“Dad!” she screamed.
Her father’s eyes met hers and went wide with fear. “Get out!” he shouted as a swarm of flying snakes settled on him like a boiling coat of writhing black tar.
The snake creatures chittered and squeaked in excitement, their voices high and painful in Zoe’s ears. In a few seconds, everyone in the café was lost beneath seething piles of the hungry creatures. Snakes broke away from the pack and flew at her, tearing at her face and arms with needle-sharp teeth.
Zoe stumbled outside and ran back along the street. She stopped once at the corner to puke, but there was nothing in her stomach, so she just dry-heaved painfully. When she could get up, she started running again, heading back the way she’d come with Valentine. She ran back to the living, twisting buildings, over walkways that changed under her feet and through underpasses where the windows in sideways buildings showed her the inside of ghost kitchens and bedrooms. She ran until the pain in her leg forced her to stop. She looked around for landmarks. She was by a small park with broken benches and a jungle gym covered in cobwebs. Zoe didn’t recognize any of it. She was lost.
She followed the empty streets back along a path that felt right, but that she knew in her heart wasn’t taking her anywhere she knew. The streets grew narrower, the buildings older and more weather-beaten as she walked. The abandoned cars that dotted the other streets now became old single-speed bikes so choked with rust they were practically fossilized. Soon the asphalt gave way to wet cobblestones and the yellow light of gas lamps. This was an old part of town she’d seen earlier with Valentine, she was sure of it. If she could find her way through and back to her father’s building, she knew she could get to the boardwalk and work her way to Valentine’s home.
Along the way, she passed empty bakeries and a closed Laundromat full of rotting clothes. Occasionally, she’d catch a glimpse of someone ahead in the street, but they were always just stepping out of sight, turning down a side street or hurrying inside a building. The city was full of dead souls, but she hardly saw anyone. They’re all hiding inside, she thought, afraid of their queen and her dogs. And worse. The image of her father covered in snakes flashed into her head and she had to push it out or she knew she’d scream. Just get back to Valentine’s. Get back where it’s safe. Then I can think about it. But not now or I’ll come apart right here and die.
Jewels were scattered in the gutter. Diamonds. Rubies. Sapphires. She stopped to pick up some pearls, and when she stood again she saw three black dogs staring at her from the corner. As she started to cross the street away from them, one of the dogs raised its head and snarled. The others turned in her direction, showing their teeth and letting out deep, rumbling growls. Zoe was sure that the way to the beach was down the street where the dogs sat, so she walked a few yards past them, giving them a wide berth, hoping she could circle back and around them. One dog rolled to its feet and loped toward her. The others followed.
Zoe remembered a mean Doberman that one of the neighbors owned when she was a little girl. The first lesson her father had taught her was to never run from a dog. Zoe turned to her right and walked steadily away from the hounds, forcing herself to keep an even, unhurried pace, even as she heard the pack’s snarls getting closer. Her heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest. She tried to stay calm and breathe through her nose, but she couldn’t get air, so she gulped in lungfuls through her mouth. Could the dogs feel her fear?
Something tugged at the hem of her coat. As it pulled, it growled. Zoe tried to keep walking, but the growling grew louder and the pulling became more insistent. She couldn’t pull back because she was afraid of her ankle giving way and of falling. She knew if she did, the pack would never let her get up again. Zoe did the only thing she could think of. She stopped. To her relief, when she did, the dogs stopped, too. She felt the tension on her coat ease as the one pulling her let go. Then the snarling started again, deep-throated and deadly. The pack was spreading out behind her and moving forward, starting to encircle her.
Zoe stood her ground. She could hardly breathe and her hands shook. As the dogs moved closer they looked bigger than ever, the size of bulls or lions, but she knew that this was just fear playing tricks on her mind. She forced herself to stay still and not run. The dogs growl and let out small choked barks. Almost like they’re talking to each other, Zoe thought. And they’re not going to wait forever.
“Now or never,” she said. The dogs looked at her. She raised her right hand slowly. When it was chest-high, she threw the pearls she’d picked up as hard as she could. The dogs moved steadily toward her, but then the pearls began to fall, clattering and smashing apart as they hit the street, throwing gleaming shards into the air. The dogs leaped away from Zoe and tore after the rattling jewels. The moment they were gone, Zoe ran around the nearest corner.
The dogs turned as one and headed back for her, heads down, teeth bared. Zoe heard them behind her, barking and snarling. She ran as hard as she could, waiting for the attack, for the feel of the breath being knocked out of her as one leaped onto her back—the sound of the pack closing in on her when she went down. But nothing happened. Zoe stopped running and turned, looking back the way she’d come. Half a block back, the dogs paced impatiently at the entrance to the street. They whined and yelped, but refused to approach. Zoe turned in a slow circle, trying to catch her breath. She couldn’t see much around her. All the gas lamps had been broken and the street was dead black. Valentine said not to go down unlit streets. But he wasn’t here, and if he had been, would he be anxious to go back and face down a whole pack of the queen’s dogs?
She could make out the shapes of three- and four-story small apartment buildings, similar to others in the old quarter. But these buildings were barely standing. Some leaned heavily to one side, threatening to collapse. Others were mere skeletons with open roofs, charred by fire. The desiccated corpse of a black dog was nailed to the door of what might have once been a small church. Zoe stopped and stared in amazement at the sight. Who was crazy enough to kill and display the corpse of one of the queen’s spies for everyone to see? No one was going to come down here. Not unless they had to. She looked back and saw the dogs still pacing at the end of the street. Were they afraid, she wondered, or were they waiting for something? She turned back to the street, and understood instantly why the dogs hadn’t followed her.
“They” shambled onto the street one at a time or in stumbling groups. Zoe knew who they were and Valentine’s words came back to her. “There are souls a lot worse off than me,” he’d said. “The dying dead.”
They crawled from the doorless maws of crumbling buildings, clawed their way from under junked cars; they slipped from open windows and clambered from basements. They were thin beyond belief, less even than walking skeletons. They were sucked dry, empty, like papier-mâché ghosts on Halloween. But their teeth and nails looked hard.
It was too late to turn back. There were more behind her than in front. The souls were slow and she kept moving down the alley. Even on her bad ankle, when they reached for her, she was able to dodge their grasping hands.
As they lumbered out onto the street, the souls called to her. Their voices were barely a whisper. Not, Zoe knew, because they were trying to sneak up on her, but because they hadn’t had a reason to speak for a very long time and their vocal cords had withered to dry reeds.
A woman in a nurse’s uniform grabbed Zoe’s arm. She barely felt it and easily brushed the woman off. It was the same with the others. They were as insubstantial as leaves in a winter wind. But there were a lot of them and she could feel the weight of their numbers begin to press in around her. More souls poured from the buildings up and down the street. Fingers tangled in her hair and pulled at her legs.
A tall man in a rotting tracksuit reached out his snakeskin hand and raked his cracked fingernails down Zoe’s throat. She felt blood where he’d touched her. She punched the man in the che
st as hard as she could. Her hand went all the way through him and out his back. She let out a small scream, and when she pulled her arm back, the man flew apart like someone blowing on a dandelion. The souls backed away for a moment, then pressed in against her from every direction.
Zoe punched and kicked her way through the mob. Hands grabbed her coat. Teeth bit into her arms and legs, but she kept lashing out. The zombified souls flew apart around her, filling the air with a choking dust. Far behind her, she could hear the black dogs frantically howling and barking.
At the end of the block, she ran face-first into a chain-link fence. At the bottom was a section of torn links. She fell to her knees and squeezed herself though the small break. She felt dry, crumbling, insect-husk fingers grabbing at her legs. One of her pockets caught on the sharp edge of one link and she had to rip the coat to get free. The dead tried to pull her back through the fence. Chipped teeth, like ivory knives, bit her hands when she grabbed the fence to resist them. A man in a cop uniform tried to crawl under the fence after her. He caught his back on the link that snagged her coat, but it didn’t even slow him. He ripped himself in half down the full length of his back and the two mirror-image pieces of him lay side by side, still grabbing for her. A woman in a bridal gown tried to push her way straight through the fence. Piece by piece, she fell apart, as the metal tore apart her papery skin.
Zoe ran a few yards in the dark, slipped, and rolled halfway down one of the cobbled staircases that led to the canals. Far away in the distance were lights. She limped along the narrow canal walkway until she came to a place where the black water slid under an old library coiled around one of the canal’s docks. She clambered up the side of the embankment until she could see the boardwalk just a few blocks away. She ran toward it as fast as she could, glancing over her shoulder for signs of the dogs or the dying dead. But no one followed her.
There was some kind of street fair going on along the oceanfront boulevard. It seemed like all the inhabitants of Iphigene who had been in hiding were now gathered up and down the length of the boardwalk, pressed tightly together and cheering. They were a ragged mob, red-eyed and worn-looking, like an entire city coming off a three-day bender. Uncertain and overwhelmed, the new arrivals stayed together at the far end of the street, not far from where the buses had let them off. Maybe this was some kind of welcome party, Zoe thought. What a fucked-up introduction to eternity. As she looked down the crowd, with their improvised limbs waving over their heads, they looked to her like an army of broken marionettes, dancing out of step to a song no one could quite remember. Zoe had never seen anyone in Iphigene looking happy before, but here was a whole street of smiling faces. It made her nervous. She kept her collar up and hung at the back of the crowd, trying to see what everyone was looking at. They were staring in the same direction, toward the white palace at the far end of the street.
From nowhere, drums pounded in her ears. Complex rhythms. Three or four patterns piled on top of each other. Shrill double-reed horns played a quick discordant melody that made her ears hurt. The louder the crowd cheered, the louder the music became. There were no musicians or amplifiers in sight. The music seemed to just materialize out of the air. Zoe didn’t want to cheer. She wanted to run, but she stood her ground.
“Look!” someone shouted. “Children. Her children!”
The crowd surged back onto the sidewalk as black cobras came roiling their way down the middle of the damp street. They were the biggest snakes Zoe had ever seen. Each one was easily the size of the crocodiles Mr. Danvers had shown her class, twelve feet long or more. Their skin shone like obsidian in the moonlight, and their eyes were green-gold, like tarnished coins. Their enormous fangs were bone-white daggers set in up-curved mouths that made it look as if the cobras were always smiling.
Behind the snakes came dozens of the queen’s hulking dogs, led by tall men with snouts and heads like wolves. Dressed in rough leather breeches and chain mail over dark jerkins, they held the snarling dogs with heavy silver chains, yanking them hard when one of the hounds would rear up on its hind legs as if it might lunge into the crowd. The spectators along the boardwalk cheered and screamed with delight as the dogs went by. The more the dogs snarled and charged them, the more they whooped and laughed.
The music stopped and the crowd grew quiet. The change was immediate and dramatic, as if it was something that had happened before. A kind of play or ritual in which everyone knew their part but Zoe. For a second, all she could hear was the endless pounding of the waves on the beach. She was still giddy enough with adrenaline that the abrupt change didn’t scare her. It heightened her excitement. She knew what she was feeling wasn’t exactly right, but she couldn’t help herself. The rational part of her brain told her to sneak out the back of the crowd, but something else kept her rooted to the spot. It was like being a little high or what she imagined being under a spell would be like. She had to know what was going to happen next.
A murmur rose up through the crowd and all heads turned toward the palace. The cheering started again, harder, wilder, and louder than ever. Zoe stood on her tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd. When she couldn’t, she crouched down and saw the legs of a horse moving down the boulevard. A protective circle of the wolf men surrounded the rider. When they were almost abreast of her, Zoe stood back up. She knew instantly that the woman who towered over the crowd on horseback was Queen Hecate. She reminded her of the shadow woman she’d seen in her dreams.
Her horse was black, but not like any black Zoe had ever seen before. It wasn’t black like the snakes, who were shiny and whose scales shone like dark jewels. Queen Hecate’s horse was black in the same way that darkness is black. The horse was the color of no light, as if the horse itself wasn’t there and what the queen was riding was merely its shadow.
The queen herself was the most beautiful woman Zoe had ever seen. She was tall and wore a sleeveless tunic and leather breeches of silver and midnight blue dark enough that it was almost black. Her long braided hair and skin were as pale as moonlight, and her arms and shoulders were sculpted and strong. Her silver crown didn’t encircle her head like an ordinary crown. It curved up and back from the center of her skull like a serrated shark fin. She wore knee-length leather boots with flat soles and sharp metal tips. Not the boots of a pampered princess, Zoe thought. Those were the boots of a warrior queen.
When Hecate reached Zoe, the girl looked up at her with awe. Every movement, every angle of Hecate’s body presented a being of strength and power. The screams from the crowd grew louder and more demented by the minute. As Hecate drew abreast of Zoe, a wispy cloud passed in front of the moon. The light in the street shifted almost imperceptibly. As the cloud covered the moon’s face, Queen Hecate’s face disappeared. Gone was the gorgeous snow-queen profile, and in its place was the snarling head of a great, black she-wolf. The wolf’s dark eyes scanned the crowd with a predatory gleam. Zoe stepped back, pushing to the rear of the crowd, not caring who she bumped into or which toes she stepped on.
A second later, the cloud moved beyond the moon, and Zoe chanced another look at the queen. She was a beautiful woman again, nodding and waving to her subjects.
“You aren’t clapping,” said a tall man to Zoe’s right. She stared up at him, trying not to look too scared or shocked. Whatever spell or adrenaline high had kept her rooted to this spot was wearing off. She was tired and overwhelmed enough that her mind froze and she couldn’t come up with a good lie for why she wasn’t clapping. Then the man smiled down at her.
“It’s all right. I’m not clapping either.” He turned and looked back over the heads of the crowd, toward Hecate. He spoke quietly. “It’s strange, isn’t it? Seeing everyone here like this. The smiling, the cheering, their faces beaming up at our queen. Every soul here tonight hates her, and would like to see her ripped to pieces by her own hounds. Yet here they all are, screaming for her as if she were the answer to all the riddles that have ever pla
gued or terrified the human race.” The tall man shook his head. “Why do you think they do it?”
Zoe’s head was swimming with fear and confusion, but the man didn’t do anything threatening, although it would have been easy to point her out to one of the queen’s wolf bodyguards. The stranger had a sharp, birdlike face and heavy, unruly eyebrows. His skin was gray and sagged on his cheeks and under his chin, as if he’d been heavy once or, like her dad’s aunt Irene, had spent most of the last twenty years drunk.
“Maybe they’re afraid not to cheer,” Zoe said.
The man shook his head again. “Silly girl, we’re all afraid of her. But that’s not why these people are screaming with such glee.”
“Maybe they do it because they mean it.”
The man looked at her, his expression open and curious. “Ah,” he said.
“I guess, if someone was really kicking your ass, you’d want them to be special. I mean, I’d rather have Batman kick my ass than Mickey Mouse any day.”
The man nodded. “A friend of mine once put that same thought a little more elegantly: does the smart sheep make friends with the wolf or with the other sheep?”
“The wolf, definitely,” Zoe said.
The man smiled down at her warmly, patting her on the shoulder. “Good girl,” he said. “Have a lovely evening.” He turned and walked away, disappearing into the noisy crowd.
At the end of the street, Hecate stepped down from her horse and stepped onto a sort of stage. Zoe couldn’t take her eyes off the woman as she strode to the front of the platform and raised her long arms for quiet. The crowd went silent in an instant.
“Welcome, my subjects, my friends, my children,” Hecate began, her voice amplified magically so that it seemed as if she was speaking directly to Zoe, and to her alone. “Welcome especially to those newly arrived members of our family, new souls whose experiences and insights will, no doubt, reward and enrich us all.”
Dead Set Page 14
