No flies. Why no flies?
“This isn’t . . . decent,” Genevieve said.
“No shit?” Anna moved the beam of the flashlight over the other corpses. More gunshot wounds, a few horrible gashes, a couple of bodies with no sign of what killed them. Some new, some desiccated and half-eaten with rot.
And one more.
“Oh no.” She stepped over the blond guy, stepped on another corpse’s hand, and stumbled, catching herself on the rail.
A body lay facedown at the bottom of the stairs, half on the carpet and half on the lower two risers, giving the unmistakable impression of having been thrown down the stairs like so much refuse. It was the body of a small woman, wearing a dirty white shift, her spindly arms thrown out to either side.
Anna stood and looked down at the body. The room seemed to rock, adrift on an angry sea, and Anna’s own rage swelled as if in response.
“What?” Genevieve asked.
“It’s Adelaide.”
“Shit. Why?”
“I don’t know.” She hadn’t gone easy, though. Not from the look of the bruises and the burns. “They wanted something from her. Just like they want something from Karyn.”
Poor Adelaide.
“Hey, uh . . .” Genevieve paused, her voice so tight it was as though her throat had seized up and cut off the words. “I don’t know. Maybe we should get out of here. These people are insane.”
“Go if you got to. I ain’t leaving without those splinters. Not now. There are no other options left.”
A long silence. No footstep or creak of beam interrupted. “Let’s get moving, then,” Genevieve finally said.
Anna edged around Adelaide’s outflung arm, the curled fingers on the end somehow adding a pathetic note to the whole scene, and started up the stairs. She wasn’t entirely clear on what was going on in this place, but she had a handle on this room: it was a body dump. Why they couldn’t get the corpses out some way or bury them, she didn’t know—had a suspicion that maybe this was something she really, really didn’t want to know—but the fact that Mona had turned her downstairs living room into corpse storage was undeniable. This hadn’t happened yesterday. Anna was no expert, but some of those people had to have been dead for weeks, maybe longer.
She’d just as soon forget about it, or at least lock it away in the back of her mind, but she doubted that was going to be possible.
As she ascended, the scent of rot was pushed to the background by that other smell, burning metal and fucking flowers. She thought again of the monster at Mendelsohn’s.
Is it here?
The stairway ended at a wide hallway, surprising Anna. The ground floor was so dark and silent that it felt subterranean, like it must be a basement or a cave, and the pile of corpses seemed like something that even somebody psycho enough to have would still want to keep behind a locked door, separate from the space where they lived and slept.
Maybe it’s food, Anna thought. Not for the people here, but for the source of that stink.
She stopped at the top, and once Genevieve joined her, she killed the light. The hall had gone into darkness, but she’d thought there had been a couple of doors on the left and at least one on the right. Best she could figure, if she hadn’t got turned around on the ground floor, she wanted the last door on the left. That ought to take her to the northwest corner of the house, more or less. Mona’s rooms.
If her eyes had adjusted, she couldn’t tell. Everything was still an undifferentiated black. She put the goggles on again. She still couldn’t see a damn thing. Her feet lit up like the Vegas strip, but the whole rest of the hall was a blob of black and blue with the occasional stray line or shape that suggested nothing in particular.
With the goggles still on, she walked slowly down the hall, keeping a finger on the left-hand wall. She found the trim of the first door after a few steps and stopped to listen. Nothing beyond the slight shuffle of Genevieve’s shoes on the carpet.
She kept going. No sound at the second door, either, and the hallway ended shortly after that. She turned around and listened at the door again. To her left, Genevieve was the sole bright shape in the darkness, white on black, her face an eerie skull.
No light from below the door, no sound from beyond.
She crouched and slowly turned the doorknob. The door swung quietly open when she pushed.
Only darkness in the next room.
Good. Means nobody else is in here. Probably. It wouldn’t do to get too cocky. Nail had warned her that the infrared couldn’t see through things or around them. Maybe, if she was lucky, it could pick up a sort of heat halo around somebody who was hiding behind a couch or something, but she’d have to be pretty damn lucky. These just weren’t precision instruments. In retrospect, they probably weren’t even the right tool for this job, but they were what she’d had handy.
She pushed the goggles up on her forehead and counted to sixty while her eyes adjusted. Moonlight leaked around the curtains on the far window—light that was almost useless, but a shade better than she’d seen through the goggles. At least she could kind of tell what this room was. Some kind of lounge, she thought. A handful of big dark lumps were arranged around the floor, and the faint light reflecting off them suggested leather. Couches, chairs. The dim sparkling to the left seemed like it might have been a row of glasses behind a bar.
This was going to be slow going, she realized, even slower than she’d thought. She couldn’t navigate with the goggles on, but if somebody were hiding in one of these rooms, she’d never see them without the goggles.
These are people, she reminded herself. They need to see, just like I do. They talk. They move. They sleep and snore. And they probably don’t know I’m here. I have the advantage, dammit.
She made her way across the wood floor to a dark rectangle on the right, which had to be a door or a doorway. A door, it turned out, in some dark wood. She listened at it, heard nothing, and with a barely audible sigh, put the goggles back on. Then she opened the door.
Again, nothing. No—wait. That wasn’t quite true. There was something ahead of her, maybe fifteen feet away at the level of her thigh, the size of . . . A glass. A glass full of some warm liquid, sitting on an end table.
If the liquid was warm, somebody had been here recently. Maybe they’d be back.
She went toward the table, sliding her feet slowly a bare inch above the floor. She found the edge of a chair that way, skirted it, and got to the table. She touched her hand to the glass. Fairly warm. Had to be recent.
Somebody had just been here. Her heart rate kicked up a notch. Where had they gone? She couldn’t see the damn exits.
One more time, she took the goggles off and waited. This was maddening. It helped, though. There was only one way out of this room besides the direction she’d come in—straight ahead. She opened another door and went into another room.
At last, light. A trace of moonlight came from a doorway across the room in the right-hand wall. She thought she remembered windows from before, so she walked around the room, hugging the wall to her right. The candle wasn’t much, but her eyes drank in the light, and the details of the room began to resolve. It was a mess. The door on the left-hand wall had been smashed to the floor. Ahead, a pile of sticks looked like the remains of a destroyed kitchen table. Bullet holes pocked the wall next to her. There’d been a showdown of some sort in here. She wondered who won.
She approached the doorway and, keeping low, peeked around the corner.
This was it, the library Guy had taken her to meet Mona in. No candle here, just the moon through diaphanous curtains. Once Genevieve had followed her in, she closed the door.
Anna flicked her light back on. This part was old news, though she hadn’t often performed it with the owners in the house. Even so, her hands were quick and sure as she took books down from shelves and checked drawers. Nothing on the first set of shelves, nor the second. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for. The picture in her mind was a s
ort of tarted-up toothpick container, like the little plastic jars you could get at the store, only with a pentagram painted on it in red nail polish. Ludicrous, and she had to consciously try to keep the image away so she wouldn’t focus on it. The fact was, she didn’t know what she was looking for, but she had to be open to finding it.
“She, uh, she comes in here a lot?” Genevieve asked.
“What? Yeah, I guess. Shhh.”
Genevieve stood to the side, hands in her pockets, musing as she surveyed the room. Anna found that irritating as hell—she could at least help, though Anna supposed she’d probably be noisy if she did, so maybe that wasn’t a bad thing after all. It was still irritating.
Having cleared the books off two shelves, she started pushing at the back panels on the bookshelves, hoping for a false back or something. The toothpicks—the reliquary—might not even be here, she realized. Her instincts were usually pretty good about this kind of thing, but nobody was perfect. She’d go room to room if she had to. Even if it took all night.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
Anna spun, and Genevieve dropped the figurine she’d been holding. It smashed with a sound so loud it seemed it would wake the whole block.
Mona stood in the doorway.
Chapter 22
Everything hurt. That was the core truth of life that had evaded Sheila for thirty-nine years, a truth masked by a thousand other distractions, and it had taken this latest immense, crushing agony to finally crowd out the rest to the point where she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Life was one long lesson in pain, physical and emotional, and even the most sheltered and cushioned accumulated aches of the body and soul over time, ranging from the slow breakdown of knee and spine to the cumulative guilt of wrongs inflicted and humiliations suffered. She thought maybe that was what really killed you, eventually. All that weight of suffering. Surely if you lived long enough, it would drive you mad otherwise.
She followed behind Rain, each step a shock that rippled up through the webwork of bloody slashes that now covered her torso. Rain had put them there, she remembered. Sheila had collapsed, feverish, her body no longer able to tolerate the blood loss and infection, and even that last meal of blood and flesh had done little to help her recover. She hadn’t lost consciousness, not exactly, but she’d descended into delirium. The brick of the alley she’d collapsed in oozed a black slime, anthropomorphic rats had paddled by on boats made of human skulls, and giant, angular jointed limbs, like those of a monstrous spider, protruded from every window and probed blindly around the alley.
Rain had stayed with her. Had tried holding her hand, even, though that had proven too painful, and so she’d stroked Sheila’s forehead instead. Sheila remembered her smiling down, lips and cheeks still stained with blood.
Eventually, Rain had taken the knife from Sheila’s bag and begun cutting. At first, Sheila had laughed, thinking Rain had gotten bored and had finally discovered a new diversion, and while the pain was horrible, there was a hilarious sort of irony in thinking Rain had stayed with her out of a desire to help. But as the blood poured, she realized that it wasn’t boredom or bloodlust—Rain was working magic in Sheila’s flesh. Painful, terrible magic—but somehow, crazily, healing magic, of a kind. The wounds in her fingers closed. The red streaks on her hands faded. The fever abated. The new wounds scabbed over quickly. Not healing, but not bleeding much, either.
She was going to live.
The truth of life was pain, but that core truth held a secret. Experiencing pain was living, truly living, and once you embraced that, it came with a euphoria greater than the pain itself. She had a memory of a place of darkness, where all sensation was mostly absent, muted when it was present, the senses straining for any kind of input at all for years, decades. It was insane, a false memory, nothing she’d ever experienced, obviously, but compelling nonetheless. Even pain was better than that nonlife.
She reminded herself of that at each step, and with each painful jolt, a comparable thrill ran through her body. It didn’t erase the pain, didn’t offset it in any way, but it felt good, and that was enough.
Rain looked back and smiled at her. She smiled back. Something bothered her about the exchange—it didn’t hurt. It felt good, all by itself. What was up with that?
Just pain in waiting, she thought. One day, those good feelings would be swept away on a tide of loss and agony, and they would have only served to make the wave that much stronger. She felt relief at the thought. Better that than that she’d somehow misunderstood everything.
They followed the slime trail of the slug creature. Rain had called it this time, once Sheila had shown her how, and the fresh stump of her finger still bled. Not freely, though—Rain had had the presence of mind to bandage the wound, a concept that had somehow, horribly, been driven from Sheila’s mind at the sight of red running blood. The red blot on the bandage still spread, though, and it was hard for Sheila to keep herself from watching it.
They trudged through still another section of town full of run-down buildings and wreckage, nearly devoid of people. Since joining the Chosen, it had been like this, as though the universe had opened a crack and Sheila had slipped through to an alternative dimension full of ruin. She knew better, mostly. The company she kept now wasn’t fit for roaming the suburbs and holding office jobs, and they had relegated themselves to the cracks between ordinary life. They weren’t cracks, though. She could see that now. They were craters, colossal, inescapable gaping mouths, even for the normal residents who hadn’t taken up with otherworldly forces. Pits lined with downward-pointing spikes. Once you fell down here, it would take divine intervention or a near-miraculous cosmic accident to get you back out.
The apartment buildings thinned as the Chosen walked, and soon whole banks of windows were covered with plywood and danger signs.
“We could live here,” Rain said. “Just like at the slaughterhouse.”
The idea had a certain attraction. Spend their time sleeping, eating, and plumbing the strange mysteries that itched at the back of her mind. It wasn’t realistic, though.
“No,” she said. “We can’t.”
Rain merely looked at her, eyes wide in a question.
“What happened to Harriet?” Sheila asked.
“Died, I guess.”
“While I was out?”
“Yeah.”
Sheila nodded. “Accident?”
Rain’s forehead wrinkled. “No. I don’t think so. I didn’t see it, but I think she just . . . gave out.” She licked her lips. Sheila doubted she knew she was doing it.
“There’s only six of us left, Rain. We really are all going to die.” It was true, she thought, but the most unsettling thing wasn’t the fact itself, but that it carried no emotional weight whatsoever. She expected her heart to pound, her stomach to get that queasy, acid-sick feeling, but there was none of that. Instead, it had the feel of a nuisance, or maybe the contemplation of the distant conclusion of a great party. One day the good times would stop, and that was it. It wasn’t that distant, though, she didn’t think. She just wished she could really believe it.
Rain nodded, her mouth drawn up small, her face serious. “I think so. Yeah.” She looked around, gaze moving from the yellow sky to the decaying buildings to the four remaining Chosen who still walked with them. “We’re damned, you know,” she said. There was no particular concern in her voice—it was just an observation, like “Hey, it might rain later.”
“I know.”
“All I can think about is how hungry I am.”
Sheila knew what she meant. “And how much I’d like to get fucked right about now.”
“Fuck yes.”
It would be easy. Turn around, grab Antawn or Raul by the balls, and do it right here, or maybe go into one of the buildings. Maybe get everyone to go.
The gray thing turned. It picked up the front end of its body and pointed it back at her, giving the exact impression of studying her over its shoulder, never mind
that it had neither eyes nor shoulders.
Van Horn. It was supposed to take them to Van Horn, and it occurred to her for the first time that, having been tasked, it might not be receptive to distraction. She thought of the crunching sounds it had made when eating, shivered, laughed, and walked faster.
Ahead, the apartment buildings opened onto a wide plaza of cracked concrete, surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. The building beyond was a sprawling disaster of cinder block, broken glass, and collapsed walls. A fragment of smashed plastic sign reading MENTARY SCH still stood out front.
The creature led them straight toward it. It slithered across the road, up the curb, then through a break in the fence.
Sheila stopped at the fence. The creature hadn’t gone off easily trod paths before, whether that meant sidewalks, alleys, or streets.
“Here?” she whispered. “Is he here?”
Once again the creature made as if it were looking back at her. It paused for a nerve-racking moment, then continued.
“Shouldn’t we have a plan?” Sheila asked. The other Chosen looked at her, but the creature kept moving.
She looked to Rain. “Take Raul. Go around the back.” She smiled. This might actually be fun. “We’ll go in the front. If you see anybody besides Van Horn, kill them.”
The others nodded, mouths solemn, but gleeful anticipation dancing in their eyes.
They moved in.
* * *
The scream sent a sickening spike of fear right up the center of Nail’s body, and he was on his feet before his head had even cleared.
The sound stopped. He paused, wondering if he’d really heard it, or if he’d finally fallen into that half space between sleep and waking and he’d imagined or dreamed it.
“Hurry up!”
Karyn. Nail moved. He threw the door open so hard it banged off the wall and rushed in, lighting the room up with his phone as he came in.
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