The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

by Margaret Killjoy

The brussels sprouts were from the food bank, but were going to taste amazing, regardless. I cut them up, drizzled them with oil and salt, and put them in a second tray. I’ve made fancier meals in my life, but it still felt good. I set the old-fashioned kitchen timer and went to join everyone else.

  “You can’t figure it out?” Brynn asked. She was pacing. She didn’t strike me as the type who worried much, but she was worried.

  Even Doomsday looked paler than usual. She leaned back in her easy chair, feigning nonchalance, but her teacup trembled in her hand. “I didn’t lead the ritual. I was blindfolded. I’ve spent all day poring over my books, and there’s nothing there. Nothing.”

  “Nothing about dismissing a spirit?” Brynn asked. “Or nothing about Uliksi?”

  “Nothing.”

  Thursday was standing, statuesque, at his partner’s side. There was certainly more to their relationship than him trying his hardest to guard her, I was sure, but times call for us to fulfill certain roles.

  “Will Rebecca know how?” Brynn asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Doomsday said. “Vulture went to warn her last night, and how did he put it? She’d gone paranoid, ‘jet-fuel-can’t - melt - steel - beams - level paranoid.’ Made him show her his ribs. Vulture said, and I agree, that you only get that kind of paranoid when you’ve just got no agency at all. When you wish you had control over your life but you just don’t. She and Clay planned the ritual together, I don’t know that either of them would know how to do it alone.”

  “What are our options?” Brynn asked.

  “If we leave town, take Rebecca with us, will it come after us?” Thursday asked.

  “It probably can’t,” Doomsday said. “But it’s a moot point. I won’t leave without cleaning up my own mess.”

  “Rebecca’s place is warded too?” Thursday asked. “Uliksi can’t get her? If you and Rebecca stay inside, what’s it going to do? Nothing? Attack the people close to you?”

  “I have no idea,” Doomsday said. She set down her tea, untouched, then pulled her feet up onto the chair and hugged her knees.

  “Where are Clay’s notebooks?” I asked.

  People turned to me, realizing for the first time I was in the room.

  “The only thing he liked more than the sound of his own voice was the sight of his own handwriting,” I said. “When he died, he didn’t have any of his journals on him.”

  “He lived with Anchor, for a while,” Brynn said. “They broke up last winter, and Clay kind of took it badly. No one knows what they were fighting about, though. For a year and a half, they were inseparable. Then, a week of quarreling and it was over.”

  “They were fighting about Uliksi,” Doomsday said. “Anchor worshipped it as it was, didn’t need to know anything more about it. Clay wanted to understand it, so he moved into the basement of that gas station, down by the bridge. Where it lives.”

  “He moved in with it?” I asked.

  Doomsday nodded.

  “So if Clay left notebooks, they’d be there?”

  Doomsday nodded.

  “We have to go get them. Bring them to Rebecca.”

  Doomsday was lost in thought. Slowly, she nodded.

  “The deer thing,” I said, “it’s only up during the day, right? Powerless at night? I’ll go now.” When you know you’re going to do something anyway, it’s better not to overthink it. Definitely better not to let your mind linger on the cost/benefit analysis. But going to find his notebooks got me closer to solving both my problems, all at once. I could find out what happened to Clay and I could help this Rebecca person dismiss Uliksi. And hope Doomsday wasn’t going to summon something worse. Something that lived up to her name.

  “I’ll take you,” Brynn said.

  “I’ll lend you my gun, in case the ghouls are out,” Doomsday said. She crossed the room and went up the stairs. I didn’t want the ghouls to be out.

  “Neither of you all have to do this,” Thursday said.

  “Yeah we do,” Brynn said.

  Doomsday came down the stairs two at a time, her hand on the banister. “It’s gone,” she said. “My gun’s gone.”

  Anyone else would have asked Thursday if he’d put it away the night before, but Doomsday didn’t even entertain the possibility that her partner would have handled the firearm irresponsibly.

  “Eric,” Brynn said. “During the funeral.”

  “No,” Doomsday said, “we saw him the entire time. Except maybe the ten minutes we stepped away.”

  “He stayed there the whole time,” I said.

  “Eric wouldn’t know we had a gun. Wouldn’t know where it would be. He’s never in the house.”

  “Kestrel,” I said.

  “Wasn’t he at the funeral the whole time too?” Thursday asked.

  I knew I was the most likely third suspect, and what I was about to tell them wasn’t going to help. “No,” I said. “Kestrel wasn’t there at the end.” I told them about meeting Eric, about our conversation in the park, about how Kestrel showed up late. He’d had plenty of time to steal the gun.

  It’s not nice to rat people out like that. But it’s also not nice to steal people’s guns.

  “Doom,” Thursday said, “can we keep you away from windows? Maybe take Brynn’s room?” He climbed up on the couch to lock the window. Likely, there were bars ready to go over the doors. There’s not a squatter alive who hasn’t been through their house and analyzed all the ways the police might break in. Hell, usually we’ve already broken in once ourselves.

  Thursday left to secure the house against human intruders, and Doomsday made her way, defeated, up the stairs. Brynn and I stood in the living room, facing one another, getting ready to head into the night.

  The kitchen timer went off. Dinner was ready.

  No one was in the mood to enjoy it.

  * * *

  We walked down the middle of the street, and I was calmer than I thought I’d be. Probably because I had a plan. I had something I was going to do. I wore my pack, emptied but for some essentials. We had no idea how many books we’d be trying to bring with us, so the extra storage was important.

  It had been dark for hours, and I scanned the power lines for those creepy ghoul birds. Either they weren’t there or I couldn’t see them.

  What I did see were torches. Below us, coming up from the river, people were walking with torches. I counted a dozen specks of flame, dancing through the night. Brynn saw them too.

  “Mourners,” she said. “People celebrating Uliksi.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a tradition,” Brynn said. “Any other night, it wouldn’t be something sinister. Hell, two days ago, I would have been with them.”

  “But tonight?”

  “It can’t be good.”

  She led the way off the street, through a front yard sculpture garden of rusted rebar animals—Uliksi and his ghouls, I recognized now. We took shelter in an ivy-covered, roofless house, and peered back out at the street through what was left of a window in what was left of a kitchen. The torches came around the bend. Nine adults and three children bore them, each with a homemade animal mask. Goats and geese, sparrows and sheep. One of the figures stood head and shoulders above the crowd. They marched past us in silence.

  When they’d turned the next bend in the road, we left our shelter and started back down the hill.

  * * *

  The basement door, I learned, was just off of the river, near the base of the bridge. We scrambled down a steep path, then hopped from rock to rock along the edge of the water. The trees were thick down here. The gibbous moon cast enough light that we could make our way without turning on our headlamps. A breeze brought the earthy smell of the forest, and the river was a white noise that drowned out all other ambient sound.

  “What’s in it for you?” Brynn asked as she clambered over a fallen tree. “Why aren’t you just skipping town?”

  For some of the last months of Clay’s life, he’d walked this path every mornin
g and night.

  “You know there’s a part of me that hates this place?” I asked.

  It was rhetorical, of course, and Brynn didn’t answer.

  “I’m too stubborn to give up traveling. Clay wasn’t. That same stubbornness is going to carry me through. I came here to find out what happened to him. I’m going to.”

  I clambered over a fallen log, the bark digging into my hands.

  “And also—and this is clearly the more important reason—could you imagine just leaving? Now? Never learning what was going to happen? The fear of missing out would rip my heart out of my chest as surely as that deer.”

  Brynn laughed. I liked when she laughed. We continued on along the water, and I heard the dry heave of ghouled animals. I never would have expected that would be a sound I’d come to recognize. We crouched low, peered into the woods.

  “We’re almost there,” Brynn said. She pointed. The base of the gas station went all the way down to the water, and a chain-link fence stood between us and the door, with a simple, unlocked gate. When I focused, I could just make out a dozen silhouettes between us and where we wanted to go. Goats and geese. Squirrels and sheep. In all respects but their lack of organs and ribs, they acted like every barnyard animal I’d ever met—docile, annoying, and fully aware of the sorrow and emptiness of their captive lives.

  “They’re awake,” I said. “Should we go around? Go in through the front?”

  Brynn shook her head. “The trapdoor to the basement is welded shut.”

  “Should we, I don’t know, herd them somewhere? Get them away from the door?”

  Brynn, still crouching, flicked open her extendable baton.

  I sighed, then extended mine. The weight felt good in my hand. Most days, a baton made me think I could take on the world. That night, though, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be enough. I wouldn’t fight a single living goat by choice. Let alone an undead one with all its friends.

  Brynn stood back up straight and walked right toward our destination.

  “Always afraid, never a coward,” I mumbled to myself. My blood started racing. I stood up, tightened all the straps on my pack, and followed.

  Animal eyes turned toward us with mute curiosity, which turned to malice as we tried to rush past them. A silent mess of geese got underfoot and lunged for my hands. I started swinging. It wasn’t animal abuse. They were dead already. Some of the ones I hit didn’t get up again.

  Brynn was almost to the gate when the goat ran at me. Someone or something had sheared off the beast’s horns, presumably before Uliksi had stolen the creature’s rib cage. Not an easy life, or unlife or whatever. I pulled back and swung from the hip, like a one-handed batter, and hit the goat in the skull with all my strength.

  I must have grown up watching too many zombie movies. Hitting that thing’s skull was like hitting a boulder, and I probably hurt my hand more than I hurt the goat. Still, the blow seemed to have stopped its charge. It was still in my way. It tried to bleat, but had no lungs.

  I heard a low rumble like distant thunder and turned in time to see a demon bull crash out of the trees and barrel toward us.

  “Oh fuck,” I said, or Brynn said. I started thrashing at the dumb goat in front of me with the baton. It bit my hand and I dropped the weapon. I dove over it, but my backpack destroyed my attempts at a smooth acrobatic roll and I landed on my back.

  Brynn helped me to my feet, and we were through the gate. I swung it shut, dropped the latch, and was knocked off my feet as the bull slammed into the chain link. The fence post bent to a forty-five-degree angle, and the beast backed up to charge again.

  I got up again, clutching my bleeding right hand, and we stumbled in through the open door to the basement and slammed it behind us as though that pitch-dark room offered us safety.

  We switched on our headlamps. It was a single, large room, like any basement in any shitty house anywhere. A water heater and a furnace and pipes stood out from one wall, and a box spring and mattress lay on the floor in the near corner, with simple gray sheets and a pile of ratty old comforters. A milk crate served as a bedside table, and a short stack of books stood atop. Against the far wall, a bloodred deer with three antlers lay sleeping upon a knee-high pile of rib bones. As soon as my headlamp flashed across Uliksi, I put my hand over my light. But the demon didn’t stir. With the sun below the horizon, he likely couldn’t move at all.

  Bile rose in my throat. The bones Uliksi slept on weren’t the pale white of long-dead, sun-bleached corpses. They were gray and yellow and gristly. Some of them, I surmised, were human.

  “Let me see your hand,” Brynn whispered. “You’re hurt.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. I hadn’t really looked to tell if that was true. But I didn’t want to look. Not until I was somewhere safe. It wasn’t bleeding horrendously. I wrapped my wounded hand with the bandanna from my back pocket, tight enough to keep pressure on the bite.

  “Don’t want you turning into a weregoat or something though.” Brynn laughed. It was a nervous laugh, probably because, well, I don’t think either of us knew for certain if that was an actual possibility.

  “I’ll be fine,” I whispered.

  I went to the books beside Clay’s bed while Brynn stood watch. There was a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the copy I’d given him. I opened the front page, saw my own handwriting.

  Clay, maybe you’ll get as much out of this as I did.

  Under it, he’d written back: Danielle, I think at the end of it, you’re more Nemo than I.

  It took all my presence of mind not to drop the book. Had he known I would come hunting after his ghost, and end up looking through his bedside reading? More likely, he’d just written the note absentmindedly. But for fuck’s sake, what did I know about the world anymore?

  The next book was history, something about the Kronstadt rebellion—obscure Russian history, when the Bolsheviks decided to kill all the anarchist sailors. I flipped through. No notes to me, but here and there he’d highlighted passages.

  Last, a spiral-bound notebook. The first couple pages were filled with some college kid’s English Literature notes. A decade back, Clay had shown me that trick. Punk’s Christmas, he called it—when the school year ended, college kids threw out everything from unopened food to art supplies to furniture to computers to, obviously, notebooks. Head on over to the dumpsters, pick up anything you need. After the rote transcription of some boring lecture in a stranger’s hand, however, I saw a page with Clay’s handwriting on it. I threw the books into my backpack.

  From outside the open door, I heard birds. Dawn. Shit.

  Brynn and I had the same thought at the same time, and we grabbed one another and bolted across the room to crouch behind the furnace. A row of small windows lined the top of one wall. The first hint of color and light came through them a moment later, and Uliksi stirred.

  The sheer unreality of the situation took off the worst of my anxiety. Brynn held my good hand so tight it hurt almost as bad as the one the goat had bitten, and we watched Uliksi rise to face the day. For all the world, he moved like a regular deer—graceful but nervous. If he knew we were there, he made no sign. Instead, he headed for the door and was gone.

  We crouched in the encroaching dawn, our hands locked together, our breathing as quiet as we could make it, for a full two minutes before we left to find Rebecca’s tree house.

  SIX

  A squatter’s life is ruled by darkness. Breaking into buildings, digging through trash, even just sneaking up onto rooftops to see the city—all those things are easier and safer to do after dark. But the sun was up as we marched along and then away from the river. The day before summer solstice, it was going to be up for a long while still.

  I trained my eyes on the woods for movement. Walking in the forest, you don’t see most of the animals. Only once, I saw something, somewhere in the branches above us. Could have been a squirrel, or a bird. Hell, could have been a mountain lion. Better a living mountain li
on than an undead squirrel.

  After twenty minutes along the riverbank, it was an hour’s hike up a ravine. There was another way to Rebecca’s place, a path that ran up over the top of the hill, but it would have taken us through town. We needed to get Clay’s notes to Rebecca so she could figure out how to perform the ritual, and we couldn’t risk running into Uliksi or Eric. Brynn led us unerringly with a compass and a laminated U.S. Geological Survey map. Having a destination—Rebecca’s tree house—and an idea of how to get there were about all I had to prop up my waning courage.

  While we walked, I let myself wonder more about Eric and Kestrel. They said Doomsday and the rest, they were going to summon something worse.

  I’d play it by ear, I decided. Listen to Rebecca. Decide how much to trust her.

  We stopped only once, to pick at the previous night’s dinner from Tupperware. Brynn had a few bottles of cold coffee, and caffeine did its best to replace the adrenaline that had been slowly draining out of my system since we’d left the basement.

  “I love coffee,” she said, smiling. “I know it’s banal to say. I know I’m addicted. I know everyone loves it. I don’t care. There’s only a small handful of things in this world that make me happy, and coffee is one of them.”

  “What’s another?” I asked. We were both slightly delirious.

  She thought about it for a while. “Shit like ‘feeling useful’ or ‘not paying rent,’ right? But I’ll stick with weaknesses. Romance novels. I fucking love trashy romance. The straighter the better. The worse the politics, the better. I’ll just eat that shit up.”

  “That’s awesome,” I said.

  “Your turn,” she said. We capped the coffee, started back up the ravine.

  “I want to say ‘horizons,’ because as often as not, the chance to get over the closest one is what gets me up in the morning. But you told me about romance novels, so I’ll do you one better. Fan fiction. Erotic, queer fan fiction. I don’t even care what fandom. Give me someone getting it on with a werewolf or a seahorse-unicorn or whatever and I’ll be happy.”

  “Really?”

  “I read it on my phone,” I said.