The gate slams shut behind us, sounding like a blast of thunder.
I’ve got my gun in my hands, pointed down and to the side. The last thing I need is to accidentally clip one of my coworkers. My palms are sweaty, so I try and keep a solid grip.
Buildings stretch up all around us, more than one teetering precariously to the side. The streets are choked with rubble, debris, garbage. It is dark here: no street lights, no lights behind any of the broken and boarded windows. A fire escape hangs partially attached off the side of one building nearby. It is quiet. All I can hear is our feet walking across the scattered trash and my harsh breathing.
“Contact!” a spectral voice yells up ahead, and three of the officers in front peel off up and around the corner to the left to follow. We keep moving. There are periodically alleyways, so dark I can’t see ten feet into them.
I can feel Greystone off to the right somewhere, inside one of the buildings. I don’t know what she is thinking, but I can sense flickers of emotion from her. Concentration. Worry.
A soft, slow chuckle echoes from the shadows of a ground-floor interior. It looks like some shop with knocked over shelves and broken out windows. I can’t see anyone inside.
A shotgun blast sounds out from behind us, from where the other officers went. Yells and cursing. Another blast.
More laughter, closer this time, from behind a door on our right. One of the officers in back snaps off two shots.
“Stow that!” Marsh bellows. “Save your shots.”
I can hear movement all around us now. Silhouettes move in windows up above us. Rocks come whizzing down.
Marsh stops, cups a hand beside his mouth, and shouts out, “Let us through! Send someone to the square!”
A brick comes sailing down and clips Finnegan in the side of the head. He fires a couple shots back in the general direction it came from, all the while clutching his head where he was hit. Holes blossom about a foot across in the walls where he’s shot. I can hear things moving all around us now, but I still don’t see anyone.
A gunshot claps, and one of the officers in the back goes down screaming. Part of his chest is missing. It isn’t until Marsh knocked me to the ground that I realize I was just standing there, staring at the lack of blood and wondering what was wrong.
Gunfire opens up into a full firefight, and we all scatter for cover. I’m glad I have enough wits about me that I don’t drop my gun. I dive behind a pile of rocks heaped up next to the wall of the nearest building. It’s not going to remove me from the line of sight of the tallest windows, but it’s close enough to a wall that hopefully I’m not too exposed.
I see Marsh get hit a couple times as he works his way behind a pillar under a porch. A chunk of his right shoulder goes flying from the impact of one shot. He barely grunts. The body fragments are scattering to dust on the street.
“Marsh, you OK?” I shout over the din.
He waves me off in irritation and starts firing back. Cries of anger bark out as his shots find targets inside apartment windows around us. Shards of glass and particle board are showering down around me as officers return fire.
I still haven’t seen who we’re shooting at. I would pop off a few shots, but I don’t know where to aim them.
A scuff sounds from behind me. I’m about five feet from the mouth of an alley. A little head pokes out around the corner to look at me.
“Holy crap!” I yell in surprise. I can barely make it out in the gloom, but it’s a little girl. She can’t be more than eight years old. Her stringy matted brown hair hangs down around her dirt-smeared face. Holes and stains cover her clothes.
“Sweetheart, get down!” I yell at her, but she just stares back blankly.
A chunk of brick disintegrates above her head from an errant shot, and I don’t even think. I’m up and running at her. A shot sails past my shoulder; the wind tickles the side of my head. I feel a flash of heat on my skin from how close it came.
I grab her around the waist with my arm and slide both of us behind a wrecked dumpster inside the alley. We’ve got a bit of cover now.
“Are you okay? What are you doing out here?”
I step back so I can examine her, hold her at arm’s length, and make sure she’s not injured. She smiles at me through broken teeth and bleeding gums.
And then her expression lurches into a rictus of rage; her fingers claw at my face, and she tries to bite into my arm. My armored sleeves prevent any damage. I just feel pinching from where her teeth are chomping down.
She lunges for my face, and I get my forearm up in time to hold her off. She’s flailing wildly with her hands, screaming incoherently, and her ragged nails trace lines across my cheeks where she connects. She’s kicking crazily, and even through the armor, I feel one connect with my shin.
“Sonnuva—” I can’t keep her off me, and she’s way stronger than any little girl I’ve ever encountered. A slap hits me on the side of my head, and it feels like she’s almost torn my ear off. I’m so busy trying to fend her off my face that she is able to kick me in the ankle hard enough to knock me on my ass.
She postures to pounce, and then her head disappears in a spray of bone and brain matter, the body falling on top of me. My ears are ringing from the shot at close range. Someone is shouting near me, and it takes a few seconds for sound to make sense again.
“Suck it up, Green!” Clark snarls, kicking the girl’s body off me. He and Marsh both dive behind the cover of the dumpster. The headless body is twitching, but then I see her ghost rising up from the remains. Her face is still contorted in rage, jerking to within inches of my face. She starts screaming at ear-splitting decibels, drowning out the ringing sound in my head.
Greystone appears through the wall opposite me. She looks down at the ghost child, scowls in distaste, and looks at me.
“You are OK?” she asks me. I nod, feeling lost.
“Thanks, Greystone,” Marsh says. She fades through the wall again.
“I hate these things,” Clark says. I hear snarling in the darkness further down the alley. Two more children come running around a corner, banking off the alley wall. Clark pops up from behind the dumpster and starts firing. The slugs tear through one of them, knocking holes in its body and blowing off one leg below the knee. It hits the ground face-first, looks up and slowly starts dragging itself forward. I’ve never seen so much fury in a face before.
The other kid hits Clark at full speed, and both go sprawling on the ground.
I have my gun leveled at both of them, but they’re thrashing around so much I don’t dare take a shot. Marsh reaches over, grabs the kid by the scruff of the neck, and slams it into the wall with one hand. He then immediately follows up with a fist to the kid’s face, hitting with so much force it smashes the face flat. Splinters of brick explode off the wall behind the back of the skull.
“The square. Now!” Marsh says, pushing me forward down the alley. The child’s body staggers drunkenly around, arms outstretched, flailing blindly for something to grab on to. Clark shoulder-blocks it to the ground and then follows right behind us. Ghosts of children start streaming out of the alley walls around us, howling and wailing at us, swirling in a maelstrom of rage and confusion. We run through the ghosts, trying to ignore them, and head to an intersection in the alley. Just as Marsh gets there, a pack of about a dozen kids comes running from the right. Three or four of them latch on to his legs. He grabs another by a ponytail, swings her around and chucks her down the opposite alley. I lose her in the dark, but I can hear her moving around.
“Start shooting!” Marsh yells at me. Clark doesn’t need any prompting; he’s up again and already squeezing off rounds into the pack. I don’t see what happened to the kid who tackled him.
I bring up my gun, look down the sight, but I can’t do it. If it’s some big shambling corpse, maybe no problem. But these are kids. At least, they look
like kids.
A half dozen are on Marsh now. They aren’t able to knock him over, but they’re slowing him down. My brain can’t quite wrap itself around what is happening. It looks like Marsh is playing with them. I expect to hear giggles and squeals of delight, not the screams of animals—cries of fury and anger. I can’t help but wince when I see Marsh hit one so hard its chest collapses, or when he stomps a skull flat into the ground.
Movement sounds from behind us, and I see the rest of the squad moving up the alley.
“Found some friends, Marsh?” Armstrong says, smiling as he unloads shot after shot into a boy no more than twelve, knocking him to the ground. The body looks young, but the eyes contain enough animosity – enough, I don’t know, evil—to last a lifetime.
This is a nightmare. I can’t get out of here soon enough. I hold my gun in front of me, too scared to use it, too frightened to put it away.
It doesn’t take long to scatter the kids; they go scampering back into buildings. We’re standing in a four-way intersection of alleys in between the backs of various apartment buildings. From here, there isn’t much direct line-of-sight from windows. In the distance, other officers are still exchanging gunfire.
Greystone appears at the mouth of the alley up ahead of us, and she motions us forward.
“OK,” Marsh says. I expect him to be breathing heavy, something to indicate he’s been exerting himself. Other than a few tears in his clothes, he doesn’t look any different than usual. His shoulder where I saw him get hit earlier is writhing, the skin knitting slowly together as it recovers. I shake my head in disbelief. Davenport has staple holes in his hand that are going to last for eternity, but Marsh was practically missing his entire shoulder.
“Marsh, your shoulder.”
He ignores me. “The square is up ahead to the right. We’ll run for about a block. Once we’re there, we’re safe. They won’t be able to bother us. Even they can’t break the compacts in place there.
“And you!” he says, rounding on me and pointing a stubby finger right into my chest.
“Shoot these damned things! They are not children.”
“You say that, but—”
“I told you to be careful and shoot anything you see here! I thought even you would be able to follow those instructions. Listen, I know where you come from kids are cute and cuddly. Even when they barf on you, it’s roses and rainbows. But these things aren’t children anymore. They are endless pits of venom and anger. They have been stuck in their little bodies for centuries. Any kid who sticks around after death has major issues, usually uncontrollable frenzy and anger. And it festers and rots inside them. They respect no laws; they have no boundaries. You cannot trust them. If one gets close to you, you shoot enough holes into it that the body can no longer hold itself together. Am I making myself clear?”
Tears form in the corners of my eyes. I’m not sure my voice won’t break, so I just nod my agreement. I feel sick, watching these little creatures getting shot and mangled. Rationally, I understand. Of course I do. But I can’t shake the horrified feeling that has gripped me.
I hear my companions ejecting spent bullet casings and loading new rounds into their guns. I don’t even know how to do that yet, but it’s too much information for my brain to try and process right now. We move forward as a group, running briskly out of the alley opening and down the street. Though this street looks much like the one we came in, no projectiles come at us from the windows overhead. Either they are all over on the other side, or they’ve had enough fun for one day.
“You’re going to want to see this,” Greystone announces as we reach a wrought iron fence with the gate hanging askew. I’m surprised to see that it’s a cemetery. I realize it’s the first one I’ve seen here. I guess with the dead walking around, there’s no need for places like this here. It’s not very big, around a couple acres. The fence encompasses it completely. Pathways choked with weeds wind through headstones and mausoleums inside, many toppled over or crumbling.
This must be the square Marsh was talking about; it seems like our destination. We all walk in. Despite what Marsh said about it being safe here, I notice no one is holstering their guns.
“What is it?” Marsh asks, following the ghost. She glides past rows of headstones, over around a mausoleum. She waits for us.
I’m not the first one there, so I hear their curses and mutterings before I round the corner. A body lies on the ground, sprawled spread-eagled on its back. I recognize him.
It’s Davenport. And like our four other victims, his eyes are missing, merely smoking craters. It must have happened only moments before we arrived. Even from where I stand, I already know that he’s dead.
“Hey, look at it this way, Green,” Burchard says, scowling. “No more stapling assaults for you to file.”
Chapter 19
What the hell is Davenport doing here?” I ask. Looking down at the body in this empty place, all I feel is confused. This seems so utterly random to me. It’s like showing up on the Moon and seeing my first-grade teacher there. Davenport’s corpse is staring up at the sky with empty eye sockets. Like the others, it looks like the eyes have been burned out or melted. I expect him to start laughing, sit up, and admit he’s pulling one over on me, but no matter how long I stare at him, he doesn’t move.
I turn to Greystone. She’s floating in place, not saying anything, just staring down at the body. “You told me we had a lead, Ms. Greystone. That’s why we’re here. What’s the lead?”
She glances up at me; then her face screws up in irritation. “That information wasn’t shared with me. Ask your partner.”
“But—” She’s upset about something again. I don’t want to figure it out right now. I step up to Marsh. Before I can ask him anything, though, he’s moving.
“Clark, Finnegan, guard our perimeter. Make sure none of those little bastards sneak up on us,” Marsh orders, pointing to corners of the fenced graveyard. More gunshots sound from a few streets over as the two detectives quickly run to their posts. I hear screams that keep going, like air sirens, from somewhere nearby. When you don’t have to pause for breath, I guess you can really belt those out.
“How about it, Marsh? What’s the lead that brought us here?” I ask when he takes a pause from giving orders.
“We got a letter,” Marsh scowls as he says it, like it’s a crime that words can be left on paper. “It had some details we didn’t think anyone outside the department knew. It was warded against scrying, we couldn’t figure out who sent it. So, we thought it was credible. It said to meet here. Now. If we’d known it was only Davenport, I don’t think we’d have bothered.”
Marsh looks off to the left over my shoulder. I’m about to ask something, when everyone else, almost as one, turns to look in the same direction. I spin, gun in hand, expecting some crazy new creature to be standing there looming behind me.
Nothing is there.
“What the hell?” I ask, confused. And then I hear it.
It’s a wailing so high pitched that it barely registers. If there were dogs here, they’d be freaking out right now. It sounds like wind through a field of wheat, a chorus of whispers and distant moans. I try to stare in the same direction everyone else is looking. It takes me a minute, but then I see them.
There are ghosts in the shadows of the windows overhead. The darkness of the windows behind them makes it hard to see, but they are close enough I can discern something inside. They are fuzzy, insubstantial, even for my understanding of ghosts. I can’t even determine the gender of most of them. There is a semblance of faces in their shapes, a general outline of body and head, but no specific features. In Greystone’s case, every detail is crisp and sharp; individual strands of hair, eyelashes, fingernails. If I couldn’t actually see through her, I’d expect to touch her. These things, they’re menacing shapes.
And then I notice something that makes m
y skin crawl. Some of the forms have more than one face. I can’t figure out if they are multiple shapes overlapping with each other, or if they swirl in the same mass. I can’t tell what is going on.
“Are they merged together?” I ask. I look over at Greystone. She looks nauseous and doesn’t answer me.
Kim quietly says, “They’re staying in the buildings. They might leave us alone.” He doesn’t seem like he believes it though.
Marsh shakes his head. “No. We stay here too much longer, and they’ll come at us. We’re going to have to activate the Ghostbanes. Greystone, tell the rest of your guys it’s time to go. Banes are going active in ten.”
She scowls at Marsh but doesn’t stick around to argue. She races away back towards the gate.
“You know how to activate your Ghostbane, kid?” Marsh asks me.
“I don’t even know what you’re saying.”
“I’ll make this quick. Touch your badge and clearly think ‘Activate Ghostbane.’ I think it should work for you. We’ve never tried it with a mortal before, though.”
Great. I do as he instructed. Activate Ghostbane! Activate Ghostbane! Activate Ghostbane!
Marsh looks at me, studies me a second, then shrugs. I don’t feel any different. “Guess we’ll see,” he says.
He turns to the others. “OK, let’s move out. Burchard, Meints, grab Davenport; let’s get him out of here.”
I follow Marsh as he begins to lead the group back the way we came. Marsh starts speaking to me as we go.
“You’re not in any danger from the ghosts, kid. All they can do is annoy you like a pack of bees. But you get a pack of faceless ghosts screaming in your ears and swarming around you, you can’t do anything else. Our badges can do a handful of things. This is one of them. It will repel ghosts, keep them about fifty feet away. You just might want to give Greystone warning before you do it, though.”
Marsh and Armstrong shoot at anything that moves ahead of us as we run back through the alley and out into the main street. The other two groups of officers are retreating as well, holding off any kids that might feel tempted to attack us from behind. I shiver as I see what looks like a little ten-year-old girl screeching bloody murder, trying to claw us apart. She comes running at us from behind, but she gets torn to shreds by several gunshots that rip apart huge chunks of her body. Her ghost pulls itself out of her crumbling body and continues to come at us, screaming even louder. Then she slams into an invisible force like a wall; I swear she flattens against it. She struggles, clawing at the barrier, trying to get at us, but she starts losing traction, like she’s being pulled away from us. She starts moving backward, slowly at first but gathering up speed, until she rockets away from us. I’m guessing it’s the Ghostbane at work.
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