by Devon Taylor
Rhett stepped through the door with the others close behind.
They came out onto the street. Rhett could barely hear himself think over the honking horns. The line of traffic stretched away in both directions, cars only visible by the pearlescent glow of their headlights in the fog. Farther up on the left, he could see warbling red lights. There was some kind of accident holding up traffic. That must have been their destination.
Rhett looked across the street, trying to get a read on where they were. But the fog was too dense to see more than a foot or so in front of him. He turned around. Maybe they had stepped out of a recognizable building or …
His mouth fell open. The door, which had a single word—MAINTENANCE—printed on it, was attached to a towering orange metal arch. The arch reached straight up into the fog, but lights of its own illuminated enough of the shape for Rhett to make it out. Dense cables swooped down and away from the arch, then swooped back up, connecting with another arch down the street, which he was quickly realizing wasn’t a street at all. Down the road, near the crash, the other orange arch dug into the cloudy air, splashing the fog with soft yellow light.
“We’re on the Golden Gate Bridge,” Rhett said, mostly to himself.
“Put that together, did ya?” Basil asked. “Don’t be such a bloody tourist, mate.”
It was hard not to be, though. Even with three-hundred-some-odd days of soul-gathering under his belt, Rhett was still amazed every time they turned up in a new place. They had been to San Francisco before, but never like this. The last time had been for a stabbing victim in the Tenderloin. Not exactly an exciting encounter with the city.
But the bridge, in the early hours of the morning, with the fog rolling in across the bay, smothering everything except for a smattering of out-of-focus lights, was one of the most beautiful things Rhett had ever seen. He wished he could stay and admire it, but the push wasn’t going to allow that.
And neither was Mak, who was snapping her fingers at him.
“You awake over there?” she said, putting as much snark into her voice as she could.
Rhett, Theo, and Treeny followed Mak and Basil down the side of the bridge, with the railing ticking by on their left and the traffic beeping and snarling on their right. As they went, the fog began to recede ever so slightly, exposing a little more of the bridge and the cars that were stretched out across it but not much else. Rhett could see the emptiness beyond the railing, where there was only the drop into the water.
There was an ambulance ahead, its lights dancing off the fog, looking like fire and smoke from a distance. Near the ambulance was a tangle of metal and leather that might have once been a car, but it was hard to tell now. The image jarred Rhett out of his sightseeing. The car wrecks were the hardest for him.
The mangled car looked like it might have been a Mercedes, maybe a BMW. It was something luxurious, either way. Gnarled twists of glossy black finish and shreds of tan leather circled each other in a gruesome dance of destruction.
As they got closer, Rhett overheard a conversation between two paramedics—something about how the car had been going over a hundred miles an hour. And once they were closer still, Rhett could make out the blood that was coating some of the jagged points of metal. He followed the blood, finding the places where there seemed to be more of it, until he found an arm dangling from the wreckage. It was pale, with small fingers and manicured nails. There was a diamond the size of a small asteroid on the ring finger. Wrapped up in all that carnage was a woman clinging to life.
Basil and Mak got there first, and Mak was looking for a way to get to the woman. Around the car, there were probably a dozen paramedics and cops but no firefighters. If anybody was going to save the woman, it would be them. But there was no fire truck in sight.
Then, from way off at the other end of the bridge, as if in response to Rhett’s thought, there was the sound of an angry, nasally horn. The fire truck was trapped at the other end of the bridge, caught in traffic with everybody else. There was no way this woman was escaping her vehicle without them.
Rhett took up his position, standing near the smoking wad of expensive steel, fingering the knuckle blade at his hip, sensing Treeny and Theo and Basil completing the perimeter behind him. He had yet to see anything out of the ordinary, but on a morning like this, with darkness and fog and chaos surrounding them, putting up their guard was the best thing they could do.
Mak was saying something. It sounded like “… can’t even get to her…” But Rhett wasn’t sure. There was a lot of noise. More honking from cars that were inching past the wreck, angry yelling from farther down the bridge, and the fire truck blasting its horn, trying desperately to get through.
He glanced over his shoulder. Mak was climbing on top of the mangled hulk, peering down through what used to be a window. And then Mak was climbing down inside the car, squeezing her narrow, muscular figure through the chewed-up gaps.
“Mak!” Rhett called. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” He was practically screaming to be heard over the din, and he wasn’t sure she heard him even then. On the other side of the wreck, Basil made eye contact. His face was concerned now. Apparently Rhett wasn’t the only one with a bad feeling.
He watched Mak disappear into the carnage. She was out of sight.
Traffic crawled past them, horns screaming to be heard. Slowly, one by one, the dim glow of headlights turned into actual beams that were attached to vehicles morphing out of the fog. Drivers were hanging out of their windows, hollering at one another as everyone tried to squeeze by the wreck. The fire truck horn sounded out of the void, over and over, wailing like a banshee.
Rhett squinted against the darkness and the fog and the lights filling up the fog, trying to see if the fire truck was getting any closer, in some weird way hoping that it would. He knew it was already too late—the push was enough to assure him of that—but at least then no one would be able to say that it had been hopeless, that a few hundred commuters were too impatient and frustrated to give the fire truck enough room to pass, to give it a fair shot.
The horns rang out like an overture of panic. But somewhere in there, Rhett thought he could hear something else …
A roar?
An actual scream?
Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like it was coming from a machine. It sounded like an animal, something predatory. Something hungry.
Down at the far end of the bridge, where the fire truck was making its desperate crawl toward the wreck, Rhett could see dark shapes. Tall shapes. Shapes that appeared to be climbing the cables of the bridge and moving across the roofs of the gridlocked cars.
All at once, the angry horns and irritated yells started to die down, and there was a sense of movement coming down the bridge, a wave of chaos.
“Oh my God,” Basil said, and Rhett heard him clearly now. “Mak, get your ass out of there! Now!”
But Mak was already midgathering. Rhett could hear her murmuring the words from inside the crumpled car. I will guide you to the clearing.
“Basil…?” Rhett started to ask. But after a moment, there was no need. They came out of the fog like phantoms, tall and shadowy, grinning like madmen.
Psychons.
Rhett had never seen one. In his months as a syllektor, the worst-case scenario—the thing that all syllektors armed themselves against—had never happened. He had only heard the stories that Basil and Theo told. These were the things that inspired nightmares of skeletons clothed in shadows.
The real thing was so, so much worse.
They were at least twice as big as a normal person, towering over most of the vehicles. The ones that were scaling the structural parts of the bridge looked like giant birds of prey, preparing to swoop down and collect their kills. The psychons were fleshless, arms and legs sinewy with muscle and cartilage, their hands and fingers made of knobby bones that were hooked into claws. Their faces were mostly bare skulls with a few ribbons of connective tissue strung here and there—up thei
r necks, between the two halves of their jaws, deep down in their sunken, cave-like eye sockets, where beady white eyeballs looked out, vacant, starving. They wore cloaks that were tattered, hanging about their grotesque bodies the way algae hangs on to old shipwrecks, in ragged, fluttering tufts. The cloaks came up over their heads, forming hoods that did little to mask the awfulness of their faces.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Basil spat, and ran up to where Rhett stood. The two of them and Theo and Treeny formed a line in front of the car wreck, where Mak was still inside, gathering the soul of the driver. “Mak! Hurry it the hell up!” Basil reached over his shoulders and came back with a scythe in each hand. He did his drumstick spin with them. Theo, grinning, removed his battle-ax from its place across his back. And Treeny, trembling, fanned out a handful of her knives. Rhett gripped his knuckle blade, slipped it from its holster.
“How did they find us?” Treeny whimpered.
“I count six, boss,” Theo said. Technically, the “boss” was Mak. But he was speaking to Basil.
“Keep it together, Treeny,” Basil said. “You too, mate.” That last part was directed at Rhett, who was doing his best to process what he was seeing. The monsters, the soul-eaters. They were actually there in front of him.
“I’m good,” Rhett said. “I’m good.” He was repeating it mostly for his own comfort.
“Two of them are going up the cables, Theo,” Basil said. “They’re going to try and come down on top of the car. Make sure they don’t. Treeny, Rhett, and I will go after the others. Everyone try to divert them from Mak.”
“She should be done by now,” Rhett said.
“She’s stuck,” Basil replied quietly. “She’s got to be stuck.”
The psychons moved in, four of them on the road, weaving around some cars, going over others, all with unsuspecting drivers behind the wheels, drivers who knew nothing of the fight that was about to break out between two factions of the dead. The other two were slinking up the cables of the bridge. They were moving faster now, closing in, their torn cloaks billowing limply behind them. One of them opened its mouth and a peal of vicious noise escaped it, something like a roar and a scream combined, the noise a beast makes right before chomping into its freshly hunted meal.
“Here they come!” Basil called, glancing one last time over his shoulder, the hope in his eyes that Mak would be there. She wasn’t.
All six of the psychons cried out, and all six of them rushed forward, their skeletal claws splayed and their mouths spilling some kind of white goop. They were salivating.
Theo took off first and leaped into the air. He caught one of the bridge cables, where a psychon was clawing its way toward the car wreck. For a second, Theo just hung there by one hand, massive feet dangling above the sidewalk and the protective railing. Then he swung his other arm, the one with the ax held at the end of it, and sliced through the cable with a single blow. The whole bridge jerked as the disconnected cable sprung back, colliding with another cable, the one with the other psychon on it. The cable swung through the air and came down on top of the still-unmoving traffic, smashing several cars. Drivers screamed and abandoned their vehicles. To them, a support cable had just inexplicably snapped, possibly as a result of the car crash. The paramedics and cops were running, too, staring up at the bridge cables, preparing for more to come down on top of them. Everyone scattered, fleeing into the dense fog.
The two psychons that had been climbing the bridge plummeted back down. One of them smacked into the asphalt and lay still for a second, then jerked back up, looking angrier than ever. The other one dropped down on the other side of the railing and disappeared, its roar fading rapidly.
Theo landed on his feet, swung his battle-ax around, and went back for more, running at the psychon that had fallen back onto the bridge.
After that, there was no more time to react.
Basil took off sprinting, head down, toward the oncoming psychons on the road. Treeny took a hesitant step back, then gripped the knives in both of her hands and held her ground, waiting for one of them to come to her. There was a fire in her eyes that Rhett had never seen before. He was impressed.
Rhett had a split second before one of the psychons, its eyes homed in on him, cutting through him like lasers, was on top of him. He took that split second to give one more look over his shoulder at the pulverized Mercedes—or whatever it was. The woman’s arm still hung limp and pale out of the mess, her ring winking at him with the glow from the headlights.
Then the second was up, and suddenly Rhett was upside down, the psychon’s skeleton claw wrapped around one of his legs. The bridge, still mostly obscured by the fog, flipped around in his vision like a pancake. Rhett hung tight to his weapon for as long as he could, with the psychon flinging him around like a human tassel, until the velocity became too much and the blade slipped from his grip. He saw it flip away into the fog.
Rhett tried to kick out of the psychon’s claw. He snapped his feet out, pushing and squirming as the world spun around him in a whirlwind of lights. At one point, his face passed right above the pavement, his vision filling up with the black rock and yellow lines.
Then he was looking at the psychon itself, right in the face. But it was shrinking, getting smaller by the second, and Rhett’s feet were no longer caught in its grip. The psychon had thrown him.
He smashed into the side of a car, crumpling the door with a metallic crunch. Glass from the shattered window rained down on him. He slumped to the ground, with his back against the severely dented car and his legs stretched out in front of him, one of his pant legs torn and the ankle beneath it gouged. There was very little blood, but Rhett could see the pink muscles, sliced and splayed open, exposing part of the bone.
Something wet plopped into his lap. It was thick and mucus-y. A string of it glistened in front of him, still caught between the glob on his pants and its source. Rhett followed the string up and saw the ugly, grinning face of another psychon perched on top of the car, looking down at him.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he murmured, echoing Basil.
There was one above and one across the bridge from him, and Rhett had no weapon to speak of. The one that was across from him, the one that had tossed him like last week’s garbage, took a menacing step toward him. At the same time, he heard the one on the car growl above his head, not in a hungry way—they didn’t want to eat him, after all, they just wanted to get him out of their way, probably in the most violent manner possible.
Rhett tested his legs, pulling them toward him. The one that had been massacred was the right one, and while the left one curled up with no problem, the right one stayed where it was. He couldn’t feel any of the pain and wouldn’t dare force his senses to feel it. But the leg was no good now. Even if he wanted to make a run for it, he couldn’t.
The psychon that stood facing Rhett took two or three more steps in his direction. Meanwhile, farther down the bridge, it looked like Basil had taken the arm off another one, but they were still circling each other, the psychon down an arm and pissed, Basil spinning his scythes cockily, ready to remove more appendages.
Theo was beating one of the monsters with his bare hands, his ax either lost or forgotten. And Treeny was fending one off from inside the backseat of a now-ruined sedan, the psychon clawing at the outside, popping in windows, shrieking in frustration while Treeny kicked at it with her feet and swiped at it with one of her knives.
When Rhett brought his attention back to his own shitstorm, the psychon that had thrown him was still closing the distance between them. And the one above him was crawling down the side of the car, its face unsettlingly close, its cloak hanging down around its pointed cheek bones, drowning most of its features in shadow. Its eyes were still bright, though, staring out of that darkness with raw intensity.
The lights began to flicker. All of them. Even the headlights on the cars. They stuttered on and off in random patterns. The shroud of fog that still hung about the bridge looked like it was performing s
ome sort of light show, the golden sparks dancing around inside it. All up and down the bridge, the lights were seizing, creating a war between the darkness and the light.
The psychons were messing with the lights somehow. Or maybe when Theo cut that cable, something else snapped, causing an electrical malfunction. But that didn’t explain the headlights.
And when Rhett glanced back up at the psychon that had been slinking toward him from on top of the car, it was retreating slightly, hesitating. It looked around at the flickering lights, obviously just as confused as Rhett was.
Rhett could still hear the grunts and clangs and angry yells coming from the other three, but they had to be seeing this, too. He looked back down the bridge for them. What caught his eye, though, wasn’t their ongoing fights but a wave of darkness that was passing over the bridge. Where the lights at this end were still sputtering and dancing, the ones at that end were going out completely, the fog making it that much more difficult to see.
The shadow rolled toward him.
It fell over Basil and Theo and Treeny and the other psychons, squashing them into blackness, seeming to take the sound of their battles with them. Rhett made eye contact with the psychon standing in front of him. Those bright little eyes were still angry, but now there was something else. Could it be fear? Rhett was sure that it was. And that made him terrified.
Then the lights went out around him. There was an audible click as they did. And darkness descended. The psychons were somewhere in that black abyss, but he couldn’t hear them, couldn’t hear anything. The rest of the lights across the bridge went out. The dark was complete, impenetrable. Not even the lights from the city were making it through the fog.
Rhett waited. The killing—or, he supposed, the ghosting—blow would be coming. If there was anything that was going to work to the psychons’ advantage, it was this.
Time stretched out. He didn’t know what to do. He was about to try to get to his feet (or at least to his one good foot) when a handful of the lights snapped back on.
