Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  They moved in relative quiet, and Maeve was glad of that. Had any of them attempted to speak with her, she feared what words would come out of her mouth. Her voice could not be trusted now, and neither could her vision. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and with the exertion of the descent, she grew weaker. Sicker. Her tears dried, but the cough worsened and the pain she’d felt before deepened.

  The edges of her vision turned red. Images tried to crowd into her mind and many times she shook her head to refuse them. More than once she paused and held on to the rocks, fearful that she would sink into a vision of the past—one of the moments of mental slippage that felt so much like memory. Horrific, impossible memories of hunger and sickness and murder.

  Hollow.

  Gnawing.

  Hunger.

  Resisting the lure of that slippage felt like trying to stay awake behind the wheel of a car. She coughed hard enough to make her sway on her feet. Leaned against the rocks to make sure she didn’t unbalance in the wrong direction and fall out over the gorge. The hidden place might have been carved by ancient glaciers, but it was far from smooth. The rock slabs jutted out, and there were a hundred places she might strike on the way down if she fell. Edges that would break her, shatter bones, stave in her skull.

  Maybe that’s best, she thought, leaning against sheer stone.

  “No,” she whispered.

  In that other voice.

  Her eyes had closed. When she opened them, she saw a figure in the rain about twenty feet away, a tattered shroud, blistered skin taut over bones, tinted red, eyes bleeding black.

  No, the hunger whispered to her. No, said Death.

  Breathless, fear like ice along her spine, she lifted a hand to cover her mouth, and fresh tears slid down her face in the rain. Did the others see it? Had it come for them or only her?

  Maeve stood up straight, away from the wall of the gorge. The urge to throw herself over, to break and bleed and be gone, tugged at her more powerfully even than the gnawing hunger. The presence tried to claw at her, as if to anchor her to the stone, to keep her alive, but her mind flashed forward to what came next—to the moment when she lost herself to the hunger and reached out to whomever was near.

  It wouldn’t matter who, in the end. The need would override any love, any hesitation. Walker wanted to save her, but no sense of self-preservation would save him from the yearning that made her begin to tremble, even now. That red hunger had a much stronger sense of self-preservation than Maeve herself had.

  The red hunger.

  The wraith … it was inside her. Its memories.

  No, she thought. But now she had allowed the thought to blossom in her mind, and it took root. The hunger did not belong to her.

  Back along the trail, Rose dropped down from one massive rock slab to another, canted the other direction. She glanced at Maeve, and her eyes narrowed with concern, but then she turned to reach up, offering Priya a helping hand.

  Maeve fought it. Her hands shook, and then her whole body. The urge to wait, to reach for them, whichever one of them caught up to her first …

  Red streaks like poison ran under the skin on her arms. Maeve stared at those streaks and at the sores where it almost looked as if she’d been burned, black divots in her flesh. She wondered how they could all even look at her, as sick as she seemed.

  Maeve began to cough so hard that her throat bled again, and she sprayed red and black onto the rocks. The rain thinned it, began to erase it, but not before the others had seen it. They stared at her.

  Walker passed Priya and Rose, moving quickly, dropping down from one stone slab to the next. He drew his gun. Rose shouted at him to put it away. Fifteen feet from Maeve, Walker paused to glance back at Rose.

  “I just want to make sure I’m between you and her,” he said.

  Maeve laughed softly. Or something inside her did. “You and your gun,” it said.

  Walker narrowed his eyes, studying her. “That’s right.”

  The gunshot came out of nowhere.

  Chips of stone and dirt kicked up from the trail only inches from Walker’s feet. Priya cried out as Rose grabbed her and slammed her against the wall of the gorge, shielding her. Walker pressed himself against the same slab of stone and turned to Maeve.

  “Take cover!” he barked at her, eyes wide as he tried to figure out what to do next.

  Maeve knew they were pinned here. Based on the angle of the shot, the shooter had fired from the same side of the gorge they’d come from, but farther to the south. That meant they hadn’t found the entrance to Walter’s Descent but were trying to make their way down into the gorge by a more precarious route.

  Maeve stepped toward Walker. He stared at her.

  “Take cover, goddamn it!”

  Maeve coughed. She scratched at her left arm, tearing open one of the purple blisters there. It stung, but not too badly. The wind buffeted her as she leaned out away from the wall of the gorge to get a better look.

  Three more gunshots in quick succession. One bullet took a chink out of the stone that jutted a few feet away from her, back the way they’d come. Rose shouted some profanity, still shielding Priya.

  Maeve licked her lips. Tasted blood and something sour. Something awful.

  Walker saw the look in her eyes. Took aim at her chest. “Don’t do it. Fight it, Maeve.”

  She grinned her bloody grin, but there was very little of Maeve in it. She felt her lips part, felt her teeth bare. Maeve fought it—forced her eyes closed.

  With her eyes closed, she sees that revelry again. The obsidian room, the bodies lying about her on the floor, covered with those plague sores, a pretty blond girl on her knees, vomiting something solid, a piece of her insides coming up. Her hands reach out in the glow of the red-glass windows—

  Maeve opened her eyes. “Back up.”

  Her voice came out a rasp, but Walker must have seen something in her face. Maeve wondered if he saw her there or the presence. The hunger.

  He backed up. Kept the gun trained on her as she shuffled past him.

  “Rose. Priya. Get out of her way,” Walker said.

  Maeve hung her head. Shuffling past them, she paused a moment, hunger ripping into her. Her right hand strayed toward the back of Priya’s neck, shaking with the effort to stop herself.

  “Mae-Maeve,” Rose said through trembling and tears, using the nickname only she, as the little sister, had ever had the privilege to use. And hadn’t used for fifteen years, at least. “Please … don’t.”

  Maeve pressed her eyes closed again. This time, instead of a glimpse of the hellish past, she saw this morning’s nightmare. Mom. Logan. Dad broken in the street.

  Her scream tore something loose inside her.

  Maeve ran along the trail. When she hit the turn they’d all taken, she leaped upward. She hit the rocks ahead, jagged, slippery stone slabs, slicked with rain. Maeve did not fall. The shooter up on the wall of the gorge fired again, and the gunshots echoed all around.

  The thing inside her was ascendant now, but for the first time, they worked in concert. Hunger weakened her and strengthened her at the same time. It overrode fear and hesitation. Even without sickness, Maeve could not do the things she did now, but the red hunger, the death she carried inside her—it could.

  She crawled and climbed, leaped and scrabbled from rock slab to hard-packed soil. Her hands and feet found purchase, fingers thrust into cracks, and, spiderlike, she ascended.

  A ferocious gust of wind tried to scrape her off the wall of the gorge. Maeve barely noticed. Instead, she zeroed in on a glimpse of silver, and then her gaze locked on the small, lithe woman with the gun. Her silver hair blew around her in the wind. The rain had lessened, the sky a bit less gray, and Maeve thought she saw the glint of the woman’s eyes.

  Or that might just have been the gun.

  Agatha, she thought.

  Agatha, the red hunger replied.

  They both remembered the story Rose and Priya had told about the petite assas
sin. Maeve had listened to the story, and anything Maeve heard, so the death inside her also heard. Agatha had come to kill her, certainly, but would this assassin just shoot her through the head or wait until Maeve got close enough so Agatha could take the death touch from her the way Maeve had taken it from the BMW driver?

  Maeve thought the latter.

  So did the hunger.

  Which meant Agatha would let her get close before she tried for a kill shot. The hunger shifted into the front of her mind, drove Maeve down into a dark little box at the base of her own brain where she could still see what her eyes could see, but her limbs were no longer hers to control. The hunger clawed and burned, but the burning was the fire of a furnace. An engine. She clambered up the rocks, fingertips finding cracks, knees scraping and banging, shoes scrabbling.

  Agatha hid most of herself behind a stone slab, leaning out, arms steadied so that she could take aim. The little killer radiated confidence, so sure of her aim and her willingness to pull the trigger that even the uncanny speed and agility of Maeve’s ascent hardly seemed to rattle her. Until it did. Agatha blinked and wiped rain from her eyes, furrowed her brow and resettled her aim, and Maeve could see the moment when she understood there was more than sickness here, more than just the germs bred in a lab. Impossibly, Maeve quickened her ascent and saw a ripple of fear in Agatha’s eyes.

  She pulled the trigger out of fear instead of precision. Defending herself instead of attacking. It threw her off, just slightly, and Maeve’s speed did the rest. A bullet grazed her left hip, carved a bloody furrow, but then she lunged the final ten feet. Agatha squeezed off three more shots, but she did it while in motion. The killer tried to get out of the way of Maeve’s scraped and bleeding hands, and none of her shots struck home.

  The rest of the bullets never left her gun.

  Maeve clapped her hands on either side of Agatha’s face and rode her down onto the rocks, straddling her. The killer tried to bring her gun around, even knowing she had only seconds to live, and Maeve batted it from her hand, bent and kissed Agatha oh so gently on the mouth. As Agatha began to cough and her throat turned black and blisters boiled up on her skin, Maeve pushed the woman’s silver hair away from her face and watched her die.

  Inside, she cried.

  Inside, she screamed.

  But not really. She wanted to grieve and to feel disgust for the way the presence that had taken up residence inside her reveled in Agatha’s death, but the infusion of life felt too good. She shuddered with the pleasure of it, suffused with a sense of well-being, a lightness and a strength she had not felt even a minute before.

  As she sat astride the woman, there in a cleft in the side of the gorge, the red hunger subsided. Maeve felt its presence fade, and she regained control over her body. She still trembled with the aftereffects of the meal she’d just had, but now she trembled in horror as well.

  A sob escaped her and she hung her head, eyes closed, not wanting to move but not wanting to look at the woman she’d just murdered.

  Drowning in self-loathing, she heard voices shouting and she remembered the others. Rose and Priya. Whoever the fuck Walker might be.

  Maeve climbed off the corpse of the killer and turned to look down into the gorge. The others had stopped three-quarters of the way down. Walker had his gun aimed up toward her, though Maeve couldn’t imagine he could reliably target her from that distance. She glanced up at the rim of the gorge, only twenty feet above her head. Much closer to her than her sister and the rest. It would have been so easy for her to go up instead of down, to keep running, but where would she run?

  No. Her only hope waited below. There were people who still loved her, though she didn’t know how that was possible. If she kept running, someone else would find her soon enough. Walker had told her that many of them would be like Agatha, they would want her dead or not care if she lived. For whatever reason, he seemed to want to keep her alive. Treat her fairly. Help her.

  “Maeve, please!” Rose shouted up to her.

  “Hurry!” Walker called, his voice carrying. “They’ll be coming.”

  Maeve stiffened. They should do something to hide the body, make it harder for the Blackcoats to track them, but Walker was right. All those gunshots, and now the shouting, would quickly bring other hunters to this place. It might be moments from now, or minutes, but it would be soon. They didn’t have time to delay.

  It would have been better if she could have left the others, gone off on her own again, but right now her best chance lay with them. Her only choice was down.

  She moved swiftly, but not as swiftly as before. The red hunger still lurked within her, but in truth it had become her. In her bones. In her blood. In her guts and her heart and lungs. In her hands most of all.

  Maeve felt the strength in herself, the ravenous need, the cunning and betrayal, and wondered if she might no longer be human.

  But if not that, then what?

  She clambered down the side of the gorge. The others waited at the bottom, warily watching. A moment before, Maeve had felt sated, trembling with satisfaction. Now, already, it had begun to fade. As she descended toward those upturned faces, she felt a twinge of hunger return.

  20

  Walker steadied his aim, moving the gun to track Maeve as she scrambled down the wall of the gorge. The others had frozen, and Walker didn’t blame them. Over the years, he had seen many impossible things, he’d been trapped underground in a place so steeped in evil that he’d inhaled it with every breath, but the way Maeve moved now, swift and agile, limbs thrusting at unnatural angles … seeing that made him want to run. If it unsettled him so deeply, he could imagine what it did to those who loved her.

  His aim didn’t waver.

  “Stop right there, Maeve,” he called when she was about twenty feet above them.

  One hand on an outthrust rock, she pirouetted, her left foot barely catching a foothold. Maeve looked down at him as if the others had vanished. Her eyes narrowed. They had a red tint that hadn’t been there before. It might have been a thin caul of blood covering her eyes, or it might have been the eyes themselves.

  She hung there, staring at his gun, and waited.

  The last of Agatha’s screams still lingered in his head. Rose and Priya seemed frozen, waiting to see what would happen next.

  “Circle around us,” Walker told Maeve, gesturing with the barrel of the gun. “Get to the floor of the gorge as fast as you can and then back away. Give us room to come down. If you get too close to anyone, I won’t have a choice. You get me?”

  “I get you,” Maeve said. But it no longer sounded like Maeve. Her voice had a low, whispery quality, the way a snake might sound if it learned human language.

  Maeve scuttled around to their left and kept descending.

  Walker glanced at the others. “All that noise is going to bring people running. We’ve got minutes, but probably not too many. So move it, but don’t let Maeve anywhere near you.”

  Priya and Rose went quickly. Unlike Maeve, they were still on Walter’s Descent, and the trail became easier to traverse near the bottom. The rain had subsided to a drizzle, but they were still soaked and the rocks were slippery as they hustled.

  Priya still held her left arm close to her body. Pale from blood loss and shock, exhausted, she struggled to stay upright. Rose steadied her as best she could. Walker lowered his weapon but kept glancing down at Maeve to make sure she had followed instructions.

  “That’s not her,” Priya said. “You don’t know her. That’s not Maeve.”

  “She’s sick. Infected,” Walker said, pretending he didn’t know what Priya meant. They had both seen Maeve’s eyes and heard her voice. The changes in her were obvious even to someone who’d only met her today.

  “Whatever she does, you can’t kill her. Don’t shoot her,” Priya said.

  Rose pushed the wet hair away from her eyes and looked at her. “I know you’re trying to help, babe, but please…” She shot a hard look at Walker. “If she t
ries to kill one of us, you shoot her.”

  “Rose,” Priya said, “you don’t have to—”

  Rose kept her gaze locked on Walker. “You saw her. She’s something savage now. Rabid. This morning … she didn’t know what she was doing. Now she does. If she comes for us, you stop her.”

  Walker gave her a single nod. As they started moving again, he watched the way Maeve waited for them at the bottom and he wondered. She moved jerkily, pacing back and forth like some kind of junkie in need of a fix. Priya said the woman down there wasn’t Maeve, and Walker couldn’t escape the feeling that in some vital way, that might be true.

  A dozen feet from the end of the trail, he lifted his weapon again, tracking Maeve.

  “Start walking,” he told her. “Lead the way. Find a cave or some kind of shelter. We need cover as fast as possible.”

  So many things buzzed in his head. General Wagner had people crawling all over the mountain. Agatha had been a solo operator. The two dirt bikers had been, what, Israeli or Russian? Then there were the people in the Jeep that David Boudreau had told him about. No sign of them yet. But all the noise from the gorge would draw Wagner’s Blackcoats at the very least, and he had to assume his little group was running out of time to find a place to hide.

  Alena would have gotten his message from Joel by now. She would be doing her best to get him evac from this disaster, get Maeve safely off the mountain. But Walker had been stranded before, and he knew he couldn’t count on the cavalry arriving in time. He had to think of something.

  The Moonglow River churned along the bottom of the gorge. They’d come down the west wall and emerged on the wide swath of inhospitable terrain that ran beside the river. The moment Walker reached bottom, he picked up his pace.

  “Keep your eyes open,” he said to everyone, including himself.

  Maeve had turned south toward town and gotten a good thirty paces ahead of him, but he wasn’t worried about her running. When she had murdered Agatha, she had been much nearer to the top of the gorge than the bottom. If she had wanted to run, she could have done it then.