THE PEANUTS GANG(tm) PRESENTS: A PEANUTS HALLOWEEN II: ELECTRIC BOOGELOO by Gary Achenbach Copyright 1993 [Disclaimer: <deep breath> Right. The following story is an original piece inasmuch as these particular words (to *my* knowledge, anyway) have never been strung together in this fashion before. However, story elements have been lifted from, at last count: the Terminator films, the Evil Dead films, the entire martial art genre, the Cthulhu mythos, and countless other sources too numerous to list. Any resemblence to any real persons, alive, dead, or Al Gore, is entirely coincidental, except for when it isn't. The following story contains, and is limited to, gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex, occasional lack of continuity, deus ex machina plot contrivances, and a total lack of character development. As far as I know, this story is completely devoid of any literary merit. If you don't care to read any further, don't. If you think this will offend you or even just irritate you, decide for yourself whether or not you wish to read further. If you wish to read further and be offended and/or irritated, feel free to do so. If you wish to express how much this offended and/or irritated you, feel free not to. If you do not, upon completion of reading, find this story offensive and/or irritating, but do, however, find this disclaimer annoying and/or irritating, rest assured that the author shares your opinion. Please fasten your seatbelts and extinguish all smoking materials.]  ***[The present. Pre-disruption]*** Life used to be simpler, Charles thought vaguely as he ran down the street, firing randomly with twin Uzis into the shambling mob of zombies shambling menacingly forward. Every now and then, he'd throw a grenade into a particularly large clump of them. Both Uzis ran out of ammo at the most inopportune moment, as so seldom happens. 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...well...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 warcries, machine gun fire, and the whoosh of jury-rigged flame- throwers. Captain Schroeder strode dramatically out of the disproportionate haze of smoke, an smoking M60 held in each hand. As the bullet-ridden zombies stirred randomly, he fired brief bursts with an amazing lack of recoil. The faceless extras comprising his squad busied themselves with dragging the doubly-dead zombies into big piles and turning flamethrowers upon them. Schroeder tossed one of his heavy machineguns 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 vanpelts. "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." He didn't look particularly old. His eyes were whirling pools of something inhuman, but they weren't old. A young demon's eye's, 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 asked, wavering slightly. 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 went on in this vain for some time. 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?" --if you laugh, your agony will be greater than anything anyone has ever experienced or will ever experience again.-- Linus shuddered. "Understood, Master." --you require a handful of dirt.-- He didn't laugh. He didn't really have a sense of humor anymore. But he was still dumbfounded. "Pardon your servant, Master, but..could you repeat that?" --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 illogic and desire.-- Linus hmmed. "Tall order. Take a few days longer..." --not just anyone's hope and illogic...-- "...and desire and innocence. Master, could you just cut to the fucking chase?" The manifestation paused. --your lack of deference begins to irritate me. i spare you now, but not again. 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 fore- told. you should not have any problems. you already have enough ingredients to conjure the device needed. here is what you need:...-- "Van Pelt's stronghold is thirty miles thataway," 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. Lietenant 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, he 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 AA 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." 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 F16, 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 mentall 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. Several hundred 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 lasy 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. Nightvision 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. 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. 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 easy to produce with 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. There was a difference there, you can see. 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. Oddly enough, it fell. With a tremendous amount of force. It collapsed the caverns below it. 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. 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. Unfortunately, the ejection mechanism didn't seem to work. He solemnly uttered the age-old bird death thought. "Fuck." Van Pelt chuckled as he saw the Leviathan smash into the ground. His chuckle died when his floor tilted slightly. "Right," he said to himself. "That's over with. Now...back to the past." He strode purposefully to his temple/laboratory. 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. 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 levelled his assault 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. 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. "Those statements don't necessarily go together." He 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 targetting 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 myriad minor flesh wounds fell onto it. There was a flare of light, and he was gone. The crystal began to steam. Snoopy shrugged as best as he was able and opened a small cut on his muzzle. A drop of blood fell onto the crystal just as it shattered. And then there were none. Outside, everything froze into a free-standing probability wave...waiting. [Commercial break. Get Met. It pays.] ***[20 years earlier]*** ***[Pre-disruption]*** It was Halloween. The gang, at a mean age of 15, had gotten a bit to 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 the elaborate to stupid. Most of them were drunk. The main joke was about Linus. He was, apparently, spending the night in the pumpkin patch. Granted, Sally was with him once again, 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 Charlie Brown 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 Covens' 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. 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 fullblown 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, a small percentage of the girls did to. (The school psychologist had personal theories about Lucy's hostility towards the world, for example.) 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 layed 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 vomitted onto the ground and ran as fast as he possibly could. 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. "Euw, gross!" was Lucy's immediate reaction. "Pig Pen, *when* are you going to learn to take a fucking shower?" He ignored her statement, used to the like. "Linus..." he gasped, instead. "Linus..." "What about my blockhead 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, Charlie Brown. Oh God..." He fainted. Peppermint Patty, perhaps thinking to be "helpful," walked over and dumped the tub of water and apples over him. It did bring him round 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 vain for quite some time. The practical upshot was that several of the gang decided to follow him 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. Charlie Brown led off a resultant chorus of vomitting 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. "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 levelled. The 'Great Pumpkin' had sank back into the ground...and every corpse in the cemetary, 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 towards 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. Frankline 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 his 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." Lucy burst out laughing. "You??!! You can't do ANYTHING, you blockhead!" "Look, bitch," Brown began. "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 knapsack 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.) 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 firey explosion in midair. Twenty years. And one final chance. ***[World War I. Post-disruption.]*** The breath .whuffed. out of Snoopy as he fell six feet into the bottom of a trench. The soldiers next to him didn't even look at him as they surged out of the trench. 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 trench. 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 airbase, located several hundred yards from the front. It was abandoned, primarily due to this fact. There was, however, a functioning Sopwith Camel. Snoopy whuffed excitedly and bounded into the cockpit. Extending his waldoes to the fullest, he could work all the controls quite well. He had to modify the shoulder harnesses, but overall, not bad. He taxiied 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 pilotted 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 imself, but in German. "Appropriately enough, he is a skilled *dog*fighter, hmm?" He guffawed loudly at his own pun. The duel began in earnest. Several hours 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. ***[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 three hours 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 said. "And I don't care. I'll kill you here as well as anywhere 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 defensive 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 devestating force across his face. He stumbled away, wiping away blood. He nodded calmly to Brown. "First blood. Too bad you kick like a girl." 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 to 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 knife point 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 but change everything...even if not...it's worth it." Linus cupped his hands, spoke a single syllable, and they burst into blinding blue flame, consuming the flesh in seconds and greedily marching up his arms. Then a curious thing happened. Linus' mouth opened wide in a scream... "NO!!!!!!!!!" while simultaneously, Linus' voice said, resignedly, "Yes." Then the flame consumed him entirely. 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. ***[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 it's just time to relax." ***[20 years ago. Probability wave collapse]*** Wait a minute, Linus thought to himself as he gripped the knife. I can't do this! For a moment...a 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. ***[World War I. 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. ***[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 in his foot which he still refuses to discuss. Linus has some dark memories that he's succeeded in suppressing, but for the occasional nightmare. Cliched, overused, but true: everyone, more or less, lived happily ever after. --Gar