by Marcus Sakey
Something caught her eye, a dozen feet away. Her Glock. Scooping the gun up helped. The smooth, machined weight of it made her feel grounded. Like gravity applied, when she’d never expected it not to.
Claire took a deep breath, then another. Looked around.
Somehow, she’d been thrown clear of the explosion. She’d landed on the sidewalk, probably thirty linear feet from where she’d been standing. Amazingly, she didn’t seem to have suffered so much as a sprained ankle.
Stupid of her to miss the wires. She’d been in too much of a hurry. Simon Tucks must have known that sooner or later they’d find him, and wanted to be ready to go out with a bang.
Looking around, she could see that he had succeeded.
The two-story townhouse was now a one-story pile of rubble. Bricks and broken glass and bits of furniture. The houses on either side slumped and leaned. The school across the street was still standing, though many of the windows had been blown in, the construction paper hanging in tatters.
Even at the end, he had to hurt people.
She couldn’t imagine how she’d survived, but somehow, she had. And without a mark on her.
It was over. The single man who had turned a city of millions into prisoners was dead. Brody was avenged. She was alive. It was over.
Claire hobbled out to the street. At the end, she could see a squad car rounding the corner. She leaned against the broken stump of a tree, fishing out her identification. A miracle she’d made it. But it was over. The others would be here any . . .
The squad car hadn’t moved.
There were no sirens.
No bystanders. No teachers rushing out from the school. No neighbors screaming and bleeding.
Just her . . . and something moving inside the house.
A shape uncoiling itself from a pile of rubble. Rocks and dust slid off it like it had burrowed out of the center of the earth. She imagined a monster, some pale tentacled thing.
But it was a man. A bit shy of six feet, lithe and strong. He coughed. Looked around.
No, no, no, that’s impossible, it can’t—
Simon Tucks. The sniper.
It was him, and not him. She saw in him the man whose mug shot she had looked at earlier, the man who had opened the door, the man she had shot three times through the chest.
And yet, he didn’t look the same. He was leaner. Taller. His cheekbones were sharp lines, and his eyes blazed. The rest of the world seemed blurry behind him.
He noticed Claire. “You?”
Panic tore her. It was the distillation of four-year-old fear of the monster in the closet, the one beneath the bed, the certainty that the moment her parents left the world changed into something darker and more dangerous, something that was waiting for her, something that knew her and was excited by her fear.
She snapped the Glock up and fired.
Click.
Misfire. She racked and aimed again.
Click.
The thing that looked like Simon Tucks leapt.
From forty feet away it leapt, and at the height of its arc it had to be twenty feet in the air, and then it landed in front of her, and it smiled.
One arm moved in an impossible blur, a backhanded slap, and she was the one flying.
The world was fuzzy, everything too fast, too much, too loud, the ground lurching up too hard, and she hit with a scrape that took the skin off her palms and one cheek. The gun was gone, lost somewhere. She pushed herself to her knees and then burning agony seized her skull, every inch of it on fire and the world shifted and she realized that she was being hoisted up by her hair, Jesus God that hurt, she kicked, flailed, screamed, reached for his arm and got it, pulled up enough to take some of the pain off, and realized she hung two feet off the ground, and this new Simon that could lift her with one arm stared at her with eyes that had in them a thousand deaths, that had lived for centuries, and a mouth that was beautiful and cruel, and he said, “I’m not scared.” There was something like awe in his voice. “I’m not scared anymore.”
The blow hit her stomach like a machine-driven piston, a force beyond human strength, and her breath fled and her consciousness nearly followed, and her grip failed so that she hung by her hair, and the thing shook her like a cat with a toy, there was the ripping of scalp coming loose, and then it threw her, by her hair, and again the world lost focus and this time she welcomed it, anything to end this, the concrete racing to embrace her, and when she landed the blur took everything.
Stand up, she told herself, stand up and run run run do it now
The thing, this new Simon, stalked toward her. “I’ll never be scared again. It doesn’t hurt anymore.” He leaned over to pluck a chunk of masonry from the ground with the same effort it would have taken her to lift a fallen dinner fork.
Claire had never really prayed before. She’d wished for things. Wanted things. Had occasionally asked a vague and nameless force for them. But never truly prayed. Never poured all her thoughts and desires and hopes and fears into a single desperate cry to something bigger than her. Please. Please, I need help.
The sniper stopped. Fifteen feet away and victorious. Staring at something.
She needed to know what. Managed to turn her head to look where he was looking. Expecting Jesus, or an angel, or love incarnate come to save her. Something a thousand feet tall and blasting light.
But all she could see were four figures. Shadowy, her vision or the dust, she couldn’t say. A woman raising a sword. A man clutching a fireman’s axe. A biker with a knife in each hand. And . . .
Will Brody.
The darkness rushed toward her, and Claire welcomed it.
TWENTY-SIX
Edmund flourished.
For centuries he had subsisted on the souls of the dead. He had wandered his new country from one end to the other. Watched cities rise with no one to build them. Hunted for hunger and hunted for power. He had believed himself at the limits of strength, and been content to live that way. Like the lions he had seen in a dead slave’s memories.
Now that he rode the living, drove them to madness and murder, he discovered he had only reached the threshold. No longer was his sustenance a matter of chance encounter. Now he could make the living deliver themselves to him.
Restless of mind, he began to experiment. To toy with mortals like a child tearing apart dolls. He stalked the cities, seeking the desperate and the lost, the lonely, the broken. Whispering to them. Spinning webs of darkness. Tending misery like a farmer in his fields.
At his urging, the brokenhearted threw themselves from cliffs, the bereft cut veins in warm water, the desolate stood above sleeping family members with hammer in hand.
Power flowed like rain, and he came to understand that power was all. The intricate arrangements of people—personality, friendship, love, law, order—were nothing but trappings to disguise that fact.
Life was power, and it could be collected. He stockpiled like a sultan, until his treasury overflowed with glittering wealth.
Soon he saw that there were worlds beyond life and its pale echo. Worlds beyond counting, growing ever darker. Like a rope left too long in the water; tight-knit at one end, it softened and unraveled and gave way to rot.
As he had once walked America, now he walked between those worlds, from end to end. From the shining edge of life, bright and noisy, to the faded fields where shades stood aimless and drained. Waiting for nothingness. He could tear them like old paper, the essence of them crumbling away in his hands.
For his own amusement, he chose a living woman and rode her through the worlds, haunting her like the Furies. At his urging she lit her house aflame with her children inside. When she dropped from the gallows, he was waiting on the other side, and after he had fed upon her, he pursued her into the next world, and the next. He ate her soul in small bites, careful to leave just enough of her to continue. When he had hollowed her out, and she stood on the edge of the merciful abyss, he bled some of his power into her, returning color to
her world and strength to her body, only to abandon her with the knowledge of all she had done and all that had been done to her. There had been a perfection to her screams.
Edmund flourished. And when his power had grown beyond what he’d ever believed possible, he began to see the others.
First at a distance. Manifestations of energy he could barely comprehend, like hurricanes on the horizon. For centuries he had thought himself unique, the apex predator of a great plain dotted with prey.
Now he understood that he had never been alone. Nor was he the strongest.
They were few and fearsome, older than he. In steaming jungles, Axayacatl had stood astride temples and cut the throats of babes. The tattooed sailor Magnus had begun to tack through the tides of power a thousand years ago. The Comanche had been a war leader, ferocious astride his mount, terrible in his retribution. On the other side of the veil he had skinned prisoners alive and raped children before their parents’ eyes. When they met on a windswept plain near the end of the worlds, the man’s gaze had glowed like red coal, and for the first time in centuries, Edmund remembered fear.
They moved as he did, traversing the worlds, spreading the tendrils of their power from the wellspring of life to the brink of nothingness. They cultivated horrors in the living world and reaped the benefit in the afterlife. They had walked the same path and gathered their strength the same way, and he could feel their hunger. They sensed his power, knew it less than their own, and licked their lips.
It was Isabella who made him understand why they did not fall upon him and plunder what he had spent centuries building.
In appearance she was of middling age, white haired and handsome. But that meant nothing, just as the teenaged body he inhabited was no measure of him. She crackled like a summer storm. He who had fancied himself at the limits of power now felt a pale boy again, thin and weak. She could wipe him from all the worlds.
But, he realized, not without risk. Like animals battling for dominance, even a victory could be too costly. Any wound he dealt—and he would not go quiet—would weaken her. Which would make her prey for the others.
Thus the risen gods existed in a state of constant wariness. Never a risk. Never a rash move. Ready always to feed upon their kin. Trust was weakness. Time meant nothing. Only power mattered.
But Isabella had ideas.
As her dress slipped from her milky shoulders, she told him she had been watching him. He was young, and his perspective was fresh. The restlessness of his mind shone against the complacency of the others. Perhaps, she said, as she straddled him, engulfed him in her searing heat, they could complement each other. Grow together into something beyond all the others.
It wasn’t bodies coupling, not really. They transcended the physical. They manifested their own realities. Their will became their world. They were gods, and their sex was lightning across bleak skies, the rumblings of waking volcanoes.
Together they danced in disaster. They seeded madness and destruction. Fed bloody ideas to those who made bloody reality. Raised up monsters and fed on their offerings, and when the monsters fell, they fed upon them too.
And Edmund flourished.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Someone was moaning, very softly.
It was a moment before she realized it was her.
She wasn’t awake and she wasn’t asleep. Something wet and soft brushed at her face. It was gentle but insistent, moving methodically. Claire tried to open her eyes. They seemed stuck, the only thing coming through a trickle of hazy grey light.
“Shhh,” came a voice. She knew it. Trusted it.
Tired, so tired—
There was a feeling almost like falling.
Brody wrung out the washcloth. The water in the steel mixing bowl was pale pink. He poured another splash from the bottle and went back to work, scrubbing as softly as he could at the crusted blood around her eye. The damage was superficial, though it must have hurt like hell. Her knees looked like she’d fallen off a motorcycle. There were clumps of hair and scalp missing, the remnants bloody and raw. He’d had to pack her nose with gauze to staunch the bleeding.
He worked carefully, cleaning the wounds, dabbing away the dirt and dried blood, the touch of the cloth making her unconscious body twitch. On the way home they’d raided a Walgreens, Lucy keeping watch as Kyle grabbed bandages and bottled water, and Sonny clambered over the pharmacy counter for Tylenol-3. Brody had stood in the dim store holding Claire like a child, her weight nothing against the new power of his muscles, his mind whirling.
Claire was here.
Claire was dead.
The next time she opened her eyes, they seemed to work better. The light was still grey and hazy, and one eye felt thick and swollen.
Her brain was in a compression device squeezing from all sides at once. Like a blood pressure cuff inside her skull. Her mouth was gummy.
Claire blinked. A surface swam into focus, eight feet above. Ceiling. She was lying down. Somewhere soft, a bed, blankets pulled to her chin.
She tried to turn and immediately regretted it. Her neck was so sore it seemed frozen in place, and the movement spilled agony through her head, like the pain was an overfilled glass.
“Easy.”
It was impossible. But she knew that voice. “Will?”
Abruptly he was in her sight, leaning down, his features carved with worry. He must have been sitting in a chair beside her. Jeans and a sweatshirt, a scruff on his cheeks, a ripe smell like he’d been working out. “I’m here.”
“What—where—”
“Easy, okay? Take it easy. I promise I’ll explain.” He made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “Or do my best. But first I want to make sure you’re alright. Can you focus on my finger?”
He ran her through basic triage, checking for a concussion, squeezing her arms, her legs, her ribs, asking if they hurt.
She thought, Your dead lover is touching your body to see if you’ve broken anything.
He pressed some pills in her palm. “Take these.”
Claire struggled to sit. Brody put a hand behind her back to help, then held a bottle of water to her lips. The pills stuck to her tongue, but the water, oh sweet Jesus, the water. She swallowed the pills and kept going, deep gulps, rivulets spilling down her chin. When she was done she coughed, then wiped at her mouth with tender fingers.
Finally, she said, “Are you real?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t a dream.”
“No,” he said. There were dark circles under his eyes, and an air of sadness. “I’m sorry. I let you down.”
“Huh?”
“You shouldn’t be here. I tried to . . .” He made an open gesture with his hands and trailed off.
She planted her hands, scooched back against the headboard. Pain splashed over her like scalding water. She closed her eyes and waited for it to ebb. Then blinked and took in the room. Stylish, impersonal. A hotel. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can you please . . . what’s happening?”
“I knew you’d be there, and I wanted to help. They said I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t be able to reach you, but I had to try. I felt you both get here, and somehow he’d already become an Eater. I guess he kind’ve was already; eighteen murders, all that pain, all that panic. Anyway, it’s good we were there. He saw us, and maybe it was that there were four of us, or that Sonny and I have both fed, but he bolted.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
Brody rubbed at his temples and gave a wry laugh. “That probably didn’t make a lot of sense. Okay.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll explain. It’s not easy to hear.”
He did.
It wasn’t.
For the last two days, behind the rage and frustration, behind the fear of failing to prevent another murder, behind the howling grief she didn’t dare acknowledge, there had been something else. The feeling she got watching a magic show, or a round of three-card monte. A sense—no, a certainty—that she was being played.
It was as though her life had become part of the spectacle, a confrontational comedy prank to catch her off guard. Ah-ha! she imagined the host saying. Gotcha! Claire McCoy, FBI agent, lawyer, rational woman, you have begun to listen to voices from beyond!
How else to say it? Everything, beginning with the dream that wasn’t a dream, all the way through finding Tucks in the database, had felt like the setup to a scam. A trick. It felt that way still.
But she had killed Simon Tucks, only to see him reborn. She had watched him leap forty feet to hoist her one armed. And as tired and funky as Will was right now, he looked a great deal better than he had the last time she’d seen him, on the table at the morgue.
Could you still call it a trick when the magic turned out to be real?
“I think I’ve got it,” she said. “It makes sense, sort of. Entropy always increases, but not like flipping a switch. And this is life we’re talking about. We don’t really understand life at all. What it means, what it is, even how it began. ‘Umm, well, there were amino acids and then maybe . . . lightning?’ Physics tells us things fall apart, but life is the opposite of that. Life grows, spreads, changes. It’s like the reverse of entropy. So if life is the alpha, and nothingness is the omega, then why shouldn’t there be stages in between? I bet there are more stages than this one. Other echoes, growing fainter.”
Brody gaped.
He’d been blown up, been hunted, had witnessed impossible feats, killed a woman and then lived her story, wandered an abandoned city, joined a group of post-apocalyptic humanitarians living out of a luxury hotel, dreamed true events, and arrived just in time to see the man who had murdered him attacking the woman he loved. He’d have thought that he was beyond surprise.
And yet. Claire’s face was bruised, her hair matted with blood, gauze up her nostrils. He’d just told her that she was dead. And instead of going to pieces, instead of doubting and arguing, she’d simply begun to rebuild her worldview.