Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  His next words were drowned out by a sudden echoing boom.

  The shadows above the Zotovic thing’s head spiked in outrage, and then as the body fell to the ground they began to dissipate like drops of water on a hot stove. The back of his shirt was shredded with dozens of tiny holes, their edges singed.

  Izzie could feel the hands that held her arms relax their grip.

  “Patrick?” Daphne said beside her.

  Izzie turned in her direction, and saw that Patrick had rolled onto his side, holding Izzie’s fallen shotgun in a one-handed grip, smoke still trailing up from the wavering barrel.

  “Is Joyce . . . ?” he said weakly before trailing off, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

  The Ridden who had held her were still standing behind Izzie, but motionless, like mannequins. When she climbed to her feet, they made no move to stop her. Izzie looked around the room, and saw that the rest of the Ridden were in the same state, standing stock still, expressions vacant as the inky blots on their skin began slowly to fade.

  Daphne was already at Patrick’s side, helping him up into a sitting position.

  “Is Joyce . . . okay?” Patrick croaked.

  “I don’t know,” Izzie said as she bent down and tore a strip of cloth from the hem of Zotovic’s ragged shirt. Then she tied a makeshift tourniquet around Patrick’s right leg below the knee. “Let’s go find out, shall we?”

  Patrick’s eyelids were heavy, his breathing shallow, but he was alert and conscious as Izzie and Daphne helped him stand. With one arm over Izzie’s shoulder and his other over Daphne’s, he was able to keep his weight off of his right leg.

  Bodies began to fall to the floor all around the room, first singly or in pairs, and then in increasingly large numbers, like dominos being toppled one by one.

  “What’s happening to them?” Daphne said.

  “Minor . . . shareholders,” Patrick managed. “They were connected to the loa through . . .”

  He left off, struggling to catch his breath, but rolled his eyes toward the lifeless form of Martin Zotovic on the floor at their feet.

  “With his connection cut,” Izzie finished for him, “the loa must not be able to maintain its hold on the others.”

  Patrick nodded once, the most he was able to muster.

  “Come on,” she went on, maneuvering Patrick toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  As she and Daphne worked together to steer him toward the stairway door, Patrick rolled his head to the side to look at Izzie through half-lidded eyes.

  “I could hear you,” he said. “In the dark. You pulled me back.”

  She wasn’t sure if he was in shock, or brain damaged, or just delirious from loss of blood.

  “Like a bird,” he said sleepily, his head forward, chin resting on his chest. “A spark . . .”

  He trailed off into silence.

  Tightening her hold on his arm to keep him from falling, shouldering his weight, Izzie continued to walk forwards. The light and flames still shone all around them, but the shadows were beginning to fade.

  EPILOGUE

  The trees in the park beside Powell Middle School were a riot of color, tinted with blooms of bright pink and purple, and the spring air was thick with the scent of them as Patrick made his Saturday morning rounds though the neighborhood. He leaned heavily on the cane in his right hand with each step, still unable to bear his full weight on his right knee, but as the months had gone on the pain of his injuries had faded, though the memories remained. There were other gaps in his memory, of course. Moments from childhood and the years since that he continued to find were missing. But he retained the broad sweeps and bigger picture, and was thankful that the losses had not been greater.

  The marks on the buildings that he checked were clean and well-tended, though some of them had been joined by graffiti tags that identified which of the neighborhood kids had claimed the right to maintain them. A competitive streak had taken hold in the neighborhood, with different factions of students vying to see who would earn their new gym teacher’s most effusive praise. Since leaving the force and starting to work for the school full time, Patrick had done his best to be as impartial as possible, though he found that Regina Jimenez and her brother seemed to be responsible for the greatest number of well-kept markings. Hector had watched from the window of the house as the Ridden had been shot in the forehead from Patrick’s pistol and kept on standing, which had scared him straighter than any lecture could have ever managed to do.

  When he rounded the corner at the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony, Patrick saw Izzie parking her car on the curb in front of his house, and by the time he was crossing Almeria she was already standing on the sidewalk.

  “I thought you weren’t due back from Quantico until tomorrow,” he said, as she opened the rear door on the passenger side and pulled out her bag. Then he waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively. “What, couldn’t stand to be away from your girlfriend a moment longer?”

  Daphne had moved into the rooms upstairs soon after the new year, once he had finished converting them into a separate apartment. Izzie had been splitting her time between Virginia and the city in the months since, but it seemed to Patrick that he should be charging her rent, too, considering how many weekends she spent there.

  “You’re going to be seeing a lot more of me,” she said, with a crooked smile. “My request to transfer to the Resident Agency here went through. Gutierrez has been promoted to run the Field Office up in Portland, and Daphne is being bumped up to take over as the new R.A.”

  Patrick wasn’t surprised to hear that Gutierrez had gotten the nod. In the fallout of the Ink investigation, Izzie and Daphne had downplayed their own roles, leaving Gutierrez to bask in the effusive praise of the mayor, who credited his Resident Agency with providing crucial support to helping the RPD stitch up the narcotics ring that the public now believed had been operating out of the offices of Parasol. The official story was that the company’s CEO had been tragically killed by that same narcotics ring when he uncovered their activities and tried to put a stop to it, and that one of Recondito’s finest had suffered a gunshot wound while trying unsuccessfully to save him. It was an explanation that fit the publicly known facts, and though Patrick was uncomfortable with the momentary fame that he enjoyed after articles ran with headlines like “HERO COP SOLVES MURDER OF FELLOW OFFICER AND SOFTWARE CEO,” it kept anyone from trying to poke holes in the story.

  “Wait, does that mean your girlfriend is going to be your supervisor?”

  Izzie shrugged. “It won’t be the first Bureau regulation that I’ve broken since coming here.” She slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder, then closed the door. “Don’t worry, though, I’ve got a line on a place of my own. Nice red-brick house in Ross Village. My grandmother would have loved it.”

  She took a few steps down the sidewalk, peering down the alley to look at the mark that Patrick’s great-uncle had left on the rear of the house a lifetime ago.

  “So how are things here?” she asked, turning back in his direction. “No major disasters I should know about?”

  Patrick leaned on the handle of his cane with both hands.

  “We’re keeping a lid on it.”

  The Ridden were off the streets, and unless someone managed to get down into that abandoned mine outside of town, they weren’t likely to be back any time soon. But as they’d learned from Alistair Freeman’s journal and their discussions with G. W. Jett, the Ridden were only one of the potential dangers that came along with living in a true place like Recondito. The walls between the worlds were thin here, and there were always things that were breaking though from the Otherworld and beyond.

  The front door to his house opened, and Joyce leaned out the gap, her hand on the knob.

  “You ever coming back inside? I’ve had breakfast waiting for almost half an hour.” She turned and flashed a smile at Izzie. “Hey, you. Daphne’s upstairs, I’ll let her know you’re back.”

 
; Then she disappeared back inside, and from the open door came wafting the smell of fresh-baked island donuts.

  “So we’re good, then?” Izzie said, looking in his direction.

  “Good enough for now,” Patrick answered. There would be time to tell her about the possession that he had dealt with a few days earlier once breakfast was done. “Yeah, we’re good.”

  The Ridden might have been gone, but the city still needed someone to protect it from other threats from beyond. Already they had faced a number of other minor incursions, and it was only a matter of time before something major broke through. But they had survived one encounter, and they would be ready for whatever came next. They would have to be.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a huge debt of thanks to Bill Willingham, Lilah Sturges, and Mark Finn, who were generous with their advice when the earliest version of this story was first coming into focus, to Allison Baker for her support and encouragement in all the years since, and to Jeremy Lassen for helping bring it into focus.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chris Roberson is the co-creator, with artist Michael Allred, of iZombie, the basis of the hit CW television series, and the writer of several New York Times best-selling Cinderella miniseries set in the world of Bill Willingham’s Fables series. He is also the co-creator of EDISON REX with artist Dennis Culver, and the co-writer of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D., Witchfinder, Rise of the Black Flame, and other titles set in the world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. In addition to his numerous comics projects, Roberson has written more than a dozen novels and three dozen short stories, and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award four times; twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; and has won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History in both the Short Form and Novel categories. He lives with his daughter, two cats, and far too many books in Portland, Oregon.