The Big Reap tc-3

by Chris F. Holm

  It took me a sec to realize the sores that polka-dotted her dead flesh weren’t sores at all. They were too round, too regular, a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, some knotted old scars, others seeping lymph and pus, still others raised with fresh blisters.

  They were burns: from cigarettes, from cigars, from orange-glowing coils of old-fashioned automobile lighters. Self-inflicted, no doubt, to demonstrate how much she burned for him.

  It’d be sweet if it weren’t so goddamned disgusting.

  When I saw a shard of glass in her blue-tinged, black-nailed hand as well, I realized too late what had happened. The words fell from my lips as soon as they occurred to me.

  “This is a trap,” I said. “Grigori told you to lay a trap for me, didn’t he?”

  The question was, by default, directed at Yseult, since she was the closer of the two, and therefore the one that I was facing. But it was Drustanus who answered. “She won’t tell you anything,” he said. “She can’t.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” I chided, trying to buy some time, “cat got her tongue?”

  “Actually,” he said, a note of affection evident in his tone, “it was a hyena she fed it to, once she bit it off to prove her love to me.” She opened her mouth and stuck out as best she could a ruined stump of blackened meat that was once a tongue. “She always has been better at expressing her devotion than I.”

  “He set you up, you know,” I said. “Grigori, I mean.”

  “He didn’t.” Drustanus’ rusty voice was full of defiance and false bluster, doubt shading both.

  “He did,” I insisted. “Just like he did to Ricou. What was it he told me? That Ricou was a sacrifice to the greater good. How’s it feel to be tied down atop the altar right behind him?”

  Kate leaned in close and muttered, “Uh, Sam? You think when we find ourselves stuck between Zombie Bonnie and Clyde is the right time to practice your taunting skills?”

  I ignored her. And the voices in my head saying pretty much the same damn thing — one mine, the other the trucker’s.

  “You’re mistaken,” said Drustanus.

  “Yeah? Then answer this, whose idea was it you should lead me away from him while he went and found someone to eat?”

  Drustanus’ hideous features darkened. “It was only logical,” he said. “My injury left a trail, after all, and Grigori knew we two would not assent to being separated. If we wished to confront you in numbers, it had to be Yseult and I.”

  “You sound just like him. He wound you up with all his pretty talk and let you go, didn’t he? That must be why he waited until the bitter end to make a punk bitch out of you, no one likes to have to put down their favorite lapdog.”

  Drustanus roared. Charged. Blood dripping from his stump, and from his one remaining hand, which still gripped the makeshift blade of glass. And then, in that slow/fast/out-of-sequence/all-at-once way times of blood and valor seem to unfold, the scene shifted. Yseult coiling to pounce in support of her one true love, a low growl escaping her lips. Kate, beside me, assuming a defensive stance — knees bent; weight on the balls of her feet a shoulder-width apart; hands open, not balled into fists; arms up and ready. Me, looking back and forth between the two threats, handicapping the odds of each reaching us before the other. A rush of footfalls. Drustanus, distracted, looking past me and away. Me following his gaze. Yseult turning, twisting, and then with a metallic thunk and a crack like shattered bone, she’s going down, jaw shattered, head half caved in. Gio, behind her a little ways, doubled over, panting, one hand against a nearby locker for support. And Theresa following through with her swing of the steel pipe that was her dismantled shotgun’s barrel as if she were Hammerin’ Hank himself, knocking a ball into the stands.

  Drustanus still coming. Eyes wide and wet and not on Kate or me, instead locked on Yseult’s dazed, flopping form; her eyes rolled back, her limbs rigid, mangled mouth foaming pink at the corners.

  “Ter,” I yelled, “the pipe!”

  Ter’s a good soldier. A fighter through and through. She didn’t question, didn’t hesitate, and — despite her blindness — didn’t miss. She chucked the barrel to me, and I lunged toward the speeding freight train that was Drustanus, jabbing it forward with all I had.

  It struck his ruined flesh, his fragile bone, underfed and undernourished in the face of all the energy he’d been expending — and, thrumming with sudden electricity — punched straight through.

  He slumped to his knees. Blinked in confusion. Dropped his shard of glass onto the floor. It shattered. He tipped forward. And as I plucked the yellow, chalky remains of his soul from the end of the gun barrel, grinding them to dust between my fingers, his last pained, reverent word was, “Yseult.”

  His body caved in before our eyes. Shook the building from foundation to rafters. While behind us, unnoticed at first, Yseult struggled to her knees, and plucked her own glass shard up off the floor.

  It was her strangled pleading I noticed first. A wet, guttural sound, like an animal not known for the ability trying to mimic human speech. When I turned away from her fallen lover, I saw her, head dented like a rotten Jack O’Lantern, moving her shattered jaw, her face all twisted up, not with anger, nor malice, but simply grim determination.

  When my gaze trailed downward to what her hands were doing, I realized what she was trying to say, what she was trying to ask of me.

  She’d used the shard of glass to slice open the flesh of her chest; gouged deep furrows into the yellowed breastbone beneath, and cut muscle and connective tissue away from between her two exposed ribs. Pushed her tiny fingers through the gap — probing, searching, to no avail. What she wanted could not be found without assistance, without the touch of one of my kind to make it present itself.

  She was trying to gouge out her own soul.

  To follow her beloved to the grave.

  As Drustanus had said, she always was better at expressing her devotion than was he.

  I approached her, hand extended — equal parts a calming gesture, and a promise of death’s reprieve. “Sammy, the fuck you think you’re doing?” asked Gio with alarm. “You just killed that freaky bitch’s boyfriend. Now you’re gonna make all nice?”

  He took a step toward me, intending to intervene, but I waved him off with my free hand.

  “It’s okay, Gio. Yseult’s not going to hurt me. If she did, if she evicted me from this meat-suit, it would only delay her in following Drustanus. Isn’t that right, Yseult?”

  Tears shone in her eyes. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  I couldn’t help but feel some kinship with her. My eternal damnation, after all, was nothing more or less than an extended demonstration of my love for my dear, sweet Elizabeth. As my hand found her shoulder, and her body shuddered from the sudden current of my touch, I told her, “I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal.”

  Her hand dug deep into her own chest once more, and then her eyes went wide. With her last ounce of strength, she pulled it free, and then slackened.

  Her withered soul fell from her grasp, cracking as it hit the floor.

  I let go of her. She slumped to the vinyl tiles. Then I ground her soul to dust beneath my boot. Her body followed suit, desiccating before our eyes.

  “Now,” I said, “let’s go find Grigori.”

  20.

  “That was some messed-up shit back there, dude,” said Gio, huffing and puffing while we sprinted for the auditorium, but somehow still finding breath to speak.

  “In case you hadn’t caught on, Dead Guy I Stuck Into a Different Dead Guy’s Body, messed-up shit is sorta my specialty.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but even for you, man, this is fucking bugnuts.”

  “Ugh,” said Theresa. “Don’t mention bugs.”

  Kate looked at Theresa, and then back to me. “Bugs? What’d I miss?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning,” Theresa said, “if you ever wanna sleep again at night.”

  We sprinted past the busted down front doors, continued onward down
the hall. No sign of Grigori. No signs of life at all, I thought.

  Then a door opened to our right, yellow light spilling into the dim hall. Two girls deep in joking conversation shuffled, smiling, out. Their expressions faded to worry when they caught sight of us, and shot on past toward fear; an enormous afroed black woman arm-in-arm with a short, squat Pesci-in-Goodfellas-looking mofo; a bruised and battered waitress, her uniform spattered with blood; and a beefy, bearded, gore-streaked trucker with a crooked ear and a bevy of seeping wounds who was carrying a pipe caked with bits of rotting lung and heart and brain.

  “Get back inside,” I said, jabbing my finger toward the classroom they’d just vacated. “Are there more of you in there?”

  One of them nodded. The other elbowed her.

  “It’s all right,” I said, “we’re not gonna hurt you. Just get back in there. Lock the door if the door locks. Barricade it either way. And don’t come out until the cops come get you. You understand?”

  This time, they both nodded. Then retreated. The bar of light that shone underneath the door went out, and I heard the slide of something heavy being moved.

  And we continued down the hall once more.

  “You know, Sam,” said Kate some twenty silent paces later, “that shit back there with Drustanus and Yseult? Kinda sorta personal for me. I mean, those evil bastards upturned my life. Wrecked my place of business. Turned a table of my best tippers into the blood-drinking undead. Cheesy catchphrase aside, if that ain’t personal, then what the hell do you call it?”

  “An average Tuesday?” Theresa ventured.

  Kate laughed.

  Despite myself — and these godawful circumstances — I couldn’t help but think I’d missed these three.

  Up ahead, a child of twelve or so was slumped against the wall, two holes puncturing his neck, blood oozing down it and soaking into the collar of his shirt. “Grigori, you monster,” I muttered, and forced my new XL meat-suit to put on a burst of speed. Kate — not carrying fifty extra pounds of beer-and-chicken-fried-steak weight — still reached the kid first.

  “He’s got a pulse,” she said, two fingers to his neck on the side opposite the wound, “but weak. He’s going to need a doctor, and soon.”

  The sirens outside brayed loud enough to make my meat-suit’s ears pop. Lights, red and blue, splashed through the hashmarked windows facing the ruined Pancake Palace and projected strobing diamond patterns across the far wall of the hall. “He’ll get one,” I said. “Won’t be long before they wind up over here. Let’s try and keep their workload light, shall we?”

  “Sam — up here!” Gio and Ter stood before a set of double doors a little ways down the darkened hall — the entrance to the auditorium. As they opened the doors wider, I heard the sound of children singing — “Luck Be a Lady,” unless my good ear deceived me.

  And then a commotion.

  And then screaming.

  By the time I reached the auditorium door, Grigori had climbed onto the stage, which though bare of set-dressings was dotted with tweens in street clothes, their singing halted, many of them now cowering stage-right against the curtained wall. If he’d come at them from the other aisle, they would have had a shot at making the exit, which was stage-left, but Grigori was too clever for that, shepherding the whole flock toward the slaughter so he could regain his strength and make his escape. For the child in the hallway had not come close to slaking his thirst, healing his injuries, or restoring his human visage. In fact, looking at him, it almost made his appearance all the worse. His features were now half-human, half-ruined. His body, crushed from the ribcage down by the truck’s front grille, was reassembling itself unpleasantly before our eyes, muscle stretching, pulsing, splitting off as it coated exposed bone, vasculature spreading like some kind of malignant vine. As I watched, he reached into his gaping chest cavity and snapped a rib that had knit together crooked, wincing as he did. It came off in his hand, and then he reattached it once more, this time correctly.

  He stepped toward the children, jaw as wide as an anaconda’s, outsized canines catching the footlights and gleaming sickly yellow. They cowered. Shrieked in terror. Wept at their fate.

  Well, their almost-fate. Because that’s when I had me an idea.

  Credit Kate and Ter and Gio for showing me I was not alone. That I was better with friends by my side.

  No, I thought. Not friends. Family. Because we’d been to war together. We’d bonded in a way that couldn’t be broken. Found a strength together we lacked apart.

  As could these kids.

  As would these kids.

  Grigori closed the gap between himself and the frightened children. I sprinted toward them, an old Chesterton quote ringing in my ears. “Fairy tales are more than true,” he’d said. “Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” These kids knew damn well the world was full of horrors; the news reminded them of that fact on the daily. It was time someone showed them they could do something about it.

  As I belly-flopped onto the stage and scrabbled awkwardly to my feet, Grigori grabbed a child by the wrist, and pulled him close. Then he turned to face me, holding the boy between us like a shield.

  “Any closer, and this boy dies.”

  I stopped, and put my hands up. “You aim to kill him anyway,” I said. “You aim to kill them all.”

  The kids behind him gasped, and cried, and wailed. Kate, Gio, and Theresa stood frozen in the aisles of the empty auditorium, the only people in the room not on the stage.

  Grigori shrugged. “It’s true,” he said. “But perhaps, if you’re willing to let me leave, I’ll feed on only half of them. Or feed on each just half to death.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.”

  His one human eyebrow arched. Then the mental projection of the human face he struggled to put forth flickered, and the eyebrow disappeared.

  “You do?” he asked, amused. “What’s that?”

  “Your gaping chest contains a soul,” I said, my gaze leaving Grigori’s face for a moment and locking briefly with that of the trembling boy in his grasp. “Withered. Vestigial. Dead. Inaccessible to most, but attaining physical form the second I lay hands on you. Once it’s crushed, you’ll be no more, and you’ll no longer be able to hurt these kids, or anyone else.”

  “I know this,” said Grigori impatiently, tightening his grip on the boy in his arms. “Why do you think I choose to use this child as a shield? You cannot reach into my chest through him.”

  “True enough,” I said, raising my voice and hoping the kids behind would take the hint, “but that’s the thing.”

  “What’s the thing?”

  “I don’t have to be the one to crush it.”

  His eyes widened.

  I leapt at him, and grabbed his wrist, pulling it away from the young boy’s throat.

  The boy, newly brave, twisted to face Grigori and drove his tiny hand into the monster’s chest, while as one, the children who’d been cowering behind Grigori pounced, coming to their fellow student’s aid.

  And when the dust settled, Grigori was no more.

  “Hell of a goddamn gamble, Sam.” This from Kate. “Turning these kids into monster-killers.”

  “I encouraged them to protect themselves,” I said. “You of all people should get that.”

  “I do,” she admitted. “But still. After today, they’re gonna have some serious shit to work out.”

  “And their whole entire lives in which to do it.”

  “Uh, guys?” Gio, trotting back into the auditorium from the front hall, which faced out toward the Pancake Palace crime scene. “I hate to break up this little philosophical discussion, but those of us stuck in their bodies for the long haul gotta motor. Them cops outside are headed this way.”

  “You two got an escape plan?”

  “Always, brother. We stashed our ride a couple blocks away before we boosted the truck. Clean papers, clean tags — both fake, of course, duped from an
identical ride three states away, but they’ll hold up if someone runs ’em, and we got IDs to match.”

  “The authorities are gonna be closing in fast. I hope your ride is speedy enough to get you outta here before the whole town gets locked down.”

  Gio gave me a who-the-hell-you-think-you’re-talking-to look. “The beauty we boosted’s a 1970 Torino fastback with three hundred seventy-five horses under the hood. Only thing she can’t pass is a gas station.”

  “Good. Take Kate with you. Keep her safe.”

  Kate: “Hey!”

  Gio: “We’ll take her, but we can’t promise she’ll be safe.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  It was Theresa who answered. “You think we been hiding out this whole last year? Well fuck you very much, Sam Thornton, cause we ain’t been running, we been fighting. In case you somehow failed to notice, shit’s gotten rough out in the world of late. Angels and demons and everything in between so intent on bashing in each others’ skulls, they no longer seem to care who gets caught up in the middle. I’m talking ordinary people caught up in shit they shouldn’t be — in a covert war that ain’t theirs to fight. So we been out there helping ’em, wherever and however we can. Kate wants in on that, she’s welcome, but she for damn sure won’t be safe. Wouldn’t blame her for saying no.”

  “Actually,” she said, “count me in.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Yeah?” asked Gio.

  “Yeah,” said Kate. “You can see how far hiding got me. Mayhap it’s time for me to fight.”

  Booted feet like hoof-beats as the cops stormed the front door. Not SWAT, I thought — not yet — just uniforms. The three’s window for escape was closing. Mine had closed already. Someone was gonna hafta delay the police, after all.

  “This place got a back entrance?” I asked the kids.

  One nodded, and pointed toward backstage. “Out the door and down the hall,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Then, to my friends: “Go.”

  “But Sam–”

  “There isn’t time,” I said, biting back tears. “Just go.”