From out of the dark came one more of Yancy’s boys, but he wasn’t alone. His expression somewhere between scared and terrified, he held a four-foot pole with both his hands, at the end of which was a metal collar fastened around the neck of the sixth zombie. Like its former fellows, this one wore the tan jumpsuit. It was tall, making Yancy’s muscle have to crouch a bit as he walked with the pole going upward to the zombie’s neck. The undead man had been past middle age before coming into his present state, but he’d managed to keep a healthy head of graying hair and might have been handsome. Now, though, his face was contorted with rage. Slobber dribbled from his lips, and his eyes burned with need—for flesh, I guessed, or maybe it was just the desire to rip into the living to exact revenge over the indignity of being rendered undead.
I took it all in at a glance, but my mind started running a hamster wheel again over one more detail that screamed out at me.
This zombie, too, was missing its right hand.
Lester Rincon, I presumed.
So whose was the other handless corpse with its head and left arm being dissolved in the vat? Neat Pete must have had a busy few days.
“What are you doing?” Grommet said, clearly surprised at his man’s actions.
“There’s something else back there,” he said, cocking his head in the direction he’d just come. It was all shadows to me, but there must have been a door, a room where the Grommets had retreated with Rincon when the rest of the zombies had broken free. They’d come out at the all clear only to find me about to be dropped into the drink.
Yancy Grommet had no sympathy for his man’s uneasiness. “Well give him to Mike and get back there and find out what—”
But that was as far as he got.
At that point things started happening fast.
A white blur darted out of the shadows and hit the latest arrival square in the back, making him lurch forward and knocking the zombie Rincon off balance. A second later, I saw that the blur was Neat Pete, only not so neat any more. He’d clearly been bitten in all of the earlier commotion and had undergone the Turn while hidden away in the back room. Where he’d been psychotically precise in his actions in life, the undead version of Pete had no reason to be measured; all the rage he’d had to channel away to allow for his artistry with a blade came out now, and he vented it first on the man who’d been wrangling Rincon. The man went down with Pete on his neck; seconds later blood pooled on the floor around the Grommets’ feet.
With his neck still collared and the pole dragging impotently behind him, Rincon regained his balance after stumbling away from the collision and turned immediately on Mike. The man whose job it had been to keep his gun trained on the bound Clancy Grommet hadn’t known what to do in the first moments of the attack, and so had done nothing to save his compatriot from Pete’s undead rage. Now, with Rincon loose and coming at him, Mike panicked, firing three slugs into the zombie’s gut, slowing him for only a second before he was on Mike. The poor guy tried braining the zombie with the grip of his pistol as he went down, probably realizing only in his last second of life that he should have shot the thing in the head and been done with it.
There was snarling and shouting, the sounds of tearing flesh and gurgling, slurping revenge being taken on the living and then the dead. The Grommet brothers, no longer hell bent on each other’s destruction, had managed to find some coordination in their four legs and were moving rather quickly away from the mayhem. Edward had taken his gun away from my head and tried training it first on one zombie then the other, but the Grommets were moving straight toward us and so blocked his shot.
Their escape caught Neat Pete’s attention, and he was no sooner done with his first victim than he was up on all fours and bounding after the Grommets. He threw himself into Clancy’s chest, and the three tumbled to the ground.
That was when Edward’s gun went off. He must have held it almost next to my ear, as a high-pitched whistle was suddenly all I could hear. The air filled with the smell of gunpowder, and Neat Pete flew backwards off the Grommets, a spray of blood from his head wound.
Dazed from the gunshot going off so close, I just stood there for a second as Edward leapt off the catwalk to go to his boss. Yancy lay under the bulk of his brother, who had blood on his shirt. Whether it was Pete’s or his own, I couldn’t tell.
My only thought was to run, to squeeze past the van and out the door I’d been forced through earlier. But then I saw Lester Rincon look up from Mike’s corpse. He ignored the Grommets and Edward and Pete’s thoroughly dead body and looked instead right at me.
I had always known that zombies could move fast. After that night, I could have written a dissertation on that fact. Rincon was up and at me, speeding across the floor as though drawn to me by some inexorable force, like we were two magnets that would fly together solidly if they got even close to each other.
I could do nothing but take a few steps back and brace myself. With one heel just at the edge of the vat, I leaned forward, hoping I could fend him off when he hit the top of the ramp. But even as he was coming, I knew it wouldn’t go that way. He’d steamroll me into the same stuff that was busy dissolving the body beside me.
So, when the zombie hit the top of the ramp, I leapt forward, telling myself I’d take him out at the ankles. It worked better than I would have dreamed. I dropped in front of him, hitting him in the shins with my shoulder. While his body moved fast, his mind must not have been quite in sync, as he kept going forward even though he must have seen me crouch before him. He tripped clumsily against me and then sailed over my body.
If I’d been possessed of the slightest bit of grace, I would have continued my roll, popped up on my feet and turned to make sure he wasn’t coming back at me. But grace has never been my strong suit. I ended up rolling off the side of the ramp and hitting the concrete floor head first, my body rolling over my neck and my feet flying out over me so I landed flat on my back with a thump. The drop didn’t knock the wind out of me, but I lay there for a few seconds anyway just trying to make sure that I really had survived.
Then I got to my feet and crouched again, ready to bolt. But when I looked up onto the platform where I’d been standing seconds before, all I saw was the first dead zombie, the one I’d thought was Rincon. And as for Rincon himself, I could see nothing but the metal pole that had been fastened to his neck. It stuck straight up out of the vat for a second as the zombie thrashed around in the liquid, and then it sank as the chemicals began to do their work on the already compromised body.
I thought for a second of running up the ramp to grab the pole and fish him out, if only to save the remaining hand, but there was no use, and I really didn’t want to get my hands on that pole now that it was wet from whatever was in that vat. It wasn’t like I carried rubber gloves or anything. Plus, I really didn’t want to try that hard.
When I turned from the vat, I saw Edward trying to help the Grommets to sit up. It required a lot of moving of legs and shifting of weight, all of which was rather undignified for the conjoined mobsters, and they both cursed him as he worked. In their twisting around, I could see each brother’s face, and they both looked scared, though not just from the attack.
Edward saw me looking and said, “He’s bit. What do we do?”
The blood I’d seen on Clancy’s shirt hadn’t just been from Pete getting shot. The former blade man had taken a little chunk out of Clancy’s pectoral muscle, right through his shirt—one last betrayal of his boss. Now the question of whether the brothers shared more than just skin and bone would be answered. Clancy was bound to Turn, but would Yancy, too? And what would it be like being joined at the head to a thrashing, raging, flesh hungry zombie if it turned out that only one brother should Turn? I supposed if anyone deserved to find out, it had to be one of the Grommets.
Edward looked at me, expectant, as though he figured I’d know what to do, as though I had some expertise in this area. And, of course, I did. Zombies, vile and dangerous though they were,
were my people, too.
The thing was: I was faced with a choice. Rescue one or both of the Grommets and earn whatever passed for gratitude among their kind as they went back to double-crossing each other in more conventional ways. Or let one or both Grommets die, their criminal empires expiring with them. I’d be a hero to many, having effectively dropped a house on two witches at the same time. But it would only have meant watching over the next couple of months as petty thugs and killers nastier than Neat Pete struggled over bits of the Grommets’ turf. After a while, two or three would emerge, clamp down on the rest, and the city would be back to what it was now—only with criminal overlords of a type I couldn’t know or predict.
It took me only a few seconds to see I really didn’t have a choice. It was a case of the devil you knew and the devil you didn’t. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the case containing Drea’s antidote.
“We can talk later about what this is worth to you,” I said, my voice still hollow in my ears from the effects of the gunshot.
Seven
“That ought to do it,” Bascom Quibble said, pulling the needle out of the hand and stepping away from the table.
He looked disgusted, like he was a stuffy art collector who’d just had to purchase a comic book for a nine-year-old.
The hypodermic fitted neatly into a foam-lined case, which he zipped shut with finality and tucked into his briefcase.
“We’re done then?” he asked, looking from me to Pixel.
“No quality control?” I asked.
He narrowed his eyes at me and then answered his own question. “We’re done. I’ll see myself out.”
He turned without another word and was out the door in seconds.
I was glad to see him go, having already told myself he’d have to find someone else the next time he or his girlfriend got themselves into a jam. I didn’t like the way they worked.
Pixel barely noticed Bascom’s passing. I could see she was nervous. She looked at the severed hand where it sat on a plastic cutting board that she’d placed on the plain pine boards that made her coffee table, her lips held tightly together and sucked in between her teeth just a bit. I doubted she got this tense when doing a major hack. Lester Rincon’s hand was a bigger deal than anything else she’d done in a long time.
I’d phoned Pixel the night before after walking out of the drug lab with all my body parts intact to tell her it looked like I’d be able to get Bascom Quibble to work his magic on the hand. It had been good news, but she still hadn’t heard from her old man, and his absence was starting to get to her. At the time, I hadn’t felt all that sympathetic: I was exhausted and shaken up and still wondering why I’d started down this path in the first place. I still didn’t know if she’d been straight with me, if she was spending her down time getting rolled with the drugs Neat Pete had been overseeing at the lab, or if that smell I’d picked up on the night she’d shown me the hand had just been the lingering scent of her dinner.
I’d decided it didn’t matter; the ride I was on with her was about done now, and I didn’t have to have all the facts in order to be able to get out and walk away. If the hand failed to re-animate, I wouldn’t be getting a vacation, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing the Grommets were beholden to me. Sure, I could call in the favor and use it to have Max Patterson’s debts forgiven, but Pixel would have to prove herself worth it first.
On the phone, I’d insisted on a day’s rest and had set up the meeting at her place for the early evening. Now, after having slept till almost noon and worked on a few loose ends with other cases, I stood here with Pixel and watched the dead man’s hand as it began to twitch.
“My God,” Pixel whispered when she saw that Bascom’s process was beginning to work.
She reached for it, but I stayed her hand. “Be careful.”
She gave me a quizzical look. “It’s not like it has teeth.”
I gave her a be-my-guest gesture and stepped aside. Pixel must have re-thought it for a moment, as she picked up the cutting board rather than just lifting the hand off it. She carried the whole thing to her computer desk and set it down in front of the keyboard. Then, a bit gingerly, she grabbed the thing near its base and nudged it forward, lifting it just a little to place the fingers on the keys.
We waited, both of us expecting the muscle memory to kick in at the familiar feel of the keys beneath its fingertips.
But nothing happened.
We waited longer, and the hand just twitched.
It wasn’t going to work. Pixel’s plan had been an interesting one, but nothing more. All those dead men last night, me almost among them, all for nothing. No pay off for Pixel, no vacation for me. All wasted.
And then, after a few seconds more, I understood why.
“It’s not going to work,” I said. “Not like this.”
Pixel gave me another questioning look.
I nodded toward the desk. “Put the hand on your tablet.”
“My tablet?” she asked. “I don’t get it. Why would…?”
“Just try it.”
She pulled a drawer open, took out her tablet, and switched it on. When it had booted up and she’d called up the keyboard, she set it down on the cutting board and picked the hand up, not so gingerly this time, to place it on the tablet.
Almost immediately, the fingers began to move. P, it typed. Then I. I glanced at Pixel, my teeth gritted. The X followed, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. The E came next, and then the L. It paused and started with the P again.
Pixel looked at me, her mouth open now, confusion on her every feature.
“Ace…” she said. “Why would Lester Rincon be typing my name?”
I swallowed and looked at the floor, then back at the hand. “It’s not Lester Rincon’s hand,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “But you said the zombie’s right hand was missing.”
“It was. And there was another body there, too. Another dead zombie with a missing hand.”
“And you think this one…”
I nodded.
“But why would Pete lie about it?”
“Because he didn’t want to tell you whose hand it really was.”
She just looked at me, still not getting it.
“You said he was driving past your father’s place when he saved you from the satyrs.”
Now she got it. Her confusion was gone, replaced by horror. I knew it would only get worse as she thought about how she’d kept this hand in her fridge for the last couple of days, and worse still as she thought of how her father had finally ended up in the middle of a zombie massacre.
She stared at the dead man’s hand, still impotently typing her name the way Max Patterson had typed it compulsively all the times he’d messaged her in life. Pixel put her hand to her mouth and turned away in horror.
“Pete…” she started.
“Fulfilled the contract on your father. And then he saved you from the satyrs and had you in the car with the cooler. When you asked what was in it, he couldn’t help himself, had to say what it was, maybe to impress you, but couldn’t say whose hand it was.”
“And he killed Rincon, too?”
“Probably the same night. Probably showed Clancy the trophy and then threw it away. He’d never considered the possibility of what could be done with that hand until you told him. And when you started asking questions, he just plugged Rincon’s name in. Probably the first thing that came into his mind. And then he didn’t know how to back out of the lies once they’d started.”
“So my father’s really…”
“I’m sorry, Pixel.”
I didn’t want to say more, but I knew that Max Patterson’s handless body had likely been in Pete’s trunk as he drove Pixel home that night. I was sure Pixel would figure that out, too, without my telling her.
The tears started falling then, big drops spilling over her lower lashes and onto her cheeks. I decided it would be the decent thing to offer a hug, so I put my han
ds on her shoulders. She turned her face into my chest and started sobbing.
I held her, watching over her shoulder as the hand continued typing her name.
She got it together after a minute or so and took a few deep breaths as the tears abated. I leaned back, my arms still around her, and looked down at her.
It was one of those things that just happen.
I hadn’t meant it, hadn’t planned it, but my eyes went down her blouse. It was only a second of staring at the swell of her breasts, and then my eyes were up again, looking over her shoulder, not wanting to make eye contact.
No silver crucifix hung around her neck, no martyred figure dangled in her cleavage.
I didn’t know how she knew the werewolf from the Gaudy Mirage, whether she’d paid him or if he just owed her a favor. It didn’t matter. She’d set me up, and I’d fallen for it.
Idiot, I thought.
I just stood there with her like that, not sure what to do. As vulnerable as she was now, I might have been able to provide more than comfort. A few more hugs, some rubbing of her back, and maybe I’d be behind that curtain of beads that separated this room from her bedroom. It would be lousy of me, but it would be fitting revenge for all she’d put me through the last couple of days and nights.
Instead, I just leaned forward and kissed the top of Pixel’s head, a fatherly gesture, intentionally so, and one calculated to hurt as much as to comfort.
“Sorry, kid,” I said. “Better luck next time, huh?”
Then I turned and walked across the room. At the open door, I turned for a moment to see her still standing there, not having moved, the dead man’s hand still on the tablet. She’d have to figure out what to do with it now. And for a second or two, I thought of closing the door again and walking back to her.
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