by Rob Thurman
“Two,” I said blackly. “This would make two. Two makes it a regular habit from now on. At least on road trips.” I looked down the gravel road dimly lit by the car lights. “How many dead people with flesh still on them could be there anyway? There have to be other graveyards. This can’t be the only one.” That had to cut down on bodies Suyolak could use.
Niko was already moving down the road. “Dyer, Indiana, has a population of just over thirteen thousand. I can’t imagine there are more than three cemeteries or so.” Nik and his damn memory; he couldn’t pass a sign with some mildly pertinent knowledge without committing it to a brain cell. “I wouldn’t think they have a high daily, weekly, or even monthly death toll, except for today when Suyolak went past and those corpses won’t be buried yet. As for bodies still moist and gelatinous enough to slither about in this cemetery, I suppose it all depends on how skilled the embalmer was.”
“Thanks for that,” I said, following behind him. “That didn’t make me want to barf at all.” Delilah loped ahead of us, tired of our careful pace. The path was lined with old trees, pines, looming enough to dim the car headlights further. The smell was sharp and fresh in the air.
“I’m sorry.” He wasn’t. “Does your work of fighting the rotting dead conflict with stuffing an entire bag of orange puffy chemicals down your throat in less than a minute?”
Before I had a comeback in defense of what I’d formerly believed to be the perfect food, I watched the ground erupt to one side of us. It was a man, a dead one, clawing himself out of his own grave. It was like a monster movie come to life, almost as if we were watching late-night television rather than something true and real directly before us. He kept digging until he was all the way out and swaying, his eyes and mouth stitched shut, his best Sunday suit covered with large stains of decay and rot.
Abelia had insinuated they were fast, but this one wasn’t. We could’ve cut him down before he managed to make it out all the way into open air, but . . . damn . . . this was our first semizombie. Of course, it wasn’t a zombie at all, not actually, but it was something you didn’t see every day, in our dark world included, and sometimes you had to let your curiosity get the best of you. This was B-movie legend. I’d seen this a hundred times on TV and in the occasional video game when I was younger. I’d enjoyed watching a good zombie throw down then—who didn’t? I wasn’t enjoying this one, but neither was I as wary or prepared as I should’ve been. What happened next showed me that.
The thing stood for a moment, wavering, and then the flesh literally fell off its bones, which did nothing good for its already compromised suit and did even less for my stomach. The rotting flesh continued to pool around the feet, wave after wave, before finally extruding hungry, mottled-green feelers in the air. Okay, that . . . that was not right. The skeleton, along with some stringy ligaments and cartilage left behind, abruptly collapsed with the suit, and I lost my taste for zombie movies just like that. A shambling zombie was one thing; a running zombie was not bad either, but zombie Jell-O I could do without.
And when a mass of putrid flesh dropped from the nearest tree to race across the ground on hundreds of tendrils, wrap around me, and climb to cover my head, neck, and shoulders while we were distracted watching the other show, that cinched the no- zombie thing for good. It happened in about two seconds. Abelia was right. It was so incredibly quick that I barely saw it; I only got a flash of what it looked like. It must’ve been only fairly fresh. It was still mainly flesh colored, spotted here and there with dull green and moist gray. One closed eye slid across it as it moved. How it sensed me, I didn’t know or much have the time to care. It still smelled strongly of chemicals—embalming fluid—not that it covered the stink of rot. Rot against my nose, my mouth—everywhere; it wouldn’t have to suffocate me. I’d choke on the stench first as it pressed closer against my face, wrapping even more tightly around my head.
I dropped the machetes. It wasn’t as if I could chop my own head off to get rid of this thing. I ripped at it with my hands. If Niko was calling my name, I didn’t hear as moist pulp filled my ears. He could’ve been under attack as well. I didn’t know. I continued to rip at the hood of skin and meat over my head. My fingers slid through it with a sickening lack of leverage. How do you fight putrescent pudding from Hell? You can claw and claw and never catch hold.
It wasn’t coming off. Jesus, it wasn’t coming off. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get it off and I couldn’t breathe.
But I could leave.
I pushed out blindly, because if he could be there, he would be there. I pushed once and hit nothing; twice and struck a hard form. Niko. I knew he’d be doing what he could if he could shake off any attackers of his own. I shoved again and let myself fall backward away from him at the same time to give myself space and not take part of him. I didn’t want to take a Nik fingertip, thumb, or entire hand through with me when I went. That wouldn’t be good—not good at all. As I fell, I made the gate around me, something that clung to my skin this time that I welcomed.
And then I was back in the car with small pieces of corpse in my hair and one or two sliding down my face. I vaulted back out, wiping them off with a hurried hand, and ran back up the road, promising myself a chance to yak up Cheetos—the perfect food no more—far and wide when this was over. I saw Niko ahead chopping my personal graveyard amoebas to smaller and more-manageable pieces. There was no martial arts skill required there; only butchery. The mullo was fast, but it—or Suyolak—had been taken off guard by my disappearing act. It slithered back and forth in confusion, still trying to find me. Niko wasn’t one to let an opportunity to fillet an opponent get away. “Are you all right?” he asked as he stamped his boot on one wriggling piece to hold it in place while he finished a damn fine filleting job on the rest of it.
“Except for smelling like Romero, the latest in zombie cologne, I’m fucking great.” And I was—I meant it. Fan-fucking-tastic. The smell still bothered me, but as for the rest? Vampire, troll, revenant, boggle, mounds of racing blobs of decomposing bodies: It was all the same—one damn good time. Bring it on. So what if it ruined Cheetos for me? There were a thousand other snack foods to take their place. I scooped up my machetes as I passed Niko and tackled another mullo that was about to take Robin from behind as he held off another one in front of him. This one had either been in the ground longer or had been a customer of an extremely crappy funeral home, because as it hit the ground with me on top of it, it virtually disintegrated. There was only a large puddle of extremely foul-smelling goo under me. The tendrils that surrounded its “body” fluttered, then melted as well.
I looked to one side to see Delilah laying into another mullo as if it were a pork-scented chew toy. But as quick as she was, it was quicker. It managed to wrap around her lower body, taking out her hind legs. She snarled as she went down—no yelping for her. When the mullo moved up toward her head, I was there to drop my machetes and grab it. This one must’ve been put in the ground only a few days ago, because I was able to hang on to it and rip it off before it could cover the snapping wolf head. It didn’t matter what the Kin had in store for her or what she had in store for me. I couldn’t let her go without giving her a chance. What she did with that chance was up to her.
But as I pulled it off her, I lost my grip as it thrashed muscularly under my hands. In the moonlight I could see it was covered with lines and curves that made up nothing recognizable now, but had probably once been a wealth of tattoos before death. He or she had been in good shape before hitting the slab, because it had more fight in it than all the others combined—a gym rat maybe putting dead muscle to strong use. Its attention turned from Delilah to me, it lunged, tendrils grasping eagerly at the air.
And that is all it got—nothing but air.
I reappeared behind it and Delilah. When it had gone for me, she had gone for it and rode it down to the ground, her muzzle buried in muscle and meat, ripping chunks of it away. I retrieved my machetes and joined in. It wasn’t long b
efore it was a stretch of quivering pieces spread far and wide on the grass and gravel. I stood still, both blades ready, and listened, although if anyone was going to be the first to hear something, it would be Delilah. I kept my eyes on the triangular white ears that pointed forward, then back, then forward again before she yawned and began energetically rubbing her muzzle back and forth on the grass. No more mullos.
“I suppose that embalming fluid isn’t the tastiest additive to spice up your meal,” Goodfellow commented, disgust dripping from the words as he came up to us. For once, he hadn’t escaped the multisplatter that had gotten the rest of us.
Not that she’d actually eaten any of the mullo. Delilah had made it very clear in the past that she didn’t eat roadkill—which in her eyes was the dead or pathetically slow humans. The first was degrading and the second wasn’t nearly challenging enough. Robin held out his arms and grimaced at what he saw and smelled. “Don’t start,” I warned before he could complain. I was covered nearly head to toe in graveyard goop from taking down the mullo that had almost had him from behind.
“No one is getting in my car like this,” Niko said. His hand fisted a handful of my jacket. “And how did you say you were feeling again?”
Yet another good mood was washed away in the cemetery’s ornamental pond. We were attacked again, this time by two ill-tempered swans. The one time I wished Salome had come along for the fun and she couldn’t be bothered. I asked Robin if skinny-dipping with the big white birds could be considered cheating on Ishiah. If I’d had any positive feeling left at all from my traveling that Niko hadn’t managed to drown, they were finished off by Goodfellow trying to strangle me while a swan pecked irately at my head.
Then it was back on the Lincoln. With both our candidates for coffin thief living on the West Coast, there was no reason for the truck or us to leave it . . . and then there was the trail of disease that had led us here so far. The driver probably didn’t know we were behind him. Suyolak knew, though. If he was appearing in my dreams, he knew we were coming. No doubt he knew Abelia and her men were behind as well. Clan ties, blood ties. I hope he gave them worse dreams than he’d given me. But although he obviously did sense us behind him, I thought he was confident he could slow us down long enough until he was out of the coffin. He’d definitely oozed confidence in my dream. And with Abelia’s crappy, carelessly complacent seal application, he might be right to feel that way.
“When do we meet Rafferty? Better yet, when do we make a motel stop?” I asked Nik as the night air rushed into the car to dry our clothes on our bodies. Only Goodfellow had felt the need for nudity in the swan pond. Delilah had kept her fur on while splashing among the water lilies and swan feathers. While that water had been an improvement over the rancid slime we’d been wearing, soap and a motel shower would be better. It was a given that Abelia wasn’t letting us all pile into her RV to clean up.
“I think we’ll be able to combine the two events,” he answered. Robin was already snoring in the backseat. “I meant it when I asked, you know. How are you feeling?”
“You’re not going to let it go, are you?” I groaned. “For once I finally got something good out of the Auphe package. I think I’m due.”
“You’re more than due,” he said. “No one in your life knows that more than I do, but it seems too good to be true. And anything that seems too good to be true often is. There’s usually a price to be paid. If there is one, I want to know what it is.”
You couldn’t hold it against your family for caring too much about you. You might want to, but you couldn’t. “Is my being in a good mood that scary?” I complained halfheartedly.
“Terrifying,” he said. The word rang with sincerity. “Absolutely terrifying.”
By the time we reached Monroe County, Illinois, I was behind the wheel. Niko had caught a few hours’ sleep and Robin had yet to wake up from our graveyard festivities. He wasn’t a big believer in sharing the load. The fact that he’d changed on the road and hadn’t been fighting mullos in his pajamas from the car lot was a lucky break for us—and for the mullos, if the dead could be scarred mentally. It was a little past eleven at night when I pulled into the parking lot of the motel with the best rooms money could buy. Thirty-six bucks a night. How could you go wrong?
“We check in, shower, and keep going?” I asked. It wasn’t a problem with Niko’s and my being able to switch off driving. Delilah had a werewolf’s stamina; I knew from personal experience. Although with the Kin’s finding out about us, it was unlikely I was going to keep experiencing that too often in the future—one way or the other. I had to wonder, though, if even Delilah, fearless as she was, wanted to face my brother if she tried and actually succeeded in killing me. Delilah was Delilah, though. She believed she had no equal and in some respects she was right. But Niko . . . She thought she knew him, but she couldn’t, despite seeing what he’d done six months ago when he’d thought I was dead. She’d seen it, been there, but because she was Delilah, she couldn’t let herself believe it.
Niko was out of her league. Niko, when he wanted to be or had to be, was out of anyone’s league—except for Suyolak’s, who was a whole different ball game. One I wasn’t sure we could play. Killing with a thought: What the hell kind of game was that?
“No, we’ll spend the night. Rafferty is going to meet us here in the morning.” Niko flipped his phone closed after talking with the healer. Being that his side of the conversation had been yes, I see, and yes again, I hadn’t gotten much out of it, besides hoping Rafferty knew how to play Suyolak’s game and win. “He’s leaving his motel now. He also said it’s on the news: Three men were found eighty miles west of Dyer, Indiana, dead of an almost unheard-of cholera outbreak.” He tapped my forearm with the cell. “Their ID is out of state. The authorities are trying to determine now if they’d traveled outside the country and caught it there.”
“But we know better,” I said grimly. I’d given Niko all the details of my dream about Suyolak. “Three strangers with out-of-state ID. You think our thief just lost his muscle.” And lost his relief drivers, which would slow him down. “I still don’t get it. Suyolak knows what’s going on, at least enough to be messing with dreams. The slower whoever snatched him goes, the worse for him. He might think he’ll get out before we catch up, but his chances would be better if there were more guys for the drive.”
“Killing is Suyolak’s nature. He might not be able to help himself. Knowing what’s wisest and being able to do it are two widely different things.” He tapped my arm again with the phone.
“Yeah, that last one was subtle. Not aimed at me at all,” I retorted.
When he checked us in and came back with one key, that was about me, too. Delilah had parked her Harley and was lounging against it. At the sight of the key, she narrowed her eyes at him, but before she could head to the office for another room—our room—Niko told her, “If the Kin find you, they find my brother. I would prefer we showed a united front in that case.”
Robin woke up at that—part of him anyway. A puck mind could sense this type of opportunity at any level of consciousness. “A foursome should be united front enough,” he mumbled. He was climbing out of the car and his eyes hadn’t quite opened yet, but he was unbuttoning his shirt. “Prepare for the pucking of your life.”
“Ishiah,” I said. “And I can’t believe you actually consider that a pickup line.”
His eyes opened to peer through wind-tangled strands of light brown hair and his fingers paused at the third button. “You couldn’t have let me stay asleep, could you? If I’m unconscious, it can’t be cheating.” He buttoned his shirt, tucked Salome under his arm, and headed for the back of the car. “Even if I were conscious,” he muttered as he opened the trunk to retrieve his bags, “sex with the magnificence of me would at worst be considered a heroic act of community service. Ishiah would no doubt give me a medal for benefiting humanity. And that line has worked more times than you’ve drawn breath.”
He plucked the
key from Niko’s fingers, scanned the squat building, and started for the far end as he grumbled on. “Cheating isn’t even a word in my language. Just as the old saying that the Eskimos have many words for snow, we have many words for sex—a thousand and three, I think, but not a single one for infidelity. Doesn’t that say something? Doesn’t that mean something?” He vanished behind the motel door, still talking to himself; still questioning himself. But Robin was the only one who could come up with those answers.
As for the issue of Delilah and me, I already had my mind made up: “Nik, I think we can handle a united front if we’re in the next room,” I pointed out.
He folded his arms and stared at me. I stared back, telling him silently that I could take care of myself. Aloud, I said, “It’s the Kin, Cyrano. I can handle the Kin. I’ve kicked furry ass in the past. Now is no different.”
“I think it’s considerably different, and you know it. There’re Kin and then there’re Kin,” he returned—not particularly cryptic to anyone, but I didn’t think he meant it to be. He let it go, though, and went for his own bags. “With Suyolak capable of toying with our dreams, I would sleep in shifts.” He slammed the trunk shut, tossing me my own bag. “If you sleep at all,” he added dryly.
I didn’t.
I wasn’t sure if Niko had either. Robin might be living the puck ultimate terror of monogamy, but Niko was a big fan of the “Trust no one” philosophy. He had his exceptions. He trusted me, and he trusted Robin as well. He trusted him to watch his back in a fight and to step up whenever we needed help. He trusted him in any situation that could go south fast. But he’d also been chased ruthlessly by Robin before the puck’s reconnection, in all senses of the word, with Ishiah. Niko had an infallibly long memory and an extremely sharp sense of survival. Whether it was a sudden catastrophic monogamy failure and things going south in an entirely different way than how the phrase was normally used, Niko would be prepared for any eventuality.