2 Death Rejoices

by A. J. Aalto

I peered down the stone ramp into the seemingly bottomless mine shaft. A moldy flap of burlap was stuck to a rock nearby, and the railroad ties were slick with ooze. It smelled like decades of abandonment stirred up by unnatural death. I could hear a steady drip-drip-drip below that made my shoulders creep up to my ears.

  “Gee, I really wanted to go first, but if you insist, Dr. Edgar, have at it.”

  He hesitated. “Batten should never have come alone. He thinks he's a one-man demolition crew.”

  I felt the corner of my lips turn up reluctantly. “He's not?”

  “Not this time.”

  “And that's why we're here. If he needs us, he's got us. Right, Irish?”

  “We should wait for backup.”

  “No matter who gets here first, unless it's As— Three-Heads, they're not going to be much help. They don't know how to fight a zombie-creating necromancer and his forces of absolute horror.”

  “Neither does Batten. Neither do we,” Declan protested, incredulous.

  He had a point, so I didn't argue. Instead, I wiggled my pointer finger at my face, where I was sure my upper lip was swelling from Malas’ punch. “Listen, I got socked in the face by a trick-ass motherfucking vampire—”

  “Trick-ass motherfucking revenant,” Declan corrected.

  “No, fuck that undead asshole, he gets the V-word. I got socked in the face by a vampire. Also: my brother's a blood-slurping bat, there's an ogre who likes to hang out naked in my house licking my revenants, and my boss has corpsepox. So, you look here, dhampir…” I jabbed a finger down into the dripping dark. “I'm really super tired of all the death-making and chicanery. I'm marching into that mine shaft to save Mark Batten's life-ruining, glory-hogging, dream-invading, magical-tongued, hotel room-destroying ass. If you wanna turn tail and run, that's fine. But before you bolt, you have to explain to me how you, an immortal, can be so damned cowardly. I'm the squishy, mortal meat-bag. I'm supposed to be the coward, here. Now, are you going to step up, or are you gonna say you got out-sacked by a girl?”

  Declan gave me a long, considering look, clearly unhappy with what he saw.

  “Whatever happened to the woman who insisted it was her day off?” he asked. “The one who wanted to hide under her bed and eat junk food?”

  “She got sick of hiding. And an asshole zombie dentist made her drop the pretzels. Besides, I think it's after midnight, so it's technically not my day off anymore.”

  “Lord Dreppenstedt would want me to get you out of here, regardless of the cost.”

  “Harry's not here.”

  “He's going to be furious.”

  “He'll be furious if he finds out I busted the window of the Bugatti. He'll be more than that if he finds out a certain yellow-bellied half-breed let his DaySitter go alone into the dark to find trouble,” I said, adding an emphatic pffft. “You've come too far to go back now.”

  “I'm not going to be able to get you out of here?”

  “No fucking chance. You and I both know I'm going to make a mistake or two, and boy, I hope that it doesn't get me killed, or worse. Luckily, I tend to make mistakes in an epic fashion. My mistakes save lives. Wait. That was supposed to sound way more heroic than it did.”

  He nodded once, and heaved a deep sigh. “Let's go, Dr. B.”

  I nodded back then glared into the abyss, touching the butt of my mini Cougar for reassurance. “Damn tootin’. Time for the villain to make tragic face.”

  CHAPTER 59

  THE FIRST THING TO HIT ME was the smell. “This is more than just bad air quality,” I said. “Let's be safe. Got your gas mask from the CDC?”

  Declan was way ahead of me. I heard the hiss of his ventilated exhale before he turned around to nod at me, looking like a big-eyed khaki-green anteater. I dug into my go-bag, pulled the gas mask out, and put it over my head.

  The mine shaft was penetrated by two choices for descending: a slick stone ramp, or a rickety elevator that couldn't possibly still work. The idea of voluntarily suspending myself in a metal cage above a black, seemingly bottomless shaft and hoping the elevator wouldn't topple into the void made me see stars. The ramp looked safer, punctuated by railroad ties that might have once been attached to metal rails for ore carts. They now made handy toe-stops to keep us from sliding too far. I was about to dismiss the elevator entirely when a shuffling, scratchy noise down the shaft caught my ear.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered like some actor on a ghost hunting show. We both stopped in mid-step; the only sound now was our breath hissing in and out of the gas masks. I reached for the dangling control box for the elevator, hovered my thumb over its big orange metal button. “Think this thing actually works?”

  “Maybe that's what the generator outside is powering?” Declan said.

  I chewed my bottom lip for a full minute before depressing the button. The controls buzzed under my gloves and hummed, the mechanisms hoisting the lift up out of the black pit below. Outside, the generator chugged. The cage elevator swam up from the gloom. It was not empty.

  Arms. Reaching through the metal cage. Rattling the bars. Metal creaked, squealed warningly. Oh shit. Something growled and my butt puckered. Shitabrick!

  I pressed the button again frantically. “Reverse! Down! Go down!”

  Declan backed away from the edge, as far as he could go before he hit the wall. “Marnie…”

  “I'm trying.” The elevator wouldn't stop coming. Apparently, it needed to complete the up cycle before it could go down again. I backed away also, letting my go-bag fall off my shoulder. “Taser!”

  He made an affirmative noise, dug in my bag, and gave me the device. He took my gun from its holster and pressed back against the wall. I watched the caged arms come, straining above pale white faces rising up the shaft, taking in the vacant stares, mouths ajar, and especially the fresh wounds in their skulls above their ears. These were fresh techno-zombies, with implanted headsets.

  I leaned as far back as I could, aiming the Taser with one hand while still holding the control box in the other, thumb ready to send them back down as soon as possible. There were so many undead packed into the elevator cage that I couldn't even count noses, never mind the tangle of writhing arms. Metal grated and squealed.

  “Don't look them in the eye,” Declan warned.

  I looked at their chins instead, and saw why: fangs. Small, but significant. Hybrids.

  With a shaking thumb, I jammed the button again. The elevator jerked, swayed, and hesitated, bumping twice in midair. I thought it wasn't going to go back down, but then it began to sink, not smoothly, but with a clang and clattering of old cable protesting at too much weight and my fickle demands that it change direction.

  “Well,” I said, powering down the Taser and trying to tell my queasy stomach to settle, “if Spicer didn't know we were here, I think I've officially announced our arrival.”

  We made our way down the ramp for fifteen minutes or so, palming the dripping walls to keep our footing, when the stink became almost unbearable even through the mask. Declan barely slowed despite the darkness, and in seconds he was too far ahead of me, lost in the black. I swore under my breath and stage whispered into the murk.

  “Hold up, Irish. You're my eyes down here.”

  Declan returned, swimming up out of the shadows. “Stay with me, for fuck's sake.”

  The CDC gas mask had a little light on top, which I clicked on, since the elevator trick had pretty much blown our cover. The mask did little to filter out the noxious odor of decomposing bodies below, and the dank air was heavy with the odor of purge fluids. The ramp echoed with dripping water and the cry of every ounce of courage leaving my spirit. That last part was probably my imagination.

  “Smells like death,” he said. “Death and cologne.”

  I made a soft, affirmative noise “A little death isn't going to spook us,” I told him, knowing it wouldn't have spooked Batten at all. WWBD? Batten would go balls-to-the-walls. But if that was a good thing, where the hell was he?
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  Every twenty feet or so, Declan paused to adjust to the increasing stench of putrefaction. Once, distracted by imagining the horrible stuff that undoubtedly awaited us when we finally reached wherever the bottom was, I didn't stop in time and collided with him; the weight of my backpack nearly toppled us both.

  He threw out a hand, caught the slimy wall, grimaced, and wiped it on his pants, then fished out a pair of latex gloves from his doctor's bag and snapped them on. Looking back over his shoulder at me, he had to look up the ramp, and the tilt of his chin made his face look soft, almost childlike. His wide eyes pleaded with mine through the big plastic shield of the gas mask. “Have we got everything?”

  I jostled the backpack. “In addition to Taser and gun? Stakes. Knives. Candles. Chalk. Herbs. Rope. Salt. Clay. Butane and lighter fluid.” I smiled to encourage him. “I even brought two cans of diet Dr. Pepper for the post-zombie-slaying celebration.”

  He breathed in and out slowly. His mask turned his breath into a sleazy pant as he hustled down the rest of the ramp.

  The room at the end of the descent was big enough to have served as a king's banquet hall. It served now as a chamber of the dead and dying, and those caught in between. If I could have torn my attention away from the immediate danger of the two figures against the wall, I'd have noticed signs that Spicer had been living there for weeks: food stores, a chemical toilet, a camping cot, boxes of supplies, even a fan bringing breathable air in from the opening of the mine. I'd have seen chains and shackles, shiny and new, bolted low into the stonewalls, entwined with chicken feathers, vines, dusted with powders, and surrounded by chalk symbols and severed chicken feet and flayed fish corpses. I would not see a tub of Vicks Vap-O-Rub; the necromancer was accustomed to the smell of death.

  These things did not immediately register with me. What did register were the two zombies standing nose-to-corner, Thing One and Thing Two, and neither of them fresh. One of them leaked a constant mucus-thickened trail, like the world's most disgusting bag of frosting. They stood still, not the stillness achieved by a revenant, but the undead stillness that combined the lack of breath and blinking with the unsteady wobble of decomposing cartilage and, in the case of Thing One, a bloated, shattered ankle. They stood in this wavering, inhuman stillness with extension cords coming out of their heads. Plugged in. I stared at the weird spectacle until my gears caught: recharging the headsets, and maybe their phones. I wanted to ask who their carrier was, if they had any kind of signal down here.

  Watching them for signs they'd noticed us, I sidled one step closer to Declan. “Why are they not attacking?”

  “Not hungry?” Declan guessed, looking at the gore-smeared bowls by their bare, rotten feet. “They're Type R; they'd only attack if commanded or hungry.”

  Type R. Raised. Was I looking at the walking remains of Stuart the DaySitter and the unnamed Master of the Revels? I tried to catch one of their eyes, but they had no interest in me from this distance. Myopic. Hard of hearing. It was possible our presence hadn't registered.

  “Maybe Spicer is commanding them to stay,” Declan said, “in their headsets?”

  I indicated the state of them with a grimace. “Or they're so far gone that they don't see or hear us.”

  Declan nodded rapidly, and the elongated, olive-green nose of his gas mask shook up and down. We stepped over remains of broken Brut bottles, exchanging cautious glances about the shards, moving further into the room. The fan whirred noisily, bringing fresh air from the surface, and we both peeled back our gas masks, testing the air quality tentatively. It still sucked, but wasn't overwhelmingly hideous, more late spring outhouse than high summer dumpster.

  The next thing to capture my attention was the oddly graceful shape Anne Bennett-Dixon made on the table. She lay on her side, her small, pregnant belly resting on the tabletop. Her neck was held to the table by a large metal claw, like a bear trap, the iron fingers clutching the flesh and tendon to keep her cervical spine in place and hold her to the table. This did not seem to trouble her.

  “Nice of the villain to tie up his hybrid for us. Points off for not using railroad tracks, though. What do you think he was doing to her?” I asked, dropping the gas mask gently at my feet, followed by my backpack. I lowered my face as close to her as I dared. “Does she smell like Batten's cologne to you?”

  Anne's eyes rolled up at us. “Baby.”

  Out of the side of my mouth, I asked, “Did that zombie say something?”

  “I think so.”

  “Zombies don't talk.”

  “You said Dunnachie said ‘rend bowel’ when he was after you.”

  “Don't remind me.”

  “Baby,” Anne said, and pinned me with a calculating gaze. Her parched lips came up off her teeth, revealing tiny fangs slicked with pestilent yellow-green goo. “Take baby.”

  “Oh, hell no.” I was having none of whatever she was selling.

  One of the zombies in the corner gurgle-snorted like a fat man coming awake and half-turned. Declan grabbed my forearm in warning, but my voice crawled back down to a cautious squeak on its own.

  “What am I, midwife for the dead?” I whispered. “Not gonna happen.”

  “Poor thing. Maybe that's what Spicer was planning to do here.”

  I wrinkled my nose at the baby bump. “There's no chance the baby is alive, right?”

  “I sincerely doubt it. She's been two different kinds of undead. We need to put her out of this misery.”

  I took a deep breath, tasted death on the air, and smothered a cough behind my fist. “Think she'll burn?”

  “Hell if I know. I don't think he knows.” Declan jerked his chin at Spicer's Vodou set-up and the techno-zombies. “If he doesn't know, I can't imagine who would.”

  “What the fuck do we do about her if she doesn't burn?”

  “You're asking me, Dr. B? I'm just your assistant.”

  Okay, maybe I deserved that. “Where is Spicer? And where's Batten?”

  “I don't know, I don't know, I don't know,” Declan hissed, tossing his gas mask down in my pile of things. “I don't know anything you don't know!”

  “Okay, gloombucket, calm your tits.”

  He ignored my cursing and scanned the room, getting himself under control; that he had become so quickly accustomed to my vocabulary was sort of nice. I stuck close to him as he investigated a collection of jars on a knee-high bench in one corner by a peg wall of tools and a shoulder-high pile of boxes. The jars had once contained baby food; the labels were peeled off, but hastily, and I could still clearly read Strained Squash on one. Inside each jar, something pale, pasty, and slightly reflective coiled lazily, as though the necromancer had infused smoke with custard and white glitter nail polish.

  “Astrals. This is his collection of souls. He kept them to boost his powers.” I felt my lips tighten against my teeth. “They're not labeled.”

  “Labeled?”

  “There are no names to tell him which astral belonged to which zombie,” I said, and rage I hadn't known was there began to swell. My voice quivered. “As if it doesn't matter which soul is which. Which person — these were people — and he's got their spirits in little fucking baby food jars. Look, is this Stuart? What about this one? The Master of the Revels who we still don't have a name for? Mr. No Name? How would you like to end up a nameless soul floating in a Gerber jar that used to hold mushy green beans?”

  “I know, Dr. B.,” he said quietly. “I'm sorry, but did you expect him to care? This is a man who's using zombie slave labor. He may have once had the ideals of the Grand Priory, but it's obvious that John Spicer is no longer operating with any heart at all.”

  I shook my head rapidly, but the rage didn't dissipate. “Guess I'm still trying to see good in him. But he's just as bad as Malas. Maybe worse. I don't recall Malas ever stealing someone's soul.”

  “No,” Declan said, “Malas just takes your life and promises your soul to the Second Circle of Hell.”

  I stared at the jars fo
r a long minute. “Point taken.”

  “Looks like Spicer's not here,” Declan said, motioning to several branching openings in the wall. “Unless he's down further in the mine. I doubt it, though. The further you go, the worse the air quality will be, fan or no fan.”

  “Batten's not down here, either. Where the hell did he go?” I said, picking up the single jar that had two astrals, one big and one tiny. “Do you suppose this is Anne and her baby?”

  “It's the only jar that has two distinct astral bodies.”

  Movement from my left, behind the boxes, brought my head around. I spotted a pair of tanned arms and hands stretched up on the wall by the passageway and flung myself into Declan with a breathless cry, fumbling the jar. Declan's quick, sure hand caught the jar with a latex-covered whack. He tucked it in my back pocket, making an awkward lump.

  When the hand-thing didn't come out at us, I shuffled cautiously forward to peek and found him: dark-haired head limp, arms roped and cuffed up against the wall, groggily regaining consciousness. When his head flopped to the side, I could see that his lip was puffed up and split — a match to mine — and there was dried blood crusted under his nose. My heart lurched sickly in my chest and I heard myself whimper. Batten brought his chin up, cracked one eyelid, and promptly slammed it shut again.

  “Oh, fuck,” he groaned. “I was afraid it was you.”

  I slapped a gloved hand to my chest, pulse slamming with a blend of relief and distress. “Why are you all bruise-y faced and locked up in — holy crapbaskets, are those your own handcuffs?”

  “Shut up and get me the keys.”

  “Don't you have your knife to cut these ropes?” I asked.

  “Shut. Up.”

  “He took that too, huh? Knife and handcuffs? Boy, were you pissed or what?”

  Batten's jaw clenched hard and a line of muscle along his neck twitched. “Get. The. Keys.”

  “You're lucky I'm not Spicer.” I pointed the zombies out helpfully, in case Batten hadn't noticed them.

  “I wish you were,” he said. “He's easier to deal with.”

  “Oh, obviously,” I said. “Look at yourself.” I examined the heavy twisted rope, sturdy cuffs, and big iron bar in the wall. I yanked on the bar. It wasn't going anywhere. It was a weird set-up, obviously slapped together out of whatever Spicer had handy. I whistled low.