“What was that?” I grunted.
“EMP grenade,” Max said, his teeth clenched. He fell back on his haunches, his good hand clamped around his shoulder, blood leaking around his nails. “Someone in the bunker must’ve used it to kill the Lifetaker.”
“Is Maggie dead?”
“Don’t know. Those things have a limited range. Maybe she’s just temporarily offline.”
I tore a piece of material from my smartskin sleeve. “Let’s get a tourniquet on that arm.”
He put a hand against my chest, stopping me. “Forget me, I’m okay. Get that bitch.”
I stood. Struldbrug was going to regret ever bringing me back.
My Beretta was in pieces. The blade that had pierced it was lying on the carpet, dull with blood. It had ricocheted through a metal bust of Sophocles, taking his eyes with it.
I picked it up by its hilt and ran outside.
***
McDermott came out of the bunker just as I stumbled onto the driveway. He pointed his plasma pistol at me and tried to fire, but its insides had been fried by the EMP. He tossed it down, grinning, flexing his arms. “Good,” he said. “As it should be. You and me.”
“You watch too many holos,” I said.
I put all my energy into one move.
I threw myself forward, tucked into a ball. I came out of the roll low, my arm extended, the blade deep in his abdomen. His mouth formed a perfect “o” of shock, his golden irises ringed in wide surprised white.
“Sorry,” I said. “No time for a showdown.”
I yanked the blade sideways. It tore through his obliques and came free in a spray of blood and tissue. McDermott fell to the cement, dead as love.
Pain shrieked up my limbs like screech beetles, biting and tearing. Only the thought of Nicole escaping got me to my feet. I moved to the front of the house, fighting nausea, shaking my head to clear the black spots from my vision.
Nicole stood on the hillock behind the cemetery’s fence. She must have paused in her flight to watch me kill McDermott. Now I saw her whirl and disappear down its far slope.
There was a crack of thunder and the heavens opened up, drenching me in an instant, making my camo and my night optics useless.
I tore the headpiece off and ran toward the cemetery.
69
DONNER
The rain beat at me like a living opponent, every drop lancing through my tattered nervous system like a blow. The screech beetles had turned into locusts, devouring my muscles and tendons, consuming my strength in a million tiny bites.
I stumbled twice before I even reached the fence. When I hauled myself over it, I lost my footing. For a second I thought it was all going to end there with me impaled on the iron gate. Somehow I avoided the worst of the spikes and barbed wire and got myself across the top. But I slipped on the way down and hit the ground hard, on my back. The concussion sent so much torment through me that I blacked out for a minute.
I picked myself up. Blood ran out of my mouth—somewhere along the line I’d bitten my tongue. Part of my mind, my lower reptile brain, screamed at me for rest, telling me to curl into a ball under one of the big oaks, just drift into an exhausted stupor and forget everything. But I had one more job to do.
Sometimes no choice was the best choice.
Lightning tore holes in the sky, revealing purple-black clouds that looked insane with rage. The trees were dead, their trunks serving as their own grave markers, their twisted arms reaching to the sky for a reprieve that never came. They had resisted the elements for as long as they could, but now chunks of bark and wood hurled down with every fresh slash of water.
The weeds that overgrew the place were a sickly white-gray. Somehow they’d survived the enzyme, but only barely. Matted and dense, they clutched at my ankles, trying to snare me. Hidden beneath their chaos was an obstacle course of markers, rocks and roots.
I went down three more times, the last one an ungainly pitch headfirst against a headstone that made me see sparklers and hear brass bells.
Behind me, over the storm, I thought I heard voices calling my name.
I really hoped that it was Maggie. I didn’t know what I would do if she wasn’t okay.
I staggered forward through the headstones.
The place was enormous. So many lives. When I was tiny my dad had taken me to a cemetery; I’d seen the headstones and asked him how they got them to grow out of the ground that way. He’d laughed himself silly. The question didn’t seem childish now. God did grow headstones for us. And our epitaphs were already written.
Ten feet further I almost fell into an open plot that had been half-filled with leaves and debris. Only a sizzle of lightning revealed it in time. Arms pinwheeling, I staggered back onto my ass, cursing.
The lightning and thunder went to their corners for a round break. The rain took the opportunity to redouble its efforts. It was so gelid that my fingers were numb around the knife.
Then, without warning, the Blister went out.
One minute its electromagnetic discharges were sparking into the sky, crimsons and maroons splashing the firmament. Then, nothing. I could still faintly make out the shape of the domes, reflecting the city lights below, but they themselves were off-line.
Struldbrug had promised to fly back and find Adam and the President, tell them everything: how the Shift was a farce, that neither reborns and norms were infectious to the world, that the Blister hadn’t been designed to keep the Shift in but to contain her deadly Retrozine-C while it destroyed everyone. Them included.
I guess they believed him.
Somewhere I heard a howl. Nicole had seen it, too.
Without sky flash and Blister, it was terribly dark now.
Onward.
The thunder uttered a growl and the rain increased its pummeling. I stopped, disoriented. The darkness of solid objects was indistinguishable from the black canvas before me. The rain blanketed all sounds.
This was hopeless. I couldn’t track Nicole in this void. She could be anywhere, far away by now.
Then the lightning returned with a vengeance, sundering a tree maybe three hundred feet distant. The wood literally screamed. In the flare of its illumination, I saw her. She’d ducked out from behind a mausoleum when the electricity struck. She froze for a second and we saw each other, our eyes locking over the distance. Then she sprinted over a hillock.
I ran after, determined not to lose her again.
When I staggered to the top, she was gone. Water spattered the stones ahead of me, but she was nowhere.
How had she—?
Too late I realized she’d been baiting me. She’d let herself be seen deliberately, to lure me forward to this position. Perched there like I was, at the top of the rise, I’d stand out clear as day when the next lightning bolt hit. A perfect target. She would double back around.
I turned in alarm, my feet tangling in the thick vegetation. Jesus, this couldn’t be happening.
My knife, where was my knife?
The next bolt of lightning struck, and there she was, just a few yards below me, her arm already raised to throw.
I fumbled my own blade up with insensate fingers, but the hilt slipped from my grasp to tumble into the dark grass.
Find it, where did it—
Her dagger took me in the chest. I felt it pierce my breastbone, but its blade was so finely honed I didn’t know it had penetrated deeper until I felt my heart try to beat around the metal. And shudder.
Then I was falling backwards, down the hill toward an empty mawing mouth. Just like she’d planned. The sides of the earth opened up and swallowed me, black walls rushing toward the sky around me. I hit the bottom of the empty grave with barely a gasp.
It got quiet. Just the rain. Water turned by gravity into a weapon. It kept me conscious, smacking me in the face. Lying there in the grave, I was too tired to laugh at the absurdity of it.
The sky lightened a little bit, dark blue struggling against black.
; A foot planted itself at the edge and Nicole peered down at me. “Damn, can’t stay away from holes in the ground, can ya?”
She squatted closer. My heart was spasming in violent arrhythmia. It would fail soon. Couldn’t pull out the blade—I’d bleed to death. My hand fumbled at my sides, searching.
She looked out at the offline Blister. “You really screwed things up,” she said with a sigh. “But don’t think I can’t get out of this. By morning, my spinsters will have made me the hero of Necropolis, and you, the worst terrorist of the last fifty years. How does that sound?”
Sense of touch was almost gone. Muscle control nonexistent. Hands like slabs of meat. Darkness. Crowding. My. Vision.
Hang on… hang…
“First I’m going back to the house,” she said. “Anyone who’s still alive, I’m going to kill. Then I’m going to crush that smarty’s globe into fucking dust. What do you think about that?”
Dead fingers smacked. Against a shaft. Hanging from left pocket. Hadn’t. Lost it.
Get it out, get it out…
“Sorry about your wife,” she said. “I’ll bury her next to you.”
My arm flopped back over my head. Nicole saw the glint. “What’ve you got there?”
Please, guide my hand.
I threw. The pneumatic syringe sailed up through the rain. Straight into Nicole’s neck. Before she could bat it away, it had autoinjected its entire ampoule of Retrozine C.
She yanked it out of her flesh and stared at it. “What the fuck?”
Then she realized what it was. Dropped the syringe. Spasmed as she felt it begin.
She turned and ran. I was forgotten.
Run all you want.
Nowhere to go.
70
MAGGIE
Maggie watched Nicole stagger through the tombstones.
She crashed into one, leaning over its cement cross, gasping, twenty-five years old now, her face young and gorgeous and filled with mortal terror. She pushed back, kept staggering forward.
Twenty years old now.
Cursing, screaming, as the rain abruptly stopped and the skies softened. A strong wind began herding the storm front away from them.
Nicole stumbled against a tree, clinging to a low branch, her hands thinning, shortening until the branch was too thick to hold onto.
Now sixteen, now twelve, her clothes falling away as she shrank, her face dissolving and reforming, then dissolving again.
She saw Maggie. She ran toward her, begging in a voice strangled by shrinking vocal chords. A gold ring dropped from her too-tiny hands into too-large shoes. She stumbled out of them. Her stockings swam around skinny pre-adolescent legs.
Her knife sheathes slipped off her forearms into a tangle of weeds. Her veil fell to the earth, forever discarded.
Four years old, naked, Nicole finally dropped to her knees, threw her head back and screamed at the sky. But it was a child’s scream, without power, without even understanding anymore.
Then she disappeared behind a low monument.
Maggie walked over. A tiny fetus lay in a puddle of rainwater. It twitched, its pathetic limbs grasping, moving, its bird-eye blinking against the last drops of rain.
Maggie turned away in revulsion. When she looked back a moment later, all that was left was a glob of indistinct cells, a wad of flesh, shrinking, shrinking…
Dissolving…
Then nothing but the sound of wind.
***
Struldbrug landed the chopper in the street beyond the fence. The mansion was burning, casting a wicked yellow light down the embankment. Three dark forms climbed from the vehicle.
The moon slinked out, full and bright. Where it had been hiding during the storm, she didn’t know. But now it added its preternatural glow to the sky, sparking off the wet marble like angel fire.
In the distance, she could hear more choppers coming, probably tactical dragonflies ordered up by the President.
The figures were clear now. Struldbrug. Max, a long coat thrown around his shoulders, teeth gritted in pain.
And then Armitage, his hat on his head and that damned pipe in his mouth, his hair a fluorescent white, his eyes golden.
She uttered a bleat of astonishment and ran to him. Her hands drifted over the craggy surface of his face. He gave her a wry frown. “A funny thing happened on the way to the morgue.”
She threw herself into his arms.
***
Maggie slipped into the grave next to Donner.
There was a piece of paper clasped in his hand.
She was about to tell him they’d get him out of there, he’d be okay, they’d radio for paramedics, but before the first syllable had passed her lips, he said, “Shh.”
She clamped her mouth shut, eyes brimming with tears. She leaned forward and he whispered into her ear.
She nodded. “The scientists are dead. I’ll make sure their research disappears, too. I’ll make sure it ends.”
He smiled that crooked smile at her. The one only he could make work.
He tried to say something else, but death took him first.
***
She knew what he’d been trying to say, so it was alright. Three little words, words that transformed a cold cosmos into a place of hope.
She climbed out and opened the paper. She read what he’d written. Max and Struldbrug walked over to her.
“My daughter?” said the immortal.
She shook her head. He wavered, but then nodded. It was as though he’d always known, despite his best efforts, the inevitability of this outcome.
“I’ve flooded the Conch with the news,” he said. “The origins of the Shift, and its inevitable end now that Nicole is gone. There will be some revivals for a while, but Shift will fade of its own accord. The reborns alive now will be the last. There will be a generation, not very long from now, that will read about them like creatures from a fairy tale.”
Armitage looked like he couldn’t quite believe it.
Max eyed the paper. “What’s that?” he asked Maggie.
“A newspaper clipping Donner pulled off the Conch.” She cleared her throat. “From the Long Island Democrat, September 30, 1890: ‘Frule Eklund, a Frenchman, aged 52 years, who has been engaged as grave digger and general assistant in the Maple Grove Cemetery, dug a grave in one of the rear plots last Thursday, unbeknown to his keeper. It was not discovered until Saturday morning, and not until after Eklund had been found sick with fever in his bed in the barn. He died on Saturday night, but just before he breathed his last told of the grave which he opened for the receptacle of his own body, in which he was buried yesterday, as desired.’”
Max chewed it over for few seconds. “What’s it mean?”
“Donner’s telling us he dug his own grave. He doesn’t want us to bring him back,” said Struldbrug.
Manhattan’s aeries were glowing red with the rising sun. The day would be its own color now, not enhanced by the Blister. It would be cold but clear.
Maggie was staring at Armitage’s fedora. She snatched it from his head put it on her own. “Hey,” he said, surprised.
She fished the cigarette—the one she’d snatched out of Nicole’s hands in the parlor—out of her pocket.
“Damn shame,” said Max solemnly, looking at the grave. “I was starting to like the guy.”
“Not to worry,” Maggie said. They looked at her in a triple take of surprise.
She pulled the brim down aslant over one eye and grinned. They were all gaping now. She lit the cigarette with a burst of plasma from her fingertip. She drew in the smoke and held it in her holographic lungs, relishing its feel. She released it into the rain-fresh air and treated them to a perfectly arched eyebrow.
“After all—”
She raised the syringe that had fallen from Nicole, and twirled it.
“—You can’t keep a good man dead.”
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, thanks to my friend Scott F
ishkind, who had a seriously cool idea that started me down the long road to this book. I am deeply indebted to him.
To my agent, Sandy Lu of L. Perkins Agency, for rescuing me from the slush pile.
To Dina Waters, Eric Kibler, Craig Snay, Mark Frost, Hilda Speicher and Xavier Amador for their active support and insightful comments on this manuscript. To Scott Sutton, who read this book on his tiny Blackberry screen at least ten times (and counting), and always managed to find a new typo.
Thanks also to fellow Youngstown natives Greg Smith and Chris Barzak (a talented novelist—check him out!); and especially TV writer/producer Jack LoGiudice, who took me under his wing in the wilds of LA and helped me become a professional TV writer. To my former TV agents Nancy Jones and Sue Naegle, to Peter Tolan, and to comedy titan Chuck Lorre, for taking a chance on a green NY playwright.
To Tracee Patterson, for her love and support. You too, Nathan and Lindsay!
Special heartfelt thanks to my brother, John, for the countless hours we spent in the basement creating worlds out of teddy bears, cardboard and imagination, setting us both on the path to writing careers. And for his support and advice, in good times and bad. We may not share the same genes, but you could not be more my brother, John.
To the fifth-grade teacher (I wish I could remember her name) who was my first publisher. She took my short story, typed and bound it, and put it in the class library next to all the other books. That was all it took to make me writer. Teachers are more precious than gold. It’s a shame we don’t treat them that way.
And finally, to the memory of Michael Bennahum, my first manager and agent, who never gave up on me, even when I screwed up. I still miss you, Michael.
About the Author
Michael Dempsey is a novelist, actor, playwright and theatre director. Michael wrote for network television in the mid-’90s. Necropolis is his first novel and the result of a lifetime’s passion for crime and speculative fiction. He lives in northeastern Ohio with his family, where he is working on his next novel.
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