“We’re doing everything we can, Domino,” Adan said. “It’ll have to be enough.”
“Or it won’t,” I said.
“It will. Are you ready to go?”
“Give me a few minutes. Mr. Clean makes me nervous and I won’t have a chance to check on him if I don’t do it now.”
Adan nodded. “I’ll go look in on the kids.”
A little tinge of jealousy snuck up on me from behind and squeezed my cheeks. I turned away, walking over to the leather couch and collapsing on the soft cushions. “You need some singles?” I said, digging in the front pocket of my jeans. Adan stared at me blankly. “For the dancers…you put a dollar in their…never mind, country boy.”
“I’m not going for a dance, Domino,” Adan said.
Chavez looked back and forth between us, grinning. “It’s a strip club, chola. It doesn’t cost anything to look.”
“Fuck you, Chavez. Go, Adan.” I waved him away and closed my eyes. Sarcasm and snark can be deadly weapons, but when they misfire they can really make you look like a clown-the goofy variety, not the scary ones. I didn’t even care if Adan wanted to take another peek at the dressing room. I might have worried about him if he didn’t. Why did I have to say something? Why couldn’t I have said something that was actually funny? Why did fucking Chavez have to hear it?
I took a deep breath and beat the moment of schoolgirl awkwardness back into the closet. Then I conjured an image of Mr. Clean in my mind, tapped the abundant juice pulsing through the club and spun my peekaboo spell. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” I said.
At first I thought my spell had failed. The image that sprang up behind my closed eyelids was a gray, color-streaked frenzy of motion-blurred chaos. Then the image froze, instantly, and I found myself looking down at an expansive pile of headless zombies. A massive scimitar of silvered steel extended into my view and dripped crimson from the razor-sharp edge.
“Get out of my head,” said Mr. Clean. “You know I hate that.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, technically, you don’t really have a head. You’re a spirit.”
“I do have a head, as I am at present manifest in the physical world, and indeed you demonstrate that my head possesses within it far more productive material than does yours.”
“That was a hell of a sentence, Mr. Clean. You might need to diagram that motherfucker for me.”
The jinn’s sigh murmured in my mind. “What do you want, Dominica? As you can see, I’m busy. I was about to set upon a strip mall where the dead are, as we speak, causing great distress to the locals.”
“Well, I’ll let you set upon it in a second. Seriously, what’s with all the verbosity? Are you feeling okay?”
“The carnage is invigorating,” said Mr. Clean. “I am lifted on wings of slaughter and soar on the hot, red currents of sublime and exquisite war.”
“If you’re having such a good time, maybe we can renegotiate the price.”
“Not a chance.”
“Didn’t think so. Where are you?”
Mr. Clean laughed. “Where is the hatred in a man’s heart? Where is the plague that steals silent and unseen through the village streets while the children lie dying in their beds? Where is the-”
“What’s the fucking address, Mr. Clean?”
“I’m in Northridge.”
“War is hell,” I said. I had the jinn working the Valley because he could move faster than my gangsters and the juice was probably thin enough out there to give the sidhe respiratory problems. Mr. Clean could cover more ground than anyone else I had on my side of the zombie apocalypse. “What are you doing with the heads?” We hadn’t really gotten into the details, and I’d been worried about it since we closed the deal. I did not want to go home to a condo full of zombie heads.
“As you did not specify a location for proper disposal, I am leaving them where they fall.” I saw the scimitar point down to the pavement where one of the zombie heads lay on its right cheek. It stared up at me-at Mr. Clean-out of the corner of one filmy, gray eye. It snarled and gnashed its teeth.
“I hope the Xolos are quick about cleaning up the mess. That’s going to be hard to pass off as LSD in the water supply.”
“Even if you had directed me to dispose of the heads properly, the bodies remain animated, as well.” The jinn reached down with the scimitar and poked at one of the decapitated bodies. Its arms lashed out and the thing grabbed onto the sword, dragging its hands along the blade. Mr. Clean wrenched the scimitar free and the hands grasped blindly for a moment before withdrawing.
“Yeah, don’t do that,” I said. “I just want you to bring me one head-leave the rest of them alone.”
“Which head would you like?”
“The last one.”
Adan and I zigzagged our way over to Mateo and headed north up the narrow street lined with body shops, warehouses and distribution centers. Taggers had put down most of what passed for paint jobs on the concrete and brick that crowded us on either side. If anything, the street was even more choked with abandoned vehicles than Alameda and the freeway had been. There were a lot fewer cars, but a lot less space to cram them in. We moved quickly, running and leaping along the metal highway, occasionally pausing to liberate a dead motorist that hadn’t yet turned and gone hunting. Most of them were so badly mauled I wasn’t sure they’d be mobile even when they went Zed. We didn’t spot a single zombie up and about.
At Seventh Street, the sprawling warehouse district began to give way to stores, bars, restaurants and the occasional loft or apartment building. We saw shattered windows and splintered doorways, and the businesses were empty and silent.
When we crossed Sixth Street, we heard the noise. It didn’t sound a whole lot different from the obscene choir I’d heard when the zombie horde attacked us on Alameda, except this time it was punctuated by staccato bursts of gunfire. Adan and I stopped on the hood of a greenish-gold Chevy beater and looked at each other.
“How do you want to do this?” Adan asked.
“I figured we’d walk up and you’d throw down that blast spell. Worked pretty good last time. It ought to buy us enough time for Lowell and his guys to get out.”
“Listen to the gunfire.”
I did. “Automatics…some small-caliber stuff.” Then it registered. “Aw, shit, some of the zombies are carrying.”
“Yeah, you have to think the automatic fire is coming from the soldiers. The rest of it, though-that’s got to be zombies.”
“Who are you and what did you do with the country boy?”
Adan laughed. “I’m a quick study. This could get complicated if the zombies have guns. Even if they didn’t, you had it about right-we’d basically have to walk right into the middle of them for me to use that spell. Maybe we should try to think of a smarter plan.”
I nodded. “Let’s move in a little closer and scout it out.” When we crossed Palmetto, we could see the loft building that had been the soldiers’ objective up ahead. The produce warehouse was still out of sight. The noise had grown to a dull, persistent roar and the sharp bursts of gunfire followed one after the other. I’d been around gunfire plenty of times, even automatic weapons fire, but it hadn’t sounded anything like this. I might have called myself a soldier, but I’d never been in a war zone.
I flipped my head up at a large, white stucco warehouse and we levitated to the roof. We moved carefully and quietly to the edge and looked out at the vast horde of zombies that surrounded the produce warehouse across the street.
There were a hell of a lot more than five hundred of them.
Either the bean-sidhe were wrong, or Chavez’s map was wrong, or the dead had gotten some reinforcements of their own.
“The Zed Sea,” said Adan.
I glanced at him. “That’s not bad,” I said. “You’re usually as funny as a bunion, but you show flashes of real talent. The Dead Sea would have been pretty solid, but you bumped it up a notch when you went wi
th Zed Sea.”
“Better Zed than Dead,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah, you’re good.”
“What’s red and white and-
“No, see, you got to know when to stop. Be patient, you’re learning.”
Adan grinned and then his face hardened as he looked down at the horde surrounding the produce warehouse. “What do you think?”
The back wall of the building was a featureless expanse of red brick, but still there was a solid ring of the dead around it, at least twenty deep. The zombies in front were clawing at the brick, as if they could tunnel through the wall. The west wall had two large, barred windows. The glass was broken out and soldiers were firing through the bars. They’d thinned out the front ranks on that side, but they were less effective than I might have expected. I guessed it was hard to get a clean head-shot with a limited field of fire and a zombie horde surging around them, close enough to reach out and touch.
“They can’t get to us up here,” I said. “Let’s just take them out. Use fire if you’ve got it-it’ll spread. Keep it away from the windows.”
Adan nodded and stretched out his hands toward the zombies, fingers spread. “Bladhm,” he said, and a fiery current jetted forth and spilled across the undead mob.
“Do you want the flamethrower spell?” I said, glancing sideways at him. Then I spun up a fireball and hurled it down at the massed zombies.
The initial damage was impressive, but the reaction wasn’t what I’d been expecting. The zombies ran for cover. I’d seen enough zombies running around trying to eat people, it was hard to remember they weren’t mindless monsters. Fortunately, while they had the right idea, tactically speaking, their execution was no better than any other human mob. They all tried to run in different directions and whole waves of them went down under the panicked feet of their comrades. Burning zombies unselfishly shared with their fellows that had escaped the attack, and fire spread through the desiccated bodies like rumors on a Hollywood set.
“Across the street!” a lone voice shouted. “On the roof of the white building! Get them!” Armed zombies scattered throughout the crowd opened fire and bullets chipped stucco off our building’s facade, forcing us back from the edge.
“Smart zombies with guns,” I said. “No fair.” We heard breaking glass from below as zombies smashed their way into our warehouse.
Adan looked around the roof. “They’re not that smart,” he said. “There’s no internal stairway up here. The access ladders are the only way they’re going to get at us.”
“How long will it take them to figure that out?”
“Probably not very long. If we want to stay here, we’ll have to defend the ladders. There are six of them.”
“I’m not sure what good it does to stay here, anyway. The zombies shifted around to the front and sides of the building where we can’t hit them.”
“We need a plan,” Adan said.
“Yeah.”
“Any ideas?”
“I was really hoping your shockwave thing would work. I don’t have any spells designed to clear out several hundred zombies.”
“We could go down and fight them on the street.”
“There’s too many, Adan. I don’t know how good your defenses are, but they’ll eventually take me down. If I don’t get shot, first.”
“Maybe we need help.”
“We are the help, Adan.”
“Okay, let’s think it through. We don’t have to drop all the zombies. We just have to get Lowell and his troops out of there.”
“How are we supposed to do that? We can’t even get to the door. It would be like trying to fight our way through a mosh pit to the front of the stage. Except this mosh pit will try to eat us.”
“Yeah, and the soldiers might shoot us accidentally.”
“We need a distraction,” I said.
“That could work. What did you have in mind? Zed’s not interested in much besides eating.”
“Yeah, I’ll be the distraction. I’ll go down there and let them get a good whiff of me, then I’ll take off and they’ll chase me. You get the soldiers out of there.”
“I should be the distraction,” Adan said. “I have the blast spell if the zombies get too close, and Lowell doesn’t really know me.”
I didn’t like it, but he had a point. I nodded. “Okay,” I said, “you’re the bait. Be safe, Adan.”
He grinned and put his arm around me, pulling me to him. He leaned in and kissed me softly on the mouth.
“Every guy wants to be the hero,” he said, and then released me. I wanted to say something-anything-but my vocal cords were momentarily paralyzed. Adan drew his sword and spun his jump spell, launching from the rooftop, across the street and onto the roof of the produce warehouse.
I smelled apples and cinnamon, and tasted it on my tongue. “What the fuck just happened?” I whispered. I looked down at myself with the fairy sight, but if there was any glamour on me it was the hormonal kind. My heart was pounding in my chest and my body felt light, like my levitate spell wanted to pick me up and lift me into the air.
Adan looked back, grinned and raised his sword, then raced for the front of the building where the zombie horde waited below, howling for blood and flesh. He jumped again when he reached the edge and disappeared out of sight. The noise intensified to an ear-grinding screech when he hit the street in the middle of the massed zombies.
I took deep, steady breaths and waited for my pulse to slow. Then I dug out my cell phone and called Lowell.
“What’s going on out there, Riley? Something’s got Zed all worked up.”
“That’d be Adan,” I said. He had more than zombies worked up. “He’s leading them away from the building.”
“I’ve got a man down in here. We need to get him out fast.”
“Working on it, Lowell. Once the zombies clear out, I’ll come down there and drop any stragglers. Just make sure your guys are ready to move. I don’t want to leave Adan on the hook any longer than we have to.”
“I’ve got Black Hawks circling. Once the threat is neutralized, the helos can land in the truck lot across Santa Fe. Do you and Adan need extraction?”
“No, we can handle it. We still need to thin out the Zed population a little around here once your guys are out.”
“Okay, standing by.”
“Yeah, good, and don’t shoot me when I get down there. I need my shields for the strapped zombies.”
I put the cell away and heard a scrabbling sound behind me. A zombie was climbing onto the roof from an access ladder, a black male in a red muscle shirt. He reached down and helped a girl with bright green streaks in her blond hair climb up after him. That was gentlemanly. The two of them bared their teeth and stared at me with their dead eyes. They approached slowly, warily, crouched down with their hands extended like wrestlers. Another zombie crawled up on the far side of the roof.
I didn’t want to use my levitation spell because I was pretty sure I’d draw fire if I went any higher than the level of the rooftop. “Man is born free,” I said, “but everywhere he is in chains.” Force magic whipped around the male zombie and immobilized him. I fixed the threads of magic in my mind and spun my ghost-binding spell, pulling the girl’s spirit from her body. When the corpse collapsed, I dropped the chaining spell on the man and did the same to him.
Seeing the fate of the first two, the third zombie howled and charged me as four more zombies climbed onto the roof from different ladders. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and my force spell sent the charging zombie sprawling. I spun the ghost-binding spell just as the four newcomers charged.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. It was like a small-scale reenactment of the whole zombie apocalypse-crunch all you want, we’ll make more. I backpedaled toward the western edge of the warehouse, pulling in juice as I went. “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” I said, spinning a wall of repulsive force around me. The charging zombies hit the wall and were hurled aw
ay like bowling pins. One of them went screaming over the edge of the building, arms flailing.
More zombies climbed onto the roof. One of them carried a revolver and another was toting a shotgun. I reached down for more juice and my eyes started to burn. Each one of the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up and started dancing. My heartbeat thudded in my chest, and blood and juice pumped through me like a rain-swollen river. I threw my hands out, pushing at the plane of force and sweeping it across the rooftop like a giant invisible broom. Zombies were hurled over the side and dropped to the street and sidewalk below.
Unless I wanted to make a full-time job out of knocking zombies off the roof, I needed to move. I ran to the edge of the building and spun my jump spell, retracing Adan’s path to the roof of the produce warehouse. I ran to the front of the building and looked down. The loading area was clear, but there were only freight doors along that side. I scrambled over to the east side and finally found an access door. I dropped down in front of it and knocked.
“Riley?” Lowell called from inside.
“No, pizza guy. Open the fucking door, Lowell.” The door opened and Lowell backed away, letting me in. He touched the earpiece of his headset and started barking orders. Almost immediately, I heard the sound of helicopters in the distance.
A couple dozen soldiers in black fatigues were huddled around the office and scattered through the warehouse area. Two of them were tending to a soldier lying on a makeshift pallet of tarpaulins. It looked like his left arm had been nearly torn off, and blood soaked the canvas beneath him.
“Extraction in five minutes,” Lowell called. “Fall back to my position, on the quick.” As if to emphasize his words, an assault rifle chattered from the far side of the warehouse where a team of soldiers covered the ground-floor windows.
My cell phone rang. “Zed’s moving west across the Fourth Street bridge,” Chavez said. “It’s big. There might be a thousand of them.”
“We’ve got choppers in five minutes, Chavez. Are they already on the bridge?” It had to be a quarter mile across the river and the railroad tracks. It would be close.
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