Dead Set

by Richard Kadrey

  He lit the camp stove and put water on to boil. “So, you saw Father.”

  Zoe nodded. “You were right. There was nothing I could do for him. Hell, I couldn’t even watch.”

  “I’m just glad you got back here in one piece.”

  Zoe took off her sneaker and rubbed her sore ankle. Her whole leg was burning. It wasn’t until she was sitting here, where she felt relatively safe and at home, that she noticed.

  “I can’t leave Dad like this, paying for my mistakes,” she said. “I have to do something.”

  Valentine picked up the teakettle from the stove and slammed it down hard. “Yeah? And what are you going to do for him? You going to bring him back with you to the land of the living? Maybe he can live under your bed or be the monster in your closet.”

  Zoe looked down at her sore ankle as she adjusted the rag. “I can’t leave him here, being eaten piece by piece. I saw the dying dead. I won’t let him end up like that.”

  “Yes, you will. You’ll leave him just like you’re going to leave me, because it’s what Father and I want and it’s the right thing to do,” shouted Valentine. “You keep trying to change things you can’t change. Some things are just too big. They are what they are and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He came over to her and bent down, pushed Zoe’s hands out of the way, and retied the cloth around her ankle until it was snug and comfortable. “If you love Father, do what he told you when you first came here. Go home. Be safe. Have a life.”

  “How can I just run off and leave you?”

  Valentine got up, went to a pile of dishes, and put two cups on the table. “Just put one foot in front of the other and keep doing that until you’re far away from this shithole.”

  “I don’t even know how to leave.”

  “Yeah, that’s a problem,” he said. “I’ve learned to sneak around the edges of things. Get far enough out of town to sneak into your dreams, but that’s because I’m dead. You need some other way back.”

  “Emmett . . . um, Ammut, he’s alive, isn’t he? I could go out from the place where he goes.”

  Valentine turned away from her, rummaging for the sugar. “If we knew where that was.”

  “I might know someone who does,” said Zoe.

  Valentine turned and looked at her intently. He reached over and turned off the stove. “Let’s go.”

  Traveling with Valentine made Zoe feel safe and they didn’t see any dogs along the way, so it wasn’t more than half an hour before they were standing in front of Mr. Prosper’s building.

  Valentine looked up and down the bright, clean street and gave an exaggerated whistle. “Damn. I’ve seen these buildings, but I’ve never had the nerve to go inside. I always figured they had some kind of alarm that could smell street scum.”

  “You’re not street scum.”

  “I’m sure not one of them,” he said, looking up at the top of the building.

  They went through the lobby and took the elevator up to the top floor. Zoe led the way to Mr. Prosper’s apartment. She turned the knob slowly, and when she could feel that the door wasn’t locked, she pushed it all the way open. Mr. Prosper was still asleep on the bed where she’d left him. She went over and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing the sleeping man. Valentine remained in the doorway, his gaze taking in the room and its opulence.

  Zoe gestured for him to come in and close the door. Valentine nodded and did as he was told. Inside, he spotted Mr. Prosper’s knife on the floor and picked it up. Zoe watched him weigh the blade in his hand. He shrugged off his greatcoat and let it fall to the floor. Zoe hadn’t seen his arms in the light before. They really were pipes. His hands were a crazy combination of metal scraps all fitted together like a rusted jigsaw puzzle. It didn’t make sense that they could work, but they did, by whatever magic ruled Iphigene. Plus, they looked formidable.

  Valentine smiled at her. Zoe reached over and shook Mr. Prosper’s shoulder. “Wake up! Hey, wake up!”

  Mr. Prosper jerked violently away from her and raised his head. “What?” he said hoarsely. He opened his eyes and looked at Zoe, but didn’t seem to recognize her. His gaze moved past her to land at the foot of the bed, where Valentine was standing, the knife held tightly in his metal hand. “Gah!” shouted Mr. Prosper, scrambling back farther on the bed. “Go away!”

  Zoe gently put a hand on Mr. Prosper’s leg, and that seemed to get his attention. He jerked away from her, his eyes wild with fear. “You!” he said in wonder.

  “Me,” said Zoe. She glanced up at Valentine. “I told my brother how you kidnapped me and how you said you were going to slit my throat. Know what he wants to do to you?” She leaned in closer and spoke in hushed tones. “With that bad leg of yours, he wants to drag you down to one of those dark streets and leave you for the dying dead. How does that sound?”

  Mr. Prosper put his hands over his face. For a second she felt bad for the man, blubbering and terrified, stripped of his dignity and everything he valued by Hecate and now by her. But he did threaten to kill me and steal my body and we really won’t give him to the dying. Maybe scaring him a little is payback.

  “No! Go away, please! I’m sorry,” Mr. Prosper said.

  “If you’re really sorry, tell me how Emmett gets back to the world. What’s the way out for someone who’s alive?”

  He looked at her in horror. “No. I can’t.”

  “Tell me how to get out of Iphigene,” Zoe insisted.

  “She’ll know it was me. She’ll feed me to her dogs.”

  “She will if I go and tell her what you did.”

  “What?”

  As Zoe and Mr. Prosper talked, Valentine went around the man’s room taking small things and stuffing them in his pockets. He slipped the empty flask off the bed, took a silver bottle opener off a table and a faceted glass paperweight off the top of Mr. Prosper’s dresser.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Zoe said to Mr. Prosper. “I bet I can make a deal with Queen Hecate. My brother and father would like living in this building. Would you like this room, Valentine?”

  Valentine looked over at her and Mr. Prosper as he was slipping a cigarette lighter into his pocket. “Very much.”

  “I can do more,” said Zoe to Mr. Prosper. “If you worked for Hecate, I bet Emmett has one of those records with your soul on it. I’ll get her to tell Emmett to break it. What will happen to you if your record breaks?”

  The man’s wide, wet eyes swiveled in their sockets, looking first at Valentine and then at Zoe. “Please. You can’t.”

  “What will happen to you?”

  “I’ll fall apart,” he said in a tone that was more of a plea than a statement. “It’s horrible. I’ll burn up from the inside out and disappear. Forever.”

  “It doesn’t have to happen. Just tell me how to go home. But first tell me this. If Emmett can get to the real world, why doesn’t Hecate take his body?”

  Mr. Prosper seemed horrified by the question. “He’s her child. She’d never hurt him.”

  “Why can he go back and forth to the real world when no one else can?”

  “For the same reason that he holds the records. He’s Ammut, the eater of the dead. The keeper and destroyer of lost souls. Some spirits are ushered into this world and others—”

  Zoe nodded. She didn’t want to hear the rest of the sentence.

  “I understand. Now, how do I get out?”

  Mr. Prosper held up a hand in Valentine’s direction, palm out, defensively.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” he said miserably. He pulled one of the pillows from the bed and clutched it to his chest. His face contorted. “Please, my leg,” he whispered.

  Zoe took one of the laudanum bottles from his bedside table and handed it to him. Mr. Prosper tore out the cork with trembling hands and downed half the bottle before coming up for air. “Thank you,” he sa
id, gasping. He pointed out the window. “On the beach, near the far end of the boardwalk, is a rocky outcropping. At low tide there’s a drainage pipe. You can’t miss it. It’s big enough for a man to stand up in. Follow the pipe for perhaps a quarter of a mile and take the left fork.” He took another drink from the bottle. A smaller one this time. “Soon you’ll come to an underground entrance to the palace. Only Emmett ever uses it, so no one will bother you. When you see the door, you’ll know you’re on the right path. Keep going until you see light. When you reach the end, you’ll be back in the world of the living.”

  Valentine came over and leaned on the wall at the top of the bed. “Are there any tricks or traps along the way?” He weighed Mr. Prosper’s knife in his hand.

  “Why would there be?” Mr. Prosper clutched the pillow tighter as Valentine loomed over him. “No one knows about the tunnel but Hecate’s most trusted advisers.”

  “I hope you’re not lying,” Valentine said. “If anything happens to my sister . . . well, those unlit streets are already calling your name.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Prosper,” said Zoe. She started to turn away, but stopped. “I’m sorry about what Hecate did to you.”

  “Go away now, please,” Mr. Prosper said. He lay down and curled up on the bed, clutching his bottle and pillow.

  Outside, it was starting to rain again. Clouds of silver and midnight blue roiled over the rooftops as a few fat raindrops fell onto their faces. It’s going to be a downpour, Zoe thought. She was struck again by how beautiful Iphigene could be in the right light. There was something wrong with that. It didn’t seem fair for there to be any beauty in a place like this. She was about to say something to Valentine when he shoved her back against the building. She tried to move, but his hand swept back and held her in place. She was getting annoyed when she saw something across the street coming toward them.

  She could make out three of Hecate’s wolf men in the rain, which was coming down hard and steady. As the wolf men advanced, Valentine shifted, keeping Zoe behind him. He reached under his coat and pulled out Mr. Prosper’s knife. The wolf men hesitated. Moving away from the apartment building, Valentine pulled her along, shifting his stance with each step, keeping himself between Zoe and the wolves. She looked around for a way out, a place to run. She couldn’t see anything. This wasn’t fair, not after they’d learned how she could get home. She held on to Valentine’s coat sleeves.

  “Zoe?” whispered Valentine.

  “Yeah.”

  “When I tell you, I want you to run. Find Father. He’ll take care of you.”

  Zoe held on to him harder. “What are you going to do?” She felt his body tense.

  “Now!” he said, pushing her away and leaping at the wolf men, slashing the closest one. The knife flashing streaks of silver streetlight as the air filled with Valentine’s shouts, the wolf men’s howls, and the hissing of the rain.

  As the wolves closed on Valentine, Zoe looked around for something to hit them with. A branch or pipe, anything.

  “Go!” yelled Valentine.

  Still, her mind screamed for her to stay, to help him, but she knew what this was. It was Valentine’s sacrifice for her. To stay now when she couldn’t help and would only get in the way would turn him from a hero into a fool. So she turned away from the fight and ran as hard as she could. The pain in her ankle grew steadily worse, but this time she was grateful. It was something to focus on, something to enable her to shut out the voices telling her to turn around and go back. In her mind, she drew a circle, then she eased the white-hot pain in her leg into its center, letting the hurt propel her through the storm all the way to the sea.

  She walked out onto the beach and her feet sank into the wet sand. Each step hurt her ankle and the usefulness of pain had passed a couple of blocks back. Now pain was just pain and each time she had to drag her injured leg out of the heavy sand, the pain made her breath catch in her throat. But she didn’t stop walking until she made it to the abandoned carousel.

  She stepped up to the crooked platform and dropped immediately to the floor, breathing hard. Rain seeped through the cracks in the carousel’s wooden roof, dripping onto the faces of some of the nearby animals. The horses looked like they were crying. Zoe lay down and pressed her ear flat to the floor. Overhead, the rain was a high-pitched patter, while the sound coming into her ear on the floor was deep bass mixed with the pounding of the waves. There were no monsters here. No mad queen. Just the rushing of the water. There was no reason for her to ever get up, she thought. I might stay just like this forever.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move. She rolled over and saw a man’s legs. He was sitting on the floor smoking, his back against the carousel’s hollow central core, the spindle room where the ride’s motor was housed. Zoe couldn’t see the man’s face, but she knew him immediately.

  Slowly, she rose and limped over to her father. “I wondered if you’d be here.”

  “Zoe,” he said. He lowered the cigarette and rubbed his red eyes. “Damn. I hoped you be gone by now.”

  She leaned on the pole connected to a pink-and-silver shark. “Nope. Not yet,” she replied. She shrugged and looked out at the boardwalk, a bit more paranoid now after the wolf men’s sudden appearance. She looked at her father. There were fresh scars on his face and hands. He looked even more gaunt than before.

  “I’m sorry I ran,” Zoe said.

  Her father patted her leg. “You did the right thing.”

  “At least we found a way out.”

  “You and your friend?” Her father took a puff of his cigarette. In the dark, the red glow lit up his whole face. Worn and weak, he suddenly reminded her a little of Mr. Prosper.

  “Yeah. Val—” she started to say, but broke off, reminding herself of her promise not to tell her father about him. She could at least keep her word about that. “He really saved my life. Hecate’s cops or whatever they are—those wolf assholes—they arrested him.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. You all right?”

  Zoe nodded. She knew it was silly since he was already dead, but it bothered her to see her father smoking. Still, there was something comforting and normal about it all. Having a cigarette at the end of a long, hard day. It’s what regular people did back in the world. The real world. It seemed so far away now. Like Iphigene was the new normal and the other was a dream. Would she ever see the other world again? She felt a sudden, unexpected twinge of homesickness. “I’m okay,” she said. “You know, I thought you were dead back there at the café. Like dead dead. You know what I mean.”

  He smiled up at her, a weak, exhausted smile. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I just need to rest for a couple of days and I’ll be fine.”

  “Then she can do it to you all over again.” Zoe hugged her coat tightly around herself.

  Her father didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “If you know a way out of here, you need to go. The whole city is looking for you. How the hell did you get here?”

  “I ran. I really wasn’t thinking about it. It was raining hard. I don’t think anyone noticed me,” she said, looking back toward the boardwalk again. “I guess someone must have seen me before and told the cops, right? But I was so happy to have found a way out. I should have been more careful.”

  “You know, if Hecate arrested your friend, he isn’t coming back,” her father said.

  Her injured leg made it too hard to stand anymore. She slid down the pole and sat facing her father. “So, I just run off back to Sweet Valley High? I leave him in a dungeon and you to get sucked dry.”

  Her father leaned forward and touched the dirty toe of her sneaker. “If Hecate finds you, she’ll kill you.”

  Zoe felt herself laugh, but nothing felt funny. “She’ll do worse than that, from what I hear.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Her father finished the cigarette an
d tossed it away. The glowing tip arced high, making burning red loop-the-loops through the rain out into the sand. “You can’t just sit here, honey. You have to go.”

  “Don’t worry. I am,” she said. “But the beach is the way out. I have to wait for low tide.”

  “Oh.” Something in his voice surprised her. After he’d told her to go home God only knew how many times, there was a hint of regret in his voice. It made Zoe happy, in a quiet, sad way. She said, “Is it okay if I sit here with you while I wait?”

  “That would be nice.”

  As she went over to him, he put one arm out and she laid her back against it, leaning against him as he wrapped the arm around her. She held on to his jacket as she had to Valentine’s.

  As she sat there quietly in the dark with her father for what would be the last time, the ice inside Zoe began to crack. She’d felt nothing for so long. The numbness was comforting, even though it brought the guilt of not really feeling how she knew she should, how she would feel normally. About her mother, about her brother’s arrest, and this last meeting with her father, doomed to be food for Hecate’s children. And then what? He would just wander away with the dying dead forever?

  If leaving was what everyone wanted, why did it feel so bad? The truth was that a part of Zoe wanted to leave Iphigene right then. To run away and forget about it, about everything she’d seen and heard. Even father and Valentine. How could she live with herself knowing she couldn’t save them and that she was partly responsible for the horror that was their lives?

  The cracking ice inside her was being replaced with a spongy fear, as if a monster were trying to swim up out of her guts and swallow her whole. She bit her lower lip and breathed hard, trying to drive the monster back into the void. If she allowed the monster to touch her, she knew that she would begin to cry and that she’d never stop. What good was crying now? It was a child’s trick that kept her from having to deal with the hard things. She wouldn’t hide from the hard things anymore. Never again. I owe it to Dad to be here with him now. And to Valentine. My shit, I can deal with later. She hugged her father harder while feeling furious with herself for being so weak and confused.