I was so busy fretting over Gumdrool that I overlooked the danger Dare was in.
The kitchen floor was little more than cracked tile resting across desiccated coral beams. It already sagged beneath an antique steel icebox, a cast iron stove, a wooden table – and Dare’s added weight was too much.
The floor sank underneath Dare’s feet.
The icebox tipped over.
Dare was too busy concentrating on his footing to notice the icebox about to crush him.
“Dare!” I shrieked, diving forward to push him towards the window. Peaches lurched behind me–
And the good news is, we both succeeded. I shoved him against a windowsill before the icebox hit him. Peaches dragged me back before the icebox fell on me.
As the icebox crashed through the brittle coral beams, the kitchen floor collapsed.
I shrieked in a quite unmanful panic as I plunged to my death. I wondered if that’s why your life passes before your eyes when you die – it’s your brain’s last, futile attempt to upload itself…
Thankfully, the basement was flooded. I tumbled backward into waist-deep water, sending a huge slosh that rattled old furniture around me. Something splashed down – Peaches, spluttering and coughing–
I shoved her aside as the cast iron stove tumbled in. The table crashed down, showering us in a rain of rusted cutlery.
The water was frigid; I flailed. Peaches surfaced, gagging.
We couldn’t see anything. The ragged hole in the ceiling strangled the light.
“Are you all right?” Gumdrool had the nerve to sound concerned. The bastard.
“Fine, I think.” I shivered with shock. “Peaches?”
“I’m fine. Void, it smells like death in here…”
“Don’t try to climb up,” Gumdrool said. “You might pull the whole apartment down on you. We’ll go outside, find a safe way in.”
“I don’t see any windows here,” I said. “Or doors. Why’s it so voiding dark?”
“Whoever lived here must have barricaded themselves inside towards the end,” Peaches said.
“One way to find out.” I tapped my earputer into flashlight mode–
— an old dresser with a cracked mirror, a muddy T smeared across its reflective surface, the drawers overflowing with rotting pigeons –
Peaches whacked my ear. “You want to run out of power before we get to the branch?”
She was right. My energy display was down to two meager red bars. I shut it off.
“No big loss,” I said. “You’ve seen one rotting pigeon room, you’ve seen ’em all.” Which was a lie – I wanted another look at that mirror, which reminded me of something – but Peaches was right. We couldn’t waste energy.
“Don’t touch anything,” Gumdrool called down. “We’ll come get you. It’s OK, we’re almost to the branch server.”
“Thank heavens,” I said. “Sweet void, it’s chilly in here.”
A clatter and thunk as they moved away. Then the gentle sound of water sloshing against walls. Peaches and I, breathing hard.
We felt around, hunting for a dry spot. There wasn’t much. We found a bed, its mattress slick with rot – and opted to prop the kitchen table in a shallow area before we clambered up onto it.
“We should cuddle up,” Peaches volunteered. “You know, for warmth.”
“I could stand the heat.”
She pressed her soft body against mine. I felt every inch of her sliding against me.
“You know what’s silly?” she asked.
“A rubber chicken that doubles as a whoopee cushion?”
She smacked me. “Amichai, I was that close to getting uploaded. So why am I trembling?”
I shrugged. “Evolution’s spent millions of years ensuring death is the worst thing that could happen to us… Because until Wickliffe, it kinda was. It’s a good instinct, I guess – keeps us from leaping off cliffs…”
“Nobody knows what it’s like to die.” Peaches shivered. “There’s always some gap between Shrive and transition. And as I fell, I thought, all this hatred I’ve picked up for Drumgoole – that’ll be erased. Like a program your DVR forgot to record.”
“That is kinda scary,” I reassured her.
“No. It’s stupid.” She shook her head. “It’s the dumb arguments the moldy oldies had. Maybe that gap makes a difference out in the Balkan provinces, where the government hauls a Shrive Point around to your village every three months, but a day’s loss? Even if I forget a little, it’s still me, right?”
“Hey, at least you have a ticket in,” I laughed. “I’m kinda living the moldy oldie experience here.”
“Void, Amichai. I’m so selfish. I didn’t even think about what it’s like for you now. Is that why you screamed?”
“I was kind of hoping you hadn’t noticed.”
“They probably heard you back at the orphanage.” She squeezed my hand.
“I don’t like being trapped here.” I pressed her fingertips to my forehead so she understood what I meant; trapped within this body.
“People lived like this for millennia,” she murmured, kissing my fingers.
“By hallucinating a big beard in the sky that watched everything they did.”
“Mmm.” She moved closer. “They also had other methods of distraction…”
“…in here?”
“We’ll hear them coming long in advance. And a little snuggling would take my mind off everything that’s happening now…”
She put her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me against her, her hips moving like they did on the dance floor. She breathed in my ear, warm and wet, rubbing her soft cheek against mine, her hand sliding down my thigh…
“Hey,” I said. “A little too much.”
She pulled away. “Too much?”
“We’re just scared, is all. We almost died, so we’re doing what biology encourages.”
“So?”
“…so you shouldn’t be putting the moves on me just out of relief.”
Peaches’ silence held the quiet of a bomb about to explode.
“Have I ever,” she asked, “questioned your motivations?”
“All the time.”
“Because despite what you may think, there were a lot of other people I could have brought on this mission. People who,” she said, thumping me on the chest, “wouldn’t clash with Drumgoole all the time–”
“Tell me he doesn’t deserve it!”
“People who didn’t Shrive voiding Mortal, so I had to come along on this stupid expedition to save their hash–”
“– I would have been all right if it wasn’t for Sins of the Flesh–”
“People who would have known how to cross a stupid floor without pulling an icebox down on themselves–”
“– you didn’t have to save me–”
“I was saving you because I liked you, you moron!”
In the darkness, I heard a sound I’d never heard before, nor expected to – Peaches crying.
I reached out to hug her; she slapped me away.
“I have plans, you dolt!” She sniffled back tears. “I’m going to steal technology from the dead. I’m going to make this world better than theirs. I’ve got the money – or I will, in thirty years.
“But I’ll need influence. And there were tons of competent people I could have tasked to this, people with ambition and good judgment and talent… but I chose you because you were my friend, and you were in trouble.
“And after all I have sacrificed to help you,” she finished, shoving me off the table, “you think I want to curl up with you because I’m scared?”
I sat, dumbstruck, in the icy water. Then I heard the scrape of coral against coral.
“Oh, thank the stars,” I whispered. Who’d have thought I’d have been happy to see Gumdrool?
The slab kept moving. But Gumdrool wasn’t using his hands to shift it; he nudged it to one side with his head. And though I was still dark-blinded, the man’s silhouette was far too gau
nt to be Gumdrool. Far too naked.
And carrying far too many dead pigeons in his mouth.
Peaches let out a hiss, too shocked to scream. The thing let out a quavery roar, like a beast trying to cram a howl through a man’s throat, then crawled on all fours onto a slippery crest of coral.
He was human; crawling clearly pained him. He kept his hands balled into loose fists, resting all his weight upon his knuckles, which were crusted with scabs. Yet he moved with the spidery nimbleness of a man who’d compensated for his handicap.
He sniffed the air, not noticing us in the shadowy back of the room. Then he shambled to the dresser piled high with dead birds. He scrabbled with numb fingers at a drawer, opening his jaws to drop in his pigeons. He stared in the mirror, looking oddly satisfied.
“Yuck,” Peaches muttered.
Naked Crazy whipped around and pounced. He rushed over me to get to Peaches – I thought he might push me underwater and drown me, but he battered me with his forearms as though he didn’t understand the use of hands. I shoved back as he clambered on Peaches–
That’s when I noticed the cross tattooed at the hollow of his throat.
Whatever they are, they’re… not subtle, Gumdrool had said.
“Dude,” I whispered. “What happened to you?”
He ignored me, chomping into Peaches.
She screamed, yanking at his hair. Naked Crazy tipped his head back to swallow something. Blood poured down Peaches’ neck.
I grabbed him, trying to haul him off her, but his naked skin was slippery. Plus, Naked Crazy was well, crazy. We were still stunned with shock – but like Gumdrool, Naked Crazy had zero barriers between plan and execution.
Still, I pulled back as he went for Peaches, yanking him away before he snapped her nose off. He whirled on me, going for my neck – had he torn Peaches’ throat out?
I slammed my palm into his jaw. He snapped at my fingers.
Peaches thrashed up through the water. Naked Crazy shoved her against the dresser.
Dead birds tumbled from the drawers as the dresser lurched forward. I caught it in both hands, looking straight into the cracked mirror, seeing the muddy T scrawled across its face…
And I knew where I’d seen that “T”: the Shrive Point in the landlord’s office.
Pigeons bobbed around my waist as I realized that these weren’t dead birds.
They were offerings.
Peaches cursed me, yelling to get him off her, but instead I fumbled at my earputer:
“Cross! Golden!”
A holographic light shot out. A three-foot-high filigreed golden cross revolved in the air over the makeshift dresser-altar.
Naked Crazy leapt away as though he’d been burned – and then cocked his head, whimpering, looking at the cross as though he couldn’t quite make sense of it. He shifted back from his four-legged stance to sit ass-to-heels, making tortured noises in the back of his throat.
Peaches hit him with a rock.
Naked Crazy lurched woozily towards her. Peaches clocked him again. He fell face first into the water.
“Come on, let’s go.” Peaches tugged me away.
I stopped long enough to pull our Naked Crazy out of the water.
“Let him drown,” Peaches said, pressing her hand to her shredded ear. “He tried to eat us.”
“Death’s different for him.”
She scowled, but helped me shove him up onto the bed. Then we hauled ass out of the basement, scrambling up a pile of rocks to the half-flooded street outside.
Gumdrool stood on a ridge of rubble, three limp Naked Crazies at his feet. He flicked blood off his truncheon.
Dare clutched his arm, groaning; the Naked Crazies had clearly bitten him badly before Gumdrool had pounded their assailants into unconsciousness. But when he saw his sister, they ran to each other, touching each other’s wounds, asking, “Are you all right?”
“We heard you screaming and followed the sound, but so did these guys,” Gumdrool said. “They attacked us the moment they saw us–”
Howls echoed across the rubble.
Gumdrool pulled us close to him, trying to shield us – but as he turned in a slow circle, we all saw ragged, skeletal men and women emerging from their hidden shrines. They crawled out from crumbling entryways on every side of us, blinking at the sunlight, faces smeared with blood and carrion.
They lifted their heads, sniffing the air, inadvertently baring their cross tattoos at us as they tried to scent our trail–
Then one of them spotted us, and let out a gargling bark. They jerked themselves up awkwardly off their all-fours stance to hunch forward, loping towards us with a terrifying speed.
We fled.
18: INSIDE A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE COLLAPSED PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE
* * *
“In here!” Gumdrool waved us into a slanted doorway. We hid inside a group of apartment buildings that had collapsed onto each other and stabilized. The buildings leaned on each other for support like drunkards, their rooms mashed together.
Behind us, the Naked Crazy Pack howled, calling like to like.
Peaches slammed the warped wooden door shut. I looked around for something heavy to lean against it, but Gumdrool shoved us into a darkened hallway.
“There are a hundred other ways to get in here,” he said, flicking on his earputer light. “We can’t wall them out. We need to go deep, lose ourselves in the building.”
The corridors twisted away, crumpling into dead ends. Their ceilings sagged low enough that some had dropped onto the rotted carpet, creating an unstable ramp up into the pancaked second floor. Gumdrool yanked me up the ramp, took a sharp left onto a mashed staircase.
“They don’t live in here, do they?” Peaches yelled, pressing a cloth against her mangled ear.
“They didn’t last time,” he said. He ran up the staircase and kicked in a door, revealing a rubble-filled hallway. He squirmed through a hole in the rubble to pull us into a room of shattered mirrors. I stared at twisted steel hunks before realizing they were dumbbells; an exercise room. Gumdrool dragged us into another sloping corridor.
“Why didn’t you warn us about the Naked Crazies?” I asked.
“Because I thought you were an infiltration expert! I didn’t think famed sneak thief Amichai Damrosch would collapse a voiding floor and alert the whole voiding neighborhood.”
“Climbing through condemned buildings is a different skill than stealth, and you know it,” Peaches shot back. “Besides, if you’d told Amichai these were feral NeoChristians, he might have been more careful.”
“Damn straight,” I agreed, grateful for her forgiveness.
“I’m defending you in the abstract. Real-life you is still an idiot.”
“I’m a… wait. Where’s Dare?”
We turned to see Dare trailing behind, clutching his bleeding arm. “I got lost…” he apologized.
“You never get lost,” I said accusingly.
“Keep up,” said Gumdrool, wedging himself into a narrow gap between two crushed walls. The Naked Crazies barked, indicating they’d made it into the building. We squeezed through, trying to put some space between us – but the crawlspace dead ended and we had to double back to tumble into another lobby, the ceiling sagging ominously.
“The building’s settled. That’s changed the layout.” Gumdrool tapped his earputer, causing a woefully incomplete map of the apartment complex to flicker in midair. He jabbed at a jiggling X. “That’s the exit to the branch server.”
“Heading this way will dead end, judging from the way these floors have collapsed,” Dare said, tracing the maps. “Lemme find a new path.”
“Wait, this is the way to the branch server?” Peaches squinted at Gumdrool. “And you led those psychos in here?”
“Like I had a choice!”
“We could have hidden until they gave up searching! You think a horde of crazies won’t put the branch staff on high alert?”
“I didn’t know where else to hide,” G
umdrool shot back. “I made the best of a bad situation your boyfriend handed me.”
“He’s not my only boyfriend.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You think I’m your–”
The ceiling collapsed, dumping a pack of feral NeoChristians on our heads.
Two of them dropped onto Gumdrool, snapping and snarling. His truncheon flew from his hand, rolling erratically across the warped floor; I snatched it up as a naked old woman loped towards me on all fours.
Another Naked Crazy fell on its ass to Peaches’ left; the last landed with a thump on a desk next to Dare, catching its spine on the corner.
At least Dare gets the injured one, I thought.
Then killer gramma was on me.
I’d like to say I wouldn’t hit a lady… But Killer Naked Crazy Grammas are fair game, in my book. I swung with the truncheon as hard as I could, apologizing as I caught her just below the ear. She fell to the ground, keening.
Peaches muttered something in her earputer; a silver cross shimmered into existence. Her Naked Crazy blinked in surprise, then lunged for Peaches.
I broke his nose.
They’re being reprogrammed to believe in your culture right now, Evangeline had said. Or to believe in something, anyway.
“They’re not vampires, Peaches,” I told her. “It worked on that one guy ’cause we were at his, what do you call it, altar. He had memories of crosses there. The rest of them–”
There was a zzzap from Gumdrool’s taser.
“– something’s stirred their brains.”
Naked Gramma bit my leg. I screamed in pain, whacking her with the truncheon – then felt guilty. Her angry animal scowl looked out of place – if it hadn’t been for the cross tattoo marking her as a NeoChristian, I could imagine her baking cookies for her grandchildren. Instead, a crazy Jew was pounding her spine.
Zzzap. The other one on Gumdrool twitched, though his taser’s charge was weakening.
Gumdrool could handle himself, though. I turned to check on Dare, expecting to see him standing over his wounded Naked Crazy. Instead, the Naked Crazy held him down, snarling and biting.
What the… I thought. Then I realized: Dare was only pretending to fight. No one would blame him if the Naked Crazies ate him alive. Dare gritted his teeth as the thing chewed his shoulder, his mouth set in a bitter smile.
The Uploaded Page 13
