by Marcus Sakey
“Okay,” Kyle said. “We’re here. Now what?”
It took Claire a moment to realize he was looking at her. The others too. Partly, she suspected, because this had been her idea, but more because she and Will had been FBI agents. Funny; these people had found a way to survive here, had faced more danger on a daily level than many agents did in a career, and yet they were still responding to an authority pattern.
“Where did you get in the building, DeAndre?”
He pointed at the north entrance.
“Right. Well, let’s hope it stays open late.” She paused, considering. “Okay. We keep the building between us and the field. Weapons out, no talking, stay close. If anyone spots us, we run.” Claire had a flash of Simon Tucks hauling her into the air one-handed, and her scalp ached at the memory. And pray they don’t follow.
They crossed the street to the sidewalk. A wrought iron fence separated them from the grounds, a bent bicycle frame still U-locked to it. Sonny took two quick steps, planted a foot, and leapt. He cleared the five-foot fence with two to spare, landed soft as a cat, and turned back to shoot them a grin. Brody, who had already reached out a hand to the railing, paused, then stepped back and did likewise.
Watching the man she loved leap ten vertical feet like it was nothing, she felt a sudden pang. What power came with abandoning the rules. They could sprint for hours, swing a sledgehammer one-handed, move like superheroes. Brody had told her that there were moments when he could almost see the sun, whereas for her, the sky had been a relentless mass of swirling grey. In this dead world, life force was power, purely translated. How addictive a feeling that must be. What a hunger it must breed.
No wonder they all live according to the Gospel of Ray. Dive off that wagon, you’re never crawling back on.
Claire and the others got over the fence the old-fashioned way, making a little more noise than she would have liked. With Brody at the front and Sonny watching the rear, the six of them skulked through the campus, bike racks and lounge space, posters for bands and plays, all of it belonging to a world they were no longer part of. She imagined drunk frat boys crossing the quad, teenaged lovers holding hands, all of it right here, separated by a thin but uncrossable membrane.
Not uncrossable. One way.
As they drew nearer the university tower, the noise they’d been hearing grew louder. The ugly bulk of the building hid the source and distorted the sound, but she thought it was overlapping voices. After the silence of the last hours, it seemed reckless, swaggering.
The north entrance was a row of metal doors in metal frames with small inset windows. Claire tried one, found it locked.
“I can open it,” Sonny said.
“Does that mean tear it off the hinges?” She shook her head. “Too noisy.”
“Look.” Lucy pointed.
Three stories up, a window was cocked open. The narrow horizontal kind that opened outward and never let in a breeze. It looked wide enough for someone to squeeze through, but unless they doubled back, found a grappling hook and some rope—
Something blurred past her and hit the wall.
Months ago, before she moved to Chicago or met Brody, she’d gone to Los Angeles for a conference. Worn out by the flight and a series of boring conversations, she’d spent the night in her hotel room flipping channels, and had happened on something called American Ninja Warrior, a competition show with a ridiculous obstacle course. She’d found herself entranced by it, and by the competitors with their sweetly toned physiques and lithe grace. The final challenge was a curved wall fourteen feet high that they had to run up. It had seemed ridiculous. Impossible.
But now she watched Brody hit the side of the building, plant a foot and push, hurtling himself upward to grab the frame of a window on the second story, then snap a fast pull-up that somehow launched him a full story into the air. He caught the inner rim of the open window—thirty feet off the ground, easy—and wriggled through. All in maybe two seconds.
A moment later, one of the doors swung open. Brody stood on the other side wearing a broad grin. The others smiled and golf clapped.
She said, “Enjoying yourself?”
“Huh?”
“Being a superhero looks like fun.”
“Claire—”
“Just saying, heroin is fun too. Until you run out.”
For a moment he looked like he was going to snap at her, and she wondered if they were about to have their first fight, right here in front of four near strangers and god knew what lay on the other side of this hideous university high-rise. But he bit his tongue, sighed slightly, and nodded. “Yeah. Roger that.”
The simple mindfulness of him surprised her, again. How many men would have gotten pissed on principle, would have resented a woman for telling them what to do? She stepped forward, put a hand behind his neck and another around his waist. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He cocked his head. “Huh.”
“What?”
“First time we’ve said it to each other.” The smile he wore was the same as when they’d lain in her apartment, staring into one another’s eyes, hours from events that would change everything. She leaned in and they kissed, hard, tongues sliding against one another.
“Jesus, you two,” Kyle said. “A little sympathy for the single, huh?” He pushed past them, squinted into the blackness. “D-Money. Where are the stairs?”
The city had been dark, but the stairwell, a shaft of cinderblocks unbroken by windows, was something else entirely. Blackness like blindness. She literally couldn’t see her own hand waving in front of her face. There was the stale smell of cigarettes, and echoes from every scuffed foot, every indrawn breath. DeAndre went first, the others following. The only connection to the world was the pressure of her feet on the treads and the cool metal of the handrail. In seconds she’d lost all other frame of reference. Up, and up, and up they went, breath coming shorter, thighs starting to tingle. Finally, after what seemed a very long time, DeAndre’s disembodied whisper drifted back. “Careful. Last one.”
Then they were stepping through the door into an academic hallway. After the pitch black of the staircase, what little light trickled in seemed enough to read by. Bulletin boards and glass cases, benches and worn industrial carpet. DeAndre put a finger to his lips and led them down the hall to a closed door. He tried the handle, and it turned. The sounds were louder now, definitely voices, raucous and overlapping, and something else. A crackling.
She stepped through the door into a small lounge, and gasped.
“Holy shit.”
THIRTY-TWO
The windows were slender and tall, and ten in this room alone, making the walls seem like bars. They could see easily now, reflected light bouncing through the glass to flicker and dance.
Eleven stories below a huge bonfire roared. Tables and chairs and stacks of books, all heaped together and lit ablaze. A sloppy, wild pyre twenty feet across, the flames leaping into the air, cracking and roaring. Claire could feel the heat through the window. A ropy column of choking smoke twisted upward against darker skies.
Surrounding the fire were people. Some stood hypnotized, staring and swaying in time to the shimmering waves playing across the embers. Near the edge, a woman danced topless, her breasts glistening, belly slick with sweat. A stylish black man with a baseball bat and a skinny white scarecrow shared a bottle and watched. Teenagers sprinted around the blaze, leaping through the fringes, whooping like matinee Indians.
Farther out, others talked tensely. Their body language was rigid, all tightened shoulders and loosened knees, but there was something habitual to the pose. None of them were fingering weapons, no one was squaring off. It was more like they were predators unaccustomed to the company of anything but prey.
Staring at the figures was oddly difficult. They all seemed more in focus than the world in a way that competed with the bonfire. The flames caught in their eyes, carved monstrous shadow mouths.
Eaters.
Scores, hundreds of them. All together.
“My god,” Kyle whispered, his voice filled with wonder and terror. “Fire.”
In the brilliant heart of the inferno something cracked, the leg of a table or the arm of a mannequin yielding to destruction and sending a cascade of sparks toward heaven. Claire looked at the others, Lucy and Sonny and DeAndre. They were pressed to their individual columns of glass, hands and foreheads pushing in. Their faces were contorted with something akin to lust. Teenagers pressing against the glass of a sex show.
Right, she thought. Nothing burns. She’d only been here a few days, and had barely begun to miss things like warmth. The magical, world-conquering power of fire. No wonder the Eaters were all together.
“Claire,” Brody said, the word humming with thin lethal tension, like wire strung at neck height. She turned, saw him pointing, followed his eyes and finger.
Beside the fire stood a broad table of polished wood. A shapeless bundle rested beneath it. Atop the table was a chair. The man sitting in it was tall and lean, his cheekbones razors. All the Eaters looked sharper than the world, but this one bent light like a black hole. Looking at him made her eyes ache.
She knew him. She’d killed him—just before he’d killed her.
Simon Tucks was not the drooping-faced loser he had been in their world. Though some essential detail of him was the same, he’d grown taller, leaner, harder. He gazed out over the assembled monsters—murderers all, eaters of souls—as though they were his subjects. Atop a chair beside a bonfire in a world where nothing burned, he seemed a dark prince or a fallen angel.
Not a chair, Claire corrected herself. A throne.
“W-w-w—” DeAndre paused, took a breath. “We oughta go. Right now.”
None of them moved. None of them spoke. Claire could hear the wet sounds of their breathing. Down below, the bare-breasted woman danced to the rhythm of the fire, her skin glistening as if striped in lava. In leathers and beards and weapons, facing a bonfire of burning trash, the Eaters cut ghastly silhouettes, something out of a Bosch nightmare. A hot acid terror bubbled in her belly. It wasn’t about being caught. It was the scene itself. There was something so fundamentally wrong about it, so inherently evil. Like stumbling upon the second hour of a gang rape.
DeAndre is right, she thought. We should go. If they spot us, we won’t make it out.
But before she could voice the thought, a hush fell over the crowd, spreading in fast ripples. Conversations ended, bottles froze halfway to mouths. The dancing woman froze.
Simon Tucks had risen. He stood atop the table radiating haughty insouciance, and every eye turned to him.
For a long moment, he said nothing at all. Just stared. When he finally spoke, his words were clear even from here, eleven stories up and a hundred yards away.
“I am come.”
Claire had listened to the messages Simon had used to bait his trap a thousand times. That voice had been nondescript; Midwestern, slightly nasal. Now he thundered like James Earl Jones.
“I am the gladiator of a fearsome god, and I am come.” Simon spread his arms wide. He let the moment linger before continuing. “Some of you have sensed my master. He’s moved in your dreams. Revealed himself when you take a life. You have felt the truth. There are worlds beyond this one, and gods dwell in them.
“Now my master comes to you through me, and you will obey.”
The Eaters shifted uneasily, exchanging glances. It was easy to forget, the way everyone here talked about them, that they weren’t mindless zombies. They were human beings; corrupted, perhaps, but still human. Simon Tucks was making them nervous as newborns.
“Some have tried to resist me. I have feasted on their stories.”
Claire glanced at Brody, saw the same thought on his mind. All the “departures” of the last days hadn’t been coincidence. They had been Simon, killing other Eaters.
“On the other side of the veil, I harvested eighteen souls for my master. Eighteen innocents. Men, women, children, taken at his whim and with his guidance. He taught me to kill, and guided my hands to the work. It was he who aimed the rifle, he who built the bombs. He told me of the traps that had been set for me and steered me through them. In his name, I held a city of millions in terrified thrall.
“Now I have crossed beyond, and I have become my True Self. My master changed me, shaped me. Filled me with his essence.
“I have given you proof of his power.” He gestured to the bonfire, his face lit manic by its fevered light. A pendant around his neck caught her eye, though she couldn’t make it out at this distance. “In this world without flame, I have come to burn. I have shown you something you did not think possible. Now I will show you something else.”
Simon dropped from the table, flexing his knees as he landed. The nearby Eaters backed away. He laughed, then reached beneath the table and hauled out the cloth-wrapped bundle. It was large and awkward, heavy looking, but he lifted it with ease.
Then the bundle began to writhe, and Claire realized what they were looking at.
“Oh god,” Lucy said. “That’s—”
With a flourish, Simon yanked off the sheet.
The woman was middle-aged and pale. Crusted blood ran down her face. She was bound with yards and yards of duct tape, arms strapped to her sides, rolled up like a rug. Tape covered her mouth, and she made muffled gagging sounds and tried to wrest free, hurling herself forward, twitching and flopping. Simon’s grip on her arm didn’t even wobble.
“You fight each other for scraps,” Simon said. “Never enough to grow stronger. Until now.”
He kept his left hand on the woman’s bicep, and used his right to remove the tape covering her mouth.
“Ohgodplease, please, I don’t know what’s happening I’ll do anything please I must be dreaming I’m dreaming oh god please god, please.”
“Shh,” Simon said, stroking her cheek. “Shh.”
She stared at him with horror and hope, her face pale, her trembling clear even from here. Simon smiled at her, then turned to the Eaters.
“We will take this dead city for our own. We will slaughter all who are not with us. We will harvest all who arrive. And as we do, we will grow strong enough to see across the veil. We will find others amongst the living, and ride them as my god rode me. We will seed destruction and fear among men, and we will feed upon it. More than that—we will share in it.”
Simon spun the woman to face the fire. Orange light played across the cocoon of duct tape. She began to scream, her words running together. “Ohgodno ohpleaseno don’t Ihavechildren Ihavechildren I’msoscared pleasegod please god!”
“Yes,” Simon said. “It is time for you to please god.”
With no more effort than it would take to toss balled-up paper at a trash can, he lifted the woman and hurled her into the center of the bonfire.
“No!” Brody lunged for the door. Claire had anticipated it and threw herself in the way, wrapping her arms around him and bracing. But she’d forgotten the strength of him now. His arms moved with hydraulic power, peeling her off and pushing her aside so hard she tripped and fell. She yelped as she did, a stupid helpless sound of surprise, but it got the others’ attention. Kyle moved first, hitting Brody from behind and wrapping him in a bear hug. With an outward flex of his arms Brody sent the other man flying.
From outside, the woman began to shriek. A terrible, high-pitched sound, like an engine spinning out of control. It was the sound of madness, of agony unimaginable.
Brody’s face twisted. He went for the door.
A blur of motion struck him just before the frame and drove him sideways. Drywall shattered and dust flew everywhere, dancing in the orange light. The noise was drowned by the lunatic shrieks of agony from below. Sonny’s tackle had taken Brody at waist height, a clean hit that slammed them both down, and then the biker wrapped his arms around Brody and squeezed. “You can’t.”
“She’s going to burn—”
“Bitch is barbecue,” So
nny said. “Nothing you can do about that.”
Claire stumbled over. “Will, he’s right, you can’t save her. There are too many.”
“I can—”
“No.” She knelt, put her hands on Brody’s cheeks. “She’s dead already. And if you go, we are too.”
Brody stared up at her, his eyes manic, but no longer fighting Sonny. The biker held his arms and Claire held his gaze and together they kept him from doing the thing that was most sacred to him.
Outside, the woman screamed.
For a long, long time.
THIRTY-THREE
Edmund moved, and reality bent.
A scant scattering of years he had been alive. For centuries after, he had wandered the primal echoes that border mortality. Feeding, growing, learning, until he could abandon those realms for the chain of worlds beyond. The endless spectrum of decaying existence stalked by risen gods. Like Isabella. Like himself.
Together, they had transcended. Ascended.
Like a whirlpool their power grew. Each sucking current harnessing the next even as it was subsumed. Each minor obliteration magnifying the fury of the whole. For decades they danced.
They gave birth to new realities, realms that could not exist. Realms where their will was their world; pocket universes built entirely of themselves. From them, they stretched out to the mortal world that was the source of all. They haunted and manipulated and whispered, planting rotten seeds and raising them up in darkness.
And when it was time, they harvested.
Edmund thought it an amusement to stand on real ground, in an echo of the world. To walk streets laid by the living, between skyscrapers built by human hands. There was no need. They could have fed from their own world. But there was pleasure in the crudity of it.
