by Marcus Sakey
Just like you had been about to. For a moment, it had seemed he and Claire had a second chance. A way to make up for the monstrous unfairness of having met only just before death. They could be together here. Openly. Could build something like a life. Not the life they would have chosen; but as she’d said, not bad, either.
It had been a nice dream, and he was sad to let it go.
Claire said, “You or me?”
“How about both of us?”
She smiled, and leaned in. The kiss was brief but sweet.
Around them voices were piling on one another, making less and less sense. Hysteria, people shouting each other down. Brody caught Kyle’s eye, mimed a whistle. The fireman cocked his head. Brody held the gaze until Kyle shrugged, and then put his hand to his mouth and ripped out another one of his ear splitters. Everyone froze.
“You’re all missing the point.” Brody rose. He stood calm and steady and looking from person to person, meeting eyes. “The echo has changed. The enemy has changed. We’re not talking about groups of two or three.”
“There are more than a hundred Eaters out there. They’re working together.” Claire stood beside him. “We are their food. If we run, they run faster. If we hide, they burn us without even bothering to fight. The echo has changed.”
“So what, then?” Hector asked.
“We break the rules,” Brody said. “We go hunting. We take the fight to them.”
His words were a boulder dropped in a pond. The reaction splashed out in a ripple. Most people shied away, cursed, shook their heads. A few, like Finn and some of the younger men, looked thoughtful.
“Those rules,” Arthur said, “have kept us safe for two decades. They are the only reason we can trust each other.”
“They’re not the only reason we can trust each other,” Brody said. “Look, yesterday, the Gospel According to Ray made perfect sense. It was simple and clear and it worked. Today it doesn’t. If you never change tactics, you lose the moment the enemy changes theirs. And they have.”
“I wouldn’t mind a fight,” Sonny said. “But how? We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“He’s right,” Kyle said. “That’s why we go out in big groups. Put ten of us to one of them, no problem. Wolf pack them, mob them, they’ll lose. But in an open battle, they’d cream us.”
“We can’t win a fair fight,” Brody agreed. “So let’s not fight fair.”
“We kill Simon Tucks,” Claire said.
“You’re still on your crusade.” Arthur shook his head. “Still trying to do what an FBI agent would.”
“All I’m trying to do,” she said, “is survive. They aren’t a family. They’re following Tucks because he’s stronger, because he can give them something. He dies, that all vanishes.”
The words floated in the air, and in the minds of the other two hundred and seven people clustered in the park. Brody could see that they were reaching them.
“You make it sound simple,” Kyle said. “But the dude’s been laying out beatdowns on vamps. Powerful ones.”
“Yeah,” Brody said.
“He’s got all their strength now, and he had plenty to begin with.”
“Yeah.”
“He made fire in a place where nothing burns.”
“Yeah.”
“So then how—”
“We don’t have a choice,” Claire said. “They’re coming for us.”
“The Eaters are faster and stronger,” Brody followed on her flow. It felt like the rhythm of an interrogation, the two of them reading each other, setting each other up for the spike. “But we have something they don’t. We trust each other. Look, the rules themselves are secondary to the fact that we are people who want to live by them. We want to be human. We trust each other. We’ve chosen community over personal power. That means that we can stand together, fight for each other. If we have to, we can sacrifice for each other. They can’t. They won’t.
“Look, I’ll be honest. If we fight, we are going to lose people. But if we don’t, we lose everyone.” He paused, then angled his body, nodded his head, did everything short of point at the children. The tweens that had crept closer to eavesdrop. The little kids racing Matchbox cars down the hill. “Everyone.”
Cheap persuasion psychology, textbook stuff, but it worked. Until that moment, people had been thinking about themselves. Now they felt the weight of responsibility.
For as fashionable as cynicism always was, the truth was that when it came to basic human responsibility, people rose to the challenge. Pretty much always. As many times as Hell had been created, history stood as indisputable proof that the mass of humanity was good. People built more than they burned, created more than they destroyed, not by a little but by a massive surplus. To know it, all you needed to remember was that we had started as chimpanzees—and then look around.
“I’m with you.”
Brody turned, surprised. Two rows up and half a dozen people over, Emily Watkins stood. Cold wind off the river tugged at her hair. “I don’t want to wait for them to come for us. Besides, he already killed me once. It’s my turn.” That brought chuckles, and Emily smiled. “I’m with them. Who else is?”
“A vote,” Kyle called from his perch on the fountain. “All in favor?” He raised his hand. Emily followed suit, and Sonny, Lucy, Finn, DeAndre, a handful of others. For a moment, it looked like there was enough momentum. But with about twenty arms in the air, things stalled out. People were weighing it, talking to one another.
Looking at Arthur. The one who’d been here longest, who had known Ray personally. He caught the looks, stepped off the wall and cleared his throat. “You all know how I feel about killing. It turns us into them. Even with the best of intentions.”
Shit. Arthur wasn’t in charge per se, but his opinion carried a lot of weight. The professor rubbed his hands, pale fingers knitting and parting.
“Our rules are simple. Pull your weight. And only kill in self-defense. Those two rules have allowed us to survive. They’ve allowed us to save countless new arrivals. More than that, they have let us be friends. Partners. Family. A life, in this death. I’ve always thought that those two rules are us.”
It was going south, fast. Brody could feel people pulling away. He wanted to speak, but stopped himself. There was nothing he could say to turn this.
“But perhaps there’s a more basic rule. Which is that we rise, or fall, together.” Arthur inhaled, deeply. Sighed. And raised his hand.
In seconds, it was over. The vote wasn’t unanimous, but it was close enough it didn’t matter. Brody felt a flush of victory. It lasted precisely as long as it took for two hundred people to turn and place their existence in his hands.
Right.
His armpits went wet and his mouth dry. He took a moment to choose his words. “The Eaters are predators. That means they’re opportunists. So”—he paused, looked around—“let’s give them an opportunity.”
THIRTY-SIX
The carts were flatbeds on rickety castors, the kind used to load lumber. They’d found five of them in the Home Depot parking lot and lashed them together with chain. They were piled high with 2 x 4s under tarps, and rattled with every bump in the street. The noise bounced down the concrete canyon of buildings.
Brody and Sonny had their shoulders to the front cart. The combined load of five carts and all they carried had to be close to two tons, but with their hyped-up strength, they had no problem maneuvering it. Claire steered from the front, trying to avoid the worst of the potholes. Even in the afterlife, Chicago has potholes, Brody thought, and fought down a laugh.
He was worn thin. Yesterday he’d walked a thirty-mile patrol, followed by a midnight raid and a sleepless night scarred by screams. Then his speech this morning, and all that came after it—planning, debating, arguing. He’d hoped to snatch half an hour’s snooze somewhere in there, but here he was, pushing a wagon train down a city street.
He wondered how much longer the strength he’d inherited from Raquel Ad
ams would last. It already felt fainter, diminished in ways it was hard to quantify. He could still do impossible things, just . . . less. Like he’d been expending the excess power. It was draining away like a power meter in a video game.
Jesus. Are you really reducing this to Call of Duty?
Clearly, whatever strength he’d taken from Raquel, it didn’t extend to preventing punch-drunk exhaustion.
The front wheel of the cart hit a crack, and the whole train shook, the metal creaking and bonging. In the silence of the echo, the sound would be carrying a mile, and he shot a glance at Claire. She nodded, her eyes as tired as his own.
There was something about the planning and operating under stress that put him right back in the Corps. He’d been trained as an officer at both OCS and TBS, and one of the central lessons was that combat rarely happened when you were well rested and ready. During written exams, instructors blared heavy metal and threw tennis balls at their heads. Surprise live-fire exercises were scheduled for the middle of the night. Everything was about fluidity and assault, about avoiding battle lines and strength-on-strength confrontation. “Turn the board around” was perhaps the holiest writ of Marine Corps strategy. See the situation from the enemy’s perspective, and then strike at their weaknesses. Speed was a weapon. Aggression could provide a major advantage.
That was the reason he’d pushed for moving right away, despite everything. Sure, sleep would have been nice, and it was unlikely the Eaters would make their attack today. They were probably still ragged from the previous night. Brody hoped so. It would help, especially given—
“Uh-oh,” Claire said, one hand above her eyes to shield them as she stared into the distance.
A tingle ran down Brody’s legs. He straightened from the cart.
Half a mile back, a handful of figures stood in the center of the street. Hard to tell how many at this distance, but at least five, maybe more. Sonny had stopped pushing, his hands fingering the knives slung on his hips, his face drawn as if the skin had shrunk. Brody glanced around the street, a stretch of Harrison near the river. To the north was the old post office headquarters and central annex. They’d been abandoned for as long as he could remember, their rows of windows blank and black. The buildings were screened by a line of chain-link fences wrapped in plastic and held down by sandbags. The street was wide here, four lanes stretching to both horizons. Nowhere to run.
“Here they come,” Sonny said.
“How many?” Claire’s voice like a wire stretched too tight. “I can’t tell.”
The figures were moving now, made blurry by speed and haze off the concrete. “Six?”
“Look up,” Sonny said.
The six on the street were matched by at least four more running along the tops of buildings. As Brody watched, one of the Eaters reached the end of a mid-rise and leapt off it, landing atop a parked bus, then dropping to the ground and moving before the impact sound even reached them. It was difficult to look directly at them, their speed so abnormal that it hurt the eyes.
“Ten.” Sonny looked over at him. “Didn’t expect ten.”
Brody shrugged and picked up his sledgehammer. He took a deep breath, blew it out. His heart slammed against his rib cage. One of the Eaters wore an expensive black leather jacket and clutched a baseball bat. Brody remembered the sound of steel bars bending, a screech that plucked at his gut. He rolled his shoulders. “Think of that woman last night. Remember what they did to her.”
“Will,” Claire said. When he turned, he saw that she had the hatchet in her hand. She was pale and shaking—and smiling. “I love you.”
There was time, just, to step over and put a hand behind her head and mash his lips to hers, and if he’d learned anything in the last week, it was that you never presumed there was more time coming. Better to take the good things when they came. For a second, two, there was nothing but her scent and the softness of her hair and the taste of her tongue.
Then footsteps pounding into pavement, and the smell of smoke and unwashed flesh. Brody turned.
There weren’t ten after all. There were twelve.
They slowed to a walk. It wasn’t caution. It was the strut of the schoolyard bully with buddies at his back; the showmanship of the date rapist unbuttoning his shirt. They twirled their weapons, smiling.
“Well, well,” said the Baller. “Look at this. Heya, Sonny.”
“Franklin.”
Brody stared at Sonny. “You know him?”
“He used to be one of us.”
“We were buds,” the Baller—Franklin—said. “Until Sonny kicked me out of their luxury hotel.”
“Wasn’t me. We decided together. You claimed self-defense three times in a month.”
“Funny. From here, it looks to me like you’ve had a meal yourself.”
“Self-defense,” Sonny said.
“You.” The man who stepped out from behind Franklin was scarecrow thin and tweaker cheeked. He pointed his machete at Brody. “Bunny rabbit. You killed Raquel.”
“Yeah. I did.”
“She and I used to kick it. Of course, I’m not the only one been up in there. You’ve been inside her too, haven’t you?”
Before he could stop himself, Brody had a flash memory of being Raquel in her dorm room bed, the boy pushing into him. The Scarecrow smiled as if he could see the thought. “Just take that memory and put my face on it.” He turned to Franklin. “Last time, we let him go. You still feeling that?”
“Twelve on three?” Franklin smiled. “No.”
“You got anything to add, bunny? Wanna beg?” The Scarecrow looked over at Claire. “Or introduce me to your friend?”
Brody said nothing, just adjusted his grip on the hammer, the handle sweaty in his palm.
“Guess we’re going to do this. Alright.” Franklin paused. “Hey Sonny, you want to come on over and join us? Let’s let bygones be. We’ll make a meal out of this one, and dessert out of her.”
The biker looked at them, then at Claire and Brody. The moment had the clarity of a scene etched in glass, every line sharp. Brody could smell the smoke on the Eaters, the woodsy scent of the lumber, his own sweat. Sonny shook his head. “I’m on the right side now.”
“Before you die,” Brody said, “I want to say that I’m sorry about Raquel. She didn’t give me much choice.”
“Before we die?” The Scarecrow flashed his ruined teeth. “You going to take down twelve of us?”
“Me?” Brody lowered his hammer. “No.”
Claire yelled, “Now!”
The tarps on all the carts flung back. Ten people sprang to their feet from between the stacks of lumber, raising bows and spears. At the same moment, the chain-link fence hiding the abandoned post office toppled over, collapsing with a crash to reveal two hundred men and women surging forward, Emily and Kyle and Lucy at the fore.
“What—”
There was a twang, and two feet of carbon-fiber arrow split Franklin’s throat like it had grown from the center. A ribbon of blood dangled from the broadhead tip. Finn had another arrow strung before the man even fell to his knees.
Then chaos.
Emily charged, howling, glowing with energy, a length of steel pipe in her hand. With her came two hundred others, whooping and yelling, raging forward, a ragged, dirty mob fighting for themselves. Claire leapt onto the cart and hurled her hatchet, the edge gleaming as it spun end over end to slam into the Scarecrow’s skull.
Curses and screams and the ringing of metal on metal, the meaty thump of landed blows.
The Eaters were surprised, but they had speed and strength. One of them had thrown a Bowie knife before Brody had even seen him draw it, the blade spinning end over end to thunk into the chest of a girl he didn’t know. A worn man with cauliflower ears and a many-times-broken nose assumed a mixed martial arts stance, flipping one attacker over his shoulder, hurling another into the parked van hard enough to dent the side. Kyle tangled with a small woman whipping a length of chain around, the links sm
acking into his face, snapping it sideways, blood spraying out in an arc. He took the hit and plowed into her, slamming the handle of the axe into her stomach, and then Brody lost them in the rush of people.
They fought with reckless speed and the savagery of frightened people. Brody stood watching as Antoine and Madeleine and DeAndre together took down a woman with a knife in her hand and stunned look on her face, DeAndre driving her back with wide swings of a knife, Antoine’s police baton lashing out to shatter her jaw and then her shoulder and then her skull.
He could feel each kill.
Not metaphorically. Viscerally. That same twist in the belly as before, a rolling gut clench like missing the last step on a staircase. The echo rocking and adjusting as power shifted. It was odd and disorienting, and yet fitting. Shouldn’t the world shift with each death? Shouldn’t we all feel each murder?
Lucy dueled with a big man swinging a length of iron pipe. Sparks flew where their weapons met. She was better than he was, but he was far stronger, and the fight could have gone either way until Hector charged in with a crowbar that shattered the Eater’s knee. The man howled with pain. Lucy took two spinning steps and whipped the sword around in a flashing arc that cut off scream and head in the same move.
The battle was vicious, ugly, and brief. Only seconds after Claire had yelled, eleven of the Eaters were down. The last one hesitated, wild-eyed. Then she turned and sprinted away, legs blurring.
Brody said, “Finn.”
The boy tracked her motion, his long leather duster swaying slightly, the red sunglasses reflecting back a bloody world. Another broadhead arrow was nocked to the string of the composite. The tip was a hollow triangle of wicked razors.
“Come on, come on, come on—”
Her speed was uncanny, impossible. One second she’d been there; the next she was fifty yards away. If she escaped, she’d warn the others about their tactics. The sniper would be more cautious. The whole plan could fall apart.
