“It’s not the cold,” said a familiar voice on Teg’s left. “It’s the damp.”
Yato gave an indignant grunt that became a scream.
Nothing could have prepared Teg for the sight of the old woman from the park digging plastic fingernails the same purple as her coat into the side of Yato’s neck. It may have been a trick of the light, but Teg thought he saw the woman’s hand brighten and her impassive face grow ruddy as Yato paled.
Teg put a bullet through her eye. The shot left Teg’s ears ringing as she and Yato fell to the dusty street. Only the steersman got up, pressing a hand to his left ear instead of his bleeding neck.
Teg’s senses kept telling him things he’d rather not know. The woman in the purple coat lay dead, but her wound had bled far less than it should have. Also, the shot had failed to scatter the advancing mob.
I hope they’re just deaf.
Teg grabbed Yato’s arm and strode briskly away from the following mob, which now filled the street from the barricade to the park. They all wore winter clothing.
It was winter in Salorien when the Cataclysm hit, Teg remembered.
He breathed deeply to slow his racing heart and focused on guiding Yato down the trash-strewn road. The steersman staggered along, weaker than the slight bleeding from his shallow cuts could explain.
We need to get off the street. Teg searched his surroundings and his memory for shelter. The park had minimal cover and might hold more hostiles. The buildings across the street were all fronted with floor-to-ceiling windows that wouldn’t even slow down determined pursuit. The mob certainly qualified, though Teg had no clue what they wanted and he wasn’t about to stop and ask.
Teg glanced over his shoulder and gaped when he saw that the ambling mob had somehow halved his lead. He broke into a run, all but dragging Yato with him. The ashen steersman was panting when they turned left at the corner of Nailand and Scrimm and ran right into a small army of blank-faced citizens in winter clothes.
The old lady in the purple coat stepped from the crowd. Both of her fully intact, lightless eyes stared at Teg. Her wrinkled mouth moved, and though the clatter of a hundred slow footsteps drowned out her words, he knew she was warning him about the relative discomfort of the cold and the damp.
Yato pushed his guide away with unexpected strength. “They are dead, not men. Hide your eyes!”
The irony of the curse Teg muttered as he covered his face with his arm no more escaped him than his eyes escaped the white light that shone from Yato.
The prana burst lasted only an instant but left Teg dazzled. He heard Yato wheezing beside him as if struggling to breathe through a crushed straw. The din of approaching footsteps had stopped.
Teg’s vision cleared. He saw Yato kneeling on the pavement, shaking as he tried to stand.
The dead of Northridge stood before him, their faces flushed; their eyes bright as those of wolves who’ve run down a wounded stag.
Teg lost count of how many times he fired. Each shot dropped one of the ruddy mob, but the others pressed forward unfazed. Though they swarmed the priest like flies drawn to roadkill, the hand of one dead Kethan brushed Teg’s. A sudden chill sapped the strength from his arm, and only with a desperate effort did he hold onto the gun.
Listing his sins would have taken Teg a month, not counting meal breaks. Now, as his longtime companion—and his only escape from the restless graveyard that had been Keth—vanished under a press of grasping corpses, his cries dwindling to groans, Teg added another shameful deed to the list.
He turned and ran for a narrow alley on his right.
The hungry dead were easy enough for Teg to shoulder past, though he suffered more than one flesh-numbing touch. He staggered into the alley and crouched between two dumpsters behind what had been a Shianese restaurant. The expected stench of rancid grease and rotten vegetables was long gone.
The dead men—if that was the right word; these were nothing like the ones in the Nine Circles—hardly let Teg catch his breath before filing into the alley.
I wonder if I’d go back to hell. Teg entertained the temptation to quit running only long enough to draw a deep breath and bolt for the alley’s far end.
6
Teg emerged from between two brick buildings onto a steeply sloping street. The dead were already stalking the road in twos and threes as dozens more funneled into the alley behind him.
Scanning the street in growing desperation, Teg spotted one place that looked completely free of hostiles. A tower of burnt umber brick stood uphill on his left where the road turned a corner.
Teg knew 1616 Foothill—a ten story block of cheap flats that had housed working class families before fire ate the sky. With multiple easily defended entrances and a rooftop overlooking the whole ward, he couldn’t ask for a better fallback position.
Teg’s hackles rose, warning him of dead hands seeking his neck. He dashed across the street, weaving between stalled cars and heaps of trash, and bounded up a short flight of concrete steps to reach the double steel doors at the building’s entrance.
Finding the door unlocked, Teg’s pounding heart leapt. Rushing in blind vexed him, but there was no time to subject the entrance to the Formula—or even a lesser, cursory search. He pressed his shoulder to the olive drab steel and pushed his way in.
No sooner had Teg gained entry than he whirled back toward the door and threw the lock. He breathed a sigh of relief when the deadbolt clicked home.
Teg surveyed the lobby. Orange-gold light seeped through narrow wired glass windows. A security desk cloistered behind a transparent metal sheet stood across from the doors. No trace remained of its last occupant.
Moving into the small reception area on the right, Teg noticed that the still air felt uncomfortably thick. The smell of plaster dust and rotted particle board stung his nose. A collection of metal frame chairs and a low plastic table, all covered in dust, took shape as Teg’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. The silence was total.
He was alone.
Probably not for long, thought Teg. There were other ways in. It was only a matter of time before his pursuers found them.
The shock of losing Yato clutched at Teg’s mind. He shifted his focus to survival. Berating himself was a luxury that would have to wait. Getting better informed of his situation was priority number one, and that meant heading up to the roof.
There was no power to the elevator. Teg found the stairs and made his way upward in the sparse light of windows placed at every other turn. He proceeded carefully, checking each landing and the inevitably vacant hallway stretching beyond it before climbing to the next floor.
The possibility of getting trapped on the roof occurred to him during the ascent. Recalling the building’s two fire escapes, both of which rose to the top floor, allayed Teg’s fears. From his unobstructed vantage point atop the tower, he would plot the best route back to the ship.
And after that?
The next part was still fuzzy. Maybe Jaren would come to and hatch a brilliant escape plan.
Teg shook his head. That would be just like old times, but Keth had proved that the past was dead.
He’d just set foot on the fifth floor landing when Teg’s eyes alerted him to the first anomaly he’d encountered since entering the building.
The hallway was empty, but in the dim light Teg saw that the last door on the left stood open.
The sight gave Teg pause. He tightened and slackened his grip on the gun as he weighed the possibilities.
Was it an ambush? No one had passed him on the stairs, which were the only set, meaning that anyone lying in wait for him must have already been up here. Judging by its location, none of that apartment’s windows faced Foothill Street, so its occupants couldn’t have seen Teg coming.
What about the fire escape? Teg doubted his single-minded foes were creative enough to climb up and lure him into a trap with an open door.
Another possibility lightened Teg’s heavy heart. Could there be survivors?
> The signals were mixed. The dead seemed too stupid to leave doors open on purpose, but anyone who left doors open by mistake was too stupid to survive.
The apartment’s resident might have been killed years ago while stepping out for the mail, leaving his front door ajar. A pair of footprints in the dust, facing the door, ruled out that scenario. It had been opened from the outside, and recently.
Teg crept into the hall to satisfy his morbid curiosity. What he found froze him where he stood. Besides the two small, fresh footprints facing the open door, the only other tracks along the entire length of the hallway were his own.
Teg strained his ears for any sound and heard only his own rapid heartbeat. At length he inched forward until he could read the number on the open door—503.
1616 Foothill Street, Apartment 503. The address was familiar, though Teg couldn’t quite remember why.
Applying the Formula on the door might’ve calmed Teg’s frayed nerves. But the high likelihood of deadly foes hot on his trail forced him to give the living room beyond a quick once-over before stepping inside.
Shafts of hazy light slanted down from four windows on the right, leaving four gold-orange squares on the floor. Depressions in the worn carpet showed where furniture had stood—for a long time, judging by their depth.
A family lived here once, observed Teg. Uncharacteristic nostalgia came over him when he thought of all of the birthdays and holidays that must have been celebrated within these walls.
It was no use pining for an imaginary past. Here and now where he had to live, his world was dead and the apartment was empty.
Or was it? Teg thought he heard a floorboard creak somewhere down the hallway off the living room. He listened but the sound didn’t come again.
Teg flexed his fingers. The numbness caused by the dead men’s touch was gone. He tightened his hold on his gun and slipped into the dim hallway.
The smell of dust prevailed everywhere, but a rosy fragrance impressed itself on Teg’s mind; not a scent, more like the ghost of one. It was probably just his senses rebelling against the barren sphere, but he didn’t dismiss the occurrence outright.
Five doors lined the hallway. The third on Teg’s left stood ajar. The opening looked like a narrow brass pillar gleaming in the dark.
That room has a window.
Had the dead come in through it? There was only one way to find out.
Teg burst through the door and into a bedroom, hoping to surprise anyone inside. He succeeded. A dark shape huddling just beyond the lone window’s light rose from its knees with a startled gasp. The figure’s slight build informed Teg that it was a woman—or had been.
Not that it mattered. He’d seen women in the flower of youth, wrinkled grandmothers, and freckle-faced girls descend on Yato like ants swarming a beetle. Whatever these people—Teg’s people—hand been, the Cataclysm’s aftermath had warped them into something loathsome. He had no compunctions about putting any of them in the ground where they belonged.
The thing that might have been a woman stared at Teg with red-rimmed blue eyes that widened when they saw him. The hood of her dark brown jacket obscured the rest of her fair-skinned face.
Teg pointed the barrel at her forehead, pressed the trigger, and heard an empty click.
“Sulaiman?” She asked with confusion; not fear. Her light Kethan accent made the name a poem—a sad one.
“You know Sulaiman?” Teg asked, keeping the empty gun trained on her.
The woman’s black skirt rustled as she stepped forward. “You aren’t him?”
“Why would you think I was?”
“You look just like him.”
“No I don’t!” Teg said an instant before he recalled that his denial had exceptions. After all, he’d walked out of Tzimtzum with golden hair and sapphire eyes. Both hair and eyes had slowly darkened, a process that Yato had credited to Teg’s infernal regeneration following the form of his soul.
None of which explained why the last survivor of Keth had mistaken Teg for Sulaiman Iason.
Until Teg remembered how the abomination that nearly killed Elena had looked when it lay dead in the Exodus’ engine room.
The woman now stood in the shaft of amber light shining through the window. She pulled back her hood with delicate hands, freeing blood-red hair that spilled almost to her shoulders.
The sight of her held Teg riveted as he holstered the gun. Now he understood why this address was so familiar.
“Astlin?”
Astlin’s face brightened. “Teg Cross. It’s really you.”
Teg approached warily as if expecting her to vanish like a dream. Of all his old friends, Astlin was the one he’d least expected to see again. Not only had most of the Middle Stratum’s population died in the Cataclysm, Astlin had vanished twenty years before the doomed expedition that had lit the fuse.
“I hope so,” said Teg.
Wariness became suspicion. Not only was Astlin the sole survivor in Northridge, she hadn’t changed since he’d last seen her, aged seventeen.
No, thought Teg, that’s not right. It wasn’t even that Astlin hadn’t aged in forty years—though that did seem to be the case. Something was different about her; something hard to put into words. She seemed more present, more real, than anyone he’d ever met.
A smile turned up the corner of Astlin’s mouth. “You look great.” She cocked her head slightly. “A little rough around the edges, but…”
Teg gently took Astlin by the shoulders and guided her away from the window.
Astlin’s brow furrowed. “What are—”
Teg pressed a finger to his lips. She got the message and fell silent.
“I know how you feel,” he whispered, “The last time I had this many unanswered questions, I’d studied for the wrong exam.”
Astlin gave him a skeptical look.
“Okay, to be fair I never studied, but that doesn’t matter.” He hooked his thumb toward the window. “What does matter is the city full of atypically spry corpses on the hunt for their next meal. Since all the local dining spots are closed, we’re on the menu.”
“The whole city?” Astlin’s voice wavered. “We’re the only ones left?”
Teg gave her firm arms a squeeze that he hoped felt reassuring. “Questions later. Right now we need to get off the sphere.”
He took a gamble and prayed it would pay off. “Your ship’s on the roof?”
Astlin shook her head.
Teg’s hope dimmed. “Okay, where is it?”
“I don’t have one.”
Wrath and despair strove for dominance in Teg’s soul, but simple shock triumphed. “You’ve been here this whole time? Everyone thought you were missing.”
Astlin slid from his grasp with a backward step. Her face hardened, and her eyes focused on something only they could see.
“Everyone was right. I’ve been back for less than an hour.”
“How the hell did you get here?”
“Not hell,” Astlin corrected him. “Kairos.”
It was Teg’s turn to furrow his brow. “Where?”
Astlin spread her hands in exasperation. “You said ‘Questions later’.”
Footfalls echoed from the landing. Teg’s muscles tensed. He turned away from Astlin, drew his gun, and ejected the spent shells. Brass casings chimed as they hit the bare wood floor.
“There’s a dead army between us and my ship,” Teg said as he dug through his jacket and pants pockets. “They already ate my steersman, so here’s the deal—I blow your brains out; then mine. Let’s hope I’ve got two more bullets.”
Astlin’s delicate hand clutched his shoulder. “You can shoot me later. Where’s your ship?”
Teg found one fresh cartridge and kept digging. “In the park. Might as well be on the moon.”
“Wait here,” said Astlin. “I’ll be right back.”
“You’ll never make it.”
Footsteps approached from the hallway outside the bedroom. Teg gave up searching
and loaded the lone bullet.
“Close your eyes and hold still.”
Teg turned to level the gun at Astlin’s head.
She was gone.
A visual search ruled out any exits besides the closed window, which to judge by the dust hadn’t been opened; and the door, which Teg had been facing.
Had he simply imagined meeting Astlin?
Yeah, let’s go with that.
Teg faced the door again and held the gun to his temple.
“…not the cold,” a whiny, tremulous voice announced from down the hall.
“Oh, fuck that!” said Teg.
The old woman shuffled into the doorway, her purple coat immaculate; her head intact. “It’s—”
The enclosed, wood and plaster-clad space magnified the gun’s report. Teg wouldn’t have heard the end of the old hag’s sentence even if his last bullet hadn’t shattered her jaw and decorated the far wall with her skull’s contents.
Its surprisingly meager contents…
Another dead person—this one dressed as a postman—stepped over the hag’s body on his way into the room. Others could be heard filing along behind him.
Teg stowed the gun and threw the window open. He stuck his head out and saw an emergency ladder bolted to the outer wall beside it. A sea of the dead surrounded the building’s base, so Teg pulled himself onto the weather-stained rungs and climbed.
The ladder ended in a set of arced railings bolted to a waist-high ledge enclosing the rooftop. The surface was coated with adhesive sheets of a pebbly material that was originally white but had suffered discoloration from dust, cooling system runoff, and sun damage.
The sun’s no problem anymore, Teg thought as he looked up at the all-encompassing fire. A moment ago he’d almost killed himself out of despair for losing Keth. Now he hoped to live long enough to kill Vaun for cursing it.
Teg strode across the roof, wending between plumbing vents and corroded boxes housing Worked air pumps that heated or cooled entire flats. Northridge spread out around him—a mass grave disguised as a rundown neighborhood. He could see over the hill of the same name to the barren northern plains. Beyond them loomed the Guild house, only half-hidden by the horizon.
The Secret Kings Page 6