Deader Still

by Anton Strout

  There was so much spectacle in the room that she didn’t see me at first. Instead, she saw Mina panicking in the glass coffin and stealthed her way across the floor toward it.

  When Jane reached it, she slid along the side farthest from Cyrus as she examined the glass coffin. Mina saw her and started screaming directly at her, but thanks to the vampire-resistant strength of the glass, and being encased myself, I couldn’t make out a word she was saying.

  Cyrus, however, heard Mina and turned. Even though Jane was blocked from his sight by the swirling blood and Mina’s body, it was clear something was up by the particular way Mina was freaking out in the box. In response, Cyrus incanted something and the zombies started shuffling toward the glass coffin.

  I bent down as far as I could to the holes from which my hands stuck out and pressed my lips against my wrists.

  “Jane!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Incoming!”

  Jane peeked out from behind the coffin and looked around the room, assessing where my voice had come from. She spied me, her eyes lighting up. Then she noticed the zombies and gave up trying to hide and stepped into plain sight. Cyrus couldn’t miss her now, and sure enough he waved his hand and the zombies corrected their course, heading straight for Jane instead of the coffin.

  Jane continued to look around. The only thing close to her was the power box for Mina’s holding cell. Jane slapped her hand on it before pointing toward me, emitting that piercing electronic noise I had heard first in the Oubliette. Power danced up the length of the box. It arced across the room and up the front of my display case.

  Cyrus watched the whole thing with grim fascination but ran for cover, taking only long enough to incant some commands to his zombie minions.

  The raw power flowed up my case and shot into the cords around my wrists. I felt electricity touch me and made sure my tongue was out of the way so I wouldn’t bite it off.

  The power shocked me and the cords around my wrist burst into flames, which would have been fine had I been wearing my gloves. The smell of burning flesh, of my flesh, filled the booth, and pain I could do nothing about overtook both my hands. All I could do was wait for the cord to burn enough so that I could snap it, but the pain was intense. Seconds felt like minutes. I viciously tried to pull my hands into the booth in a desperate attempt to free them. The flaming cord snapped the glass between the two holes and my hands were inside the booth, along with the flames. The cheap vest I had been dressed in caught on fire in seconds. I gave another tug at the cord before I felt it snap.

  Apart from the reinforced glass front, I noticed that the rest of the case was nothing more than the gutted remains of an actual Zoltar unit. Now that my hands were free and I could get some leverage, it was easy enough to smash through the more flimsy back of it. My jacket lay on the floor nearby, and I scooped it up, throwing it on over my charred outfit.

  I looked around for Jane, spotting her near where she had come in, retreating from the swarm of zombies. Mina, on the other hand, was still trapped in her clear glass coffin. As pissed as I was at her, I just couldn’t leave her there like that.

  I ran across the room and lunged for the case, throwing my weight against it.

  “Brace yourself,” I shouted, hoping she got the picture even if she couldn’t hear me. Apparently she did, and she raised her arms to press out on both sides of the coffin. I ran at it again, rocking it to its tipping point, and it went over from my momentum. I landed hard on the glass, and a fraction of a second later it shattered beneath me and I came down hard on top of Mina. There was a sickening wet swirl of mist around the two of us, and although I had just had the wind knocked out of me, I resisted the urge to take a deep breath. I wanted no part of this creature somehow entering me. I grabbed Mina and rolled the two of us out of it, hoping the vamp would choose flight over fight in this situation. I looked back to see the red cloud pause as if to register us, then dart off toward the roomful of crates.

  Mina was out for the count, as far as I could tell. I rolled to a standing position. Cyrus had run for cover, but where was he now? I couldn’t see him, but since he was the necromancer controlling these zombies and they were still coming, it meant he was still alive somewhere nearby.

  Jane had pulled back to the edge of the crate room and began scaling the towers of boxes. It was a smart move—zombies weren’t strong in the climbing department.

  I caught up with her and joined her at the top of the crates, my burnt wrists screaming with pain. I pressed them against my body.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It was one of the few bits of helpful arcana I know.”

  “It’s okay. I’m fine,” I lied. “At least I’m not in that box anymore.”

  “But, sadly, you’re still in that gold swami shirt and it’s burnt. It smells like hair on fire.”

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “How did you find this place?”

  “I came here to get you, and I almost had to beat it out of Godfrey,” she said with wickedness appearing at the edge of her eyes, “but that man caves real easy. See how having evil tendencies helps sometimes?”

  There wasn’t really time to argue about the finer points of good and evil right at the moment. We needed to get out of there.

  “We’re so screwed,” Jane said.

  “Yeah, well, at least we’ve got vampires now, so Connor will be happy,” I said. “Somehow I take some comfort in that.”

  “Simon,” Jane said, pointing back into the exhibit room.

  I turned around. Mina was gone from where I had left her. My eyes shot over to the main wall.

  So was The Scream.

  34

  We needed to find a way out of this subterranean madhouse, and if we were lucky, we’d find Mina as well, so Jane and I could recover the painting.

  We had to get moving. I looked down into a sea of flailing arms and undead eyes. The zombies couldn’t climb, but there were enough of them that they threatened to topple over the already precarious stack of crates.

  “You know,” Jane said as she tried to keep her balance, “they seemed a lot less scary when they were working in the typing pool at the Sectarian Defense League.”

  The crate underneath me shifted and I jumped to hers as mine fell away and disappeared into a group of zombies.

  “Time to go,” I said. Jane nodded and reached for my hand, hitting my wrist by mistake. I yelped.

  Jane jumped back, almost toppling over, then started digging through her shoulder bag. “Hold on a second.”

  “Is that . . . ?”

  Jane nodded. “The Greater and Lesser Arcana Welcome Kit, yeah. A little more fashionable than the one you guys have, and easier to wear in the field, too.”

  Jane pulled out two dirty-looking finger-shaped rolls of bandages and placed one against each of my wrists.

  “Mummy Fingers?” I said. I haven’t seen them since . . .”

  “You found me lying in the alley outside your apartment,” Jane dashed out. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just hold still.”

  Magic caressed the area as the bandages uncoiled themselves and proceeded to wrap around each of my wrists. The sensation felt creepy as hell, like a snake slithering against my skin, but when it was done, I could feel the healing, or at least painkillers, kicking in.

  “Better?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Okay. Let’s try our great escape again,” I said, and this time I grabbed for her hand first. “Let’s go.”

  I jumped for the next set of crates just as the ones we were standing on toppled over. Leaping from crate to crate, we made our way to the far end of the darkened room. Halfway across the vast expanse, Jane overtook me and started going off in a direction different from the one I thought we should be headed in.

  “Uh, Janey?” I said, almost losing my balance as I changed my course. “You sure this is the right way out?”

  “Just follow me,” she snapped, a little bit of her darkness resurfacing. “We don’t have time for that male macho bullshit over direct
ions.”

  Considering how lost I had been by the time I had found Mina earlier, I shut up and followed. As the end of the room got closer, Jane dove over the edge down to ground level with her blond ponytail streaming out behind her. I followed, landing on my feet, thankfully not needing to use my hands to steady myself.

  Jane, however, hadn’t landed on her feet. She was lying on the floor, intertwined in a pile of limbs with Mina. The Scream stood swaying nearby, precariously balanced on one of the crate corners that threatened to tear through the canvas. Art won out over chivalry and I dashed over to the painting to save it. I guess it showed where my priorities were.

  When I turned back to the two of them, Mina was already throwing Jane off of her and getting to her feet. In Mina’s hand was my bat, but before she even realized what was going on, Jane snatched it away from her.

  “No problem,” Mina said, turning her attention to Jane. “I can handle Miss Needs to Dye Her Roots without it.”

  Jane gave her a pained smile. “Natural blonde here. That red of yours looks straight out of the box.”

  The low moan of the approaching zombies came from behind me, sounding much closer than I had expected. I turned my attention away from the two women, but not before I saw Jane flip herself up into a standing position from prone on her back.

  “Here’s the thing, bitch,” Jane said, again using harsher language than she normally did. “If you’re going to mess with someone like Simon, you want to keep in mind who his friends are . . . and in this case, who his girlfriend is.”

  It was of some comfort that Jane still thought of us as a couple, despite the past few days.

  “Ladies . . .” I started, but I could no longer spread my attention between the oncoming zombies and them. I didn’t know which I found scarier—Jane’s attitude or the approaching brain munchers. “Jane! Bat! Now!”

  She tossed it to me and I caught it, spinning it until I had the handle firmly in one of my hands.

  Holding the bat like it was a rapier, I poked several of the approaching zombies back into the others, causing a delay in their advance as they stumbled around. It slowed them, I hoped, to the point where I could deal with only one or two at a time, but I wasn’t sure how long I could make that last, with more and more piling up behind them. I caved in the head of the closest one with a noisy squelch and chanced a look over at Mina and Jane.

  Mina threw herself toward Jane, but I could see desperation and fear in her wild eyes. Jane, on the other hand, looked pissed off and determined, a look I hoped I never found myself on the receiving end of in our relationship. The two of them fought. Mina had fighting technique on her side, but fear was making her sloppy and Jane was blocking everything Mina threw at her with ease. Even with constant blocking, though, Jane had been pushed back up against the wall, almost smashing her head into a junction box and leaving her with nowhere to go. I had to help her.

  Room-temperature fingers raked against my neck and another set dug into my gold shirt, pulling at it until it tore. I spun back around. Three of the zombies had closed in on me, and the one with its fingers on my neck moved in for a bite, its putrid breath hitting me full in the face.

  I grabbed the bat tight with both hands and brought it up in a circular swing, hoping to knock away the arms clawing at me. It worked, almost too well. Both of the zombie’s arms snapped free and went flying off into the darkness, landing with a wet thud.

  “Do . . . not . . . WANT!” I grunted as I started swinging like wild to fight off the squickening sensation of having literally disarmed them. Something slimy dripped down my face but I ignored it in my berserker rage.

  Winding up like one of the Yankees, I drove back the closest three with one swipe.

  Jane screamed from behind me. I turned back around. Mina had slammed her into the wall, and though hurt from the impact, her eyes were dark with anger.

  Mina stopped beating Jane long enough to look over at me. “You like watching a little girl on girl? Or maybe you just like watching me kick your girl’s ass . . .”

  Despite the look on Jane’s face, it was clear she was getting her ass kicked now, but what could I do? The zombie hits just kept on coming and I wasn’t getting any closer to helping her.

  Not that I needed to. Right then, Jane reached her hand out along the wall, coming in contact with the metal junction box she had almost clocked herself on. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead of words, out sprang that sound of a thousand modems dialing for connection, louder than I had heard it before. Mina’s hair started to rise as if charged with static. Then I felt mine do the same. One of the darkened fluorescent tubes blinked to life overhead, glowing brighter than it should have until it shattered as if from a massive overload. Electricity shot from the open sockets and rained down and through both the zombies and Mina, but not channeling through me.

  The remaining zombies, as electrified as they were, didn’t have the capacity to react to pain, but instead kept coming until something in their wiring cooked to the point that they fell to the floor, smoldering. The smell of burnt hair and charred meat mixed with that of rotting flesh and I gagged.

  Mina was screaming bloody murder behind me. Unlike the zombies, she felt everything that was happening to her, and I realized that at this point Jane was actually electrocuting her.

  “Jane,” I called out. “Stop.”

  Jane’s eyes stayed focused on Mina, but she made no motion to detach herself from the junction box. Sparks were pouring from the ceiling in a cascade around Mina’s still-twitching form.

  “Jane,” I shouted, reaching for her, but stopped short. I hadn’t been trained in how technomancy worked. I wasn’t sure if I’d electrocute myself in the process or not. Still, I couldn’t let Jane kill someone, not while I had a chance to do something about it. I ran between her and Mina, fully passing into the stream of electricity arcing to her.

  Although the power only arced into me for a few seconds as I cut across its path, it was like getting kicked hard-core in the breadbasket, except given the intensity of it all, my whole body felt like it was the breadbasket getting kicked.

  Jane faltered when she saw me take the hit and her one hand dropped from the junction box as she screamed.

  The electricity in the air dissipated and the two women both slumped to the floor. Shaking from my jolt, I caught Jane just before her head hit the ground. Her eyes were open, but they stared ahead, blank and unmoving.

  “Jane?” I said, worried. “Come on back to me. We’ve still got a lot of arguing to get on with in our lives and I can’t have it be all one-sided. C’mon now . . .”

  I hugged her to me and felt her gasp in a deep breath. She started to sob.

  “Where were ya just now?” I said, laughing a little with relief. “You were looking a little Voldemort around the gills there for a minute. We should probably talk about that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said, repeating it over and over, rocking back and forth in my arms as we sat there on the floor. “I couldn’t stop myself. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t kill her, did I?”

  I turned to check on Mina, but was surprised to see she wasn’t lying there anymore. And once again The Scream was gone also.

  “I think she’s going to be just fine,” I said.

  35

  The sun was just starting to set as the two of us, shaken, exited through the back-alley door that had led to the underground section of the Guggenheim. I was having trouble just walking. With so much raw electricity in that last blast, I was kitten-weak and had to rely on Jane to help me walk, making this quite possibly the slowest escape ever.

  “I think we need to call downtown and let the Department in on what happened here today,” I said. “Connor’s going to go ballistic, but at least I can report that I wasn’t wholly wrong about there being vampires, or rather a vampire, in New York City. That should ease a little of the tension between the two of us.”

  I reached for my cell phone in the inside pocket of m
y jacket, but when I pulled it out, it was melted, the same as the last one.

  “Fuck,” I said, dropping it. The now-hardened plastic blob of my ex-phone shattered as it hit the sidewalk.

  “Use mine,” Jane said. She reached into her pocket, but hers had also melted. “Looks like we’ll have to tell the Department in person.”

  “Just let me catch my breath for a second,” I said. “Okay?”

  Jane nodded and led me to safety across Fifth Avenue

  , headed for one of the entrances to Central Park. I thought about Connor’s warning about the park at dark, recalling the odd lights I had seen while running through the trees. It took all of my remaining strength to plant my feet firmly on the ground to stop Jane from walking me into the park.