by John Meaney
So many burned books.
“Hades.” Donal pressed his fingertips against the incinerated door, decided the whole thing might come crashing down if he pushed, then walked around to the smashed, empty window. “Thanatos damn it.”
He stepped through the open gap, into the destroyed window display, then down onto the floor. Glass shards, gray and blackened with smoke, crunched beneath his running shoes. The bonfire stench was strong, but there was no sense of smoldering warmth.
Where was Peat when it all went up?
Donal moved into the dark interior, his black running suit blending with shadow. Past bookcases that were half charcoal, past spilled masses of books that were mostly ash, Donal moved slowly. If there were predators here, they wouldn't be looking for books, they'd be looking for the cash register—which Donal now saw lay toppled on the floor, empty.
He headed for the staircase at the rear.
“Ah, no.” There was another scent on the sooty air. “No.”
Slowing down, aware that the staircase could fall, he wanted to run up and check what he suddenly knew, but disaster lay that way. He tested the treads, climbing close to the wall.
Careful.
It took time, and one tread crumbled, but then he was past it, nearly at the top. Once on the bare landing, Donal noticed the fire damage was less. There was a coldness in the air.
Then he was in the smoke-blackened bedroom, and the four-hundred-pound figure slumped on the floor was immediately recognizable. Donal went down on one knee to check, but it was unnecessary. Peat's corpse was at ambient temperature, and the woody smell that used to rise from his dark spongy skin was gone.
Perhaps smoke inhalation … No. A dark stain had spread across the floor, its origin a gash in Peat's neck. A clean incision, from a heavy blade.
“Peat. Ah, Peat.”
Donal guessed he hadn't fought back. Peat had possessed more-than-human strength, but with his gentle nature he could never have defended himself.
Stepping away, Donal retraced his tracks, trying to leave minimal disturbance. Scene-of-crime diviners, if they processed the scene, would appreciate his not disturbing the evidence. But he wondered, as he carefully descended the burned stairs, whether there would be a proper processing of this particular crime scene.
Back through the shop he went, exiting via the broken front window, and came out onto the sidewalk, trying to remember the location of the nearest phone booth.
There.
Two blocks away, beneath the rusted bridge that supported an elevated length of track, a dim light was glowing in a booth, somehow unvandalized. Donal jogged toward it.
He reached the booth and looked inside.
“For fuck's sake.”
The phone looked brand-new and functional—and it was colored indigo.
Shit.
Trusting that he was immune, Donal forced himself to pick up the handset and ask for the emergency operator.
“Gimme Homicide,” he said, when a police wraith answered. “This is Lieutenant Riordan, badge number two-three-omicron-nine, and I need an SOCD team in Lower Halls, stat. I have one homicide victim, male.”
*At what location, Lieutenant?*
“Peat's Place.” Donal gave her the address. “It's a bookstore, or was. Someone burned it out.”
*I'll inform the squad, sir.*
Something in the wraith's tone had altered. Perhaps she already knew of the burning.
“You'll send someone straightaway?”
*I'll ask immediately, sir. How fast they respond is up to them.*
“But—” Donal stopped, because the operator was no more standard-human than Peat or himself. “I understand.”
*I'll do my best.*
“Thank you.”
The line went dead, and Donal replaced the phone. He walked slowly back to the ruined shop, then stood on the sidewalk, totally still, and waited without moving.
It took two hours for the investigation team to turn up.
Perhaps investigation team was too fancy a term for the semiretired forensics officer and the scene-of-crime diviner trainee who turned up. The diviner was pretty, and Donal watched as she tuned in to the environment. She winced, picking up a resonance of Peat's brutal death.
Good.
Donal knew that her fast reaction meant she would be able to identify the murder weapon. Perhaps she was good enough to identify whatever traces the killer—probably killers—had left. Then it would be house-to-house inquiries and listening to word on the street that would find the bastards.
Except that this wasn't Donal's case, and couldn't be, if he was to track down Cortindo and Gelbthorne.
“You taking this case, Lieutenant?” asked a young uniformed officer.
“That's just what I've been thinking about. I can't.”
“Huh. What happened, you were just jogging past?”
Donal looked down, realizing he was still wearing his black running suit, and remembered his reason for leaving home. So much for a pleasant run.
“More or less. Look, gimme a ring on progress, will you? Let me know who's got the murder book. If you can't contact me directly, try Robbery-Haunting.”
“Got it, sir.”
But there was a glum undertone in the patrolman's voice that stayed with Donal as he made his way out of the ruined bookstore. It was the tone of disillusionment, knowing that whatever the law said, some deaths were more important than others.
So what am I going to do? Walk away?
Donal forced himself to continue down the street. From a bar at the corner, music played. It was around two in the afternoon, and people should be at work. But the Crossed Scimitars always had customers, regardless of the hour.
When he walked in, there were glances of recognition and a couple of waves, but most of the customers ignored him. The place was run-down, but there was more than poverty and sleaze; there were thirty individuals here, each with his or her own life story filled with detail, and Donal knew some of the highlights. None of Peat's old friends was in here.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” said the hard-faced man behind the bar. “What can I get you?”
“Nothing. I've just come from Peat's Place.”
“That was a shame.”
But an involuntary flicker of eye movement told Donal everything. In the corner, seven men were drinking. One of them looked up at Donal.
“You're looking good, Donal.” His expression, or perhaps subvo-calization, continued the sentence: “for a zombie.”
Donal sniffed the air. Had he been living, the general pungency would have masked any individual scent he might have tried to detect.
I can smell burned fuel.
“Uh-huh. I want to talk to Big Jag here.”
The big man in question smiled into his beer. Tattoos swirled across his face: motile, like black fern leaves circling a whirlpool. He'd been on the street less than a year, after his latest stretch in Wailing Towers. Inside, he'd been an eager member of the Human Brotherhood.
Mixed in with the faint stench of fuel was a trace of the woody scent that Donal had always associated with Peat.
“ ’Course, you're an intelligent guy, Jag,” continued Donal. “Like, if I went into your hovel right now—I mean apartment, no offense—there's no chance I'd find a murder weapon, or traces of whatever you used to burn the place. Right?”
Big Jag looked up, blood draining from his face. It made the tattoos appear darker. He stared, then lowered his head. His massive shoulders slumped.
Then he began to cry, like a little kid caught out of school, misbehaving more through inattention than malice. Or perhaps someone had put him up to it.
His mental abilities were on a par with the average fourth grader's. Whether a sentencing judge would take account of that was another matter.
Oh, Hades.
“You did it, Jag.”
“I don't want to go back inside. It's not nice there.”
Perhaps it was just the booze, and regret about w
hat he had done.
“Come on. Come with me.”
Two of Jag's companions looked at each other. One moved his hand toward his pocket.
“There's no need to be afraid,” added Donal, casting his voice.
The hand movement stopped.
“That's right.” Donal softened his tone as Big Jag pushed himself to his feet, and stood with his head hanging. “This way.”
Donal left the bar with Big Jag right behind him.
Slowly, they walked down the street to Peat's Place. There were two cruisers and an unmarked parked out front. As Donal approached, a short, stocky Detective-One from the 53rd Precinct waved his notebook. It took a moment for Donal to recall his name.
“You're Kribble, right?”
“Sure, Lieutenant. Bit of a mess in here, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Don't see much hope of catching the killers, myself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Huh. Nonhuman, begging your pardon. Random hate crime. Happens all over.”
“Right.”
“So—”
“So you can arrest Big Jag, or I can. It's your case, Kribble.”
Kribble blinked at the shambling hulk of a man behind Donal.
“You mean him?”
“That's the one.”
“Why? You don't think—”
But the young SOC diviner was just exiting through the broken window, stepping down to the sidewalk. She stared, then pointed.
“He's one.” Her voice was clear and carrying. “One of them. The fuel and weapon resonances are really strong.”
Kribble's eyes narrowed. Then he reached for the handcuffs on his belt.
“Okay, buddy. What made you think you could get away with this?”
“He hasn't even had a bath or changed his clothes,” said the diviner, “since he did it.”
Big Jag was beginning to sob.
“Good work, Detective Kribble,” said Donal. “Interrogate him properly, with a bit of gentleness and tact, and you'll get the lot of them. You'll want to retrieve the murder weapon from his apartment now, before his buddies get there.”
Kribble blinked.
“Feather in your cap,” added Donal, “closing a case this fast.”
“Uh, sure …”
Behind Kribble, the uniformed patrolman who'd talked to Donal earlier was grinning.
“Let me know how you get on,” said Donal.
He turned and walked away.
Soon he came to a wide stone pillar set on a corner. There was a man-size black iron door. To one side was an indentation into which Donal's police badge would fit perfectly.
How did I know?
Donal stood still, allowing his awareness to descend into introspection.
Did I try the bar by chance?
He'd lived in the neighborhood, and known the kind of people who frequented the Crossed Scimitars. But his intuition had grown stronger as he'd neared the saloon door.
No. Not chance.
Deeper into memory and awareness, Donal drifted down through the architecture of his mind, until he reached a place where the memory of subliminal sensations opened to his internal analysis. He had, at some level, smelled the trace molecules that led him to Big Jag. He could even, in memory, identify probable companions, men in the bar who'd been with Big Jag in Peat's Place.
Leave that to Kribble to sort out. With the young diviner's aid, he'd get the others.
Donal's awareness began to rise.
At the level of emotions, he made some kind of lateral drift, immersing his awareness in his grief for Peat, at the senseless fatal beating of that gentle being. Then he became curious, within his mind, about the structure of that grief, and he moved inside the awareness of motion, noting the pattern of feeling, and …
It was evaporating.
Shit.
Donal rose fast now, and surfaced back into normal awareness, snapping his eyes open. He sucked in a breath.
“Mister, are you all right?”
A boy was staring at him.
“Yeah, I was just doing some breathing exercises, you know?”
“Um, okay.”
“You live around here?”
“Sure.” He pointed along the road. “We live over Fozzy's Rags.”
It was a washeteria that Donal remembered well.
“Good. You like reading books?”
“Sure.”
“That's a good thing. You get on home now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Donal watched him go.
What about Peat?
No feeling of grief remained inside him.
The memory had been like that old literary classic that Peat had told him about: expanded recollections sparked by tasting a scarab cookie. What Donal had just done was similar, but diving inward, going deeply inside himself. Except that he could not grieve for Peat, and from now on—he was sure—he never would. In examining that particular emotion-to-memory linkage, he had destroyed it.
Was this the kind of thing that zombies learned to avoid? The ones who wanted to remain approximately human?
“Fuck it.”
Donal pushed his badge into the opening, and the iron door ground open.
Down in the catacombs, Donal began to run. It took only seconds to reach his cruising pace, as though he no longer needed to gently warm up. Or perhaps the concept of a warmed-up zombie was an oxymoron.
Do you…. ?
Here, the old sarcophagi were melded with the worn tunnel walls and floor like geological features, their inscriptions long eroded into nothingness. Perhaps they even predated the reactor piles. In the newer tunnels, bronze and brass sarcophagi shone in the half-light, often under armed guard for the first few months, until the bones had degraded. Rich families could afford to save their dead from the reactors.
Since the day that Donal—tricked by Malfax Cortindo—had touched the knucklebone of a dead artist called Jamix Holandson, he had felt the bones’ thoughts inside himself, as if they were his own.
Do you hear the bones?
That was when he'd stopped running the catacombs. When Laura (and her hexlar-armored troopers) had rescued him from his trance state, about to flense the dead diva's flesh from her bones for himself … then things had changed once more. Entering the catacombs again, it seemed that the dead had grown afraid of him.
Do you feel the song?
He feels it.
Now, as he ran with a new fluidity, Donal felt a grin spreading across his face. He was filled with creeping fear, but it was the bones’ dread, not his own. He was enjoying it.
He ran faster.
There was a low opening to one side, and he ducked through, then leaped across an acrid puddle, body horizontal, then tucking into a ball. He saw the ceiling pass overhead as he rolled on his shoulder, then he was on his feet and running once more.
Faster.
Insinuating whispers rose, grew in number, overlapped like breaking waves as he ran through a long cavern filled with a multitude of sarcophagi, some decorated and grotesque enough to form subterranean mausoleums in their own right. In the background, perhaps he felt or heard a whimpering, a deep harmonic of suffering, and he wondered if burial was not the escape that rich families hoped.
Leave.
The patterns of dread were altering, affected by Donal's passing, as if in torment they could sense his being here.
Leave us now.
Donal laughed and continued to run.
For three hours he ran, through labyrinthine complexes of subterranean aqueducts, then abandoned hypoway tunnels that had not been part of the Pneumetro network for a century, and then into more catacombs. He vaulted over a low sarcophagus. At an uneven stone pillar, he leaped high, kicked against the pillar to change his direction, spun around his vertical axis as he descended, and sprang into a fast run once more.
Perhaps, despite death's disadvantages, this was a kind of pleasure he could enjoy.
He became mo
re adventurous, vaulting larger sarcophagi, scrambling over mausoleums, landing with a roll that brought him to his feet. Jumping across a gap, he struck the stone wall with hands and feet, using the compression of all four limbs to power his spinning jump onto another tomb, drop to his hands—an impromptu cartwheel, unplanned—and continue with the run, ignoring the background sea of whispers until he felt (or heard) something different.
There is another.
Donal canceled the vault he'd been about to attempt, and ran around the worn sarcophagus instead. Could the bones sense other zombies here?
Where?
Up above, in the world.
But—he avoided a puddle—there were thousands of beings like him in the city overhead. Whatever the bones were sensing, it wasn't a zombie … or not just a zombie.
Donal slowed, coming to a stop in a high, dark gallery. Some eighty feet overhead, he estimated, was a stone balcony with what looked like the beginnings of steps leading up to the surface. Warped pillars formed from distorted blocks of stone supported the balcony.
Laughing, he leaped to the nearest one, fingertips and toes neatly landing in the gaps between stones, and crimped his fingers. Then he leaned back, using torque to press his feet against the surface—a combat school instructor used to shout: “Only mugs hug rock. Soldiers are laid back”—and then he began to climb, shifting his weight with a fluid action, spidering his way up the pillar.
Soon he was on the balcony, then ascending a helical sequence of cracked, crumbling steps, until he reached the hollow interior of a corner pillbox, much like the one he had entered by. From the inside, the doors required no validation of identity. Donal worked the mechanism, the black iron door swung open, and he stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Up here, the bones were silent.
As the door clanged shut behind him, Donal scanned the environment. He was at a crossroads, and the streets were near-deserted. An unmanned street-cleaning truck, heavy with armorlike cladding, drove slowly, with brushes rotating. Perhaps a block away, a siren started up, then cut off, as though someone had hit a switch by accident.
It was a big city; something happened every five minutes. But the bones down below had been disturbed by something—by someone like Donal, in some specific way. He jogged across the street. Bands of darkness swept rhythmically along the tall buildings.