by Chuck Wendig
But the boy doesn’t turn around. He keeps coming.
This is awkward.
“No, no, I don’t want to play right now, little boy. Go. Go.” He feels power surging through him, suddenly—the divine awareness is electric. His mind leaves this place for just a moment, and he sees everything about all the worlds. The Seven Heavens and the Realms of Hell, Earth and Sky and Ocean, cosmic wormholes and twisting stars, eternal forests and impossible mazes. All the men and the mice, all the falcons and all the fish. All the fallen gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters.
He can change it all. He can remake the world in his image.
There’s a sound of a little cough in front of him. A throat clearing.
He opens his eyes, irritated at the interruption. There stands the boy.
He speaks in his voice. But also in another voice. A woman’s voice. Cupid’s bitch. Psyche.
“The throne is what you always wanted,” he/she says.
And he thinks to vaporize the child’s body with his mind, but he doesn’t get the chance.
The child swings the Devil’s own blade upward. Lightbringer cuts through the side of the glass throne and carves off a piece. A very sharp piece.
“What do you think you’re—”
The boy plunges the shard into the Devil’s throat.
HEAVEN SHUDDERS. THE red wires snap, hiss, shake as if in hurricane winds—all the dead angels suddenly sit up and moan, before again falling back down into torpor. Cason watches the events unfold—his son walking toward the throne, then carving off a piece of it to plunge into the Devil’s neck.
The Devil bursts into flames. He shakes and writhes, screaming. Cason runs, feet bounding across the discs as they tremble beneath him. He grabs his son, scoops him up just as the Devil’s flesh turns to magma.
It melts into the chair, and becomes part of the glass.
Again the wires go dark. The chair stops pulsing.
And Heaven is still.
“Daddy?” Barney asks.
Cason hugs him. The boy cries. Not a full-on sob: just the quiet whimpering of a very scared, very confused child.
But he sets the boy down. He tells him, “You cross over. You go on back. I’ll be right there. I promise. There’s... something I have to do first.”
Then he takes the sword from the child and gently urges him.
“Daddy, I don’t wanna.”
“You have to. Hurry. I’ll be there.”
Barney crosses over, crying. Cason calls for his son to be careful. And not to fall.
He sighs, holding the blade. The glass extends, the edge gleaming as blue fire flickers inside of it. He thinks to sit—knows he could—maybe even should. A little voice reminds him that he’s dead; genuine dead. This might be the only way to keep on going. And it would always let him stay in touch with his wife, his son. He could give them everything. He could give them the world on a platter.
He raises the blade above his head.
But then he realizes: it would be a gift, wouldn’t it? To be God. To have that power. Barney would grow up to be president. Alison would never die unless Cason allowed her to, and then they could rule this place—and all the worlds—together.
A perfect dream.
He’s never been a fan of perfect.
He cleaves the throne in twain.
CHAPTER FORTY
Falling
HEAVEN BREAKS APART like a cookie crumbling in a man’s grip. Shards and fragments. Golden discs and severed wires.
Cason falls, and so does his son.
They find one another in the whipping winds. Pieces raining down all around them. Angel bodies tumble. Cason holds his child tight as they turn and tilt and rocket downward, the boy wailing, now, sobbing at these moments—Cason doesn’t know what’s happening, or where they’re going, but he knows this isn’t good. He thinks, this must be what it’s like to fall out of a plane, to have it break apart and to plummet to the earth below. A fear that gives way to peace assails him. He whispers in his son’s ear, tells him it’ll all be fine. Even though he knows that it won’t.
Something grabs him, lashes around him.
And pulls him back up.
HE AND THE boy are drawn up through what feels like Hell’s asshole. It’s soft and hot and burns the skin and—
They both belch up out of a puddle of blood and onto the floor.
Nearby lays a minister’s corpse.
Cason gasps, grabs Barney, scoops him up and covers his eyes. All he says is, “We’re here. We’re home. It’s okay. Shh. Shhhh.”
There stands Psyche, looking frazzled and freaked out.
And Tundu sits on a nearby pew. Gut-shot. Gray-skinned. Eyes staring ahead, empty. Dead as dead.
“Oh, shit,” Cason says, feeling his own tears starting to well up.
Except, then Tundu gasps. His body stiffens. Eyes roll around in his head like loose marbles.
“He’s still alive,” Psyche says. “I’ve tried to soothe his mind. Calm his shock. But he needs a hospital soon, or he’s going to die.”
Cason nods. “I... okay. I don’t know how.”
“I’ll take him,” she says. Wings erupt from her back.
“My wife. She’s... out there somewhere. I need her.”
Psyche touches his brow.
He can see Alison. Out there. In the corn. Sobbing over—
My own corpse.
He knows just where she is. He kisses his son’s cheek, tells the boy it’s time to go see Mommy, and it’s time to go home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter and self-described ‘penmonkey.’ After working in the computer and role-playing game industries he began scripting TV and film projects, including a horror film script which won him a place at the prestigous Sundance Screenwriter Lab 2010. He has published the novel Double Dead and novella Bad Blood with Abaddon Books and Blackbirds with Angry Robot, and has a forthcoming YA series with Amazon Publishing.
www.terribleminds.com
@ChuckWendig
SOMEONE HAS STOLEN COYOTE’S PENIS.
The Native american trickster god and Richard greene, one of his mortal marks, fi nd themselves unwitting bedfellows as they seek to regain what they have both lost. The trail leads them to England, where they find murdered anglo-Saxon spirits, a reclusive god of the forge, a london gentleman’s club exclusively for deities and a terrifying conspiracy. If Coyote is going to save the world and get his mojo back, it’s going to take everything in his bag of tricks - and he’s suffering from the ultimate performance anxiety.
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A VAMPIRE IN ZOMBIELAND
Coburn’s been dead now for close to a century, but seeing as how he’s a vampire and all, it doesn’t much bother him. Or at least it didn’t, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead—but not dead like him, oh no.
See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like flesh. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And on the run. And more pissed-off than a beestung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector—after all, a man has to look after his food supply.
“Wendig is ferociously inventive and effortlessly sharp”
– Richard Dansky, author of Beloved of the Dead and Firefly Rain
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San Francisco after the zombie apocalypse. Vampire-predator turned human-protector Coburn is on the trail his his vampire sire. When he finds him, it is not to catch up on the good times, but take revenge.
Alcatraz. Super-zombies. A ketamine-trip cult of New Age weirdos who eat the flesh of the zombie as some kind of grotesque communion. This is anohther tale from the inimitable Chuck Wendig.
“Thank the good Lord for Abaddon Books... exactly the kind of new spin on zombies I was looking for.”
Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review on Double Dead
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Title
Indicia
Part One: Love Dies
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Two: The Divine Right of Kings
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Part Three: To The Heart of the Maze
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
About the Author
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