by R. L. King
“Let’s start in the back and work our way forward,” Nick whispers. “That way, we can get out faster if we need to.”
I don’t have a preference, so I shrug and head up the road between two of the first group of buildings. We pass a few dumpsters, an abandoned car, and what looks like the remains of one of those golf-cart things they use to shuttle people around backlots. Its wheels and top are gone, leaving nothing but shredded seats and a twisted steering wheel.
We pass the two buildings and reach an intersection with a good view of four of the five buildings. I was right: the back row has two more soundstage-size structures, for a total of five. I hold up my hand to stop Nick.
“Stay there a minute—I want to go out in the middle of the intersection and look around with magical sight. Hopefully I’ll spot something.”
He nods, taking a few more steps back to make sure I’ll be well out of his range. “Hurry up.”
Yeah. No problem there. I feel suddenly vulnerable and exposed out in the middle of the intersection, and to top it off, I’ve got a feeling I can’t explain telling me something’s about to go wrong. Stop it. There’s nobody out here but you and Nick. If Selene and Twyla are here, they’re inside and probably busy with other stuff.
I close my eyes for a moment, then open them and shift to magical sight, turning in place so I can see all around me. Nothing lights up except Nick. I see what Twyla meant now about his aura being strange: one second it’s there, strong and bright blue, but the next second it’s gone, like he’s winked out of existence. The first time it happens it freaks me out, making me think somebody’s grabbed him, but then he pops back in again like nothing’s wrong.
I’m about to switch off again when I spot two things.
The first is a faint, magical glow seeping through the closed door of the right-side building in the back. A little thrill runs up my back and I’m about to spin around and alert Nick when I notice the second thing.
The little thrill becomes a rush of ice-cold water.
Oh, shit!
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Suddenly, the area is alive with auras. They’re coming in from every direction, slipping around the buildings’ cover and rushing toward us.
Nick hasn’t spotted them yet—I can tell from the way he’s still watching me. “Nick!” I yell. “Incoming!” I take off in his direction, pulling my gun from my pocket even though I know it won’t be much help against a crowd like this.
Who are these people? Did Selene hire a platoon of security grunts to keep intruders away from her hiding place? That doesn’t make sense—why let a bunch of people in on your plans? Surely one or two would have been enough—
Oh, gods, there are more coming from the way we came in! They’re moving strangely, fast but shambling. Familiar somehow, too, like—
No…
“Nick!” I scream again as I draw closer to him, then spit out the rest in a breathless panic: “They’re those cannibal zombie things! Like what happened to Twyla!”
“What the—” He spins around, trying to take in everything at once. There have to be at least fifteen of them now, converging on us from all directions. I can’t see them clearly in the darkness, but as they get closer I can hear them, growling and muttering. Their hands are up, claws extended, and their eyes are wild. Their auras are nearly solid red with rage.
My mind races, trying to think of something magical I can do to affect them—but even if I can, I’m too close to Nick. I’ll probably blow both of us up before I hurt them.
There’s no way to run, though. They’ve got us surrounded. I cast a desperate glance up, wondering if I can get far enough away from Nick to levitate, but even if I could do it, I won’t leave him there to face them on his own. I thumb the safety off my gun—at least if I’m going down, I’m taking a few of those bastards with me.
Nick, surprisingly, doesn’t seem to be panicking. He looks scared, sure, but not like he’s ready to take off any second. “Stay close to me.”
I point the gun at a group coming in from in front of us. “We’ve got to make a hole—then we can run—”
He grips my arm. “Remember Twyla?”
And then I do remember Twyla—what happened back at the old shopping center. Whatever is turning these people into zombies, his power neutralized it. But there were only three of them then—now there are a lot more. Does his power have limits? Is this the time we want to find out?
I dart my gaze around again, still looking for an opening. It’s going to be close, and we might still get hurt even if he can stop them.
I tense even more as they get closer—what if Nick’s wrong? What if there are too many of them and his power doesn’t work this time? What if—
And then the first wave is upon us.
Up close, I can see them better in the moonlight: the claws, the wide-eyed, mindless stares, the open mouths. Oh, gods, they’re gonna rip us to pieces.
I fire my gun—I can’t help it—but the panicked shot goes wide. I’m a decent shot—at the range. But if anybody ever tells you that trying to face down a horde of angry cannibal zombies is the same as calmly squeezing off a round at a paper target in a controlled environment—well, I think you’ve got a pretty good idea of what I think about that.
The zombies don’t even react to the deafening shot. I think we could have had a machine-gun nest waiting for them, mowing them down in waves, and the ones that didn’t get hit would shamble over their dead friends and keep coming.
One of the clawed hands closes around my shoulder, digging into the thick leather of my jacket. A smell like sun-ripened roadkill rolls out of its open mouth. The rest of them are following.
In desperation I bring the gun around and point it at the thing’s face as its mouth opens wider—
It jerks back, and for a second I think I’ve shot it even though I don’t hear the gun go off.
Another one flinches back, clutching its head and running into the one behind it. They scream, and then the rest of them take up the sound.
Suddenly, all of them are staggering, shrieking, colliding with each other, moving like robots who’ve lost their control units. Nick stands next to me, shaking but steady.
I point the gun again, ready to fire if any of them start in our direction again.
But they don’t. As I watch in terror, they continue staggering around. Nick roars something unintelligible, waving his hands, and charges forward toward them.
“Nick, don’t—”
But he doesn’t listen. As he gets closer to the shambling, jerking creatures, now all clumped together in a group and making no effort to run away, they all scream again, blunder into each other, and collapse in a heap.
Most of them do, anyway. One lunges forward toward Nick, and he yelps and flinches back as the zombie sinks its fangs into his arm. Then, before I can react, its face lights up in an expression of utter shock and horror—sane, human shock and horror—right before it keels over and joins the rest on the ground.
I’d like to say I do something brave at that point, but all I can do is stand there and pant, bent over with my hands pressed against my thighs. It’s a wonder I don’t shoot myself in the foot.
Nick’s not much better. He slumps, nearly falling over himself, puffing like he’s just run a race. “Holy…shit…” he breathes. “If that hadn’t worked…”
“How…did you know?” I say between harsh breaths.
“I didn’t. But we didn’t have a lot of other options, did we?”
I can’t see him clearly in the dimness, but his voice is harsh with pain. I grab his arm and squint at it, trying to determine if the zombie that bit him broke the skin. “Are you bleeding?”
“Yeah—not bad, though. Hang on.” He slips his jacket off, revealing his white shirt. The arm is stained with dark blood. “Let me bandage it up.”
I shove his sleeve up. The wound doesn’t look bad—his clothes prevented most of the damage. “Damn!” I snap. “I could try to heal it, but�
��”
He shudders. “Yeah. Let’s not blow my arm off. I’ll wrap it up.” He rips a swatch off the bottom of his shirt.
“Here, let me do that.” Now that I have something to do, my terror starts to fade. When I finish wrapping up his arm, I start acting like I’ve got some sense again. First, I move away from Nick and look around with magical sight to make sure there isn’t a second wave of the zombie horde on the way. So far, so good, though—I don’t see any other auras approaching. With a shaking hand I put the safety back on the gun and stuff it in my pocket, grateful for my bad aim.
The zombies aren’t zombies anymore. I still have only the moonlight to see by, but even then I can tell the claws are gone, and the yawning mouths and wild eyes are closed. These people look like humans again—but they’re all unconscious.
Or worse.
“What happened?” I ask Nick, who’s also looking over the pile of bodies. “You didn’t knock Twyla and the those other two out. Are they…dead?”
He bends down and hesitantly checks for pulses on a couple of the ex-zombies. “Alive. And I don’t know.” He takes a couple steps back. “I have a theory, though.”
“Let’s hear it.” I step back too, still half-afraid as soon as we get out of Nick’s glitch range, they’ll all reanimate and come after us again.
“Remember what I told you before? What Grandfather told me when I was practicing my control?”
“Uh…” I struggle to replay the conversation, but my brain’s a little fried at the moment. “Remind me.”
“He said the more powerful the magic near me, the more dramatically my power affects it. So small magic like your sight or something just fizzles and doesn’t work, but big magic like fireballs might blow up in somebody’s face.”
“So where does this fall? Before, you changed them back from zombies but didn’t knock them out.” I eye the pile again. Nobody’s moving yet. They’re out cold.
He paces around them, keeping his distance. “My theory is that since there are so many more of them than before, that means there’s a bigger concentration of magic in the area. So instead of just changing them back, I—shocked them or something. Not as bad as blowing them up, fortunately.”
I have a sudden, terrifying thought. “You don’t think…Twyla’s in there somewhere, do you?”
He tenses. “I don’t know. I didn’t exactly get a good look at their faces. Do you want to dig through the pile and check?”
“Not…really.” It’s only then that I remember the other thing I saw, before the zombie horde attacked. I point at the building where I saw the glow. “Nick—we need to move. I think I know where Selene is. If she sent these things after us, she might think we’re dead now. It might be the chance we need.”
“But what about—” He nods toward the pile.
I don’t want to leave them either—not without checking. But we don’t have a choice. “Look—you said they’re not dead. So if Twy’s in there, she’s alive. She’ll wake up with the rest of them, with a headache but un-zombified. Not a best-case scenario, but if we don’t find Selene now, she’ll either finish what she’s trying to do—whatever the hell that even is—or she’ll get away again.”
Nick glances at his watch, then looks around. “I wonder where Grandfather’s people are. Or if they’re even coming.”
“We don’t have time to wait for them.” As uncomfortable as I am around Quentin Happenstance and his criminal organization, I have to admit it would be comforting to have a few more of them backing us up. But my sense that time is ticking away won’t let up. “Come on.”
With a final glance over my shoulder to make sure the ex-zombies aren’t coming back to life as soon as we get away from them, I head toward the building where I saw the glow. Taking advantage of Nick’s hesitation, I quickly shift to magical sight, and the glow immediately springs up again, shining through a crack in the door. Good. Either Selene didn’t hear the commotion outside, or she assumed her zombie minions killed us.
As we get closer, Nick grips my arm. “Bron…?” He sounds thoughtful.
“What?”
“I just realized something, and you’re not gonna like it.”
What now? I stop at the building’s edge. “I don’t like any of this, so what else is new?”
He points back toward the pile of unconscious people. “If Selene’s behind turning those people into cannibal zombies and sending them after us, then that makes this whole thing even more confusing.”
I’m about to wave him off, focused now on getting into the building, but damned if he doesn’t have a point. “You’re right. If she did it, that means she’s been out here longer than we thought—or else she’s working with somebody else who did it.”
“It doesn’t make sense that she’s been here, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because Twyla was a zombie before. Which means if Selene’s the one making the zombies, she already had Twyla. If she wanted her for something, why let her loose? Why not just grab her and do whatever to her?”
“She didn’t know about your power, though. Remember, so far all the other zombies have been taken down by the cops. Maybe that was her way of getting Twyla killed without implicating herself, and we interfered. So now she’s trying again.”
He sighs. “Yeah, you have a point. But she’s still alive—or at least she was when you did your spell. If Selene wants her dead and she’s afraid you might come looking for her, why wouldn’t she just kill her right away to get her out of her hair? I still think she’s working with somebody else. Maybe this Razakal guy, whoever the hell he is, or somebody we don’t even know about. I still think there’s a connection between whoever it is and Selene, though I’ll be damned if I have any clue what it might be.”
“Me neither. But we don’t have time to figure it out now. We’ve got to get in there. If she’s got Twyla, she’s going to kill her—if she hasn’t already.”
Nick looks reluctant, but nods. “Yeah. You have any ideas about how to get in?”
“Maybe one of the doors is open.” I point toward the side of the building, where there’s a normal-sized door.
“Yeah, that’s gonna happen.”
“Stranger things and all that—at least let’s check.”
But he’s right—the door is locked tight. Once again, I’m frustrated with myself for not learning more magic. The more complicated lock-opening spells aren’t taught until later in the apprenticeship.
Another thing I have Selene to blame for. She’s racking up quite a tab.
“You sure you can’t open it?”
“Positive. That’s a tricky spell, and I never learned it.”
“You really need to find yourself a new teacher when this is all over, you know.”
“Yeah, one problem at a time.”
He pauses a moment, then turns further down the wall. “Hey—is that a window?”
I hurry forward to check. This place is abandoned, after all—it’s possible some homeless people or thieves might have broken in to use it as a squat. Maybe one of the windows is broken.
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? A great coincidence. But…no. I check along the wall, but all the windows are intact. Go figure that we’d find the only abandoned building in existence with unbroken windows.
I sigh.
Nick’s not ready to give up, though. “Can you break it?”
“Nick—”
“Come on. That can’t be hard, right? I know you can throw refrigerators.” He looks around, then runs over to another abandoned golf-cart thing and grabs a warped wheel with a flat tire. “This is way lighter than a refrigerator. Just wing that baby right through the window and we’re in.”
I glare at him. “You do it. You don’t need magic to break a window.”
He looks a little sheepish. “Uh…good point.”
He takes a couple steps back, raises the wheel, and flings it at the window.
It hits with a loud thump and bounces off.
“Hey, it’s a thick window!” he protests.
“So if anybody’s in there, now they know we’re here, and we’re still not inside.”
He retrieves the wheel and offers it to me. “Come on—uh—sports person famous for throwing really hard. You got this.”
I tilt my head at him. “You’re hopeless, you know that?” Despite the gravity of the situation, I can’t help smiling. He cracks me up sometimes.
“So they keep telling me.” He offers the wheel again.
I let out a loud sigh. “Okay. Fine. But don’t blame me if it doesn’t work. Get out of the way, Human Explosion.”
“That’s a lousy superhero name, you know.”
“Go.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He moves off, muttering, “Sounds like somebody who flies by the power of flatulence.”
“Nick…”
“Don’t even want to think about what the costume would look like…”
It’s really tempting to throw the wheel at him instead of at the window, but time’s still ticking. Come on—you can do this. You’ve done it before. Nick’s right: I didn’t exactly throw something as big as a refrigerator, but I did divert it. And this wheel is a lot lighter than a major kitchen appliance.
I take a couple steps back, closing my eyes as I try to visualize the spell. Then I open them, gather the magical energy, and release it with a grunt.
The wheel sails forward about three feet, loses its momentum, and flops to the ground.
“Uh…” Nick ventures. “Ball one? Fumble? Offsides?”
I shoot him a glare, but damned if his joking isn’t loosening me up. “Let me try it again. That was a practice throw.”
“I hope so.” His tone is dry, but then it gets more serious. “I know you can do this. Just keep remembering none of that shit that messed you up was your fault. Also, if we can get in before those guys wake up, that would be awesome.”
“No pressure,” I mutter, with a glance back over my shoulder even though I can’t see the zombies from here.
