The Company of Death

by Elisa Hansen

  Emily’s eyelids blinked like rusty hinges. "What is…that’s…touchscreen?"

  "Yes." He did not look up as he tapped at it. "And he called me old-fashioned."

  "Who did?"

  Death was too absorbed in whatever his screen displayed to answer.

  Old-fashioned was one way to describe it. It must be half an inch thick. Emily hadn’t seen anything that chunky since her kid years. "I'm sorry, but that's just, I don't know. It's weird.”

  "I have to keep track of everyone's time, do I not?"

  "I just didn't expect, you know."

  "That I would change with the world?"

  Is that what he called it? She shook her head.

  "There are so many ways in which Death must continually adapt." He scrolled through an endless spiderweb of tiny words in an alphabet Emily could not identify from what little of it she could see.

  "Humans invent new ways to die every day." His hand stilled, and his hood drooped. "Used to invent." The wind picked up from somewhere distant. It took an eternity to gust down the riverbed and roll over them. The device disappeared into Death’s cloak. His attention shifted beyond Emily.

  "Is that how you knew when I was going to…when I decided to die? That thing told you?"

  "Yes."

  She hesitated but couldn’t help herself. "Who's going to die next?"

  "No one."

  "What?"

  He waved a dismissive hand and started to walk again. Emily was too shaken by his deep, defeated tone to question the convenience of his direction.

  "Wait." She half-jogged to keep up with his long stride. "Wait, what do you mean no one? Someone has to be the next person to die.” So she didn’t technically die, neither did her team. But what about everyone else in the world? “What about all the zombies?"

  "I told you, it is not the same. Transformation is not death."

  "You're saying nobody in the world is ever going to die again, except by zombie?"

  "Un-die. And so it seems."

  "How?"

  "Or become a vampire, I suppose."

  "That can't be possible!" For every Michele the flesh-eaters got from behind, an Alaric fell from the roof. It had to be so. Emily would have taken that plunge herself tonight if she knew it would kill her. Why the hell did she hesitate to pull the trigger? Goddammit! If it hadn’t stuck…

  Her fingertips brushed over the G18. Despite what Death said, she had to wonder: was there a way she could fire it now that would end her? Destroy whatever she was? One bullet to the brain never put a zombie down for longer than an hour. But could she keep shooting until her brain disintegrated? She couldn’t chop off her own head, but she could build a bonfire.

  Not yet. She had to get to the LPI unit at the border first.

  Wait—was the border still in the direction Death walked? His somber silence made her hesitate to ask. As their path twisted and climbed, it sank in how completely turned around Emily would get if she struck out on her own. Waiting until sunrise to point the way would waste time she could not afford. She needed a guide. Even if that guide was Death.

  But the longer he remained, the more Emily feared he would magically disappear into the inky smoke from which he materialized in the abyss. She did not dare pull her eyes from him, lest it happen the moment she did. She would be so alone. It compressed her with leaden gravity. Alone, and one of them.

  The space between the rock walls grew narrower for a few hundred yards and then opened into a small, dry lakebed, scattered with the husks of former shrubs. Death set out across it. Every other minute, Emily’s fingertips brushed her gun to make sure it was still in the holster on her thigh. Usually, walking with it for long wore on her, but she could barely feel it now.

  "I'm sorry," she said, finally convincing herself to shatter Death’s silence. Her eyes burned from her efforts against blinking. "But I don't get why you're still here, walking around in the desert with me. Aren't you going to poof away?"

  "No."

  She blinked, long and slow. It didn’t make her eyes feel any better. “Okay.” But he could be leading her anywhere at this point. She chewed her lip. "Will you please tell me where we're going?"

  "You do not have to come with me," said Death, perhaps for the first time in eternity.

  Emily almost laughed. Then she almost cried. "What else can I do?"

  A long moment passed. "East."

  "What?"

  "We are going east."

  "Why? I mean that's good. For me.” Gratitude caught her in a desperate way she didn’t expect. Although, was his unchanged course truly coincidence? How far would he go? “But why are you going east?"

  "I need some space."

  "Space?"

  "I must summon my brethren."

  The sickled edge to Death’s words made any further questions shrivel on Emily’s scratchy tongue.

  It didn’t keep them from running idiot circles around her brain, though. She tried to squash them by piecing together her day’s events. Where did she first go wrong? Was it when she dropped the radio? Or before that, when she decided she needed to prove herself? Or before that, when she asked for reassignment? Before that, when she first developed her standards? God. But she couldn’t help how she felt. Could she? What else could she have done?

  Anything else.

  "Seventeen months working to overthrow the bloodsuckers," she murmured some time later, "and I get jumped by a flesh-eater. I'd die of shame if I could."

  "He was one of the fast ones," Death said, as if repeating her earlier words would make her feel better.

  Emily’s head snapped up. After such a long silence, the otherworldly quality of his voice unsettled her anew. But the fact that his condescending tone did something as normal as annoy her somehow put her at ease.

  "I'd never have let it happen if I was paying attention. I don't drop my guard."

  "Only takes once."

  "Yeah. Thanks."

  "You'd just had very distressing news."

  She glowered up at him. Was he watching her then, before she first saw him appear? How long?

  Creeped the hell out. It was no excuse. Everyone down. It still didn’t even feel real. Too soon, too sudden. But she wasn’t going to wake up from this. Ramon, Rosa, Carlos, even Daisy. Her entire team…

  Emily’s gaze fell to the scuffed toes of her boots. "They’re really…really all gone. They were literally everyone I had left in the world. They were…” She shook her head. “If you’re right and those assholes didn't kill-kill them, then what Snakeman said was true.” Two cattle trucks full of starved zombies. What could any of them have done? Emily swallowed past the sandpaper in her throat. “So, vampires are using zombies to fight for them now. People talked about this kind of thing, but we never thought they could make it work."

  How could they control them? Set targets? After releasing the truckloads, how did they round them back up again? How could they keep them from attacking their own guards? If vampires had it figured out, this was a seriously big deal. The LPI needed to know.

  The information couldn’t help her team now, but others… The world…

  Everyone down.

  Skin flaked off Emily’s chapped lip as her teeth scraped it. "I bet Ramon shot himself.” Did the vampires make him an offer, like Snakeman tried to persuade her? “He would never let them take him. He would never be a blood slave."

  "Vampires have a way of making people change their minds."

  Her head snapped up. "Are you saying they took him?"

  "No."

  “But you know he's not alive anymore?"

  "Yes."

  "Goddammit."

  "Perhaps. Theological discernment is beyond me."

  Emily’s eyes felt dry enough to catch fire. Ramon was one of them too, now. One of…us. And Rosa and everyone else. Emily’s nausea surged.

  "Is he like me?" she asked after a minute. "I mean, could he be? Talking and in his right mind?"

  "No."

  "G
od," she whispered. This time, Death remained silent. Her pace slowed, and she let the distance between them grow. He did not seem to notice.

  She wanted to blame the vampires. She wanted to put every drop of her boiling, anguished frustration into fueling her hatred for their disgusting, selfish, shortsighted ways. But regardless of when her mistakes truly began, Emily saw Snakeman’s cigarette. And she was too stupid to recognize the danger. Too caught up in trying to impress Ramon and the team. She gave the all clear. She sent two dozen people, pure and healthy, to a doom so much worse than death.

  "God, Ramon," she whispered, her gaze on the black horizon. "I hope you took most of them down with you. If you're one of them now, I hope someone just like you takes you out." And Rosa, would her soul be with her two lost little girls? Would Carlos find Alaric?

  The gritty wind tugged at the ends of Emily’s hair. It ought to have tickled her cheeks, but for once, her changed skin felt nothing, just as her changed limbs felt no fatigue from the fast pace over rough terrain. Nothing.

  "I’m so sorry," Emily whispered, and she named her team of yesterday to herself one by one, making up names for the new guys she couldn’t remember, her changed lips brushing against each other like parchment.

  “I won’t let it be for nothing.” Her changed eyes throbbed, but tears did not, could not, come. "Never let them win."

  13

  Power

  The pre-dawn called for Schubert. Schubert and solitaire. The Andante con moto filled Leif’s head, an entire string quartet transported through two tiny plastic earbuds, while each card played out before him, no larger than a child’s fingernail on a screen that fit so very nicely in the palm of his hand. He told himself he would only play one game, perhaps two if he lost the first. Five at the most.

  That was over two hours ago, and the quartet played for the fourth time on repeat. But this would be the last game. Finally. In fact, he’d already won it. It was merely a matter of dragging every single mini card in the columns to the top of the screen—an obnoxious user-friendliness failure on the game’s part. But Leif’s victory had been such a long time coming, and his dexterity so quick, that he did not mind the effort. He lounged against thick microsuede cushions, his stark white thumb brushing over the screen while the fingers of his other hand tapped against the side of his mouth in time with the music.

  Halfway through depositing his knaves, the quartet cut off mid-note, and the screen went pink.

  No battery power remains. Please connect to power.

  The black letters stared up at him, and he could do nothing but gape back.

  “Power? Where am I supposed to find power?”

  His iPod made no reply.

  Leif just could not win.

  He rubbed his eyes and yanked the headphones from his ears. “All anybody wants these days is power.” The screen faded to black. “At least you’re polite about it.”

  He eyed his faint reflection in the dark screen, then gave it a winning smile and rolled off the couch. Broken glass crunched under the handmade leather soles of his fantastic new shoes as he crossed the room to the wall next to the slumbering rhinoceros of an entertainment center. He jammed a fingertip into the eyes of an electrical outlet. The socket crumpled around his hand, but otherwise, he felt nothing.

  “Of course.” He sighed. Sitting on his heel, he raked back his hair from his forehead, the silky strands caressing the webs of his fingers. “Powerless. Like the rest of us.” But weren’t all these quaint desert communities supposed to convert to solar systems ages ago? “Tut tut, Dog Flats.”

  Well, he would simply have to seek power elsewhere. That meant going back outside. But the iPod was worth the risk. Dog Flats wasn’t large, and Leif still had a couple hours to fill before sunrise. He wasn’t caught yet, which meant anyone chasing him must have lost his trail. Leif did still see the sense in huddling in hiding, of course. But doing so in silence? Simply too much to ask.

  He hopped up and leapt through the broken bay window, alighting on what was once a suburban front lawn. The lack of automatic sprinklers reduced all manicured grass in the cul-de-sac to a brown anthill utopia.

  Smashed-in automobiles here and there along the curb glittered in the starlight. The faint scent of death lingered in the garage doors and former flowerbeds and sculpted pavement, but any corpses once strewn upon the debris-scattered street had long ago been scavenged away.

  Leif lifted his face to the breeze. Electricity glimmered in the air; he could taste it. Not that it would do him any good up there. He laughed softly to himself, then he took off toward the cul-de-sac’s outlet, his coat flapping around him like woolen wings.

  On his way in, he had rushed past a hospital squatting at the edge of town proper. He retraced his steps to seek the hospital’s backup generators. If no fuel remained, other buildings with something to use abounded. As wasted as the land could seem, if one knew where to look—and Leif certainly did—power could always be found.

  He slowed his pace as he passed through the town’s small business district where the buildings stood closer together and the streets narrowed. With all the decay in the air, it took concentration to sniff others out. He listened for any telltale sounds of shuffling footsteps, and the very opposite sounds his own kind could make. The shambling revenants often peppering towns like this were nothing to him. Even the speed of that rarer variety humans called “the fast ones” was negligible compared to the thirstiest of vampires. And though it was not unheard of, it was exceedingly doubtful their snapping jaws would take interest in his cold, lifeless flesh. Like Leif, they preferred the hot pleasure of sinking their razor teeth into mortal meat.

  When he first arrived hours earlier, Leif combed the ghost town for prey, but the best he discovered was a lone armadillo. He supposed that much was fortunate if one felt inclined to play loosely with the word. He’d pounced upon the poor creature with desperation he was glad only ghosts witnessed. It provided nourishment of a sort, but now he, once again, felt all the thirstier for it.

  Human blood would likely be out of the question for some time, but Leif could not subsist off armadillos. Tomorrow, he would need to find something larger, something with more personality. He’d finished the pathetic thing all too quickly and slunk off into the windy roads of the residential neighborhood. There, he flopped onto the most comfortable couch he could find to wait until dawn, when he’d have to crawl into a dark closet or under a kitchen sink. At least the hospital would have some sealed-off room or other where he could spend the day.

  And then what? Manhattan, New York, flickered again across his painfully short mental list of options. As much as the idea knifed his pride, perhaps it would be for the best after all. Why, oh why, did it have to be all the way on the other side of this deliriously wide country? How many communes lay between him and that distant oasis? But even as he considered the option, an old familiar shadow oozed its way into the corners of Leif’s consciousness. A desolate effluvium that plucked at strings of his existence he very much preferred remain unplucked.

  There had to be a way to avoid giving up his aspirations. Once upon a time, he and Lorenzo were on intimate terms. Surely those days were not entirely forgotten? After all, Leif hadn’t technically done anything. Could he spin Lorenzo a more convincing version of the story he tried on Ricky? Make him believe he merely meant to secure his own future? Was it unheard of to wish to exist on one’s own in a nice place with nice things? What was immortality for, if not that?

  Lorenzo was ruthless, but he was reasonable. If he wanted something Leif alone could provide? Well, that would help.

  But what did Lorenzo want? The resources to demolish New York. To triumph over the great Apollonia and the vampires who pushed the buttons and pulled the levers in Manhattan. The strength to fortify his communes against the world. Which would be easier with no world left to rally against him. And that was his angle, wasn’t it?

  Apollonia, the oh-so-mighty Apollonia. That’s what Lorenzo wanted
. To take her down, to take her place.

  Power, like everyone else. Leif laughed and folded his hand around the iPod in his pocket. Music first. Then blood. Then he might be able to manage the mental prowess to concoct a plan.

  Keeping to the shadows out of habit, he cut across a school parking lot, then dashed around a convenience store and down the back alley of a strip mall until he reached the high fence at its end. He hopped over without touching it, then paused to survey the parched field between him and the hospital. Beyond the wafting overgrown grass, the highway that brought him to town stretched like a tether to every vainglorious risk taken for failed ideals. The hospital’s tattered flag danced at half-mast like an undead marionette in the wind while the electricity in the air positively crackled.

  A light blinked off to the left in Leif’s periphery. He spun around, and his eyes made out an antenna several hundred feet down the fence in the darkness. It perched atop a small, lonely building. Some sort of utility shed or control console. Two patient, deliberate breaths, and the antenna’s light blinked again.

  Leif reached the building before the light had the chance to blink a third time. The door hung ajar, its latch broken with a force no human could manage unaided. He paused to sniff the air but picked up nothing more than a faint human scent, too weak and too old to be anything more than a tease.

  Inside the shack’s first room, darkness cloaked the machines, but Leif heard the humming of electricity in the walls, felt its microscopic titillations. He rubbed his hands together and grinned. Mechanical things filled most of the space, but Leif didn’t give them much attention. He could tell at once no one was there to give him attention, and that was all that mattered. Whoever broke the latch and activated the generator, living or undead, remained nothing but a fragrant memory. He moved through the interior door to the smaller back room before scanning the walls for an outlet.