    The wave of mass possessions swept from city to city, crossing the whole world in a matter of weeks, and nothing could stop it or even slow it down. It jumped from eye to eye, head to head, often over before it was even suspected. The weaker minds tended to fall first, and so it was that children and even babies became thrall changelings. They attacked their parents and siblings with whatever came to hand, chuckling with alien glee as blood soaked their small hands. The uber-espers had always believed in the use of horror to destabilize opposition. And they did so savor the taste of the more vivid emotions, as they picked through brains like gore crows on a battlefield. They sent their thralls running madly through the streets, killing for the joy of it until killed in their turn, and shock and terror and panic destroyed any defenses the cities might have been able to assemble.
    But there was still one final horror, even beyond what had already happened.
    Diana Vertue discovered it. She led her followers, the Psycho Sluts, out of the Rookery and the Parade of the Endless, and they flew high in the skies of Logres like gaudy hawks of war, on a mission to protect the next city in the thralls’ path. Douglas Campbell hadn’t wanted them to go. He sympathized, but he didn’t think they could do anything against the massed might of the uber-espers, and he was afraid of losing them. If they were to be possessed, there was no saying how much damage they might do. Diana had nodded, said she quite understood, and then informed Douglas that she and the Sluts were going anyway. And there must have been something of the old Jenny Psycho in her voice, because Douglas just nodded, and turned away.
    Diana and the Psycho Sluts came to Delta City in the early hours of the morning, dropping out of the crimson-streaked dawn like so many avenging angels. They took up a position on the outskirts of the city, by an abandoned barricade made of piled-up furniture, and linked their minds to set up a mental barrier in the path of the advancing thralls. The barrier shimmered on the heavy morning air like heat haze, shot through with shimmering energies. Diana could hear the thrall army coming long before she saw it. The crash and crash of so many feet, an army beyond counting, shaking the road with their studied malevolent approach. They appeared slowly over the curve of the horizon; at first just a crowd, and then an army, and then so much more. An uncountable force, all walking in perfect lockstep, their feet a thunder on the road.
    The uber-espers must have known the mental barrier was there, but they didn’t even slow their thralls’ advance. They marched on, all with the same awful smile, the same horrid eyes, and crashed right through the barrier. The moment a thrall passed through it, the mental contact with the uber-espers was cut off, the possessing mind forced out of the body. Which fell forward, to lie limp and still on the ground, with empty faces and dead eyes; nobody home. The thralls kept coming, crowding through the barrier, collapsing into growing heaps of unmoving bodies before Diana and her appalled followers.
    For this was the final horror. The uber-espers had become so powerful that once they took over a mind and ate it up, they wiped the brain completely clean. The old personality was subsumed, gone forever. A thrall was just a shell now, an empty body for the uber-espers to use as they would. Thralls could no longer be freed from possession and returned to their lives. Possession meant mind-death.
    Diana looked at the empty bodies piling up before her, and didn’t know what