by Lia Habel
That’s the only way I could describe what I was seeing.
They were men. They looked like men, at least—human—but like people who had been dead for months, years, in all stages of decay—flesh hanging limply off limbs, bones exposed in some places, parts missing. A few of them were wearing faded gray uniforms with various insignia. Needless to say, I didn’t stay long enough to check their identification.
I bolted from the room and slammed the door shut behind me. Without the master key, I couldn’t lock it. Behind the door I could hear more of the things entering, laughing, talking.
“It’s all right, Miss Dearly. We’re not here to hurt you,” said one, quite loudly. His voice had a ticking quality to it, as if he was forcing air out past flesh that wanted to cave in. The voices of the others were low and garbled. Some weren’t speaking at all, but growling and moaning.
“Our commander would be very disappointed if we took his fun away.”
I ran.
If my heart had feet, it would have been up the staircase before the rest of me. I paused at the top of the steps for a split second, my breathing short and hot, trying to decide where to go. Dad’s room, my brain said. Get a gun.
As I turned to head down the hall, I saw them already on the staircase below me. God, they were fast. And yet not well-coordinated—the faster they ran, the more they seemed to stumble from side to side. One was bypassing the rest, though, scrambling hand over hand up the wooden banister like some kind of crazed, rabid monkey, his eyes boring into mine. The first one I had seen. Their leader?
Don’t care. Gun.
I raced down the hall and into my father’s bedchamber. I locked the door and fell to my knees, feeling about underneath the bed in the dust and the dark. He had kept the keys to his gun cabinet beneath, or … oh, God, had someone moved them?
I could hear the things throwing themselves at the door, screeching in anger when they found it locked.
Please, please …
My fingers encountered jingly metal, and I drew out the keys. I groped my way over to the gun cabinet and managed to get it open. I pulled out a shotgun, if only because I knew that the shells were stored in a metal box immediately underneath it. Fumbling, trembling, I tried to load it.
They were beating down the door. They’d set up a rhythm and were starting to shake it in the jamb.
I got the shells into the gun and snapped it shut. I stuffed the loose pockets of my nightgown with more shells. Then, forcing a breath, I looked around. My father’s bathroom was accessible from here, but there was no exit from it. Wide glass doors looked out onto my father’s balcony, but I’d have to jump to the ground from there …
… or climb the trellis to the roof.
Plan in place, I moved to the balcony doors and threw them open. My father’s bedroom was immediately above the study, and I could see even more of the creatures on the ground below, storming in through the windows. How many were there? Going down was not an option.
I slipped the gun’s strap over my head and started to climb the white trellis that was mounted on the side of the house. It was rife with roses, and their thorns pierced my skin and snagged my nightgown. Drops of blood beaded on my fingers, but I ignored the pain.
About midway up I heard the door break and a howl of triumph from the monsters. It wasn’t long before they were out on the balcony with me. One of them caught my nightgown in its bony fists. I gasped, losing a few inches of height and one of my slippers as it yanked me down. I dared to look back and saw the thing baring its teeth at me, or what was left of them, as it tugged me closer. Another was latched on just beneath him, curling its gray tongue over a stain on one of the trellis crossbars.
It was drinking my blood.
Horrified, I kicked out at the head of the one holding me. Surprised, it let go, and I scuttered upward. The moment the edge of the roof was within reach of my fingertips, I started pulling myself up. The monsters growled in rage.
Rooftop reached, I turned on my hip and got off two rounds right into the thing’s stomach. It fell from the trellis and banged into the iron railing of the balcony, but caught itself and remained standing. After a moment’s pause it lunged for the trellis again.
I stared, stupefied. It should have been dead.
“Nooooora!” their leader cried out.
I reloaded my weapon and then started kicking at the trellis, trying to dislodge it. I didn’t dare use my arms. But despite my best efforts, two, then three, then four of the things started climbing up toward me.
“Come on!” I wailed. Their weight and my kicking should have knocked it down. Why wasn’t it falling?
It was then I realized that their leader was already on the roof, having pulled himself up via the decorative molding on the eaves. He grinned at me. “Don’t you want to come with us? You’re bound to be the most popular girl at the party.”
I leapt to my feet and leveled the gun at him, leaning into the slant of the roof. The mob beneath us swelled with more corpses, a writhing mass of crawling things reaching for me, howling for me, almost at the hem of my nightgown again. The one who had tasted my blood was particularly manic, panting like a rabid dog.
The talking one had to go, though.
Somehow I found the purchase to pull the trigger, even though my fingers were slick with sweat and blood. One round sent him staggering back, and the second blew off a good chunk of his upper arm with a splatter of black ichor. He didn’t fall down. He didn’t even cry out in pain.
Instead, he laughed.
“Why won’t you die?” I yelled. It was a cry from the gut, a terrified voice not my own.
And then I felt someone grabbing me from behind; my eyes were blinded by the light of electric lanterns. I cried out in panic and tried to wrench myself away. I was prevented from doing so, but in turning I saw soldiers clothed in black, with cloth masks over their faces and flashing red beacons pinned on their shoulders. I heard shooting all around me, below me. One of the soldiers whipped out a powerful automatic rifle and took out the talking monster with a single shot to the head. I saw the body tumble down off the roof and heard it land with a splash in the fountain below.
The soldier holding me pulled off his mask, and I saw those milky, blank eyes again, set in the pale face of a young man. With ever mounting horror, I realized that the departed fellow had come back for me.
The soldier standing next to him took off his mask as well, and I saw exposed cheekbones and a hollow, bony eye socket.
Oh, God, oh, God …
The one with the blind eyes smiled thinly. “Sorry about this. Maybe next time you’ll listen to me.”
A black bag fell over my head. I screamed, smelled the rising vomit on my own breath, and passed out cold.
“Move, move, move!”
With the girl slung over my shoulder, it wasn’t as easy to get down the side of her house as it had been to climb up it. I did my best to tuck her securely against my neck and then used two of the rappel lines to slide down. The other members of my team waited for me to hit the ground before they hooked in and fell afterward.
The battle was just picking up steam. We were already winning, of course, because we had guns. Around us, enemy soldiers dropped in mid-stride, gore starbursting from their skulls. The lights in the houses nearby were rapidly going out as everyone realized what was going on and—very wisely—hit the deck.
“We should have just gone in and grabbed her to begin with,” Tom griped before squeezing off a shot.
“C’mon,” I said, choosing to ignore his statement of the bloody obvious. It was over. We’d been trying so hard to hide, and here we were fighting, gangland style, in the middle of the royals’ capital-freaking-city.
I was going to get reamed out mercilessly when I got home.
“Vulture has landed.”
I heard the squealing of brakes as a van pulled up in front of the house and the wet crunching sound of it taking out a couple of enemy soldiers for us. The rear doors,
which declared the van a MUNICIPAL VEHICLE OF THE CITY OF NEW LONDON, swung open. Metal benches had been welded along the two longest sides of the van’s interior, and I hauled myself up by one of them, taking my cargo to the back before returning to help my teammates up.
The moment Tom’s last foot left the ground, the van took off. He and Coalhouse got the doors shut, swaying helplessly back and forth all the while. The van held extra ammo and equipment, and these things shifted beneath nets that had been bolted to the floor.
“That was intense,” Coalhouse said as he fingered his empty eye socket.
“Don’t pick at it,” Tom said, a remnant of annoyance still in his voice.
“Tom, do not lecture me like I am your girlfriend. You have a girlfriend.”
“If you think he can lecture me, you’re sadly mistaken!” the girlfriend in question said over the intercom, filling the metal cavern with her voice. She was driving. “Hey, Bram, did you see me take those two out in front? That was wicked. Totally unplanned, too. I am just that awesome.”
“Yeah, Chas,” I said, distracted. We were all safe and accounted for, and my emotions were starting to settle. I tried to keep in mind the possibility that we were being pursued, but somehow that didn’t seem important.
I looked to the girl. I knew that Tom and Coalhouse were looking, too.
The smell of her blood was filling the cabin.
“Brace yourselves, gentlemen,” Chas’s voice singsonged.
I knew what was coming. While the others took their seats and strapped in, I stood up and quickly hauled myself hand over hand down the length of the van. As we crashed through the gates of the Elysian Fields guardhouse, I tumbled toward the girl and pulled her into my arms to absorb the impact.
She made a little sound, like a gasp. I froze.
Was she conscious?
The sound of the van’s engine roaring in my ears, I lifted a hand from her side to the edge of the black bag Tom’d thrown over her head. I truly hadn’t wanted to have to do it this way. Not that I’d really been convinced that invoking the name of her father and asking nicely would get her to come with me.
But part of me had hoped.
When I’d splashed my way back from the attempt at a noninvasive extraction, tired and terrified and very, very angry with myself, the others had teased me about not being able to pick up women. Well, I had her now. She was light in my arms, and so warm it almost burned.
I pulled off the hood, bracing myself for a scream.
She was still out.
I pushed her hair out of her face and wiped off her mouth with my sleeve.
“Wow, she’s cute.”
I lifted my eyes and glared at Coalhouse. “Inappropriate.”
She wasn’t cute. She was beautiful.
Dearly’s daughter was so pale and small, it was hard not to compare her to a muslin rag doll. Her cheeks were still flushed from the fight, her lips red. This was only the second time I’d seen her in color, her image familiar from silvery daguerreotypes and black and white monitors, where her hair might have been any shade of dark.
I stood and carried her to one of the benches, using the straps to secure her to it. We needed to get her cleaned up, before someone started calling dibs. “You got the first aid kit, Coalhouse?” I asked. My voice was gruff with faked professionalism, I could hear it.
“Uh, yeah. Hold on.”
One puffy sleeve of her nightgown had slipped down, revealing a white shoulder. As Coalhouse retrieved the kit from beneath the netting and stumbled over to me, I tugged it up and smoothed it over her skin.
All while I rattled off a long list of curses in the soundproofed room of my mind.
Twenty minutes later the van rocked to a stop. Tom shouldered his gun and slowly opened one of the van doors, viewing our surroundings through his sights. “I don’t see anyone.”
“I got nothing,” Chas said, her voice low on the intercom. “Buzzard is thirty minutes on our tail. They’ll get the next ship out.”
I freed the girl and picked her up again. This time I cradled her in my arms, bridal style. “Okay, we do this fast. Right, guys?” My teammates nodded.
Tom kicked the second van door open, and out we marched. We hustled past the docks and boat slips, past the metal-shingled guardhouses. We were at the New London port—which even for this time of night was strangely empty. The part of my brain still capable of processing irony told me that everyone was probably inside watching news reports of the “kidnapping” we were still performing, right beneath their noses.
One of the two ironclads we’d commandeered for this mission, the NVS Christine, was waiting for us at the very end of the port, as far as possible from the lights of the city. We stomped up the gangplank, which was retracted immediately after us. I heard shouted orders and the sound of clanking machinery as the crew prepared to pull out. We wouldn’t be on the water long—just a quick trip down to Colombia. We’d be on a truck to base in another hour, tops.
I carried the girl into the body of the ship, down to B Level, where the medical teams were already assembled. Coalhouse had injected her with a sedative in the van, as instructed. I wasn’t afraid that she’d wake up now so I gripped her a little more securely than I’d been willing to before.
Everything was rushing, the sound of feet on metal grating, computers booting up. The head of the meds in Dr. Dearly’s absence, Dr. Horatio Salvez, stood in the midst of it all, pointing here and there and occasionally pausing a moment to absorb a screen full of information proffered by a lackey. White-coated technicians, all of them living, scrambled to follow his directions. A few were still busy erecting the little screened rooms they’d use to start fixing us up.
“There they are!” I heard one of the techs shout. She sounded relieved.
“Oh, goody,” Chas whispered. “I hate going to the doctor. I’d rather be back underground in the water playing Ophelia.”
“What about mold,” Tom reminded her. “Fuzziness on a girl is never attractive.”
“Oh, now that’s just gross.”
Squabbling as they went, Chas and the others were pulled off for their postmission checkups. We’d been hiding in the waterlogged second level of the Elysian Fields for two days, which was a rather long time for people like us to go without medical care. Our handlers had probably been freaking out.
As for myself, I headed toward Salvez. The moment he saw what I was carrying, he shooed a petitioner away and came over. “Oh, poor Miss Dearly,” he sighed. He reached out and lightly touched her cheek.
I was surprised by the growl that wanted to well up in my throat when he did this, and fought it down. I told myself it was stress, not my illness’s way of saying, Get your own take-out.
“Here,” I said, miming the motion of handing her over.
Salvez stepped back and pointed toward a gurney. “Put her there, for now.”
I did. The warmth of her body lingered in my hands.
“Go with Dr. Evola, he’ll see to you.” He bent over the girl and pushed up her eyelids to check something. “We should make landfall soon. I believe we are, as the old saying goes, hauling ass.”
Charles Evola must have heard Salvez say his name, because he was waiting. He waved and gestured for me to join him behind a nearby screen, pointing out a tangle of thick power cords on the floor before I could trip over them.
“Tough few days?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. Understatement.
I unbuttoned my jacket, unhooked my holsters, unsnapped my bulletproof vest, and pulled my black T-shirt off. I knew the drill. I took a seat and remained still as a stone as the tech hooked several sensors up to my scarred, stitched, stapled, superglued skin.
“Too bad it’s not over yet.” Charles was a young, tan man with golden hair and a brass-rimmed monocle snuggled beneath his left brow. He peered at the screens arrayed around us as they flashed a series of gray and emerald green symbols. He then punched a sequence of characters into a chunky metal ke
yboard, and a chugging sound commenced. Thirty seconds later a holographic image of my internals sprung up from a screen on a nearby crash cart.
“No new wounds. Nice going there. A little muscle tearing, but we’ll knit that up at your next tightening … not about to cut you open here.” He studied the image for a few seconds more and murmured, “You know, of all our boys, I swear you have the best joints. You have the joints of a thirty-year-old. A living thirty-year-old.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Never let it be said that I don’t give compliments.” Charles shut the image off and opened the top drawer of the crash cart. Several prepared syringes, of the large and scary-looking variety, were arranged there. “Okay, then, time for drinkies!”
I lifted my arm without having to be ordered. I have a valve permanently installed in my forearm for the purpose of getting my meds, and another one on my inner thigh for drainage. Charles delivered the stuff with an equal lack of fanfare, and with the dexterity of someone who’s performed the same operation thousands of times before.
My gaze drifted toward the equipment table as he worked. Everything was crafted of shiny stainless steel, and I couldn’t help but catch my own reflection several times over. I regarded it more morosely than usual. My skin is almost marble white, incredibly pale—not just sunless, but bloodless—and sits tight against the muscles of my face. My eyes were blue, but are clouded over now. I still have my hair, which is brown and unremarkable, but hey, some guys lose it when they die. I suppose I should count my blessings.
“Got the girl, then, huh?” Charles asked.
“What?”
He grinned. “Dearly the younger.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Little advice? Let her hear you before you let her see you. Might help.”
“It’s a little too late for that.”
“She saw you?”
“She was on the roof, shooting at the Grays.”
Charles whistled. “Nice. Girl has spunk.” He pushed the plunger on the last syringe, and I watched its pale blue contents swell the veins in my arm. When he withdrew the syringe, the tiny motor in my valve kicked on, pumping the stuff farther into my body.