by Elisa Hansen
“Oh, these bags? Hmm… I suppose I could give them to you. Why? What’s in them?” He jiggled the duffel against his ear before smiling at Scott again. “You point it very nicely, but your empty rifle is not going to do you much good.”
“What do you want?” Carol snapped again.
Emily backed up until she stood at Death’s side. “Can’t you take them from him?” The way Death jumped onto the dock with her was vampire fast. Couldn’t he whoosh over to the forklift the same way?
“I have no power over him,” he answered in a low voice.
“Not even physical power? You’re huge. Just push him over and take them?”
“None.”
The others had gone silent.
The vampire was staring at her. “Oh-ho, what’s this? You’re not one of them at all, are you?”
“Fuck you,” Emily spat.
He smirked his stupid smirk, then gazed past her to Death. “And hello there, tall dark and mysterious. Fancy seeing you here. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Tell us what you want for the bags,” Carol demanded.
“Oh! A trade? Hmmmmm…” He flicked a shoe at one of the zombies that managed to crawl up the forklift’s rung to swipe at his feet. It flew across the yard as if hit by a baseball bat, its head exploding on the wall like a pomegranate.
“What about a bite out of your scrumptious human? Just a little one. A taste.”
“No!” Emily jumped forward. “You can fuck all the way off.”
The reaction stemmed from pure instinct, but the instant it left her lips, she regretted it. So soon after her new resolution? She took a shaky step back, her hand covering her mouth.
But it was too late; Scott hesitated, looking to her. And the vampire expelled an exaggerated sigh.
“Well, that is a pity.” His gaze drifted down Scott’s body to the gas can at his feet. “Though I could just take him.” He swung the bags over one shoulder and disappeared from the forklift in a blur.
Emily was too shocked to move for a crucial moment as he landed on the dock, inches from Scott. By the time her feet obeyed her, he was gone again in another dizzying rush. But Scott stood there still.
They all looked to the forklift.
The vampire had their fucking gas can.
“But I suppose this is all I really need.” He flipped the full can into the air and caught its handle between his fingertips as if it weighed nothing. “Much obliged!”
Another pasty white grin and an absurd wink, and then he dropped backward off the forklift and zipped through the crowd with speed that made it almost impossible for Emily to track his disappearance around the driveway’s corner.
“Wait!” she shouted after him. But he was gone. “Bitch!”
Scott’s gun drooped to his side. He stared out at the night beyond the yard walls, his mouth hanging open. “He… He…”
“I’m sorry, I—” Emily pressed her palms against her eyes. Had she just cost Scott his only chance at escape? “I shouldn’t have spoken for you. I…”
“He…”
“Who is that guy? I’ve seen him before. He…” No, she should probably keep those details to herself. But could they get him back? Emily’s blood was useless, but could she offer him anything else? Offer a vampire. The realization grazed her, a muffled blow amid the storm of the moment, and it seemed so simple she could almost laugh. She’d do it. Of course she would. Just like Rosa said, you do what you gotta do.
The climbing zombies kept Carol too busy to answer Emily’s question, and Scott just gaped, in some kind of shock.
Emily turned to Death. “How does he know you?”
His screen was in his hands again, his gaze fixed on it, but it was dark, off. “He is a killer.”
The image of the vampire running up Suncrest Hill with fear in his eyes replayed in Emily’s memory. Now he’d showed up here with the zombie truck. How? Why? Not that Death cared. She ground her teeth as she studied his downturned face. “Why did he take our stuff? What the hell does he want?” There had to be a way out of the factory. Something Death could do.
“Did he not make it clear he wants to kill Scott?”
“No.” He just said a taste. “Is he going to?” Something. Death could move as fast as the vampire. For short bursts, anyway, as far as Emily had seen. He could go after him, talk to him if nothing else, tell him she’d negotiate. Or—or could he get more fuel from the generator tanks for the zombie fire?
“Not tonight,” he answered with a sigh of resigned disappointment.
Emily’s focus zeroed in on that remark. Death’s defeatist tone made her want to grab him and shake him until his bones rattled. “How do you know?” she snapped.
He stared at her for a moment, looked down at his screen, then back to her.
“Don’t give me that! You said yourself your bullshit schedule changes sometimes.”
“Rarely—”
“The truth is that you don’t know. You can’t! You can’t know anything.” Anything… “Just like Manhattan. You can’t know they’re all going to die! You can’t know it’s hopeless.”
“I’ve told you. If they don’t die, they will un-die.”
But no. No. Yes.
Emily’s voice dropped as a queer calm washed over her. “You can’t know that either.”
“I know what’s going to happen.”
Death wasn’t cold and unfeeling. No. Not entirely. If he were, would he need to dwell on the worst possible outcome to avoid being surprised by tragedy? He was just lost and afraid. Just…desperate. Emily knew desperate. Emily could work with lost and afraid.
“And what is going to happen exactly?” She took a careful step toward him. “You made it sound like the fortress is going to get bombed or something.”
“No, no bombs. Battle.”
Who could attack Manhattan without bombs? Even when several communes banded together a year ago and tried an assault from multiple sides, the LPI decimated them. Did any commune out there exist with the kind of resources now to wage such a battle?
What could they possibly have that would be enough to get through Manhattan’s defenses?
Besides the element of surprise, of course.
Emily’s eyes widened.
“Well, we can prevent the battle! You said we have twelve days.” If they could get out of the factory. “We have time to warn them.” If they could get Scott there safely so he could get her past the gates. Then Death’s schedule would change, right? It would be direct meddling with his precious balance. Even if he were there. The people scheduled to die would live, would have time to be saved instead. “We have to!”
“We?”
“Yes, we. It’s not impossible.”
“The only thing I can do, Emily, is reap life when it ends.”
“Or you could, you know, not do that.”
He looked utterly disgusted by the suggestion.
“What? You just did it with Scott. You’re clearly capable! Why did you do that, huh? And why did you pull me up here? Why did you stop me from shooting myself yesterday? You can pretend you don’t care about anything but reaping, but you’re fucking lying to yourself.”
“Do not presume—”
“Oh, no, buddy. I’m presuming. I’m presuming all over the place.”
He shook his head, took a step back from her. “If Time does not unbind me, the lives lost will fall to undeath. But if he does unbind me, there is nothing to stop me from taking them.”
“You can stop you! You can refrain from reaping. Apparently sometimes you even want to. It doesn’t have to be they all die or they all un-die. Listen to yourself. There can be a third option.”
“Emily, I am starving.”
“Deal with it!” He was as bad as the communes with their utterly unsustainable model. “Think about how hungry you’ll be later. You’ll feast there, but then what? If Manhattan falls, so does the cure. So does the LPI and every last effort to stop the communes. A few years down the line
when the last human is gone, what will you do?”
“End.”
“Is that seriously what you want? Do you think that’s right just because you’re ‘natural’ and undeath isn’t?”
“The balance—”
“Fuck the balance. It doesn’t have to end your way or theirs. It could not end. I’m trying to help you. Work with me here!”
He sighed, turned to look out over the groaning swarm. “It would just be a waste of time.”
“Time’s the one who did this to you.” Her hand caught the long part of his sleeve to draw him back, the midnight fabric soft and thick between her fingers. “So let’s fucking waste him.”
Silence. Emily’s ears were ringing. The noise of Carol fighting on the ladder behind her sounded lifetimes away.
Death stared down at her for a long, grave moment before he spoke again. “But how?”
“Well, who’s behind the attack?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then let’s find out. Or something. We’ve got twelve days. We have to try.”
“Time has never…” He tucked his screen away, pulled it out again. “I have never… My brethren…” Wind from nowhere blew through him. His robe sank and swelled. He lifted a hand as if to grasp something that wasn’t there, ended up clutching dead air. “It would be entirely unprecedented.”
“Yeah.” Her fingers wound tighter into the material over his arm. “It would.” Just like Emily. “Just like us.”
The fire deep in Death’s eyes flickered, and his mouth actually opened.
But whatever he was about to say was cut off by the guttural roar of a diesel engine. Emily let him go as her attention whipped to the driveway beyond the yard. Scott jumped up from his cowering corner.
Emily strained her ears. Was it receding? No, it was coming closer. A minute later, shrieks rose from the zombies at the far side of the crowd as the back end of a flatbed truck rammed through them. A flatbed truck filled with rectangular bales of hay to the top of its slatted sides. Bodies caught under its wheels, and the howls grew piercing and anguished. It swerved around the forklift and rumbled up to the dock. Bones cracked, flesh squelched. The floor under Emily’s feet jolted as its end hit.
Catching herself against the control panel, she looked to Scott. He was shaking his head in disbelief, his mouth moving, but she couldn’t hear him.
The flat top of the hay lined up a foot above the dock’s floor. The zombies not mowed over or pinned to the wall attacked it, wringing their fingers into the slats, climbing the sides.
The driver side window whirred down. A white hand thrust the nearest zombie far from it before the vampire’s face leaned out.
“Well?” he called to them. “Hop on then.”
Scott hopped. Emily would have cheered if she possessed any air for it.
“Scott!” Carol cried as he scrambled to the front of the hay. Her eyes flashed red, matching the frantically blinking light on her chest, and she abandoned the ladder to follow him.
Emily dug her fingernails into her spongy palms and faced Death. His hood hid his down-turned eyes, his arms folded across his chest.
Well, she would do it. With or without him.
She turned her back, tucked her hair behind her ears, took a breath, and stepped off the edge.
The truck lurched forward, making her fall to her knees. The hay hit her harder than she expected. And it stank. She flattened against it, twisting her fingers in as it bucked and jolted with each thud of the bodies beneath the tires. Ahead, Carol anchored Scott while they knocked the last of them off the slats as the truck escaped the yard.
Emily craned her neck to look back at the dock, but her hair blew into her face and she couldn’t see anything. By the time she shook it from her eyes, the truck was around the corner, the dock long out of sight.
So that was it, then. Fine. Whatever.
“Idiot,” she whispered to herself, her voice catching.
“I’m right here.”
Emily jerked and rolled over to see Death crouched at her side. A laugh burst past her lips as the weight of the past forty-eight hours took off from her shoulders like a great black bird thundering into the night.
It shouldn’t matter, but it did. And Emily could work with that.
“To option number three?” she asked. “Let’s save the world?”
“Hm.”
“Just say yes.” She felt like she could laugh for years. “You know you want to.”
He folded an arm over his knee and cocked his head at a thoughtful angle. As the speeding wind whipped his cloak, Emily caught a glimpse of dusty bone feet on the hay. His balance was perfect, effortless while her aching fingers clung to the bales for dear life. Dear undeath. Every muscle tensed. How long would she be able to hang on? If the truck didn’t slow soon…
As if reading her mind, Death leaned over to put a hand on the center of her back. The pressure was just enough to make Emily feel like she wouldn’t go flying off into oblivion if she ever let herself relax.
She took a long, deep breath, and for once, her chest felt fine. “So, yes?”
“Indeed.”
To Be Continued
Acknowledgments
Erin Wright, if nobody else in the world but you loves this book, I’ll still die complete. Thank you for being my biggest fan from the dawn of morbidity and the sweetest spooky friend a girl could ever hope to squish. And Wanyi Jiang, you relished darkness with me in my most formative years. This book would not exist without the two of you making me believe I could write.
Paul Schuler, your unconditional love and support of my macabre weirdness makes me reach for the super blood moon. ‘Til death do us part.
Thank you to Linda Jacobs for raising me to be a reader. Your Edgar Allen Poe bedtime stories, Gothic horror pop-up books, and sci-fi indoctrination planted strange and unusual seeds I can’t appreciate enough. No, I never wanted a “normal” mom.
To my awesome and bogglingly smart beta readers, thank you all for giving me so many amazing ideas to steal—John Skylar, Katey Garrigan, Lindsay Ellis, Antonella Inserra, A. F. Linley, Stephanie Kroll, Holly Brown, Nick Hansen, Andie Biagini, Serina Young, and Matt Gallo, who was there that night in 2010 when this story first seized my brain and has been giddy about it ever since. So many other incredible people provided feedback on parts of this book through writers’ groups and friends that I can’t even begin to list you all, and I am eternally grateful.
Thank you, Lindsay Ribar, the query letter queen, for all your industry insight and generosity.
And lastly, thank you Michael Shulman and Emily Streetz for each making me haaaaate zombies so many years ago. They say write what scares you, so I picked zombies. I’m the last person I ever thought would fall for a zombie protagonist of my own making. Thank you, thank you for terrifying me to new nightmare horizons.
About the Author
Elisa Hansen is a recovering musical theatre major who enjoys graveyards, haunted mansions, gothic fashion, decorative skulls, black tea, and red wine. Born and raised in Southern California, she lived fifteen years in New York City before settling in Charlotte, NC.
When she’s not reading or writing books, you can find her on YouTube as her alter-ego, The Maven of the Eventide. Her humorously analytical video essay webseries, Vampire Reviews, examines the evolution of vampire tropes and allegories in media and pop culture through a feminist lens.
ElisaHansen.com
twitter.com/ElisaInTime
youtube.com/mavenoftheeventide
facebook.com/mavenoftheeventide
patreon.com/mavenoftheeventide
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