by Sierra Dean
“You can count to two. Good for you.”
I liked that he wasn’t afraid of me, because it made the next step that much sweeter. I lifted my sword and rammed it into his shoulder, wedging the blade in the meat of his armpit where it would hurt like hell but not do any serious damage.
He screamed like I’d cut off his balls. Which he also had two of, so I might use them to make my point further if he decided he didn’t want to listen.
“See. Now you only have one arm.”
Jock wailed, writhing around on the path like a fish plucked from the sea. My sword had gone all the way through him, keeping his upper body pinned in place, but he still managed to toss himself to and fro a fair bit.
“You bitch. You fucking bitch.” His words were garbled by a mouthful of saliva, which dribbled down his chin as he cussed at me.
“That really is your favorite thing to call me, isn’t it? Look, up until now I’ve been nice. I didn’t break your knee. I didn’t cut off your arm. But I have to draw the line at name-calling.” I glanced quickly to Genie, who was staring at me like I was someone she’d never met before. “Tell me who is responsible for this, and I’ll let you go.”
“If you let me go, I will hunt you to the end of the earth, cut off your head and rape the fucking hole, you bi—”
“Bitch. Yeah, I got it. Thanks. How about this, then? You talk, or I make sure you only have one of everything left.” I placed my foot near his crotch and toed his nuts meaningfully. “I’m pretty sure there are some things you’d like to keep paired up, yeah?”
He went still, and his eyes stopped rolling around long enough to fix me with a crazy man’s glare. Then he laughed.
God, I hated it when they laughed.
“Doesn’t matter whether you know who they are or not. Knowing won’t stop them. You can’t win this. They will find you and everyone you love, and before this night is over you’ll be wishing you let me kill you when I had the chance.”
I snorted and pulled the sword out of his arm, giving it an extra twist for good measure.
“Jock, better and scarier men than you have threatened me. Scarier women have followed through. And quite frankly, I think you’re full of shit. I think a bunch of power-starved assholes with a little magic are running around the city, and I think it’s about time someone cut them off at the knees. Now tell me where to find them.”
Jock blinked back tears and rolled himself into a fetal ball now that I wasn’t keeping him pinned anymore. “Don’t worry. They’ll find you.”
Chapter Seven
Part of me wanted to keep poking holes into Jock until he coughed up a name. But since he hadn’t talked yet, it would take a lot more work than I was willing to do to get him to confess.
I debated letting him run back to whoever it was that sent him, but in the end we settled for handcuffing him to a park bench. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have left a prisoner to rot, especially given how insane things were in the city. I made an exception for Jock, though, since he obviously had connections to the people in charge, and I wasn’t worried for his safety against the dead.
Well, not too much.
To be honest, if anything terrible were to happen to him—like if he were to slowly bleed to death from the hole in his arm, for example—I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
I was running out of fucks to give, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spare any on a bottom feeder like Jock.
I did regret losing the handcuffs I’d taken from Keaty’s, but I hoped we wouldn’t need to lock anyone else up tonight.
“From here on out we just kill everyone. No questions asked.” I resheathed my sword as we continued our quest across the park.
“I can’t tell if she’s kidding,” Genie whispered.
“She probably can’t either,” Desmond replied.
I had meant it as a joke, but it was hard to say what I would do when push came to shove. The necromancers had to die. And if I needed to kill people to get the job done, I would. There’d been a time in my life I used to let the underlings live, but things had changed. I no longer believed being guilty by association was the same thing as being innocent. People chose to do bad things. They chose to align themselves with evil people, and they had to know death was a possibility.
So if it came down to it, I would kill whoever needed killing, and I wouldn’t feel bad about it.
Okay, I might feel a little bad about it.
I got the walkie-talkie from Desmond, and for the first time I wished we’d come up with some sort of team names or codes in case anyone else was listening in. “Hey, Keaty? It’s Secret. Uh, over?”
“Secret, is this an emergency? I have the distinct memory of telling you we should only use this frequency in emergency situations. Over.”
Nice. “Would you consider getting attacked by a thug who works for the necros to be an emergency?”
Silence.
“Over,” I added, rolling my eyes at no one in particular.
“I would consider that to be a potentially emergency-like situation. Is everyone in your group all right?”
“Yeah, we’re all fine, over.”
“And the thug? Over.”
“He’s chained to a park bench.” I looked over to Genie. Though the light around her hand had diminished considerably, it wasn’t gone altogether. Just how much bang for the buck could she use her power for? “Keaty, I’m not sure we should continue this plan. I think we should regroup. Over.”
When the radio picked up again it wasn’t Keaty’s voice, but Holden’s that came through. “Let’s cut this over nonsense. What the hell good do you think it’s going to do if we go back to the townhouse, hmm? You think we should sit around and wait out the storm there?”
The sarcasm in his voice bit me harder than his teeth ever had. “I don’t want to put anyone in danger,” I said quietly.
“Everyone is already in danger. This isn’t the kind of situation where you can protect us. This is bigger than you, do you get that?”
“That doesn’t mean we need to go looking for danger.”
“Secret McQueen doesn’t want to go looking for danger.” His snort came through loud and clear. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
A joke about his not technically being alive to see it sat heavy on my tongue, but I resisted the urge to say it. Holden was mad at me, and he had every right to be. If this was the outlet he wanted to use to express himself, I wasn’t going to take the wind out of his sails.
“Fine.” I had to try hard not to growl. “Please be careful, and keep your eyes open, okay? I think this is a lot more dangerous than we originally anticipated.”
“We’ll be okay.” His voice had softened somewhat, and after a beat he added, “Tell that dog of yours to keep both eyes on you, understand?” The words were all for Desmond, and he heard them just fine without me passing the message along.
“Over and out,” I concluded, handing the walkie back to Des. “Now can we please get a move on?”
It was a longer walk from Keaty’s house to the 97th Precinct police station than it would have been under normal circumstances. Every block or so we were forced to duck behind cars or trash bins in order to conceal ourselves from the risen. While they mostly had their eyes glued shut, I’d started noticing a few of the older dead, and I didn’t want to test my luck with their senses. They didn’t seem to be moving in large packs anymore. The ones we saw were alone or in pairs, but the larger groups must have begun to split up, which was both a mercy and a problem. Sure, hiding from one was easier than hiding from a dozen, but now that they were on their own, we were seeing them with far more frequency than the packs.
What we hadn’t seen were any living humans.
Either everyone had split, or people were hiding in their homes, but regardless of where they’d gone we weren’t seeing any signs of life. Genie also mentioned, with a somewhat bitter edge to her voice, no one had offered us any help.
Not tha
t we could have accepted it if they had. Lying low until it all blew over wasn’t an option. Things wouldn’t blow over until we dealt with them.
When we finally reached the squat gray building that housed the 97th precinct, my heart stuttered. The front steps were ablaze, and I briefly thought the whole building was on fire.
I squinted into the sudden brightness of the flame, and it took a moment for me to realize several large stacks of cardboard and a bunch of garbage had been placed on the front steps, and those had been lit on fire, not the building. When we got closer, the stink of burning garbage became much more apparent, and I wrinkled my nose, trying to ignore it.
We edged around the flame and made our way into the police station, shutting most of the stink outside when the door closed behind us.
On its best day, the station could hardly be considered welcoming, with almost no windows and the general warmth of a prison. But now, without even fluorescent lights to guide us, it was a truly dismal sight to behold.
More often than not, a pert, bitchy blonde named Barbie would be glowering at me from behind her desk and giving me all sorts of attitude before she let me pass. But today the venomous gatekeeper was nowhere to be seen. I honestly hoped that meant she was okay and hiding somewhere to protect herself. I might not be Barbie’s number-one fan, nor she mine, but it didn’t mean I wanted anything bad to happen to her.
At least nothing worse than an unfortunate haircut.
I certainly didn’t wish death on her or any of the other antagonists I encountered on a day-to-day basis.
I was relieved to see the station was, for the most part, unscathed. A few file folders had been abandoned, their papers strewn across the floor, and someone had abandoned a gym bag on the main stairs, but apart from that the place was untouched.
“You think she’s still here?” Desmond asked, holding his gun at the ready.
“It doesn’t smell abandoned,” Genie offered.
The trouble with places like this, where the public came and went and there were constantly people around, was they never truly smelled abandoned. Everyone left their mark, and over time it could be difficult to tell whether a scent was old or fresh. But Genie was right, even to me the place smelled of activity, which meant there were people around. Living people, thank God, because death had its own distinctive odor.
Climbing up the stairs, we prepared ourselves for anything we might find on the next level, especially armed police officers. Given the amount of looting and violence occurring in the city, they had to be expecting some kind of outside infiltration, yet they’d left their doors unlocked. Were they still trying to provide a safe haven to those who might need it, or were they hoping their own officers on the street would be coming back to them in one piece?
Probably both.
I pressed my back against a wall and waved to Desmond and Genie to do the same. I was not naturally skilled at using hand signals to convey messages, but they seemed to understand what I was telling them without much difficulty. I wasn’t trying to sneak in, but I also didn’t want to get my head blown off if I waltzed into the middle of the room unprepared.
“If there’s anyone there, I’m not here to cause trouble,” I shouted, my voice surprisingly loud. The main office area of the precinct was a wide-open floor with dozens of metal desks spread throughout. Normally the din of ringing phones and loud voices was overwhelming. I’d never heard it this quiet before. “I’m armed, but only for my own protection. I’m looking for Mercedes Castilla.”
The silence stretched long enough I thought I might be talking to an empty room after all, then someone coughed.
“What’s yer name?” a gruff male voice called out.
“Secret. McQueen.” I offered them as two separate statements, thinking after the fact he might want my last name too. “Who are you?”
“Detective Sergeant O’Brian.” I noticed he didn’t get snippy with me for asking, and I appreciated it. “You alone out there, Ms. McQueen?”
“I have two others with me. They’re also armed.”
“All right. Well, you guys c’mon in, and we’ll both stop shoutin’ at each other. Deal?”
“Deal.”
I stepped forward, keeping my gun out but pointed down, in case O’Brian was bullshitting me and planned to put a hole in my head. I held my hand out for Desmond to wait back with Genie and scoured the room for the detective. A moment later a rough-looking middle-aged man with glasses and a graying mustache Tom Selleck would have envied stepped out from behind a desk. He, too, was holding his gun, but he didn’t seem too eager to fire at me.
“Friendly?” I asked, though he’d already claimed to be.
“No one ever accused me of bein’ friendly, no. But I ain’t gonna shoot you if that’s what you’re asking.”
I could have asked for ID, but if he was a bad guy and had overthrown a police station, he’d have plenty of access to getting a badge somewhere. “Good enough.” Holstering my weapon, I waved to Desmond and Genie, and they entered behind me.
“Glad t’see some people are getting through those streets okay. Most of my staff are out there tryin’ to help, but damn, man. I don’t know if we can do much good. Where’d you come from?”
“Drove in through the Tunnel a couple hours ago,” I explained. “Sort of a shock.”
“No shit. You said yer lookin’ for Detective Castilla?”
“Castilla or Nowakowski.”
O’Brian scratched his mustache, and the corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. “Guess I’m gonna owe the Wonder Twins an apology after this.”
“What do you mean?”
“The two of them and all their weird cases. Like they’re on the X-Files or some shit like that.” He shook his head, and I struggled to maintain a straight face. Tyler, at least, was doing exactly that by working the FBI’s paranormal desk. “I thought they were loopy, ya know? Guess they’ll have the last laugh. Zombies and all.”
He said zombies like a girl on a diet might say carbs. Like it was a dirty word but not something made up.
“Do you know where they are?”
He nodded. “Castilla’s downstairs makin’ sure the manual locks on the cells are all working okay and the perps aren’t stirrin’ up too much trouble. She’ll be up soon.”
“And Tyler?”
“He’s out doin’ a sweep. Checking the area for zoms. He shouldn’t be gone more than an hour. I hope.”
“They’re not zombies,” Genie sputtered.
“What’s that?” O’Brian’s attention shifted to my sister.
Instinctively I wanted to block her, to protect her, though I didn’t know what from. In here we were about as safe as we were going to get.
“I said, they’re not zombies.”
“No? Then what are they? ’Cause they sure do look like the walking dead to me.”
I sighed. I hadn’t been planning to explain the difference to the general public because I didn’t think arguing about the semantics of walking dead versus zombies would do much good. But O’Brian had asked, so we might as well be upfront with him.
“I don’t mind explaining, but can we wait for Cedes to get back? I’d like to limit the number of times we have to make the same speech, you know?”
O’Brian nodded and set his service pistol on the desk, then sat himself next to it. He wiped his brow with the back of his arm and let out a groan. “I’ve been on the force thirty-two years. I worked the streets durin’ the 2003 blackout, when people were sleepin’ outside and it looked like we might lose control of the whole damned place. But I tell you, I never seen a thing like what’s going on out there tonight. Not in my damn life.”
“I don’t think any of us have,” Desmond offered.
“I’ve never feared for this city the way I do right now. More than the city. I’m…I’m scared. Is this the end?”
“End of days?” I asked. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You sound awful sure.”
“If anyone
can be sure of the apocalypse, it’s Secret.” Mercedes had entered the room through a back flight of stairs and was standing in the dark recesses, barely visible. She hung back for a minute, then moved across the room, wrapping me up in a tight hug. Since Cedes wasn’t one for big emotional displays, I was taken aback by her sudden expression of warmth. It took me a second to realize I ought to hug her back.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I said.
“Me? You’re the one with a nasty habit for being in the line of fire. I was so worried about you.”
I smiled. “You know me. Takes more than a few ambulatory corpses to keep me down.”
She evidently didn’t find this very funny.
“Your friends here were just tellin’ me these ain’t zombies.” O’Brian slipped a small container of chewing tobacco from his breast pocket and placed a bit between his gum and lower lip.
“Oh?”
I explained to them what Keaty had told me, trying to limit my use of the phrase necromancer but failing terribly. There wasn’t much sense in downplaying the paranormal aspects just because O’Brian was with us. He’d witnessed the dead rise and take to the streets tonight. There was a good chance he believed in the supernatural now.
Most people were going to need to reassess their understanding of the world after tonight. Now they would know the truth. Ghost stories weren’t just stories, and the things that went bump in the night were no longer figments of their imagination.
The world was going to be a different place when this was all said and done.
I had to give O’Brian credit. He took the whole thing pretty well, considering what we’d told him. He nodded a lot and didn’t ask too many questions, which was what I liked in authority figures.
“Where’s Owen?” I asked Cedes, hoping her boyfriend was somewhere safe if he wasn’t with her here.
“He and your cat are holed up at my apartment. The alley gate makes it more secure than a lot of other options.”
