“Oh?”
Dekalb nodded, his absurd joint bobbing in his mouth. “Yeah. Your teachers in med school. They forgot to tell you that formalin is highly flammable.” The match struck and lit with a tiny hiss. Dekalb snapped it away from himself in a fluttering arc that dropped it right into Gary’s bathtub.
Chapter Seventeen
The flammable liquid in Gary’s bathtub ignited all at once with a great FFFHWOOMPing noise as all the air in the room was sucked into the conflagration. A fireball of incredible light and heat shot upward through the open ceiling while everything in the room tried to catch fire at once. I raised my arms to protect my face as light and heat roared out at me as I tried to catch my breath. My feet left the floor and everything turned over on me and I could feel the hair on my forearms curl and singe. I lowered my arms and found myself on my back.
Painfully I sat up until I could see Gary again. He had become a pillar of molten flame. His enormous overstuffed body shook convulsively as burning fat seeped from his broken skin and dribbled down his limbs like candle wax.
As I stared—and believe me, I was staring, there was a brutal hypnotic quality about the horror before me that would not let me go—he struggled to recover himself, to regain control of his body. The pain… I can’t describe the pain he felt. No one could, no one living. Human beings don’t ever experience being burned to death, not the same way Gary did. Our brains can’t take the overwhelming stimulus. We black out and are spared the worst of the misery.
The dead don’t sleep. They don’t faint, either. Gary was dying in the most excruciating way possible but he was not allowed the mercy of unconsciousness. I could see him trying to regain control of his rebel body, to fight through the pain. His hands flexed, his arms came down. He was trying to grab something. Anything. Me.
I barely rolled out of the way as a massive burning arm slammed down on the flagstones beside me. I could feel the heat coming off of Gary, I could feel the super-heated air displaced by his strike. My feet pushed hard to get underneath me, my arms flexed to lift me off the ground. If I didn’t get up to a standing posture in the next second I was doomed.
Gary swung around, his arms extended like clubs, the light they gave off dazzling me as I slipped just under his grasp and came up with my back against the wall. He pulled back an arm and tried to punch me with an enormous burning fist but I managed to dodge. The punch collided with the wall and shattered the bricks there.
I had a moment of safety. Gary was blind—the fire had turned his eyeballs to cooked blobs of jelly. He cast about, this way and that trying to find me in his personal darkness. I decided not to give him the chance.
I turned and ran and slipped into a corridor leading out of the tub room—and found myself face to face with a dead man in scorched denim overalls. I had forgotten about Gary’s personal guards. This one didn’t seem pleased at all by what I’d done to his master. His broken hands grabbed at my shirt and his mouth came open, his teeth angling for my shoulder. I reared back, trying to break his grip but it was no use—he’d gotten his index finger tangled in one of my belt loops. The best strategy I could think of was to knock him into Gary’s bathtub, hopefully setting him alight, but if I had tried that I would have been pulled in right after him.
The dead man’s jaw stretched open wide, preparing for the bite, when something truly surprising happened. Whatever animating spark, whatever life force I could find in Overalls’ eyes (and there wasn’t much) drained out of him. His eyes rolled back in his head and his knees buckled. Lifeless, twice dead, he slid down beside me and nearly yanked me off my feet.
A dead woman with cornrows in her hair appeared to replace him but she dropped dead before she could even touch me. Good thing. I was still busy trying to untangle Overalls from my belt loop.
I got free and ran—just ran as fast as I could, with no idea where I was going. I came to the bottom of a flight of stairs and tried to remember whether the dead had dragged me down or up when they took me out of the pumphouse. I was still standing there in indecision, desperate to get out of the dark fortress, when I heard footsteps from above coming toward me. Two sets of footsteps. One slow, measured and rhythmic, the other jumbled and chaotic as if someone with no coordination at all was trying to keep pace. I’d heard footsteps like that before, in the hospital in the meatpacking district. That had not ended well.
There was no place to hide and I had no weapons. I would have died, no question, if the creatures coming down the stairs had wanted to take my life. Lucky for me they didn’t.
A mummy with a blue ceramic pendant dangling from his neck appeared out of the gloom. She—I could see rough angular shapes like breasts and hips under her tangled linen wrappings—lead one of the dead behind her, a man with no nose. Just a gaping red hole in the middle of his face.
Three steps above me they stopped in unison, in a way that suggested she was in control of the dead man. She placed her hands on opposite sides of his head and pressed hard as she leaned her forehead against his. The dead man made a strange dry sucking noise, raspy and painful-sounding, that had to be him drawing breath in through his wound. When he spoke it was clear to me somehow that it was not his own voice I heard but that of someone else, speaking through him.
You should go now, she told me. He’s not so much in his right mind anymore, our Gary. He can’t hold his end up, if you catch me right. This place’ll be crawling with the dead anytime now. I’m guessing you don’t want to be here then.
I licked my lips. “Well, yeah,” I said.
Come with me then, lad. I’ll show you the way out, she said, and stepped past me, dragging her pet dead man with his head under her arm. She moved quickly, far more quickly than any of the dead I’d seen so far, and it was difficult to keep up in some of the narrower passages we had to crawl through. I must have run in exactly the wrong direction when I left Gary’s tub room. If it wasn’t for my Egyptian guide I would never have found my way out.
We emerged eventually into bright daylight and fresh air. I didn’t realize until I got some clean air into my lungs just how much soot I had inhaled. Gary’s fortress was burning—the plume of smoke trailing from the top of his tower was shot through with sparks. I didn’t care too much about that. There was no point in going back inside.
I did care about the fact that the mummy had brought me out onto a lawn of scruffy-looking plants surrounded by quaint brick houses. Gary’s stockyards, where the prisoners lived. I called out Marisol’s name until I started coughing, my scorched esophagus protesting vigorously against any further speech.
Doors and windows opened in the houses and terrified faces looked out at me. As I stood there wondering what to say to these people Marisol came running up to me with a chipped tea cup. It was full of water that I gulped down with gratitude.
Marisol gave the mummy one quick glance and got over any surprise she might have felt at the Egyptian woman’s presence. I suppose she must have seen lots of dead people during her time of imprisonment.
“Where’s Jack?” Marisol asked.
Jack. Sure. Jack, who as far as I knew was at that moment hanging upside down by one foot in Gary’s tub room. Dead. Hungry. Unable to get down. “He didn’t make it,” I told her. No point in going into the details.
She slapped me hard across my cheek.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down hard on the patchy grass.
“That’s for getting him killed. Now. What the hell is going on? Is Gary dead? Please tell me that Gary is dead.”
I nodded.
“Good. What’s the plan?”
I thought about that for a while before answering. There had been a plan—then the plan fell apart. Except now maybe it might still work. “We have a helicopter coming. That fire should be all the signal our pilot needs—he’ll be here in ten minutes. Then we’ll get you out of here. There’s one problem, though.”
“There’s only one problem?” Marisol asked. “That makes this the best day ever!”
Marisol bit her lip so hard it bled. I could see the blood. Then she nodded and grabbed me by one ear. She pulled hard and I could do nothing but follow her, protesting madly.
She took me all the way past one of the houses before releasing me. I stared at her, truly pissed off—I’d just risked everything to save her from Gary, after all. Then I looked up and saw what she was trying to communicate to me.
There was a fifteen foot wide gap in the wall—a place where Gary hadn’t quite finished his construction job. There were tidy piles of bricks lying around, ready to be put in place, but no work crew around to finish the task.
Meanwhile on the other side of that wall were perhaps a million dead people. A million dead people who hadn’t eaten in days.
Chapter Eighteen
The dead don’t run. They hobble. They limp. Some of them crawl. The faster ones trample those with fractured or missing legs. The stronger amongst them push the weaker to the side.
They make no noise when they walk, no noise at all.
They came at us like a wave, a wave of limbs and contorted faces, eyes wide, clouded and vacant, hands, fingers coming at us like the foam on the top of a breaker, fingers, claws, nails. Visually they were hard to look at, their details hard to discern, one dead thing difficult to tell from another. Their mouths were open, every one of them. They were too human and dispassionate to see as a herd of panicked animals, too animalistic and insatiable to think of as a crowd of people. They all wanted one thing, which was us.
When a mob is coming for you there is no emotion except fear.
There was one of them—a woman in a dress that had been soiled and stained with blood and even burned, it looked like—a woman who was faster than the others. She strode boldly ahead of them and as she got close we saw there was no skin on her face or neck, just the twanging elastic bands of her facial muscles that snagged on her vicious-looking exposed teeth. Her eyes were dark pits under a thick gel of clotted blood like cold spaghetti sauce. Her hands reached for us, the fingers clenching again and again, her hair flowed out behind her in great tangled ropes.
Marisol picked up a broken piece of brick. She squeezed it in her hand a couple of times and then with a little yell, “Hyah!” she flung it as hard as she could at the dead woman’s face. It struck her square in the forehead, in the exposed skull. The dead woman collapsed into a heap, her head like broken pottery.
It broke the fear, a little. Enough.
Marisol and I began to grab bricks and shove them down in the dirt, trying to close the hole in the few minutes we had before the dead arrived. It was pointless busywork, of course, but it was better than panicking. “Marisol—go get—the rest—to help,” I gasped, between bricks. She nodded at me and turned around to head to the houses behind us. She didn’t get any further than a step or two, though. When I saw why I dropped the brick I was holding.
The mummy was there—the one who lead me out of the fortress. She held the dead man with no nose on her lap like a mother tending a sick child.
“What do you want?” I demanded. “What are you?”
The voice that spoke to me gurgled out of the dead man’s throat, an affectless growl that belonged to neither him nor the mummy who clutched him. It belonged to Mael, of course, Gary’s teacher, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. He hardly bothered to introduce himself. What am I? Just bits and pieces, is all, odds and orts and not enough of them to add up. I’m no harm to you. Quite powerless on my own. Then again, I might be a help.
I stared into the dead man’s eyes. “Listen, I don’t have time for this.” I gestured for Marisol to get the others, to keep filling in the hole. She ignored my waving hand and stared at the mummy.
I do. I’ve all the time in the world, lad. More time than I want, to be frank. I have a certain accommodation with the fine lady of Egypt you see here. Her and her mates. Now I can’t lift a finger to aid you, seeing as I haven’t any. I’m fully bodiless right now, to the extent I had to borrow this poor bloke’s mouth. She has a real talent for knocking heads, though. Are you interested in hearing more, lad, or should I piss off and leave you to your bricklaying?
I had seen how strong the mummies were. How many of them could there be, though? Hardly enough to take on the crowd of dead people outside the wall. They might slow the walking corpses down. It might be enough.
Still. I’d come this far by knowing not to trust the dead. “You obviously want something in return. Help us and we’ll talk about it.”
Marisol kicked me in the shin. “He means he’ll do whatever you ask.” She stared at me and mouthed the words “hey, asshole”. Then she jerked her head in the direction of the dead mob, maybe five minutes away from us at their current speed.
I guess she had a point.
The dead man smiled. It’s nothing you’ll mind doing. It’s just finishing what you started. I’m a two time loser, friend. I sacrificed myself to save the world and I failed at dying. I tried to oversee the end of the world but I was no good at being dead. What comes after that? What’s more important than the end of the world, I’d like to know. There’s got to be something for me still, because I’m not allowed to just die. Do you ken it now? I’ve been shivered down to fragments of what I was. I can’t rest until they’re reunited. And I think you know who’s holding the best of me.
“No—I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I confessed.
The dead man’s eyes rolled in their sockets. One of them got stuck showing only white. Gary, you oaf! Finish him off! Until he’s well and truly dead I’ll never sleep easy! He ate me—bit into my head like a melon, and now he’s got half my soul in his belly. Free me and I’ll save all your friends.
“Gary’s still alive?” I asked.
“You said he was dead,” Marisol insisted. Well, I had said that. I’d believed it, too. I shrugged.
I’d set him on fire. Burned him alive, or undead, or whatever. Then again I’d also seen him take a bullet in the head and he’d come back from that.
I glanced over at Gary’s fortress. It was still smoking, though I couldn’t see any more sparks shooting out of its top. I was unarmed and already exhausted. If I didn’t do this, though, he would just come back. Over and over again, forever, until everyone I knew and loved and cared about was dead. Including myself.
“Don’t wait for me if I don’t come back out in time,” I told Marisol.
“Okay,” she replied.
Just as I began to move the mummy punched the dead man so hard in the face that his head collapsed. I might have shrieked a little to see that. The mummy ignored me. I guess my conversation with the ghost was over. She climbed over our pathetic attempts to fill the hole in the wall to stand outside, her arms crossed, waiting for the dead to come. From inside the fortress other mummies emerged—maybe a dozen of them in total. They moved far more quickly than the dead ought to. I gave them a wide berth on my way back inside.
Once inside the fortress it wasn’t hard to find Gary’s tub room. I just followed the smell of overdone bacon. Smoke filled the open space at the center of the tower, an oily, nasty fuming smoke that smudged my clothes where it touched me. Everything in the big room was covered in a thin film of fatty soot. Human beings didn’t belong in a place like that but I did, I had to be there. I stepped closer and peered into the gloom of the empty bathtub. The bricks were spalled by the intense heat of the fire, some of them pulverized by the blast. A pool of molten fat in the center of the tub still bubbled and flickered wit
h tiny flames.
What was left of Gary leaned up against the rim, one sagging shoulder pressed hard against the bricks. Gary’s legs were nothing but scorched sticks of bone that stuck out from the charred mass of his abdomen. They looked like the legs of a stork, perhaps. Something of his torso remained and his arms, club-like appendages that were curled across his chest. His head was still smoldering. It had sustained less damage than the rest of him—the one part of his body that hadn’t been made mostly of combustible fat. His eyes were gone, as well as his ears and nose, but I could sense somehow he was still in there.
“Dekalb,” he coughed. “Come to gloat?” His voice was nothing but a dry rasp.
“Not exactly.”
“Come closer. I’m glad for the company in my last couple of minutes, I guess. Come on. I don’t bite. Not anymore.”
I figured I could handle him now by myself. The voice—the ghost, or whatever it had been—had told me Gary could no longer control the undead. It would just be the two of us. At least, that’s what I was thinking when I stepped closer to the tub. Then I heard a rattling noise like a length of chain being dropped from a height. Exactly like that, in fact. Jack must have climbed up his own chain—then laid in wait, in ambush, for somebody, anybody, to walk directly underneath him.
He was on my back, his legs wrapped around my waist, his teeth in my neck. His fingers grabbed at my face, one of them sinking into my left nostril and tearing, ripping at the flesh there. I shook back and forth, desperately trying to dislodge him as warm blood ran down my already-stained shirt. I heaved backward, unable to catch my breath, my body still stunned by the force of impact. No, I thought. No. I’d come so far, so far without getting badly injured, without being killed—
“Sucker,” Gary chortled, without lifting his head.
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