Grim Tidings

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Okay,” Hank said. His voice was shaking, as were his hands, and he pressed them over his face. “My head hurts so much,” he muttered. “Okay. What do we do?” He looked at me, and I looked back, wishing to everything that he could understand me. Or that Uriel would swoop down on a bolt of lighting, or that Leo was here.

  I needed Leo. It was a physical need, deep in my gut, and it made me whine. If he was here, we’d be fine.

  “He’s not,” Hank said, surprising me. “But I am, and between the two of us we have to get out of here. So what do I do?”

  I blinked. I didn’t realize the whole mind-reading thing worked when I was a hound, but maybe we weren’t so screwed after all.

  I bumped the front window with my nose, where the creatures were almost within spitting distance. They wanted us to run, so they could chase us down. Adrenaline pumping through our blood probably made it that much sweeter.

  “So we gotta fight our way out?” Hank whispered. “Because I’ll say right now, I hate zombie movies. I am totally the guy who gets eaten immediately. I’m not prepared to battle the undead.”

  I didn’t need Hank to fight—he’d probably just get in my way— but I did need him to be ready to run. I’d make sure the creatures’ attentions were on me.

  “How?” Hank asked. I bumped his hand with my nose, and he shivered. “Cold,” he said. “I mean . . .” I kept my eyes on the fleshy part of his hand. He sighed heavily. “Go ahead. I trust you.”

  I took his palm gently in my jaws and bit down just enough to start a good flow of blood. Hank grunted, but he didn’t flinch. I made sure the blood was smeared all over my head and back, and then I looked up at the door lock. Hank flipped it open, and I sucked in a breath.

  When the door opened I exploded outward, giving the creatures no time to swarm me. I hit the biggest one in the chest, taking him to ground and tearing into his neck with my teeth. The blood tasted terrible, clotted and rotten, and I fought the urge to gag as I shook one, two, three times until I felt the vertebrae snap.

  Another creature hit me from the side, pinwheeling me off the first. This one wore shreds of a jumpsuit. He landed on me with his full weight, snapping but only getting a mouthful of my fur. I flipped us, slamming his skull into the pavement hard enough to crack.

  The last two were smart enough to try to rush me from both sides simultaneously. I ducked, swiping one in the torso with my claws. It tripped and stumbled into the other creature. I bit down hard on the Achilles’ tendon, crippling it, and when the other one swiped at me, I latched on to its forearm, so hard I felt my teeth connect through the loose, rotting skin and muscle. This one had been out here for a while, and had a smell to match, but it also took the longest to go still after I’d ripped its throat out.

  Turning to check the darkness and the roofline for other moving shapes, I jerked my head at Hank, who broke out of the door running and headed for a truck parked askew across the boulevard, abandoned with the keys still inside.

  I followed him, until he tripped and went down. He let out a cry, and I saw he’d tripped over the waitress’s body and was floundering in her blood.

  “It’s okay!” I yelled—well, snarled. “They have to bite you to infect you!”

  Hank scrambled up, using my fur for purchase, but before we’d moved a step the waitress’s hand locked around his ankle. Hank screamed, and she returned the sound, rearing up and locking on to his arm.

  I put my full weight on the waitress, cracking a few ribs and ripping her away from Hank. I bit down, tearing into her already ruined throat and crushing part of her jaw in my haste to make her stop moving. She gurgled and went still.

  I looked back at Hank. He was standing there, his shirt shredded, holding his arm as if it didn’t belong to him. He stared at me, his pupils expanding with every breath. “She . . .” he said, staring at the deep, bloody half-moon in his forearm. “It hurts . . .” he said mildly, and started to sway.

  “Hank!” I barked, jumping up and shoving my hip against him to keep him upright.

  “I’m dead,” he said, his voice still calm and detached, like he was telling me he’d gotten a paper cut. “I’m infected. I’m dead.”

  “Don’t freak out,” I said, as much to myself as him. I breathed out, blinked, and opened my eyes back at human height.

  “Holy shit,” Hank said. “You think I’d be used to seeing weird stuff by now, but that was . . . the weirdest.”

  I didn’t asked him what it looked like when I changed. I’d never seen it and I really didn’t want to know.

  “But that aside,” Hank said, “I’m dying.”

  “You’re in shock,” I said. “That’s why you’re so calm about this. But I need you to stay calm when I tell you what’s going to happen next.”

  I looped Hank’s arm over my shoulder and dragged him back toward the filling station. “Does it strike you as odd,” he said, voice slurring, “that we would be drugged and dumped in a town full of killer zompires by the government? I mean, I know it happens all the time in movies but this is not a movie . . .”

  “It does,” I said, kicking at the garage door until it rolled up a few inches and I pushed it the rest of the way. “But right now I have more important things to think about, like you not dying.”

  “Oh, I’m definitely dead,” Hank said. “I know these things, Ava. I have precog . . . precog . . .” He shivered and went limp against me, and I lowered him as gently as I could, stripping off the rest of the ripped shirt. The flesh around the bite was already going blue-black, and soon the infection would stop his heart, and jump-start it as something new and terrible.

  I dumped out the garage’s ancient first aid kit, grabbing all the bandages I could find. I tied off Hank’s arm with rubber tubing, as tightly as I could, and yanked the coffeepot off the warmer, putting one of the metal disks from the grinder in its place.

  Hank’s eyes fluttered open at the crashing. “What are you . . .”

  “Listen,” I said. “The only way you live is to stop the infection, and the only way to stop it is to cut off the path to your heart.”

  Hank looked over at his arm, which was turning purple. “I can’t feel it . . .” he said. I put my hand on his forehead, looking into his eyes.

  “I need to cut off your arm.”

  Hank immediately started screaming. I tried to block it out as I knelt on him, pinning his shoulders with my full weight. The garage at least had a crop of power tools—if I’d had to do this by hand, I’m not sure I could have. “I am so sorry,” I whispered as I picked up the saw, pressing the power button. Hank was lucky, in a way—he’d pass out from the pain after a few seconds. He didn’t have to see the aftermath, smell the blood, or inhale the smoke from the burning stump after I pressed the hot metal circle now sizzling on the coffee machine over it to cauterize the wound.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew even as I slumped back, coated in Hank’s blood, with burned fingers and shaking hands, that his chances of survival were pretty minimal. But he could just die. He didn’t have to wake up one of Cain’s creatures.

  Picking up the bandages, I wrapped the stump as tightly as I could. Hank’s breathing was ragged, his eyes dancing back and forth under the lids. I’d seen a lot of men die of a lot less on battlefields, which this undoubtedly was. I was still fighting the pull of the Walking Man, even now. He was reaching out to me. Picking off people around me one by one until I gave in.

  I wasn’t giving in this time. I put Hank on one of the rolling carts and opened the door again, in time to see headlights sweep across the street. I tensed, but there was only one black SUV, and one person inside.

  Valley opened the driver’s door but paused when she saw the two of us. “What the hell did you do to him?” she said.

  “Why do you assume I did this?” I grunted, rolling Hank toward the car.

  Valley leaned down and felt Hank’s pulse. “Just a crazy hunch.”

  I started to tell her we should get in the car and get the h
ell out of here but before I could, Valley straightened up, lifted her boot, and put it on Hank’s neck. “Now how about we’re both honest for a minute?”

  My stomach sank. I guess I had my answer about why we’d all ended up out here.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Valley didn’t speak as we faced one another. She just pressed down harder on Hank’s windpipe, until Hank’s mouth worked like a fish thrown up on land.

  Shapes moved in from all around, from the street and the houses and the fields beyond, naked corpses moved by the sheer force of their hunger. The smell of stale blood permeated my nose.

  “So he got to you?” I asked Valley.

  She flinched, just a little. “He is not the reason I’m here.”

  I tried not to show any fear as I stared Valley down, and the creatures moved in around us, surrounding us. The one nearest me let out a sad sigh as she ran bloody fingers through my hair. Her torn-up nails caught and pulled at my scalp until I jerked my head away.

  “My reasons are not hunger and madness,” said Valley. “But brotherhood. You’d understand that, if you weren’t working for the bastard set on exterminating us.”

  “I’m sorry that you got kicked out of the special angel club,” I told Valley—or whatever her name actually was. The Fallen kept personal details like that close to the vest. “But I am only interested in myself and the few people I care about. I don’t care what kind of vendetta you’ve got against heaven, or Uriel. Leave us out of it.”

  Valley laughed. “Oh, and speaking of your golden boy upstairs—don’t bother screaming for him. This whole town is packed so full of death magic thanks to Cain that he might as well be looking for hay in a haystack.”

  I clenched my jaw so hard I drew blood from my own lip. I was so angry I wanted to scream. I could feel the hound clawing its way up my throat. It didn’t want to scream, it wanted to tear and shriek and howl. It wanted to fight back. I pushed it away.

  I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around myself. This was how it always ended up for me. I could try to break away from what I was, but I was always going to be the one who had to bend to someone else’s will, to keep myself or somebody innocent safe and alive.

  Sure, I could strut around like I was the Grim Reaper’s personal badass, but now I was going to knuckle under to another psycho control freak who’d decided I was fun to torture. And I was going to do it willingly, because Hank didn’t deserve to be here with me.

  “Promise me that you’ll get Hank help. Leaving him alive for now isn’t good enough.”

  Valley gave a cold sigh, colder than the wind whipping up. “Azrael said you were a sentimental piece of work. Way too many feelings for a hellbeast.”

  “Promise me or I’m going to slit my own throat,” I said. “And somehow I think that my delivery is a condition of Cain helping you people out with your Armageddon.”

  Her square jaw ticked, and I knew I was right. “Fine,” she ground. “He’ll be good as new in a few hours.”

  I stepped away, letting the dead press around me. “I’m all yours,” I whispered. Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe I wouldn’t fall back under Cain’s thrall. Maybe this was a good thing—if the Fallen who’d given Owen a fake Scythe was working with Cain, and Valley in turn was helping them, maybe I was the one who was really in control.

  The crowd of dead moved, and I was forced to move with it, until I felt hands on my arms and legs, bearing me up and moving me along without my feet touching the earth. A tear slipped out of my eye as I realized the truth—I had never been in control. I was just a piece of flotsam on a tide I couldn’t fight. Drifting inexorably back to Cain’s side. Back where I belonged.

  We moved for miles that way. I tried to keep my eyes on our direction but after a while it was hard to see anything except the mass of bodies. There had to be a couple hundred of them, and eventually it became too much effort to do anything but look up at the black sky, slowly fading toward a weak gray first light.

  A sudden chatter of rotors cut the silence, and the mass of dead rippled and stirred. “The army is taking over the quarantine,” Valley said from somewhere close but invisible to me. “Or if they aren’t they will be shortly. People get so upset nowadays. Entire cities wiped off the map by flood and plague, back then. Bodies as far as the eye could see stinking and bloating under the sun. The flies would be so thick you’d think they were the air.” She breathed deep, letting out a satisfied sound. “The air is very clean here. I like the cold. Where I am from in the Kingdom, it was a hot place.”

  “The place you’re going is supposed to be pretty hot, too,” I muttered.

  “Fighting is always such a waste of energy and yet the small things always refuse to give up,” Valley said. “The army will quarantine this town. They’ll contain this for a while, keep it a secret, but eventually it will get out. It will spread. And then this beautiful cold place will be just as the deserts were. Covered in corpses. Dirt soft with spilled blood. Sky clouded with flies.”

  “Sounds like you have everything you want, then,” I said. “Lots of dead people and lots of live ones who are miserable because of you. The ultimate temper tantrum, am I right?”

  “You think we’re angry at the Kingdom?” Valley laughed. “We couldn’t care less about those still sitting under the thumb of the Host. We hate humans. The people who get to live never knowing that behind the veil, all of this is happening. Creatures like you and me watching them with envy, because they are happy and their lives have an ending.” She slid into view, her hair glowing gold against the sunrise. “But not anymore. Now their world looks to them like it does to us.”

  I stayed quiet, and she grinned. “No more fighting?”

  “No,” I said. “Just thinking I used to find Uriel kind of nutty for wanting you exterminated. Now I completely understand his desire to spit-fry every last one of you.”

  “Feel like you might still win while you can,” Valley said. “Keep hope alive. Once Cain has his prize, you’ll never see a sunrise like this again.” She stroked my cheek. “He’s missed you. He can’t wait to show you how much.”

  We passed through another town, another main street. Windows were broken out. A car had crashed into a hydrant, windshield spattered with blood. Somewhere far away, a burglar alarm whooped and droned endlessly. I focused on staying still, on not screaming. If I started, I wouldn’t stop.

  The sun was up, but weak, when the dead finally stopped. We were far away from the highway now, in an empty field surrounded by a half-tumbled cyclone fence. A sign too rusted and riddled with buckshot to read lay on its side, but I guessed this was some kind of government property. Lilith had once taken me to an old missile range, when she’d tried to use me to open Tartarus. Maybe Cain had similar proclivities.

  Valley stopped, waiting absolutely motionless. She had the eyes of a snake, unblinking, devoid of any life. The dead lowered me to the ground and I realized I was on a pitted ribbon of asphalt painted with ghostly white letters. An airfield, I thought, and heard a groan as an ancient antenna radar swayed in the wind, a few hundred yards away.

  Then my vision blacked out and he was in front of me. “You returned,” Cain said to Valley.

  “And I delivered,” she snapped. “Now get back to work. The quarantine barriers are going up faster than your little science projects are reproducing.”

  “Patience,” said Cain. “As in all things, Dantanian. Patience.”

  “Great,” Valley said. “Now she knows my name.”

  “Not to worry,” Cain rumbled, crouching and lifting my head with his massive hand. I couldn’t struggle, was too tired and sore to even move. I didn’t bother shutting my eyes.

  I’d always known I’d end up right here, back under his control. It was like the last decades had been a great dream, and now I was awake. I knew he’d never stop looking for me, and that eventually, like all good hunters, he’d run me to ground. “You’re not going anywhere,” he intoned. “Are you, little
bird?”

  “Must be nice,” I whispered. Valley wasn’t wrong—even though I’d accepted I was probably not leaving this place alive, I couldn’t resist fighting his thrall. “You get a free ticket out of Hell and all of this is waiting for you. It’s like coming home from prison to a hooker holding a birthday cake.”

  Cain let out that rock-crushing sound he called a laugh. “I want nothing, little bird. And I have received nothing. I have not been in Hell.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “You escaped from Tartarus like all the rest of the damned souls. That’s why you stopped. Because you died on the highway in that twister.”

  All of a sudden the dead drew back, ten or so feet, like startled roaches fleeing from a light. Cain stood to his full height, teeth bared. “You stupid creature. You think the wind can stop me? The storm? Any force of nature? Nothing will remove me from the world. Least of all you.”

  His foot flashed out, and I felt as my skull got trapped between it and the asphalt. The last thing I saw were the dead closing in again, hands lifting me up as if they were taking me away to my funeral. When I snapped to, everything was bright instead of dark, dry instead of damp and cold, and I could hear my own heart throbbing so deep I vibrated all the way down to my toes.

  “See?” Valley’s voice cut through my fog like a weed whacker outside the window cuts through your Sunday hangover. “I told you she wasn’t dead.”

  “I get that the know-it-all thing is a big hit with the meat bags at the Kansas SP,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. Or rather a voice that sounded vaguely familiar but to which I couldn’t put a face, like a familiar radio announcer doing the weather. “But if you could cut it out, I’d royally appreciate it.”

  “Bite me,” Valley said. “I get Cain’s chew toy, I make nice-nice with his creepy ass, now you get busy with your end. Need I remind you that all of these moving pieces you love to shove around the board all have the potential to get us skewered on the end of Uriel’s sword.”