Black Blood
Page 39
At least the lack of casing meant he had finger-and toeholds, helping him to climb.
It hurts.
Not for long.
And then he was at the top, hauling himself into place. There was an inspection cover, but he ripped it off as he stood up. He balanced, one foot on either side of a deep opening into the projector's dark heart. Inside, pure pain screamed back and forth, in standing waves of suffering: harmonics of torture, the wavelength of death.
Malfax Cortindo's face was a rippling mess, not quite rebuilt, certainly not finished to make him look near-human. It was a lengthy procedure, creating a revenant from a long-dead corpse, after resurrection to zombiehood was no longer possible.
Too bad.
Pity he won't live to suffer longer.
“You,” said Cortindo. “Riordan.”
Brax Devlin was staring across at Marnie Finross's corpse. Then he looked at Donal.
“I'm going to kill you,” he said. “And it will hurt, for a long time before the end.”
“You can't.”
“Why—?”
This is it.
Yes, my love.
“I'm already dead,” said Donal.
Then he put his feet together, and dropped inside the cavity.
Into the middle of undead zombie bones, carefully positioned.
Into agony.
Without the floating mirror to reflect it, the ravening white beam of energy burst through the wall of Building 17, across an expanse of flat white ground, and tore into a warehouse full of conventional high explosives. The detonation was immense.
From the military convoy five miles away, where Hayes stood atop a truck with binoculars in hand, the rising column of flame and sooty black smoke was appallingly visible.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
Beside him, Temesin was silent, staring downward.
It took two minutes to get the convoy into motion, heading back to Gladius Armaments, pouring on the speed. By the time the vehicles reached the site, GA personnel had already thrown the gates open, welcoming the soldiers as rescuers.
Less than ten minutes after the explosion, Temesin and Hayes were with the special forces team that burst into Building 17. The first body they found was a ruined corpse of a scarlet-haired woman.
“Marnie Finross,” said Temesin.
Next, they found two dead men. One was a revenant, obvious from the rippled skin, whose legs and torso were intact, ending abruptly below the shoulders.
“Cortindo.” Hayes kicked at the corpse. “Must've stood in front of the beam.”
“Bad idea.” Temesin crouched over another man. “And this'll be Brax Devlin.”
“I wonder what killed him?”
A foot-wide triangular fragment of metal had buried itself inside Devlin's skull.
“Yeah, I wonder. Where the Hades is Riordan?”
All around, the special forces troopers were fanning out, working their way along the rows of zombie-bone weapons, laying demolition charges.
“Sir?” One of the soldiers had climbed on top of the big energy projector. He stood there now, an explosives pack in hand, staring down. “You'd better come up.”
In the end, it took two more soldiers, in addition to Hayes and Temesin, to haul Donal Riordan's body out of the resonance cavity.
“Shit. Ah, shit.”
“Let's get him out of here, before they blow the building.”
“Ah, shit.”
The soldiers were gentle, carrying the body.
Some two hundred mourners went to Donal's funeral. They stood around the opened double grave, and watched as pallbearers—Harald and Viktor on one side, Kresham and the glowing form of Aggie on the other—carried the coffin from the black ambulance.
Gravediggers, using black ropes, lowered the coffin into place, then walked away to a discreet distance, waiting for the rituals to finish.
Commissioner Sandarov said some words. So did Harald, before returning to stand beside Ruth, who hugged his arm as she cried. Viktor's deep voice became a croak, unable to finish what he'd intended to say.
Brian stood alongside Eagle Dawkins from the firing range. When the gathering of mourners finally began to break up, Dawkins muttered something about sightseers. He'd been at Laura Steele's funeral, as well, and there had been only a handful of people to watch her burial in the grave where Donal had joined her. Suddenly, though, it was politically expedient to bid farewell to a symbol of tolerance and reunification, as the streets of Tristopolis became safe once more.
Yesterday in Fortinium, the Senate had voted against the Unity Party's Vital Renewal Bill, with a massive majority.
One by one, couple by couple, group by group, people drifted away, heading back to the various cars and taxis that waited for them. Jo Serranto and Dr. Thalveen left just after Commissioner Sandarov. Soon, there were few people remaining. Shaven-headed Kelvin stood with Alexa Ceerling, neither of them strictly well enough to be out of Mordanto Hospital. Professor Helena Steele remained close to them, her face a mask without expression; but she required her driver, Andre, to help her when she finally walked back to her limousine.
And then there were three people left beside the open grave. Kyushen Jyu and Sister Lynkse held hands tightly, as they had throughout the burial ceremony. Sister Felice, arms crossed, stood apart from them.
“You two go now,” she said finally.
“We can wait.”
“No, Lynnie. Take Kyushen home.”
“I… All right. See you later.”
“See you.”
When they had gone, Sister Felice stepped back, and waved to the gravediggers. They came over.
“We can wait a while longer, ma'am.”
“No, go ahead.”
“Ma'am.”
She watched them shovel dark earth into place, filling the hole. She watched them smooth the soil on the surface. And she watched them leave the graveyard, so that she was alone. There were no lights nearby, and the sky was dark purple as always. Darkness shrouded the headstones.
She stood and watched nothing move, nothing make a sound, nothing live anymore.
“Oh, Donal.”
Something glinted red off to her left, then again to her right.
“He'd be glad you came.”
One by one, the cats drew near, until they were sitting, perhaps a hundred of them, in a circle around Donal's grave. For a long time they sat, silent and without movement, while Sister Felice held herself still. Then the cats turned and slipped away into darkness.
A single small cat, little more than a kitten, remained.
“Hey.” Sister Felice squatted down. “Spike? That's a good name.”
She held out her hands, the cat jumped into them, and she stood up. Cradling the cat, who drifted quickly into sleep, she remained standing in place.
After some unknown time, she realized a man was standing beside her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The man was tall and thin. Despite the darkness, he wore peculiar, curved, heavy-looking dark-blue shades.
“My name is Lamis.” His voice was sepulchral. “People forget about me.”
He looked down at the grave for a minute, maybe two, then turned and left.
After a while, Sister Felice turned and stared at a spot of ground beside her, frowning, as if trying to remember something. Then she shook her head, and looked down at the little cat still cradled in her arms.
“Come on, sleepy Spike. You're coming home with me.”
Then she was gone, and the graveyard was silent.
Fifty days later, beneath the heavy soil, the blackwood coffin was still intact. Paid for by the Aurex City Police Department, it would not dissolve for months, perhaps years. Eventually, it would disintegrate, allowing the worms and insects who crawled through the soil to finally feast.
Inside the coffin, Donal, too, lay intact.
Then a bright amber light filled the interior, and he gasped. His body jerked, and he clawed open h
is shirt, pulled open his chest cavity, and ripped out the pendant producing the searing, blinding light.
Inside glowed the snowflake, the stasis generator that Harald had retrieved in the Westside Complex, and handed to Donal via a handshake. Nothing had changed inside its field: no entropy, no physical process, no time passing since he'd dropped inside the weapon cavity.
He sucked a breath in, his nerves alive with pain.
Now the amber light was fading, as the stasis field began to dissipate. For a few seconds, Donal had illumination to see where he was. He pressed his fingers against the satin lining, felt the hard wood beyond, and understood everything.
“Oh, fuck.”
BLACK BLOOD
A Bantam Spectra Book / March 2009
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by John Meaney
Bantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered trademarks and
Spectra and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meaney, John.
Black blood / John Meaney.
p. cm.
“A Bantam Book.”
eISBN: 978-0-553-90614-1
1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Police—Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6113.E17B57 2008
823′.92—dc22
2008037374
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