Dead Set: A Novel

by Richard Kadrey

  A light rain was falling where the tunnel ended. A street spread out before her and a cloudy sky hung above. It was night and the rain was stinging cold, but to Zoe it felt like the most glorious shower in the world. She held out her hands and rubbed them together, washing off as much of the grime as she could. Then she looked up and let the rain rinse her face clean. There was a full moon, high in the cloudy sky over a calm, black sea. It was a beautiful sight. A sudden blast of wind came from the direction of the water, carrying an ocean chill. Zoe shivered in her wet clothes. By the far wall a heavy black overcoat hung off the end of a bedpost. She picked up and inspected it. The coat was relatively clean and no rats seemed to have claimed it for their own, so she put it on. The weight and warmth made her feel better instantly. But that good feeling only lasted for a moment. Above the bedpost where the coat had hung, a single word was carved into the high granite wall:

  IPHIGENE

  Eight

  There must be some mistake. The garbage-strewn passage and this dreary, pitted road couldn’t be part of the same town where she’d just spent a day with her father, could they? Maybe there was more than one Iphigene.

  A horn blared at her from nearby. Two bright lights crossed over her. A screech echoed off the rocky cliff as tires tried to grip the wet road. Zoe lurched back and pressed herself against the hill. She’d wandered to the center of the road without even realizing it. A bus swerved around where she’d been a second earlier and continued on, disappearing around the curve. Everything was suddenly quiet, except for the rain, which was coming down harder than ever. Wind from the ocean threw itself against the hillside and the rain seemed suspended in the air, like shuddering Christmas lights. Iphigene, whatever version of Iphigene she’d stumbled into, lay just around the corner ahead. She’d come much too far to simply turn back without a look, so she started walking.

  Her right leg hurt. She’d twisted her ankle coming down the giant stairs and now her whole leg throbbed. Her sneakers were soaked through, but she could live with that. It meant they couldn’t get any wetter. She pulled the coat tighter around her, hoping it would warm her up. It helped a little, but not much. As she neared the town, the rain turned to a fine mist. Zoe heard the sound of the surf breaking quietly on the shore below the boardwalk. The fat, ice-white moon cast its reflection onto the dark water. For just a moment, no more than a heartbeat, the moon looked to Zoe like a giant eye watching everything and everyone in Iphigene, including her. Then the feeling was gone and it was just the moon again.

  Ahead, the bus that had almost run her down sat idling by the curb. The front and rear doors were open and people were stepping down to the pavement. Many of the new arrivals stood on the corner, seemingly confused. They turned in slow circles like lost dogs trying to catch a scent that would lead them home. A few walked up the street, drawn by the sounds coming from the bars, while others crossed over to the boardwalk to stare at the ocean.

  Zoe approached a plump man in a dark brown suit at least a size too small for him. The rain plastered his straw-colored hair across his forehead and his white shirt across the ample curve of his belly. He and a handful of others seemed unwilling to move far from the idling bus.

  “This isn’t right,” murmured the fat man.

  “Uh, excuse me,” said Zoe.

  He looked down at her. “It’s all wrong,” he said.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  The plump man turned in a slow circle, his arms held out in a gesture of confusion. “It’s not supposed to be like this.” He wrapped his thick hands around the bus-stop sign and shook it, as if to see if it was real. When the sign stayed firmly rooted to the street, he seemed to shrink a little. He shuffled away, around the corner, muttering to himself, “This isn’t right.”

  Zoe put up the collar on her coat and held it closed with one hand. She went down the strangely-familiar-but-unfamiliar street, keeping her head down, trying to blend in with the new arrivals. At least then she’d have an excuse for checking the place out so much.

  What had gone wrong with the city? Zoe wondered. She passed the newsstand with the green awning. The newspapers and magazines lay in bloated piles, waterlogged and black with mildew. The clothing store where, she remembered, they sold coats like the one she now wore was empty. Broken mannequins lay among the sodden shadows, broken limbs scattered across the cracked linoleum floor.

  On the next block, one of the big restaurants where, as her father had explained to her, nervous souls ate endless, pointless meals, was dark. The shattered front window had been carelessly repaired with cardboard and tape. Fireflies moved in sluggish lines inside the dirty glass. No, not fireflies, she thought as her eyes adjusted to the dark. People were moving around carrying miniature oil lamps made from ancient apothecary and liquor bottles. Zoe could make out a few faces inside the restaurant. They stared out at her with such hunger and dark resentment that it scared her. She turned away and crossed over to the boardwalk.

  There were fewer people by the beach. An old man a few feet to her right was staring out at the moon, rubbing and flexing his arm as if it hurt. When he moved it, the arm squeaked. In the moonlight, Zoe saw that the man’s arms were tarnished metal pipes, sort of like what they used in the bathrooms at school. The man’s ragged coat was a patchwork of other coats, pieces of plastic, and what looked like vinyl from a car seat. All the pieces were stitched together crudely with string and wire. Zoe turned her head, looking down the length of the boulevard. A woman limped along on a carved leg from a piano bench. A young boy tossed a ball in the air and stabbed it in midair with a short knife that protruded from the end of his arm where his hand should be. Everyone on the street seemed to be held together with rags and junkyard plunder.

  She looked back at the beach, but was startled by the old man, who had drawn closer to her. His pale face was so worn and heavily lined that “old” didn’t begin to describe him. He looked “ancient,” and Zoe flashed on things from Mr. Danvers’s class. Carved scarabs in Egypt. Fossilized skulls from Kenya. Mammoths frozen in Siberian glaciers. The old man’s face could have been as old as any of those things.

  He smiled and put his metal hand on her arm. “You remind me of my daughter,” he said in an airy, thin voice.

  “Thank you,” said Zoe, not knowing anything else to say.

  The old man’s face changed. He leaned close to Zoe’s cheek and sniffed. “You smell like . . . I don’t know.” He seemed lost for a moment. Then his smile grew wide and wild. “The world! You smell like the world!” His hand closed tighter on her arm. “You’re alive!” he whispered.

  Zoe pushed the old man hard and backed away. But he came after her, dazed and excited. “You’re alive!” he repeated over and over, getting louder each time he said it. People on the street stopped and stared. Zoe kept backing away, fear creeping up from her stomach. A couple of people broke away from the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk and started toward her. Zoe bolted from the old man, back toward the bus stop. At least there were lights there.

  But a curious crowd had gathered there, too. Zoe spun and started down a side street between the newsstand and the bar. Out of the corners of her eyes she caught glimpses of stripped cars tilting on flat tires and small fires in vacant lots where lost souls were huddled around jets of burning methane that leaked from the ground. The souls turned to look at her.

  Zoe turned a corner and slipped on the wet pavement, going down hard on one knee, twisting her bad ankle. From both ends of the street, she could hear what sounded like all of Iphigene, wood and metal limbs clanking and scraping as the inhabitants of the city closed in on her.

  She struggled to her feet and took off running, moving without direction or thought, propelled by her desperate need to stay ahead of the mob. When the street came to a sudden dead end, she darted down another alley and dashed by what looked like a row of derelict warehouses. Her breath caught in her throat. The throbbing in her leg was making her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t
run forever, she knew, but for now, she kept moving.

  A hand closed on her arm and jerked her hard to the side. She tumbled down a short flight of stairs into a damp, dark basement. It only took her a moment to get back to her feet, but when she tried to scramble back up the steps, someone grabbed her from behind. A hand clamped over her mouth and a voice whispered, “Shhh. They’re right behind you. Keep quiet.”

  A moment later, the mob came stumbling down the alley. Zoe froze on the stairs, hoping she was down low enough to be invisible to the street. Whoever was behind her pushed her head down so that she could only see the rough concrete steps on which she lay. Soon everything grew quiet. She could hear her own heart beating and the nervous breathing of whoever was holding her. A moment later, his hand moved away from her mouth, and she felt his weight lift from her body. Still on the steps, she turned and looked back into the basement.

  “Thanks. I think,” Zoe said.

  She didn’t see anyone at first. Then she heard someone move and could just make out a pair of feet in tattered sneakers illuminated by a slash of light near the far wall.

  “You okay?” asked whoever was wearing the sneakers. A boy, definitely, she thought.

  “I guess. Why are you all the way over there in the dark? Come out where I can see you.”

  “I’m cool over here right now,” said the boy.

  Zoe put her hand in her pocket and closed her fingers around the razor. “You can’t keep me in here,” she said firmly.

  “You’re not so smart, are you, if you can’t tell the difference between a kidnapping and a rescue?”

  “I’m feeling about as rescued as I need,” she said, rising. The pain in her ankle made her wince. “Thanks. I’m heading out.”

  “Where?” the boy asked. “Do you know your way around Iphigene? Do you even know where you are?”

  Zoe wanted to tell the voice to fuck off, but knew the boy had a point.

  “How far are you going to get on that leg?” he asked.

  “Okay,” said Zoe. “But how am I supposed to trust you if you won’t let me see you?”

  The boy’s feet shuffled on the dirt floor. Now it was his turn to be nervous, she saw.

  “I’m not much to look at. Kind of ugly, in fact,” the boy said. “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Okay, but this voice-from-the-shadows thing is a little too Freddy Krueger. If you’re trying to be my friend, come on out.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hey, I’ve seen The Evil Dead. As long as you’ve got a head, I can deal.”

  Zoe watched the sneakers take half a step forward, revealing a length of filthy, torn jeans.

  “I didn’t want it to happen like this, you know,” the boy said. “I had it all planned different. But then those assholes started chasing you.”

  “What did you have planned? Who the hell are you?” She was ready with the razor.

  A pause. “I was hoping maybe you’d know. But why should you? The real thing isn’t much like in dreams.”

  Zoe sat on the steps, her mind racing. There had been something familiar about the voice from the moment she’d heard it. It tickled something far in the back of her brain, like some deep memory or half-remembered dream. She let go of the razor and said, “Valentine?”

  The boy took a step back, disappearing completely into the shadows. “This is dumb. I should go.”

  Zoe was up on her feet and crossed the room in a couple of painful steps. When she plunged her hands into the dark, all she felt was the rough stone of the basement wall. Off to her right, she could hear breathing, so she reached out in that direction. Her fingers brushed heavy cloth, and she closed her hand on the boy’s arm. There was no flesh there. It was as hard and unyielding as steel. Zoe stepped back into the middle of the room.

  “Come into the light, Valentine. Please.”

  The boy shuffled forward, his shoulders hunched, head down. Dark, unruly hair covered his face. Zoe reached out and touched his other arm. It felt as hard and artificial as the first one. She thought of the people she’d seen on the street, the ones with wood and metal limbs. She put her hand on Valentine’s shoulder and felt something more familiar there, like skin and bone. The boy kept his head turned away from her and all she could really see of him was his heavy, patched greatcoat. It had a stiff collar so high that he could hide half his face behind it, but Valentine’s familiar brown eyes glittered at her from behind the wall of the collar.

  “It is you,” she said, and for the first time outside of her dreams, Zoe put her arms around her brother.

  Valentine’s body was thin. He went rigid when she hugged him, and he didn’t make any move to hug her back. When she tried to kiss his cheek, he pulled back suddenly, stepping into the dark again.

  “Valentine, you don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Then why are you hiding? What’s wrong with you?”

  A skeletal hand spotted with rust slid from the dark, pointing toward the stairs. “We shouldn’t stay here. They’ll be back.”

  “Did I do something to hurt you?” asked Zoe.

  Valentine stepped past her, moving quickly to the stairs. “It’s all right. We need to go.”

  Zoe followed him, limping on her injured ankle, which, after her fall into the basement, felt like there were pins sticking into the bone.

  “You’re hurt,” Valentine said. Her took her hand and helped her to the stairs. “Sit.”

  Kneeling on the dirt floor, Valentine pulled a long, dirty white rag from the pocket of his greatcoat. He pulled off Zoe’s sneaker and socks and carefully wrapped the rag around her ankle and foot, slipping her sneaker back on when he was done. As he worked, all Zoe could see of him was the top of his head and the occasional glint of light off his iron hands.

  “Try that,” Valentine said.

  Zoe stood, slowly putting weight on her bad leg. It stung, but the pain didn’t make her want to retch anymore.

  “That’s a lot better. Thanks.”

  Valentine nodded and started up the stairs. At the top he turned and said, “Keep your coat buttoned and your head down. Walk slow, like you’ve got nowhere to go and all eternity to get there.”

  “Do we have to go back out right now? I’m kind of freaked by this place.”

  “ ’Course you are,” said Valentine. “You’re not supposed to be here. None of us are.”

  He stepped out first, then motioned for Zoe to follow him. They walked down the wet night street away from the direction in which Zoe had been running. The rain was misting down, making tiny diamonds on her overcoat as she and Valentine came to better-lit streets. Zoe looped one of her arms around one of Valentine’s. She felt him stiffen for a moment, but he didn’t pull away.

  They crossed a broad street that she recognized. They were near the bar and boardwalk where the crowd had spotted her, she thought, a little afraid. But this time she wasn’t alone. She looked at her sleeves, staring at the rain jewels there.

  Heavily muscled, with bodies and huge heads that reminded her of the granite gargoyles on churches, enormous black dogs were eating something that lay in the gutter. The dogs from her dreams.

  Zoe felt Valentine tug her arm. “Don’t look,” he said. “They’re Queen Hecate’s spies.”

  Zoe couldn’t help glancing back. “What are they eating?” The dogs hungrily ripped into their food. “It almost looks like a body.”

  “I told you not to look.”

  Zoe closed her eyes for a few seconds and let Valentine lead her. All her life she’d wanted to live in her dreams with her brother and now her dreams had come true. But they weren’t alone and it was both wonderful and horrible.

  When they were well past the dogs, Zoe whispered, “Valentine, what happened to the city? I was just here a day ago and it was beautiful.”

  Valentine shook his head. “Nothing happened. The city’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. Father tricked you with pretty
pictures and sweet lies. He showed you what you wanted to see so you’d get the hell out and never come back. Why did you come back?”

  “I think I did something bad. I just wanted to see if he was all right.”

  “You think you’re going to fix anything? Look at this place. Look at these people. Look at me.” He lifted his head a little way out his high collar. She caught a glimpse of stitches in his face. Not the kind the doctor had given her after she’d fallen as a kid. These stitches were thick and crude, like wires in cheap leather. “Don’t worry. Father hasn’t been here long enough to look like me. But he’s not exactly what you remember.”

  “What the fuck is this place? Are we in hell?”

  “Yeah, but not the one you mean.” They turned off the well-lit streets into a darker industrial area. Broken fences ringed fields full of strange and fearsome machines: cranes with what looked like claws, bulldozers with teeth. What lay ahead was even stranger.

  Just a few blocks off the main road, the streets weren’t straight anymore, and neither were the buildings. They twisted around, over and under each other, like weeds and vines in an abandoned garden. Some buildings stood straight up while others lay on their sides like snakes, wrapping around other twisted buildings, strangling the upright ones so they shrank to almost nothing at the middle but bulged at the tops and bottoms.

  Valentine said, “The city used to be called Calumet. That means ‘peace.’ Now it’s Iphigene. Only Queen Hecate knows what that means, and no one’s asking her.”

  “That’s the queen the dogs spy for?”