Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  “That’s twice Reve Azrael tried to kill me,” Gabrielle said. “And twice she’s failed.”

  Bethany put her hand on Gabrielle’s arm. “Are you okay now? How did you…?”

  Gabrielle shrugged off Bethany’s hand. Bethany backed away, confused.

  “I’m fine,” Gabrielle snapped. “But I’ll be even better once Reve Azrael is dead.”

  “That makes two of us,” I agreed.

  Bethany and Isaac both shot me a look, but I didn’t care. Maybe Gabrielle had gone off the rails, but she was right about this. It was time to put the rabid necromancer down. It was time to end this once and for all.

  “Reve Azrael has the fragment,” I said. “But she couldn’t have gotten far, not yet. We can still find her.”

  Isaac nodded. “Agreed. Fan out, search the park.”

  We split up. I started down one of the long paths that ran parallel to the water. A hundred yards ahead of me, the path took a sharp turn onto an access road that ran north out of the park. A crowd rounded the corner of the access road and lumbered down the path toward me. They moved stiffly, and as they came closer I saw pale, discolored skin, dirty clothes, and bright red blood.

  Shit. More revenants. I turned and ran back toward Castle Clinton. But it was too late. Revenants were flooding into the park everywhere. A small army of them proceeded down the central path past the battered bronze sphere. More came shambling down the winding side paths. There had to be a hundred of them, and they were all coming our way.

  Twenty-Four

  The revenants poured into the park, blocking the paths as they converged on us. The few remaining park visitors who’d braved the rainstorm stopped what they were doing and watched the revenants go by with puzzled expressions. What was wrong with them? Why weren’t they running? I looked around for Bethany, Isaac, and Gabrielle, but there was no time to regroup. I turned and bolted back the way I came, down the path toward the access road that led out of the park.

  Unfortunately, that meant running right toward the revenants. They surged forward in a tide of dead, groping flesh. These revenants moved slowly—perhaps they weren’t as fresh as the last batch—but there were a hell of a lot of them. I didn’t see any way around them. I stopped and looked back quickly. The paths were filling up. The revenants ignored the gawkers in the park, lumbering past them, staying on target. And that target was us—or, more accurately, me. I was the one Reve Azrael wanted.

  I ran toward the oncoming horde. Reve Azrael had taken my gun, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. I still had my fists. I would bash in as many rotting skulls as I needed to. But as I ran into the crowd, the revenants didn’t seem to take any notice of me. They marched right by me, moaning and growling like animals. I stopped, letting them file past. I’d never seen Reve Azrael’s revenants act this way. None of them tried to subdue me. None of them spoke. I turned in circles, watching as they flowed around me and continued on. Where the hell were they going?

  A short, male revenant walked past me, his hair a shaggy mop of unruly gray. I put a hand on the shoulder of his torn blazer and spun him toward me. His face was green and craggy, the lower half of it glistening red with blood. His eyes widened in surprise. I dropped my hand from his shoulder.

  There was no red glow inside his pupils. This wasn’t a revenant.

  The dead man squinted against the rain, brought the straw of a Gray’s Papaya cup to his lips, and took a sip. “Dude, where’s your makeup?” he asked.

  I frowned at him. “What?”

  “Your makeup,” he repeated. “Aren’t you here for the zombie walk?”

  “Zombie … walk?” I asked, confused. I looked around. Rotting, bloody-mouthed “zombies” talked on their cell phones. Some pushed baby strollers, with the babies inside made up to look like zombies as well. A zombie Santa Claus lumbered by with a bag full of rubber limbs and heads. Behind him staggered a zombie in a “sexy nurse” costume, her ample cleavage spattered with stage blood.

  It was fake. It was all fake. How could I have been stupid enough to think these were revenants?

  The man in front of me took another sip from his Gray’s Papaya cup. I clearly saw now that it was just makeup on his face. It was starting to run a little in the rain.

  “Um, it’s a flash mob in honor of Halloween?” he said. I still didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He sighed in annoyance. “You should check out this new thing they call the Internet sometime.”

  He walked off, dragging one leg behind him in the way he assumed the living dead moved. If only he knew how wrong he was.

  I started pushing my way through the zombie walk, but it was going to be next to impossible to find Reve Azrael in this crowd. Battery Park was twenty-five acres, the largest public open space in downtown Manhattan. That left a lot of places to hide and a lot of fake zombies to blend in with. And that was if she was even still here. For all I knew, she’d already left the park. If she had, we’d never find her. She could disappear down the side streets, vanish into the subway tunnels or sewer system and be untraceable.

  I kept moving, trying to see past the zombie walkers or over their heads. Some of them were getting a little too into it, snarling at me, pawing at me, gnashing their teeth. From the corner of my eye I thought I saw a truly rotting face, its eyes burning with red light, but when I turned there were only more zombie walkers in makeup and costumes.

  “They’re out to get you,” a voice rasped, close to my ear. “There’s demons closing in on every side.”

  I spun around, ready to defend myself, but the voice only belonged to another zombie walker. This one was wearing a red-and-black leather jacket and matching red leather pants. He wasn’t talking to me. He was singing, in what he thought was a suitably zombielike voice, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

  I had to get a grip. I would never find Reve Azrael if I kept letting myself get distracted by these idiots. I continued to wade against the tide of zombie walkers until I managed to break free of the crowd. I found myself in the open space of Battery Park’s World War II memorial. Standing between the two rows of massive, granite pylons that stood like gravestones leading down the waterfront, I tried to gather my thoughts.

  None of us knew where Reve Azrael had gone. None of us knew how many revenants she’d left behind. The zombie walk was a perfect distraction, slowing us down and breaking our focus. I was tempted to think she’d planned it this way, but Reve Azrael didn’t give a damn about flash mobs or the Internet or any of that. She only wanted one thing. To turn every last New Yorker into a revenant and rule over a city of the dead.

  So what did she want with the fragment? Summoning demons wasn’t her style. Then again, Nahash-Dred, the Destroyer of Worlds, would certainly leave her a lot of dead bodies to play with.

  Movement at the entrance to the World War II memorial caught my eye, where a huge bronze eagle stood atop a polished, black granite pedestal. I thought I saw someone duck behind it—a muscular, bald man, the right half of his face mushy like oatmeal. Had I seen glowing red eyes? Was he a revenant, or just another zombie walker? I didn’t know, but my nerves had me on high alert. I moved toward the eagle, wishing I still had my gun. I turned the corner of the pedestal. No one was there.

  More zombie walkers limped past, growling and pretending to grab at me. These damn fools were driving me crazy. If they didn’t stop soon I was going to deck someone.

  I kept moving through them like a salmon swimming upstream. Finally, I reached the access road. I continued up it until I exited the park. I was on State Street, a busy road that wrapped around Battery Park and became Water Street where it ran parallel to the East River. The last of the zombie walkers were filing into the park now, leaving amused pedestrians on the sidewalks laughing and murmuring to each other. Shielding my eyes from the rain, I looked up and down State Street but didn’t see Reve Azrael. Damn. She could be anywhere by now.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Isaac.

  “Do you hav
e her?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “What about the others?”

  “Nothing. This flash mob isn’t making it any easier,” he said. “I’ve got Gabrielle in the sky, searching from above, but so far she hasn’t spotted Reve Azrael anywhere.”

  “She’s probably long gone,” I said.

  My neck prickled. Someone was watching me. I turned around. The muscular, balding man stood behind me, his eyes glowing red in his half-oatmeal face. His fist connected with my chin in a powerful punch. I reeled backward, losing my grip on the phone. I heard Isaac call my name as it fell to the sidewalk. A van raced up on the street behind me. Its brakes squealed. The side door slid open before it came to a full stop, and the revenant pushed me inside. I landed flat on my back. There were others waiting in the van—bony, tattered shapes looming over me with glowing red eyes. The side and rear windows had been blocked off with cardboard. Oatmeal Face jumped into the van and slid the door closed, sealing me into the dark interior. The inside of the van reeked with the stench of rotting flesh. The engine revved, and we squealed away from the curb.

  Cold, bony hands affixed a zip tie around my wrists. Another pair of hands grabbed my shoulders and hauled me into a sitting position against the wall. I counted five revenants with me in the van: one in the driver’s seat, and four with me in the back, including Oatmeal Face. Their red eyes glowed eerily in the dim light.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  None of them answered. They just stared. She was watching me through them.

  “Not feeling talkative anymore, Reve Azrael? That’s a first.”

  The van took a corner fast and hard, the tires shrieking against the asphalt. I tipped over as we turned. A revenant missing his lower jaw reached over and pushed me upright again. The stretched, torn skin of his cheeks hung low over his neck, wobbling as the van jostled and bounced over the road.

  “You might want to slow down,” I called to the driver. She was the corpse of a young woman who had obviously been in some kind of accident. Most of the skin had been scraped from the front of her skull, leaving bits of shorn flesh stuck in her long, auburn hair. In the rearview, her wide, lidless eyes looked like marbles. “If the cops pull you over, you’re going to have a hell of a time explaining why it looks like you fell face-first into a meat grinder.”

  Like the others, she ignored me. Fine. Reve Azrael was obviously toying with me. She wanted me to wonder where I was being taken, and what she had in store for me.

  Isaac and the others would be wondering the same thing. By now, they would have figured out I’d been kidnapped. They would have found my phone on the sidewalk outside the park. It wouldn’t be a lot to go on, but it would be enough to tell them I hadn’t left voluntarily. They would try to find me, but they would almost certainly fail. They didn’t know about the van, and judging by our high speed we were already far, far away. A bystander might have seen me get taken, might even have caught the license plate, but with the zombie walk distracting everyone it was doubtful. Once they realized they were running out of time, they would stop looking for me and focus on finding the last fragment of the Codex Goetia instead. It would be the right thing to do.

  But it meant I was on my own.

  The first thing I needed to do was figure out where I was. I got up on my knees and craned my neck to look out the windshield. Through the sheets of rain on the glass, I caught a glimpse of the East River on our right and the Brooklyn skyline beyond it. Then Oatmeal Face shoved me back down again. I’d seen enough to guess we were heading north on the FDR Drive, the highway that ran along the eastern edge of Manhattan. After a few minutes, the van took an exit and turned onto a side street. We drove a small distance farther, then turned into a structure of some kind. The natural light coming through the windshield was cut off instantly, as was the sound of the rain drumming on the roof. I was in complete darkness, with only the red glow of the revenants’ eyes in the dark with me. Then the van’s headlights snapped on. Where were we? I tried to look out the windshield once again, being sure to stay seated this time so Oatmeal Face wouldn’t get grabby with me again, but I couldn’t see anything, just the twin headlights spearing out into the dark. It had to be a tunnel. I felt us descending as we drove, until we were several stories below the street. Then Eyeballs behind the wheel brought us to a stop and parked the van. The headlights went out. I was in pitch-blackness again.

  I heard Eyeballs get out of the front and come around to open the side door from the outside. Oatmeal Face, Jawless, and the other revenants dragged me out of the van by the zip tie between my hands. The sharp plastic bit painfully into my wrists.

  “All right, all right, I’m coming,” I said. “Keep your faces on.”

  No reaction from any of them. Humor was wasted on the dead.

  In the dark, all I could see were five pairs of glowing red eyes. There was no noise to tell me where I was. I smelled mud and rust and old, stagnant water. The revenants dragged me forward. I slid my feet along the ground instead of lifting them so I wouldn’t trip over anything. The ground shifted under my feet like dirt. It wasn’t wood or cement, then. That told me something about my surroundings, anyway, even if it wasn’t enough to draw any conclusions from.

  We had to be close to the FDR Drive. Maybe just a few blocks inland from it. But how far north had we come from Battery Park? Were we near the South Street Seaport, or had we gone farther? Stuyvesant Town? The United Nations Plaza? I tried to think of other landmarks, important buildings, anything that could be a clue to where I was, but I couldn’t concentrate with the revenants yanking me along. Hell, for all I knew I was completely wrong and we were under a field in the Bronx somewhere.

  I heard the sound of a door opening. A rectangle of light poured into the darkness around me. They led me through the door into a stone corridor. Eyeballs closed the door behind us again and drew a bolt across it. We were in a catacomb that looked old enough to have been built centuries ago. Thick cobwebs clung to the corners and hung from the ceiling in ghostly tendrils. Torches burned in sconces at intervals along the walls. It reminded me of the ancient, subterranean corridors leading to the Nethercity, and of the strange, sunken tower where the oracles had dwelt. Once again I got the sense that New York City had been built on top of some ancient civilization that had been abandoned and forgotten.

  We descended a spiral staircase of cracked stone. At the bottom, the revenants led me through a doorway into another torchlit catacomb. I paused, startled to see dead bodies hanging all along the walls—male, female, old, young, clothed, naked, all of them suspended a couple of feet off the floor by ropes tied around their wrists. They looked like marionettes waiting to be picked up by their puppeteer. I didn’t want to go anywhere near them, but the revenants pulled me forward. None of the suspended bodies moved or opened their eyes. I was grateful for that, at least.

  We passed through corridor after corridor, each one lined with bodies in various states of decay. This place was a maze. I tried to remember the way we’d come, but I quickly lost track. Finally, we stopped before a rusted, iron door. Eyeballs opened it, and the others dragged me through.

  Inside was a small room with an earthen floor and rough-hewn stone walls. There, waiting for me, was the same woman I remembered skulking about the fallout shelter. The woman I’d thought was Underwood’s girlfriend. Now, of course, I knew better. This was Reve Azrael in her true body. She turned her thin face toward me, her eyes as dark as midnight, her long, unruly black hair falling across her face. The five revenants pulled me in front of her and held me there.

  I didn’t take my eyes off her. This was her lair, her turf. She had the advantage here. That made her more dangerous than ever.

  She stared back at me silently.

  “It’s just like old times,” I said. “You used to stare at me a lot back then, too. Never said much, though. At least, not with your own mouth.”

  Beside me, Oatmeal Face said, “I did what was necessary.”


  I looked at the revenant, momentarily confused. Then I turned back to Reve Azrael. “Oh, I get it. You can’t talk, can you? You can only talk through the dead. No wonder you went crazy.”

  “It is true, I communicate only through my revenants,” Oatmeal Face said. “It was the price I paid for my power, and I gave it willingly. What need have I of my own voice, when I can speak with the voice of hundreds? Thousands?”

  “Like Underwood,” I said. “Or whoever he was before you turned him into a revenant. Do you even remember his real name? Do you even remember who he was before he became part of your little charade?”

  “His name is irrelevant. It is the name Underwood that has meaning. At one time, it was my own. But the other syndicates and the black market were all run by men. And like so many men, they preferred to deal only with other men. Underwood provided me with the face I needed to do business with them. He had other uses, too. When I needed a decoy, he played the role of Melanthius. And when I needed to keep you in line, little fly, his was the perfect face for that, too.”

  “I’m sorry to break it to you,” I said, “but Underwood doesn’t have a face anymore. In fact, he doesn’t have much in the way of a head anymore.”

  “No matter. That body has served its purpose. I have no use for an Underwood now, or a Melanthius. The time for such games is over. The witch, Gabrielle, knows that. She knows it better than the rest of you. I almost respect her for it.” Reve Azrael studied my face. “It surprises you that I am aware she is still alive. I would know if she had crossed through the dark, but she has not. There is so much anger burning inside her. Even through the cold, dead flesh of my revenants, I could feel it. It reached through them all the way here, to me. Her anger gives her strength, and her strength makes her a threat.”

  “What did you expect after you started playing dress-up in her dead fiancé’s body, a bouquet of flowers and a thank-you card?”