CHAPTER THIRTY

 

 

Darling watched as, one by one, her new companions drifted into sleep.

Companions, she thought, watching their heads droop and eyelids grow heavy. Not friends. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But companions was okay. Better than enemies.

Or was it? At least when they'd been enemies, everything had been simple. Go here. Kill this guy. Go there. Tear off some faces.

Now, with the pretender hunting for her, things had grown complicated.

Maybe that was good. She liked complicated. Kept her guessing.

On the far end of the table, Rosenfeld was the only one still upright. Made sense. Just like Darling, she didn't have the right parts to get tired with. Just another machine gone rogue. "You want to tuck these babies into bed?"

"You can laugh," Rosenfeld said, "but they've fought harder than you ever could."

"That hurts my feelings."

"You don't get hurt. You just keep killing."

Darling shrugged. "Guess you haven't forgiven me yet."

"Guess not."

"Too bad. You're missing out on an incredible package deal."

A shimmer of shadow beyond the windows lining the front of the Mission. Had anyone else seen? No, Goodwell and Chan were both staring into space, eyes open but unseeing. Fitch had collapsed on to the table, hands folded beneath his head. And Rosenfeld? She was too caught up in her own anger to pay attention to anything outside.

Darling crossed to the window, wiped a clear patch from the condensation, squinting out into the night.

"There was a time," she said, "when I'd be able to feel my brothers and sisters getting close. Like... electricity on the skin. Now everything is... dull. Like I'm wrapped up in too many clothes."

"Sounds like depression."

"Didn't know dead women got depressed." Darling stared, then wiped a larger circle with her sleeve, until the window was clear. "I didn't use to ask questions. Then I started wondering what my name used to be. How much the queen took from me. I think she realised I was drifting away and started... sealing me off. Walling me away from the rest of her servants. A week ago, even, I'd have felt them coming. Or maybe it's your wards. They're like a big brick wall. They can't see in, and we can't see out, and now it's too goddamn late."

Rosenfeld was silent as she made her way across the dining room to stand beside Darling. No cars passed in the street. The rain had strengthened from a trickle to a downpour, but in the darkness on the far side of the road she saw streetlights winking on sunglasses.

A line of dead men and women, standing stiffly, hands open by their sides, fingers splayed like beartraps ready to snap shut. Some were cops, still in ragged uniforms. Some weren't. A naked man, bare feet bloodied. A woman no older than Mrs Archer, pixie-cut hair plastered across one eye, an American flag pin stuck to the breast of her windbreaker.

And behind them all, a figure cut from black on black. Nothing there but a rainslicker. The shadows beneath were smoke and water.

"She sent the emissary," Darling breathed. "We're all one hundred percent fucked."

The figure in the black rainslicker raised one hand, as if waving.

The dead walked.

 

Kimberly slammed through the storage room door, still pulling on her jeans, following the sounds of panic. The rest of the team were on their feet in the dining hall, staring open-mouthed at the figures milling beyond the glass.

Not Rosenfeld's usual crowd. No homeless men and women waiting for their rations of crusty bread and cold vegetable soup. These were the pretender queen's creatures.

She raced across the dining hall and grabbed Fitch by the collar. "Out the back! Out!" He didn't argue. Behind them, the wet slap of palms pressing against the glass echoed like applause.

Goodwell and Chan were already running for the rear of the Mission but Mrs Rosenfeld hadn't moved. She waited in the centre of the cafeteria, hands at her hips, the Raconte twins by her side. "Been walking in circles all damn week," she said. "Not gonna run from my own home. I cast the ward in the walls. Salted the mortar with my own blood. They're not coming through until I say so."

"You sure about that? One slipped in to have a chat with me five minutes ago."

Mrs Rosenfeld only grunted, and as the glass began to bow inward and fists rained against the main doors of the Mission, Kimberly suspected those wards weren't as strong as Mrs Rosenfeld pretended. Brick was only brick. They hadn't stopped the thing in the rainslicker sending her a message. They wouldn't stop the weight of a hundred dead men and women hurling themselves against the hinges. "Fitch," she hissed. "You drove here, right?"

"Parked out back," he grunted, then shook his head. "Only got space for two."

"We'll make it work!"

Rosenfeld clutched her hands before her. There was a papery noise of skin being torn, and then the slow drip, drip, drip of a loose faucet. She shook her hands, fanning blood wide and high. It spattered across the floor, sprayed the ceiling, stained the surface of the battered old benches.

The Raconte twins waited. Silent, heads down, sentinels by Rosenfeld's side.

"Holding them the best I can," Rosenfeld said. "Problem is, if I hold them too long, they'll get frustrated. Remember what I did to Gull's place?"

Kimberly's stomach fell through the floor. "They're going to squeeze us out of the world."

"If we make 'em wait. Or I let through and cut them down."

She went to grab Rosenfeld's arm. "There's too many!"

Rosenfeld shoved Kimberly back with surprising strength for such a small, old woman. "This is my home! Nobody tells me what to do but me! Now you get out of here before I kick your ass myself." Rosenfeld ducked her head. "If I get out, I'll catch up. If not... you tell the pretender from me. You tell her she should've moved on. Found her own world to lord over. This town didn't need her. You tell her. You tell her!"

Detective Goodwell had Kimberly by the arm, dragging her back, as Rosenfeld flicked her hands. Blood misted the air.

Then, in a voice too deep for Rosenfeld's lungs, a voice that threatened to tear the air: "You are invited."

The doors swung open.

The dead men came through in a tide of old flesh, grabbing for Mrs Rosenfeld's shawl, clawing at her eyes. She jumped back, not light-footed but still nimble enough to duck away from their grasp. Her lips fluttered.

The blood ignited.

Fire scrawled across the ceiling, leaped along the linoleum, arced high in the air as Rosenfeld thrust her ragged wrists at the dead. They floundered as flames jumped across their chests, lapped over their cheeks, boiled in their throats. They fell to their knees, dragging nails down their own faces, as their tongues and eyes burned black.

The things inside them chittered and screeched. Blade-thin limbs jagged from behind yellowed teeth.

The fires roared high but there were too many dead, pouring through the open door in wave after wave. One moment the Raconte twins were blond, waif-like statues by Rosenfeld's side. The next moment they were blurs of motion, grabbing the dead by the wrists, bending them back until tendons broke with rubber-band snaps. A nude woman with her hair in flames grabbed one Raconte girl around the temples and sunk her thumbs into her victim's eyes. The twin fell back, fingers blade-straight, punching deep into the naked woman's stomach, carving through muscle to grab guts and twist.

Kimberly looked away. "Fitch, we have to-"

"We don't have to do nothin'. She's her own woman."

"You're just gonna leave her?"

Regret flickered across Fitch's face. "She's not like us."

But she was. As Kimberly ran for the back exit, following the pounding of Goodwell and Detective Chan's footsteps, she dared glance back.

Mrs Rosenfeld was on her knees. Her shawl was drenched with blood but the fire didn't touch her. It jumped across her shoulders, danced around her hair in a halo, but never kissed her skin, like she was insulated by a hands-breadth of air.

The Raconte twins were still fighting, but they were only two women and the dead didn't stop. They batted one twin to the ground, pouring over her. Five, ten, then twenty blank-eyed men and women crushed her down. Pale waves of hair vanished beneath limbs, and those limbs vanished beneath the flames, until they made one great and terrible pyre.

Firelight bathed the walls. Smoke stained the whitewashed ceiling.

Still, the second twin fought. A dead thing in a policeman's uniform caught her in a bear-hug, something black and slick crawling from its open mouth to coil around her neck. The Raconte twin smacked its sunglasses off, and roaches poured from the dead man's eye sockets.

Long, pale fingers dug into the dead man's jaw. The crack of broken bone carried over the flames and the roar of the dead as the Raconte twin prised the cop's head off. Its spine gave way with a wishbone snap.

Then she, too, was brought down by the crowd.

"Run." Mrs Rosenfeld looked over her shoulder, dark eyes encircled in flame. "The queens know you're coming. Run, Mrs Archer. For all of us."

Her hands raised high, flames leaping between her fingers, never touching, only dancing. They flickered on her palms, kissed along her wrists.

Then she was gone, devoured by the weight of bodies.

Kimberly ran.

Even as she staggered out the back door and into the rain she saw the dead arrayed there, twenty or more attempting to climb the chain-link fence encircling the Mission's back lot. Too many, she thought. The new queen must have sent every servant it had.

A pistol report echoed off the red-brick alleys. Detective Chan stood, legs spread, sighting on the horde. "Get us a goddamn car!"

Kimberly whirled. Three cars waited in the back of the lot - two sedans, rusted around the gills, spiders weaving homes in the hollows of their side mirrors, and a battered pickup that had to be Fitch's. He was already yanking open the door, diving inside, even as the new queen's servants battered against the fence. They shook the chain link, muttered through lips swollen black. Their movements were jerky, limbs tugged by invisible strings as they clambered up and over coils of barbed wire. Some got tangled, bare hands shredded as they fell over the top of the fence. No matter. There were more waiting behind, boiling up and over, the fence sagging beneath their weight as they climbed across each other's bodies.

"The bastard won't start!" Fitch called. "I think I busted the ignition. Jammed the screwdriver in too far."

Kimberly was frozen in place. A rangy man, shirt hanging open to his navel, was the first up and over the fence. He landed face-first in the gravel, hands-outstretched, like he was a circus acrobat reaching for a distant trapeze, and landed in a cracked-bone tangle. The man shuddered in the dirt, then stood. His right arm was bent back, wet bone showing through broken skin.

His eyes were gone. Silver-backed beetles squirmed in the sockets.

He staggered toward Kimberly, grinning obscenely through swollen lips, tongue pink and wet between his teeth. Behind him, the fence sagged beneath the weight of bodies.

She took a deep breath. Reached for the heat, the fire that she'd hurled on the mountainside. That immense power, just out of reach.

It wouldn't come. "Fitch!" Kimberly screamed. "Fix it! Now!"

"Workin' on it!"

Not fast enough. The fence fell in a crash of steel, bodies bouncing as they impacted the pavement, and more behind, always more, trudging over the twitching shapes of their companions.

Some of the men being crushed into the carpark gravel moaned in pain. They tried to stand, cried out as they were kicked down.

They weren't dead, she realised. Not zombies after all. There were still people inside those puppeted bodies, struggling against the commands, screaming silently as they raised their hands, curled their fingers into claws, staggered on, one stiff leg after another.

She'd thought the bug-things were the brains. That they'd worked their way so deep that they wore their victims like flesh-suits. But if they could still feel, still cry out...

Through the eyes and into the brain, she thought. A thousand little legs pressing into the soft places, making them dance and speak and run and cry...

Little legs. Legs like cockroaches.

An engine roar. "Finally! Get in!"

Kimberly ran, Darling and Goodwell by her side. Chan took two more shots, muzzle-flashes lighting her cheekbones, before sprinting for the pickup and clambering over the side. Kimberly was a foot from the rear tray when the pickup surged, and for a moment she thought Fitch was about to leave her. Then her fingertips found the edge of the tray and Chan had her by the wrist, hauling her up and over.

Goodwell and Darling were only a second behind. They fell into the tray in a heap, bouncing off each other like billiard balls as Fitch circled the lot. The dead tide was moving fast now, not staggering but running, footsteps crunching on loose gravel. Their crushed companions were forgotten, sandwiched between the ground and the chain link fence, cut apart like soft-boiled eggs beneath the sharp edge of a spoon.

Twenty, thirty, more. They rushed the pickup even as Chan braced against the side of the rear tray and fired another five shots into their mass. One bullet spun a young woman around, dropped her in the dirt. Another took a man in a tan jacket just above the eye and sprayed brains like wet confetti across the sky.

The last shots went wild as Fitch hit a pothole. They were headed for the exit on the west end of the parking lot, but the pickup was struggling to get up to speed and the new queen's servants were running now, almost leaping across the wet earth, close enough to grab at the pickup's taillights, to snatch for the tray, to grasp for Kimberly's ankles with cold, damp fingertips...

The fire wouldn't come. But she had other weapons.

The insects came in a tidal wave. They skittered from the garbage piled against the back wall of the Rosenfeld Mission, out of the disused lot next door, crawled from the fresh earth. They came in a shiny black-backed tide, roaches and moths and crawling wasps, spiders by the hundreds, worms pushing free of the soil to taste the rain. Checkered beetles and cow-killers and hordes of gnats that moved like vicious clouds. Katydids and weavers and ticks and kudzus climbing over each other by the thousands, scrabbling across the gravel, up the legs of the men clawing their way into the pickup tray, across their faces.

Into their mouths. Smothering their eyes.

A woman in a blue summer dress who'd already hauled herself over the edge of the pickup and was swiping at Kimberly's feet fell back, clawing at her face. A heaving mass of insects poured between her teeth and over her tongue.

She batted at her neck like she was trying to pull the insects out through her own throat. Then she fell, bounced off the road, and was gone.

The others fought through the tide of insects, but not fast enough. They were blinded, clawing not at Kimberly but at their own faces, tearing sway fistfuls of moths only for hundreds more to take their place. Kimberly kicked one old man in the face, felt teeth snap beneath her heel. He gripped her ankles, nails sinking into her skin.

She needed more. Every mosquito for miles, every roach hiding inside greasy McDonalds takeaway bags. Every...

Bugs in their brains, Kimberly thought. That's how the queens make them dance.

And if the queens could do it...

She looked into the ruin of the dead man's face, squinted like she could peer inside his skull, and screamed, "Let go!"

A pause.

A twitch.

The pressure on her ankles slackened, but only for a moment. Then the man clamped back down, nails tearing long lines of blood along her ankles. "Son of a-"

Goodwell mashed the man's wrists with well-placed kicks. It wasn't pain that made him finally let go - it was the soft, chicken-bone crack of the dead man's joints turning backward.

"I've got you," Goodwell panted, as Kimberly's attacker bounced off the tarmac. "Strap in, Mrs Archer."

The pickup rattled through the parking lot gates, got two feet of air as it caromed off a speed bump, landed so hard that Kimberly nearly bounced out of the tray, and they were free. The Rosenfeld Mission was a dark blur behind them as Fitch accelerated through the streets.

The last of the new queen's soldiers stood dumbly in the middle of the road, hands hanging limp by their sides. Then, as one, they turned and retreated into the dark.

Fitch took a hard right, and they were gone.

Kimberly couldn't relax. Not yet. When she settled back into the pickup's tray she found her breath still coming in hard gasps. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. The terror fizzed in her head, leaving her faint.

"Christ," she whispered. "They almost-"

"I know," Chan said.

Light behind the windows of the Mission. Smoke billowing free. The distant pop of glass shattering in the heat.

"They got Rosenfeld."

"Yeah."

"She's dead." Kimberly choked on the words. "She's actually dead."

Darling shook her head sympathetically. "She's been dead a long time already."

"She wasn't like that! She was..." Kimberly's pulse was an animal roar in her temples. Fury boiled in her lungs. She turned, hammered on the rear window of the pickup's cab with one clenched fist. "Fitch!"

Muted, through the glass: "What?"

"We're following your plan. The one that'll blow the pretender to hell."

"I never called it a plan! It's a bad idea, I said!"

"Take us there."

The pickup slewed across two lanes as Fitch looked over his shoulder in shock. "Now?"

"Now." Kimberly settled back in the rear tray, gripping tight to the sides to keep from being flung out on to the road. No use dying this close to the end. "We're killing the bitch tonight."

Darling, pressed into the furthest corner of the tray, gripped tight and met Kimberly's eyes.

A slow nod. A curl of the lips.

Nothing more.